It’s been a long, long time since I
called Saigon my home. Still, here I
am, steep in middle age, tentatively,
trying to take up roots once more.
And in Saigon, I discover that I
live in many different time zones all
at once.
In the present: an energetic city
where moneymaking is the name of
the game. In it, I am a mere newcom-
er, an émigré of sorts, who needs to
build new connections, and learn
new idioms—the ropes. Despite
knowing the language I struggle to
navigate this enormous city, which
constantly expands and changes. The various districts,
neighborhoods, its young and fast-shifting cultures—I
try to understand the complex society and various social
strata that weren’t here before. The pop stars, the novels,
the TV series, the new films, the social-media stars—I
know nothing of them. Still, I try to listen to its rhythm,
the conversation, the lyrics. Slowly, very slowly, I make
inroads.
More of the present tense: You can see it outside
my window—high-rises lining the river, gleaming and
shining at night like a promise. You can also hear it:
day and night, the din of construction, the roar of the
motorcycles. If I once contrasted backward Vietnam to
modern America, I now need to compare a new mod-
ern world versus an aging modern world; these days the
two countries seemingly run on parallel tracks.
In a coffee shop where I go in the morning to write,
I spend quite a bit of time eavesdropping. The phrase
một tỷ is mentioned the most. And it means one billion
dong, around US$42,000. It is often used to describe
prices of real estate, as in “that property is worth about
$70 billion and you need to get it before it goes up.”
It follows that the other word is bán—or to sell. “Bán
mau em oi”—“Sell it quickly, Sister!” The middle-aged
lady tells this to her friend, so I wrote it down on my
laptop. “Don’t wait. It will become lukewarm next week.”
Property is the name of the game here. That is, buy,
buy, sell, sell is the point. Indeed, the majority of the
conversation, one way or another, somehow has to do
with money, and money usually involves real estate
dealings. “Let me tell you how to get him to sell.” “Don’t
get cheated—I’ll get my company to back you.” Another
sentence I wrote down after hearing someone saying it
rather loudly at the next table.
Though I buy and sell nothing, I bask in this
excitement; it’s an energy that is seductive and admit-
tedly contagious. I watch with awe
as the wealthy spend their money
here in such abandon at high-end
nightclubs and restaurants. Up the
street from where I live, a shopping
mall recently opened. It sells Lam-
borghini and Rolls Royce at its posh
entrance. People are always taking
selfies with the sparkly cars in the
background.
Yet some nights, strolling the
darker alleys, I am reminded that so
many more remain mired in humili-
ating poverty—the hunched backs,
the tattered clothes, the skin-and-
bone bodies, squatters with cigarettes in mouth, a mel-
ancholic ballad on the radio.NATURALLY, I ALSO LIVE in the past tense. With
a memory edged in sadness, edged in joy of a wartime
Saigon as if it’s entirely elsewhere, a sleepy town lost in
time. Sometimes it comes unannounced into the pres-
ent. The other day on my way to a dinner party, my taxi
drove past a building that I instantly recognized despite
all these years. “You came into this world at this hospital,
in that room.” My mother had said it many times when-
ever our car drove past it during the war. As a child, I
would often look up in wonder. There on that second
floor, that room with its wooden shutters always wide
open, I came into this world. An odd moment, just like
that, and the past and the present intertwined: Old Sai-
gon superimposed itself on New Saigon, and a rush of
various memories of a tropical childhood overwhelmed
and made me slightly breathless.
Especially when it rains: thunder claps like bombs,
then followed by the roar of the monsoon on a tin roof
of a modest café, under which I sat one afternoon wait-
ing for a friend while the radio echoed an old ballad of
Trịnh Công Sơn’s song “Tình Nhớ”” (Memory of love),
sung by the incomparable Khanh Ly. Transported, I
see myself as that young boy again, reading his French
comic books under the veranda with its tin roof, and
over which the rain roared like a million tiny gallop-
ing horses. A flash of a thousand wartime memories.
At such a moment I am completely displaced: am I an
American writer working on his laptop waiting for a
friend, or am I still that child who once believed the
borders were real, impossible for many a mortal to
cross? Yet he did dream, didn’t he, like his childhood
hero Tintin, of going on adventures in impossibly far-
away lands?Old Saigon
superimposed itself
on New Saigon, and
a rush of various
memories of a
tropical childhood
overwhelmed and
made me slightly
breathless.WORLDLIT.ORG 49