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!

Vietnamese lesson

Despite what you might have learned from the Vietnam War, this country can be divided into three regions, especially linguistically: northern, central, and southern (hence the three stripes on the old South flag). Although, if we really wanted to complicate things, there are many other dialects that I'm unfamiliar with, plus indigenous and foreign languages. But it's understandable that the northern (Bac) and southern (Nam) dialects dominate. The dialect of northerners is the usual form of communication among bureaucrats and politicians, based out of the capital Hanoi. I think Tieng Bac is also seen as the most formal/educated, as it's taught in Vietnamese-language courses.

In addition to being spoken in the south, Tieng Nam is the most popular tongue of Viet Kieu, which makes sense since most of them fled because of the fall of South Vietnam. I don't know too much about how the dialects work, but for some reason Tieng Nam is closer to what I speak, the central version. That's why I chose to intern in Saigon (though, ironically, most of the people I work with are from the north). People from the north and south understand each other just fine, but they don't really understand those from the central region. On the one hand I find that frustrating because if I improve my Vietnamese it will be somewhat useless, since I'll only be able to speak with people from Hue. On the other, I'll have an advantage if I improve enough to understand all three dialects, while most understand two. I think it's easier for me to learn their dialects than vice versa.

I don't know if the Vietnamese I already know is an advantage or a handicap. I once wrote an article about the hair salon Great Clips (yes, seriously) and a stylist told me that it was harder to train older employees because they'd picked up bad habits that didn't conform to the official Great Clips technique. I might have that problem. When I find new words, my experience makes me somewhat resistant to learning how northerners or southerners pronounce them; I'd rather first learn how my mom would pronounce them. But the experience also means I instinctively know a lot of the connotations of words and phrases, the kind of thing I can't really learn from a class.

Who you gonna call? Mr. Knife.

Vietnamese are superstitious people, especially about the hereafter, and although I think superstition (like religion) derives from lack of awareness, I’ll admit I once believed in some of it. My mom used to tell me that if I left my hair down outside at night, ghosts would hide in it and follow me into my house. I don’t know if she was just trying scare me – like the story about scraping and eating food from sidewalk cracks in the afterlife if I threw any away now – but until middle school it pushed me so far as to hold up my hair by hand when I didn’t have a hair-tie.

I hadn’t thought about those stories much until recently, when I visited my grandmothers in Hue. One afternoon, while some men were preparing a cung, one of my grandmothers yelled across the yard that they better not stand too close to the trees. I’d forgotten that ghosts are plentiful in trees – the greener the tree, the more abundant the ghosts. To humor her, one of the men assured my grandmother that they were safe in the daytime.

Though amusing, the warning didn’t really surprise me. What did surprise me the next day was when my other grandmother invited me to spend the night with her. I wasn’t planning to take her up on the offer, but was even more deterred when I noticed the knife on her bed. She apparently slept with it as protection from ghosts.

The real puppets in Vietnam

Water puppets (mua roi nuoc) are to Vietnam as street performers are to New York: watching them is a very Vietnamese thing to do, just not for local Vietnamese. Most of the audience Saturday night were visitors, and the creators intended the dozen or so skits to teach viewers about Vietnamese life and culture. Some scenes, such as men fishing or animals hatching, could be universally understood. But, ironically, I suspect some of the most interesting ‘lessons’ were beyond foreigners without the context to understand them. Only people familiar with cung would recognize that the puppets carrying plates of fruit in a procession were honoring their ancestors. And though I only vaguely remember reading the legend of the turtle that helped Vietnamese defeat their enemies, I doubt many outsiders recalled the fable when they saw the puppet of the golden turtle. But the figure is as much a part of the country’s folklore as Paul Bunyan is of America’s.

The stage consisted of a long, shallow pool of murky water (the better to hide puppet masters, I’m guessing) in front of an iconic building of red shingles and curved roofs. On either side sat three performers who handled all the sound: wearing traditional ao dai, they voiced the characters of the puppets (human and otherwise), sang when appropriate, and accompanied the entire act with musical instruments.

