Essay from The Literary Review

Eight Postcards from Vietnam

LINH DINH

I was born in Saigon and lived there until I was eleven. In 1975 I came to the United States,where I stayed for twenty-four years. Sixteen of those years I spent in Philadelphia. In 1999, I returned to Saigon to live. In Philly I would occasionally take the train to an unfamiliar neighborhood, walk around, look at everything, then stop in a bar for a drink. Just about everything I looked at was weird, off, stupid, funny, and occasionally menacing. But an American city does not yield its secrets as willingly as a Vietnamese one. What happens in public are mere spectacles, with private lives drawn out behind curtains.

In Vietnam, however, the distinctions between private and public spaces, inside and outside, are fudged. You can observe the activities inside a house by simply walking past it. Their doors and windows are wide open. Most eateries also leave their steel gates wide open. An American nurses his beer staring at a shelf of liquor, a mirror, or a television. A Vietnamese drinks facing the street. All of life's dramas are played out right in front of him: destitution, greed, deformity, love, lust, death. But that does not mean he's seeing much, because, as a friend of mine said, “We've lived here all our lives, so none of this jazz fazes us, but you, coming from the outside, are gawking at everything.”

Country Living

     I visited some friends near Chau Doc recently. My hostess Nga, her husband, Thong, and their two boys live just outside of town, at the base of Sam Mountain. The family business is an oven that turns out 800 baguettes a night. Nga also runs a two-table café. It had almost no business the two days I was there. When one little girl came by to ask for ice, Nga pointed her to another café down the street. We took turns swinging back and forth on the lazy hammock as we chattered.
     Their house had two tiny rooms, a sort of open kitchen, and, get this, no bathroom. There was a cement shower stall in the back. For a “number one,” one had to sprint down the street to Nga's mother's house, three hundred yards away. Their latrine used to be the adjacent field, until that plot of land was bought by a gas station.
     The walls of the front room were decorated with plastic wrapped pictures of Mount Rainier. The ceiling was decorated with cobwebs.
     On my first evening, Nga's two sons took me to the town's entertaiment center: a sort of nightly country fair. There was an antiquated merry go-round, with creaking metal horses, cars, and helicopters. There was a roller skating rink the size of a New York one-bedroom apartment, where teenage boys and girls were gleefully grinding and bumping into each other. At a shooting gallery, one could shoot plastic caps at ping pong balls to win prizes such as a package of instant noodle, a can of soya milk, or a can of root beer. At another booth, one could bet the numbers to win a bag of detergent or a bag of MSG. Framing all these festivities was a stage at the back on which a forlorn man sat behind his silent drum set.
     The grown-ups in this little town congregrate each night at the many darkened cafés to stare at video movies. The fare is usually a Hong Kong shoot-them-up or a chop-socky. “The guys also like to drink,” Thong told me, “and sometimes they get into these noisy fights where they swing at each other and miss.”
     A visitor to Chau Doc does not return home without a jar or two of its famous “mam,” or fermented fish. There is a large variety, all with a very pungent aroma. Travellers overseas are routinely warned against bringing mam on board, lest a leaky jar will give Vietnam a bad name.
     The mother of all mam, the stinkiest, however, is Cambodian. It is the infamous “bo hoc mam.” It is not so much fermented but rotting fish, complete with maggots (which, by the way, are not eaten). Once you get over the smell, I've been told, it is delicious. Because of the large Cambodian population in Chau Doc, I thought, what better place to try some bo hoc, finally? But my request to sample this delicacy was met with looks of horror from both Nga and Thong. Although they had been the most gracious hosts during my stay, no amount of pleading could get them to buy some bo hoc mam for me.
     “You'll have to run to the bathroom,” Nga said, “and we don't have a bathroom.”

