Serious in Saigon

DAY: 21
LOCATION: Ho Chi Minh City

Several friends had told me I didn’t need to spend much time in HCMC, so I had only one full day to sightsee before heading to an island. I started the morning off with a salute to the city’s name sake, the Communist revolutionary leader Chu Tich Ho Chi Minh. His friendly statue greeted me on my walk to a hipster café.

A hipster café? You say. Yup. They’re littered all over the city. It’s one of the biggest social things to do, especially at night. And while it’s clearly the influence of European culture (the French introduced coffee production to the country during their occupation), the Vietnamese have most certainly made it their own.

Well, except for maybe the place I’d chosen due to it’s early opening time – L’Usine. I might as well have been in Silverlake, with posters of the Great Smoky Mountains and Joshua Tree, fixie bicycles, and backpacks with LA and NY monograms for sale. Not that it wasn’t charming, with its all-natural bath products and soy candles, just more… an obvious place for an American to show up. Anyway, I ordered a Vietnamese coffee overlooking the busy street, abuzz with morning motorbike traffic, and tried not to feel too bad about being such a Western tourist.

That didn’t last long. My next stop was the War Remnants Museum, and although Greg had told me it was “a sobering perspective requiring lots of emotional processing,” nothing could’ve prepared me for this experience. It was harrowing.

The museum consists mostly of photographs and texts documenting the Vietnam War from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese government. While my high school history classes had been critical of the US involvement in the war, if not entirely objective, we never studied anything quite as damning as the material presented here. From the protests around the world demanding the US stop intervention to the self-immolating American citizens, this was not a war wanted by the people. It was one of special interests and resources, a brutal display of power.

I felt sick as I made my way through the exhibits, each more heartbreaking than the last. One featured pictures from the field of innocent victims, civilians running naked through bombed out villages, charred babies, mothers swimming through rivers with four or five children trying to escape. Most of the brave photojournalists had given their lives to capture these tragic moments on film.

Another exhibit, perhaps the hardest to take in, showed the devastating effects of chemical warfare, particularly Agent Orange. For any doubters of the evil of Monsanto, one need look no further than this gallery of severely deformed and crippled individuals. I could barely stand witnessing these photographs - how these victims managed to persevere such incredible hardships left me floored.

But they did. While impossible to describe anything as uplifting in this museum, the exhibit on the ground floor of survivors of dioxin poisoning and landmines humbled me to my core. One man with arms stopping above his elbows, Mr. Nguyen Mao Tan, had become a celebrated painter. Another man with no legs, Mr. Nguyen Hong Loi, became a swimmer. A female activist with cancer, Hunyh Thi Kieu Thu, had biked across the country seven times. The power of the human will to overcome adversity is immeasurable.

After leaving the museum, I didn’t know what to do. My stomach had an angry empty sensation, but I felt too shell-shocked and alone to find something to eat. I sat on a bench near a tank, my eyes swollen and drained of tears. What do I do?

I called Rebecca. I knew it probably would’ve been healthier to stay in my own experience, to transform the empathetic distress I so often go to into a more altruistic form of empathy, but the pain just felt too large. I dumped on her, gradually returning to my body.

“Okay, I think I seriously need to eat something now,” I said after half an hour of talking about the war and Monsanto and our next writing project. “But I love you so much. Thank you for being there and talking to me about this.”

“Of course, that’s what I’m here for.” She sounded so close – it was hard to believe she was half a world away. “Call me tomorrow from the island.”

I plugged one of the vegan restaurants I’d found on Happy Cow, A Di Da Phat, into Google maps. The walk to Phuong 8 helped me further decompress, as I turned my attention to Vietnamese city life. I wandered down random alley ways brimming with food markets, traversed large intersections fearing less and less for my life. When I finally found the street I was looking for, I passed right by the restaurant – it was so tiny and unmarked. A true hole in the wall.

If I’d felt like a tourist at L’Usine, I was an alien at A Di Da Phat. There was not a single Westerner in sight. The food was buffet style, with a woman behind the counter dishing things up. No one spoke English, no signs indicated what each item was, you just pointed at what you wanted. A single plaque reconfirmed everything as vegetarian, so I just went for it, pointing away, then took a seat in a small plastic red chair in the back. While not as posh an experience as Cuc Gach Quan, it was nevertheless tasty.

And crazy cheap. When I went to pay after eating, the woman typed into a calculator what I owed: 20,000 dong. Less than one US dollar. It felt almost criminal. I handed her a 50,000 and nodded a thanks.

I took the river esplanade back to the main part of the city, passing the zoo and the Notre Dame Cathedral on my way to Independence Palace. The church was a bit jarring after the museum, another reminder of Vietnam’s troubled history of occupation, but the Palace felt downright haunting. Immaculately maintained, it’s a step back in time. I could almost see the generals in the conference hall and the basement war rooms, with its old-school technology and vintage swivel chairs. It looked like a film set, and yet it had been real.

There was only one other place on my list – the Chu Chu tunnels outside the city – but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I went and got a manicure and pedicure instead. My first in six months. Because it was cheap and my nails looked horrible. I gave my cosmetician a big tip. She did a really good job. Maybe I should’ve given her my whole wallet, but then what?

I returned to my hotel, and went up to the complimentary cocktail hour on the tenth floor. The views of the city were grand, the fresh coconut sweet, but I couldn’t shake the heaviness of the day. It clung to me like the night terrors I’d had since I was a kid. The boogeyman in the room was gone, but the uneasiness wouldn’t let me turn off the lights.

I kept thinking about my privileged Western life over dinner. Why do I get to eat at this serene vegetarian restaurant with bamboo-wrapped chopsticks? How is it that I can come and cry over the deaths of Vietnamese civilians caused by my country, then carry on like nothing ever happened? How can I justify the hotels, the restaurants, the massages, the manicures and pedicures, all of it?

I suppose I could argue I was helping their economy. The hotels, the restaurants, the spas – they needed business, and I was giving it to them. But it all felt so much deeper than that, and the answer not quite as easy as “stop eating meat.” I heard my mom’s voice in my head – “Amy, you don’t have to solve all the world’s problems tonight.”