Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  A tiny corkscrew metal staircase spiralled upwards to my room from the foyer in the front of the house. Some evenings I climbed up to the floor above me to talk to the fellows who lived there. Sitting under the shade of a big umbrella, on their charming tiled balcony, I would watch the sun set over the roof tops.

  After a while I learned when it was time to shut my windows against the evening’s mozzie invasion. At dusk the smell of incense would waft into my room from the balcony of the house across the alley where an altar perched on a small stand. During the day the altar always had fresh flowers on it, and every evening joss sticks were lit. The balcony of the house adjoining mine was a rough lean-to that had been tacked on level with my room. It touched the roof of the house across the alley and the residents used to reach over and put their face washers and towels and their baskets of chillis and other vegetables, on the roof to dry in the sun. A permanent clothes-line ran the length of the balcony and I often looked up to see someone sitting, only a few feet away among the washing, eating their noodles and smiling at me.

  There were some minor detractions: the electric power usually went off for an hour or two during the day, and I was sometimes woken in the middle of the night by next door’s dog routing imaginary burglars, or the neighbourhood cats having a sing-song on the roof. And the neighbour’s rooster had a faulty time mechanism. He not only crowed loud and long at day break, but at nine in the evening too!

  One day I accidentally ended up at the War Crimes museum. In Vietnam I was often glad that I was not an American, but at this museum I cringed to think that Australia had been involved in the American War too. I had been trying to get to the Museum of Natural History, but the War Crimes Museum seemed to be the place that other tourists wanted to go, so the cyclo riders presumed that I did too. Or did they take me there on purpose to shame me? It worked. The American army did some horrible things in Vietnam, and the museum contained photographs of them doing it; and smiling and enjoying it. I know that crimes and atrocities were committed on both sides, but only South Vietnamese and American evils were pictured. I found the museum experience extremely traumatic. I was shocked almost to tears by what I saw. Apart from the massacre of innocent people, the senseless destruction of the forests and the land was appalling. It also made me realise that I was probably eating agent orange every day that I spent in Vietnam. Seventy-five million litres of defoliant were sprayed and 2.2 million hectares were defoliated. Two million civilians were killed, as were 1,350,000 soldiers in the North and South, approximately 64,000 Americans and 423 Australians. At the height of the war 1.2 million tonnes of bombs were dropped in 400,000 air attacks each year at a cost of fourteen billion dollars.

  The grounds of the museum housed a Huey helicopter, an A37 plane, a menacing seven ton bomb, a tank and a guillotine that had harvested heads, first for the French and then for the Diem regime in the South. There was also a replica of the tiger cages used to punish prisoners in Southern detention camps. All of them were sickening illustrations of man’s inhumanity to man. The display inside the buildings included latter-day atrocities of the west, such as heavy metal music.

  Another day I tried again to go to the Natural History Museum. I pointed it out on my map to the cyclo rider but, surprise, surprise, once more I ended up at the War Crimes Museum. On the footpath outside it I met Nigel from the Hanoi-Danang train again and we arranged to meet for dinner at Kym’s.

  Cyclo riders would sometimes rip off tourists if they got the chance. Who could blame them? They are so poor and they think that we are all rolling in cash and it doesn’t matter to us. But you could get one who would look after you. Once I stopped to buy a coconut and the seller asked me for 3000 dong. My cyclo rider argued with him that the price was 2000 and that he shouldn’t cheat me. It seemed that if they decided you were their property, they took care of you.

  Another time I negotiated a cheap price for the trip back to my guest-house. The rider had insisted that it was a long way and when I got there I realised that it had been a lot further than I had thought. I said, ‘It was a long way,’ and gave him twice the fare. He nearly fell off his bike with shock, but he was pleased. The next day I came across him again. You couldn’t help but get known to them, we westerners stick out like country lavatories among the neat Vietnamese. When I met yesterday’s cyclo rider again outside the post office. I said, ‘How much to Cholon?’ and he replied, ‘Oh, with you there is no problem. You will give me what is right.’ And from then on we saw a good deal of each other, to our mutual satisfaction. He took me to places I needed to find but had no directions for and often found me shops where people gave me better deals than the regular tourist places. Nye was, like so many Vietnamese I met, a genuine and friendly person.

