Destination Saigon

Adventures in Vietnam

By Walter Mason

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2010 Walter Mason
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-949-5

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Map,
Monks and Movie Stars,
Hairdressers and Seamstresses,
Consuming the Corpse Fruit,
Telling Lies about Confucius,
Jasper Prayer Beads,
Latin Quarter,
Mystical Hanoi,
When Cheap isn’t Cheerful,
The Towers of Binh Dinh,
Ice Cream in Quy Nhon,
Fish, Beer and Bananas,
The Can Tho Feast of Asking,
Don’t Pay the Ferryman’s Wife,
Crazy Delta Dancing,
Dad’s Place on the Mekong,
Feeding the Chickens,
Grandmother’s Secret,
Tay Ninh Oi!,
Cao Dai,
Dressing Up,
Off to See the Black Lady,
Feng Shui and Flower Arranging,
The Furniture-breaking Demon,
Forgotten Ancestors,
Hello Kitty,
Tattooed Dragon,
Losing Hope in Hue,
Our Lady of La Vang,
Cinnamon City,
Perfume River,
Gentle Mother,
Mr Buddha,
Begrudging Compassion,
Gas Masks and Goggles,
The Hermit on the Hill,
Pastel Pink and Porcelain,
Patron Saint of Hairdressers,
Café Society,
Familiar Spies,
Trysts and Dubious Treats,
Salted Plums,
Escape to Mui Ne,
An Invitation to Party in the Old Market,
Fishermen’s Karaoke,
The Big Buddha of Phan Thiet,
In Police Custody in Tra Vinh,
Homeward Bound,
Bibliography,

CHAPTER 1

MONKS AND MOVIE STARS

I came for the vegetarian barbecued pork in the down-at-heel Thuyen Vien restaurant on Nguyen Van Dau street in an un-glamorous suburb of Ho Chi Minh City, once known as Saigon. Served on a tiny little plate, the dish was accompanied by stuffed bitter melons and a sea-salty fungus soup that everyone insisted was very good for me. Like most restaurants in Vietnam, the Thuyen Vien Vegetarian is wildly overstaffed and bursting at the seams with waitresses, plain young country girls who flee in giggles at the sight of a foreigner, and the motorcycle parking area is richly populated by surly, semi-supine youths with cigarette smoke curling from their lips. Though always busy, one has the slightly uneasy feeling that the Thuyen Vien never gets properly cleaned. It is also the kind of place that leaves you worried rather than reassured about the safety of your motorcycle. And the attendants have none of the scrubbed wholesomeness you would expect of the vegetarian.

But, like almost everyone else in the city, we turned up again and again on sabbath nights, joining the amazing throng of mostly young people intent on observing the traditional vegetarian days twice a month. The observance of vegetarianism is an important part of Vietnamese Buddhist culture, though in the easygoing way of Vietnamese Buddhism you only have to do it on certain days. The big sabbath is the fifteenth day of the lunar month, when it is almost impossible to find a seat in a vegetarian restaurant with people queuing out the door in an effort to appear virtuous.

‘Don’t look now,’ hissed Kien, my fashionable young companion, ‘but a movie star has just walked in the door — and he’s got monks with him!’

Now whenever anyone enjoins me to not look I have an uncontrollable urge to spin around and stare pointedly, which is exactly what I did. I was rewarded with a surprised but dazzling smile. Cosmetic dentistry is very cheap in Vietnam, though generally Western tourists are still wary of taking advantage of it. The movie star was tall, buffed and tattooed, with a luxuriant goatee. His head was shaved, unusual in Vietnam where a bald head is considered the rightful badge of Buddhist monks; to sport one as a layperson is slightly disrespectful. Not that this bothered the two elderly, slightly scruffy monks who accompanied him. They had that cultivated look of nonchalance that universally says: ‘Eat my dirt — I’m with someone hot and famous!’

The tall fellow was, my friend assured me, one of Vietnam’s premier movie bad guys. Men blessed with copious body hair were frequently cast as the bad guys in Vietnamese dramas, I’d noticed. Far from playing the villain now, this particular meanie was doing his bit for the faith this sabbath, running back and forth to the alfresco buffet to bring the monks their food.

