Hello Chicken Soup

Goes the market women’s mantra song waiting for customers in Sapa, Vietnam.

Basic English is all you need to sell chicken soup. It arrives with long white noodles. Food women work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. 

Sellers, shoppers, locals, a few tourists with guides or in pairs feel comfortable with inexpensive market food. What is the profit margin, food cost, labor cost? 

Two foreigners live here. One is a Frenchman mid-20 with a brown ponytail. He speaks fluent H’mong. He stands on the cement staircase between the cloth market and sprawling food tables. He stares at people eating. He doesn’t smile.

He was married to a local H’mong girl, 19. She had a baby. Two years ago he left her. He pays support. Now he is chasing a Red Dzao girl. He works for the International Manipulate Relations Love Company with a Big Orgasm.

A fluent thin foreign man in his 20’s wearing large framed glasses carries a worn knapsack. He walks fast. He buys greens and tofu. He goes into a small shop for cooking oil. He hurries away over broken disjointed concrete blocks covering the central sewage system. He is in exile from far away. 

The Red Dzao women are persistent sellers, Buy from me. Repeat. Repeat. They never give up.

Mo, my 10-year old teacher gave a good lesson in how to handle these sellers. We were hanging out.

She said, When the women ask you to buy something, don’t say maybe, or later, or not now, or tomorrow, they will remember you and now and maybe and later and tomorrow they will tell you, you said tomorrow, later, maybe, now, Thanks for the lesson, Yes, I don’t know but I understand.

My and Mo, Sapa, Vietnam

Red Dzao

Mo