Vietnam - Saigon

For most of my youth, my perceptions about Vietnam came from songs like Still in Saigon by the Charlie Daniels Band, and Copperhead Road by Steve Earle.  Those songs portray veterans of the Vietnam War who deal with the return to the United States in different ways, both describing lives altered forever by their experiences in the first televised war.  My history classes touched on events leading up to the war, but the dry text about policy and administration had my eyes quickly glazed over.  Still, something about this war struck a chord with me, and my curiosity was stoked In the 1980’s by the run of popular Vietnam War movies like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.

I wanted to know more about this war that divided the United States, and I went through a period where I read every book I could find on the subject until the events started to make sense to me.  I took a course on the war for a college history credit, and I used an excellent video series as a study guide which helped further my understanding. After a thirty-year painting career, I’ve had the privilege of working with numerous Vietnam War veterans who trusted me enough to tell me some of their stories, many of them harrowing, all of them life changing.  A common thread in the majority of all this information is the horror of war played out in a country containing rich natural beauty.

We’ve been traveling in Vietnam for three weeks now, and it’s still strange to hear the citizens refer to the events surrounding the American War and how their struggle for independence resulted in a victory that reunified the country.  I can say with certainty that the wild tropical beauty of Vietnam has far exceeded the images conjured in my imagination for so long, and I’m thankful that my family can experience living here for a while.  Just as the mountains, countryside, and coastal areas have vastly different appearances, the cities we’ve visited have been striking in their variation and feel, and we’ve enjoyed learning about the culture in each one.  

After a three-hour delay in the Da Nang airport, we finally touched down in the city formerly known as Saigon late yesterday afternoon.  While the name of the city was changed to Ho Chi Minh after the communist victory in 1975, its former name is still used commonly by locals and tourists alike, and I will henceforth refer to the city as Saigon because I like the way it sounds, and it’s easier to type.  We took a half-hour taxi ride from the airport to our apartment in the center city through some of the most intense, competitive traffic we’ve witnessed so far in southeast Asia, and that’s saying a lot.  When we arrive in a new place, I always try my best to observe everything I can and then compare my first impressions with the things I perceive during the course of our visit.  Compared to the faded French elegance of Hanoi, Saigon looks blocky, thrown together, and grimy with broken sidewalks and rusted transformer towers tilting into the streets under the weight of thick, tangled knots of thin electrical wires.  From what I’ve seen so far, the city looks like it was abandoned for ten years until someone blew a whistle prompting the sudden return of eight million people wearing masks and riding scooters at the same time.  

Our last two days in Hoi An were spent close to the homestay, and before we made one final trip into the old city on the last night, our host, Mr. Luong, invited us for a late afternoon snack.  The “snack” turned out to be a full meal featuring deep fried shrimp rolls and strips of sauteed beef wrapped up in thin rice paper with fresh greens and herbs.  Mr. Luong opened a bottle of wine and toasted our good health and good fortune and told us how much he enjoyed having us as guests for seven nights in his homestay.  He is a kind man whose large family lives on the homestay property and helps with cleaning and meal preparation.  We sat in the courtyard with Mr. Luong and enjoyed our meal while he told us about his country and the many changes that have occurred since the end of the war.  He said that the standard of living for most citizens improved greatly twenty years ago when the government lifted restrictions on industry and opened the doors to foreign investment and trade activity.  Under the communist regime, military service for eighteen-year-old men is compulsory, and it is forbidden to speak out against the government, but the majority of citizens in Vietnam are free to live where they want and work in a vocation of their choosing.  Mr. Luong was interested to learn more about life in America, and we enjoyed a long, relaxed afternoon full of lively conversation, and Deena and I were thankful that Joseph and Deveny could participate in this enlightening discussion.

