Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, writers and media makers, are traveling in Southeast Asia and reporting on their visit.
Happy New Year--from Saigon.
Sherry and I arrived at Tan Son Nhut Airport--a designation like so many others with a grim resonance for us for more than forty years--just minutes before Tet, the week-long New Year's Festival was to begin. Outside the airport people were clamoring for taxis--so anxious or so excited were they to get into Saigon proper before the Year of the Tiger began. We got in the mood.
Once we grabbed one, the taxi ride in was
exhilarating, after the 24 hour trip from snowy New
York City, as the streets were thronged with dozens hundreds thousands
of young
people on motorbikes--motos, as they are called here. Sometimes
whole families are bunched on a single moto. Stopped at
red lights,we called out
Happy New Year, from the taxi window, in between erratic bits of
videotaping.
Upon checking in at our hotel, situated just two
short
blocks from the central Cho Ben Thanh market, we asked
about the
fireworks and were assured that the best place to see them now was the
roof of
the hotel . . . Up we went in the elevator, with a
bunch of other
visitors to Saigon, both Vietnamese and not. We were in
time--which seemed auspicious--and was, as it
turned out, for our nine days in Ho Chi Minh City. As the
fireworks boomed the strangers looking out on the roof
wished each other a Happy
Year of the Tiger, in several languages.
I suppose in
exploring every unknown and
alluringly foreign city the swirling atmosphere of chance, even if
ultimately
illusory, seems to take over with each glance left or right, or each
uncertain
step this way or that. But Tet in
Saigon nourished that potential, as we wrestled with inadequate maps
(the
bookstores were all shut for the
week--Tet, you know--and so we kept failing to find a decent map, which
had its
own detourned appeal once in awhile--but
not always). In the first
Temple (Quan Am Pagoda) we went to in the Cholon District (which one
reads
about in Graham Greene's The Quiet American as a suburb of
Saigon, in
the still-Frenchifed Fifties) we were struck right-on by
the fantastic
incense-drenched smokey spectacle of the rapt desire for good
fortune.
Dozens of worshippers lighting
joss sticks they stuck into ceramic jars and incense cones hung on the
ceiling in hopes of good fortune
for the coming year. It was enough to turn any sentient being into a
believer on the spot. And so newly religious,
I joined in the ceremony, as Sherry wielded the
camera. The overlap of the
practice of worship to the more mundane practices of everyday life was
so
striking that we left suitably dazzled and soon stumbled into an actual
gaming
arcade, a few blocks away, where
luck was a bit more mixed with skill as Sherry and I took turns playing
some
kind of pinball with some young Vietnamese also playing and trying
against high
odds to instruct us on how to play. We were
transfixed for quite awhile--and
when we broke away, thanking our neighbors for their help--we asked the
young
attendant what we owed for playing--and she checked our scoreboard--and
paid us
10,000 dong--about sixty cents.
A few days later, in a muted Disney-fied
almost amusingly ghastly tour of the Cu Chi
Tunnels outside Saigon (from which the 1968 Tet offensive was launched
by the
VC against Saigon) the politics of luck (another name for class struggle
in
this context?) were played out on all sorts of levels. For
instance, at the climactic point in
the tour you can pay a little extra for some ammo and
shoot the Vietnam War weapon of your choice at a target
range. That nobody ever seems to
hit a target would appear to be one point of this game. The
punishing noise is another.
But much more compelling was the chance to talk
to the tour
guide, who had been demonstrating and lecturing about the enemy (that
is us, the US), demonstrating,
that is, the use of boobytraps and lethal cages, how the tunnel
entrances were
camouflaged, how the VC did and didn't survive in the tunnels. We
talked to him about his own
experience of the War--he was a man of about 67 years of age.. He'd
been an advisor to the Green
Berets, was wounded in 68 and luckily -there it is again--demobilized--so
after
'75 when he should have been a target for 'Reeducation' was given a pass
on
that. He asked me whether I'd been
in the army during the War and when I explained that I'd been a draft
resister
responded, "oh, like Muhammad Ali."
We had in common the knowledge that the War had been the
determining
moment in both our lives.
The Cu Chi Tunnels , like the War Remnants Museum
and the
Reunification Palace, are the major sites of the circuit of war tourism
in the
Saigon area. Tourists can be
counted upon to always behave like tourists so there was no visible
hesitation
in snapping photos in front of US tanks on the grounds of the War
Remnants
Museum, or in posing with broad smiles with arms draped around the VC
mannequins at Cu Chi, etc. And of course we
videotaped many of
them doing so. And since it was
Tet a great many of the tourists were Vietnamese--not just Westerners.
These monuments (and others, scattered
here and there, like the small street-corner memorial to the first monk
who
immolated himself, which is venerated on a daily basis by passersby)
give
Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City an ever-present ever-past sense of doubleness also hinted at by its double name.
There is much more to say but these are the
themes we are
reckoning with right now so far:
the resonance of names, the deception of chance, and the
persistence of burning--as we continue.
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