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.

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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.

“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!”

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

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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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:

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 →

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

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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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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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 →