In some skits, the brightly colored wooden and metal puppets obeyed the constraints of the water – humans rowed, ducks swam, dragons danced and squirted water. In others, the characters miraculously walked on water, acting out the skits as if on land. But the whole time I wondered how the puppeteers maneuvered their dolls. Could they hold their breath underwater just long enough for a skit? Were they lying to the side of the pool, reaching in unseen? Was it all done by machines? The last question was answered when seven or eight puppet masters appeared onstage at the end of the show. Seeing the people drenched from the neck down probably answered the first question, but I’m not much closer to figuring out their secret.

Roughin’ it

The discomforts of day-to-day life are not exactly unique to the countryside, just more numerous than in the city. Most of the inconveniences I encountered in Hue last week are also present in Saigon, though fewer and further between in the latter. The night I arrived in Hue, there was a blackout in the municipal districts that I passed through as well as in the rural area where my uncle lives. My cousin, who had come to pick me up from the airport, joked during the drive home, “It’s because they knew you were coming.” But as it turned out blackouts make daily, planned visits as part of the city’s efforts to conserve electricity. Since Hue is not as busy as the bigger cities, the authorities here can afford to intentionally cut off the energy supply for a few hours a day.

Luckily I had Eugene O’Neill to keep me occupied. My only real problem with the blackouts was that they deprived me of a fan during the hottest hours of the day; I was starting to understand why people here take so many naps in the daytime. I know I shouldn’t have been so weak, but it might have been more bearable if not for the added physical aggravation from, as my cousin liked to call it, Mr. Mosquito. He left at least a dozen “gifts” on my left arm alone, and countless more all along my head, shoulders, knees, and, yes, toes.

I did use some bug repellant but not much because it’s a bitch to wash off, especially when there’s no real shower. The wash room consisted of a pail and a spout not unlike the one in my backyard in Sacramento. I was also scared to enter the room at night because its roofless structure practically invited in Mr. Mosquito.

The outhouse had a roof, though no seat. The toilet looked almost normal, except its white bowl was set in the ground so that you must crouch over it rather than sit down (I’ve learned this is called a squat toilet). To flush required pouring water from a bucket down the drain until the toilet was clean again.

When we were thirsty, we boiled water, and to boil water, we needed firewood. I didn’t drink much unless there was ice, and for that we’d send one of the boys to the small store down the road. It was understandable that there was no ice in the house, since refrigerators are something of a luxury. In fact the house didn’t have much furniture at all, mainly bureaus and beds with planks but no mattresses. I was only surprised when I found that my relatives had a TV. Besides being cheaper than refrigerators, TVs are apparently considered more important (as a link to the rest of the world?), which is why you’re more likely to find a TV in a Vietnamese home than a refrigerator. Maybe things aren’t so rough.

Homecoming

Like most people, my nostalgia constantly pushes me to return to old haunts, I guess out of hope that part of the past can be frozen in amber, that if the places still exist, then the memories live. Though I left Hue too young to remember anything about it, returning there last week still felt like stepping into the past. For three days, I lived with my mother's brother and his family in the village where I was born, where my mother was born, and where her mother was born. The village, nestled in the countryside in central Vietnam, is a five-minute walk away from the beach, where the kids used to sleep under the stars when the nights were too hot at home.

The relatives I met knew almost as little about me as I knew of them, but they remembered me as the baby carried out of there two decades ago. “She was just months old!” they would explain to each other, calculating when I must have been born and when my family must have left. They understood that I wouldn’t remember names or faces, and excused my poor Vietnamese.

Seeing their faces, though, was enough. In them I saw time preserved, I saw lives that carried on as if nothing had changed since that fateful day. I saw what my life would have been if in fact things hadn’t changed. My brother would occasionally tell me, “You know, you were almost left behind. You’re lucky our uncle was there to carry you to the boat.” I don’t actually think my mother would have left me in Vietnam, but it’s true that others weren’t so lucky. Her sister came the same way we did a couple years later, trying several times to get to America through Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea, only to be sent back. They closed the door; that was how she described it to me when I met her.

