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Vancouverite Road Trip: Saigon, Vietnam

112 Degrees and Rising in Saigon

I could see my plane’s shadow dance over the perfectly kept farms and rice patties, the emerald greens contrasting sharply with the darkness of the grey blue water. We started coming over the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. The suburbs of this city of 6-million plus are a maze of buildings thrust against one another with little regard for city planning or logic. This from a country that still seems to be holding onto some of the strongest parts of its communist past.

And with that, you are introduced to Vietnam, via a line up to immigration. The airport seems very ‘60’s socialist kitsch and the long stalls of immigration officers dressed in the green uniforms with red and yellow trim that seem like they must have been ordered from a central Communist uniform factory and the soldiers from central casting. They almost didn’t look real, more costume, than any reality. Once you get through that eye opening process and on your way to Ho Chi Minh City proper, it is an overwhelming, loud, and busy explosion. Thoughts of any romantic or quant experience in the orient are very quickly shattered. Even the draw of enjoying the colonial French influence in Vietnam seems to fade, quicker than the three million plus scooters unleashed on the city as you realize that Ho Chi Minh City is in tremendous flux. The Americans may have pulled out of South Vietnam, but it seems the Vietnamese embraced the west after they left, anyway.

Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as it used to be officially called and the name it now still unofficially clings to, is Vietnam’s industrial epicenter. This is the country’s New York and Detroit mixed into one – an economic, industrial, and cultural behemoth. And while the pollution and business of this city drive the nation and make Saigon what it is, the people still live very much on the street. Every corner there is street food, and people selling photocopied English books – mostly about Vietnam, but you can get even the most pretentious best seller usually. They eat right beside the road. Hell, they cook right beside the road. I’m not sure what is worse. But even still, you can see delicious looking baguettes for sale just inches from the traffic. It’s actually hard to figure out where the street ends and the sidewalks begin. At best pedestrians are mere afterthoughts to the motorcycles. At worse, targets. Motorcycles rule the roads and sidewalks. Traffic rules, street signs, lights, directions, they are all but kind suggestions. But at this core, you can see the struggle of Saigon as it rages against, modernity, rages against time, rages against a world that is coming in very fast.

Thomas Friedman Eat Your Heart Out

Already you can see many a western style coffee shop – no Starbucks per se, but at least Starbucks-lite, and they were full, not just of western tourists and expats, but locals. Lots of them. This is the slow hand of globalization. If I were Thomas Friedman of The New York Times I might very well to try make some sort of ground breakingly clever cultural statements. I might say something about how the young Vietnamese girls still wear their beautiful and flowing Ao dai’s, but today they are listening to their iPods. That the man who helped liberate them from colonial French rule, and drive out the Americans, Ho Chi Minh himself, looks suspiciously like the statue of Colonel Sanders out in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken store just a stones throw from a government building with a rugged image of Uncle Ho in his army greens. In fact, Uncle how is just another icon or brand for tourists and locals alike. Or how about the local police officers? Still maintaining the apparatus of the state system, but today they are also using their cell phones to text message while they sit around.

The truth is everything I have ever learned about Vietnam, was probably learned while watching American movies about the war. Watching “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon” and even “Good Morning Vietnam” was a crash course in Vietnam. Everything you have to know about the temperature in Vietnam is made abundantly clear by Robin Williams’ portrayal of Adrian Cronauer doing Walter Cronkite:

“I just want to begin by saying to Roosevelt E. Roosevelt, what it is, what it shall be, what it was. The weather out there today is hot and shitty with continued hot and shitty in the afternoon. Tomorrow a chance of continued crappy with a pissy weather front coming down from the north. Basically, it's hotter than a snake's ass in a wagon rut.”

Sad but not entirely untrue. And I’m certainly not going to make any excuses for learning my Vietnam from the war films of the 70’s & 80’s. Or worse from half-baked TV shows like “Tour of Duty”. But let’s be honest here, it’s not as if I’ve broken the cardinal rule of never fighting a land war in South Asia or anything like that.

To get a real glimpse into the old school regime, bring some books into the country that seem mildly controversial – preferably something political. Then go to the post office and try to mail them. Up along the Dong Khoi (“uprising”) road, which was once called Tu Do (‘freedom’) when the Americans were here, and Rue Catinat during the French reign, you’ll find the General Post Office across the street from the charming Notre Dame Cathedral – a peek inside reveals some ridiculous fluorescent trimmed art of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It’s worth the trip if only to enjoy this 1880’s built colonial building, and believe me, the requisite painting of Uncle Ho on the wall.

