Saigon Happenings
By KorskiA Frenchman, a backpacker, is taking a bus north and it’s leaving early and he doesn’t have any dong, the national currency. So he goes to an ATM machine at six a.m. and gets what is the limit on most machines in Saigon: 4,000,000 dong, about $270 U.S. As the stack of 100,000 freshly minted dong come out of the machine, the Frenchman feels a gun in his back. He turns in fright and the gunman and his accomplice grab the stack of 4,000,000 dong and run. Apparently, it never occurs to them to ask for the Frenchman’s wallet, or to take the daypack that’s at his feet.
The Frenchman, beside himself, seeking justice, goes to the police. He explains what happened. They say they’ll look for the thieves. But it will cost 20,000,000 dong.
Don’t laugh. This is Southeast Asia where the attitude is: I love the foreigner’s money and may he never stop coming. But on other matters: fuck him, he’s a second-class citizen and an inferior. Well, I overstate my case, just a little bit. They love our white skin and would all love to have it, which is the reason so many Vietnamese women cover their feet when wearing sandals and cover their legs and arms and faces when outdoors, and use umbrellas when they walk, and have no problem using whitening creams. And will have no problem buying and using all kinds of toxic whitening creams when the first generation of adults finds itself among kin in Southern California.
Oh, and I forgot the big noses and even some of the body hair, on the chest. Many would like to change noses. I don’t know what they’ve got in mind with the chest hair. Maybe just fascination.
Whether or not they like big Caucasian dicks is another matter and one about which there are all kinds of stories. I have no idea what a systematic survey might show, but it sure would be fun to see the results.
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As I write these words, I’m in a hotel room overlooking a busy street, and it is raining, and I find myself turning again and again to look at the wet delicate leaves of a pepper tree in front of the window. The TV is on, and a woman is singing in Vietnamese, and the fan is on, and the air conditioner, a good one, is on, and my laptop sitting on my lap is hooked up to a cable which gives me a fast Internet connection—right now as I write. But I can’t get a single light to go on, and at the moment I don’t have the interest in walking down one flight to stairs to find out why.
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When I was in Vietnam a couple of years ago, I left without getting rid of all my dong. Before I returned home, I found myself in four other Southeast Asian countries. Not a one of them would exchange the dong for any other currency.
I learned today that the dong I’m carrying is now made of a special slimy plastic material, and it’s all made in Perth, Australia. Now, presumably, it will be more difficult, perhaps impossible, to counterfeit these ubiquitous 100,000 dong notes. The Australians have a secret formula for making the money, I’m told, and I guess they’re not eager to sell it to the Vietnamese. I assume that when I leave, if I find myself with extra dong, I’ll be able to exchange them in Laos (no, surely not Laos!) or whatever country I find myself in before going home. But who knows? This is Vietnam, and it is progressive, and today it has got a pretty high inflation rate. And I hear that the government changes its rules on just about everything every month.
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My first morning here I had some pork noodle soup and this shitty Vietnamese overcooked coffee that takes forever to filter in front of you—but I don’t mind, the more I can turn the speed of my mind down the more I’ll see. Or this is what I tell myself. Sometimes I love what I tell myself, even when it’s not true.
When I pay the bill, which only comes to a couple of bucks, I leave a tip of about $.75.
This morning, I stopped at the same place for what they call banana pancakes. I also asked for some orange juice and two cups of coffee. Which meant I had two of cups with those high-hat metal drippers sitting atop porcelain cups in front of me, the idea of which made the waitress laugh. She stared and laughed at me like only someone crazy would ask for two cups of coffee at the same time. This is the same woman who waited on me yesterday, a small and bulky and somewhat comely woman full of energy and a warm smile. When I came in and sat down to place my order today, she came up to me and pounded me a couple of times on the back. And then hugged me from behind. I guess this is what a twenty-five percent tip gets you in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Saigon in 2008.
I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d have publicly done to me if I’d left, by accident or otherwise, a tip of 100,000 dong, a little less than seven dollars U.S.
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Yesterday, I hired a guy with a peddle-driven taxi (I forget what they’re called) to take me around Saigon for a couple of hours. Saigon in slow motion, I thought. Plenty of time to suck up all the gases and other pollution on the big wide streets full of screaming motorcycles and buses and cars crisscrossing in front of one another and zooming past and around us. Plenty of time to take plenty of street shots with my zoom lens on the move, I also thought.
