While Saigon's main products seem to be dust and noise, a trip to the countryside shows what is really happening. I went to the mountains, every available flat space is utilized. Coffee beans drying on porches and where grass should be growing. Vietnam has a similar geography and demography to Japan. Overpopulated, with very little available flat land.
I visited the main temple of the Cao Dai religion, the eyeball religion claiming God watches over all. Graham Greene said if he wasn't Catholic he would be Cao Dai. With Sun Yat Sen and Victor Hugo for saints, and spiritual mediums that include Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill, why not? At first I felt it was some kind of strange comedy religion, but no, the ceremony was dignified and strangely moving. Performed during the constant popping of flash cameras and hundreds of tourists looking on.
Then visited the 250 km of Viet Cong tunnels hollowed out of the hills near Saigon, where they lived and planned for years. I clambered through, scrapping my elbows and bumping my head, drenched in sweat after a mere 100 meters. Dark and stuffy in those liberation diggings, I felt rushes of irrational fear and deep claustrophobia. What nationalistic fanaticism drove those people to spend years under there? Ultimately to win, and to lose. No more dollar-hungry driven capitalist exists that a Vietnamese newspaper seller.
Or an 'artist' in Dalat, wearing his French beret, chain smoking and scamming tourists. The hustling Zen monk writing Taoist surrealist poetry, and making more money in a day than the average Vietnamese makes in a year. Ultimately, that is how I divide the people. The most charming, beautiful, naive people I have encountered anywhere; and the most rude, brutal, lying, money-hungry scam artists going under the guise of 'guides.' Now that I'm back in Japan's safe womb, I don't blame them. They have to survive. I felt the same when I visited a school in Cambodia, and watched a Japanese teacher who couldn't speak Japanese and an English teacher who couldn't speak English. Their pay? Ten dollars a month.
Ultimately though, the only people I really had to watch were honky foreigners. I stayed in a lovely hotel in Bangkok, filled with caring artists, San Francisco pony-tailed theater directors, Greenpeace T-shirt-wearing liberals, Danish 'wellness' experts -- and it was one of those fucks who stole the jeans and shirt I'd left in the care of the hotel.
Five years ago I stayed at the seediest hotel imaginable in Bangkok. Filled with washed-up junkie whores who flip their VD test cards on your table as a means of introduction, reptilian heroin dealers carrying pistols in their belts, ancient waiters who had seen gunfights in the basement when it was an opium and gambling den. Layers of crushed mosquitos decorated the walls and piles of unwashed plates were under the beds. I left my luggage in care of the sleepy, apathetic woman running the place and came back a month later to pick it up exactly where I left it. Ho hum, honkies -- you've got to love'em.
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