My friend harrumphed. ‘No-one,’ he said, ‘takes monks out to dinner. This is all for show.’ His cynicism was lost on me, however. Always a willing acolyte at the shrine of celebrity, I was ready to be wowed by the villain’s good works. He ordered an abstemious bowl of vegetarian noodles for himself, and carefully waited for the monks to begin their meal before he picked up a spoon and started in on the almost tasteless broth. Occasionally he would lean forwards and, using the hand-held end of the chopsticks (the ultimate in self-sacrificing good manners), select a morsel of food to pop into the monks’ bowls.

This was too much for my dinner companion. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘there is no need for this. Turning his chopsticks around! In two hours time he’ll be sitting down at a goat-meat restaurant!’ Spearing a little curried ‘prawn’ made of tofu skin, he went on, ‘Yes, a nice little goat-meat hotpot and a carton of Heineken.’

Glaring spitefully at the movie star’s pious table, he added in a hiss, ‘And bad girls!’

* * *

People are perplexed about why I love Ho Chi Minh City so. They can understand the charm of rural Vietnam, or the quaint antiquity of the northern and central regions, but for most Ho Chi Minh City is a hellish metropolis, a kind of oriental Los

Angeles without the celebrity. It is the kind of place where you can’t really cross the road with any sense of security, and where every other person seems to be cultivating some kind of scam that could potentially involve you, the unsuspecting tourist. It is hot and crowded and polluted. And I love it. I love the noisy, laughing people with their delicious food and cheeky manners. I like their brash frankness, their unashamed curiosity and their frequently great kindness, qualities I encountered over and over in Vietnam.

People born and bred there refer to it as ‘the City’ when they travel. This infuriates those from other cities, particularly Hanoi.

Ho Chi Minh City is glamorous, in the way that all big, ugly, congested cities are glamorous. It sucks in all the beauty of the whole country with its promises of riches for girls (and boys) willing to work in entertainment, tourism, hospitality and — inevitably — prostitution. Saigon is full of movie stars, pop stars and restaurant singers who tour the city by night, dropping in at beer halls where they sing a song or two, collect their tips (wrapped elegantly around the stem of a plastic flower) and get back on their bikes to go to their next gig. At the most humble end of the industry are young men from Mekong Delta towns who troll the streetside wine shops with a boom-box attached to a bicycle, singing sad little selections of southern folk music to drunken labourers.

And there are monks — vast quantities of monks. No-one knows how many; no-one keeps count of such things. If other cities seem lacking in monks it is because most of them have set up temporary residence in Saigon in an effort to advance their studies. Like almost everyone else in this crazy city, living is often desperate, and the poorest monks are frequently forced to sing for their supper in the performance of endless funeral duties (for which they are well paid) or temple chores, both of which get in the way of the education they originally came here for.

In 1999 I spent six months studying Vietnamese at the Ho Chi Minh Social Sciences University on Dinh Tien Hoang street in Saigon’s District 3. At some point during this period my grandparents, both in their seventies, decided that they’d visit me. My grandma was one of nature’s huggers. She adored children, and she loved people in general. Anyone she met who delighted her would be drawn into a hug.

I had explained to her that Buddhist monks weren’t really allowed to touch members of the opposite sex, and she seemed to comprehend that restriction. But, a few days after her arrival, when we drove out to a remote village temple in Binh Duong and I introduced her to a gaggle of smiling young monks, she grabbed the one nearest her and drew him into a warm embrace. The other monks, and the old abbott, fell about with laughter as the slender young novice disappeared into my grandmother’s ample arms. He returned slightly dazed, but smiling politely.

‘Grandma!’ I scolded. ‘I told you not to touch them.’

‘Oh, I know, love, but they’re just such sweeties,’ she said as she reached for the next one, getting ready to plant a great big kiss on his cheek.

* * *

For every monk there are ten nuns, or so it’s said. Certainly the city nunneries are bursting at the seams. At the very lowest end, nuns take to the streets morning and afternoon selling humble religious sundries door to door from small baskets. If you ask for a price the tired and sweating young nuns invariably reply, ‘Whatever you can offer, brother.’

