the conceptual street
I was riding back on a very crowded bus in a bad mood, up Nghi Tam in the evening. “It sucks,” I was thinking (influenced in my wording by our American housemates), “to live in a city where everyone talks about you because they are sure you can’t understand the language whereas, in fact, you understand it just enough to know that they are talking about you but not to catch what they are saying.” Halfway between blissful ignorance and streetwise perfection; along with most of humanity, I suppose.
Anyway, looking out of the window of the bus I saw a shop in Thuy Khue. Thuy Khue is the name of a street and I knew the shop was in that street because it said so on the frontage, after the number: 345 Thuy Khue. That’s normal in Hanoi but the street I was on was certainly either Yen Phu or Nghi Tam (I was near the junction of those two).
In fact I might not have thought about this further – many things in Hanoi appear to make no sense – if that had been the first time I had heard of Thuy Khue. But it isn’t; a few days ago Hannah announced that there was to be a reading of Vietnamese women’s poetry on Thuy Khue. “Where the hell is Thuy Khue?” I asked and she didn’t know.
Then on thursday a motorbike taxi driver took me the long way round back from the Daewoo Hotel, all the way through a very pleasant part of the city which I’d never been through before round the far side of Ho Tay (West Lake). Taking a cut down a tiny alley with the lake at the end I saw again the street name (Thuy Khue) on a building – I cannot now remember what kind of building. “Ah so that’s where it is!” I thought.
But that was, at a guess, about three miles from the shop I saw today with no possible single road to connect the two locations and a large lake between them. And I know I’ve seen another shop on Thuy Khue somewhere else in the city but I can’t think where.
It seems clear to me that Thuy Khue cannot be a street which would be visible on a two, or even a three dimensional city plan. Instead it must weave itself through some additional dimension, but which one? I cannot help thinking that the kind of shops on the street would give me a clue. In the kind of statistics which ecologists use, and which I’m about to have to try understanding again, a variable – temperature for example – is referred to as a dimension so that, in theory, a place or a thing can be defined in its entirety, not just in terms of (what we normally think of as) its position, by specifying its location on every one of a total of n dimensions, where ‘n’ is an unspecified number, presumably very large.
I imagine that Thuy Khue exists on this kind of dimension, and that the presence of a shop on Thuy Khue and the distance along it (as indicated by the number) reflect the extent to which it exhibits a particular attribute. But, again, which one? It would have to be an attribute which the vast majority of shops do not possess at all or they would all be on Thuy Khue. Of course there may also be shops or even houses which are on Thuy Khue but at points where it does not intersect with the three dimensions of normal space. How these shops would be able to do business, and with whom, remains a matter for speculation.
Unfortunately I cannot remember what any of the three Thuy Khue shops were selling, if indeed they were all shops. The only thing that I’m sure of is that there was a reading of Vietnamese women’s poetry on Thuy Khue. But Hannah never went to it because it turned out that it was actually last month. I can’t help wondering, in fact, if there is perpetually a reading of women’s poetry last month on Thuy Khue. It all depends how it intersects with the dimension of time, I suppose but I’m out of my depth there.
Perhaps the name of the street would give me a clue. I am not sure what it means. Most of Hanoi’s streets are named after famous people, often revolutionary heroes of one sort or another but some have more esoteric meanings. I think the street which our street meets, Xuan Dieu, is called ’spring rhythm’ or ’spring pattern’ or something but I can’t be sure. Perhaps I can look up Thuy Khue in the dictionary but then I’m not exactly sure that I have the name right. I think that both ‘u’s were ordinary ones (not the ’smile’ u which sounds a bit like Lurch from the Addams family) and that the second had a ‘heavy’ tone marked by a dot underneath but, then again, I’m not sure. Was it actually Khuy Thue? No, that sounds wrong…
