Comfort zone

I didn’t realize I had a fixed idea of Saigon’s landscape until I discovered that it was wrong. Upon stepping into Phu Nhuan District, I thought, where are all the skyscrapers? The Gucci ads? The three-piece suits? I felt simultaneously disappointed that the city was not more modern and foolish that I’d made the assumption to begin with. Where did I get that untrue notion? I must not have made much effort to look at recent photos of the city. From all the stories of Vietnam’s stunning economic growth and desire to Westernize, I turned Saigon into Tokyo and Beijing, which I thought were valid comparisons.

What a relief it was, then, to spend some time in District 1 last night. I had to stop by the bank in that district, which I discovered is the most Westernized (read: touristy) of the city's 19 districts. So that’s where all the skyscrapers were – mostly in the form of hotels, of course. L'Occitane, Rolex, and Louis Vuitton abound, as do KFC, hamburgers, and pizza. I’m not sure what kind of person would travel all the way to Vietnam and dine on the Colonel’s cuisine, but the chain seems to be popular with locals.

Although I’m tempted to find out how KFC in Vietnam stacks up against the original, my cousin and I opted for a seafood restaurant after the bank. To my dismay, lobster turned out to be just as unaffordable here as it is in America – nearly $100. Maybe next time. Instead we shared a humble but tasty substitute, prawns, and a seafood hot pot. I knew the food was supposed to be fresh – we saw guests making their selections from tanks at the entrance – but when the server placed the ingredients in the pot, I noticed the shrimp still squirming on their skewers. The server hastily covered the pot.

Once outside, we walked to the famous Ben Thanh Market, only to come up against a gate that was closing and lights that were shutting down. No matter. A block away, hundreds had gathered for an outdoor skit and concert, perhaps lured, as we were, by the fluorescent lights and booming stereo. Predictably a comedy, the skit reminded me of an improv performance, though I knew it was scripted. Using banners and backdrops made of paper vulnerable to the light wind, the actors played with a not-so-subtle message to wear helmets and avoid littering. Then came the musical acts, mainly young singers like the self-proclaimed “boy band, Melody” and a foursome that has probably watched its fair share of the Pussycat Dolls. These girls, at least, were more democratic in dividing up the singing, and invited a handful of elementary-school-age boys onstage with the condition that they must dance. Why didn’t they invite any girls from the audience? I asked my cousin. Little girls are probably too shy, she said.

Reaching the other side of the world, and the other side of the road

Getting sick, lost, pickpocketed – I came here worried about all the risks I assume are present in most developing countries. But getting run over by a motorbike seems uniquely more probable in Vietnam and, if I can mean this without over-dramatizing a legitimate concern, it was one of my more persistent fears.

Fittingly, among the first sights I encountered was the ordered chaos of the streets. Without lines to distinguish between lanes, motorists seem to feel their way through the streets, the deft weaving deliberately between other vehicles, the rest bottle-necking at popular intersections. Now the question is, how did the chicken cross the road?

I received mixed advice about this beforehand, but the best has been: just go. On the wider, busier streets, pedestrians can certainly wait at traffic lights, which motorists heed almost without fail. But that’s not an option on the smaller roads, and locals don’t make much use of crosswalks, anyway. Luckily, pedestrians have a couple of advantages: first, the motorbikes rarely exceed 20 miles an hour, so you can get pretty close before they’ll actually hit you; second, the motorbikes approach in jagged clusters, and because they’re small, you can pass one or two at a time until you get to the other side.

In general, the vehicles will slow down for you, but I don’t depend on that because accidents are a real danger. As if to confirm that, two motorbikes collided next to my hotel within a few days of my arrival. I turned around just in time to see people collecting around the scene and to notice the chair flung from the sidewalk into the street. Everyone was fine, but when we got home, a news report on TV announced how many people had been killed in car accidents that day, and my cousin said yes, that’s normal.

All of this probably isn’t doing much to dampen the stereotype of Asian drivers. But the truth is, it wasn’t long before I came to value the ability required to operate a vehicle in this environment. I thought I could never drive in a place like Los Angeles or New York (still true), but Vietnam is a whole other ballgame. The locals didn’t invent the system, they just adapt to it. There are few places to make U-turns, so you do it where you can, and other cars fall in line. Street signs are scarce and obscure, so people rely on the lettering above shops, almost all of which include full addresses. The roads are overcrowded, paved unpredictably, and fraught with endless construction, and to maneuver them so naturally takes, I think, appreciable skill.

