by Arthur Black
A traffic jam in Saigon? Can’t tell you. Never saw one. Oh, it’s curb-to-curb chrome and rubber, all right. An absolute river of motorbikes and scooters and tuk-tuks, but like a river, it keeps moving. And like a river, there are back eddies and side streams and rapids and the odd whirlpool. Can’t go forward on your motorbike? No problem: go up on the sidewalk. Still can’t go forward? No problem: do a U-ey and go back. One-way street? No problem.
Sounds like chaos, and on Salt Spring it surely would be. But in Saigon, as in a river, it works. In three weeks I saw more motorbikes and scooters than I could see in three lifetimes on Salt Spring, but I saw only two motorized mishaps—and even they weren’t proper traffic accidents. A motor scooter fell over while the owner was parking it, and another guy had his brakes freeze as he was crossing, well, a sidewalk, but that’s another story. Point is: no damage, no injuries.
Ah, you say, but what about pedestrians? What about trying to cross that river of chrome and steel? Well, that’s where it actually helps to be from BC. Especially if you’ve ever crossed a salmon stream while the fish were running. If you have, you know that if you walk slowly and steadily, those salmon—those tens of thousands of obsessed, hormone-besotted salmon—will not run into you. Their fins will tickle you; you will feel the ripples of water as their tails lash by—but head-on and T-bone collisions will not occur.
Same with the rivers of traffic in Saigon. If a pedestrian walks slowly and steadily and most of all with intent, those tooting, revving motorbikes and scooters will magically part on your upstream side and rejoin on the downstream stretch without so much as brushing your Tilley trousers.
It should be a disaster, traffic in Saigon, indeed in much of Southeast Asia. Stop signs are ignored, traffic lights are merely a broad suggestion, vehicles travel in every direction at once. It would be total chaos if we tried it here at home, but there, somehow, it works.
Day after day, night and day, the streets of Saigon, gorged with people and vehicles, continue somehow to function. It’s an Act of Faith, crossing a Saigon street. Which is another thing that can’t hurt. I know I said three Hail Marys before I stepped off the curb in Saigon. And I’m not even Catholic.
Make Mine a Double-Double
There are many things in this world beyond my feeble ken—nuclear physics, Microsoft Word, women—but a daily and ongoing bafflement is the corner coffee shop. How does that work exactly?
By which I mean: how do those enterprises stay in business?
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s economic hara-kiri. You have proprietors paying a hefty rent to occupy a trendy, expensively refurbished space to sell heated beverages to, well, basically, a roomful of freeloaders.
Granted, the cafe owners get a nice return on the four or five bucks they charge for a mug of hot water and .000003 cents’ worth of ground beans, but still . . .
Think of the customer turnover compared to, say, a hamburger joint. At the Burger King the customers are sliding through like Jeep chassis on a Chrysler assembly line. And at the coffee shop? Well, the lady at the first table—the one hunched over her iPad next to the chai latte that’s so old it’s sprouting lily pads—is working on chapter twenty of her doctoral thesis on the influence of Rumi on neo-Renaissance architecture. At table two, a homeless guy wearing Bose headphones is puzzling over the New York Times crossword. The rest of the clientele is reading, writing, snoozing, gazing into space or murmuring sweet nothings into adjacent earholes.
Hardly any of them are buying and nobody’s moving. I’m no economist, but that does not sound like an outstanding model of mercantile viability.
And speaking of unsound business practices, who’s the marketing genius who came up with the idea of offering free Internet access in coffee shops? Brilliant! Now every geek with a laptop who’s still living with his parents has a free downtown office (with a heated bathroom and complimentary serviettes) where he can go and play Grand Theft Auto until his fingers bleed.
It makes no sense. And yet there is an intersection in downtown Vancouver that features a Starbucks on the northeast corner, a Starbucks on the southwest corner, and two independent coffee shops on the other two corners! They all appear to be crowded and they’ve been in business for years.
So what do I know?