It was dark when we arrived in the old city of Hoi An, and the lanterns were glowing all through the town streets.  We found a coffee shop with a second-floor terrace that looked out to the alleys below lined with vine-covered ficus trees. We talked over tall glasses of iced coconut coffee, a beverage to which we are now fully addicted.  We slowly wandered the lantern-lit streets taking a few new twists and turns eventually ending at the river where we sat barefoot dangling our legs over the concrete embankment.  Hoi An grew to prominence as early as the fourteenth century as one of the most popular trading ports in southeast Asia and held that status for over five-hundred years.  The well preserved old city still testifies to its former glory, and the weather-stained buildings along the canals are charming day and night but especially in the early evening when thousands of decorative lanterns give a glow to everything in their warm sphere of light.  Sitting in our small apartment in the heart of Saigon, we’re already missing kind-hearted Mr. Luong and the lure of ancient Hoi An, but the streets of Saigon are calling, and we must explore.

The Saigon free walking tours are extremely popular and require booking many days in advance, so I figured why not try to reserve a spot the night before?  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Much to our delight, someone from the tour company responded quickly and said they would organize another small group to accommodate our family along with two more travelers and gave us a meeting time of 1:30 the next day at a market about a mile from our apartment.  

Like every other street in Saigon, ours is constantly busy with scooter traffic and lined with small family restaurants, coffee shops, and various forms of retail establishments.  Our headquarters is on the third floor of a four-story building with a coffee shop occupying the first floor. The proprietor and his wife manage the apartments, most of which are leased by tong-term residents.  Each floor has an open kitchen built into the large landings off the stairwell, and we wave hello to residents in the process of cooking meals as we go up and down the stairs.  Our room is tight with a double bed for Deena and me and bunk beds for the kids.  There are no windows, but thankfully we have our own bathroom and a strong ceiling fan that sounds like a chopper landing in a rice paddy.  The air conditioner went on the fritz last night, which was unfortunate since the temperatures are in the nineties with matching humidity, but the owner has been diligent to get it working again, and the banana smoothies presented to us by his wife this morning helped our attitudes tremendously.  

Procuring food in the neighborhood has proved to be a bit of a challenge since most of the nearby restaurants are popular with locals but look to be rarely visited by westerners and many menu items are unfamiliar.  On our first night in Saigon, we wandered around in a travel-induced haze before settling on dinner in a small cafe with a stand out front that displayed seven pale yellow waxy chickens hung on a wire behind a pane of glass.  Some of them were roosters in their past life as evidenced by light pink combs still in place on their featherless, boiled-in-the-last-two-days-or-so heads.  We ordered noodle soup with beef but were served noodle soup with chicken, which came from the birds with the broken necks in the window after a flurry of chopping by a young man who wielded a mean meat cleaver.  The meat was a little tough but fairly tasty once we pulled off the skin and got past the bones.  Banh mi is the term the Vietnamese ascribe to French bread, and they sell it at small stands on the street and load up the fresh baguettes with all kinds of savory stuff.  We discovered a stand run by a nice lady on our block, and we’ve been buying her delicious breakfast banh mi loaded with fried eggs, cucumbers, and cilantro the last couple of mornings.

Fueled by a late morning banh mi breakfast, we walked the mile from our apartment to the market and met up with our tour guide, Vu, a twenty-two-year old with a spring in his step, a twinkle in his eye, and long hair dyed a copper color.  We were joined by two friendly ladies from Australia and struck out into the historic streets of Saigon with Vu who had the magic possessed by most Vietnamese pedestrians that allow them to part traffic with a firm hand gesture.  Vu was enthusiastic with a big smile that seemed impervious to the high heat and humidity, and he enjoyed showing all of the old hotels and government buildings around the city center most of which were built by the French a hundred years ago during their colonization of Vietnam.  We saw the opera house, Notre Dame Cathedral, post office, and the old Continental Hotel, which according to Vu, is the hotel in which Ho Chi Minh himself preferred to stay during his visits, although I can’t find any substantiation for this assertion.  

City Hall

Ho Chi Minh

Uncle Ho slept here....maybe

Ben Thanh market

Bricks at Notre Dame Cathedral

My favorite part of the tour was standing across the street from the old CIA building, weathered but still tucked in among the fancy hotels and high rises with the famous helicopter perch and ladder in the iconic evacuation photograph from 1975 still in plain view—I had chills going up and down my spine as I photographed the rooftop.  Vu had the famous picture from 1975 on his phone along with the altered photo released by the communist North, and he gladly emailed them to me so I could post them.  It’s obvious that most people see right through the propaganda, but the machine keeps rolling.  Nearby, we walked past a large middle school, and we could hear the children singing inside. Vu said that they were going through the litany of pro-government songs, which is part of the afternoon schedule every day.

