A Saturday night in Saigon

Growing older single has taken away the ability to do nothing without the sneaky feeling of being a social misfit. I’ve always enjoyed my own company – or that of characters in books and sitcoms – but now I can’t shake the feeling that it’s pathetic, and I should be out somewhere creating a fracas.

Every weekend I see Facebook photos of my peers taking their kids to the zoo, or watching TV with their partners, or having lunch with other couples. And I wish I was too. Until I found that several of them look at my weekend pictures and wish they were doing that. Clearly there’s a healthy amount of greener grass in the world at any given point in time. So that’s okay.

So I’m spending a Saturday night watching my friends make the mistakes I’ve already made, swallowing the wisdom I know they won’t hear, confining myself to light chaperonage that can perhaps steer them away from the worse bits. I’m drinking too, just like they are, but am hampered by a vague sense of responsibility, a very clear memory of what a hangover feels like, and an even greater desire to not lose my Sunday to one. (I’m also blessed with a harder head than most, which helps.) I seem to have moved seamlessly from eternal sister to eternal aunt. The fun kind, who you’re happy to hang out with. I do have a lot of good role models in that, so that’s okay too. As a cousin once said to me, we needed our young, single aunts; everyone needs that aunt.

I sit on the stairs, peacefully texting other friends in other time zones, while various characters from Leonard Cohen songs surge up and down, getting on with the serious business of bad decisions. I enjoy myself, as I usually do when left alone to do so. Clubs and noisy bars have never been my mileu in terms of social success, because I need conversation to click. I love the noise, the clubby music and the party vibe, but only as a spectator. If I’m allowed to just be the weird woman on the sidelines writing blog posts about it, I am deeply happy.

Now it’s two in the morning, still an hour away from the blinding lights of closing time. The evening is at the height of its fever. There are the young animals raising the roof with the sort of confidence you have to be born with. Around them, others are brandishing the kind that comes one shot at a time out of a tequila bottle. There are girls judging other girls for doing exactly the sort of thing they would like to be doing. Some girls for whom this is a working evening, many others who are so far down the tequila bottle that that line is not the only one that’s a bit blurred. Girls in tears, girls who will be in tears in the morning, boys getting into trouble, groups of friends unsteadily but doggedly holding one another back from one fate or the other.

Someone sits down on the stairs next to me saying “That’s the longest text message in the world”. I tell him it’s a blog post. He says I’d do better to rescue my friend. I look at him enquiringly, he points downstairs to the bar. I follow the pointing finger – and yes, it’s definitely aunty-time. I shelve the writer and get off the stairs. I have no trouble disentangling her, and getting her into a cab. I get into a cab myself, feeling like the oldest inhabitant of the world. It isn’t until I get home that I realize belatedly – for perhaps the five hundredth time in my life – that I’d misread an opportunity on the stairs. Could probably do with an aunt myself!

Silent Night, Noisy Night

At my Sunday lunch, someone played Silent Night from my playlist, and the boy who grew up in Darjeeling and the girl who grew up in Whitefield agreed with complete understanding that this song evokes greater nostalgia for our India than any number of Diwali lamps.

When I return home in December, the Whitefield in my mind is the one I grew up in, where it’s quiet enough to hear the church bells on Christmas Day. Where they play cricket in the Inner Circle ground on Sunday mornings and bring excitement into the lives of the dogs – sooner or later a ball would land inside the private gardens, the dogs would fetch it and then guard it ferociously in full view of helpless fielders outside. They’re all still at the gate, those dogs, tails wagging. The car is still a red Omni van. Traffic is thin on the roads. Jagriti is still a farm. The lake is unfenced, surrounded still by flower farms and vineyards. There are eucalyptus groves instead of housing developments with Balinese names. When I say Bangalore to people who ask where I’m from, the place in my mind is from the early nineties, when Whitefield was just the greener, quieter oasis on the outskirts of India’s Garden City.

No sign remains of either place, of course. The reality is an over-developed hellhole. I know there’ll be Facebook updates on the ride from the airport, from walks where I notice that yet another 100-year-old heritage cottage has been buried in the foundation of a block of flats, another signature raintree cut down. I might as well just schedule them now and save myself the 3G bill.

But the Sunday, with the windows open and the rooms full of the December sun, it seemed as if no time had passed at all. My parties are just like my parents’ many, many gatherings. My table looks exactly like my mother’s. My overreactions to others’ policy decisions regarding plates or cutlery are quite hereditary too.

And given all the changes in Whitefield, it’s amazing that my parents are still able to buy their coffee freshly ground from the same little coffee merchant, and their bread freshly baked in the same bakery that was there before I was born. The fact that the bakery now has two branches and has a snack bar has not changed the bread. (The coffee man has no such ambitions – I doubt even the grinder has been upgraded in the 30 years).

