In my first twenty-four hours here, I broke every gastronomic travelers rule that had been drilled into me. I tried three varieties of seafood I cannot name, I ate fresh vegetables still dewy with the tap water they were washed in, I ate fruit regardless of whether or not it had a peel, I tried some kind of mashed up sticky meat that may or may not have been cooked, and to top it off I had ice in my drink. Under the careful guidance of my hosts, I quickly learned to tell the difference between foods and drinks that are safe for me and those that are not. So far day ten and I haven’t had recourse to my bottle of Imodium.
I've also learned to be less particular about bugs and other moving things. The ants and beetles are large, but so are the butterflies. So large I had to look twice and then a third time to convince myself they were really butterflies and not furry black hummingbirds. The flowers they pollinate are lush and vivid and almost filter out the exhaust fumes from the motorbikes that churn down the street twenty yards away. Baby geckos crawl on the walls of my room from time to time, but they don't get too close and they give the place a nice homey feeling. I actually kind of like them there. A small bat flutters around now and then when I forget to close the door, but it's just a harmless fruit bat – I think – and the fruit it lives on is just as tempting to me as it is to him, so I don’t mind him being there either.
I've even learned to stay calm when the odd bug makes its way into my food, though I still don't intentionally eat it.
I'm grateful to my hosts for showing me how to eat everything. The fruits here are all wonderful, but without some help I would not have known what to do with them. Like my mom her first year in America, unsure which part of the pumpkin to use to make pumpkin pie, I imagine myself staring endlessly at something like a spiky red rambutan, wondering what to do with it, and finally just cutting into its leathery peel and making an educated guess. Eat it raw? Who knows… maybe you're supposed to cook it. Is it eaten as a fruit or as a vegetable? A seasoning? Mashed up with something else? Boiled whole? Eventually I would have either just passed it by or figured out by trial and error that you eat the raw fleshy inside just as it is, and that it's one of the most delicious fruits I've ever tasted, like a grape but sweeter and with a peel rather than a skin. Served cold they're as refreshing as an icy glass of water and much safer when you're not sure where the water comes from.
Aside from eating strange fruits, my first major accomplishment after arriving is to learn how to cross the street. In Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon as many still call it, that’s a near-death experience over and over again. Eight million people, two million motorbikes, countless bicycles, cyclo pedicabs and hand pedaled trikes, plus a handful of cars, tour vans and buses, all paying virtually no attention to streetlights, traffic direction indicators or crosswalks. Red lights are supposed to be for everyone. Only the cars actually stop. Everything with less than four wheels ignores them. Cross traffic makes its way through an intersection by waiting for a critical mass to form, then simply forcing its way through.
And yet, it all seems to work somehow. Schoolgirls pedal along gracefully in clean white au dais – the trousers and tunic that make up the traditional costume of Vietnamese women. Half the time they ride two to a bike, the passenger sitting on a cushion attached to the rear wheel and sometimes helping to pedal from there. Motorbikes carry as many as four people at once, or are weighed down with things Americans would never dream of strapping to the seat of a mo-ped sized Honda… computers, toilets, glass window panes, twenty foot lengths of rebar, baskets of chickens, cages of puppies, live pigs, dead pigs, flayed pigs, mattresses, furniture, tropical fish in tightly sealed bags, entire kitchens on the move, place settings and all.
Everything is in motion here. Even the act of reading a street map. Given a map, a Vietnamese will trace his finger along the route where you’ve been, where you’re going, where he works, where his mother lives, anything to keep moving. He will never, as far as I can tell, simply point to where you are and stop. Eventually, I figure out where I am on my own and soon I am eager to move beyond the street corner that has kept me captive out of pure fear, watching pedestrians dodge their way precariously between and among the traffic. It takes some observation and a little bit of courage to join them those first few days, but I soon get the hang of it. I start out on small streets then work my way up until I can successfully take on a major thoroughfare.
