by Pico Iyer
Ho Chi Minh City, in fact, is a shameless refutation of everything that Ho Chi Minh stood and fought for. Yet it bears out what nearly everyone who fought here concluded: that the driving, ruling passion in Vietnam is not for any imported political system but simply for Vietnam. Nationalism, not Marxism, is what drove people to lay down their lives, and almost every Vietnamese might bear the nom de guerre that Ho Chi Minh took for himself, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot). If Marxism has to be scrapped in pursuit of nationalism, so be it. “We build socialism in a flexible way,” a Vietnamese friend told me when I asked him how he could reconcile the explosion of free enterprise with the country’s notional Communism. “If we were to have socialism as in the Soviet Union, our country would collapse.” Nothing if not pragmatic, I thought. “If you are rich,” he continued smoothly, “you will make the country rich.”
And though the inflation rate may be 200 percent, a former Vietcong official told me, “there is no social disturbance here. People in Europe cannot understand it. But the reason is the parallel economy.” The black market, fueled by remittances from Vietnamese abroad, allows people to live, very often, like kings almost, in five-story villas, with cars of their own, their savings kept in dollars, sapphires, and gold. And everything is negotiable in Vietnam. When I asked a Hanoi guide for a receipt, he instantly said, “You need I write more or you need I write less?” When I told him that the actual figure would do nicely, he looked decidedly disappointed.
Thus the only word for Saigon is “wild.” One evening I counted more than a hundred two-wheel vehicles racing past me in the space of sixty seconds, speeding round the jam-packed streets as if on some crazy merry-go-round, a mad carnival without a ringmaster; I walked into a dance club and found myself in the midst of a crowded floor of hip gay boys in sleeveless T-shirts doing the latest moves to David Byrne; outside again, I was back inside the generic Asian swirl, walking through tunnels of whispers and hisses. “You want boom-boom?” “Souvenir for your dah-ling?” “Why you not take special massage?” Shortly before midnight, the taxi girls stream out of their nightclubs in their party dresses and park their scooters outside the hotels along “Simultaneous Uprising” Street. Inside, Indian and Malaysian and Japanese trade-fair delegates huddle in clusters, circling like excited schoolboys and checking out the mini-skirted wares, while out on the street legless beggars hop about, and crippled girls offer oral services, and boys of every stripe mutter bargains for their sisters. One wanders, dazed, as through some crazed Fellini night-world, beautiful women in golden ao dais waving slowly from slow-moving cyclos.
The bottom line of all this commotion is, of course, hard currency, and it is business that makes the whole whirligig go round. Saigon’s streets teem with stalls selling everything from Chinese goldfish and tubes of Volgate toothpaste to “Country Music” tapes and mysterious beans, so many anarchic goods that they spill off the sidewalks and block all traffic. But the most common items to be found are books entitled Making Investments in Ho Chi Minh Ville and Export Import 1991 Directory. Near the antique shops there are Microcomputer and Software Service Centers; inside the department stores, next to a hundred styles of sandals, are English-language manuals and books on How to Survive in the U.S.A., knocking against tomes like A Guide to Investment Co-operation and An Investor’s Guide to Vietnam. “In Saigon, if you have money, you can do anything,” said a Vietnamese friend of mine from Da Nang, a little wistfully.
It is that kind of heedless consumerism that is redecorating the city daily, and Saigon, like more and more of the south, seems to be learning—or relearning—how to make itself pleasant and available to foreigners (as neighboring Thailand has done so artfully): the bookshops are full now of soft-focus old French books on l’Indochine, the stalls sell this week’s editions of Time and Newsweek, the people adapt themselves with a courtesan’s suppleness to one’s needs. It is common to hear that Saigon is returning to the hoary vitality of the war; but it might be more accurate to say that none of that ever left, and now it is just coming out again (“coming out” like a debutante, like a sexual renegade, like an old habit effaced by something foreign). A city that has had intimate relations with the West for so long cannot easily remain innocent of complications; and much of Saigon has the feel of a palimpsest—what was once the elegant French Rue Catinat, and during the war was the freewheeling Tu Do or “Freedom” Street, is now Dong Khoi or “Simultaneous Uprising” Street.
