Eight postcards from Vietnam - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Linh Dinh

I was born in Saigon and lived there until I was eleven. In 1975 I came to the United States, where I stayed for twenty-four years. Sixteen of those years I spent in Philadelphia. In 1999, I returned to Saigon to live. In Philly I would occasionally take the train to an unfamiliar neighborhood, walk around, look at everything, then stop in a bar for a drink. Just about everything I looked at was weird, off, stupid, funny, and occasionally menacing. But an American city does not yield its secrets as willingly as a Vietnamese one. What happens in public are mere spectacles, with private lives drawn out behind curtains. In Vietnam, however, the distinctions between private and public spaces, inside and outside, are fudged. You can observe the activities inside a house by simply walking past it. Their doors and windows are wide open. Most eateries also leave their steel gates wide open. An American nurses his beer staring at a shelf of liquor, a mirror, or a television. A Vietnamese drinks facing the street. All of life's dramas are played out right in front of him: destitution, greed, deformity, love, lust, death. But that does not mean he's seeing much, because, as a friend of mine said, "We've lived here all our lives, so none of this jazz fazes us, but you, coming from the outside, are gawking at everything."

Country Living

I visited some friends near Chau Doc recently. My hostess Nga, her husband, Thong, and their two boys live just outside of town, at the base of Sam Mountain. The family business is an oven that turns out 800 baguettes a night. Nga also runs a two-table cafe It had almost no business the two days I was there. When one little girl came by to ask for ice, Nga pointed her to another card down the street. We took turns swinging back and forth on the lazy hammock as we chattered.

Their house had two tiny rooms, a sort of open kitchen, and, get this, no bathroom. There was a cement shower stall in the back. For a "number one," one had to sprint clown the street to Nga's mother's house, three hundred yards away. Their latrine used to be the adjacent field, until that plot of hind was bought by a gas station.

The walls of the front room were decorated with plastic wrapped pictures of Mount Rainier. The ceiling was decorated with cobwebs.

On my first evening, Nga's two sons took me to the town's entertaiment center: a sort of nightly country fair. There was an antiquated merry go-round, with creaking metal horses, cars, and helicopters. There was a roller skating rink the size of a New York one-bedroom apartment, where teenage boys and girls were gleefully grinding and bumping into each other. At a shooting gallery, one could shoot plastic caps at ping pong balls to win prizes such as a package of instant noodle, a can of soya milk, or a can of root beer. At another booth, one could bet the numbers to win a bag of detergent or a bag of MSG. Framing all these festivities was a stage at the back on which a forlorn man sat behind his silent drum set.

The grown-ups in this little town congregrate each night at the many darkened cafes to stare at video movies. The fare is usually a Hong Kong shoot-them-up or a chop-socky. "The guys also like to drink," Thong told me, "and sometimes they get into these noisy fights where they swing at each other and miss."

A visitor to Chau Doc does not return home without ajar or two of its famous "mam," or fermented fish. There is a large variety, all with a very pungent aroma. Travellers overseas are routinely warned against bringing mam on board, lest a leaky jar will give Vietnam a bad name.

The mother of all mam, the stinkiest, however, is Cambodian. It is the infamous "bo hoc mam." It is not so much fermented but rotting fish, complete with maggots (which, by the way, are not eaten). Once you get over the smell, I've been told, it is delicious. Because of the large Cambodian population in Chau Doc, I thought, what better place to try some bo hoc, finally? But my request to sample this delicacy was met with looks of horror from both Nga and Thong. Although they had been the most gracious hosts during my stay, no amount of pleading could get them to buy some bo hoc mam for me.

"You'll have to run to the bathroom," Nga said, "and we don't have a bathroom."

Give Me Money

You would think that begging is a freelance profession. Just walk up to someone and say, "Give me money!" But it's not quite that simple. All the lucrative spots for begging in Saigon are controlled by cowboys (hoodlums). You must be authorized to beg on Nguyen Tri Phuong, for example, a street known for its seafood restaurants attracting deep-pocketed diners. At the end of the day, you pay the cowboys a commission. Those who trespass are asking for a puffy face and a black eye.

Another off-limits area for unauthorized beggars is Pham Ngu Lao Street. This is where the foreign backpackers in Saigon congregate. Here the beggars will ignore the local Vietnamese and make a beeline for the foreigners. English is a prerequisite: "Giver me one doughlar!"