Well, I know that some coffee shops seem to be feeling the pinch on their bottom line. They’re taking down the “Free Internet” signs and taping up the electrical outlets in an effort to uproot the laptop squatters. There’s a café in Chicago that’s even resorted to flat-out bribery. If a squatter voluntarily gives up a seat when the place is crowded, management will buy that squatter a drink on the house.
Which, presumably, said squatter will sip while standing outside on the sidewalk, looking in.
Not every customer who goes to a coffee shop is a space hog, of course. A lot of customers line up and get their orders to take out—which again would make sound, efficient business sense if the customers were ordering a double cheeseburger with a side of fries to go.
They are not. They are ordering concoctions such as a half-skinny, half-chai, iced Frappuccino with whipped cream and a spritz of hazelnut syrup and an organically grown cinnamon stick on the side. Or possibly a demitasse of Ethiopian high-mountain dark roast pour-over with a decaf espresso shot and a lemon slice.
It’s ironic. Coffee shops have been around since Shakespeare’s time. They are the social equivalents of watering holes on the Serengeti—great places to meet with friends, catch up on the latest gossip.
The only problem: it’s getting harder and harder to find anyone whose nose isn’t buried in an iPad or—radical thought—to find a place where you can just get a cup of coffee.
Of course there’s always the Canadian solution.
No upholstered chairs, no baristas at the bar, no po-mo computer graphics on the wall. Just fluorescent lights, Formica tables . . . and a queue that moves like Jeep chassis on a Chrysler assembly line.
Timmy Ho’s. Make mine a double-double.
To go.
Of Beavers and Bullets
Know what I like best about Canada’s national symbol, the beaver?
It’s not imperial. Not for us the American eagle with its razor talons, the British bulldog with its gobful of teeth or the ballsy Gallic rooster that struts symbolically for France.
Canadians chose a docile rodent with buckteeth, a potbelly and a tail that looks like it was run over by a Zamboni. We could have opted for a ferocious wolf, a majestic moose, a mighty bison or a fearsome polar bear.
We went with the flabby furball that wouldn’t harm a black fly.
Maybe that set the pattern for our provincial emblems because they’re pretty bland and inoffensive too. British Columbia has the Steller’s jay; Newfoundland and Labrador went for the Atlantic puffin. For Ontario it’s the common loon (perfect—what with having Ottawa and all) and New Brunswick stands behind the mighty black-capped chickadee.
I’m not sneering about this. I think it’s positively endearing that Canadians chose non-threatening, peaceable symbols to represent their provinces. For our prickly cousins to the south, it’s a little different. They go for state guns. Arizona has just proclaimed its official state firearm: the Colt single-action army revolver. It’s the long-barrelled, six-cylinder shootin’ iron favoured by Wyatt Earp and various other sanctified thugs of the American Wild West.
Arizona was late off the mark—the state of Utah has already declared its official state firearm: the Browning M1911, a semi-automatic .45 calibre handgun.
Is the Browning M1911 for hunting elk or target shooting? Nah. Its purpose is to kill people, period. It was developed by gun maker John Browning specifically for the US Army, which had put out tenders for a handgun powerful enough to drop an enemy soldier with a single shot.
I can see how the Army might lust after a powerful heater like the Browning M1911. It’s
more difficult to figure out why any state legislature feels it needs to honour an instrument the only purpose of which is homicide. You’d think that American politicians might be just a tad sensitive to the idea of venerating a weapon of semi–mass destruction after US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot along with eighteen other unarmed citizens in Tucson by a lunatic armed with—guess what? A semi-automatic handgun.
But then, Arizona has a different take on handguns—a different take on a lot of things—than most of us. It has a state reptile (the rattlesnake)—even a state tie (the bolo). And if you google “Arizona motorcycle seat” you will see an item that’s very big among some bikers in the Grand Canyon state. It’s a leather motorcycle saddle with a couple of extra features: along the back is a cartridge belt for bullets and on the flank is a holster for a long-barrelled revolver.
