Saigon, day 1
Vietnam is coffee paradise. Several cafes line each block. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of nice places to sit and spend a day with a novel or a laptop.
I spent all day at this cafe. The bread, butter, and pate were amazing (US$2 for the best baguette of my life). My $3 bowl of beef noodle soup was superb, as good as any beef noodle soup you can find in Taipei.
I walked 5km back to my hotel. I like walking through unfamiliar cities in South East Asia. They’re safe enough. What I see along the way more than compensates me for the risk.
The most dangerous part of the walk was crossing the street. Crossing the street in Vietnam is terrifying: you have to walk right into heavy traffic and hope that the vehicles will stop before they kill you. It’s scary, but it’s easy once you get the hang of it. Hold your hand up, make eye contact, be confident, walk slowly, and don’t make any sudden movements. When I did that, the cars and bikes stopped or wove around me.
After a few successful crossings, I got good at playing chicken. I enjoy walking directly in front of a car or scooter to make it clear that I have the right of way. By my second time crossing the street, I was already confident enough to lead other people through traffic. I saw two women hesitating by the side of the road, so using charades I said “let’s cross together!” I positioned myself so I would be the first to be hit if an inattentive driver happened to mow us down; they stood behind me. I felt like a gentleman.
It makes me sad to admit this, but (aside from the skill and courage necessary to cross the street in Vietnam) most of what I need to know about how to stay safe in developing countries I learned from growing up in a not-so-great neighborhood in Chicago. Be aware of your surroundings; be confident; look like you belong there and like you know where you are going; don’t make eye contact, but don’t look scared. Also: if someone comes up to talk to you on the street to pitch something, ignore him or her completely and walk away; it doesn’t matter what they’re offering, you don’t want it. I actually feel safer in most places in Asia than I do in some places in America.
When I take a long walk through a city, I get an idea of the character of the the country and the people who run it. If you want to understand how a country is governed, reading the laws or the constitutions would be a waste of time. Instead, walk on the streets and see how the government interacts with the public.
In Thailand, the King is everywhere, in life-size portraits with gilded frames, in tiny laminated photos in cabs and businesses, on billboards and TV. His omnipresence felt puzzling and suffocating to me. America has its own version of civic piety — support our troops, the founding fathers were infallible geniuses, etc — but that’s nothing compared to Thailand. No public space is without the King. When I went out to the movies in Bangkok, I had to rise to salute the King before the first reel started rolling. The patriotic film they show during the salute is a schmaltzy montage of adulatory photos of the king, tracking him from his coronation to his old age. The film is not very subtle, but it’s effective: even my cynical foreign heart was moved.
In Cambodia, the police stand idle and seem oblivious to the lawlessness around them. It is likely that one eye is scrupulously looking the other way and the other eye is looking for a chance to catch a bribe. In Cambodia I was just as wary of the police as I was of the hawkers and touts I met on the street. I knew that if I attracted their attention or pissed them off, I could end up fighting a made-up charge and the emancipatory bribes could pile up quickly. A Cambodian friend told me that I didn’t have to worry about anything more than an occasional $5 hit in Siem Reap: more expensive police-orchestrated extortion rackets are more of a Phnom Penh thing. Siem Reap needs the tourists, she said, and cops know not to do anything that would chase them away. In Phnom Penh, on the other hand, you have to worry about both sides of the law.
In Hong Kong, except for the ubiquitous public service announcements they post on the street and in the MTR, the government is mostly invisible. The government doesn’t need to be omnipresent, because civilians do such a good job enforcing order on themselves and on their peers. Stepping even slightly out of line will earn you hard looks from the locals.
In Japan police are like mailmen. Remember the mailman from Mr. Rogers? Every Japanese police officer is just like that guy. The cops walk their beats, try to be helpful, and socialize with people in the neighborhood. They don’t have much to do, because crime doesn’t happen there. Even Japanese gangsters are well-behaved: they know that anything that garners attention from the press or police is bad for business, so they settle their affairs quietly and without involving innocent people. The crime world there is so orderly that Yakuza families open up offices in public places and hang a shingle that says, more or less, “Yakuza headquarters.”
Vietnam has the largest government presence I have seen in my travels. In Ho Chi Minh City policemen stand at every intersection and along every block; they are spaced no more than 100 meters away from each other. The yellow star of Vietnam and the sickle and hammer of the Leninist tradition are on red flags. Communist propaganda is omnipresent: billboards feature Ho Chi Minh, tanks, and men and women with photogenic asiatic socialist realist faces. Military monuments are common. One storefront had an action painting of Vladimir I. Lenin, hungry and ferocious as ever, looking over his shoulder as if he had been surprised from behind by a mob of counterrevolutionaries. Here, in Asia’s youngest, most dynamic Capitalist Communist state, Lenin lives on.
The city architecture reminds me of Siem Reap in Cambodia, but this place is far more prosperous. Much of the city looks like it was built yesterday. This is a place that got rich overnight, a gawky teenager after a growth spurt. I walked past a half dozen first-rate home decoration stores with stainless-steel kitchens on display, but the streets outside the stores were incompletely paved, more often irregular dirt and concrete than not. When I got back to my place, my feet were filthy.
My room is spare. No tv or wifi. I don’t mind, I like it that way. $15 a night, not bad.
Life abroad is a sequence of many small mysteries and puzzles. Today’s mystery and today’s puzzle? Am I supposed to sleep on the wood without any cushioning? Do people sleep on wood tiles here? Or is there something soft to sleep on? My bed is made out of wood tiles tied together with fabric. As I searched for something soft to sleep on, I was already thinking of how I could use clothing in my pack to create a makeshift mattress. No need though. There was a bedroll in the closet. The bedroll, sadly, isn’t much of an improvement over the wood.
My hosts are a kind Vietnamese family. I found them through airbnb. On one of the walls of my bedroom is the family height chart, one pencil mark per child per year. It’s an intimate thing to find in a hotel room.