  I finally got to the Natural History Museum on my third try. Well, I was actually taken to the zoo, but it was next door. I had to pay 10,000 dong to see both the museum and the zoo, so I was obliged to get my money’s worth. For a person who doesn’t like to see anything in a cage, I had done a lot of zoo-going lately.

  The museum was dark ochre in colour and looked like a cross between a pagoda and a temple. Inside it was very grand and decorated in an eastern style. Among the exhibits was some antique porcelain, but it was mostly Chinese. Regrettably I saw few good pieces in Vietnam. The best collections are in Jakarta and Taiwan.

  In the grounds of the museum, which were also the botanical gardens, I rested on a comfortable stone bench under one of the great trees that stood on the grass. At one time these were the best botanical gardens in Asia and they were still enjoyable. There were small trees contained in large urns, little formal gardens that were spanned by willow bridges and pretty, wing-roofed stone pagodas with stairs on their four sides that were guarded by seated stone lions. It was Saturday and courting couples and families with children strolled the paths, but it was not crowded.

  In the zoo, the animals were enclosed in various pens. A large beautiful space was allotted to a couple of dozen ibis, who seemed perfectly content among masses of trees and a stream that ran through mock mountains. The monkey cage was an enormous nineteenth century wonder; a lofty edifice of wrought-iron domes that were open to the sky and in which big trees had been left growing for the monkeys to climb. This prison did not look nearly as bad as that of the big cats who were crammed into minute spaces. The elephants, poor things, were all chained; the big ones in a cage and three young ones in a row outside. A couple of beautiful big black panthers, some bears and the exotic birds had the worst of it. They were all incarcerated two or three to small cages.

  I appreciated the food, prices and service at Kym’s even more after I had been downtown and discovered the tourist ghetto that surrounds the expensive hotels. Walking along the High Street in this downtown tourist area, it was hard to pass some of the pathetic beggars. But some of the young women had the look of professionals. The first time an old lady held out her hat to me as I went by, I thought she was trying to sell it to me and walked on. It only hit me later that she had wanted help.

  Outside one restaurant window I came upon a little boy of no more than six years old, who was hopefully pressing his box of Wrigley chewing gum up against the glass and trying to entice someone to come out and buy a packet. I sat on the window ledge and bought a couple. The wee one had a card pinned to his diminutive chest. It assured the world that he was a legitimate orphan and as such was entitled to support himself in this trade. Almost everywhere I went, beguiling tots flashed their Orphan Permits at me and sold me Wrigleys chewing gum. By the time I left Vietnam I had purchased enough gum to stock a shop.

  One day I asked one of the little girls who sold postcards outside the post office why she wasn’t in school. I thought that she was playing the wag, but she replied that she had no money to pay for school.

  In the shops of the high street you could buy all the consumer items you could possibly want, and more. I found things that I had not been able to get for love or money in China. And in this count
ry where so many people didn’t have enough to eat, or were actually starving and many didn’t have work, merchandisers were trying to convince the populace that they needed air fresheners, toilet cleaners and all kinds of useless junk.

  I saw some funny things on a few of Saigon’s many motorbikes. The Vietnamese could get up to four people on a bike. Sometimes children were placed on the handle bars, or on the petrol tank, and sometimes mother and father would ride with a child between them, as well as one in front of father. One day I was stopped in my tracks by a classic sight; a man steering a motorbike with one hand while he cradled a sleeping baby under the other arm. Another time I saw a young couple who were obviously in love. He was driving, she was riding pillion, but they were holding hands. Ladies driving, or riding pillion, protected their skin by wearing the kind of long, above the elbow, coloured cotton gloves that we would wear with a formal ball-gown.