But it is more a marvel of socialist bureaucracy at it’s best, or at least a tiny glimpse into the former glory of all things socialist. The sound of hammer stamps thumping, and dozens of workers shuffling paper, and the thrill of filling forms out in triplicate are like lost relics of the past. But the books, they won’t let you send them until you get the Cultural Control office to check them out. Now we’re talking – this is the soft and warm hand of Uncle Ho touching you. Just down the street is a small non-descript government office. As confusing as this process was, the workers there were pleasant, and three goldfish bowls had happy orange fish swimming in them amongst various boxes of junk stacked here and there. Not exactly much to fear. To check the books, for their subversiveness or significance maybe, it isn’t quite clear, but it would cost $1,000 Dong per book to check. It would also take 24 hours to check them – obviously there are some speed-readers working for the people’s party in the Cultural Control office.

The next day you return hoping to find your books unacceptable, or better yet, full of censored lines with a sloppy black marker. Sadly, not. But they show you the books again, before wrapping them tightly in white paper, and taping them up with a small certificate on each end certifying that these books, are a-okay by Uncle Ho’s people. I counted at least 4 forms that were used to have the books checked to ready them for the post office. I had originally thought the money was just to fill the government coffers, but I see now that the amounts of paper, tape, and ink must cripple the government in costs. To send 6 books through this amazing process it will cost you the $1000 Dong ($1 US is about $16,000 Dong) per book plus another $2000 just because they say so. It’s worth it.

God Bless The French

If you stay in one of the many famous older hotels in Saigon you may feel as if you are not really in the orient at all. And there are many of them. I chose to use the term ‘orient’, because a friend of mine likes it and admittedly it sounds better. It certainly does sound more romantic with its meaning sunrise east. At the Hotel Continental, where Fowler meets Pyle in The Quiet American you can certainly see back in time to see the ebbs and flows of fortune that took place in Saigon. Imagining the time of the colonial French and can see how they tried to build an Asian version of a provincial town in Vietnam. And while the Americans were fighting their Civil War in 1861, the French were seizing Saigon and making it the capital of French Indochina.

At the 11th floor Saigon Saigon Bar in the 1959 built, and 1998 remodeled, Caravelle you can almost imagine the foreign correspondents of the past sitting there drinking, smoking, and maybe even writing stories over drinks. During the 60’s the hotel was the home of the offices of AP, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Of course, if you go during the wet season and are there on a Thursday afternoon it doesn’t quite have that same feeling. Although the lone graying expat drinking and smoking by himself at the bar could have been at home with David Halberstam or Peter Arnet, or even famous photographer Robert Capa. I’m sure of it, he looked jaded and almost annoyed that he wasn’t yet drunk. At any rate, you can see why journalists at the end of the war claimed they could cover the action without ever leaving their barstools. They don’t make bars like this anymore. Or reporters.

But let’s get back to our friends the French. Today their influence, still visibly marks Saigon, the colonial architecture in a variety of buildings around the city certainly is far more impressive than yet another new sprawling and modern building which are going up at an inspiring speed. At some point we’ll be traveling the world and realize that most modern cities all have the same looking buildings, and they just aren’t that good looking anymore. So for Saigon, Rick Blaine’s phrase “we’ll always have Paris”, thankfully becomes we’ll always have the colonial French influence.

The trouble is, that the Vietnamese didn’t like the French rule, and really how could you? France subjugating another nation just seems, well, just so dirty and wrong now. A nation where today they burn tiny cars at the rate of a couple hundred a month to protest cheese prices – or perhaps something less trivial – couldn’t have once had an empire could they? In fact today it seems downright impossible. And it wasn’t just the French either; the Vietnamese had seen enough of foreign powers to last them forever. Especially after 1000 years resisting the Chinese rule that began in the 2nd century. If you can outlive 1000-years of the Chinese, honestly, what is 8-decades of the French? It’s a coffee break. And the icing on the cake may have been the Japanese rule during WWII, who took over from the French who were too busy surrendering back home to Germany.

