Viet Nam: Saigon

Viet Nam: Saigon

Arrived at the ariport in the early afternoon and changed $600 USD into over 10 million dong, the first time I've been a millionaire since South Korea. The airport terminal was new and very efficient but small for a city the size of Saigon and full of posters and advertisements mostly in English and oriented to Western business. In contrast, next to the runways concrete structures for protecting helicoptors from Viet Cong attacks remained as an eiree and unexpected remnant of the US war. This juxtaposition kind of set the tone for the visit.

Streets in Saigon—virtually no one there calls it by its official name of Ho Chi Minh City—are very narrow and crowded, much more than those in China and in much worse repair. There are zillions of motorcycles and few cars and fewer bicycles. One of the most striking first impressions is the webs of electric wires strung in incredible tangles onto the cross bars of concrete poles sometimes just a few feet above the heads of pedestrians. If someome’s lighbulb or telephone goes dead due to a break in one of these wires, I could see it taking months to find the place to splice the wire.

Streets have hammar and sickle banners and silhouettes of Ho Chi Minh with quotes. Lots of people are out in the early afternoon despite the heat. Everywhere there is a very high level of activity. No one on this weekday afternoon is taking an rest as they would be up north in China at the same hour. There are peddlers everywhere, a good number of beggars, lots of street food but relatively few restaurants. We made the mistake of entering a huge indoor market near the hotel, definitely a tourist area, and were aggressively pursued by hawkers so we quickly made for the nearest escape. Even as I was on the run, one woman came after me and grabbed my shoulder—more of a caress—in an attempt to get me to look at her merchandise. Nevertheless, many middle-aged mostly European tourists and a few young hipsters were having a good time bargaining for spandex jeans and souvenir knick-knacks.

Wandering around we happened to pass a Hindu temple and were deluged by people selling incense and flowers to use as offerings inside the temple. I was quite surprised to see Vietnamese devotees in this overwhelmingly Buddhist country putting their faces into the corners of well worn dirty stone altars while others were kneeling and bowing before various Hindu dieties. I foolishly took some incense sticks that were thurst into my hands and lit them and put them in front of some of the statues. Upon leaving the place I was swarmed with people demanding money for the incense, but after less than an afternoon in Saigon I was calloused enough to refuse them and walked directly away. As a rather seasoned tourist in Asia, I’m accustomed to paying a good bit more for goods and sevices, but it must be said that in Vietnam some of these situations were over the top.

Interestingly, women in Viet Nam and Southeast Asia generally were not obsessively thin and in most cases very casually dressed. I suppose it's because they are in between the time when there wasn't really enough to eat but before the arrival of the advertising industry. The only exceptions to the not-very-well-dressed rule were the uniformly comely ladies in the hair salons, who were dressed to kill just inside the large glass doors and windows of these establishments. There seemed to be little doubt that their real business is not hair dressing.

The War Remnants Museum is an absolute requirement for visitors to Saigon. The museum is just what is says—a collection of objects left over from the French and US wars on Viet Nam.: a helicopter, a jet, a recon plane, mines, bombs of all kinds and sizes, grenades, rifles, machine guns—just about everything. Most of the museum was galleries of photos going back to the French wars, a good bit of them taken by US and French correspondents, many of them war critics. There are also pictures of and statements by US war resistors including those who burned themselves in protest. Of cousre, Jane Fonda is there too. One room is dedicated to pictures of anti-war protests from around the world. There were mock-ups of the infamous tiger cages and illustrations of the various torture mechanisms for male and female victims and the effects both immediately and decades later. Examples include waterboarding (still a favorite), electronic torture, various methods of hanging, finger pins, snakes, helecoptor executions, etc. etc.

Another part of the museum had to do with Agent Orange birth defect victims. There were many grim photos as well as a film. The tone of the museum reminded me of the documentary film Regret to Inform but even more powerful. For the sake of my mental health I went through the whole thing rather quickly not dwelling on any one part very much. In fact, there was little new for me, but still on a few occasions I had to back off a bit. In several of the rooms there were books for guests to record their impressions in, but I didn't read or write in any of them. I thought about writing something but didn't know if I'd be able to stop once I started.

Overall, the museum was balanced and tastefully done in the sense that it straightforwardly recorded what had transpired in terms of the French-US aggression, the Vietnamese resistence, and world wide opposition to the war including opposition in the invading countries. Perhaps I was reading into it for my own reasons, but there seemed even to be a certain sympathy for the French and American soldiers forced to fight in Viet Nam. There were donation bins to collect money for war victims and a few limbless beggars right in the compound but I didn't contribute. In the US I once gave a small contribution to the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation for aid to Viet Nam war victims, but when they called again the next year, after the Iraq war had started, I was angry and refused to give any more and lectured the caller about why I was refusing. Conscience money to pay for past wars is less needed than action to oppose current atrocities. The lessons from the war and why similar wars keep occurring remain to be learned by the public at large.

In the courtyard of the museum I overheard an American woman of Vietnam War era vintage asking a Vietnamese man who was perhaps in his 40s something like, "Do hate the Americans? You have a right to, you know!" The man smiled uneasily and replied, "No, no, we don't," but his reply was anything but forceful and convincing. She didn't seem to accept this response and her body language indicated she wanted more, but the man just muttered his answer again, turned his back and quickly moved away shaking his head—either to reinforce his reply or perhaps to indicate his unwillingness to carry the conversation further.