  I read that Hanoi and Saigon have the highest traffic accident death rate in the world. Once I saw the tangled wreck of a motorbike lying on its side in the middle of the road with one pathetic sandal underneath it. I shuddered. No one walked away from that. Crossing the street in peak hour traffic was also not without its dangers. I would get to the middle, breathe a sigh of relief that I had made it this far with all the legs and arms that I had left the curb with. Then, lulled into a false sense of security, I would suddenly be shocked out of my tranquillity by a blast, a screech and a rush of air as a motorbike came at me on the wrong side of the road!

  One day my lovely inn keeper handed me a written invitation to her daughter Leung’s thirteenth birthday party. I was stunned, Vien only looked twenty herself. I asked Emile, one of the Frenchman who lived upstairs, taught French at the university and spoke Vietnamese, to interpret for me so that I could ask her where I might have an ou dai made to wear to the party. She whizzed me to the market on her motorbike to buy the material. The Ben Thanh market, with its distinguishing central clock tower and pill boxes on each corner, has been Saigon’s largest market for eighty years. Standing in the centre of a square where eight streets converge, it is a phenomenal place with a great variety of merchandise; bunches of frogs with their legs tied together, live squawking hens, baskets crammed with pig’s snouts and ears, clothes, jewellery, dress material, kitchenware. It took hours to get all the way around the goods.

  Outside the market a line of monks stood with their begging bowls in front of them. A tiny, ancient monk, who was obviously the elder, was in the fore. I said, ‘Good morning, grandfather,’ as I contributed to his bowl. To my surprise he said, ‘Good morning, madame.’

  The next day Vien took me around the corner of the alley to a dressmaker, and I got myself equipped with a pale blue outfit much to the delight of the populace, who took it as a tremendous complement that I liked their national dress enough to wear it. The ou dai usually does nothing for frumpy westerners who squash themselves into it, because it is intended only for slim and graceful Vietnamese women. I, at least, am slim.

  Downstairs all day on Sunday a dozen women worked frantically cooking and preparing food. At the party only the men and the foreigners sat at the big round table to eat.

  The women served. The food and beer flowed freely. I was photographed with everyone possible, but especially the birthday girl, who was done up like a sore thumb with makeup and curls, and wore clumpy Doc Martins.

  13 Snake Livers and

  Jungle Juice

  The weather seemed to me to be getting more humid daily as the northeast monsoon, and Christmas, approached. Hoping to find a ship that was sailing in the direction of home, I canvassed the maritime shipping companies which fronted the Saigon River. Everyone I spoke to was unfailingly polite to me, but I could see that they all thought I was deranged; tourists travelled by aeroplane, not cargo or coastal boats. The manager of one company did say that a cruise ship was coming into port soon and he gave me the address of the firm that handled it. I shot around there only to find that the ship was going the other way – to Hong Kong and China.

  There were flotillas of boats on the busy river that runs through Saigon’s city centre – small boats that sailed the local waters and big cargo ships that went everywhere – but none carried passengers except the ferry to Cambodia. I wanted to go to Cambodia very much. There was, however, a slight draw-back to this venture. The area in the south where the ship would drop me was infested with Khmer Rouge guerillas, and travellers had been kidnapped and murdered there recently. And getting from the coast to Phnom Phen also entailed passing through dangerous country that was held by the Khmer Rouge. I considered risking it, but long-term foreign residents of Vietnam who had been to Cambodia via the northern route strongly advised me not to go to the south, so I reluctantly decided against it. Giving up on ships, I considered the other possibilities. Qantas flew to Australia. That settled it.

