Out of wonderland

If I were to make a diagram of my experiences in Vietnam, there would be one branch for things that turned out as expected – generally, goods are cheaper than in America, journalism is more submissive, and fashion is equally mixed. There would be a branch for things that surprised me, either because they differ so much from America (take off your shoes when entering a shop), or because we’re not so different after all (is there anywhere the income gap isn’t a problem?).

Of things that aren’t so different, I don’t know if my biggest discovery would disappoint or delight, but it is this: many of the pleasures of visiting another culture (language, food, customs) were, in this case, already available to me in America. I spoke Vietnamese at home, of course, but also in the Vietnamese stronghold of South Sacramento, people generally don’t need English to conduct business, read the paper, or just carry on with daily life. In South Sacramento and at home, I have also eaten most of the same cuisine I’ve had in Vietnam – mi xao, banh xeo, bun bo hue, etc. I noticed this because people here constantly asked me during meals whether the food was OK, and I’d constantly explain that yes, we have all of this in America. That might be the reason I haven’t gotten food poisoning. Unfortunately, that also means it was hard to try new foods (plus I’m not brave enough to try snake).

Many of the local customs, like eating on the floor or lighting incense for the deceased, were already a part of my life, thanks to my parents. They also decorated our house with cultural ornaments, from paintings to statues to fans, which made it very difficult to buy souvenirs here, as most of the useless knick-knacks I came across are available in South Sacramento.

So I would call this discovery disappointing because it sort of defeats the purpose of coming here – emphasis on “sort of” because the country still holds enough of a unique lifestyle, history, and development for a good old-fashioned culture shock. But for tourists who can’t afford to come here, this could be a delight because all they have to do is spend some time in the Vietnamese community in their own towns. For America the implications are both good (as Viet Kieu add diversity to the country) and bad (as they insulate themselves from mainstream America).

(Aside: as I’m writing this, two chickens have just wandered into my room.)

Between the expected and the unexpected, there’s a third branch in my diagram. I noticed it in my first week in Saigon, when it came time to do laundry. The vast majority of people hand wash and hang dry their clothes, which makes perfect sense. It’s not as if I expected people to have washing machines, but I also hadn’t thought about the fact that my clothes, too, must be hand washed. So there are things that aren’t surprising, but that you don’t think about until their time comes.

And the time has come to say goodbye. Although I knew I would have to leave Vietnam, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be leaving its people and traditions and way of life. Of course there’s plenty I won’t miss. I can’t wait to get away from Mr. Mosquito, away from the smog and the two types of weather, heat or rain. I won’t have to barter with merchants anymore, and they won’t follow me around every inch of their stores, trying to convince me to buy things I don’t want. I won’t be solicited on the street by errant peddlers who can’t possibly make a living with what they’re selling, or by poor children selling lottery tickets when they should be in school.

Usually I don’t miss anything or anyone because I know I’ll see them again. So the exceptions are things and people gone forever, separated either by time (hence my debilitating nostalgia) or, as I see now, distance. I still have a few hours until my flight back to America, but already I am missing this bustling city. I’ll miss the wind rushing past as I sit on the back of a motorbike. I’ll miss seeing a movie for $2 or staying in a beachfront hotel for $12. I’ll miss always having someone to tell me how to say or spell a word in Vietnamese. I’ll miss being called “Lien oi” and “Lien Lien” and “em.” And I’ll miss the people calling me by those names, people with whom I’ve spent almost every day for the past two months, people who hadn’t factored into the equation when I first planned my trip but who now sum up the entire summer. But I’m wrong about one thing: they’re not all gone forever because there’s no question that I’ll be back.

Relative worth

The temptation for visitors to spend money here is akin to the psychological effect of a sale: customers are partly motivated by the appeal of getting something for a fraction of the usual price (because most tourists have the benefit of a favorable exchange rate), and they are compelled to take advantage of this limited-time offer, while it lasts (because they’ll soon return to their home countries). So, Vietnam is one big clearance sale.

At least that’s the influence it’s had on me. So when I see that something I might want (four dresses, three pairs of shoes, a white gold necklace…) is cheaper than it would be in America, I’m more likely to splurge. In that respect, Vietnam seems to have brought out the spendthrift in me because I can indulge in something as trivial as ice cream every day, or as extravagant as a weekend in Nha Trang (considered the most beautiful city in the country).