Travel enough in Saigon and it’s suburbs and you begin to know why the French buildings are so dominant over everything today. It’s the style. Aesthetics are hard to see here – down right impossible. Nearly every storefront is a jumble of messy items, an overload of junk, and even the majority of buildings themselves struggle to make even the least amount of sense. Yet, you do have those few glimmers of hope – the Ao dai for instance – before you lay your eyes upon the complete lack of style and begin to wonder how it was North America ever turned to the orient for style at all. And maybe it is too early, too soon from the yoke of Communism to ask where the style is. But then at first glances, I’m sure New York in the late 1800’s would have given off the same unfinished, dirty, down right crazy development feel. Or perhaps Chicago during its build up to the 1893 World’s Fair would be a better example. Completely uncontrollable growth isn’t pretty, and frankly it looks that way. What is going up now might not even last 5-years to say nothing about lasting as long as the French Colonial buildings, but that is probably for the best. It’s growth triumphing – well, beating the hell out of anyway - over style.

And certainly this doesn’t mean you want every restaurant in Saigon to be like the one called Mojo in the Caravelle’s building. It’s simple, modern and clean design – and striking orange branding – seem terribly out of place in this city. And you certainly don’t want to turn Saigon into a bland repeat of what cities like Vancouver and San Francisco are doing either. But how do you follow up communism during a period of explosive growth?

The Anti-Backpackers Manifesto

The other thing, related to style that leaves a distasteful feeling in my mouth are backpackers. If you want to save money and travel, it’s the way to go. But it wasn’t until I went to catch a tour bus in Saigon’s backpacker district that I clued in on how much I can’t stand these people anymore. Upon entering it, you kind of want to mimic Alex Guinness doing Obi-Wan from Star Wars describing Mos Eisley spaceport, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” Okay, even I might say that is a little much.

But when you see this army of backpackers, the shaggy hair, the Che inspired beards, the unwashed stench, the anklets, the woven bracelets and, my god, the flip-flops you want to turn the other way. There was a time I could travel with them, but whether it is because I’m too old, or I’ve finally grown up, I don’t think I can do it anymore. You just know that many of them can sit around and quote Naomi Klein’s No Logo at will, but you also know that they are wearing a brand of their own now – western backpacker chic– and it isn’t pretty. Amusing to be sure, but the backpackercephalus is a creature to stay away from. And for me, that realization took only 5 short days.

Years ago, traveling was something you did to become a refined gentleman or lady. You took your trunk and went to the continent. Today, you let your beard grow shaggy, you buy cheap looking hippy skirts, and you stay in the backpackers areas of town. You can still get your vegemite on toast to make it feel like home. Most of all, you see the sights during the day, and drink beers at night in dive bars. Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio film, “The Beach”? There is a reason why people want to find that perfect place to travel. The reason is that you get to these places, and you’re not alone. There are 100’s of other people like you, standing in front of the same thing – a statue of Ho Chi Minh – and you might as well have stayed home.

The Uncle Ho Experience – Part One

From my perch at Saigon Saigon one afternoon, I can see the delightfully cheesy façade of The Rex Hotel – once a garage for Peugeots, and later a six-story building used by the US Information office and officer residence. It’s 6-foot crown logo and trademark has been blazing on the roof since 1986. And it was here where some of the most ridiculous press conferences of all time were held, the infamous “Five O’clock Follies.” You can also see the handsome Hotel De Ville (People’s Committee Building) and its accompanying statue of Ho cradling a baby in his arms. The funny about this is that you can buy a similar postcard, actually this amazing one of him clutching a little girl. The back caption says, “No one could love small children as Uncle Ho did”. Unintentionally hilarious, apparently nobody kills ‘em quite like Uncle Ho does and he’s virtually everywhere. There he is in a heavily Soviet influenced propaganda poster. There he is writing. There he is with another young girl. There he is in army greens. It’s a virtual “Where’s Ho” experience not to be missed.

Even at the Saigon Opera House or Ho Chi Minh Municipal Theater where on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday (May 19th) I attended a charming violin and piano night in this turn of the century venue. The funny thing was that the main attraction looked like a cross between, who else, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu and Uncle Ho himself, even in a white jacket and black bowtie.

