Romancing Saigon

IN MY COUNTRY, it’s 50 years since 30/4, so Sorrow of War all sold,” says the girl on the crowded pedestrian bookshop lane in central Saigon when I ask for Bao Ninh’s famous novel. They’re stringing up buntings with the national flag outside, so you see the brickwork and rose windows of the Notre Dame Cathedral opposite through a fluttery crisscrossing of yellow stars on red. All eyes are on this year’s 30/4—the 50-year anniversary of the Ho Chi Minh-led victory over Saigon, the last stronghold in the South. It’s been Ho Chi Minh City since, officially, but this Paris of the East has nothing official about it. The grandiloquent French architecture, wide boulevards in the town centre, and old hotels spoken of as figures who have seen it all—once the setting for the last bastion of revelry as the war took over—are today backdrop for consumer culture-oriented fun. The helpful book­seller thinks another store down the road might have the novel. “Follow me,” she says and points it out.

I learnt of The Sorrow of War from Rohit Inani’s moving profile of its author in Caravan magazine some years ago. Kien, the novel’s narrator, like Ninh himself, is savaged by the “dirty war” in all sorts of ways, the horror couched in an almost unbearable lyrical intensity. That reticent, moody Ninh on a rainy day in Hanoi, his novel banned for a time by the Communist Party, created a synecdoche of Vietnam for me. I wilfully imagined that his generation, scarred irreparably by the past, would give the whole culture an attractive gloominess. Instead it seems to have a native exuberance, heightened now into a terrific gaiety—the multilingual crush of tourists, bleachers to hold thousands they’re putting up on the avenue by the 1960s’ modernist Reunification Palace for the Liberation Day parade, cannon firing drills by the river, reports of over­seas Vietnamese streaming back home for the celebration, and the already over­flowing cafés, restaurants, boutiques, souvenir shops, and museums.

The middle-aged cleaning lady in our hotel room—smiling and deadly efficient—heaves a pretend rifle to her shoulder when I ask about her father, while mother was a tailor. They were among the many who came South after the communist takeover, so she was born here but with this her store of English—or perhaps her time for small talk—runs out. Outside is Dong Khoi Street with some of the showiest colonial build­ings looking in top shape, such as the Opera House with its pair of neo-classi­cal maidens holding up the portico, and the enor­mous Central Post Office, its high vaulted ceiling worthy of a hushed cathedral though it’s frantic with tourists, me included, looking for stamps for their postcards. A digital billboard across the intersection from our room flickers with images all night—a model winking in a toothpaste ad, replaced by a boy urging one to Grab, a taxi and food delivery app. Grab and wink, says the spirit of the market-driven economy liberally in evidence here. Then follows a lit-up poster of a girl soldier, a white dove, and the shimmering “30/4”. I read a few of Ninh’s painful pages at a time, see that he’s mourning not just three decades of war starting in the mid- 1940s against the French, but also the effacement of a liberal, thinking spirit. Kien’s artist father burns all his paint­ings because they don’t conform to the new order’s social realist norms.

What else sells big these days, I asked the young man at Phuong Nam book­store. Among the translated titles he laid out for me were a fictionalised biography of Ho Chi Minh, a popular 18th-century epic lament called The Song of Kieu, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. He’s believed to have written it at Hotel Continental down the road in the early 1950s, but Zac, my husband, has determined that this is an exaggeration—he mostly worked out of a discreet, grey apartment building vis­ible through the windows of our room. Zac is hard on the Greene trail, checking out settings from the novel and altered locations from the 2002 film—apart from doing justice to the city’s muse­ums, while I linger over breakfast on the hotel rooftop, and then dawdle on the street where all the theatre is.

Just before the trip, I chanced among my father’s books on a yellowing copy of M Sivaram’s slim paperback, The Vietnam War: Why?. Sivaram was based here early 1965; the book, published out of New York, characterises Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong as horrors, details the coup after political coup in the South but is circumspect about the weapons, chemicals and aid worth billions of dollars the Americans are pouring into the country. He seems to see it all from his perch in a corner of the Continental lobby, particularly how decadent Saigon is still partying as the canons thunder nearby. The utterly urbane Sivaram is largely forgotten though he reported at length on much of Southeast Asia.

I walk to the Ho Chi Minh Museum housed in an arcaded, salmon-pink wharf-side old building which has hundreds of his personal effects, models built to scale of his ancestors’ homes, photo after photo of him through the years, including one with Nehru in Hanoi—the first overseas politician to visit after Vietnamese independence— and countless presents given to “Uncle Ho”, usually artworks depicting him. It’s hero worship on a scale the Nehruvian generation wouldn’t have stood for. I’m struck by an outsized green watering can, its proportions somehow match the larger-than-life leader. He used it to water a star-apple tree given him by comrades in the Southern Resistance and it speaks more than the rest of the display put together.

