The Red Little Stool

When most people think about Vietnam, they think about phở. Or Vietnamese iced coffee. Or the motorbikes - that endless, improbable river of them somehow moving without collision, like a city that agreed on a set of rules nobody wrote down.

Spend enough time here and you'll realise there's another symbol. Less poetic. More honest.

The little plastic stool.

You know the one. Usually red. Sometimes blue. Occasionally a colour the heat decided for it. Cheap enough that nobody counts them. Strong enough to hold a grown man eating his second bowl of bún bò Huế at a table.

I've known these stools my entire life actually.

Growing up in Melbourne, they appeared at family gatherings, Tết celebrations, backyard BBQs. They'd materialise from nowhere when extra relatives showed up, which was always. Nobody questioned their origin. They were simply there - like an auntie arriving with a bag of fruit nobody asked for, or someone insisting you've gotten too skinny since last time.

I thought I understood them.

Then I moved here. And I realised I'd only ever seen the stool in one context - family gatherings and cheap convenience.

Maybe I'm reading too much into a piece of plastic. Maybe.

But it's everywhere.

On pavements cracked by heat and use. In alleys so narrow you have to turn sideways. Outside cafés that are really just the front of someone's house. Beside an old man at 6am nursing a cà phê sữa đá, staring at nothing, or possibly at everything - it's genuinely difficult to tell.

On a construction site. At a barber's on the footpath. Behind a woman selling lottery tickets who hasn't moved in hours. The same stool, every time.

What struck me (and I only realised it now) wasn't the simplicity. It was what the simplicity permits.

In places I've lived, hospitality requires infrastructure. A lease. A fit-out. A concept. Someone to take your coat.

Here, sometimes all you need is concrete and a pot of something that's been going since before you woke up.

An empty patch of pavement becomes a restaurant. A laneway becomes the kind of place people return to for twenty years. A complete stranger becomes the person sitting close enough to share your table, your plate, and eventually a story about where they're from and why they stayed.

The stool puts everyone at the same height. Literally.

No VIP section. No rope. No table that costs more than the meal. Just people, close together, eating something that was made for them even though whoever made it has never met them.

I've spent most of my career thinking about how people connect. Building events. Designing spaces. Asking myself what makes someone feel welcome.

I had theories. Some of them survived Vietnam. Most of them didn't.

Because some of the most alive I've felt here - some of the most genuinely present -happened on a stool that wobbled slightly, at a table that was a repurposed crate, eating something I couldn't fully identify but couldn't stop eating.

We confuse hospitality with design. I did too.

But hospitality was never really about the furniture. It's about making room. It's about the willingness to set something in front of a stranger and say "here, sit, eat, stay a while."

Vietnam has always known this, I think - unknowingly. The way you know something you were never taught. You just do it, and you keep doing it, and it never occurs to you that someone somewhere is watching and taking notes. And maybe that's why this unremarkable piece of plastic has outlasted trends, renovations, and every attempt to replace it with something better.

It's not beautiful. It's not interesting. It won't photograph well on its own. But it reflects something that this country keeps showing me quietly, without making a fuss about it.

Resourceful. Unpretentious. Adaptable. Profoundly, stubbornly human.

When people ask what I think of when I think of Vietnam now,

I still think about the food. The coffee. The motorbikes.

But somewhere in that picture, there's always a little red stool.

And someone already sitting on it, not waiting for anything. Just here. *Photo from: https://vinwonders.com/vi/wonderpedia/news/van-hoa-ca-phe-sai-gon/