I took the six-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by most locals in Asia) last Thursday, pressing my face against the glass as stilted wooden houses and endless plains of paddies that signal Southeast Asian countryside began to appear. I drank in the wonderful green, light rice paddies stretching into darkened, gnarled tree groves and clusters of giant palm trees quietly curving their tufts to the sky. Longboats with a single cone-hatted farmer slid along the transport canals in the paddies, almost platforms in their small wooden depth. Foot-wide dirt paths with perhaps a bicyclist or ancient motorbike on them led to stilted open-air houses, the lucky ones shading their height beneath a tree and the unlucky homes as stark in the sunny fields as a single streak of black against white. I watched as a herding boy waded through a pond by the road on the back of one of his huge horned cows, heading towards four poles with a blanket suspended between them and a hammock hanging beneath the shadow. The provinces appear an idyllic place of fresh vegetables and peaceful, wandering days, until you recall the crushing facts of disrupting, destabilizing poverty that rural people face. Making that recollection that startled me out of my reverie was gloomy, comparing the serenity and directed life of honest work clearly filled with family to the grit, squalor, and loneliness in Phnom Penh, an unavoidable life because of starvation, sickness, or any of the other low-class killers in rural areas.
I came to Vietnam to visit friends of mine who I met during their education training in Phnom Penh who now teach in Saigon. It was a magnificent beginning to my “couch-surfing” career, an introduction to the beauty of being injected into a community and experiencing travel through the eyes of an established local. I saw things I never would have glanced at twice, took risks I wouldn’t dare alone, experienced a higher enjoyment and appreciation of the surrealness in these places as I shared them with fellow eyes and thoughts.
There was a palpable difference between Saigon and Phnom Penh that struck me as soon as we crossed into the city. Saigon is like how Bangkok would be ten years ago if Thailand had been colonized by the French—a steaming, rushing metropolis with plenty of shiny metal skyscrapers and clean, unbroken sidewalks, as opposed to the dust and squat tin buildings of Phnom Penh. No garbage or in-your-face poverty, few desperately hawking taxi drivers and shaky begging hands. The only abject scene of destitution I witnessed was my first night in Saigon, a flicker of movement by the wall of a building that ended up being a young woman naked from the waist down, facing the wall as she squatted over a newspaper and emptied her bowels.
One of the strongest traits Saigon and Bangkok share is the magnificent presence of both modernism and urbanism with a preserved culture and local way of life. It is entirely normal to walk down a street bursting with shops selling all marks of goods, with glass doors and popular music playing like any nice establishment, then sit down on a cracked lawn chair at a dirty-looking street stall drink a glass of iced Vietnamese coffee with all Saigonese natives. The awkwardly reliant relationship between foreigners and locals that chafes me so painfully in Cambodia is nearly absent, probably on account of Vietnam’s booming economy—exaggerated in Saigon by its thriving capitalism. A difference that struck me after a day was the absence of bowing with prayer-hands in greeting and thanks, a gesture of respect utterly engrained in Cambodia and Thailand and odd not to see in Saigon.
The street food, beginning with the infamous pho noodle soup, is abundant and absurdly cheap in Vietnam. I had great fun wandering the streets with my companions to search out the perfect sinh to’s (fruit shake with condensed milk) in flavors like avocado, Vietnamese sandwiches made from a mini-baguette and filled with chili sauce, meat, cucumbers, and a variety of other addendums, bready steamed dumpling with sauce in the middle and pinched at the top, sticky summer roll with a piece of sugar cane to chew inside, or plate of scrambled egg, cabbage, bean sprouts, tomatoes, and nugget-like noodles all mushed together in an omelet and dipped in salty hot sauce. My favorite experimental dish was a giant crepe folded over and stuffed with ingredients like snails (strangely mouth-watering although slimy,) mushrooms, unidentified seasonal vegetables, and eggplant. You slice and yank at the crepe communally with chopsticks, then quickly transfer whatever you manage to grab onto a piece of lettuce, and sprinkle various leafy herbs into the lettuce before rolling it up and dipping it in an orange-y peanut sauce.
The friend I stayed with, Catie, introduced me to three former students of hers between the ages of 19 and 22 who enlighten her to all the stealthy nooks and crannies of Saigon. These students, two girls and a boy, were nothing other than delightful—humorous, passionate, creative, moral, and above all friendly. I reveled in the gift of spending hours exploring Saigon with them, hearing the real story of all the tourist attractions, letting them haggle at the market for Catie and I, sitting on little plastic chairs on the street as they talked about their goals for going to university and their futures, seeing the fruits of their hobbies like photography and drawing, goofing off in hats and sunglasses as our silly giggles bubbled over. They are like family to one another, the best of friends, spending most of their days together, and somehow gladly welcoming Catie (and me for a too-short time) into their circle.
Halloween in Vietnam was unavoidably bizarre. People wandered the humid streets as Spiderman or mustached ladies—woe to Catie and me as we drove on her motorbike through a quieter area in our costumes, drawing incredulous guffaws as we passed. When we were stopped at an intersection a girl on the motorbike next to us pointed to a colonial peeling school on the left corner and said—“Very haunted. Ghosts who die there in the war. Do not go there tonight!” Definitely the most real haunted house I’d ever seen. I experienced clubbing in a Socialist country, replete with armed and uniformed guards outside the decorated entrance and an enforced early closing time. But, the dancing was spirited, all-inclusive, and went nonstop for hours in everyone’s blissful holiday glee.
Walking off dinner the next night, Catie and I and two friends happened past an outdoors martial arts academy. Stopping to peer, we were beckoned through the flourished Chinese arch to take a seat and watch the ongoing advanced class. The students, men and one steely-eyed woman, whirled, jumped, crouched, and kicked as they wielded numchucks flying around their bodies and heads with great speed and agility that they blindly caught in shocking positions. The younger students walked about comparing their poufy black pants, red belts, and strapped slippers, showing off a few headstands and carefully copied moves in the process. It was a show of remarkable athleticism and an exceptionally traditional sport to be invited to watch.
I bounced back on the bus engrossed in the sunset and sorting my emotions and memories, another return to Phnom Penh with it feeling only slightly more like home. But stepping off the bus, I snapped into an ease with the city and its cogs, giving advice to a lost-looking group of tourists and hiking off with my backpack in what I recognized as a non-threatening shower to get my fair price for a mototup to my apartment. Being here has been rearranged in what is difficult and a breeze; not a single day is easy—but there is at least of spark of loveliness and hope now in every day that keeps the kindling burning beneath me, urging me further in and onwards through this webbed world we walk through.
Comments