One night there’s a celebration in the city’s main promenade Nguyen Hue, choc-a-bloc with families who cheer performers on makeshift stages singing patriotic songs to karaoke tracks, then roar with delight as the fireworks are let off while I’m taken with the 3D light show playing out on the façade of another sumptuous 19th-century build­ing—once Hotel de Ville, now housing the People’s Committee. The projections on the darkened edifice appear to make it melt away, then spring back to life, while above camera-equipped drones hover, keeping an eye on the crowd.

ARCHITECTS ALL OVER the world say these people were brilliant at building temples without cement. The baked bricks were joined to each other with a special glue,” says our guide, Mr My, to the minivan of half-interested tourists. We’re heading to the valley of My Son to see the scattered remains of an Indianised temple city, one of a handful of sites left over from the days of the Cham kingdom.

The Indian-origin Chams started to settle in coastal south and central Vietnam in the 2nd century, the king­dom absorbed by the Viets more than a thousand years later. I’m half-interested too in these old-time Hindu-Buddhist so­phisticates—though they were also sea pirates when it suited them—who left a significant mark on the Vietnamese. (The other great shaper and adversary in equal parts over those centuries has been China, before the French turned up.) The balance of my attention is on the present—and Mr My, who says he was 15 when the “American war” ended. “Whose side was your father on,” I ask. “He worked, office jobs, first for the French, then for the Americans.” Father speaks four languages, Chinese among them, and is aged 105. Mr My pulls up a video of a recent family gathering, deftly snips an image of his wispy-looking father from it, and zooms in to show me. I want to ask how his parents held out after the Communist takeover—many from the southern half of the country fled; those who remained and were considered loyal to the previous regime didn’t have it easy. But I hold my tongue because he’s passing around a Vietnamese dong note, asking the company to identify the bearded figure on it, satisfied when they know their Uncle Ho.

“Follow me,” says Mr My as we head past Cat’s Tooth Mountain, its canine-shaped peak prominent. Of the 68 temples and towers here, built between 4th and 13th centuries, only some 20 remain, the rest bombed in wartime. My companions scramble onto the fragile structures for photos of themselves, then, felled by the killing heat, retreat to the shade of a tree, while Mr My bounds about lecturing his much-shrunk caravan on the god-king, Bhadresvara, sculpted on the outer walls, and the sig­nificance of the yoni and lingam within, not forgetting to point out a grassy bomb crater and two rocket shells. I’ve seen specimens of Cham-era sculptures at Saigon’s History Museum, including a damaged but striking, coiffured, faintly smiling, straight-backed queen goddess. But these brick sanctuaries with their jagged silhouettes, still standing against the odds, move equally, influenced in style by South Indian Chola architecture, think historians.

We are herded back to the visitor’s centre and treated to a Cham dance of about seven minutes— stagily beautiful. I recall how a taxi driver got out, opened the car door for me, gestured with the other hand which way I should step, all in one fluid balletic motion. A decorative pen­chant in the culture but also innate grace. On the train to Hanoi, I watch from my upper berth a lady take up a strip of stick­ers—yellow star on red—and press one onto the visor of her cap. She nods off, then wakes up, takes out the strip again and starts decorating her backpack. The wallpaper in the cabin features a painted magnolia tree in full flower.

I look forward to Hanoi which the guidebooks say is dreamy: take peaceful walks by Hoan Kiem Lake, meditate at the Confucian Temple of Literature. It’s no such thing. There’s barely room to step around the lake, and at the Temple of Lit­erature, about the only uncluttered space is green water and reflected trees in the Well of Heavenly Brilliance. Liberation Day frenzy abounds here too. A girl smart­ly salutes a soldier standing at attention outside a government building on the far side of the vast Dinh Tien Hoang Street; she wants her boyfriend to capture the pose but each time she checks her phone, he hasn’t got it right. To photograph or be photographed—the only alternatives everywhere one looks.

Zac says we ought to get the Graham Greene-themed cocktail at yet another hotel where everyone has stayed, the Metropole. As we pass through the lobby, a familiar face in a display window catches my eye. What’s Joan doing here? It turns out Baez was a guest in 1972 when Hanoi was bombed. A hotel manager starts bustling when we ask about her visit, and says, “Follow me”. He gives us hard hats to go down to the narrow bun­ker where she holed up with other guests.

Her ballad ‘Where Are You Now, My Son’, released the follow­ing year, is a 20-minute montage of witnesses talking, victims crying, jets screaming, explosions, laughter, pianos, singing and poetry. She sees an old man of “unsteady gait”. I think of a steady-gaited old man I saw at the train station in Saigon, eating ice-cream. He first carefully laid a newspaper across his knees for any stray drops, took a lick, gazed between licks at his white scoop with such grave, concen­trated pleasure, it gave me goosebumps. Midway he got up to dispose of the wrap­ping, then returned to spread the paper again and work on the cone.

He has lived through the war and here he is now and nothing and no one exists. Just him and his hold on life.

boutiquescafésHo Chi Minh Cityrestaurantssouvenir shopsTravel Issue 2025Vietnam