Visit a temple run by nuns any time just after breakfast and you will see hundreds of grey-robed girls scooting all over the place, smiling shyly and attending to their duties. The inherent sexism of Vietnamese religious culture means that nunneries have traditionally attracted less financial support from laypeople, and so have learned to rely on their own resources and moneymaking abilities. Ironically, this has seen many nunneries grow more prosperous as the industrious sisters have created profitable industries. Nuns famously own and manage vegetarian restaurants, or produce and distribute the delicious little tofu and gluten dainties that are consumed in vegetarian households across the country. They manufacture Buddhist religious trinkets and ritual objects and distribute religious media such as CDs, books and DVDs. Some of the most delicately fragrant incense in the country hails from small workshops in the courtyards of nunneries, and I have even visited a community of sisters that makes its living from splitting and selling firewood.

Along with its deep spiritual vibe, Ho Chi Minh City displays a mercantile streak that sits proudly with the locals. It is a city full of shopkeepers. The harsh-voiced stallholders at the central Ben Thanh market, with their towering piles of colourful fabric and ambitious prices, serve as the exemplars of Saigon’s business spirit, which survived even the harshest dictates of Stalinist-style socialism in the 1980s.

CHAPTER 2

HAIRDRESSERS AND SEAMSTRESSES

The streets of Saigon are filled with businesses, most of them small and many of them serving to support a single family. The people of the south are inveterate shopkeepers, whose very souls were plotting commerce even while the state insisted that private profit was the worst kind of treason.

My old friend and protector in Vietnam, Kien, is of the generation that could launch itself straight into private enterprise. He runs a suburban hairdressing salon in the traditional manner of most Vietnamese bosses: the hours are long, the pay is poor; he is gruff and inclined to bark demands at the employees. But, oddly, the staff are at perfect liberty to disregard almost everything he asks and, despite his crankiness, the stylists and apprentices all seem to adore him. Indeed several of them, male and female, are not-so-secretly in love with him, and will declare to anyone who’ll listen that they would die for Anh Kien. Such devotion, however, does not extend to sweeping up hair when requested, or closing the door to preserve air-conditioning. Sometimes I would question this wilful disobedience, but Kien would merely shrug it off. ‘They work long hours,’ he reasoned, ‘and they don’t get paid much.’

‘Have you not thought of reducing their hours and increasing their pay? Then perhaps you’d get more out of them.’

Kien snorted at the idea. ‘That’s just the crazy sort of thing I’d expect a foreigner to suggest. Walter oi! You have no understanding of Vietnamese culture.’

Kien is in his early thirties, tall for a Vietnamese of his generation, his face somewhat ravaged by adolescent acne. As befits his trade he is conspicuously fashionable, wearing imported clothes and shoes and driving a new motorcycle that cost more than my small car back home. He tips lavishly wherever we go because, he says, ‘People know who I am. I am Kien, the famous hair designer.’ He uses the English word ‘designer’. He seems at ease with the world, with his foreign friends and casually masculine manner. Women like him — rather too much, as the deterioration of his marriage would attest. He has been my friend, my little brother, my em trai, for fifteen years, and I have watched him grow and change along with his country. Both, perhaps, a little friendless.

His has been something of a fairytale Vietnamese life. From picking through rubbish on the mean streets of Saigon’s slums, the father of his illegitimate mother returned from overseas in the early nineties and bought the family a house, a business. Almost overnight they were transported from the poorest of the poor to the upper middle classes, but those old memories die hard. Under the fashionable façade Kien is still a tough street kid with a steely heart and a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. Kien is sad, and give him a bottle of Heineken or two and he’ll tell you so.

His salon sits down one of the many dusty side streets of Ho Chi Minh City, where tourists rarely bother to venture. Such streets are insanely busy, though to the untrained eye it is impossible to distinguish one chaotic alley from another. Men urinate against walls, monks speed by on motorcycles, their brown cassocks floating behind them, and the ubiquitous schoolgirls float along on bicycles, the trains of their elegant white ao dai held up on their handlebars. This is the nameless, insignificant part of the city, where people lead everyday lives and work like crazy to establish a place in modern-day Vietnamese urban society.