Give Me Money

     You would think that begging is a freelance profession. Just walk up to someone and say, “Give me money!” But it's not quite that simple. All the lucrative spots for begging in Saigon are controlled by cowboys (hoodlums). You must be authorized to beg on Nguyen Tri Phuong, for example, a street known for its seafood restaurants attracting deep-pocketed diners. At the end of the day, you pay the cowboys a commission. Those who trespass are asking for a puffy face and a black eye.
     Another off-limits area for unauthorized beggars is Pham Ngu Lao Street. This is where the foreign backpackers in Saigon congregate. Here the beggars will ignore the local Vietnamese and make a beeline for the foreigners. English is a prerequisite: “Giver me one doughlar!”
     And then we have the art of begging. How can you compete with the others if you are young, have two arms, two legs, and appear healthy in every way?
     To gain an edge on the competition, you can rub fish slime on your skin to attract flies; wrap a pig blood-saturated bandage on an imaginary wound; keep salt under your tongue to make your mouth foam and dribble; swallow half a tube of toothpaste to induce a fever.
     There is also the trick of eating half a fried millipede to give yourself a rash all over. (The other half will get rid of the rash.)
     If you are an amputee of a certain age, you can always pose as a “vet.” If not, you can hide one arm, wrapped tight against your body, inside your shirt.
     On Nguyen Van Cu Street is a beggar who crawls around with a lime in his mouth and a lumpy bundle of cloth strapped to his back inside his shirt. The uninformed will think that this guy is a hunchback with a weird cyst on his face.
     Near Thai Binh Market is a vet who will point his leg stump at your face as you're trying to eat.
     Near Phu Lam Market is a guy who will curse in the most colorful language to embarrass your mother, wife, or girlfriend. Most people are more than happy to part with a thousand dong (7 cents) to get rid of him.
     Once, as I was trying to eat a bowl of beef soup, an obviously drunk beggar threatened to slam a Coca-Cola bottle against . . . his own face, unless I gave him twenty thousand dong. The restaurant owner, an old man, had to grab him by the collar to throw him back out onto the street.
     The most insidious trick among beggars is that of renting a baby. How can you not give money to a mother carrying a filthy, naked infant?
     Nguyen Thi Am, who used to sell sticky rice on Cam Chi Street in Hanoi, wrote about this practice in her haunting story, “Sleeping on Earth” (See Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam—Seven Stories Press, 1996).
     The going rate for renting a baby is a buck fifty a day. The infant will stay quiet if you pop a pill or two of Seduxel into his mouth. The child should look as wretched as possible. There have been cases of kidnapped babies deliberately injured to gain extra sympathy from passersby.

Her Place

     The Nike factory managers and whores and backpackers and outbackers can vogue their nights away at Apocalypse Now, but Carmen, at 8 Ly Tu Trong Street, is the coolest club in Saigon. Spacious, dark, with a door you must crouch to enter (even if you're Tattoo), it features mellow, comospolitan music, Nat King Cole, Tammy Wynette, and Bobby Bland, etc., on the sound system. (“Tammy Wynette as cosmopolitan?!” I can see you cringing, my friend, but context is everything; Vietnamese yodeling would be considered sophisticated in New Jack City.) The live music starts at nine, and it's mostly flamenco, played by an excellent lead guitarist, a rhythm guitarist, and a guy on bongos. There are singers also. One, the owner's daughter, has a swooning, husky voice, and does lovely renditions of Trinh Cong Son. Audience members, when inspired, have also been known to invade the stage. Once I witnessed two older American guys sing spirited, ragged versions of “Country Road,” “Red Mountain River,” and “This Land Is My Land,” with its lyrics changed to “This world is our world, from the Virgin Islands, to the Mekong Delta, etc., etc. . . . This world was made for you and me!!!!”
     As they left the stage, a friend of mine whispered: “These guys should be locked up.”
     “They are already,“ I responded. “Them are those MIA's we've heard so much about.”
     But the entertainment is secondary at Carmen. One goes there just to chill in the mellow ambience. And to chat with the owner, Nguyen Thi Hoang. Before the Fall of Saigon, Hoang was a literary star, with thirty novels and short story collections to her credit.
     But after April 30, 1975, her life quickly spiraled downward. She and her husband lost their home in Saigon and were sent to a New Economic Zone, where they labored for two years. They built a little hut for themselves, worked on the collective farm, while also caring for their four children, ages five to fourteen. She described clearing the land, by hacking and yanking at roots, on their tiny plot so they could grow vegetables to eat. “Just like Robinson Crusoe,” she smiled. “I wore one shirt for two years. It was split down the back after a while. I weighed 78 pounds. I was neither a kid nor an adult, neither male nor female.”
     But there was beauty and magic even amid this incredible hardship. “I would go into the woods in the evening to dig for cassava, when the light shining through the leaves was most beautiful. Once I heard a loud snoring, like an old man sleeping. I went to the source of the noise and saw, in the hollow of a tree trunk, two intertwined centipedes!”
     Hoang also talked about ghosts, including one variety “with only a head and its entrails dangling down.”
     On this night, however, there were neither snoring centipedes nor ghosts with their entrails dangling down, only Hoang's beautiful daughter, Ha, at the microphone crooning: “Which speck of dust changed my life, so tomorrow I can return to dust?”