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It’s not easy to breathe here. The air is hot and humid. It feels so thick and dirty going down that I resist filling my lungs with it, but I have to breathe. Every time I do I take in a new and strange combination of smells… motorbike exhaust mixes with pungent vegetables, sweet fruits, raw sewage, stagnant river water, fish paste, organ meats, live eels, fresh flowers, cigarette smoke, baby turtles trying to dog paddle their way out of shallow tubs, frogs tied up in bunches and dangling by their legs. A fish jumps out of its bucket and flops around on the pavement. All of it smells, and the combination doesn’t always smell good to my foreign nose. I go hours without inhaling a single breath of air that I would describe as refreshing.
It’s not easy to find silence here, either. The streets are loud, the shops are loud, the music is loud, motion is everywhere and people, cyclos, cars, cabs, everything is shoulder to shoulder, tailpipe to tailpipe. Even I need a break and I thought I was pretty dauntless. I take refuge at Highlands Coffee, a Canadian owned coffee shop that has a reputation for knowing how to make a decent cappuccino… am I giving up already? At Highlands everything is calm and familiar. The song playing is “Beautiful Day,” the same one we played at my friend Greg’s memorial. I am trying to take in this place that is part of my own country’s past as well. It is so different from anywhere else I’ve been, and my mind and senses feel fragmented from trying to grasp it all at once. What would Greg say to me right now? If I am already escaping into a Western coffee house after only a few days, how am I going to deal with the noise and chaos crashing around outside for the next two months? “Just tune it out, Patti,” he would say. “Tune out all the stuff that drives you crazy so you can pay attention to the things that are really great about this place. After a while you’ll be so used to the noise you won’t even notice it anymore.”
I try to do that, losing myself in the friendly chaos, the overwhelming mass of humanity that is Saigon. In retrospect, though, I think it would have been easier to start in Hanoi. Saigon is a developing economic center, still in the process of recovering from the effects of central planning and international isolation. It welcomes foreigners, whether tourists or businessmen, but it hasn’t really figured out what to do with them yet. After ten days on overload in Saigon, I’ve come north to Hanoi to visit the political and cultural capital of the country. People are more enthusiastic about their Communism in the North, which makes some American travelers feel awkward. But Hanoi itself has had more experience as a cosmopolitan center. Foreigners are more common and the locals are more sophisticated, which makes the city easier to adjust to for someone like me who has never been to Asia. The pace of life is less hectic in Hanoi and there is more open space so it does not feel as chokingly claustrophobic to me as Saigon. I immediately fall in love with the area around Hoan Kiem Lake, where the war hero Le Loi found and lost his sword to a golden sea turtle in the fifteenth century.
Whether in Saigon or Hanoi, though, or anywhere in between, a huge number of people live economically precarious lives. The average monthly wage for someone in the city is about $100 US. In rural areas it is much less. The minimum wage is currently set at 350,000 Vietnamese dong per month, which equates to about $30 US, although a proposal is underway to raise that to something a little less than $40 in 2007. The cost of living is low, too, but not that low. Most people live frugally in order to get by.
Coming from an affluent part of the world like California, it is hard for me to get used to the economic disparity. I expect people to try to trick me into paying inflated prices, which does happen from time to time, but for the most part the people I come across are more likely to put money back in my hand if I pay them too much. I try to tip a taxi driver 20,000 dong and he gives it back to me with a paternal smile, taking a 2,000 dong note out of my hand instead. I leave a waiter a tip and he follows me to the door to hand it back, thinking I left it there by mistake. “No,” I say, “for you,” which embarrasses him but he accepts it. I expect people to be begging for cash on the streets but beggars are rare. Nothing like what we have in San Francisco. The vast majority of people here are trying their best to scratch a living out of a difficult economy, even if their job is as simple as cleaning used bicycle parts or selling fresh coconuts on the sidewalk, hacked open to order for forty cents a piece.
It is not customary to tip at all in Vietnam, but I decide I will always tip generously. It’s the least I can do. Sometimes a waiter tells me I have just doubled his income for the entire day but I’m practically rolling out the door I’m so full and I haven’t even managed to spend $5. I also decide I will never complain about paying the “tourist price” in the few places where it is still charged. Tourist prices are a holdover from the 1990s, when Vietnam had just opened its borders. The first tourists were mostly Viet kieu, Vietnamese who had been living abroad and were coming home for the first time since the war. They were fabulously wealthy compared to their relatives who had stayed behind. The government approved a two-tiered pricing structure for businesses relating to tourism. Hotels, restaurants, transportation lines, museums, they all started charging a regular price for those who could produce a local ID card and a tourist price for those who could not.
