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A journey in preparation · Vietnam

Why Vietnam, and why now?

This page is about everything that comes before arriving: the research, the questions, the language lessons, the route slowly taking shape, and the reasons I want to go.

A working map, not a finished itinerary.

A working map, not a finished itinerary.

Why Vietnam

Vietnam counts its craft villages in the thousands; pottery, lacquer, silk, bamboo, stone, brocade; many recognized as living heritage, many still standing on the same rivers and roads that shaped them generations ago. What draws me isn't the number. It's that so many of these villages didn't have to choose between staying traditional and staying alive. They found a third way.

I want to understand that system up close. Who decides how a village opens itself to visitors, and who decides what stays closed? What happens to a technique once it also has to perform itself for an audience? Where is the line between a craft that is preserved and a craft that is only staged?

What's different from home

I keep comparing what I read to what I already know in Egypt. Egyptian craft is just as old, just as skilled, but it rarely has this kind of infrastructure around it: a named village, a recognized route, a shared identity a visitor can find before they even arrive. Much of it survives inside families and neighborhoods, without the scaffolding that seems to give Vietnamese craft villages their public life.

I don't yet know if that scaffolding is something to want. It may protect a craft. It may also change it into something it wasn't. That's one of the things I'm going to Vietnam to find out; to bring back sharper questions about what Egypt has, doesn't need, and might be missing.

Why hands, why now

My last trips weren't built around this. I went, I photographed what I found; hands were sometimes in the frame, sometimes not. This one is different. Every part of it; the country, the timing, the language, the route; is being planned around hands. Around the deliberate decision to spend real time with people who make things, before I ever raise a camera.

Learning the language

I'm taking short Vietnamese lessons four times a week, starting with pronunciation, forms of address, and the small phrases that might let me ask, listen, and move with a little more independence.

Here is where I am so far — my first lines, unpolished, exactly as I'm learning them:

Chào, chị tên là Mena. Chị đến từ Ai Cập. Làm về truyền thông. Chị rất thích du lịch và chị rất thích chụp ảnh. Chị đang học tiếng Việt, vì chị rất muốn đến Việt Nam.

— Hello, my name is Mena. I'm from Egypt. I work in communications. I really like to travel, and I really like taking photographs. I'm learning Vietnamese, because I really want to go to Vietnam.

I'll leave this as it is for now, and rewrite it a little better every now and then — a small, honest record of how far the language has come by the time I land.

Where I am now

The preparation is already part of the story.

August 2026 · still learning, researching, and changing the plan as I understand more.

01

Learning the language

Four lessons a week, building from nothing.

02

Mapping the villages

Researching craft communities across regions, trying to understand which route deserves time. The map stays deliberately unfinished — I want local knowledge to shape it.

03

Planning to stay

One to two months, traveling independently, staying long enough in each place that the first photograph isn't the only photograph.

What I want to do

Listen first.
Photograph later.

I want to visit workshops and villages, meet the people behind the work, and understand something about the rhythm around it — not simply arrive, take a beautiful frame, and leave. The work may become photographs, writing, short films, new entries in Field Notes. Some images may eventually become Humantique editions. But I want the encounter to lead the form, rather than deciding the story before I've lived it.

Humantique is my attempt to let the photographs help sustain the next piece of fieldwork — one story helping me reach the next one.

Questions I am carrying
  • If I learn the language, do I see differently? Does the camera understand something it couldn't before?
  • How is the craft-village model actually serving the ordinary maker — not the village's reputation, but the person at the wheel or the loom?
  • How is knowledge passed from one generation to the next?
  • What changes when a craft becomes part of a tourism economy?
  • What can Egypt take from this — and what should stay different?
  • How do I document as a visitor without making the story about me?

I don't have the answers yet. I'll let you know what I find.