Just what I want to see thundering down the highway at me—a biker on a Harley with one hand on the throttle and the other thumbing back the hammer on his hog leg pistol.
Wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Arizona I guess. Former state senator Republican Lori Klein was asked in a 2011 interview if it was true that she carried a raspberry pink pistol in her purse.
“Aw, it’s so cute,” she enthused, as she pulled out a .380 Ruger and pointed it at the reporter’s chest. The nervous reporter noted that the gun seemed to have no safety mechanism. Klein assured him that it was all right because she “didn’t have a finger on the trigger.”
Not every American politician takes a Dirty Harry attitude to guns. One of them once said this at a press conference: “With all the violence and murder and killings we’ve had in the United States, I think you’ll agree that we must keep firearms from people who have no business with guns.”
Sounds pretty reasonable to me, but what do I know—I’m a beaver boy, a Canadian. American politicians ignored the politician when he made that statement.
And that’s a pity. His name was Robert F. Kennedy.
Of Diamonds and Medallions
Christmas, in all its weirdness, is coming.
Of course it’s weird—flying reindeer? Trees in living rooms? Legions of non-union elves toiling above the Arctic Circle for room and board and one day off a year—you think that’s normal?
And isn’t it just a tad weird to look forward to a beard-o in a red suit slithering down the chimney in the middle of the night? To welcome a break and enter by a guy whose entire vocabulary consists of three “hos”? We Canucks are pretty happy-go-lucky about it. The Dutch? Not so much.
Dutch folklore features an Old Testament Santa, more Mafia don than jolly saint. In the Netherlands Sinterklaas rewards good kids with candy. Bad kids? Fuggedaboutit. They get a lump of coal.
Personally, I’d go for the lump of coal. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, for starters. Besides, it’s been a long time since I held an actual chunk of anthracite. When I was a kid our cellar was half-full of the stuff every winter. I wasn’t that enamoured of coal then because I had to shovel it into buckets and hump them upstairs to the fireplace.
So I can empathize with rebellious Dutch kids. Back when coal was the common source of domestic heat, getting a present of a chunk of the stuff was a bit like being slapped with a wet haddock.
Times change. Why, just last month a chunk of coal about the size of your ear sold at Sotheby’s auction house in Geneva, Switzerland.
For a little over twelve million dollars.
True, it was a rather special lump of coal—found in a mine in South Africa last year and lovingly cut and polished by the finest craftsmen in New York. And they don’t call it a lump of coal. They call it the Sun-Drop—the world’s largest pear-shaped yellow diamond. (The buyer remains anonymous but I like to imagine he’s some faceless, filthy rich Goldman-Sachs junk bond trader who parlayed some of his bailout money into a rock that he hopes will help him Get Lucky tonight.)
It’s no secret that expensive things come in small packages, but usually those small things are intrinsically valuable, like the Sun-Drop diamond, a gold nugget or a baggie of Colombian marching powder.
But tin? Whoever heard of paying a million dollars for a piece of tin?
New York cabbies, that’s who. One million dollars is the going price for the medallion that must, by law, be affixed to the hood of every legal Yellow Cab in New York City. What’s more, it’s a bargain.
It would have been smarter to pick one up back in 1937 when they first came out. The medallions sold for ten bucks a pop then. In the last three decades the price of a New York City cab medallion has soared by a gobsmacking 1,900 percent, making it more profitable than gold or oil.
The reason? Same as diamonds: scarcity. There are just over fourteen thousand medallions in circulation, a number that’s hardly changed in seventy-five years. The NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission prefers to keep the medallions rare and treasured. So treasured that there’s a company called Medallion Financial Corporation that exists solely to provide loans to cabbies who want to purchase their own medallion.
And how does a guy, earning a hack’s wages, manage to do that? Simple, according to Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial.
“A guy comes to this country, drives a cab six days a week, twelve hours a day, after three years, takes his whole life savings and puts it down to buy a medallion,” Murstein said. “This is a way for him to get a piece of the American dream.”