Cholon, which means 'big market,' is the crowded, busy, noisy Chinatown district of Saigon and is one of the oldest and most run down sections of town. Some buildings are crumbling and abandoned from pre-US war, pre-WW2 or turn of the 20th century colonial times. It is also the home of a number of Buddhist temples that go back a few hundred years in some cases. We visited two of the half dozen or so on the map and both were very active with incense-burning supplicants bowing and praying in large numbers. One of the temples, dedicated to Kuan Yin, had an attached school that seemed to go up to at least junior high school judging from the appearance of the students coming out.

Later in the day, we ate at a street stall run by some Cantonese speakers born in VN whose parents came from the mainland in 1931. The older brother was maybe my age and was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army later in the war after the family was extorted many times for a deferment to the point where the family restaurant was lost. All they now have now is the street stall and a floor in the old building behind it to live in. Well, he's still alive. I know the feeling. The sister said that there was a Taiwan-run Chinese language school in Saigon, so those who want their children to get a Chinese education can still do so. They say that relations between Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese community are now good.

We took a bus to two places the next day, the Cao Dai Temple in Tai Ninh Province, all the way to the Cambodian border, and the Cu Chi tunnels, an area of strong anti-French and anti-American resistence, now an exhibition area. On the way to the Cao Dai Temple we stopped at a factory in Tai Ninh Province ostensibly for a chance to relieve our bladders but really for a chance to be sold some goods made in a factory which we were told was set up to employ handicapped workers. Relatively few of the workers were in fact handicapped. The goods in the factory show room were priced slightly below what one might pay in the US. The weak leftovers of my Vietnamese langauge training allowed me to ask one worker what he made per month—a million dong, about $60 USD, or $2 per day, so there was quite a slip between what he produced and what was being taken in on the show room floor.

As we rode through the countryside we passed an area of big factories, mostly textile firms built with foreign investment money. The countryside does not seem to be so hard pressed as China when it comes to land use. The area gets 3 crops of rice and in between there is corn and peanuts as well as rubber plantations, started by the French and now run by the state. A good deal of new housing was going up along the major roads, so things seem to be prosperous enough but it is hard to make generalizations from a bus window.

The very huge cathedral-like Cao Dai Temple was interesting in a fashion. Founded in 1926, the Cao Dai religion claims to be a compilation of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism and Hinduism—the best of everything, presumably. Followers wear white and pray many times per day in some incantations that are unintelligble to native speaking Vietnamese...or anyone else perhaps including the prayers themselves according to the tour guide. Believers line up in the temple according to their seniority and position in the faith communty. It has several million followers in Viet Nam.

Cu Chi was interesting but quite disappointing in that it is an area of historical importance that has been turned into a tourist trap. The tour we were given started with an old black and white film with Viet Cong footage and commentary from the 60s explaining the particularly fierce resistence of Cu Chi villagers to the US based soldiers nearby. (The base is now used by the Vietnamese army and proceeds from entrance fees go to the military.) The famous tunnels were begun in 1948 when Cu Chi first resisted the French. The tunnels were built both to keep safe from US bombing campaigns as well as a place to escape to during combat with US troops. A B-52 crater remains and the jungle undergrowth is still thick. A tank stands in the jungle where the 5-man crew was shot dead as they tried to flee after the tank was stopped by a mine. The biggest attraction was to crawl through the black tunnels, now widened to accommodate Western derrieres. Various exhibits show how US ordnance was recycled by the VC, how various kinds of booby traps worked, and how the VC could even cook underground and spread the smoke out through vents in ways that would not be detected.

All of this was interesting enough, but it got over the top when we taken to a firing range where you could pay US dollars by the bullet to live fire any kind of weapon you wanted, AKs, M-60s, M-16s, etc. One French dude who came dressed in US knock-off camouflage really got into it. All the Japanese tourists fired weapons too. I kept my distance and somehow managed to keep my temper also.

The tour guide was maybe the biggest part of this story. He said we could call him "Slim Jim" because his old American buddies said he ate like a bird, drank life a fish and smoked like a chimney. Very cute. He said he was a new member of the tour guide company. He had taught English for 24 years in the countryside since 1973 and says he may go back into teaching after he improves his conversational English as a tour guide. Fat chance. I suspect he worked for the US Army judging from his use of words like klicks for 'kilometers,' totally a military term. When the US officialy left in 1973 he needed work and may have been forced to teach in rural areas as part of a re-education program after his US military backers were not there to help him anymore. He kept mentioning that he was a Roman Catholic and kept saying that Diem, the assassinated US toady (likely assassinated by the US because they had better toadies waiting in the wings), was "claimed" by the people of Cu Chi to be a US puppet. Diem, of course, was an ardent Catholic too, as were many of the well-heeled, anti-communist, pro-US upper class. Virtually everything the tour guide said was presented in a way to accommodate presumably sensitive American audiences. I overheard him talking to a young American about how the VC film at the beginning was "propaganda" and needed to be balanced by "the other side"—the side of imperialist aggression? The message of the day was tone down or stifle any possible obstacle to the steady flow of tourist cash. Surely the Vietnamese high school students who visit this location don't get the same message. It was sad and difficult to see this former killing zone but sadder still because an important educational opportunity was lost to the desire for tourist dollars.