Yet for all the nonstop hustle-bustle, and for all the crooked smiles that can make Saigon seem like a giant cathedral of the profane, the town is, like Bangkok a few years ago, ultimately irresistible—it simply overwhelms you with the persistence of its energy. You can no more rebuff it than you can a runaway train on a downhill slope. It’s hard, it’s made up, it’s cunning, you tell yourself, and then you go out into the streets and find yourself swept up in the sheer power and vigor of it all. On Sunday nights at six o’clock, all the motorbikes careen toward Notre Dame Cathedral in what was once John F. Kennedy Square, and there, in a novel version of the drive-in church, the parishioners simply park their bikes outside the church’s doors and stand in rows, beside their wheels, a hundred or more of them lined up in the street, the sermon broadcast through huge speakers almost entirely drowned out by the roar of traffic all around. Little kids skip around on holiday nights, blowing soap bubbles, making paper caterpillars, or posing, coquettish, in tiny, flouncy dresses. And often I found myself just standing on the street for twenty minutes or more, all but transfixed by the whole motorized carousel whizzing past. One of the most dangerous adventures in Vietnam is simply trying to cross the street in Saigon.
And for all the constant changes, Saigon is still gracious with the pleasures of an acacia-lined French town. There are the patisseries offering delicious baguettes and strong French coffee; there are the neon-lit boats, scarlet and white, that cruise along the Saigon River after dark, scattering a magic swirl of colors. In the early afternoon, a siesta sleepiness falls over the place, as the beauty-parlor girls recline on their chairs. And at night, you can go for drinks at the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel, once a U.S. bachelor officers’ quarters and still a decidedly zany place, with Saigon beauties smiling at every available male, and statues of nude figures and prancing elephants around the bonsai trees. On hot afternoons, I often stopped off in a garden café and sipped citrons pressés to the sound of “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” or some husky latter-day Piaf, as the day’s heat began to lift and the local sparks to show off their latest acquisitions.
Saigon is still a highly raffish sailors’ port of characters and stories, many of them unchanged since the war. There is the man who runs the pancake restaurant in a shed that doubles as a bus depot for a touring rock band, where tables are placed next to two shiny buses, with beauty tips from Miss Vietnam along the wall. There is the all-knowing, wily Mr. Fix-it, who has wild turkeys strutting around his floor and sells crocodile-skin briefcases, thousand-dollar tigers (complete with heads), caviar, motorbikes, and almost anything licit and illicit (he gave me the latest dirt on some colleagues in New York). There is the man who trades in endangered species (ocelots, gibbons, and crocodiles), and the veteran mama-san who runs the same girlie bar that she ran during the war (frequented often by the same men, returning GIs looking to relive old times). And there is the famous Madame Dai, once a leading Opposition parliamentarian, who now offers tourists dinner in her home, amidst a mess of eccentric bric-a-brac—masks, pots, joss sticks, and books in French on maritime law—and chatters away in French to customers who take ten minutes to order, inviting them upstairs for informal concerts afterwards.
The Saigon shops are madcap, and every time you go into one, you never know what you’ll find inside: ancient Brownie Hawkeye cameras, and 315 ml. cans of Coke in front of Mona Lisa string curtains; unsolicited companions who saunter along as, down the street, you hear the opening strains of “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hai
r.” In a bookshop, a bare-chested, wild-haired owner motions to an assistant to beam a flashlight along the shelves so that you can read titles like Japan Unmasked; in the thirty-two-kiosk Central Post Office (with one booth for “Paging Services,” one for “Formalities for Payment of Money Orders,” one for “Subscriptions to Newspapers and Reviews”), as you exit, made-up girls on scooters give you long, inquiring gazes. Cinemas have living subtitles, men (or tapes of men) who deliver all the dialogue, and there is a mosque in central Saigon, and a pagoda full of joss-stick baskets. In Saigon, in a single day, I met an Italian entrepreneur who’d gone into Kuwait just six hours before Saddam Hussein’s men arrived (and, having finally been released, promptly took off for this other war zone); the now famous former Time correspondent who, on the day of the U.S. departure, revealed that he’d been a Vietcong colonel all along (he still drives his ’55 Peugeot, talks about piastres, and asks after his long-lost friends); and the Beverly Hills resident who’d been busted for sending dope out in airmail envelopes his first week in Kathmandu.