Magic Realist Country

     Many Vietnamese are highly superstitious. They possess an unscientific mindset which allows them to believe just about anything . . . as long as there's enough poetry in it.
     A pregnant woman must never squat inside a doorframe, lest she will have a difficult childbirth. To avoid a late pregnancy, she must never step over a buffalo's harness. At the sight of the deformed and the handicapped, she must turn her gaze away. She should look often at the beautiful faces on calendars.
     To ward off an outbreak of thrush, a child's first excrement—an odorless yellow slime resembling egg yolk—is smeared into his mouth right after birth. When he's one month old, a baby's scrotum is rubbed with a heated betel leaf, to prevent it from sagging. If it's a baby girl, then the leaf is rubbed on the vagina, to prevent it from flaring.
     A child with a drowned relative must wear a brass anklet to insure against being “dragged” to a similar death later in life. A child under ten is discouraged from looking into a mirror, lest his soul, the image in the mirror, will start to play tricks with him.
     There is no end to the superstitions. They are to guide you from the cradle to the grave. You must squash a snake's head after you've killed it, else the head will return to bite you three days later. Remove all buttons from the clothing of a corpse, else the spirit won't be able to escape from the coffin. A chunk of cactus, latched to a door, prevents “bad spirits” from entering a house. Rain at a funeral augurs a financial windfall for the descendants.
     Most interesting are new beliefs conjured up by the unscientific mind. Some people believe that an X-ray will knock a couple years off your longevity; drinking milk will make your skin lighter; ingesting soy sauce will make your skin darker. Discussing a sensational murder in the news, a woman told me that if the corpse's eyes were wide open at the moment of death, then the investigation is in the bag. “All they have to do,” she said, “is develop the frozen image in his eyes. Then they will have the face of the murderer.” The eyes are cameras, literally, in this woman's eyes.
     A former VC, Mr. Hanh, told me about Bay Dom, an ARVN general who was in charge of the Chau Doc area during the war: “Bay Dom could not be shot with a bullet. Once he dared an American advisor to shoot him several times, point-blank, with a pistol! But the American missed him each time! The only way you could kill him was to shoot him in the eye!”
     “Which eye?” I asked him.
     “Either eye! The eyes and the asshole! But it has to be a bullet aimed right into the asshole. Once Bay Dom sat on a hand grenade but it would not explode!”
     I thought it strange that Hanh would elevate a former enemy to a mythical figure. A scrawny man in his early fifties, he wore a gold earring in his left ear and talked with a vast repertoire of hand flourishes and facial expressions. His wife told me later that her husband had become gay after a recent blood transfusion.
     “You mean he's HIV positive?”
     “No, just gay.”

