Hanoi server reveals ‘secret bookstore’ to Boise tourist

Don’t you love serendipity? I just had a wonderful chance to experience it.

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A week ago I was in Hanoi, Vietnam, to go to a wedding. I stayed at a new (for me) hotel, in the center of the city, where I could easily walk around Hoan Kiem Lake, find good restaurants, and treat myself to a massage. I was a tourist on that trip, rather than a worker (teacher, researcher, facilitator of others’ visits). It was the first time in 20+ years of traveling to Vietnam that I had no “work purpose.”

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One morning at breakfast in my hotel, I had a conversation with a young woman with a bright smile and braces (first time I’ve seen that in Hanoi). She brought me coffee and asked how my stay was going. I said all was great and that I especially loved walking around the lake, which was closed to car traffic during the weekend.

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“They often have concerts there. But I don’t like them. Too crowded, too loud.”

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I asked her what she liked to do instead.

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“I go to a secret bookstore.”

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She had me. If there is anyone who’s a book lover, it’s me. My husband has said for years that his next wife will be illiterate, just to avoid all of the books that we’ve hauled around the country.

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Serendipity slammed into me. She’d put me onto a mission that I’d never have had without those few minutes chatting at the hotel.

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I went to Book Street, found a dark alley and charged in. Now, normally, I don’t go down dark alleyways. But this one had a handwritten sign at the end with an arrow pointing to a one-person-wide stairwell, leading up to another long alley. At last, I found the “secret bookstore.” (Write me if you’re going to Hanoi and I’ll tell you the name).

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I removed my shoes and stepped into the tiny, two-story wooden shop, jammed with books. Many of them were stocked in more than one place; a young man stood in the English-language testing-prep books corner for 30 minutes. A woman pawed through piles of children’s books clustered on the floor. Grimm’s Fairytales (shelved in two different places) was written in Vietnamese but lacked the grim pictures that our German version has.

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I spent a wonderful hour soaking up the aura that only bookstores have. In my tourist mode, it was a perfect end to the week. And it came because a young woman stopped to chat.

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Serendipity strikes again, and wins.

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Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor emerita and coach for the executive MBA program in the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University in Idaho. [email protected] She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”

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