The uncle I stayed with has a son who also nearly emigrated from Vietnam. He would have left with my family, but his mother was afraid he’d fight too much with my brother. He and I sat by a window as he reminisced about the days of wrestling with my brother right in that sandy yard in front of us, of walking together to the now closed-down school a few blocks away, of arguing over the goodies they would occasionally sneak from my mother.

Even from his limited anecdotes I could start to imagine that forgotten life. And from the stories of my grandmothers, I could start to appreciate how complicated my family tree really is (for one thing, The Story of Pao comes to mind). The context made it easy to ask for and tell such histories, of course, but the sad truth is that I could have learned all of it and more at home in California. From the scores of young Viet Kieu I’ve known or interviewed, I know I’m not atypical for having seldom thought to ask my parents about this world and for having parents who seldom thought it comfortable or necessary to tell me on their own. But if this summer will change anything, it’s that.

Pain at the [Vietnamese] pump

With the government subsidies and average income level, I figured gas prices had to be cheaper here than in America, but at 15,000 dong per liter ($3.50 a gallon), it was about the same. People just get more out of their money because they drive the relatively efficient motorbikes and manuals.

But over the past few days, while on my meta vacation to central Vietnam (more on that in the coming posts), I started hearing about gas prices going up. "Interesting," I thought last night as I sat in the plane from Danang to Saigon, listening to my cousin read the day's top story and recalling the surfeit of similar media coverage in America. Here the prices just jumped 30 percent to almost 20,000 dong per liter.

It got even more interesting after we touched down and tried to find a taxi home. The first driver was ready to take us, until a woman with a clipboard ushered a larger party into the cab. The next driver wouldn't take us because our house was too close. Every driver after that wanted to charge 150 percent more than we'd paid last week to get to the airport. I didn't get it. Why didn't they just take us home and let the meter run as usual?

I discovered the drivers were negotiating a fee beforehand because their companies hadn't raised fares to match the rise in gas prices yet. For once I felt as sympathetic with them as I do with xe om drivers; still, there's a big difference between 30 percent and 150 percent, so I opted for a xe om, the driver somehow speeding through the streets with my suitcase held awkwardly in front of him.

It’s all about the Ho Chi Minhs, baby

Yesterday I walked home from work because there weren’t many xe om drivers near the office, and the ones that were there tried to charge 10,000 to 15,000 dong for a ride that’s usually 6,000. The truth is I wouldn’t mind spending the 10,000 (60 cents) but if I’m going back and forth everyday I don’t want to pay more than locals. And it’s also the principle; if the drivers aren’t willing to compromise with me, I don’t want to bother.

The short, pleasant walk brought my total spending for the day to less than $2. I had paid 6,000 dong for the morning commute, 12,000 for lunch at the office, and 10,000 for dinner ingredients. Assuming an exchange rate of 16,000 dong per dollar, that works out to about $1.75 (with the unpredictable inflation of the dong, it’s hard to know what the rate is each hour). See, Professor Sachs? Living on $2 a day isn’t so bad.

It’s true that I spend more than that on touristy luxuries like clothes, snacks, and entertainment, but either way, commerce is an interesting thing. Everything is bought with cash, and though most people have bank accounts, few have heard of credit cards. My brother had warned me that if I change dollars for dong, merchants won’t take dirtied money (e.g. if Benjamin’s faced is scratched or the bills are creased), but I didn’t think they’d behave the same way towards local currency. When I bought a dress this weekend, the seller wouldn’t take my smudged 100,000-dong note, so I had to give her a clean one. Oh, well – money’s all about perceived value, anyway, right?

Just along for the ride

Just as Michael Scott ‘loved’ the New York subway, I like the motorbikes (xe may) in Saigon because they take to people of all walks of life – or rather, all types of people take to them. On the street, I pass by motorists in pajamas, jeans, slacks, dresses, business suits, and ao dai. I admit the image is comical; I’m reminded of the days of old when scooters were popular in America, as was footage of businessmen scooting to work. But I doubt anyone cares about that here since few can afford the four-wheel alternative.

