Truthfully, it would make more sense to start with atiny village in the Vietnamese hinterland and then work your way up toa big city. Most of Vietnam is small, agrarian communities, after all.Unfortunately, the nature of international travel, with its reliance onjumbo jets and airports, makes such a modest start to Vietnamimpossible. You cannot avoid spending time in Saigon and Hanoi andgetting out to the countryside requires a bit more effort. The effortis well worth it, however, and you should make sure you spend at leastsome of your trip in a traditional Vietnamese village. If Saigon is theheart of Vietnam, and Hanoi the brain, then the villages are the cellsthat make up the rest of the national body.

When you head out into the Vietnamese countryside take along The Traditional Villagein Vietnam for background information. This book from The GioiPublishers of Hanoi is a detailed study of various aspects of theVietnamese village by those who know it best: Vietnamese scholars. Thebasic premise of the book is that without a working knowledge of theVietnamese village one can never understand the nation as a whole.

The Traditional Villagein Vietnam is not a traveler's guidebook. Rather it is a collection ofacademic papers written by scholars from the University of Hanoi andelsewhere. Originally published in the quarterly journal VietnameseStudies, these papers cover a diverse selection of topics, all relatedto village life. Subjects range from how to build a traditional villagehome--complete with architectural schematics--to the price of buyingvillage titles before 1945. In Thuong Son, for example, you would havepaid ten piastres to be a "literature official" and seventy piastres tobe "honorable."

Openingthis book is like lifting the lid off a treasure chest full of obscurebut fascinating details. For example, we learn that if a woman marrieda man from outside her village, then tradition dictated that the groomdonate a preset amount of bricks to pave the village lanes. Manyvillages once paved their thoroughfares exclusively through thiscommunity marriage tax. In at least one village, however, if a womanmarried a man from within the village then the groom had to give thevillage the fixings for a celebration: one piastre, a tray of stickyrice, a chicken, two bottles of alcohol, and 100 betel nuts. Did youknow that "needling the rice sacks" is an old folk saying that means,roughly, to stir up trouble? Perhaps the greatest surprise in TheTraditional Village in Vietnam is the occasional authentic Vietnameseinsect squashed flat between the pages like a pressed flower.

Ofparticular interest is Huy Vu's paper on the Ha Nam area. Ha Nam is aremote region north of Haiphong that still retains much of itstraditional village flavor. For those travelers who want to get off ofthe beaten track and explore isolated communities, Ha Nam might be theplace to do it. Huy Vu's paper will provide the historical backgroundyou need before setting out on such an expedition. But you needn't goas far afield as Ha Nam. Village life begins just beyond the Saigon andHanoi city limits. Pack The Traditional Village in Vietnam into yourbag and jump aboard the nearest outbound bus. The villages of Vietnamawait.