A room with a view

It’s hard to know where to begin, so, at the risk of neglecting a countrywide perspective, I’ll start at home. I’ve moved twice in less than two weeks, which is what happens when you go to a foreign country without making living arrangements. The thought scared me, of course, but enough people had assured me it’d be easier to rent a place once I reached Saigon that I believed it. I spent the first few days at a small hotel (khach san) while my cousin searched for a room. For just 200,000 dong a night (the exchange rate is 16,600 dong per dollar), I could have certainly made the hotel my home for the summer, but the idea has always seemed odd to me. If I want to see Vietnam as it is, why let a hotel obstruct my view? A cheaper room also had the masochistic appeal of testing my capacity for discomfort.

The hotel could not have had more than a dozen rooms, and mine came with a TV, air conditioner, mini-bar, and queen-sized bed. I had been warned not to be surprised if, as in many East Asian countries, the bathroom had no separate shower, just a nozzle that splashes the entire bathroom when turned on. But I had only one complaint about the room, something that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. It was an unsettling feeling that I gave no thought to, that I subconsciously attributed to exhaustion or something like it. Not until the second day did I realize the room lacked a window.

How silly to lose sleep over a window. But after my pathetic excuse for an internal clock had already been scrambled by the 16-hour flight, a window seemed to be the only reminder of which way was up. The combination of jet lag and an unstructured schedule had me sleeping haphazardly, always between sprints and marathons, never knowing day from night. If nothing else, I told my cousin, please find a room with a window.

Technically, she did. The room had two windows, in fact, plus the glass on the door and the large, vent-like openings near the ceiling. But it may as well have had no windows because they admitted no natural light, instead opening out onto a hallway in the building. When I walked through the hallway during the day I would glance wistfully at our neighbor’s room, which faced the street and overflowed with sunlight.

Then again, that room was also closer to the railroad running next to our building. Just 20 feet away from the train, I always heard its terrifyingly loud and irritatingly frequent whistle, so I imagine it could only have been worse for our neighbor. I can’t explain why I dreaded the oncoming train so much because it couldn’t have been the noise alone – it never disturbed me in my sleep, and I always hoped it was thunder, which inexplicably would have been more bearable. I started reading Atlas Shrugged the night we moved in.

Some other things to look for when renting a room in Vietnam: curfews, furnishings, toilets (as opposed to a hole in the ground), sinks (as opposed to a spout), air conditioning, and permission to cook.

What we didn’t think to ask our landlord was whether we could have company over, and when he refused, my cousin decided he was too difficult to live with. Our smaller, yet costlier room sits among a chain of other rooms behind the shops on the main street, rather than inside a building. In other words, we have a window. It’s hardly large enough for an average sized person to crawl through, but still, all I wanted was to see the sky. There was only one drawback I hadn’t planned for. Like our old room, this has openings near the ceiling which admit insects along with the sunlight. Now that there are newspapers covering those holes, I’m getting bitten less often, but if you’ll excuse me, I have some gnats to kill.

To the rabbit hole

Welcome.

Or maybe I should say greetings.

Greetings from Vietnam, where I will be living, working, and blogging for the next two months. This will not be the first time I explain what possessed me to spend the summer here, and it won’t be the last, but here’s the old refrain: I was born in central Vietnam but don’t remember a thing because my family immediately moved to the United States. For that reason alone I’ve wondered about Vietnam since I was old enough to grasp it, and it seems to me there are two kinds of Viet Kieu: those who want to visit Vietnam and those who don’t. It’s not that I have a family connection to the war, it’s not that I’m eager to visit relatives, and it’s not that I have any reason to suspect that of all countries, this is the one that holds something magnificent for me. It’s just that I’ve wondered, and I want to go.

I’ve been on the journalism track for half a decade, so I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until last fall that if I’m going to intern somewhere, it may as well be in Vietnam. So that’s the plan. Learn about journalism. Learn about Vietnam. And if I could improve my Vietnamese, that’d be nice, too.

But mostly, learn about Vietnam. Really, now that the unpleasant task of introducing the blog is out of the way, that’s the point of this page. With exactly two weeks in Saigon under my belt, I already want to rattle off all the differences between Vietnam and the United States, and all the preconceptions that proved to be false (or true). Just this once, though, I think I’ll resist drawing conclusions about the motorbikes and humidity and pho. I’ve made enough drawings to fill a book, but I’ll sleep on those sweeping statements and if they still make sense tomorrow, well, let the commentary begin.