Sounds more like a nightmare to me, but then so does living in New York City. My pal Eddie says I’m a wuss and I’ve got it all wrong. He used to drive cab in the Big Apple. “People say New Yorkers can’t get along,” says Eddie. “Not true. Once I saw two New Yorkers—complete strangers—sharing a cab. One guy took the tires; the other guy took the radio.”
Underground with the Viet Cong
I have no trouble accepting the premise that War Is Hell. I’ve never fought in one and impending geezerhood pretty much ensures I’ll never have to. I thank my lucky stars for that.
But if the fickle Fates decide otherwise and the future finds me outfitted in helmet, army boots and twenty kilos’ worth of combat kit on my back I have just one small request to make.
If I have to fight in a war, please don’t make me fight it underground.
My recent trip to Southeast Asia included a visit to the Cu Chi district of Vietnam, a swath of lush jungle about fifty kilometres northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. Well, it’s lush jungle now, but forty or fifty years ago it was a blasted and cratered moonscape of mud and shredded timber where nothing moved or grew.
That would be a direct result of the five hundred thousand tons of explosives US bombers had dropped on the area. They were trying to root out the Viet Cong who used the Cu Chi district as a military stronghold. All those bombs didn’t make much difference because the Viet Cong were underground in an incredible network of tunnels that ran for 150 miles over a 100-square-mile area. But they weren’t merely tunnels. The VC had constructed a maze, a complex—a virtual city that was three storeys deep in places. It incorporated sleeping quarters, meeting rooms, a command post, weapons storage, kitchens, emergency ORs—even weapons factories.
Actually, “factory” is gilding the lotus somewhat. A “factory” consisted of a few guys in black pyjamas hunkered down in the dark hammering and hacksawing chunks of bombshell debris.
As it happens, the soil in the Cu Chi area readily lends itself to the construction of tunnels. It’s a mixture of clay, sand and rock that, on exposure to air, hardens like cement.
US forces weren’t entirely unaware of the presence of the tunnels but they had no clue how extensive they were, and they weren’t likely to find out by exploring them. The tunnels were low and narrow, built to accommodate the smaller bodies of Vietnamese, not a GI’s strapping bulk. Then, too, the prospect of shimmying into a black void infested with poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, rats AND armed enemy soldiers, all in stifling jung
le heat, can’t have held much appeal. Accordingly, troops finding a concealed tunnel entrance usually elected to pump in poison gas or toss in a few grenades, fill in the entrance and move on.
So what was it like for the Viet Cong who lived in and fought out of the Cu Chi tunnels? Not good. Aside from being carpet-bombed almost daily, they suffered from a variety of pestilences. A captured Viet Cong document indicated that at any given time more than half the underground troops were stricken with malaria and that “one hundred percent had intestinal parasites of significance.” Human beings aren’t designed to live in tunnels. The air was bad, the diet was pathetic and the denizens had to learn to live in a permanent hunch in pretty much perpetual darkness. Viet Cong who didn’t die outright suffered from severe vitamin deficiency that left them with enlarged heads, weak eyes, bad hearts, swollen feet and severe respiratory infections.
Sixteen thousand Viet Cong fought out of the Cu Chi tunnels during what they call “the American War.” Twelve thousand of them lie buried in graves that carpet the outskirts of the tunnels.
Do the math. Three-quarters of the troops fighting for Ho Chi Minh in the Cu Chi tunnels died there. Clearly the whole tunnel offensive was a devastating defeat for the North Vietnamese forces.
And yet . . .
The official name of the nearest city is Ho Chi Minh City, not Saigon. It was changed in spirit the day a Viet Cong commando squad briefly but humiliatingly took over the US Embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Those Viet Cong operated out of the tunnels at Cu Chi.
The war is over and, incredibly, Western tourists are warmly welcomed in Vietnam. We can even tour short sections of the tunnels at Cu Chi—sections that have been purposely enlarged to accommodate our Western bodies. Even at that it’s a cramped and uncomfortable experience—unimaginable as a way of life.