When Kien and his family care to celebrate a special occasion, they invariably do so at the multi-storied beer restaurant on the corner of Pham Van Hai street. These kinds of mammoth, multi-use restaurants are a stock feature of every suburb in the city. Some floors, designated for family use, are serviced by demure country girls and slouching waiters dressed in crisp black-and-whites with flip-flops. Other floors, however, are for ‘businessmen’ and the waitresses here are slightly less demure and noticeably more buxom. At closing time these girls frequently leave with the customers. The Vietnamese take a more casual approach to prostitution than do most people in the West. While the fact of prostitution is still borne of poverty and necessity, it is far more prevalent and brazen than many would be used to.

There being no noise regulations in this city, the drunken shouts and toasts from the ‘business’ floor echo down the street long into the night. The residents, ever respectful of the making of a dollar, never bother to complain.

Kien, too, was a great favourite of my grandparents during their visits to Vietnam. He would take my grandmother to visit the rows of little fabric shops facing the Tan Dinh market in District 3, looking for linens, silks and pure cottons with which to have Chinese blouses made for her. My grandmother would be fussed over by the attendants, all handsome country boys in matching blue gingham shirts.

Then he would take Grandma to our favoured neighbourhood dressmaker, a quietly spoken woman in an alleyway shop who kept ‘traditional’ hours — that is, she was almost never open and she took an inordinately long time to make things. But the resultant pieces of clothing were amazing, and amazingly cheap.

While measuring her, the dressmaker would chat endlessly to my grandmother in Vietnamese, calling her ‘Honourable Aunt’. My grandmother responded equally merrily in English, each convinced that the other was completely comprehending.

She produced the most exquisite blouses for my grandmother, intricately and lovingly stitched, and they remained Grandma’s favourite items of clothing until she died.

Every time I returned to Vietnam, Grandma would ask me to give her regards to ‘the lovely seamstress’, and I always did.

I still do, every time having a few shirts made, more out of nostalgia than necessity. Grandma always wore the blouses with a set of prayer beads given to her by her favourite nuns, and she would cut quite an exotic figure at her various parties and outings back at home.

With her new-found cosmopolitanism, my grandmother would often reflect on the strangeness of her destiny, how a woman from small-town Australia could, in her twilight years, have deep and abiding connections in Vietnam, a country that throughout her life had represented a war and little else. She was enormously impressed and affected by the communities of Buddhist monks and nuns she met while she was in Vietnam. When she got back home she called me and asked, ‘Is it possible to be a Buddhist and a Christian at the same time?’ I assured her that it was, though I warned there were many in both camps who might disagree with us. I sent her a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s exquisite book Living Buddha, Living Christ, and many years later, while she was dying, I discovered it was still one of the books she kept on her side table for daily study.

CHAPTER 3

CONSUMING THE CORPSE FRUIT

In my capacity as cultural bridge, as the unashamed mixer of spiritual traditions, I was viewed as a great source of information by those young monks and nuns enrolled at university. They were hungry for information about the spiritual landscape of the West, and they had heard rumours of the great growth in Buddhism in America and Europe. As unreliable as any information I could convey was likely to be, I was still a living, breathing exemplar of the religious world outside Vietnam. I was often prevailed upon to sing for my supper and act as professional foreigner.

I was scheduled to make one of my movie star-like appearances at the Van Hanh Buddhist University on Nguyen Kie street in the Phu Nhuan district of Ho Chi Minh City. Come 11 am the streets of Phu Nhuan are awash with scores of young monks and nuns returning home to their temples for prayers then lunch. My stints at the university were suggested by Sister Truth, an academic with a doctorate in some arcane facet of ancient Buddhist theology and one of the university’s most senior and popular lecturers. My presence in the classes was intended to be purely as observer, but the moment I showed up lectures ground to a halt. I was dragged to the front of the crowded rooms and plonked on a seat as Exhibit A: freaky foreigner who is willing to answer painful questions.

At the end of each excruciating grilling by the energetic young religious I was always bundled away affectionately by old friends. On this day Brother Nguyen took me in hand and suggested we have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Though I was warmed to be walking hand in hand with a gentle young monk, I suspect that some foreigners might be taken aback by the sheer degree of physical affection shown between members of the same sex in Vietnam. It is nothing for a male to take you by the hand while you walk down the street, or to snuggle up next to you in a café and throw an arm over your shoulder.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Destination Saigon by Walter Mason. Copyright © 2010 Walter Mason. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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