Vietnam 33: Reunification Palace

One way I know I am almost at my hotel--home--when I ride in from Tan Son Nhat Airport at midnight happens when I see the Reunification Palace on my right as my taxi goes down Nam Ky Khoi Nghia. Reunification Palace was the home of the President of South Vietnam during the American War.

There is a roof with a helicopter, of course, and in the basement  is a command bunker featuring original maps and an old General Electric (American-made) radio. There's a conference room, a banquet room, a kitchen big enough to feed a crowd.  More than one room of gifts to the various occupants. Time has stood still, as they say, with all its year-appropriate Naugahyde, although the building is still used for, say, meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings.

Before tourists are allowed on the organized tour, they must watch a fifteen minute grainy black and white video on the history of the building.

And the view outside from the fourth floor could be of Paris.

Vietnam 32: A Cemetary

A cemetery next to a major road, next to a field. 

Just as a wedding is held on a day that the soothsayer says is a good day for a wedding, so too are the gravestones arranged as the soothsayer suggests. Symmetry is not the issue.

And why not?

Vitenam 31: Thien Hau Pagoda

Before the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City got exponentially worse, I used to try to visit the Thien Hau Pagoda in Cholon, Chinatown, early in the morning, usually toward the end of the visit. 

Why? Thien Hau is the saint of travelers, and, when the place is not mobbed, it is a pleasant if smoky and atmospheric place, the kind of place that is just modestly exotic enough that it suggests that Thien Hau probably can be helpful.

I mean, a visit is not going to hurt, and in a major city that has doubled in population and probably quadrupled in traffic, Thien Hau with its incense and its yin-yang roof, its relative quiet, is an oasis, a place that is another world in a city that I already think of as another (if familiar in many ways) world.

The first time I visited, I was asked to take a small piece of paper and write a wish on it. I seem to recall that I then hung it on a swirl of incense. On that last day before I was leaving, I wrote one word, in English: RETURN. 

Vietnam 30: Fine Art Museum

The Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum, maybe a fifteen minute walk from Ben Thanh Market, has never had more than six to eight other visitors any time I have been there. The place is a quick visit, and, to be honest, the draw is as much the building as it is the politically-motivated art within it. The first time I went, I walked out thinking that I had seen exactly what I might have expected to see had I thought about it. Representations of an ancient golden age. Of struggle. And more struggle. (The Chinese occupied Vietnam for a thousand years, the Japanese for a few after World War II, the French for a hundred, and the Americans....well, depending on how you count, maybe between ten to twenty years.)

But part of the beauty of Ho Chi Minh City--despite its not being known for its architecture the way parts of Hanoi are, for instance--is its rapidly vanishing urban-renewed architecture. Progress sometimes means more destruction than what some of us would like to see. Why go to Ho Chi Minh City if it looks like everyplace else? Perhaps the locals-in-power do not fully comprehend the beauty of what their city already possesses. (And to the Fine Arts Museum's credit, it was designed with windows and more windows, even if the air is notably hot.)

And to the locals, it makes complete sense that there is a fence and a gate around the museum, even if it can be easily climbed (or so I imagine). Schools, playgrounds, museums, other enterprises: there is also almost always a guard at the gate, and if it is not a museum, you are supposed to be a "member" if you want to get in...for whatever reason.

VN 29: Everything for Sale (Make Your Own Shade)

If you can't transport it, you can't sell it, even when your place on the street or sidewalk is going to have to compete with whatever skyscraper is being built.

And it is important, of you are a woman, that your skin be as white as possible. In any shop there are shelves of skin whiteners. (I believe they are primarily Korean brands, but I could be wrong.) This is not for medical reasons but for vanity: if you are a woman, lighter is better. No sunscreen but a non-la (conical hat), long sleeves and gloves worthy of the opera. Sandals but also socks. 

And yes, the face mask, now helpful because of pollution, but originally to protect from the sun. 

No, no sunscreen, or, as a friend characterized it with some disdain, "chemicals".

And, truth be told, sunscreen does melt off after about fifteen minutes in the tropical sun and heat.

VN 28: Kids

  These three kids happened to be connected to a private mini-hotel on Nguyen Trung Truc Street in Rach Gia, Kien Giang Province. (Go to Ho Chi Minh City and go west to the Bay of Thailand.) During the American War, the Americans had a prison on Phu Quoc Island, now Kien Giang Province's premiere tourist destination, a tropical paradise that not just has modest privately owned mini-hotels like Tropicana Resort but also (of course) Saigontourist (state run) hotels but also, say, these days lots of places like decidedly upscale Phu Quoc Eco Beach Resort. (Let's hope the local pepper farmers and people who in the past, before the tourist boom, worked in the nuoc mam factories still have jobs or traded upward as the tourist infrastructure grew and grew. It is very unlikely that many Phu Quoc locals would be able to so much as set foot in the local expensive  resorts as guests.)

This hotel on the main street of Rach Gia ceased to be after I stayed there. (Remineder: Rach Gia is a city of 200,000 where I was one of 3-4 Westerners: a teacher sponsored by Princeton in Asia; a French woman married to a Vietnamese; and supposedly an Australian woman working in a water quality project) Why did the hotel vanish? Well, the building is still there, but the rumor I heard was that the mini-hotel had been underwritten by American relatives of the locals and somehow because of a dispute, the Americans branch had pulled out. This hotel in Rach Gia was notable because it also offered food.

The children were fortunate because they had family who tended to them--they were not sent out to sell lottery tickets on the street, for instance. Their English was limited to "Hello. What's your name?" And their response was to giggle and run away after I told them my name and asked them theirs.

Another hotel story. I once stayed in a hotel much closer to the beach ("lan bien") that, typical of small family-run hotels, had no restaurant. Initially, I thought the hotel was a good 3-4 very long blocks (sometimes in 100 degree heat)  from any local restaurants (and not every restaurant kept regular hours that I could discern). But it turned out that nearby there was a new place called Saigon Pho which, it turned out, was started by a Vietnamese-American who had returned and then opened one of the first restaurant/catering facilities I knew of in the city.

The Vietnamese-American  found me the first time I walked in and said "an com" ("Eat rice," or, "I'd like to eat.") He knew an American when he saw one, he made sure I got enough to eat during that visit, and he gave me the short version: he had left this country as a boat person right after the war, done well enough in the US, and had decided to return here--where he had started--since he had retired. He wanted to help his country. His spoken English was as good as mine.

When I told someone local about him, someone who had even met him, I got a different story: surely he had failed in the US so he had to return to Vietnam.

I know which story I believe.