Original Ladies' Man

     Can Tho is the chief city in the Mekong Delta. Not too long ago, I was sitting at a café on its festive waterfront, near the large, goofy Ho Chi Minh statue, when a group of very swishy young men came marching down the street. The way they could swivel their hips would make Little Richard proud. “Ladiman!” the man at the next table exclaimed.
     Having never heard that word before, I asked, “What's a ladiman?”
     “Gay. They're gay. They're ladiman!”
     The common Vietnamese term for a male homosexual is either be de, from the French pede, or bong, a word meaning both “shadow” and “shine.” It took me a moment to figure out that ladiman is a corruption of the English expression “ladies' man.” In its reincarnation as a Vietnamese slang, its meaning has been inverted, from a heterosexual stud to a half-and-half, a lady/man.
     There are dozens of English words adopted into the Vietnamese language. Some are technical: radio, TV, video, computer, fax . . . Others are military: xe tang (tank), bom (bomb), na pan (napalm), min (mine). . .
     Constantly on the lips of the young set is model, which means “stylish” or “hip.” As in: “My sister is so model, she only listens to roc (rock), rap, and jazz. She only wears imported jean.”
     One peculiar transplant is lo gich (logic). The logic for incorporating a foreign word into a language is that it introduces a new object or idea. Why did the Vietnamese feel the need to import “logic,” when they already had ly luan? For cachet purposes, I suppose, the same reason that some Italian restaurants in the States are called “ristorante.”
     Unlike French, which has given Vietnamese ragu (ragoût), bo (beurre), sa lach (salade), pho (pot-au-feu), so co la (chocolat), banh gato (gâteaux), banh flan (flan), pâté, pâté chaud, and yaourt, almost no American food names have made it into the Vietnamese language. The handful of street stalls in Saigon advertising hot dog peddle a forlorn-looking Vienna sausage, served without mustard or ketchup.
     Cocktail, often spelled cooktail, is a non-alcoholic mixed fruit drink. A cao boi (cowboy) is a hoodlum. Mit tinh (meeting) means a street demonstration. Matxa (massage) has illicit conotations which the traditional dam bop (literally: “punch and squeeze”) does not. Be bi is just a baby, but ma mi (mommie) is a madame in a whore-house.
     When someone is kicking back with a bia to enjoy a phim sech, he's nursing a cold one while watching a sex video. Which leads us to o li zin, from the English word “origin.” Not a noun in Vietnamese but an adjective, this word means, curiously enough, “virginal.”
     “Are you o li zin?”
     “Yes, I am still a virgin.”
     “Are you a ladiman?”
     “No, I am a ladies' man.”
     Even the word “American” has been reshaped in the Vietnamese lexicon. Once, as I was walking on the street—literally, since there was no room on the sidewalk—a cyclo driver, pedaling alongside, hassled me relentlessly to ride in his cab. Despite my repeated refusals, he nagged on.
     “Where are you from?” the guy asked.
     It is my least favorite question, anywhere. I didn't answer him.
     “Where are you from?” he asked again.
     Again I ignored him.
     “You are a Nacirema,” he said, and pedaled away.
     Nacirema is American spelled backward. I am a backward American.

Poets' House

     Vu Trong Quang's restaurant, Trong Dong (Bronze Drum), is where poets hang out in Saigon. It's located on Le Quy Don Street, not far from the old Independence Palace. Show up any day of the week and you're likely to see a dozen poets, writers, and hacks congregating at the different tables.
     Unless a wordsmith or two have had too much to drink, when insults will be flung back and forth, the mood is relaxed and fraternal. Fortified by Tiger beer, people will chatter on about life, love, and literature. Or they will flirt with each other. At a large gathering recently, Khanh Truong, a California-based fiction writer and the editor of the influentual journal Hop Luu, eyed actress/playwright/fiction writer Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc and said, “If I wasn't married, this one would fall in love with me!”
     One poet, visiting from Hanoi, shouted love poems in my ear as her hand brushed rhythmically against my thigh.
     After staying away from the Trong Dong for three weeks, I went there last night to unwind. I shared a table with poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh and hack writer Bui Chi Vinh. As we talked, our chopsticks were busy snapping up pieces of venison, beef rolled with “Laughing Cow” cheese wedges, and stir-fried water spinach.
     Chanh is the poet maudit of Saigon. A decade ago, he made a small fortune dealing in lumber. He then published two volumes of poetry. The second one, Night of the Rising Sun, is particularly noteworthy for its intense, hallucinatory language. When he wrote that book, Chanh said, he was staying indoors almost continuously. Inside his darkened room, he would scrawl pornographic images on the walls with a pencil. Now unemployed, Chanh spends his time reading, writing, and translating. He is working on a version of T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land.”
     Vinh has penned over a hundred detective novels and is now on to his next racket: ghost stories. He told us he had just signed a contract to write thirteen ghost novels. “I write 200 pages a week,” he boasted. “Nguyen Huy Thiep, Bao Ninh, those guys are lucky to sell a thousand copies of each book. But each one of mine sells 12,000 copies.”
     Vinh, forty-six years old, then introduced us to his new mistress, a twenty-four-year-old journalist/Chinese translator. “I'm helping her out. I'm showing her the ropes of this literary racket. I'm saving her a lot of time.”
     Vinh then left us to join a meeting at another table. He's one of a dozen writers and artists hired by an ad agency, at 35 bucks a month, to meet once a week at the Trong Dong. Their duties consist of drinking themselves senseless while discussing advertising ideas.
     Only in Vietnam.

