The old woman wearing a conical hat stared at me silently

In a corner of the market in My Tho, a town in southern Vietnam, an old woman wearing a conical hat sat in a chair. Or rather, she had surrendered herself to the backrest, sinking into it as though letting gravity do all the work. She didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow at the footsteps of passing shoppers, leaving me unsure whether she was waiting for customers or simply letting the hours slip by.

When I raised my camera, she returned a look that seemed to hover somewhere between knowing and unknowing what it meant to be photographed. It was neither a smile nor a frown—more like the default expression of someone who, like dried fish left too long in the sun, had been stripped of excess moisture by a lifetime’s heat. In this country, women in conical hats are a common sight, but unlike the idyllic rural scenes found in tourist brochures, the real thing is a practical tool for fending off a mixture of sweat and dust.

In Vietnam, the conical hat—called nón lá—is made from bamboo and palm leaves, crafted to be light. It shields against both sun and rain, and if turned upside down, it serves as an impromptu bowl. In the My Tho market, nearly every woman selling vegetables or gutting fish wears one atop her head. Tourists who try the same will, nine times out of ten, be promptly cornered by souvenir hawkers.

The old woman remained seated, selling nothing. Perhaps she had already sold out of whatever she’d brought, and was now offering the very air of the market itself. The price, no doubt, would be negotiable—but I neither knew how to buy it, nor had the courage to try.