Like many Vietnamese, I have owned more crumpled raincoats than I can count. They're the disposable kind, cinched with a few rubber bands, folded into a misshapen rectangle, then stuffed unceremoniously into a scooter’s under-seat compartment or a desk drawer.
It would not be a stretch to call these a national essential. In Vietnam, they are everywhere, thanks to the weather and the way people move. In the west, life unfolds inside cars or along public transit, and an umbrella often suffices because it can vanish neatly when the clouds pass.
The tropics play by different rules. A midday sky can blaze over one minute and open into a downpour five minutes later. In a country where motorbikes dominate, you're expected to have a raincoat tucked under the seat out of sheer survival instinct. A raincoat might still be clipped to the drying rack while its owner steps into a spotless sky, unaware this is only the calm before the storm. Minutes later, they would have to pull over at a roadside stall and buy an áo mưa giấy, literally a “paper raincoat,” the name given to a thin, single-use plastic raincoat that works in a pinch and not much more.
When in Rome, wear as the Romans do.
Personally, I have never mistaken them for saviors, or even adequate shields. True to their name, they are so frail that one sharp tug or careless twist can split them. They are waterproof in theory, but far less so in the street. The loose, ballooning cut lets rain slip in at the collar and sleeves and then slow-soak everything underneath. The material feels close to the plastic bags market aunties use for scallions and live fish. Each time I pull one on, I feel like a wriggling sea creature trapped in its final demise; a damp, fumbling, plastic wrap that clings to the skin and never lets go.
These raincoats are also a looming environmental threat. I have waded through knee-deep water and watched abandoned raincoats drift by, waterlogged and translucent, floating like fish through the murk, curling into little whirlpools, then knotting over some unlucky drain. The water stills and begins to rise. What was already a flood becomes something worse.
Sheltered, but not by much.
To be fair, the blame does not belong to the áo mưa giấy themselves. They simply mirror how we consume in a society accelerating faster than it knows what to do with. A long time ago, Vietnamese wore áo tơi, rain capes woven from palm or straw. They looked crude but could endure season after season, even year after year. That was when we lived more closely with the weather and made do with what the land offered.
Then during the state-subsidy era, synthetic raincoats started to appear, though they were hardly common. In photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, people can be seen riding through downpours in their straw hats, or huddling under a single rare sheet of plastic. Scarcity made them prized possessions. Only until recently, as factories learned to spin out millions of cheap goods in a blink, did modern raincoats take on a deliberately short life, made to be tossed away.
Raincoats in the earlier decades. Photo via Báo Thể thao và Văn hóa, Báo Vĩnh Long.
As someone who swears by sturdy things but is reliably forgetful, I have complicated feelings about this wasteful invention. They exemplify a situationship you know will not end well, one that never quite meets the basics, yet somehow convinces you that maybe this time, against experience, it will last. Each time I break my own rule and buy them, I fold them carefully, hoping to stretch them across a few more uses. But the flimsy material and lackluster seams always give out, no matter how gently I try to salvage them.
And still, I cannot bring myself to hate them. One night after a date, the rain arrived without warning. Not wanting my companion to catch a cab, I ducked into a convenience store and bought a nicer áo mưa giấy for VND30,000, mostly to steal a longer ride together. The rain came in sheets and found every seam, and I shivered through nearly ten kilometers before reaching home and going straight to bed with a fever. A few months later, the relationship ended, and the ache that lingered felt as brutal as that summer downpour. Even so, I am glad I tried, thunderstorm and all.
Love them or resent them, these raincoats are an inevitable artifact of our species’ optimism and hubris. We always think we will not forget, until we do. And when that moment arrives, the choreography is oddly uniform, open the under-seat compartment, find the raincoats, lift them, and know they will not survive another storm. We pull over and buy more. The cycle completes itself. Alas, in this city, the rain must come, and with it, the áo mưa giấy too.