“It’s kind of spooky sometimes,” a Canadian lawyer said to me one day. “There you are, in the Kim Do Hotel, it’s ninety-three degrees outside, and it’s April eighth, and you’re listening to a Vietnamese cover version of ‘Jingle Bells.’ ”
Perhaps the best symbol of today’s Five O’Clock Follies in Saigon is Maxim’s, not so much a restaurant as a four-ring Vietnamese Vegas, with 242 dishes on its menu and a flurry of twelve-piece orchestras racing on and off its stage. The first time I went there, an elegantly ao daied girl led me to a table in a room full of banqueting families. I perused the enormous menu-Braised Pig Legs with Black Moss, Steamed Silky Fowl with Herb Soup, Tendon of Deer with Sea Sleegs (or Fish Tripe), Pig Brain with Crab Meat Soup. Every few minutes, one of the thirty or so waitresses, decked out this night in pink chiffon, came over and dropped a hot towel in my lap, or poured some more of my Coke into my Air France glass. Someone else brought a plate of cashews, a plate of celery, a plate of something orange. Onstage, an eight-piece orchestra was banging out some plaintive melody, led by a girl playing a xylophone. A tall old man, with glasses and slicked-back hair and the weariness of someone who has been playing Bogart since 1949, came over to take my order. The orchestra went off and was replaced by an eleven-piece band and a series of new chanteuses, vamping it up and gyrating to old favorites like “Let’s Twist Again,” while backed by projected slides of Singapore. It was a little like watching some Oriental version of Ed McMahon’s Star Search, performed only by applicants for the Hong Kong Playboy Club, following one another in a furious, unrelenting procession, belting out show-stopping versions of “Yesterday Once More,” then racing off to play at the next club down. Yesterday once more indeed: the former GIs at the next table were engaged in a heated debate about the merits of Mama Cass.
All this, of course, will change as quickly as you can say “Investment,” and Ho Chi Minh City, more than anywhere, is a butterfly waiting to emerge from its chrysalis. As it is, the city already feels plugged into the international circuit, and not just in its IDD phones and IATA schedules. Already, you can stay at the ultramodern Floating Hotel, shipped over here from the Great Barrier Reef, with cable TV, Filipina deejays, and “Pizza by the Pool” lunches that cost as much as a month’s supply of meals on the street. And already there are Melrose-flashy cafés offering Angel Hair Pasta and Tex-Mex Omelets and Medallions of Beef with Green Peppercorns. It is impossible not to feel that Saigon, with its Ca-Li-Pho-Nia Ham-Bu-Go stores and its karaoke bars, its Chiclets kids and waterski clubs, its privately owned Mercedeses and hustlers in “Atlanta Placons” baseball caps—Saigon, with its rogue economy—is the image of the country’s future.
Saigon is also beginning to become a foreigners’ hangout of sorts. House for Rent signs are beginning to appear, and English-teaching gigs; many resourceful Americans are finding a way to spend weeks, or even months, at a time just hanging out here. And there is a world of variety in the vicinity. Along the Mekong Delta, you can see islands lush with plums, durians, mangoes, and papayas, and visit a “typical farmer’s home,” complete with Snoopy pillows and postcards of Berlin. All along the island, bursting out with jackfruit, pineapple, and black pepper trees, roofs are made of coconut leaves, bridges of coconut trunks, even tea cozies out of coconuts. To the south is the beach resort the French called Cap St. Jacques, well on its way to becoming the new Pattaya. And to the northwest, in Tay Ninh, you can visit perhaps the single most colorful and extraordinary sight in all Vietnam, the rococo, Disney-worthy holy see of the Cao Dai faith, a “Third Alliance between God and Man” whose deities include Lao-tzu, Jesus, Sun Yat-sen, Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, and—head of them all—Victor Hugo, who transmit their wisdom to white-robed priests in séances. The faith once had a following of up to two million, commanded a private army, and all but ruled the province of Tay Ninh. On the way to this unlikely Vatican, you can see the Cu Chi tunnels, part of a two-hundred-mile network of underground rooms, furnished—incredibly—with whole kitchens, rest rooms, conference rooms, and theaters. Foreigners are encouraged to crawl through a specially enlarged fifty-yard stretch of tunnels, which leaves most of them half dead with claustrophobia; the Vietnamese guerrillas lived in them for weeks. Against such unearthly determination, one begins to feel, there can be no defense. And anyone who wonders where that resourcefulness has gone today need only look at the lighters made of bullets, and oil lamps of rockets, that they try to flog in places like the “Cu Chi Shop and Friendship and Sentiments.”
