In 1991 the Vietnamese I met had seemed eager to look past the war that traumatized America, to a future that would no doubt be led by America. By now, though, the ever-supple citizens of Saigon seemed to have realized that what most foreign visitors were most ready to pay for were fragrant remnants of that recent past: grainy history seemed Saigon’s passport to the future. Among the lacquer boxes and the silk dresses you see everywhere, shops sold lighters purporting to come from American G.I.s, inscribed with poignant mottoes: “When I die I know I am going to heaven because I have spent my life in hell.” The sweet-natured boy from Danang who offered me a ride on the back of his bike (Suzukis serving as a nimbler, and more negotiable, form of taxis), led me to the “American market” where I could buy water-flasks, khaki uniforms and even dog tags ostensibly taken from Americans. Where in Bangkok a tourist visits temples and palaces, in Saigon he finds himself in museums commemorating the war–or traveling out into the countryside to the Cu Chi tunnels, where you pay six times as much as in a museum to see the underground passages in which Vietnamese guerrillas hid and lived and plotted, directly under American eyes.
“The Americans used to hurry back to the base every day as soon as it was getting dark,” the onetime major who had fought with the U.S. army for seven years and was now leading me around the tunnels, told me. “For hamburgers and Tiger Beer.” What he was saying, in effect, was that the U.S., with its statistical spread sheets and White Papers, controlled the daylight hours, but the Vietnamese ruled the night. They stole into the U.S. bases while the Americans slept to filch ammo, worked the fields by moonlight and set up booby traps; in the dark–the realm of the unconscious or at least the unknown–they knew they had little to fear. It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that much of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, steeped in Saigon pragmatism, takes place after dark; Saigon is “a city of pleasures,” Marguerite Duras wrote, “that reaches its peak at night.”
During the war, the moment when one order gave way to another was best symbolized by the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the briefings before sundown the U.S. Army gave to the press in the Rex Hotel, assuring journalists of American supremacy. Nowadays, the Rex Hotel is offering a vegan festival, and “Fly Me to the Moon” was playing in the lobby when I visited. One floor down from the slot machines, a Filipino group called Los Llamados was singing note-perfect Vietnamese standards in the Paradise lounge off the lobby.
Saigon today is a confounding blend of the shabby and the sleek, conical bamboo hats and baseball caps all mixed up in the streets; the latest slick surfaces are bandaged over dilapidated buildings in front of which rats scrabble. It can sometimes seem as if the whole city is like one of its bikes, on a street riddled with red lights, accelerating into the future and then suddenly forced to stop, revving up at the intersections, and then seeing the signals prohibit all movement.
One evening, close to midnight, I went into an Internet cafe that seemed to be a model of all that modern Saigon stands for. I could buy “Girl Scout Cookie” drinks or “Lynchburg Lemonades” as I checked my e-mail. The tourist next to me was clacking away on a Japanese keyboard (under a sign that pleaded, “No Pornographic Websites…Please”). Above us a chanteuse was crooning “You are my Sunshine” in English and Vietnamese, though in the former it sounded very close to “You are my Sunscreen.” A door at the back said, impishly, “www.toilet.com.”
The “Business Office and Bar,” I saw the place described itself: a perfect conjunction of Saigon’s two favorite activities, honoring its ability to make profit out of pleasure. On the same small street there were Korean, Italian, French and Latin restaurants with, at their centre, in a perfect, improbable Saigon flourish, the cool, chaste courtyards of the city’s principal mosque.
But as I lurched out of the place, in search of a midnight lunch, I saw two large Army trucks parked in the middle of the street, soldiers busily confiscating every motorbike parked on the pavement, and carting them off to one of the trucks. Bargirls peeped out at the activity from the shadows, and a few foreigners watched the soldiers grimly reminding the city that it was meant to be puritanical.
The hope in Saigon today, perhaps, is that, like Vietnam’s great neighbor (and age-old enemy), China, it can let a hundred economic flowers bloom, while not giving up strict political control. But in reality it may find itself closer to India, where an inert and often antique bureaucracy does everything it can to stifle an overwhelmingly keen sense of private enterprise. Many years had passed on the dark, neon-flashy streets of Saigon, but the motorbikes were still driving round and around in circles, all revved up, I felt, but with nowhere very much to go. The city of the new century has all the energy and drive it wants; it only needs direction.