Street peddlers

Lena and I are working on a story about street peddlers for AsiaLIFE, the glossy English rag in Saigon. (I'm freelancing for the magazine! Very exciting.) We're chatting up every roving peddler who comes by our door as they make their winding, daily rounds through the many miles of Saigon's back alleys.

The peddlers push their heavy carts or ride their bicycles laden with baskets from 5:30 a.m. to late at night, covering up to 50 kilometers a day, calling out what they have to offer in these nasal, sing-song cries. Even the Vietnamese have a hard time deciphering what exactly they're offering, since their words are often distorted to slip more easily from the throat.

Today we talked to an ice cream man, a soup maker and a young man selling bananas. We mean to interview one of the women who pick up garbage for recycling, as well as to the roving masseuse, who claps cymbals together to announce his arrival. We'd like to talk to the CD guy, who blares copyright-infringed music from speakers attached to his bicycle, and to the man who sells a special kind of rice dumpling and uses a loud, scratchy recording to advertise and save his voice.

The most these peddlers make each day is $7 or $8. The least they earn is $1 to $2, enough they say to buy food for the day. But all told us they appreciate the freedom of their job; they like to roam the city on their bicycles, making whatever left or right-hand turn they please. They just wish that every day, they made $8.

This ice cream seller, whose name Lena wrote down in her notebook (she's gone out!), is 42 and been selling ice cream on the streets for 18 years. He started out working for an ice cream factory in Saigon until he decided to launch out on his own after a few years. He still buys his ice cream from the factory. On a good day he makes 70,000 dong a day, about $4, he says. He has a family in the central part of the country who are surviving on his farm. He sees them every three or so months, more often during the rainy season when no one wants to eat ice cream. For us, he dribbled condensed milk over our cones, each 3,000 dong. (And he sells durian ice cream!! Lena told me too late or I would have ordered it.)

Here's a few photos of the cute banana seller.


This man is 27, unmarried and works in three districts. He sells bananas -- 11,000 dong for a bunch -- and coconuts that he buys on weekly trips to the south. He's from the north but came to Saigon after following some friends. I don't know more details...Lena's in charge here and she's gone out to see a movie!

Here's the soup seller, selling sup cua, a kind of crab-meat stew with quail eggs and mushrooms. It's delicious and spicy. He and his wife, who cooks up the soup, both sell sup cua by the cup for 5,000 dong. But his wife has a permanent spot on a sidewalk somewhere, whereas he pushes his soup from a motor scooter. About four years ago he was working as a mechanic, but then the government decided to build a new road through an ancient outdoor market where his wife used to make a good living selling her soup. Her income dwindled, and so he quit his job to support her business. He admits that he makes more money selling soup, 100,000 to 150,000 dong a day, than he did as a mechanic, but that it is not really a natural job for him.