Hoi An and Fashion!

Beautiful, filled with half-naked tourists and brimming with shops and souvenirs, the city of Hoi An was a wonderful place to visit. It was all little streets decorated with pretty lanterns and smiling people, ready to cater to foreigners' every whim. A lovely veneer to a grim reality…

After waking to a crazy rooster that would cock-a-doodle-do and gurgle from 4 am to 10pm at night... me, Xuan and Angie went on a mission to find converters and order up some fine fashion. Angie had already been accosted by a vivacious warm tailor, named Em Ma, right by the bridge by our hotel. Her quaint shop was a little ways away, complete with a pregnant shop girl and a toddler napping on a mat in the back room.

From just fashion magazines, fabric and some dubious sweatshop labor down the street somewhere; Em Ma crafted me an amazing white,black pinstriped jacket with purple silk lining and matching pants. Perfect fit, I was elated!

But, the more time we spent with this little tailor, the more she opened up to us. There’s a certain sort of candidness that comes from being impoverished and it seems as though everyone in Vietnam has a tragic past and story to tell. Sit down and ask them how they are doing and they’ll tell you everything you reluctantly wanted or didn’t want to know.

Over bottles of chilled water, in this humid little shop, we learned her life’s story. Em Ma, was a woman climbing up the working class ladder. She came from nearly the lowest rung of society as a fisherman’s wife. Supporting four children without help from her bum husband, developing arthritis, getting back surgery, having a good for nothing family overseas, getting barely 4 hours of sleep a day, she worked incredibly hard to gain her place as a tailor.

Her story was heart wrenching. It didn’t help that when we came in for our second fitting, she and girl-with-a-bun-in-the-oven, were eating their first meal since 11am and it was nearly 9pm when we came in…Preggers was a whole whopping 7 and a half months into her pregnancy and preggers had to walk about 20 blocks home later…and preggers had been hauling heavy things that even a non-preggers girl would have trouble with. Oie...

After that…Haggling? Forget it.

Saying no to 4ft prune faced grandmothers selling you things you don’t need. Forget it.

Feeling somewhat okay with being privileged? Forget it.

Everyone in Vietnam had a story like theirs…of loss, of struggle, of poverty, of survival.

My fabulous suit had come at a price and that price was my ignorance.