In the end, though, much of Saigon feels almost like a Vietnamese community in California (from which, after all, many of its funds still come). And it was hard for me to think of Saigon as part of Vietnam. In Vietnam, people stare at you because they have seldom seen a foreigner before; in Saigon, they stare because they know exactly what a foreigner is worth. In Vietnam, everything is shut by 10:00 p.m.; in Saigon, the fun is just beginning then (“it’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night,” wrote Marguerite Duras). In Vietnam, you can hardly hear English spoken; in Saigon, English classes are all the rage. In Vietnam, indeed, you cannot spend money if you want to; in Saigon, you cannot save it. Ultimately, the main difference, for me, was that in Vietnam you do not feel you have to pay for smiles.
The seductions of Saigon are so loud and brazen that they tend to efface the shyer effects of the countryside; after a few days in the hurly-burly rush, I could scarcely remember what Vietnam was like. I went to Vietnam, though, to get away from noise, from sophistication, and from the state-of-the-art frenzy of much of modern Asia. And the very raciness and flash that make Saigon so exciting to many Vietnamese—the Ghosts of Bangkok Past and Future—make me, when returning to the country in my mind, take shelter instead amidst the quiet pride and unforced hospitality of Hanoi and of Hue.
Paraguay: 1992
UP FOR SALE, OR ADOPTION
“Yes, it’s very peaceful,” my
Aunt said, “only an occasional
gun-shot after dark.”
GRAHAM GREENE
I was staying in the Gran Hotel del Paraguay. It wasn’t grand, it wasn’t really a hotel, but it was certainly Paraguayan. Four dogs were sprawled out in the comfort of the lobby. A few gray-haired women from Germany were poring over a small library that offered copies of San Juan Shootout and Reagan’s Reign of Error. A fan was turning, very slowly, above us all. “We are certainly going to be the worthy hosts our clientele expects,” said the signs in every room. “Without improvising. And much more.”
The Gran Hotel was renowned as the former residence of Madame Eliza Lynch, La Concubina Irlandesa, an Irish courtesan brought back from the Boulevard Saint-Germain by the nineteenth-century president Francisco Solano López. He was the fat young man with bad teeth whose qualities, as listed by R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, included “sadism, an inverted patriotism, colossal ignorance of the outside world, a megalomania pushed almost to insanity, a total disregard of human life
or human dignity [and] an abject cowardice that in any other country in the world but Paraguay would have rendered him ridiculous.” His great achievement, so far as I could see, was meddling in Uruguay’s civil war and so involving Paraguay in a war in which it fought against not one, not two, but three of its neighbors—Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay itself—and at whose end its population of 800,000 had been reduced to one of 194,000, of which exactly 2,100 were adult men. As a result of this, in the words of the South American Handbook, López was “the most venerated of Paraguay’s heroes.”
Madame Lynch was, accordingly, a kind of ex officio heroine, a goddess by association. She had helped her lover in his cause by importing two fellow trollops from Paris to start a “finishing school” and by executing many of the Asunción society ladies who felt that an Irish strumpet was not the ideal partner for the “Napoleon of the Americas.”
Strolling out of the palatial grounds of her mansion, I made my way into the heart of the capital. The place was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was not just that none of the traffic lights was working, or even that straw-haired Mennonites in sky-blue-and-white clothes—like apparitions from some seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting—were sauntering hand-in-hand across the street. It was not even the fact that every store that was not called “Alemán” seemed to have its sign in Korean hangul script. It was simply that Paraguay seemed indifferent—or impervious, at least—to life as it is lived around the planet.