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.
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