Tet-fest: the Vietnamese celebration in the swamps...

The Vietnamese New Year is celebrated annually at the Mary Queen of Vietnam church in the Eastern part of New Orleans. No one should miss this out-of-the-way event; the food, music and atmosphere will have you forever hooked.

Lost in the swamps
       We walked into a scene of chaos: kids rushing about wielding cans of Silly String, vendors in full cry, cooking smells and children charging between your legs and running rings around any person or object that was stationary for a moment.  

       Chris, Don and I arrived after a confused journey into the far-flung swamps. Chris had an idea how to reach the church but it turned out to be the wrong one. We did learn that Michoud Blvd. ends abruptly in tall reeds and stagnant water. Beck did not come as she was flattened by the severe flu that has made its rounds, touching everyone I know.

       The setting of this festival is a paved side yard of a large Catholic church. There is a row of plywood vendor booths along one side of the pavement. Vendors there sell candy, hawk cheap plastic toys and for a small fee you can play games of darts for prizes or knock down stacked tin cans with a bean bag. At one booth a group of small children fished with plastic poles for little toys bobbing on the surface of a wading pool.  

       Opposite this long row of booths are the food vendors’ stalls behind a long counter. Signs are printed in Vietnamese with few English words as guideposts for my friends and me. I saw vegetable crepes, roasted corn cobs, battered and fried sweet bananas, tapioca and ginger pudding, spring rolls with peanut sauce, barbecued pork ribs with sesame glaze, various types of pho and on and on. Picnic tables are ranged along the front of the food area and they were packed with families.

Lions, fireworks and Mexican folk songs
       The entertainment was raucous and changed hourly. The large stage featured a backdrop of painted canvas picturing an Asian landscape.  There was an arched bridge before the backdrop and fake cherry tree branches loaded with plastic cherry blossoms reached toward either side of the bridge.  The stage was lit with multi-colored spotlights.        

     The whole setup was expensive and professional – the sound system was powerful enough that I could feel my liver respond to the highs and lows of each performance, my hair curved back from my forehead by the crashing waves of sound.

       Not speaking the language, I couldn’t follow the carney-call of the suited MC and so each event on stage was without context for me.  I just waited to be surprised and the first major surprise came immediately after we arrived. A fireworks display erupted from the pavement before the stage, almost at the crowd's feet.  Probably this had been announced but I missed it, of course.   Strings of firecrackers detonated rapid-fire while bottle rockets ascended no more than fifteen feet in the air and exploded right above the crowd’s heads. I was standing just outside the tented area of food booths and close enough to the stage that smoldering shells were raining down on me and burning like hell until I skipped backward, yelping, under cover of the tenting.

       The high point of the festival for me was the lion dance. A drummer – whose hair was molded into a spiky fan above his head – maintained a fast and primal beat. A troupe of eight young men acted the part of four lions, two men sharing each glittering costume. They leaped and capered, mimicking an animal romping like a puppy. The men in the back end of each costume showing astonishing strength by lifting their partners repeatedly into the air, placing them on their shoulders and then lifting them off again. The lions were accompanied by a man costumed as a sort of jester – dressed in motley colors and a grinning mask.   He held a large fan.  I don’t know the significance of this figure but he seemed to be a lion tamer who was continuously teased and foiled by his charges.

       Chris and I were amazed at the intricacy of the lion costumes: the heads were made to wink and roll their eyes and the tails wagged. At one point, the dancers approached a large group of children at the front of the audience and the children were delighted to stroke and pat the lions while they gamboled and frisked like pets.

       The dance ended with a prolonged barrage of firecracker explosions. Sparks and acrid smoke billowed from an enormous braided coil of firecrackers and the dancers, oblivious to the risk, hovered in their synthetic drapery over the explosions.

       We left the festival around nine o’clock and I was happy that the last entertainment I saw was a middle-aged woman in an embroidered satin dress singing, of all things, the Mexican anthem “Cielito Lindo” in a very thick Vietnamese accent. She left the stage, mike in hand, and moved into the crowd. She wandered through the tightly packed rows singing and whenever she got to the famous refrain where you sing “Aye, yay, yay, yay” she would stick the mike into some hapless audience member’s face and encourage him to sing the chorus with her. The spotlight hit these unfortunates full in the face and, startled and embarrassed, they attempted to howl along to a song that seemed completely unfamiliar to each one.  It was a strange and misplaced choice of song and the whole episode was hilarious. It was a good way to end the evening.