More scanned slides... Taken while I was living in Hanoi in the mid-ninties. The embargo had been lifted a few months before I arrived and the Asian boom was in full swing. I lived in a god-awful building with a lecherous landlord who literally used to jump out from behind doorways and try to squeeze my breasts, so I was more or less always looking for another place to live. It was incredibly hard to find apartments-- everyone thought foreigners wanted big, schmancy houses with lots of shiny chandeliers and things-- and because of the boom houses on what was then the outskirts of town, out by the Queen Bee nightclub, were running to five and six thousand dollars, US, a month. It was insane. It was also kind of fashionable to invite a foreigner to your wedding. The government had recently become less bent out of shape about such fraternizing, and people thought it seemed worldly and cosmopolitan to have a few obviously non-Vietnamese guests. I went to a lot of weddings. After a while I started joking that I was going to start a business called "Thue-a-Tay" (sounds like tway-a-tay, and roughly means "rent a Westerner")-- I'll come to your wedding and stand around looking foreign! I did also go to the weddings of a few people who were the kind of friends whose weddings you would have gone to regardless of where you were. The most interesting one that I went to was in Haiphong, on the coast, and was neither the wedding of a friend, nor a rent-a-Tay situation. A Viet-Kieu (Vietnamese-American) woman who lived in my building in Hanoi invited a group of people she knew in town to go with her to her cousin's wedding. None of us had been to Haiphong-- it's a pretty big city (it and Danang are always listed as either the third of fourth largest cities in Vietnam), but there isn't a whole lot there if you aren't there on business (the biggest port in the country) or visiting someone you know. We stayed in a severe, Soviet-style hotel in the middle of town (one of two, if I remember, that foreigners were allowed to stay in), and spent a few days wandering around while Lien dealt with family and wedding things. At the wedding, my roommate Kiyo and I took a whole lotta pictures. Hers came out really great. She had a flash, so she got a lot of really useable as wedding pictures type of pictures, but then did all this funky stuff with long exposures punctuated by the flash, and stuff like that. I didn't bring a flash to Vietnam, and when I got to the wedding I realized that I had grabbed (in my packing haste) a bunch of slide film (ISO 64) instead of the ISO400 print film I though I'd thrown in. I gave up the idea of getting any real wedding pictures out of it for the couple and followed the Vietnamese wedding videographers who wandered around the banquest halls shining a bright light on people while they asked them if they remembered when the bride and groom met. Et voila. Haiphong, Vitenam. March 1995.

Vintage photograph on a post card showing part of a room set out for a wedding breakfast. Complete with wedding cake and cold meat. On the reverse is written Alice and Charlie's