But I’m a thrifty shopper at heart, and somewhat ironically, living here has augmented that prudent side. It’s all a matter of relativity. Suddenly a pair of $8 shoes is too expensive because there’s that other pair for $5, or on another day a $5 meal feels wasteful because locals often eat out for $1.

Actually, not all of it is relativity. The exchange rate and the necessity to use an unfamiliar currency also distort my perception. If I were dealing in dollars I’m sure my spending would be more in line with habit. Instead my psychological or emotional response to the dong is unpredictable. I might see my 50,000-dong note and think, “My, that’s a large number,” so I’d hate to spend it all on a taxi ride, even though it’s only $3. Or I might shell out the same note for a beaded necklace that I’ve just negotiated down from 120,000 dong, even though I am not that interested in jewelry and don’t even buy $3 necklaces in America. Troi oi! I don’t know if I’m growing or the house is shrinking.

This little blogger went to market

When I think about it, I guess the outdoor markets here aren't so strange; I've been to plenty of farmer's markets and flea markets in America, and (as here) they sell everything from sandals and spaghetti straps, to strawberries and salmon. But, as with most things I've noticed, the difference is in the details.

I use the term "outdoor markets" somewhat loosely. Here, there are markets with tin roofs. There are markets with tent roofs. There are markets with no roofs at all. In those cases, people just set up their wares along an alley. In all cases, space is tight, with vendors often sitting on the makeshift counters or desks that display their merchandise. Some markets have everything. Some just have food. Some just have clothes and trinkets. Of the latter you would probably see plenty as a tourist, especially Ben Thanh Market.

And you'd probably only want to see the food markets as a tourist, as they'd never pass an FDA inspection. I wouldn't call them filthy – after all, that's where I buy my groceries – but you might lose your appetite. All over, hose water flows into basins of live fish that still swim around unawares, or flop around if they don't have much water. In one market, a fish flopped out into the street in front of me before the owner casually picked it up and tossed it back into its container. In another, I bought a fish that wouldn't stop squirming as the vendor tried to weigh it, so she clubbed the scaly little rebel. I remembered the incident recently, when I walked by a couple of live, skinned frogs still wriggling in their bins.

If you think that’s fun, you’d love buying raw meat. Just as vegetables are occasionally laid out on the bare ground, meat is usually placed right on the counters and nothing else. Buyers and sellers alike finger the meat liberally. That can’t be avoided, but at least I’ve learned to bring exact change: I don’t want a woman to hand me change after she’s been handling raw meat all day.

Uncle Ho

I love all the Big Brother posters paraded around the city, partly because I actually respect Ho Chi Minh, and partly because they so comically contradict Vietnam's desire to become a modern country (but don't let them catch you calling this "propaganda"). My friend translated the above poster as saying, "Ho Chi Minh's thoughts are a valuable spiritual asset of our Party and people." Other posters have PSA's ("Wear your helmet"), but aside from those, I wonder whether Uncle Ho would have approved of all the face time he's getting.

Vietnam + China

Despite the history of imperialism or colonialism or whatever they chose to call it, I assumed the relationship between Vietnam and China was pretty solid. I must have gotten that idea from China’s influence on the Vietnamese language and culture – the two peoples share many customs and I’ve heard that half of Vietnamese words (which were once characters rather than Romanized letters) are taken from Chinese. Plus the whole communism thing really should have helped them bond.

Aside from a spat over some islands, I don’t know much about the political mood between China and Vietnam, but socially, it seems Vietnamese aren’t so chummy toward their neighbor to the north. Perhaps they still hold a grudge over that centuries-old imperialism, but the resentment is subtle and certainly not a part of daily life. You just notice it when locals refer to the South China Sea as simply the “South Sea” or when they joke that if goods are low-quality, they must have come from China.

I don’t know, though, if I would call this racism because Vietnamese are generally friendly toward Chinese-Vietnamese or other Chinese who’ve settled in Vietnam (apparently, some anticommunist Chinese who didn’t flee to Taiwan came here instead). They even have their own Chinatown called Cho Lon (large market), though I couldn’t really see how it was different from other parts of Saigon. But locals see the difference. Apparently, even the dragons aren’t the same: pointing to the large white dragon statue in the middle of one street, a friend who took me to Cho Lon explained that, among other qualities, Chinese dragons are much more fierce-looking than their Vietnamese counterparts.