Water Sports

     The Vietnamese word for country is water. As in: “What water are you from?” Or: “I'm willing to die for my water.”
     With its long coastline, flooded rice paddies, endless rivers and canals, water is life in Vietnam. Many people live on boats, houseboats, and in houses built on stilts hovering above water. In the Mekong Delta, the waterways are still a primary mode of transportation. A canal is a highway, an open-air market, and a sewer. Everything happens on water, including the oldest form of commerce known to man.
     In one of Mai Kim Ngoc's short stories, a virgin is all hot and bothered after a petting session with his fiancée. Distended, he decided to lose his tumidity by going to a whore plying her trade on a sampan on the Perfume River. It was an experience so repulsive he threw up overboard. He had imagined the sampans to be waterborne hotel rooms, with “comfortable bedding, soft music, and women as beautiful as fairies.” What he found was “poor and tattered,” like “the dirty intestines of a city.”
     In Saigon, the sampan sex scene centers on Tran Xuan Soan Street in District 7. The girls here often pose as vendors of hot vit lon—a delicacy of duck embryo eaten directly out of an egg. For less than 3 bucks (including 15 cents for a condom), you can hop on a sampan, take a brief cruise, then rock the boat beneath one of those houses on stilts bordering the river. On board there is a reed mat, beer in a cooler, and a bucket of water for sanitation purposes. This service is available after sundown, with the price going down steadily after eleven.
     No small-scale activity: in 1999 the police did a sweep of the Tran Xuan Soan area and impounded 50 of these boats.
     But that's only sex on water. In the fun-loving coastal city of Vung Tau, you can have sex in water. During the day, you can rent a girlfriend (inner tube included) by the hour on the beach. This is a rather lame arrangement since you must share the water with kids, old people, and jet-skis, a situation which makes consummation a little awkward.
     At night, the whores come out for real on Pineapple Beach, a rocky stretch not far from the main post office. These ladies are known as “fairies,” celestial beings who will skinny dip with your mortal self in the South China Sea for a mere 35 bucks.

Whoredom

     Karate means empty hand. Karaoke means empty orchestra. At many Vietnamese karaoke bars, however, a man's hands do not stay empty for very long. A hostess will make sure they find a soft landing. With a population of six million, Saigon has about 15,000 prostitutes. At least that's the official estimate. Most either work on the streets or in karaoke bars.
     In my neighborhood, the streetwalkers stand in front of the church [!]. Unlike their American cousins, these young girls do not look drugged or worn out. Although overly made-up, provocatively dressed, and in high heels, they are not sheathed in vinyl, leather and fishnet stockings. In short, they don't quite look like whores. They look like amateurs.
     Vietnamese karaoke bars are often called “bia om.” Literally: “a beer and a hug.” A typical bia om has private rooms where a group of buddies can sit on a couch in front of a big screen TV to warble their favorite hits and oldies. Each man has a hostess to help him ease a tune along. A case of beer sits on the floor.
     A friend of mine believes that the girls are not just there to provide a service. “You really can have a relationship with them,” he claims. “They are hurt when you ask for a different hostess.”
     There are also “bida om” (billiards and a hug) and “hot toc om” (a haircut and a hug). (One of the more obscure slangs for sexual intercourse is “haircut,” as in: “I'm going to give her a haircut.”)
     An 18-year-old girl in my neighborhood decided she wanted to work at a hot toc om. She assumed, innocently enough, that all she had to do was rub her breasts against a man's whiskers as she gave him a haircut. She was required to do more than that and was fired after four days.
     “The place had six chairs. Three of these guys had their things out. One guy had two girls all over him. I was supposed to eat ice cream,” she giggled.
     “And everyone was in the same room?”
     “Yes.”
     There is the old knock-on-the-hotel-door trick. Or just plain knock-on-the-door trick: a freelancing whore can just follow a drunk as he weaves out of a café, tail him to his house, then knock on his door a few minutes later.
     You can also have sex on the installment plan. University students living on a tight budget can cop a quick nooky between exams for a modest down payment, and pay the balance only when they receive their monthly cash from home.
     What Vietnam does not have are go-go bars. To look but not touch is alien to the Vietnamese sensibility. And phone sex sounds like an outright perversion.