Tuesday, June 13: Diving into the “Soul of Saigon”

***Hey there! Thanks for visiting. Here are week two's posts, taking us all the way to Vietnam, where we are now in full-swing with the summer program. Peter and Nick have been off to the beach for the last two days, but are returning to the city today and flying home tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll get to hang out one more time, but it's sad to see them leave! For now, everyone all over the world take care (especially you South Africa folks) and stay in touch.

David

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A few days have passed now since we entered the country; we are actually finishing our orientation activities today and I am just returning home from my first Vietnamese class and a discussion with a former staff member of the NGO where I will be volunteering. I’m a bit overwhelmed already—especially with the language classes, where I just sort of sit befuddled. This is really a turning point in the trip, moving from Southeast Asia survey to intense Vietnamese language, culture, and politics study. I think I’ll have so much work to do that I won’t have time to create these rambling blog posts (that probably only my mom and dad are reading anyway :) ), but I wanted to share my first impressions of Vietnam while they are fresh!
Waking up in our guesthouse last Sunday was like finding myself in some sort of luxury dream. We are staying in a state-run guesthouse in District 1—the richest part of the city and the heart of downtown. The guesthouse itself is Ho Chi Minh City’s Foreign Affairs Guesthouse, run by the government. It is a large compound, actually with its own courtyard, which is very unusual anywhere in the city. The Office of Immigrant Migration is located in the compound, so everyone processing visas to leave the country must have a medical examination here, and foreign couples adopting Vietnamese babies often stay during the process. Our rooms are quite large and air-conditioned. It is still a traditional Asian wet bathroom with the showerhead perched up on the wall to spray all over the room (I’m a bit tired of trying to eke out a little space that will stay dry but still inevitably coming out with a drenched article of clothing), but there is even toilet paper here! We have a television with the Hallmark Channel in English and the maids even bring a plate of fresh fruits that I never recognize each morning. There’s no doubt that it is a pretty comfortable way to spend our stay.
Coming directly from Cambodia, the contrasts were startling. How quickly one’s frame of reference can change! All of a sudden even Vietnam’s poverty seems manageable, but it is still one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia and the world, with a per-capita income of less than a dollar a day. However, there is not the grinding, crushing poverty on the large-scale basis that you see in Cambodia. The hovels along the road here are more like the best tin shacks of Cambodia’s countryside, and a few new features showed real advancement—tall television antennas rose above almost every house and power lines seemed to cross at least most of the shacks. The wires ran low to the ground and unprotected—just a single wire wrapped that ran from the roadside poles along the roofs of all the houses in an area. It is certainly a fire hazard, an electrical risk, and generally quite dangerous, but it is power, and this advancement alone cannot be overstated.
There is a different feeling in Vietnam than in Thailand or Cambodia. I felt a much stronger current of energy and a palpable growth---something is happening here and everyone wants to be a part of it. My roommate is majoring in “Imports and Exports,” and his examination on Sunday is how ships can most effectively be used as transportation for exports. Talk about practical! Vietnam is about to join the WTO, and though there is some anxiety about what this will bring, there is also a huge amount of excitement. There is a feeling that this could be the new beginning for Vietnam’s “Socialist market economy.”
I must say that the views from the streets are about as far from traditional socialism as possible. I do not yet know enough about the social services, but capitalism is strong—the only thing that appears different is a lack of political freedom. There is tangible frustration about this continued heavy-handedness from the government in everyone I’ve talked to, and such discontent is only very thinly-veiled. The political and economic structures are very complicated; I’ve done as much reading as I can in the past few days, and I only have learned the basics. Really, I think, Vietnam has not quite yet settled into a political system that meets its needs and satisfies the majority of Vietnamese yet, and I haven’t seen a consensus on what this would be. There is not necessarily a mass clamoring for democracy—there is a big difference between freedom and democracy, but that is not to say that there is any love affair with socialism either.
I’ll be honest—this wasn’t what I was hoping to find. I wanted to find somewhere where socialism was working and could offer a productive model for how to provide for everyone’s social welfare while still progressing and remaining economically fit. I can already tell that that is not the case here. However, it is definitely safer here than a lot of other places in Asia and the world. You have to worry about traffic accidents and sickness, but not really about armed robberies. We were talking today about the muggings in the South Africa group—something like that would be extremely rare here. I’m not sure exactly why. The police presence is here, but it’s not particularly strong-seeming. Nonetheless, we do have lots of instructions about what to watch out for and avoid, and we’ll continue to be careful!