Vietnamese lesson, part 2

Words like “Internet” and “photocopy” have no Vietnamese equivalents, so they’re plastered ubiquitously across the city in their original forms. But much more interesting are the non-Vietnamese words that people have adapted into Vietnamese. And all this time I thought my parents were making these words up:

bia --- beer
cà phê --- coffee
xe buýt --- bus
cà rốt --- carrot
xúp --- soup
sô cô la --- chocolate
phim --- film
căn tin --- canteen
tivi --- TV

Load o’ crocs

The Suoi Tien amusement park in Saigon claims to have 15,000 crocodiles (ca sau, which sounds suspiciously like xau, the word for "ugly"), most of which I saw while crossing Crocodile Bridge. The funniest thing I noticed was that crocodiles often sleep with their mouths open. I thought they must have been fake, but my cousin assured me they weren't, reasoning that if humans can sleep that way, why can't crocodiles? Well, gravity, for one thing. But what do I know? The animals were definitely real.

At least that was the funniest thing until I saw people fishing over the side of the bridge. And by fishing, I mean you can pay 2,000 dong for a rod attached to a piece of string attached to a piece of raw meat to dangle over the crocodiles. I wondered why it was so cheap, and the only thing I can think of is that the employees have to feed the crocodiles anyway, so might as well make a profit by letting customers do it.

I'm sure this kind of gimmick wouldn't go over well in lawsuit-prone America; it doesn't exactly seem smart to provoke the toothy reptiles. Still, seeing that everyone else was safe, I tried it anyway. It's something of a sport, swinging the meat as close to the crocodiles as you dare, while trying to keep it just out of their reach. But the deceptively placid creatures are too quick, snapping up the meat when you least expect it.

Here comes the rain again

I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the solar eclipse on Friday, but it was clouded by a thunderstorm that came and went throughout the weekend. By no means was the storm record-breaking, but it was the first time I saw the streets really flooded on the way home. That makes travel especially difficult for people on motorbikes, not just because they have to drive through oversized puddles, but because they have to set foot in them whenever stopped at an intersection.

Small shops are flooded relatively easily, which I think has something to do with the way they're constructed: most don't have traditional doors, but an opening where the front wall would be (think shoebox) and a gate - some like garages, others like the springy argyle pattern of doors on old elevators. So on the way home I saw people scooping up buckets of water from their stores and dumping them out on the street. Yesterday, people were doing something similar at the flea market. The one I visited was lucky to have one big roof, but rainwater was funneled through pipes that stretched from the roof to spots throughout the market, so women were using big bowls to catch the runoff from the spouts.

This morning I remembered to grab my poncho, just in case. The skies aren't looking good.

On eating out

I finally got around to trying KFC here, and that’s about the extent of what there is to report. The food doesn’t cost much less and tastes only slightly worse than KFC in America. The only interesting part is the service: instead of punk teenagers, we were welcomed by stewardess-like women who also held the door open when we left.

Still, the restaurant wasn’t as interesting as local eateries. My first night here, I had fish for dinner with my cousins at a small restaurant which, like most others, had three walls, food and cookware at the entrance instead of a kitchen, and rooms upstairs where the owners lived. Not knowing what to do with the fish bones as I ate, I looked up to see my cousin dropping them on the floor. “Go ahead,” he said, seeing my puzzled face. “You're supposed to.”

Only in the smaller restaurants – smaller than Starbucks small – is it permissible to leave trash on the floor, or in a small wastebasket if there's one near the table. But most restaurants are small.

The U.S. State Department started a website to consult before going abroad, and among its many pieces of wisdom is the suggestion to scrutinize a restaurant before patronizing it. If you notice the dining area is not very clean, the website warns, the kitchen is probably worse. Good advice. But it would have ruled out the majority of places where I've eaten so far.

I don’t mean it as a judgment or a complaint, it just is. I left California loaded with enough advice to know to be wary of the local fare. I remember the scene from Babel when Kate Blanchett orders bottled water in Morocco and then tosses the ice from her husband Brad Pitt's Coke. I've been warned that no matter how cautious I am, I will get food poisoning of some form or another.

The part I didn't anticipate is that it is not only visitors to Vietnam who are careful about their food. Wherever I've eaten (except at the larger restaurants) there have usually been tissues or napkins at the table so that patrons can wipe their chopsticks and bowls before eating.

And so far, no food poisoning!