09 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Saigon life
D
ownpours at the start of the rainy season are routine, appearing and departing like the clicks of a clock ticking time. At three, the sky turns moody and darkens. At four, a downpour. By six, all is clear and the diesel thick air gets washed, the clouds hang, dripping pastel prettiness, just in time for visitors to take to sky bars and watch the sun dip into the horizon.
31 Wednesday May 2017
Posted in Books and Films: reviews, Saigon life
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“All Americans are sluts”, said my friend Vu.
“Wait… What?” I exclaimed, assuming this was just misspoken English on Vu’s part, though he is fluent in the language.
“Yeah, Americans are all sluts, man. That’s what most Vietnamese locals think just from watching Hollywood films and shows.”
The group of male friends, all Viet Kieus and Americans, nodded their agreement. Vu was the only local in the group, and he had our attention:
“Everyone is sleeping with everyone else. Different kinds of people all sleeping with each other in different ways. We think Americans are all slutty.”
06 Saturday May 2017
Posted in Saigon life
I
n Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Awakening from an unrestful sleep, perturbed by an ever roaming mind and a good hit of opium, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote these lines in a rush of creative inspiration. He may have been dreaming of Vietnam’s Quang Binh province when he wrote them.
Certainly for me, the landscape and geology of Quang Binh province have come closest to the natural realization of the romantic chasms and caves of ice in “Kubla Khan”. The area is a dense jungle in shades of green, with tall vine-entwined trees and dense foliage forming a thick canopy that conceals hundreds of caverns and the streams and rivers that course through them. Continue reading
20 Thursday Apr 2017
Posted in Saigon life
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I
like to visit 3A Station in the late afternoons, when visitors come to browse its galleries and shops, or take photos next to its graffiti covered walls. The exteriors of old colonial warehouses that used to be here are kept intact, extending to form colourful alleyways. Small trees, industrial art, and painted walls refract the late afternoon light; on most afternoons, a breeze blows directly from the river and cools the alleyway. A bar at the alley’s end, The Great Hornbill, plays soft dixieland jazz or classic 80s tunes from a lone speaker running into the centre of the makeshift square. A gentle, affecting pace contrast the alleyway with the din of Nguyen Van Cu, the busy avenue that leads into it, offering respite from the ubiquitous construction noise that typify the new Saigon.
24 Friday Mar 2017
Posted in Saigon life
W
hen he first visited Saigon in the late 1940s, the writer Norman Lewis made this observation of the sidewalk life he saw here, after a short amble through the city:
“It was clear from the first moment of picking my way through these crowded, torrid streets that the lives of the people of the far East are lived in public… The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two. At dawn, or, in the case of Saigon, at the hour when the curfew is lifted, people roll out of bed and make for the pavement, where there is more space to perform most of their toilet. Thereafter they eat, play cards, doze, wash themselves, have their teeth seen to, are cupped and massaged by physicians, visit fortune-tellers; all in the street” (Lewis, 22)
19 Sunday Mar 2017
Posted in Saigon life, Uncategorized
Halfway on the road from Ho Chi Minh to Vung Tau you turn from highway 51 onto Hoang Sa road, and the land opens up on both sides. You come upon salt marshes, with their mixture of sky, island clusters, waterways, briny sea and pungent drafts of dried fish. Views here are expansive: tufted grass, mangrove clumps, an occasional boat docked next to makeshift homes, become dots upon a larger canvas of sky and marsh water.
It took two hours to get you here on motorbike. Two hours splitting the road with careless cars, packed buses, delivery trucks loaded twice their heights with wood, metal shutters, construction sand and pebbles that bounce out their useless tarp covering and pelt you and motorbike the entire way there.
03 Friday Mar 2017
Posted in Saigon life
A short story
K
hanh got there early, as per his usual habit. Tien, the girl who made the banh mi, wasn’t awake yet, and he knew he’d have to wake her up. Saigon was in a rare silent moment of repose, the dimmest hour before dawn, too late for the night owls coming home from bars and clubs, too early for daily workers starting their morning shift.
19 Sunday Feb 2017
Posted in Saigon life
O
n a warm, humid Saturday in February, two American friends and I drove our motorbikes west of the city to visit some Buddhist and Taoist temples in Cho Lon. Cho Lon, or “big market” in Vietnamese, is Ho Chi Minh city’s massive Chinatown, noted as possibly the largest Chinatown in the world, in fact, and has been here for as long as the main section of the city has been. Even before the French made of this slice of Vietnam its Cochinchina, building up Saigon’s most emblematic buildings, Cho Lon was already a separate Chinese township, its homes packed together like any dense section of Hong Kong, existing in its own particular sphere of culture and housing the many immigrants from China living, trading, and setting down roots here.
07 Tuesday Feb 2017
Posted in Saigon life
L
ong known as the poorer, more dangerous sibling of district 1, district 4 in recent years has been shedding its reputation as repository for thieves, pickpockets, and gangsters of the city, or as a thoroughfare between its more prosperous neighbours, D1 and D7. Now, it has picked up noted prestige as a place to go for the best street foods, to shop in busy markets, a location to find every imaginable necessity sold cheaply and in bulk. District 4 is more true to Saigon’s old pace of living than D1, and its profusion of pastel painted, closely packed low rises reminds visitors of a different city and time, even as high rise behemoths and razed plots of tufted grass and gravel demarcating future apartment complexes appear ever more frequently.
21 Saturday Jan 2017
Posted in Saigon life
C
hu Hong works with his wife selling Banh Mi in district 4 in a hem next to my apartment complex. This morning he made a banh mi thit nguoi (cold cuts baguette sandwich) and fried me an egg to add to the filling. It was delicious and cost 75c, would have been about 60c, but the egg added to the price. I sat on his stool and he talked a little about his life.
“I’ve lived here since I was a kid, in that house over there (points down the alleyway). Haven’t ever moved.
Yeah this neighborhood changed alot over the years. You can see construction right around the corner from you. High rises everywhere. Used to be helter skelter houses built everywhere instead of these complexes, hahaha.
My wife sells banh mi too, you might know her (I do). She sells right outside your apartment complex. She gets her cart there in the evening to late at night, and I sell during the day. At 2 AM she sells to all the construction workers on their break.They take the night shift and work throughout the night so my wife and I take shifts too. Or she’ll sell to the college students early in the morning, too. She sleeps during the day and I sleep at night, and work during the day.
I had a brother who escaped the country just like you did. He left and went to California with his wife. All the Vietnamese are there. Whenever his wife gets lonely they come back here and visit. It’s not easy there, he tells me. It’s really hard, they put in a lot of hard work. They worked at a car wash for many years to make a living. Now they work in an office, much easier work, so it’s better now. I see them come back every once in a while.
Come by a little later in the day next time and I’ll show you our place!”