As I prepare for another family meet, count the people and the presents and wonder big suitcase or medium, it feels like this – perhaps the hundredth trip home of my adult life – is momentous. Last time I left from Singapore, the family meet being a transit stop on a much greater journey to Vietnam. I return now from that journey, refreshed to the point of transformation by the change. I’ll be home for Christmas.

The Saigon effect

Most shops in Saigon shut down by nine, but in the streets around Ben Thanh market, that’s when they start up. The night market vendors begin setting up around 7pm, placing poles, tarpaulin and merchandise, in precision order. Every night is carnival night, a wholehearted outpouring of light and sound and colour. I don’t know when they actually close – but when I've returned at 2:30 am from the occasional party, they’re doing this in the reverse order. These streets are never empty. When I’m going for my walk in the morning they’re serving noodles for breakfast on the pavements. When I return from work in the evening, they’re selling grilled shrimp.

Some vendors recognise me now. The cigarette lady knows not to charge me the tourist price because I simply won’t buy. In return, I wait politely until the tourists have finished congratulating themselves on how cheap it is, not knowing they’re paying two and a half times what they should be.

The fruit sellers have learnt that bent old beggars might get money out of me, but I take a firm stand on extortionate custard apples. The ones with cut fruit will only hail me if they have properly ripened jackfruit (they learnt very early on that I know what jackfruit is supposed to taste like). The phone card man knows I want to be let inside his shop to use the card rather than on the street where someone on a bike can snatch my phone. The shoe sellers know their shoes are too big for me, but I won’t be able to resist the neon platforms they’re waving, so I will come in hopefully anyway. The clothes people ignore me entirely because everything’s too small. The bag sellers know I won’t buy but something sufficiently colourful will bring me in. And then I will complain about weak seams and zips. Most of them are just amused by this, but one old man looked thoughtfully at my battered Hidesign sling bag and nodded in comprehension – and then said with a twinkle that I could get 10 of his bags for what I paid for that. I promptly asked him if that was his price and he said only if I was buying 10 – and we both laughed and went our cheery ways.

The souvenir shops stopped calling out to me two months ago. I went in today though, to buy a fridge magnet for my Dad, and the coconut seller outside asked me if I was leaving. The first time I bought from him, he wanted to know if my nose stud was diamonds. I prudently said no. He laughed and told me he used to be a goldsmith. I grinned back noncommittally, but neither of us had enough of the other’s language to pursue the interesting story of why a goldsmith was selling coconuts.

I nodded to him and continued on, picking my way through the clockwork bicycles and paper snakes skittering about on the pavement, skirting the pushcarts selling ice cream, dried fish or gooseberries, nodding to the old lady with the rambutans, the scooter mechanic and the cheerful beggar without a leg, smiling at the ever-optimistic cyclo guy and hammock man. When I reached the back entrance of my hotel, the doormen sprang to hold the door for me, looked thoughtfully at the fridge magnet in my hand and asked me if I was leaving.

As I added it to the pile of gifts that needed to somehow magically not add up to excess baggage, I suddenly realised I’d bought very little for myself, though I’d been living on the doorstep of Saigon’s most popular tourist market.

I looked down from my window at this city that I’d wandered for three months, not a tourist or a resident, neither expat nor local. And I know I’m taking with me a heart and mind stuffed as full to bursting as my bags – unexpected friendships like I haven’t known since much younger days in Dubai and Muscat, equally unexpected sense of not just success (which I never really doubted), but appreciation, the sweetness of partnership at work, a reawakening of hope and ambition, a moving on from the baffling injustices of recent years, the return of the laughter and energy I’d feared were gone for good.

In the exhilarating chaos of life here, I’d got myself back. Merci, Saigon. Whatever happens next, that's one souvenir I will display with pride and pleasure.

PS: Most of the photos here are not mine but I don't know whose they are so cannot acknowledge.

The Saigon Trot

Or how to cross the road in Ho Chi Minh City.

Over four weekends of hanging out in the tourist areas, I’ve seen that the peoples of the chaotic lands manage it best – South America, North and South Africa, Eastern Europe and anywhere in Asia, except Singapore (I've seen groups of nervous Singaporeans marooned for ages). The intrepid races are also up to the challenge – the natives of all the rugby playing nations, Iceland and Scandinavia can do absolutely anything. And of course, the young of all species, who seem to consider it an adventure sport. That’s one way to look at it. The other, more sustainable, one is to treat it as karmic ascension.

Rule 1: Don’t wait for the road to clear; it is never clear.

Rule 2: Look all ways, not just two, especially on the one-ways. Once you’ve tapped into the fluid oneness of the universe (two or three crossings), this is easy to do.

