My dear familiar faces,
Imagine a big city with sidewalks so crowded by streetvendors, parked motorpeds and eating or sleeping Vietnamese on plastic chairs, that it’s impossible to take more than two steps without having to avoid some kind of an obstacle. A city with streets on which motorbikes largely outnumber cars and where no one seems aware of even the existence of red lights and crossovers. A place where houses rarely are any wider than 2 meters and only fractional colonial buildings remind you vagely of this city’s turbulant history. An urban center where cyclo (some kind of a bicycle with a chair in front)and motorbike drivers offer their services WHILE you’re getting of a taxi. A metropolis where you are forced to bargain because overcharging simply is the norm. Ho Chi Minh City is polluted, THE place to buy copied books (no second handed bookstore here!) where the blank pages are larger in number than the printed ones and just about as nerve wrecking as Istanbul when it comes to street or marketvendors.
Saigon has let me down. It is just a young economic center.
And I can’t help but wonder just how communistic this country really is. I have occassionally seen propagandist posters (mostly, as far as I understood, to remind people firmly that helmets on their motorbikes are obligate). And the army presence has caught my eye several times, but they seem to be hanging around so lazily that I find it hard to believe that they ever demonstrate why they’re there.
For those who aren’t aware of this country’s history, allow me to do a quick recap. The Chinese have ruled here for more than a thousand years. So the Vietnamese eat with chopsticks and confusianism plays a great role in family relationships. Ancestors are about as holy as Buddha is. Anyways quite short after the Vietnamese finally fought off the Chinese, the French came in. Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia). I don’t need to tell you that colonialism more often than not has a bad impact (to put it really nicely) on the colony. Organised opposition against the French rule started in the early thirties. Remarkably the Viet Cong (or whatever you want to call them, they changed their party’s name often) and the US worked closely together during the Second World War to fight off the Japanese. Quite soon after the war the French wished to reinstall their power whereas the Vietnamese ought it time for independence. Sadly the US choose the side of the French. They were allies of course in the WW2, but just imagine what would have happened if the US had continued to believe in the Viet Cong’s fight for independence rather than their fight for communism. At the time though the Cold War was priority number one one the American political agenda and the joint force against the Japanese were soon forgotten. From there you probably know the story. The French gave up. America continued in it’s subborn belief of their responsibility to avert the great treat of communism taking over the world. They lost too. And now here I am about 30 years later in a dirty fast growing asian metropolis, searching for links to the past, but hey these people have moved on.
By Lotschurin