Puterbaugh
ESSAYLiving in the Tenses in Saigon
by Andrew Lam
The Puterbaugh series
is a special feature
sponsored by the WLT
Puterbaugh Endowment.
Learn more about the
biennial Puterbaugh
Literary Festival at
puterbaughfestival.org.
N
ot far from where I live now, a kilometer or
so, there’s that dock from which my father,
a lieutenant general in the South Vietnam-
ese army, boarded a crowded naval ship
on the day that Saigon fell and set out to sea. A little
further out, in District 10, there stands my childhood
home in which I once lived with my family and our
three dogs, and from which my mother, sister, and I fled
to America, two days ahead of my father.
I have not seen the house since I moved back. I
have driven past the outer walls of my old school, Le
Qui Don, and the nearby, now dilapidated country
club—Le Cercle Sportif—in whose smallest (and coldest)of three swimming pools I lazed away many a happy
sun-drenched afternoons as a child. But I haven’t found
the resolve to enter either club or school. I see them all
so clearly in memory, in dreams and reveries, having
written about my losses and gains in books and radio
commentaries back in America, that it felt like an act of
betrayal were I to go to any of these places in actuality.
I tell you all this because, while I have come back
to the city in which I was born, I feel as if I live in yet
another, a modern metropolis running on steroids, and
not at all the sleepy town of my childhood memories.
And it is rushing toward some complex cosmopolitan
destiny at a breakneck speed.PHOTO: ROBERT METZ/UNSPLASH48 W LT SUMMER 2019