  I stopped to rest by the riverside, a pleasant place that is well supplied with chairs, benches, umbrellas and shade trees, and watched children swimming and playing in the river as I drank the milk from a coconut. They seemed oblivious to the grotty appearance of the water and the fact that it was littered with rubbish. A little way down-stream a hideous floating hotel had been sited on the bank. Up and down the water plied legions of sampans that were always manned by women, some of whom accosted tourists and offered to take them for a ride. One of these women sat down beside me. I eventually convinced her that I did not want an excursion on the water and tried to tell her what I did need. She could not understand toilet, or WC, so I drew a picture of a what I imagined looked like a loo. Apparently it didn’t. Finally she got the message and taking me by the hand, led me off. Hauling me along the riverbank, she stopped here and there to chat and proudly exhibit me to her friends. They must have asked her where she was taking this strange woman and she made a gesture of pulling her pants down that I deduced must be sign language for what I wanted. We walked miles to that toilet and when we got there it was closed for renovations!

  I found few public toilets in Vietnam and they all had a guardian who demanded an entry fee. The only decent one I came across was the one next to the post office in Saigon and it was, at 500 dong, also the cheapest. If you couldn’t afford that, you went in the street. There was, however, blatant sexual discrimination in this practice. Although men urinated everywhere, women did not.

  A wide street on which hotels and other imposing buildings were located ran along one side of downtown Saigon’s riverbank. On the opposite bank a green park flourished until it petered out, at the edge of the inner city area, into the most deplorable cardboard and packing case shanties that tottered, decrepit and shonky, on stilts over the river.

  One day I took a cyclo to the Ben Thanh market. I wandered along, stopping now and then to look at my map. Every time I did this, someone came and looked over my shoulder. While I was walking through a park opposite the market, a couple of wild-looking women who resembled gypsies came close to me and, pressing against me, pretended to help me read my map. Suddenly I felt threatened. My instincts told me to get away from these women and I started moving off. They said, ‘Yes, yes, down here,’ and attempted to lead me. I was trying to lose them when they were joined by a young man. By then I was on one of the broad main streets, the women were on one side of me and the young man on the other, at the gutter’s edge.

  I was holding my handbag firmly under my arm, but my purse was in my hand. I usually did this deliberately to deflect interest from my bag. Then, as one woman distracted my attention for a second, the other suddenly snatched the purse out of my hand and they both ran off. But I hadn’t been looking where they had wanted me to and I saw that the purse had been thrown to the man, who shot off in the opposite direction. The ploy was for me to follow the women, but I reacted instantly without thinking and leaped after the man. They didn’t call me the Greyhound at school for nothing. In a few yards I caught him and grabbing him by the shirt-front, shrieked, ‘Give me back my purse, you bastard!’ He threw it a
t me and broke away. Now I was really angry. Thinking, He’s not bloody-well going to get away with that, I sprinted after him, seized him again and started hitting him over the head with my umbrella. He cried, ‘Ow and oh’, and put his arms over his head trying to protect himself, while I made a terrible fuss, yelling at him and calling him frightful names. Although there were a few people around, no one came to my aid. I suppose they could see that I wasn’t being hurt. But no police appeared. The locals just stared at us open-mouthed.

  I rushed into a nearby hotel thinking that they would call the cops. I said, ‘Help, police, quick.’ After fifteen minutes the combined efforts of the three desk staff managed to locate the number in the phone book, but the police wouldn’t come. They said I had to go down to the station. The manager told me it wasn’t far, ‘About twenty minutes walk, no problem.’ I said, ‘What’s the point.’ I’d had time to cool down and consider the consequences. I had heard that the police either end up fining you or make a lot of trouble for you. I decided not to risk it. Anyway, the thief had only managed to take a handful of dong from my purse before I caught him. But I learned another lesson from this trauma. I had believed that being in a main street at half past eleven in the morning when there were people around made me safe.

  I kept on walking until I found the Viet Cong Bank where I could change some more money. I needed it now. I didn’t carry much local currency, everything was so cheap and I often used American dollars – safely hidden in a wallet that hung on a string around my neck under my clothes.

  I was not having the most brilliant of days, so I was greatly relieved when my friend Nye, the cyclo rider, pedalled up, rescued me and took me home to my family to be comforted with tea and sympathy.