old man swallowed some more noodles and nodded. “You’re right. No more shit. Eat.”
We ate. But before I could finish, I was falling asleep. Sitting there surrounded by noise and chaos, I was afraid I’d slump forward head first into the noodles. The old man said something about Vietnam being a big-time baseball country. I was too tired to answer. Or care. He stood up, paid the guy who’d taken our order, and stepped back from the counter. I barely got my gear pulled out from under the counter before two businessmen-looking guys (what kind of business happens at midnight on a Saturday night?) piled into the seats we had just vacated.
We stepped out into the street. “Want me to carry something?”
I shook my head. “I’m good.”
He headed off in what I hoped was the direction of the Rex Hotel. We were maybe ten minutes getting there, and there was constant noise and movement and light going on around us the whole time. But I don’t remember much more than that because I was in a total zombie state for most of the walk.
2
Which is probably why I don’t remember much of that first look at the Rex Hotel either.
I woke up the next morning a little confused. The light was streaming in on top of me from a large window next to my bed. I didn’t have a shirt on, but I was still wearing the jeans and socks I’d had on the day before. I couldn’t remember getting undressed for bed. I guess that’s because I didn’t, not really.
I sat up and looked around. I was alone in the room. No sign of the old man. There was a clock on a shelf that jutted from the wall near the window. Ten sixteen. I was like whoa, I never sleep that long.
I got up and went into the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. When I came out, the old man still hadn’t come back from wherever he’d gone. I got dressed, unpacked my clothes, and turned on the TV. I was still trying to find a channel that was in English when the old man came through the door.
“Hey, Sleeping Beauty’s finally up and moving.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I don’t usually sleep in like that.”
“Don’t sweat it. Jet lag. Let’s go get some breakfast.”
“Is it going to be sort of … normal food?” The idea of noodles first thing in the morning was enough to make me give up eating for as long as we were in Vietnam.
“Bacon and eggs normal enough for you?”
I did the fist pump. “Oh, yeah.”
We ate in the rooftop restaurant. It was outdoors with a pretty cool view of the centre part of the city. That surprised me too, the city itself. Seeing them in daylight, the buildings weren’t what I expected. I mean, inside me, I knew it wasn’t really going to be all huts and grass shacks. But still I hadn’t expected this.
For starters, everything was bigger than I thought it would be. And the architecture was a lot different from what I expected. Some Asian looking buildings, pagodas and stuff, some fancy what looked like European architecture and some really modern looking places like you’d see in Los Angeles. That is if you ever got out of the airport and actually saw Los Angeles.
It was hot already, but there were some clouds around that looked like there might be some rain.
The waiter spoke English, and the old man ordered three orders of bacon and eggs, “one for you, one for me, and one for backup” was how he put it. This time I totally agreed with his food order.
I ate and the old man ate, but his eating wasn’t like mine. It was like he was sitting on something itchy. He kept moving around, looking around, and sometimes he’d just stare at something like he was trying to memorize it. Or remember it. A couple of times he shook his head. So maybe he wasn’t trying to remember. Maybe he was wanting to forget.
“So I figured it out,” I said as I dabbed toast in runny egg yolk.
“What did you figure out?”
“Why we’re here.”
“And why’s that?”
“You fought here in that war, the Vietnam War. The one the U.S. lost. You and Tal probably fought together. And now you’ve come back here to see what’s happened to the country since you left. Am I right? Is that it?”
“Something like that.” He was still looking around while we were talking, but then he looked at me. “This hotel and especially this restaurant were a big deal with American soldiers, especially officers. I came here a few times. It was a good place to forget … forget what was happening when you weren’t in places like this.”
“Were you an officer?”
“No,” he sipped coffee. “But sometimes the grunts … the regular soldiers, came here. Not often. A few times.”
“Nice place.”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t say any more. We concentrated on eating again, and he seemed less jumpy, less intense for a while. We shared the backup order of bacon and eggs. Ate everything. Sat back afterwards like stuffed hogs.
3
I have to admit it was a pretty good day. It was like the old man suddenly realized he had a kid with him, and it might be nice to do some stuff that a kid might like.
First, we went to the City Zoo, but we didn’t stay long. It pretty much sucked. I’d been to zoos back home, and they were all better than this one, even the smaller ones. The City Zoo in Saigon didn’t have many animals, and the ones that were there didn’t look like they got fed all that regularly.
I could see the old man was feeling bad that the zoo wasn’t great, so I said something about the gardens and the flowers being real impressive, but I don’t think he bought it.
Next we hit the Reunification Palace. When I hear palace, I think old. Like Buckingham Palace. This palace wasn’t actually all that old, 1960s. As we wandered through the halls and the grounds outside, I read some of the plaques that explained stuff. It was designed by a Vietnamese architect who got his training in France. Before the war and during the war, the place was known as the Presidential Palace, but when the North Vietnamese overran the country in 1975, their tanks smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace. And pretty soon the place got renamed — the Palace of Reunification.
I noticed that references to the war didn’t exactly heap a lot of praise on the Americans. Lots of stuff about how they used cluster bombs to slaughter women and children and committed every atrocity you can imagine. The old man didn’t spend a lot of time looking at that stuff.
More of the same when we crossed the street and went into the War Remnants Museum. Not a happy place. And if you’d fought on the side the old man had, it had to be tough going through there. It wasn’t all bad. There was a cannon that had a range of twenty miles, a tank, and a helicopter — all in the grounds around the museum. It was American equipment that got left behind when they pulled out. I think the old man wanted me to learn something about the war, but this wasn’t what he wanted me to learn. Inside the museum there were endless pictures of all the bad stuff the Americans did to people and to the countryside during those years. That was another short visit.
Next stop was Dam Sen Park, sort of Disneyland-Vietnam. The best thing was the elephant ride. Real elephants. The old man and me, we both went for a ride. It was cool, I have to admit. I asked the guy running the elephant place if mine had a name. He just shrugged like he didn’t understand me. I named mine Elly. I told the old man, and he named his Fant. Buddy movie stuff.
I was getting hungry, so we went to the downtown area called Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown. The old man told me Cholon means “big market.” To me it was big chaos. Plenty of shouting, people in a major hurry, lots of Asian architecture, pagodas, and statues of dragons, and these lion-dogs that sent jets of water into goldfish ponds.
“This is where we came for excitement when we had