Rule 3: Clear your mind of fear, hesitation, scepticism and all other frivolous fight-or-flight responses you’re cluttered with.

Rule 4: Look calmly upon the vast amount of traffic flowing your way and step off the kerb, where “kerb” stands for any square foot of earthly soil you set out from. Yes, those are full-sized buses...so?

Rule 5: Recognise yourself and everything else on the road as unique particles moving through the cosmos, each in its own individual, inviolate orbit. Make no judgements, acknowledge no barriers, question nothing. Just let it all flow around you.

Rule 6: Move steadily and above all, continuously, across the road. Two steps forward, one step back. Sidestep, sway back, swing forward, skip around. Two steps forward, one step back. And don’t forget to smile. The Saigon Trot, apparently coined by the expat community in District 2.

It works. More than that, it’s the only way it works. If you’re not willing to join the stream, you will be stranded forever. To begin with, you can practise in crowds – there are lots of these too – but the time will come when the cigarette lady has unaccountably shifted across the road and you will have to blood the sword on your own.

*Secret Christian Master Rule: Channel Moses.

*If you’re given to reading/watching The Secret, you could try that too. It couldn’t hurt more than being hit by a motorbike any other way. But it doesn’t work if you think like that.

The Cu Chi tunnels, Vietnam

The narrowness and darkness of the Cu Chi tunnels are difficult to describe. My stubby Dravidian body needs to bend double to walk in them. The Dutch visitors have to practically telescope. It takes me two tries and the bracing support of an intrepid Australian to nerve myself to enter. Crawling along well out of reach of the flashlight, I might have been one of Tolkien’s dwarves going through the mines of Moria. The walls are smooth and hard and way too close, except for the terrifying breaths of dark air when we pass openings to different sides; I more than half expect orcs and goblins to pour out of them. I only go about 60 metres (I had signed on for 20, but somehow got herded into the longer one), but I emerge with the sort of adrenaline high that a roller coaster produces and a real sense of the relief it must have been after seven long years.

Before you get to the part where you can enter the tunnel, neatly designed areas show you the weapons and methods used, a 3D model, a full map and even an old propaganda documentary. It’s all carefully sanitised, painless and undemanding. In the bright sunshine of a Sunday morning, the young forest that has grown over the ravages is innocuous and inviting. The fact that your guide keeps repeating the injunction not stray from the path does not register until you read a sign that says “B52 bomb crater”. You suddenly realise you’re on the battlefield, and there are still traps, trenches and camouflaged holes in the dappled forest floor. One of these is available for your guide to demonstrate and everyone keeps faithfully to the path afterwards.

The tunnellers made fake termite mounds in which they hid the air holes. There are many of these around and it’s impossible to tell which was made by termites and which by humans. They learnt to make land mines from unexploded enemy missiles and fashioned bamboo sticks into deadly traps. I count 12 types of these, from a spiky ball copying the rambutan that had stopped growing on their dead land, to a lethal swinging door inspired by cradles that no longer had a safe place to hang. When the river was poisoned, they dug wells inside the tunnels. They took their kitchens underground, designing chimney vents to make smoke disappear wispily into the morning or evening mist. They lived on tapioca for years. The resulting malnourishment only helped them make the tunnels even smaller. All of this is demonstrated through well-made, understated exhibits. You can even eat tapioca dipped in powdered peanuts, fire a rifle and buy sandals made from truck tyres.

The US Army didn’t stand a chance – how could secure young boys raised in mild climes have hoped to defeat this kind of on-the-fly innovation and endurance baked hard by centuries of struggle?

Back in Saigon, I see a notice outside a passing church and, deducing from the musical symbols that something songlike is in progress, I enter and sit in a familiar dimness, listening to the tail end of a Vietnamese choir. The words are strange but the tune of Amazing Grace is unmistakeable: “Through many dangers, toils and sins I have already come; ‘tis grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home”. It’s a strangely appropriate sentiment for a communist country that shook off the Catholic invader a long time ago. At least it replaces the tune of Green Fields of France that’s been playing over and over in my head ever since Cu Chi.

Agent Orange is still around, it gets in the meat and milk. My Vietnamese peers grew up in the desolate aftermath, their parents lived – or not – through the war. No monument stands here with the names of the dead, no flags went to the families of the fallen, nobody even knows how many fell. These claustrophobic subterranean corridors are all the memorial there is to an incredibly brave generation of civilian soldiers, both men and women. And that I think is the secret to the calmness and the complete lack of self-pity in the country: they were small and poor fighting the big and rich and they won, through their own spirit and ingenuity. What’s more, they are gracious in their victory.


Getting there: There are buses aplenty but I highly recommend the boat. Saigon River Express does it beautifully.