Another image that comes to mind: China in 2003. But instead of protection from SARS, Vietnamese drivers wear face masks as shields against the dust and smog. I’ve been fine without the coverings, and actually I wonder why more motorists don’t wear eye protection, which in my experience would have been more useful against the pollution. It’s also common for women drivers to wear arm-length gloves as protection from the sun. I’d like to think they want to guard against cancer or the heat, but no, women just hate getting dark.

Still, everyone’s a slave to the elements. When it rains, out come the ponchos. There are even ponchos made for two, I guess to make it easier to transport another person on the xe may. But even after the rain subsides, beware: a motorist sped through a puddle next to me two nights ago, leaving most of the puddle on my right half.

Whatever the weather, heat is a concern. As if the humidity and triple digit temperatures weren’t enough, the main source of heat is your xe may and those around you. Vehicles anywhere can get oppressively hot, of course, but it’s much more noticeable when you’re waiting at a light, wedged in the middle of a pack of xe may without car doors to keep out the heat of other engines. Then again, whether in motion or stopped at a light, you’re conveniently close enough to hold a conversation with your friend on the xe may next to you.

I have to say the worst thing about xe may, or any vehicle in the city, is the never-ending beeping. I thought Times Square was bad, but drivers here seem obsessed with honking at other people. They beep when the light changes. They beep at pedestrians. They beep whenever they exhale. It makes me wonder, what would they do if someone just did away with all the horns?

Everyone under the sun

"La Fenêtre Soleil" (French for sun window. Or window sun? Sunny window?) is the name of the cafe/bar, but on Thursday nights it turns into a club for the Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, and the like. Maybe the owners didn't know what kind of dances would become popular when they first named the place. That, and Vietnamese generally know more French than Spanish.

At first I thought it would be strange to hear Spanish music in Saigon, but it wasn't. The city is the most cosmopolitan you'd find in Vietnam, and I suppose the bourgeois need someplace to hang out. I was told to wear a dress, but the attire at La Fenêtre Soleil ran the gamut from gym clothes to business suits, miniskirts to Salsa dresses. Though nothing compared to the pieces of cloth girls wear to American night clubs, the dress here was racier than that of your average local; I think I saw my first thong in the city, bras optional.

The clothes fit the dance, which was innately sensual. It began with a practice session for newcomers, but experts took over for the rest of the night. I was more than a little impressed with how well the dancers handled themselves – confidently relaxed, cheerfully proficient. I could hardly keep track of the dozen or more couples who graced the tiny floor at any given moment, as they switched partners with each new song. Everyone danced with everyone else. I wondered if it was because people didn't need to know each other to dance together (one stranger did ask me to dance). But it turned out that the same crowd goes to that club every week, so they all knew each other. Free love, baby.

Even more impressive was the diversity of the crowd. We were in District 1, so I wasn't surprised to see foreigners, but these weren't just any foreigners. In addition to the Vietnamese and a few tourists, there was a healthy handful of foreigners who'd made their home in Vietnam, and no one seemed to notice skin color. I especially liked the Mick Jagger look-alike, the half-Vietnamese who appeared more Anglo, and the Russian who spoke better Vietnamese than me. But in a way I was lucky that just about everyone – Vietnamese, Indian, French – defaulted to English.

Stairway to heaven

When I was nine, maybe younger, my nanny asked me if I might like to give God a try. She was Christian and didn’t try to persuade me, just told me about him and about praying and crossing myself. Who knows what made me give in – maybe the shiny cross she gave me. I wore it for a few days until my Buddhist cousin saw it and cried, “Do you know what that is?” while removing the chain. That’s pretty much the extent of my contact with God, and anyone who knows me would be shocked to hear that I even got that close.

