Vincom Towers near Hanoi's Old Quarter

I was walking through Vincom today and it reminded me of when I was small walking through Finsherman’s Wharf as a 12 year old biking down Embarcadero alone. It’s an odd feeling, somewhat liberating and yet somewhat predictable. Walking around in a Vietnamese shopping mall made me feel—as much as I hate to admit it—at home. There’s the sense of something new waiting for you just around the corner, in a foreign country’s mall, just like I feel walking past street performers in the Wharf. You’ve seen a man get out of a straight jacket, ride a unicycle, swallow a sword, and hold a one-armed handstand at least once before, and yet it never gets old. There’s always the expectation of seeing something new in the personality of the performer, akin to seeing a novel shoe design or smelling a new fragrance on the displays in storefronts. The Vincom towers also made me feel like I belonged, somehow, to this place, this new pocket of gentrification in an ancient city. The escalators and bright lights were old friends whose tricks never failed to pique a small grin on my cheek.

But I only feel like this in Vietnam. This doesn’t happen to me when I walk through some suburban mall. Back home, in America, I pass by food courts and see all the bastaradizations of ethnic cuisine: orange chicken, margarhita pizza, burritos. In Vietnam, there’s the structure common to all malls, and yet with an extra feeling of exclusivity that hasn’t existed in America since the 40s, if not the 30s. The vast majority of Vietnam still hasn’t experienced consumerism on this level, even after hosting these corporate flagships for over a decade. Only a small proportion of people in Vietnam will ever find it reasonable to pay almost two million dong (US $100) on a striped dress shirt. They cost at most US $5 at any normal suit-and-tie store on some busy street. And so here I am, looking at prices and thinking about how outrageously expensive these items are, and then realizing that these prices are quite average for clothing back in the states. They are in fact nothing near the prices you’ll find walking through Westfield mall on a Tuesday afternoon.

And so it makes me feel big to meander through aisles of goods that I probably would never buy, but tell myself I could…if I wanted to. Pay the same price back home.