We go out to Chinatown, stopping here and there, the driver waiting, enjoying a cigarette, thankful because it means less time peddling, and I’m paying him by the hour, for a firm agreed-on price. I never, ever, in Southeast Asia go anywhere without agreeing on a price beforehand, unless I’m going in a metered taxi, and I always make sure it’s turned on.
So we get back to my hotel after two and a half hours, and I pay him exactly what we agreed on. He takes the money and looks me straight in the eye and says, Give me a tip of 50,000 dong.
I’ve been in Vietnam three times now, and I think this large tip shit has come down every single time I have gone somewhere on a peddle-driven or motor-driven vehicle or boat, anything other than a metered taxi.
The Vietnamese are shameless in asking for more than agreed on when the trip is over. It makes me, in a small way, dislike them. But I have to give them credit. They are behaving in a perfectly rational way. They understand that they will never again see more than three percent of those they do business with. This is an attitude that, I am sure, will continue to push Vietnam rapidly along the development road, putting more and more distance between the country and Laos and Cambodia, and drawing Vietnam closer to Thailand and Malaysia.
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An elderly man and woman from Australia are teaching English in District 2. They live in an apartment that costs them a little over $300 U.S. a month. Their building, and their unit, is very close to a new building under construction. In the middle of one night, because it is so easy with the building going up that is so close, thieves enter through a window and steal their laptop computer. They take nothing else. The couple goes to the police and ask for help. The police laugh and say, What can you expect? They are poor people. You are lucky. If you had woken up, they would have cut your throat.
The couple wonders whether it was the police who took their laptop.
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In Phnom Penh it is impossible to sit outside at a café and not be pestered by little kids and young men and women who are selling rip-off sunglass, and gum, and the latest Lonely Planet guides to half the world. These rip-offs sell for less than twenty percent of what you’d paid for the same guides in the U.S. Canada, Australia, and the U.K. The print isn’t too bad but you can barely read the maps. Which for most people would be reason enough not to buy them. But not for backpackers, of course.
These hustlers are relentless. They have come to you half a dozen times, and each time you have waved them away, or turned your head, and they just persist. They do not give up easily. Somehow though you can understand it. Cambodia is piss poor, and a couple of dollars a day in profit after hustling on the street for ten hours or more is a damn good business day.
But you get to Saigon, and the street hustlers are even worse. You cannot walk down the street without someone wanting to sell you the Lonely Plant guides, or sunglasses, or a ride across town, or a girl for an hour or two if you’re out at night around the five-star Sheraton Hotel. All of them will follow you for half a block (the pimps for four blocks), and they are as persistent as or worse than any of the street hustlers in Phnom Penh. (Oh yeah, don’t tell the Saigon pimps that you’re an American or they’ll tell that they or their fathers fought in the war alongside the Americans and they too killed those dirty bastard communist Vietcong and the least you can now do to pay them back is take a girl for an hour or two for thirty American dollars.)
Somehow it’s much easier to accept the hustlers in Cambodia interrupting you every couple of minutes while you’re trying to eat a soup of fried fish or enjoy a cold beer. It is a hell of a lot harder to accept all this in-your-face hustling in a country that is clearly so much more prosperous than Cambodia or Laos.
The first time I was here and ran into these aggressive and persistent and shameless street hustlers, I could not avoid a comparison with Cuba, a country to which I’d made four trips in the late 90s. There you find the same kind of aggressive and shameless hustling. I could not then nor now resist thinking that these kinds of attitudes have something important to do with living under a Communist regime. In the case of Vietnam, of course, comparisons are complicated because of the American presence here decades ago, and then too because of the very long history of exploitation by the Chinese.
It is tempting to generalize about this aggressiveness and shamelessness among the Vietnamese, and it’s not just found on the street. I like to turn to all the individual contrary cases as much as anyone does. But is it unfair to say that the Thai are just not like this? No. The Malaysians, the Indonesians, the Laotians, and the Cambodians away from the street environment where you find the foreigners are not like this either.
No, the Vietnamese, as a whole, are just harder to like than most peoples in Southeast Asia.
Stickman's thoughts:
And if the people are harder to like, surely the place becomes harder to like too.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