But a couple days ago I got much closer, right up to the foot of the man himself. On a mountain in Vung Tau, a resort city two hours away from Saigon, stands a 100-foot statue of Jesus, holding out his arms as he surveys the laity 600 feet below. “You know,” my coworker Nguyen said after I saw the icon for the first time, “there were some Boat People who escaped Vietnam a few decades ago, and when they returned, they built that statue as a gift.”

There must have been something in my face because she asked what was wrong. “Nothing. I just think it’s silly of them to take up public space like that. It doesn’t just belong to Christians.”

The next day we made our pilgrimage to the man upstairs – up a very, very long set of stairs. I went for the same reason I would stop to look at a car accident, but in fact if there were nothing up there but an abandoned car I’d still have gone for the sake of climbing the small mountain. The trek was tiring, with plenty of landings where we could rest and gaze down at the town, at the sea that turned into sky, and at the progress we’d made. Like holy harbingers, clusters of statues would occasionally greet us, as if to say: almost there.

The actual statue at the pinnacle of the hike was flesh-colored, domineering, and anticlimactic. I might have been more impressed with a golden calf, but it wasn’t really Jesus’ fault; he had to compete with a breathtaking view. On one end I admired the coast packed with ant-sized beachgoers and grasshopper-sized palm trees curving around the peninsula. I knew I was looking at something so many others must have seen in brochures. On the other end was infinite water and sky. The sight alone made me feel weightless, or as if I were filled with nothing but that floating blue.

Jesus compensated as best he could. Tourists were allowed to climb inside the statue like they would Lady Liberty, either to the balcony built into his robe, or farther up to his outstretched arms. Earlier, when my boss had told me people could do this, I’d asked, “Isn’t that a little sacrilegious?” Little did I know there was a sacred screening process. You cannot enter the body of Christ wearing shorts, skirts, or tank tops, and you must leave your shoes and water bottles at the opening. I wasn’t disappointed, but I felt bad for anyone who’d gone through all that trouble just to be turned away at the gates.

So we'd faced our maker and by providence no one was smote (smitten?) by lightning. Then again, we did get caught in the rain on the way down, Mr. Pina Colada would be happy to know. If it had come just five minutes later we would have been dry in a taxi, but I’m glad it happened. We were only a few flights from the bottom when I stopped to enjoy the wind that was picking up. On the horizon, the same wind was bringing in clouds and, to our amazement, we could see them raining into the sea before the storm reached us seconds later, the sky still light. We ran to a tunnel for shelter and did what was only logical while waiting out the storm. We ate ice cream.

I ain't afraid of no ghosts. Ma'am.

MacBeth and The Phantom of the Opera are about as "scary" as it gets when it comes to any stage productions I'd heard of, let alone seen, until last night. Nguoi Vo Ma (Ghost Wife) is a popular play here in the city, and although I can't get through a scary movie without covering my eyes, I figured this had to be interesting.

Less than $5 got me admission to a theater smaller than most American cinemas. I joined a boisterous audience that required more than a few warnings to hush down throughout the play, which just made it more entertaining. I think that's part of the nature of the performance – as professional as the actors were, this was no ballet or symphony (I'm saving that for next week). People come in their everyday clothes and prove it's not just the players who can break the fourth wall: when we first saw the sinister-but-still-living Wife, one audience member shouted, "You're too beautiful to be a ghost!"

The actors took it in good humor. During another scene, an overwhelmed audience member screamed in the middle of a dialogue, so the actor slipped it into the play: "What! Who just screamed?" he timidly asked his partner, earning a few laughs.

That about exemplifies the show. On the one hand, the performers were hilarious, playing on the cowardice triggered by belief in a ghost and making jokes that even someone with my level of Vietnamese could understand.

On the other hand, the play scared the hell out of me. I could see no difference between this title character and the long-haired star of The Ring, which also happens to be the scariest movie I've ever seen, if only because of the girl. But this ghost was worse because she was 50 feet away from me. Alternating between covering my eyes and clinging to my cousin, I could feel the same tension among the audience members because we could usually anticipate a scene with the ghost, thanks to the ominous music and erratic lighting. I'd never sat in a pitch black theater for so long before.

