Saigon Morning

We awoke and the sounds of traffic weren’t as noticeable, but the music had changed. At six in the morning with Chrissy in the shower, I heard “Black Magic Woman” playing over the sounds of the street. From our balcony we could see a good portion of the city. As the morning went on the street below began to fill, increasingly, with motorbikes. The school across the street began filling with students. The boys in black slacks and white button down shirts were playing a game that appeared to be like badminton, but they played it with their feet. Girls walked through the school gate dressed in their uniforms, all white silk slacks and traditional silk dresses.

A haze covered the city, a mixture of smog and humidity. It made it difficult to see to far over the tree tops and buildings. Saigon is sprawl. Most of the buildings are five stories or so. There are a few high rises, but no large grouping of buildings that defines a downtown. Like the traffic, the buildings are also a polyglot of structures that once had direction and coherence, perhaps.

Our guide arrived at 8:00 am to begin our tour. To avoid the heat of the afternoon he took us to China Town first. Neither, Chrissy or I were anxious to see another China Town. We have seen them in the states and in Japan and they all seem the same. This was not the case in Saigon. The China Town in Saigon set the pace for markets all across the country. This China Town was a market housing a variety of vendors. In one section they sold knock off designer handbags, another material and fabrics, clothes, fruits and vegetables, cooking utensils, restaurants, hardware, incense, funerary candles, and gifts for the dead. All of these shops were crammed under one roof. Aisles between vendors were often less than a meter across and as products were stacked outside the stalls it became difficult to walk through the shops. In the midst of the shopping restaurant workers would carry trays of breakfast to the shop staff. As the morning neared 10 am, the heat in the building began to grow and it was magnified in the cramped space between the vendors.

We then took a driving tour of central Saigon. There wasn’t too great of a need to go into some of the buildings. Some of the locations no longer exist. One place I wanted to see was the former US embassy. This was the scene of famous footage of Vietnamese allies trying to evacuate Saigon in the last days of April, 1975. It really is tragic footage, our Vietnamese friends climbed to the helipad on the roof for the last helicopters to transport them to the ships off of the coast. Many were left behind.

Our guide, Minh was one of those left. While he wasn’t among the people scaling the embassy for a ride, he was an ardent supporter of the US. He had spent time at Lackland Air Force Base outside of San Antonio in the late 1960s and he had flown for the South Vietnamese Air Force throughout the remainder of the war. Being left behind meant that he would face many hard years to adjust to the rule of the communists.

His “re-education” lasted from 1975 until 1979. He didn’t tell us any more than that, but he would frequently apologize for his stupidity. This wasn’t the same as the Japanese apology as a virtue for humility. Minh would speak with us and then say, “I am sorry for being so stupid, I can’t remember.” Or, as we went into the War Relics Museum, “I am sorry, but I can’t go in there. It isn’t good for me to see those things.” I believe that he once spoke English better than he does now, but through the process of re-education many things that he knew once are now blocked. He said that he could speak French before 1975, but now he has only a passive understanding of it.

Like Minh’s missing pieces of his memory, the former Embassy is also missing. Under orders from Madeline Albright, the Embassy was torn down in the 1990s, and other pieces of Vietnam’s architecture have been reclaimed by the Communists from the north. The former seat of government during the French colonial rule and the short rule of the Republic of South Viet Nam is now Reunification Hall and houses the communists governments regional offices, the building which housed American radio broadcasts is now returned to the Rex Hotel. A sculpture of Ho Chi Minh with a young girl now adorns the plaza between the two buildings.