The original 1975 photo

The altered photo

The CIA building today

Around the corner, we spied a Cong Caphe, and our fellow tour group members graciously allowed us time to run in and purchase two glorious take-away cups of coconut coffee which helped perk us up for the remainder of the tour.  We strolled through a beautiful park shaded by towering sycamore trees ending at the War Remnants Museum.  Vu told us to be prepared for a one-sided, graphic presentation of the American War which we had heard about from other travelers. Their information proved to be correct as we made quick work of viewing communist propaganda, the horrors of agent orange, and pictures showing the victims of American war crimes.

I enjoyed talking to Vu on the way back to the market, and he told me about life on his own in Saigon as he works two jobs to support himself.  He has six more months to go before finishing his studies at the university, and wants to continue working in the city.  He told me that the current culture in most Vietnamese families dictates the parents providing everything for their children's future, and Vu disagrees strongly with this situation.  “When parents give everything, it make lazy children in Vietnam who don’t want to work,” he said, adding that his twelve-year-old brother is a prime example of the spoiled youth in the country.  We reached the market where we gave Vu a generous tip for his services, said goodbye, and summoned an Uber driver for the trip back home to get out of the heat.

That night we watched an excellent documentary called The Last Days in Vietnam, which gives a detailed account of the weeks in Saigon leading up to the mass evacuation of April 30, 1975, which brought an end to the Vietnam War.  While most of the world refers to the events that day as the fall of Saigon, the north Vietnamese claimed the liberation of Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City in honor of their late president.  The documentary was fascinating to watch, and I would recommend it as required viewing for anyone interested in the history of the war that will continue to define this country for years to come.  The city scenes shown at the beginning of the film are eerily similar to those we’ve witnessed over the past couple of days with streets full of cars and scooters piloted by people constantly on the move in Saigon.  During our tour today, I noticed many repaired sections of sidewalk dimpled by shoe prints and furrowed by bicycle tires, marks left by citizens too busy to wait on cement to dry.  

Next day, we slept in longer, got ready for church at 11:00 and gladly left a little early to let the air-conditioner-repair guy get to his work.  The church was only a fifteen minute Uber ride away, and we got there in plenty of time to meet the pastor and his wife and hear the worship band warm up for the service.  Like the church we visited near Hoi An, this congregation met under the auspices of a Vietnamese church and had a permit issued by the government allowing worship conducted by expatriates living in Vietnam.  The music and the teaching were excellent, and we spent some time after the service talking with a fellow American living in Vietnam for six months doing contract work for his company, and he gave us some good tips for the rest of our stay in Saigon.  Before we left, I thanked the worship team for the wonderful music that morning having been most impressed by the funky groove laid down by the Asian drummer and bass player on  In The Sweet By and By that would’ve had Mother Maybelle Carter nodding in approval.

By most accounts, Saigon means “many cotton trees,” probably referring to the kapok trees planted in the region of the city by the khmer people centuries ago.  Hearing the name now, even sitting at a desk in the heart of the city itself, still evokes images of helicopters and desperate people climbing the US embassy walls in my mind. The city has a hodge podge feel with just a trace left of its colonial past and the decades following the French exit cobbled together by squat concrete structures and modern highrises with smoked glass facades all held together by millions of kilometers of electrical wire.  

My initial impressions of the city on that first night have softened a bit now that I’ve had several days to interact with many kind residents in a place where my fascination with the history finally culminated in a trip to see it with my family outside the pages of a history book.  Most travel guides describe Saigon as “high energy” and “hypnotizing,” and while I agree with those adjectives, I would add “tiring” since the frenetic pace has worn us out.  We couldn’t extend our stay in our current apartment for one more day, so tomorrow we have to move across town to a hotel for our last day and night in Saigon.  After that, we’re spending several days in the Mekong Delta in a bungalow beside the river, and I’ve already blocked out plenty of hammock time to rest and contemplate our time in Saigon.