Yesterday we met the Vietnamese roommates who we would be living with for the summer. Generally only the very richest Vietnamese have a chance to study abroad, so this program allows “ordinary” Vietnamese college students to have an intense English and cultural exchange program while giving us an amazing inside resource to Vietnam and a direct relationship for the whole summer. My roommate is super! His name is Quy, and he is a 22 year old college junior who has worked as the coordinator at this school for the Communist Youth Union’s Green Summer Campaign, doing amazing service work that would make him a prime Robertson Scholar candidate himself. We hit it off right away, as we set off on our first assignment together: a “Soul of Saigon” scavenger hunt cum miniature ethnography.
We were issued a disposable camera and a small amount of money with the assignment to capture some theme of the city in a photo exhibition supplemented by as many interviews as we could do. The World Cup is more than a competition—it is a fiery passion here, and we decided to investigate how different groups around the city watch, from rich to poor, native to foreigner, and urbanite to rural dweller. We really did manage to capture almost all of this, and each little interview vignette was revealing and poignant. In some photographs, like under the big Saigon River Bridge, rich and poor were in the same picture, with shacks built almost literally in the shade of mansions worth more than a million US dollars.
We visited a street kitchen that is forced to close too early for the game’s end because it serves beer, a middle class coffee shop open all night whose occupants admitted that they just skipped work the next day, and farmers out in the countryside without much money who crowd around a television together to watch. We talked to a cab driver who loves the games but has to work every night, witnessed a group of men in District One filling out their tables much like we do March Madness, and the crowded backpacking district at night where the foreigners all gathered to take in the game together in a rowdy atmosphere.
I quite literally felt like I was diving in to the city’s soul as we zoomed around the city after dark in the packed rush hour traffic on Quy’s motorbike. I looked over the top of Quy as he navigated us through the city (I really like the whole feeling tall thing here…), and all I saw was vast seas of traffic amid the pervasive neon glow. Motorbikes would stretch across entire blocks in width and even several blocks in length of traffic. We stopped once for gas amid tens of bikes packed around the pump, made a number of quick U-turns that left me gaping and gasping, and just narrowly avoided collisions countless times. For awhile I conversed with a Canadian couple who threaded through the traffic with us, and I finally figured out the “no hands” thing, resting them calmly on my knees, but my heart was still thumping constantly.
The streets here really are ridiculous. This is different than the cars in Paris or Cairo or the bicycles in Beijing, because in Ho Chi Minh City, everyone is on motorbikes that they can easily thread in and out, but they realize they overpower pedestrians and bicycles and expect everyone to move out of their way. Traffic lights are almost completely arbitrary, following their directions is optional, line lines and traffic flows appear to be mere suggestions, and unless you want to grow old waiting, you just have to plunge right into the flow and walk or motor across. The key is not to hesitate or make quick moves—hitting you is going to slow down the drivers, so they seem willing to try to avoid you as long as you make predictable moves. Somehow, though, relying on blind faith doesn’t seem too comfortable when in the middle of traffic.
Our allowance for the “Soul of Saigon” project was 50,000 dong per couple (about three USD), representative of what a couple of day laborers would make in a day’s salary. We cut costs as much as possible, but even taking the public bus managed to eat away at our money and we went over our limit. For dinner, we had very, very cheap pho, or a sort of beef noodle soup that is ubiquitous and has a million slight variations. We rolled up into a street kitchen and in moments a steaming bowl was placed in front of each of us. A bowl of the soup and a coke came in at a little less than one dollar each. At this point I was so thirsty that I took my chance on the ice despite our warnings—better to get sick early. And now, as I write this post with quite the stomach ache, I am cursing my “bravery.”
I gave my roommate a Duke t-shirt (which, when it was too long, he had a friend trim and sew shorter in a matter of minutes), which absolutely thrilled him. It is a joy to be able to proselytize on the other side of the world! He gave me the shirt from the Youth Union Green Summer service project he organized, and then he bought us ears of roasted corn and whole coconuts with straws to suck out the milk. What an excellent way to end our first day together.
The scavenger hunt was really useful to show us how much more there is to the city outside of the posh district where we are staying. There is no doubt that the poverty patchwork here is as pronounced as anywhere, and I can’t wait to really explore it more. After just the introductions to my language classes and internship, I’ll wait to write much about them until I know a bit more. I will say that the language class is intense. This gorgeous Vietnamese woman spent two hours this morning just jawing non-stop at us and then forcing us to repeat. I promptly made a fool of myself. Between the six tones, countless alphabet sounds, and complicated combinations, I am about to decide the language is impossible. However, it is really fun to learn and our roommates love to practice with us. I’ll definitely talk much more about all this soon. For now, it’s like being back in school—I have so much to study!