I think my favorite Ho portrait was at the Cu Chi Tunnels. A supposedly not to be overlooked activity 80kms outside the city, these were the famous tunnels used by the Vietnamese to fight both the French and Americans, and eventually springboard launch the Tet Offensive. Spread over a 200km they do give you a small sense of the stern resolve of the Vietnamese people. I’ll preface this by saying two sets of people told me how great this is, but I wouldn’t recommend them unless you really love some good old-fashioned crass commercialization of war monuments. If you are looking for solemn reflection, Omaha Beach, this is not. I don’t contend that the Cu Chi Tunnels aren’t an important part of the history of the war, but I just contend that I will take it up with those who recommended this site later.

The lone bright spot was the propaganda film at the beginning. In a fairly small utilitarian room (read: 80’s Socialist Chic), under the guise of a hastily put up Vietnam flag, and a charmingly, slightly crooked, framed photo of Uncle Ho, we watched a black and white movie about the tunnels. It was in English, sort of, but the TV looked like it was circa 1986 and sounded like it too. How cute. Then a guy got up and explained the map on the wall, and the diorama of the tunnels. He laughed a lot while speaking of terrible conditions and fighting.

It was all down hill after this. They led us through the forest and showed various entrances and fighting trenches of the tunnels. There were even really bad animatronic Vietcong making bombs at one point. Mr. Disney, please call the home office, stat. The tour guides thought it was amazing, or at least tried to for our sake. Then I watched as some hippy looking backpackers gleefully fired off AK-47’s for a dollar US a bullet. Before I left I told people I was going to do this, but it just seemed so terribly wrong. They billed it as your opportunity to act like a guerilla. Yeah, um, when you put it this way, no thanks. Once you see a Che looking backpacker with an AK-47 it makes you question guns. Trust me. Next up was the makeshift weapons and traps that the guides gleefully showed what they did to the unsuspecting Americans.

Finally after about 45 minutes of these sad little stations – with various gift shops along the way selling bullets made into tanks, books, supposed authentic Zippo lighters from the war (right, sure they were) - we finally got to go into the actual tunnel. Now of course we went through the “5-star tunnel” made doublewide for us larger westerners. I barely fit, and it was cramped, cement and sand, and nearly pitch black. I lasted the first 20 feet and came back up. Nothing to see here. If Canada is ever taken over I vote for no tunnels to defend us, perhaps tree forts or something.

Last stop was for some tea and tapioca root to feel like a true guerilla soldier. While you do get a fairly good impression of why they should be proud of defending their nation, you don’t get the sense that Vietnam has learned the costs of war very well. The pamphlet was hilarious written in the prose of Cold War era propaganda. I mean seriously, this is truly inspiring writing: “The model of the strategic hamlet is the place where America and their lackeys controlled people. Finally, the activities of boys and girls joining the army with zeal to fight the aggressors.” Wow, you can’t make stuff like that up anymore.

Today in Vietnam you get the full sense of the tragedy of the Vietnam War at the museums of Saigon. The War Remnants Museum, only recently changed its name from the rather one-sided “War Crimes Museum”. These comically state run treasures are laughably labeled as state of the art museum facilities – I guess if you are saying state of the art 1979, then you are bang on. To be fair, the museum appears to be trying to call balls and strikes like an umpire might. Still, the strike zone appears, well, fluid and quite large when America is up to bat.

And all of this makes you wonder how the Americans could step into Vietnam so badly and not truly understand it. Sure Uncle Ho was a commie, but he wasn’t a Russian or Chinese puppet was he? I guess it makes sense now that Robert McNamara in his memoir In Retrospect can be this honest: “I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or values. The same must be said, to varying degrees, about President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy, military advisor Maxwell Taylor, and many others. When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita. “

Ouch. No doubt Graham Greene would nod with a quiet and smug glee over that statement. That vacuum of knowledge plus the guiding principle of thinking that South Vietnam falling to communism would somehow threaten the Western World was a total disaster. We can only pray that somebody in the White House knows even just a little more about Iraq than they did in Kennedy’s term about Vietnam. But they went in anyway and you can see why they had to leave on noon April 29, 1975 for good by sounding the last warning, “It is 112 degrees and rising” followed by Bing Crosby singing White Christmas on the radio. And you can see the wonderful irony in the two lonely consulates of France and America, side by side behind huge walls, protected by gun slinging Vietnamese officers, forever engulfed by Saigon’s loud, bustling grip.

Posted by Jackson Murphy | Link | Comments (2)