A friend of mine tell's me when she was a young girl in Saigon a man would come through the neighborhood in the evening tapping two sticks together, calling out something like, "Noodle Noodle Noodle get your hot noodles here".
I imagine he had more to his song than that but the main point was to communicate to the neighborhood that he was taking orders for noodle dishes for dinner. The stickman represented a street vendor who was located some distance away with his food cart all fired up to cook noodles. As people called out their orders the stickman would communicate them back to the cook using a code generated by tapping his sticks together. "Two noodle soups, hold the cilantro on one, extra hot peppers, extra lime, double fish sauce, and a side of sticky rice...." Or maybe he had a shorthand like waitresses use in Lunch Counter Lingo.
The sticks were made of hollowed out wood, maybe bamboo, and made a loud enough noise that the cook could hear the coded order from a distance.
My friend's young brothers and her tried to break the stickman's code so they could send orders using their own bamboo sticks and play tricks on the street vendor. Maybe send a message like "supersize it" for the order they just made? They never quite broke the code though and the street vendor was never fooled by their messages.
I love this story and how it shows the common inquisitive and maybe mischevious nature of children. We didn't have bamboo telegraphs where I grew up but we had a lot of ideas about how to play tricks on people.
I imagine the Saigon stickman have traded their bamboo sticks for cell phones now.
pho-king has a good bit of information on Pho (rhymes with saw) and links to Vietnamese cookbooks and things.