Luckily, I haven't had any nightmares yet, although when the play ended at 11 p.m., I walked four blocks home, the longest four blocks I've ever had to walk.

To grandma's house

To make my mom happy, I had simply planned to visit my grandma in nearby Dong Nai Province as another checklist item, so I didn’t know what to think when my aunt (who lives with my grandma) told us to arrive by 8 a.m., in time to go to the cemetery. Long past the stage of surprises, I wasn’t jarred by the request, just curious. Things are seldom what I’d expect.

After an hour-long ride, my two cousins and I reached Dong Nai early and walked through a narrow alley of puddles and cracked pavement to get to the house. As we approached, the street widened and the buildings shortened, letting in the brilliant, peach-colored daylight. Before I knew it, my cousin was walking through an open door as if he’d done it every day of his life. I didn’t follow him far because my grandma was sitting on the ceramic-tiled floor next to the entrance. I joined her, as instructed.

Although it took some time to explain which one of us – me or my cousin – was her granddaughter, this actually wasn’t my first time seeing her. I’d almost forgotten that my grandma had visited us in America several years ago. Then again, maybe I had forgotten because all I ever remembered was how lonely she’d been and how much she looked forward to returning to Vietnam. Seeing her face now seemed right, not in the way that you recognize a face from your past, but in the way that a piece fits a jigsaw puzzle you didn’t realize existed.

She’s ninety-two, I learned at some point. Then, as if she were discussing a noodle recipe, my grandma started telling me about her funeral arrangements.

It wasn’t until 9 a.m. that fourteen of us – cousins, aunts, and uncles I’d never heard of, plus my two cousins and I – piled into a rented van with fruit, rice, chicken, and flowers. The ride to the cemetery lasted almost as long as the one to Dong Nai, but with a better view. Along the countryside, leafy plants formed their own roof-like layer a foot above the ground, and beyond them lay forests, some natural, some, upon closer inspection, comprised of neatly planted rows of shadowy deciduous. Something like a mix between a bus stop and a gazebo, structures of wooden posts and thatched roofs dotted the highway and enclosed several hammocks. I couldn’t imagine how people could live there, but then why else would there be hammocks? My camera batteries had died of course.

Concealed behind a small rambutan grove, the cemetery could only be reached by a muddy path barely wide enough for our van. Among the things you don’t think about until they happen: I’d never really visited a cemetery before. But based on those I passed by or saw in films, it wasn’t hard to notice the differences. Here the graves were packed tightly together in geometric rows, with just enough room for pedestrians. While most graves I’d seen in America were hidden below ground except for their headstones (therefore creating the illusion of space), these tombs included visible, coffin-like boxes I would expect to find in a sepulcher. Standing next to one of them, I thought with dread, could there be nothing but the edge of the small concrete block separating me from a corpse? The anxiety later dissipated when I looked through an opening on top of one of the “boxes” only to find it empty but for dirt. The bodies, then, must have been six feet under.

Except for that lapse, the trip was so absurdly detached as to be worthy of Meursault. My aunts prepared for the ceremony, arranging the food and incense on top of my grandpa’s “box,” while the men pulled weeds from another tomb that had no covering. Weeds and dead grass were commonplace. The grave turned out to be that of an uncle who died fighting for the South. I hadn’t known about him, not because I believed I had no uncles, but because my parents told me little about my relatives. Out of sight, out of mind.

The ceremony, I realized, was just like any cung I’ve had at home. Walk into almost any Vietnamese house in America, and you’ll find a ban tho, a sort of bureau on which families place photos, flowers, and incense to remember the dead. During a cung, families make food and sometimes burn paper clothes and (valueless) money. Just as at home, where the cung is performed out of respect, not mourning, our trip to the cemetery wasn’t meant to be morbid. So while the adults went through the motions, I joined the kids, who had run off to pick rambutan.

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.