I have not heard anything good about this policy from anyone, including the locals, and most places don’t do it anymore but I think it makes sense. I don’t feel gouged. I can’t imagine why anyone who can afford to fly here in the first place would object to spending an extra dollar or two here and there, especially when the alternative is to raise the regular price for everyone. That just makes things more expensive for the people who live here who are already barely scraping by. But that’s what they decided to do and the people who were barely scraping by just scrape harder. “The old way wasn’t fair to the tourists,” they say. “Everyone should pay the same.”
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Like many Americans who come here, I wondered if I would find lingering resentment because of the destruction the country suffered during the American War. But we in America have had a harder time getting over that than the Vietnamese. American veterans who were here as young soldiers doing their duty come back as old men visiting rebuilt cities they once helped raze to the ground. Many are searching for relief from a guilt that has haunted them for decades. They killed people here. They poisoned farmland, bombed villages, destroyed historical structures a thousand years old. They wonder, too – how could they not? – if they will be met with resentment.
But what Americans find is that their old enemies now welcome them as friends. The Vietnamese have moved on. I talk about this with a university student who walks up to my bench at Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi and asks if he can speak English with me. I invite him to sit down and we go through the usual introductory phrases Vietnamese students learn in school… What’s your name? Where do you come from? How old are you? Are you married? Do you have any children? But I’m curious what Vietnamese university students think about Americans. “I was surprised that everyone is so friendly to Americans here,” I say. “I thought maybe they would be resentful.” He knows exactly what I am talking about and he is already tired of the conversation.
“The war happened a long time ago,” he says. “Why do Americans still think about it so much?”
“I think we feel guilty,” I reply. “You know, why were we here in the first place?” I think about my own first impressions of Vietnam. Not the loud and smelly ones that have made me feel claustrophobic for the last ten days. Those I am slowly starting to pull into perspective. I think about the quieter impressions that have crept into my consciousness as I make peace with the others… impressions of gentle, hard-working people with good hearts and giving natures; simple farming families living precariously on small patches of lush, fertile land; people who smile at strangers and invite them to share food, drink or conversation at the slightest provocation, no matter how little they have to share; children who absolutely radiate joy if I say hello to them and ask their names; mothers who smile at me when I do rather than immediately suspecting me of being an abductress. “Most of our soldiers came here because the government told them to,” I say. I can see that he is not interested in the topic, but I want to understand.
I wonder what the soldiers’ first impressions were when they got here. A photograph of American GIs arriving in Vietnam hangs in the historical exhibit at the Reunification Palace in Saigon. They are marching down a street more or less single file with Vietnamese civilians pressed up against the buildings on either side, watching the procession but also trying to keep some distance. What are we doing here? their faces say. Was it because, like me, their first impressions of Vietnam were overwhelming? Or were they wondering what danger could possibly lurk in these small, thin people pressed up against the side of the road wearing nothing but rags and sandals? I come back to the conversation, “They were just kids. They weren’t killers but when they came here they had to kill people. And look at all the damage that was done to the cities and the countryside. We feel awful being responsible for that.”
“Yes, but that’s all in the past,” he repeats. “It was a war. It’s over now.” In spite of the overgrown bomb craters that still pockmark parts of the country, the bullet holes that ripple through two of the Nine Dynastic Urns, the thousand year old Cham ruins that lie in piles of rubble, the missing wing of the ancient Temple of Literature, the Agent Orange villages where victims live out their damaged lives together, in spite of all the present reminders of destruction, the war is, for the Vietnamese, a historical event. It is relevant because it is part of their past but not something to be emotional about today. They have better things to talk about, like how long I am here for and how I feel about Vietnamese people.
“I think they’re wonderful,” I tell him. I really do.
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