For the Vietnamese, the holiday of Tet is like Christmas, Rosh Hashana and Ramadan all rolled into one. It is the single most important event in the spiritual life of the country throughout the entire year. Many of the customs of Tet are totally alien to us, even though they are largely extensions of customs we have got used to through living here.

One example is votive offerings. All year long you can see people burning pieces of paper on the sidewalk outside their houses, which are also their shops. In the beginning, I thought that things were burnt for good luck; that paper phoney money would be burnt outside a shoe store in order to bring the merchants lots of clients. But not at all! It seems that whatever is burnt goes directly to the Next Life so that one’s ancestors can use them.

People burning money – and the most popular are $100 bills – are burning them because Grandma needs some dough. In the old city there are votive shops where you can buy paper copies of everything anyone would need out there in the Beyond. Paper shirts and coats for the cold season, paper raincoats for the monsoon, paper cell phones for the hip, paper money to act on that occasional whim, and even life-size paper motorcycles to zip from place to place!

The twist on this during Tet is that the votive offerings are not to the ancestors but to the very Gods themselves!

Now that Tet is upon us all of this is going on with a vengeance, and the votive street is packed. Peach flower  and kumquat branches are also traditional and they are raised, cut and stored so as to flower on Tet day, which is the 12^th of February this year. Now that the country is doing well and the economy is booming, people up here in the North are able to afford peach trees and the city is full of men and women driving their bicycles with a peach tree for sale on the back. In the old days, peach trees were sold in the South and kumquat in the North. We still see plenty of kumquat, but peach trees are certainly all the rage this year.   

Gods clothing is  also sold, paper household gods’ boots and hats. Yesterday I went with students to one of my favourite steak restaurants (just around the corner from our house and across from the Apocalypse Now night-club. They serve you a steak sizzler on a hotplate for a dollar)  for a holiday meal and in the courtyard the staff were burning a little wooden house in a great bonfire. It seems that it was the day reserved for the kitchen gods who, thus elevated, were sent heavenward to report to the celestial powers on household events during the past year.

The real news here is the street. It is bustling even more than usual. It is traditional for family members to give gifts of clothing and friends to give bottles of booze and so the sidewalks are full of merchandise and hurrying shoppers, frantic motorbikes and honking cars.

We have been told that everything that happens on Tet is important for the entire year. Foreigners are seldom invited into a Vietnamese home during Tet because we don’t know how to behave and so we may do something which could bring bad luck. The Tet lasts one week and the first three days of the Tet week are critical. After that, a lucky foreigner might just make his way into someone’s home. Vietnamese people who have suffered a death in their families just before Tet know better than to go out: they know their bad luck is contagious and do not wish to inflict it on anyone.

In fact, it is so unlucky to die during Tet that such a family will stay at home during the following Tet season as well, just in case.

When you understand this, then another aspect of Tet comes to mind, and that is the Tet we all remember: Tet, Year of the Monkey – 1968. The Tet Offensive. When we consider what it means to die during Tet then we understand the motivations of the entire nation to free itself from the American presence; we understand the longing of a people to be free.

Many thanks to Jennifer Paine, without whom Vietnam would be even more of a mystery.



Mair and Marie Do