1: The Train
Your countryside is beautiful, Jane said gamely, and no pollution on the beaches.
I gave him a weekly magazine with Gorbachev on the cover, and he hurried back to share it with his compartment mate, an eminent Party historian who spent the whole trip in pajamas. Later Kiem told me that the magazine didn’t give him much new information; he’d already heard most of it on the BBC World Service.
And while Jane and I sat silently, our friend–he did not give his name–babbled on about his life. How he was the student president of some university in Paris. How he was famous on French TV. How a gangster had conked him on the head the last time he’d visited Hanoi. How the German rock band Modern Talking is “very big” in Saigon. At one point, he dashed from our car and returned with a Paris Match article praising Saigon’s renaissance. After the first paragraph, he said, he could not stand to read anymore–“It is all lies.”
I looked out the window. When I’d woken shivering at six that morning, my first sight was of farmers already knee-deep in their paddies, perspiration staining their shirts. Now, more than 13 hours later, their northerly counterparts were just beginning to head home; one by one gaslit cottages began to glimmer in the darkness. Off in the distance, a field fire burned an orange hole in the twilight. There was no sign of the Louvre or Versailles.
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Like most men my age, I spent nearly a decade trying not to go to Vietnam. And, like most men of my age who remained in the States, I spent years wondering if I’d missed something important: A test of masculinity? My generation’s look into the abyss? Or something grimmer and more serious: the reality of unnecessary suffering and death? Whatever it was, when I was in Bangkok and saw an ad urging me to “Visit Vietnam for Tet”–Tet! now there was a word to conjure with–when I saw that ad, I had to go. But there would be more to this trip than the past: this spring it’s 15 years since the tanks crashed through the gates of Saigon’s Presidential Palace. (The last Americans had been choppered off the embassy rooftop a few hours earlier.) Getting there couldn’t have been easier. Though the USA still has no diplomatic relations with Vietnam, I simply went to Vietnam Airlines, bought two ten-day visas for $100 apiece, and booked a round-trip flight to Ho Chi Minh City. (“Saigon,” the Air Vietnam agent corrected me: “Nobody calls it Ho Chi Minh City anymore.”) Vietnam, she said, has really opened up. No hassles, no tour guides, no restrictions. Go where you want, visas extended pro forma, and if you decide to fly back from Hanoi, just change your reservation. No problem. Vietnam had proclaimed 1990 the Year of the Tourist. Meaning: “They want U.S. dollars very, very much.”
The U.S. Embassy is still standing. A hammer-and-sickle banner drooping over the driveway, it serves as the HQ of a Soviet oil company. Out the Xo Viet Road, the apartments erected for U.S. personnel now house the Party cadres. (They’re relatively nice, you see.) And the old Presidential Palace, which boasts a party room worthy of a Connery-era Bond film, now goes by the name of Unification Hall. (“They don’t want you to know this,” said our epicene guide, a dead ringer for The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan, “but the man who drove the tank through this gate has moved out of the country.”) Amid the countless architectural follies left behind by America’s imperial hubris, the only striking new building is the greatest folly of them all: the five-star Floating Hotel, which charges $250 a night (you can get a good room elsewhere for $15) and features a staff clad, none too happily, in mint-green sailor suits. Nobody goes there except Saigon’s nouveau riche capitalists, who drink $5 Cokes and hope to be seen.
