Renew, Reuse, Recycle

Hand-made fine tuners

Lately I've been learning to play a traditional Vietnamese musical instrument, a two-stringed bowed instrument called đàn nhị. I like it, and I want one of my own. But finding a model like the one I've been learning on has been sort of a challenge. My teacher's fifty-year-old đàn nhị is heavily customized. It has different strings, a different base, and much different accessories than the ones in the stores.

The most significant difference is the fine tuners on my teacher's đàn nhị, which hang from ends of the two wooden tuning pegs. When I was in the music store, I asked the storekeeper if she sold any of the fine tuners. But she never even heard of them. So I went to my teacher to find out what they were called. And they don't have a name. Because they're unique. The guy who made them was a friend of my teacher, the same guy who bolted a piece of metal and wood to the base of the đàn nhị to give it more height and weight. Since the teacher's friend passed away, no one makes those tuners anymore.

People make things here. And they repair things when they get broken. For a place that has street sweepers on hand 20 hours a day to sweep up the styrofoam, plastic bags, and empty bottles from the sidewalks and streets, I'm not sure I'd call Vietnam a throw-away culture. People in a throw-away culture buy cheap things and use them until they break. They throw the broken things out and replace them with new things entombed in packaging and shipped from far, far away. In a throw-away culture, to be "green" and "environmentally friendly" is considered hip and trendy, yet it's more of a marketing gimmick than a lifestyle choice.

Coconut lacquer vase

On a walk through Saigon, I pass by cobblers with pants smeared in black glue, who tack new rubber soles onto piles of old shoes. In a market, vendors shovel crepe-mix and rice into bags using modified plastic bottles; the tops of the bottles are cut away at an angle, turning them into rather effective scoops. And coconuts are recycled, too. After the juice has been imbibed, the husks are dried and used as fire-fuel. And the hard shells are crafted into wine bottles or lacquerware.

I've been told that cars here do not depreciate in value like cars do in the states because the ones here aren't easily replaceable. An imported car has a 100 percent import tax tacked on the price tag, and to the best of my knowledge, Vietnam has no domestic car. So, instead of buying a new car every five years, people keep fixing their old ones.

One time, I saw a guy scraping hard white meat from a brown coconut into fine shreds. Considering the glut of coconuts we enjoyed a while back, it would have been nice if we had some alternative to spooning the meat out in clumsy chunks. We could have pressed the shreds to extract the coconut cream, or mixed them with black sesame to pile onto rice crêpes and roll into homemade bò bía ngọt. I thought of the held-held tool the guy used, and Lữ seemed to remember it too, so we began a hunt to find one and buy it.

When we made bánh tét last week, we learned the sticky rice is mixed with shredded coconut. There was a lot of sticky rice, and the pile of empty husks told us there was a lot of shredded coconut. Lữ asked her cousin how she shredded them all, and she showed us a tool, which was homemade, that far exceeded our needs. It was a cut and bent piece of iron the length of an arm. The tool had a serrated edge on one side and a tripod on the other that rests on the ground. The person places a bowl under the edge and sits on the tool. As the person rotates the coconut around the serrated edge, shreds drop into the bowl below. Lữ's cousin, as generous as she is a phenomenal cook, offered us her coconut shredder to take home. Her polite insistence made it hard to decline the offer, but the tool is as big as some garden equipment, and it far surpasses our needs.

So we went to the market and asked the vendor for the handheld variety. They didn't have one. In fact, they didn't even know what we were talking about. You would think in a country that makes so much use of coconut, that the vendors would know the tools, which would be available everywhere.

Well, they are available anywhere, in a sense. I just saw one tonight. It was a steel bar the length of a pen, with a bottlecap bolted on at one end. No one here would think of sell something that can be slapped together in minutes for free using scraps from a garage. Vietnam, while I wouldn't give it that trendy label of "green," can offer many lessons of how to make things last, and how turn trash into treasure. For now, though, I don't trust my instrument-making skills. So if I want a đàn nhị that doesn't sound like a cat in heat, I'll have to buy one. And, maybe one day, I'll make the fine tuners myself.