Pistils at dawn
In their nov
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el named Ganh hang hoa (The flower vendor), early 20th century writers Nhat Linh and Khai Hung tell of a young woman, Lien, who earns what little money she can to help her husband carry on with his studies. She earns her hard crust by carrying flowers in baskets slung across her shoulder, peddling petals on the streets of Hanoi.
The troubled character hails from Ngoc Ha village, a flower growing region on the edge of Hanoi. Under the thumb of a French-ruled society, the woman is portrayed through the eyes of her loving husband. She leads a long-suffering yet dutiful life, an old school role model of the Vietnamese woman ready to sacrifice everything for the good of her husband.
Flower vendors still trudge to the city from Ngoc Ha, but their ranks are far fewer in number after property prices increased and fewer were forced to milk what profit they could from flower plantations. The peddlers like the woman in the novel can be spotted riding dilapidated pushbikes into the city from outlying provinces, a rose tinted reminder of the daily grind that is the reality for workers on the streets of Hanoi.
Quang An flower market in Hanoi is filled with giant flowers glowing vibrantly under the night lights. The pre-dawn chill of late December adds an extra frostiness to the voices of the stallholders.
Like so many markets, the flower market demands an early morning rise, although this one earlier than many others.
“I have to get up at 2:30 every morning to come here,” grizzles a pale, skinny 35 year old Nguyen Huong Sen, a flower peddler from Thanh Hoa province. She arranges her flowers on a big flat woven tray on the back of a rusty old bicycle. Her early morning start is demanded by both the ride to the market, and by the need to be in early to get the best flowers. Her old clothes tell a tattered tale as she talks of the one redeeming feature of winter.
“The colder it gets, the fresher the flowers will stay through the day, which makes them easier to sell,” she explains. “Fresher flowers mean higher prices, and that's better for the money it takes to put my three children through school.”
Half shaded by her conical hat, the woman's face looks gaunt under the fluorescent lights overhead. She has already bought some fine looking roses and daisies, which she hopes will sell quickly through the morning as it is another noted day on the lunar calendar.
“On ceremonial days, sales are much faster than usual. Most families buy flowers to offer to their ancestors,” she said.
The woman then pedals her bike into the dawn, toward the city centre to see what luck sales will hold for her today. She leaves behind the babbling excitement of the market, which will remain open for some more hours.
At midday, Sen appears again on a crowded street corner downtown. Her thin frame and the rusty old bike are the epitome of another book penned some years ago about Hanoi by a Japanese author. The book's cover is illustrated with an image of a flower vendor; each long day peddling flowers goes round like the wheels of her bike, driven on by duty to her family.
“Flowers! Flowers!” a woman shouts at Sen from down the road a-ways. She pedals over for another quick sale. She talks of the impersonality of it all as, as with so many other like other vendors - even in areas where she may sell to the same people every day - customers address her by what she sells.
“People don't know our names, they just yell out after whatever we may be selling,” Sen says. Somewhat ironically, her name means lotus, a flower held in lofty acclaim in Vietnamese culture.
“Flowers aren't really something to bargain over. It's odd, but while people haggle over the cost of other products, flowers have a relatively set price,” Sen says, adding that flower sellers are also expected to be demure when dealing with their customers.
When selling other products, peddlers make a sing song cry in the alleys and streets to let potential customers know they are around. Yet flower vendors remain quiet, as many folks believe that the sale of flowers has a special meaning.
“Flowers are elegant and are for vases in reverent places. They lose their charm when the peddler starts hollering,” Sen says.
And it gets tougher too. Sen says her efforts are great, her earnings a pittance. Travelling from street to street, she'll pick a good spot and stay there until the police give her a hard time. Sometimes they fine her, but she'll be back, because she simply doesn't have another way to earn.
While you may think the street vendors add a certain old world charm to the city, spare a thought for the poor old vendor in her conical hat on a rusty old bike. It's a tough world out there and sometimes a little understanding of where she's coming from can make a great deal of difference.
(Source: Time out)
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