Pyjama Ladies of Vietnam

If I could, I'd have an award for the pyjama ladies who sport their colorful do bo outfits everyday and to go market to hawk street foods and snacks.  When you go to Vietnam, you're sure to find your favorite gal(s) -- whether she's selling fruit, a bowl of noodles, sticky rice, or che sweet soup. Maybe you only eat her stuff once, fall in love with the morsels, and look for her again for her daily route or at her stall in the marketplace.

There's something reliably sweet and calm about the pyjama food vendors who in many ways are the life blood of Vietnam's food culture. They're savvy business women, good salespeople, and usually interested in conversation.

I hope Vietnam never goes the route of other Southeast Asian countries and put the street vendors in mall-like hawker centers. I appreciate hygiene just like the next person but I've never fallen ill from Vietnamese street food (knock on the baby plastic chairs that you sit on!). Hawker centers in Singapore are convenient but there's some soul missing.

Cathy at Gastronomy has a great posting on her favorite lunch lady in Saigon. Check it out!

Comments

[Robyn]

Yay for the pyjama ladies! Dave and I were marveling whilst in Saigon how these women manage to be neatly coiffed and made-up and generally just looking cool as cucumbers as they work over clouds of steam rising from parts and run around here and there delivering food in the markets.
I've gotten terribly, awfully sick in Vietnam a few times ... but never from street food.

[Andrea Nguyen]

I once got awfully ill for weeks from eating at the Pizza Hut salad bar in Hong Kong!

[Son]

Is there a term in Vietnamese for these women? if you were to mention them in vietnamese, what would you call them?

[Carolyn Jung]

I want to wear stylish pyjamas all day, too! Oh wait, now that I work from home, I guess I COULD do that. Ahhh, comfort here I come.

[Simon Bao]

They are not food vendors, but there certainly are plenty of Pajama Ladies here in Philadelphia, if one looks in the right neighborhoods. Pajamas and cone hats, walking down the block en route to the market, or to pick up grandkids at school, wherever.

In about another month, there will be Pajama Ladies on blocks and sidewalks and avenues where they're only seen once a year - during "Gingko Harvest." Long ago, unwisely, city fathers decided to re-green Philadelphia with gingko trees. Someone sold them the lie that they would only ship and sell "Male" trees, and there was no danger of the stinky Gingko fruits fouling the sidewalks and airways.

That didn't pan out. Philadelphia is covered in fruit-bearing Gingkos. We have abundant crops of stinky fruit, and each fall there are Pajama Ladies with plastic sacks, combing the sidewalks and parks and grassy strips - even between northbound and southbound lanes of Roosevelt Boulevard - filling the sacks with fallen Gingko fruits. Free Gingko nuts inside, if you move fast enough and collect them before they're crushed underfoot and really start to stink.

[Andrea Nguyen]

Son, I don't think there's a term for these street vendors. You'd call them by their name, or describe them by what they sell and where they sell it, and at what time.

You know, I misspelled pyjama -- which is the British way of presenting the term. I looked at what Simon wrote and realized that I had a weird lingering gut feeling about "pyjama" vs. "pajama." I'd let the best of my Viet-ness direct my spelling since in Vietnamese, we say "pee-jah-mah."

Carolyn, working from home, I remain in my jammies for wayyy too long each day.

[Chef Jay]

A wonderful tradition I hope never changes . On my first time back to Virtnam since the seventies I was so happy to see some things never change.