Untitled 3: Saigon



“...Saigon, forever....” The days here pass slowly―as you sit under the slow, circling ceiling fans in the Cafe Givral or on the shaded veranda of the Majestic Hotel, drinking iced coffee and writing postcards; as you walk along the river, Song Saigon, winding its way like a brown snake through the city; as you wake up each morning and go to sleep each night in this place, under a mosquito net to the never-ending buzz of motorbike engines in the streets outside - the days pass slowly, each like its own small eternity, its own little Saigon forever. You arrived here only a few weeks ago; but already, everything that you can remember from the time before you came here seems like someone else’s lifetime.

You finish your lunch of rice noodles and grilled pork at La Rose, near Notre Dame Cathedral; and watch a father with his baby son, playing underneath a palm tree in the park across the street. You walk over to the old main post office at the top end of Dong Khoi Street to mail your postcards back home to America, a place that now seems small and distant, like an old movie you saw once on T.V. On the walls of the post office, just inside the entrance are giant maps, painted onto the marble long ago by the French: SAIGON ET ENVIRONS, COCHINCHINE; and on the far wall in front of you is a much more recent painting, of the smiling face and thin white beard of Ho Chi Minh. You take your postcards to the overseas window to have them stamped and sent, and you wonder if they will ever reach their destination.

You go into a foreign language bookstore, in a small side street a couple of blocks down Dong Khoi from the post office to buy a Vietnamese-English dictionary; and while you’re there you see a picture book of the U.S.A. You leaf through the pages and see full-color photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan, the Mississippi River and the saguaro of Arizona; and though the forms are familiar, it seems almost as though you could just as easily be looking at pictures of the planet Mars.

And as the days pass, slowly here in this place, you try to remember what it feels like to be back there, in America - to really feel it, back there in your memory, that person you were before you came here - and you find that you can’t. In your mind, you can find yourself on a Bangkok bus, sitting next to a woman sleeping with her hair tied back and the sunlight in her face, stuck in traffic on Sukhumvit Road and inhaling exhaust fumes; on the Star Ferry, watching the moth-wing sail of a sampan as you cross Hong Kong harbor from Wanchai to Kowloon, early in the morning; alone in a pavillion beside the Li River in the southwest China province of Guangxi, green mountains like shrouded ghosts rising up from mirror-wet rice fields, all around. In a somewhat more distant way, in your memory, you can find yourself on the train from London-Paddington to Birmingham-New Street, crossing the rolling green fields of Warwickshire in the springtime at the age of twenty-one; in Paris, looking out across the city from the top of Montmartre, choking on stubby French cigarettes and thinking of Toulouse-Lautrec and La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge; standing on a raised observation platform at Potsdamer Platz, looking over the Wall into No Man’s Land - grey concrete guard towers and barbed-wire tank traps and the tall point and shiny silver ball of the East Berlin television tower, rising up like a meatball on a skewer over the Alexanderplatz. You can find yourself on a Tres Estrellas de Oro bus in the desert between Tijuana and Guaymas, your country of origin just out of reach beyond a high fence off the highway. Oddly, though, that place which once was the most familiar to you, now seems the most distant; and you cannot - except in a vague, detached kind of way - find yourself back home in America. Oddly now, it seems almost as though you were never really there to begin with; as though you were born a foreigner, in someone else’s country.

Sunday evening, and the afternoon rains have passed, leaving the streets wet and the air clean and cool. Rivulets of dark water run down the gutters along the edges of the pavement, carrying pieces of life - rice grains and fruit peels - and as the sun sinks low to the west of the city, people return to the streets. The lights go on across Saigon, across Cholon and Gia Dinh and Binh Thanh, and music echoes from the coffee shops and soup kitchens, drifting softly up and down the narrow streets. Alongside, the Cyclo men sit in their three-wheeled pedicabs, reclined back in the passenger seats waiting for fares; and children walk along the sidewalks selling packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum and Marlboro cigarettes.

Night falls, and the big event - the Sunday night ride-around - begins to happen:

Down Dong Khoi Street they come, the youth of Saigon, crossing Le Loi past the Continental and the Caravelle and the old City Auditorium - NHÀ HÁT THÀNH PHO, arching over - on bicycles, Hondas and motor-scooters, any two-wheeled vehicles they could find. On past the Palace Hotel and Maxim’s, one or two or three to a seat then around the corner at the Majestic and along the river as their clothing billows in the breeze. Turning again, onto Nguyen Hue and back up toward Le Loi, around and around - the traffic thickening as the evening goes on; girls in bright, flowery dresses and tight mini-skirts sitting side-saddle with their legs crossed behind boys in clean black and white, cigarettes and sunglasses; bright red lipstick and dark mascara and long, black hair trailing behind; weaving in and out, around and around, leaning as they take the corners so that bare knees seem to come within inches of the pavement and the rumble of motorbike engines rising up in the air so that from the rooftops of the Palace and the Rex they can hear it as they look down onto the thousands of little red and white lights circling in the streets below - around and around, past the old girlie bars and whorehouses and the drunken ghosts of G.I.’s leaning on lampposts, the young men who came to Vietnam a long time ago and never went back home again, they never left, they stayed here and they’re still here, in Vietnam, forever; around and around, stopping alongside to take a break and watch for awhile, then back into the circling stream - around and around, around and around, We are the children of Saigon, Forever, Vietnam, Forever, and we’re alive, more alive right now at this moment than we will ever be again ....


Around and around, the days―circling like the old ceiling fans in the Cafe Givral, slowly circling, around and around, here in this place, Saigon, forever.



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