Asia > Vietnam > Ho Chi Minh > Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) > Articles > Saigon - Make money not war

I met the oldest little girl in the world on the streets of Saigon. Each morning she stood on the pavement outside my hotel, selling poorly printed post cards. She neither pleaded nor pushed, but merely stood there as silent and as stoic as a sentinel.

Every day I bought cards from her and tried to get her to smile. Her English was flawless, but joyless. I guessed her to be about 11 years old. Like her homeland, she had undoubtedly prevailed over hard times, and had paid the price, physically and psychologically.

Vietnam’s 300,000-plus square kilometres are strung along 1,500 kilometres of spectacular tropical coastline and are home to 70 million people.

It is a nation of fierce fighters. In fact, few countries have been so continuously at war as Vietnam. A thousand years before they forced out the French and humiliated the Americans, the Annamese, as they were known in ancient times, were fighting the Chinese for control of their destiny. They have been fighting so long, it seems they find it difficult to stop.

Twenty-five years ago, when US troops ignominiously retreated from Saigon, they left behind more than 500,000 Vietnamese dead, yet today more than half the population has no memory of the war, and the Vietnamese are more interested in improving their lives than in bearing grudges. While Vietnam is ruled from Hanoi, virtually anything of real economic importance that happens in the country takes place in Saigon. People rarely call it Ho Chi Minh City. In the quarter century since the war, the Vietnamese economy has been a murky mix of communism, socialism and, increasingly, high-octane foreign fuelled capitalism.

At first glance, Saigon could be a southern European city. The broad, well-paved boulevards are lined with huge and lush green rain trees. There is a rose coloured Catholic cathedral in the centre of the city and there are scores of pavement cafes lining the busy streets. The distinctly European aroma of freshly ground coffee and fresh baked bread wafts through the heavy air.

Fading pastel mansions with flamboyant facades, ornate balconies and geranium-clogged gardens can still be found in and around Nguyen Hue and Le Loi boulevards. Their upper levels are home to Vietnamese families, but their ground floors are packed with gleaming Korean and Japanese television sets and CD players, all for sale.

Despite Saigon’s tidy and increasingly prosperous appearance, Vietnam is statistically still one of the poorest countries in the world. Poor, but neither desperate nor famished. In recent years, it has become one of the world’s largest rice exporters. Ironically, the United States is one of its biggest buyers, second only to Thailand.

American corporations were late to get back into the country, prohibited for years by the US government’s law against ‘trading with the enemy’ of 1917. Meanwhile, others - South Korean, Singaporeans and Rolex-wearing Hong Kong businessmen - have gladly filled the void with everything from hotels and golf courses to textile and electronics factories. Untold millions more in investments have also poured in from the 750,000 Vietnamese who now call America their home.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Western visitors were assumed to be Russians; street children would shout “Xien Xo! Xien Xo!” at every passing white face. The Russians are gone now, but the main legacies of their stay in Vietnam, Cuban cigars and Siberian caviar, can still be had for laughably low prices.

The Eastern Bloc advisors have been replaced by carpetbaggers from the West. They bask in the potential glory of making vast profits in a poor country, and they clog the city’s hotels and café, talking endlessly of promising deals.

In the charming open-air beer garden atop the old Rex Hotel, which looks out over Nguyen Huw Boulevard and Saigon’s white-washed city hall, a chubby resident American was trying to impress a visitor. Having taken a US$60 room (a month’s salary for a well off white-collar Vietnamese worker) as his office, he planned to make his fortune.

“I came in small,” he said in a Texan twang, “but I’m coming out big.”

By late afternoon, Saigon’s heavy tropical air turns sultry. It is at this time of day that one of the city’s most endearing spectacles takes place: pretty girls in elegant national dress, the ao-dai, motor home on scooters or shiny new Honda motorcycles, their long black hair tied back in bright ribbons.

In the soft, amber light, they are a vision of femininity, carrying books and sweet smelling French bread. From a distance, they resemble brilliant butterflies, fluttering through the city’s leafy streets.

The once wild night-lift of wartime Saigon is largely gone, despite new nightspots opening every month. Small bars with names like Good Morning Vietnam and Apocalypse Now have been opened for years, filled with young Europeans living on a few dollars a day. For them, the Vietnam War was a Hollywood movie.

A few ladies of the night can still be found, dressed in jeans and cotton T-shirts which say ‘Chanel,’ but for the most part, Saigon’s night-life is far more innocent than most other capitals’ in Southeast Asia. Some bars have wicker lounge chairs outside, from which patrons can watch the world go by.

For those seeking war relics or reminders, there are few in the Saigon area, except for the War Museum, formerly known as the ‘Museum of American Atrocities.’ The rusting tanks that once lined Highway One have been hauled away. Most of the fighting took place in the rural provinces and Saigon itself suffered comparatively little physical damage.

If one asks to buy American military surplus in Saigon’s sprawling old iron-roofed Central Market, one will be discreetly directed to the few remaining stalls which sell GI surplus, much of it counterfeit. Real flak jackets go for $75, while fake Zippo lighters, complete with personal inscriptions, cost about $10.

Northwest of Saigon, close by the Cambodian border, are the famous Chu Chi Tunnels, a 250-km system of underground passageways which honeycombed the area beneath the US Army’s 25th Division headquarters. Begun in the early Sixties, they are said to have reached within 30 kms of central Saigon. The tunnels included underground kitchens, field hospitals and storage facilities. To avoid detection by the Americans, who used sniffer dogs, the Viet Minh guerrillas would douse themselves with pepper or stolen GI cologne to confuse the animals.

A middle aged Vietnamese woman who had worked in the tunnels during the war, answered a visitor’s questions. Born in September 1940 (when Japan occupied the then French colony of Indochina), she had taken up arms against the Americans in 1963, at the age of 23, becoming a genuine hero of Vietnam. She had been chosen to work in the cramped, dark and intensely hot tunnels because she was petite.

For years the Americans were aware that the tunnels existed but could seldom find their entrances. In an attempt to flush out the tunnel builders, they air- dropped powerful chemical defoliant throughout the Cu Chi area. Today, unlike the lush surrounding countryside, much of the area looks like the thinning crown of a elderly man.

When asked if she had killed any Americans, the former Viet Minh warrior simply nodded. Asked if more than one, she nodded again and said, “many.” She paused and added, “I did not want to kill the Americans. They were young, like me. I only wanted them to leave my country.”

I spent my last afternoon in Vietnam at Saigon’s old Kem Bach Dang ice cream parlor. To battle the April heat - it is the hottest month - I ordered a tall glass of Vietnam’s justifiably famous café au lait and a dish of luxurious ice cream.

Amid the rumble of thunder, the heat rose and the sky split open. With the parlour’s wooden shuttered doors open to the streets, I watched as the afternoon storm rinsed clean Le Loi Boulevard and added a sweetly moist fragrance to the air.

Vietnamese girls cycled serenely through the now soft rain, as an elderly waiter placed a second glass of café au lait on my table. The battered old speakers mounted high on the parlour’s walls crackled into life. From them came the best bittersweet ballad of the Sixties, the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me, Tomorrow?”

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