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itsaphanlife

Category Archives: Saigon life

Humans of District 4

21 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life

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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.

IMG_0397.JPG“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!”

What Work Is

15 Sunday Jan 2017

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First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
– Bertrand Russell

Work work work work work. -Rihanna

work.jpg

If I were to do a breakdown of where my allotted cash for my sabbatical gets spent this year, the bulk of it went to leisure drinking: coffees and cocktails. I suspect that besides my rent, iced Vietnamese coffees, happy hour visits to cocktail bars and hipster craft beer bars, “…for malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man” all drain the coffers much more than food or other necessities.

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The sabbatical year, half way finished

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life, Uncategorized

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2016
was… a sad year of losses. In music, in civility and grace, in sanity. 2017, may you be just a little bit kinder to this world.

The flip side of this gruesome year in politics and the arts, is that I had a chance on my year off to be with family. I was able to hang with my father in Vietnam, a place where he is his most amusing, generous self. I got to spend valuable time with my mom, who is halfway across the world but always a skype call away. I got to see my brother and his lovely wife marry under the awning of colorful autumn leaves in college town, New England.

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The Viet Kieu Casanova – a short story

24 Saturday Dec 2016

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Absurd, crazy stories of love in the new Saigon provide inspiration for this short story: The Viet Kieu Casanova. This is a section of that story:

goodmorningcafe1

Section 1: The Shopkeeper

This Viet Kieu comes into my cafe and store usually three, four times a week. He’s in his 30s I think, and he brings with him a new girl each time he comes, buys her a gift. Then, they leave. It’s an old routine. The girls are always 20 something, freshly made up, with the new bodies I see now on Vietnamese women, a little fitter, bigger, firmer butts. They’re the ones I always see on instagram, or in cafes taking selfies, or at the gyms in the city barely breaking a sweat, flirting with the trainers, also taking selfies. Many of them are part time models, I’d guess.

How exhausting it is to be young and single. It was different in my days, and I met my husband when we were young and in school together. It all feels so different now.

I think this guy made some money from living abroad. Or he’s here on a long holiday, because it takes a lot of effort and work to take a different girl to the shop each time. Think of the planning that goes behind it. Imagine having to remember all that you’ve told to each girl, and all that you’ve done, all of your different stories, and with whom you said and did these things with. It must get exhausting!

My shop is on a busy stretch of Saigon’s new walking street. When I started it with my business partner there was construction all over the street to turn it into a pedestrian friendly zone, so we didn’t have many customers then. The rare people that did come, would sit down, sip their coffee, complain about the noise, and leave. But we stuck with it because I knew, once all this work on the street was finished, we’d get plenty of visitors.  The trick was to figure out when construction would get done, because the government always promises quick completion times for their projects but they always get delayed, so the date keeps stretching into the unforeseable future, and we all wait, all of us in limbo. Everyone waiting. Like the girls and this Viet Kieu, each one of them waiting to see if their investment leads to some return.

Who ever knows when you can get what you put into your business back? Who knows when you can make some money finally.  You just keep working and hoping for the best. That’s what my partner and I did.  Continue reading →

Humans of Saigon’s district 4

02 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life

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I
n my childhood, Saigon’s district 4 was dangerous, full of crime and violence. At least that’s what everyone tells me, from friends to family; I was too young to know much about it. My family lived on the other side of district 1, in Binh Thanh.

District 4 happens to also be the area undergoing the most major change and gentrification as Saigon booms and expands. New high rises and cranes have appeared on Ben Van Don, the thoroughfare that lines the main canal that distinguishes district 4 from the center of the city. District 4 also happens to be where I’m moving to this month, to finish up my year of living funemployed.

Below are brief talks with two of my new neighbors who’ve lived in D4 a long time and seen it go through all its changes.

Co ban nuoc mia, the sugarcane juice seller

I’ve been selling sugarcane juice here for thirty img_9656years. The city has changed alot since then! I have a son who drives a taxi for a living and a daughter who does nails. She’s very good, can do all kinds of colors on your nails. My son drives people for a living and makes 350usd a month, he makes a good living for himself.

Price for sugarcane juice: 30 cents per cup
Nuoc Mia, sugarcane juice, is made from crushed sugarcanes, and you can see it made in front of you as the canes are pushed through a set of steel rollers, to come out as pulp on the other side.

Anh Van, motorbike driver:

van-motorbike-driverI’ve lived here on Ben Vân Don for twelve years, before that I lived on (another street in district 4) for another ten years. It used to be really dangerous here. Alot of gangsters and criminals. A lot of robberies. It’s safe now and it’s changed a lot, but it’s more expensive too.

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The return home: Vietnamese students after an education abroad

16 Sunday Oct 2016

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A shorter version of this article is published and can be read at Bliss Saigon. Real names have been changed.

study-abroad-scholarships

T

hree years ago, over coffee at ID cafe, a comfortably decorated place for the young and hip, I met three twenty-something Vietnamese young men who had been educated abroad.

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Saigons of the future, part 1

04 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life

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There is a fantastic book by Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities, in which the author describes cities both imaginary and real, hypothetical and actual, existing in the imagination and in the realm of the historically true. Cities of the future, cities of the past, cities filled with trash, cities clogged with pollution spewing cars, cities traversing the length of one’s thought, that run as far as one’s mind can run, Calvino’s imagination creates them all.

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Oh the model flats you’ll see in the new Saigon!

26 Monday Sep 2016

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The floor is made from the carcasses of spruce trees or pines. Their dark amber, luxuriant smoothness, and all the veins in the grain together seem tailor made for this room, as if nature had contorted itself into flooring to form the ideal of a high rise’s interior. Continue reading →

Sweet indolence of the slow life

08 Thursday Sep 2016

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I left Hong Kong for a year to get a taste of a slower life, to consider the world’s motions through the lenses of a person with time to spare. What could be better than this slow sweetness, what better than to sense the day’s oozings hours by hours?  The great Continue reading →

On Imitation and Authenticity in Vietnam

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by itsaphanlife in Saigon life

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imgres.jpg   1436027870-11713499_433198036882486_677832933_n.jpg

*versions of “ca chien”

During my first full summer back in Vietnam, I paid 100 USD to a local friend and for the money was able to a) rent a motorbike, b) attain an owners’ certificate, c) possess two rain jackets for biking in the downpours that dropped so frequently during the rainy season, and d) possess one real and one fake helmet, the latter used in case I need to drive a friend around. Within one week, someone took my real helmet and replaced it with a fake one costing one tenth its value. Two weeks later, my original fake helmet too, was stolen, and I was left with the substituted fake helmet that the first thief left me to use during my last few weeks in the city.

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Still life with 4 books I read in America over this long winter break (vertical) and 4 books I bought there to bring back to Vietnam (horizontal). Loved Bliss Montage, All That's Left Unsaid, and many of the stories in Afterparties, liked/appreciated Useful Phrases for Immigrants. Wrote a longer review of All That's Left Unsaid that'll be on @weare_dvan soon. Trekking round Manhattan #bigapple New York City continues to be the best city for reuniting with old friends. #nyc #brooklyn Trekking around Boston, Harvard, Boston Commons, and showing my wife my old hometown in winter. I actually missed feeling this level of cold! #winterinboston Fun with our niece Alanna on our last days in Florida. Can't wait to have our own...we think... #funwithbabies Beach hopping and night market shopping around Sarasota and Venice, Florida #beachesoflorida In spite of the fact that Trump and Desantis both reside in this state, Florida's been A-OK with us! #florida #summerinwinter Back in America. For this visit, our family has expanded by two! #floridayrusocold #florida

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