and mud — little orphaned kids everywhere holding out their hands and begging in these little pathetic voices, American man you nice … give little money. I expected to be standing in line at weird little shops (more huts), so I could buy a bowl of wet rice that I’d have to go through with my chopsticks to filter out the bugs crawling around in the bowl. I expected a city that was not like any city I’d ever see. I expected … a dump.
And I was wrong. First of all, it’s not even called Saigon any more. It’s Ho Chi Minh City. Okay, that was partly the old man’s fault; how would I know that? He called it Saigon, so I called it Saigon. And in fairness to him, a lot of the locals still call it Saigon too. I found that out later. But officially, at the end of the war, when South Vietnam and the Americans lost and the North Vietnamese took over, the leader of North Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh, and he decided to re-name Saigon after himself. Nothing like a healthy dose of self-esteem.
No huts, at least not in any of the parts of the city I saw. Skyscrapers, neon lights, clubs, restaurants, palaces, and parks — some people begging, quite a few of them actually, but not many of them were kids. If it wasn’t for the totally different trees and flowers, the gazillion people on little motorbikes and another gazillion people on bicycles and the fact that most of those gazillions of people were Vietnamese, I could have been in Toronto.
And I was wrong about that too — the everybody-being-Vietnamese thing. The old man told me that a pretty big part of the population of Saigon is Chinese. Especially in the centre of town.
Since we’d arrived at eleven thirty at night, I was pretty tired by the time we got our stuff off the luggage carousel, and the old man had flagged down a taxi outside. We were staying at a place called the Rex Hotel — the old man told me that while we were watching luggage drift past us on the carousel. Watching and getting pushed out of the way by rude people, who seemed to think that if they didn’t get their suitcase right now, the world was going to come to an end.
I got pushed out of the way three different times. By the third time, I was getting seriously annoyed, and I was about to educate the little Asian guy who did the pushing on some of the more creative ways to use English swear words when I noticed that he was a she. A tough little she, but a she just the same. I stepped back beside the old man, who was grinning and shaking his head. I might have thought it was a little funnier if I hadn’t been so damn tired.
Before we left the airport, the old man rented two cellphones at a little kiosk, one for each of us. “Our phones don’t work over here. so we’ll need these. Don’t lose it, or it’ll cost us, well actually cost you, a bunch.”
One of the top five prettiest women I’d ever seen in my life explained how the phone worked and what our numbers were. I wanted to ask a bunch of questions just so we could keep talking to her, but exhaustion from the plane ride had ground my male hormones into powder, so I settled for nodding a lot.
She spoke excellent English, but a couple of times she couldn’t find the word she wanted and fell back into Vietnamese. The old man seemed to understand, and even spoke a few words himself. I don’t know why, but I thought that was pretty impressive. I didn’t bother to tell him that though.
The taxi ride was another adventure. I expected the first words out of the old man’s mouth to be Rex Hotel, but instead he said some stuff in Vietnamese. Then we discovered the driver spoke English, so the old man said, “Just drive around for a while.”
I looked at him in the dark of the back seat. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Just for a few minutes. Go to sleep if you want.” Then he turned to the window on his side and stared out like a kid watching for Santa Claus. It was like I wasn’t there.
It was close to midnight, yet there was an awful lot of light. Neon lights and street lights and the lights from cars and motorbikes. It felt like four o’clock in the afternoon.
And there were a lot of people on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. That surprised me, since it was pretty late. Most were still in shirt sleeves because it felt like a summer afternoon feels back home. Lots of movement. There didn’t seem to be anybody just standing around. Quite a few eating places and most of them seemed pretty busy for that time of night. Except for the people eating in those places, everyone seemed to be in a hurry. A blur of moving bodies and vehicles of all types.
Noise too, lots of it. The driver had his window down, and there was this din — car horns honking, music coming from several different places, the rattle-hum of motorbike engines … and voices, loud voices that seemed to be speaking in syllables instead of sentences.
The other thing I noticed was the smells. A big mix of smells. From the streets we drove down, there was the smell of food, kind of like when you go into a Chinese restaurant in a Canadian or American city. It was jumbled together with gasoline fumes and the occasional whiff of garbage. There was the smell of the inside of the taxi, too, a mix of body odour and beer, I think that’s what it was. And from somewhere, there was the hint of a flower smell. Like you were in a garden or a flower shop. But that smell wasn’t there all the time. It seemed like the other stuff overpowered it.
“Stop here!” The old man had yelled it, and I jumped. Then he yelled again, something in what I guessed was Vietnamese. The driver looked in the rear-view mirror and shook his head, but he stopped the car.
I looked over, and the old man was leaning forward and staring at a building. It didn’t look like much to me, just a store that sold vegetables and fruit. The produce was in bins and baskets both inside the store and outside on the sidewalk. Like one of those fruit stands you see in British Columbia. Then there were apartments or maybe offices above that for five floors.
The old man opened the door of the taxi and stepped out. He said, “Wait,” without looking back, so I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or the driver. Both of us waited, and both of us watched the old man.
He walked slowly to the building, looking up and down at it as he walked. Taking it all in. It had to have been a place that he knew for some reason when he’d been here before. Was it a grocer’s shop back then? I’d ask him later, but there was no guarantee he’d tell me. It didn’t seem like he was going to be telling me much.
There was a skinny little guy selling the vegetables, but he looked like he was putting stuff away. Closing up. About time, it had to be after midnight. The old man talked to the vegetable guy for a couple of minutes. The guy pointed up the street. The old man looked where he was pointing, then he nodded, and the skinny guy went back to packing up his groceries, covering baskets full of stuff and setting them inside the door of the shop.
The old man looked at the building some more, then reached out and touched the brick wall, left his hand just resting against the wall for a couple of minutes. Then he backed up toward the taxi, but he kept his eyes on the building.
He turned, climbed in the car and said, “Let’s go.” Then turned to look out the window again. He didn’t look at me or say anything to me.
We drove for a while longer. I noticed something else. Another sound. Loudspeakers. Not everywhere and not all the time, but every once in a while you’d hear these loudspeakers. Sometimes it was music; other times it was people talking, in Vietnamese, of course, so I couldn’t tell what they were saying. Mostly it was men talking, but sometimes it was a woman. When it was a woman’s voice, I got the feeling maybe it was like a commercial for something. The men’s voices, I couldn’t tell. It seemed harsher though, like the preachers on those TV shows where they tell you to smarten up your life and send money.
One thing was for sure. Ho Chi Minh City had like a major night life — clubs, lots of them. I could hear some of the music as we went by. Some oriental, some American. Even some oldies rock and roll. As we went past one place I could hear and see the band, all Asian guys pounding out a version of “At the Hop.” My mom loves that oldies stuff, so I know a lot of the songs from hearing them at home. These guys weren’t bad. People were dancing, and they were pretty good too.
Next was a karaoke place. I could see through the windows, some people dancing, some just watching. Two girls trying to sing “Roxanne,” the Police