“This is a service we’re paying for,” complained the American girl as she and her bags were shoved unceremoniously into the admittedly too-full taxi that was to take us to the Hanoi coach terminal. “We’re going to give you the worst review on TripAdvisor.”
I caught my fiancée’s eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Mel had recently diagnosed the problem with the vast majority of backpackers in South-East Asia as a misguided belief that the region was less a place they were visiting—a place where they were, in actual fact, guests—than a service being provided to them on their gap-year, bucket-list piss-ups. “We moaned about the constant pestering, the constant offers of ‘boat’ and ‘rickshaw’,” Geoff Dyer writes in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, “but when we wanted a boat or rickshaw we expected someone to be there, providing a boat or rickshaw immediately, at rock-bottom prices.”
We had seen examples of this all over Vietnam, where we had been living for the better part of a year: Brits yelling at tour company employees in Hoi An because the latter didn’t know when the sleeper to Hue would arrive; Americans demanding to speak to a bus driver’s manager when we were dropped on the outskirts of Hanoi, rather than in its centre, despite the fact that its centre was closed for Independence Day celebrations. In both cases, I had stepped forward to tell the travellers—almost all in their early twenties, that apparently adventurous, easygoing age—to calm down. Most of the things they were complaining about were either signposted above their heads—“You may have been told to get here at one,” I would say, “but the sign clearly states that the bus leaves at two”—or else required only the slightest knowledge of the country and its history to be understood. (“Fuck their independence” seemed to be the general vibe even after I’d pointed it out.) Theirs was a mentality, I argued, that turned every local, regardless of his station, into a service provider, and every service provider merely doing his job into a probable swindler. It smacked of Orientalism to me, of racism disguised as open-minded globe-trotting, cultural elitism as cultural curiosity.
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I was about to spend the next thirty hours slowly turning into one of them.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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