Bound for Vietnam (29 page)

Leaving this grand celebration, which was possibly a funeral, I continued on until I finally found the entrance to my alley. It was a warm night and all along this end of the street people had made themselves comfortable outdoors, cooking, eating, drinking or just sitting. As I walked into the alley, I could hear at least six different televisions and radios playing. The alleys were always full of noise and life, especially at night. And everyone’s life here was an open book. In the evening, men sat smoking on rattan couches, little children ran around playing and women nursed babies while cats, dogs and chooks foraged for food among their feet.

During the day and evening the house I lived in was never quiet. It was open to all and sundry and there was always music, laughter, singing and talking. And day or night the echoing bells of hawkers on bicycles, or with two baskets suspended on shoulder poles, rang up and down the alleys. All day I could hear the bird on the balcony next door, who lived his entire life in a small cage. Whenever he saw me he would call louder and I would talk to him. Bored out of his brain, poor little bird, he would then chirp happily back to me.

The entire façade of the house was completely uncovered to the alley by day. From its four metre frontage you stepped directly into a foyer that housed the family’s bikes and motorbikes. At night the house was enclosed by pulling a latticed wire grill across the alley front. Most of the surrounding houses were of the same design and in almost all of them the glow of a red lamp shining in front of an altar where incense burned before offerings could be seen. In the cool front rooms or the alley outside was where families lived – in public.

The living area of my house was a long, narrow space that had three large glassless windows covered by metal grilles in each side wall. A big 1960s vinyl couch and two matching armchairs with marvellous wooden arms stood on the tiled floor and wonderful wooden furniture was crammed shoulder to shoulder against all the walls. It was like living in an antique shop. At any time of the day I would be likely to find various members of the family asleep on the large wooden bed with only a sheet covering its board base. The feeling of being in a shop was further enhanced by the dishes, plates and vases that were packed solid, layer upon layer, on every level surface of the furniture. The most spectacular ornaments the room boasted were two stupendous Ching dynasty vases that loomed from the top of a carved chest. They shared their perch with two ponderous brass vases and three censors which were flanked by a pair of massive brass candle sticks. Stationed beside the phone in one corner was a lovely old wardrobe that was used as a notice board; numbers and messages were chalked on its front. A beautiful antique wooden-cased sessions clock hung on the wall. It was always an hour slow and it struck eleven for eight, but it was still going after 200 years. Several gaudily framed paintings decorated the walls, but the position of honour was given to a large picture of Uncle Ho. The altar with its red lamp, incense and offerings of fruit and flowers, reposed in a prominent corner facing the doorway.

The kitchen was a small, tiled space behind the living room where the family sat cross-legged on the floor to prepare and eat food. And well you might eat off their floor! It was continually being washed and no shoes came inside the house. The windows and doors of the living room and kitchen opened into a narrow passageway whose wall was the side of the neighbour’s house. Cooking was done against the wall in the open air on a coal burning brazier and a tap over a shallow trough in the tiled floor constituted the wash house. Here dishes, clothes, children – and probably big people too –were sluiced down and cleaned up.

The family was extended and elastic. There were children, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles and parents. A nephew, who was a university student, was the only member of the family with enough English for a conversation. One uncle was deaf and he had a deaf wife with a lovely, middle-aged face. The deaf uncle, although he spoke only with his hands, was very chatty. He talked more than the rest of the family put together and managed to communicate better with me than the non-English speakers. There was also a deaf mute child, a smiling girl with a constantly questioning look. The matriarch, Grandma, saved her false teeth for best. She never wore them in the mornings, only putting them in after lunch.

A tiny corkscrew metal staircase spiralled upwards to my room from the foyer in the front of the house. Some evenings I climbed up to the floor above me to talk to the fellows who lived there. Sitting under the shade of a big umbrella, on their charming tiled balcony, I would watch the sun set over the roof tops.

After a while I learned when it was time to shut my windows against the evening’s mozzie invasion. At dusk the smell of incense would waft into my room from the balcony of the house across the alley where an altar perched on a small stand. During the day the altar always had fresh flowers on it, and every evening joss sticks were lit. The balcony of the house adjoining mine was a rough lean-to that had been tacked on level with my room. It touched the roof of the house across the alley and the residents used to reach over and put their face washers and towels and their baskets of chillis and other vegetables, on the roof to dry in the sun. A permanent clothes-line ran the length of the balcony and I often looked up to see someone sitting, only a few feet away among the washing, eating their noodles and smiling at me.

There were some minor detractions: the electric power usually went off for an hour or two during the day, and I was sometimes woken in the middle of the night by next door’s dog routing imaginary burglars, or the neighbourhood cats having a sing-song on the roof. And the neighbour’s rooster had a faulty time mechanism. He not only crowed loud and long at day break, but at nine in the evening too!

One day I accidentally ended up at the War Crimes museum. In Vietnam I was often glad that I was not an American, but at this museum I cringed to think that Australia had been involved in the American War too. I had been trying to get to the Museum of Natural History, but the War Crimes Museum seemed to be the place that other tourists wanted to go, so the cyclo riders presumed that I did too. Or did they take me there on purpose to shame me? It worked. The American army did some horrible things in Vietnam, and the museum contained photographs of them doing it; and smiling and enjoying it. I know that crimes and atrocities were committed on both sides, but only South Vietnamese and American evils were pictured. I found the museum experience extremely traumatic. I was shocked almost to tears by what I saw. Apart from the massacre of innocent people, the senseless destruction of the forests and the land was appalling. It also made me realise that I was probably eating agent orange every day that I spent in Vietnam. Seventy-five million litres of defoliant were sprayed and 2.2 million hectares were defoliated. Two million civilians were killed, as were 1,350,000 soldiers in the North and South, approximately 64,000 Americans and 423 Australians. At the height of the war 1.2 million tonnes of bombs were dropped in 400,000 air attacks each year at a cost of fourteen billion dollars.

The grounds of the museum housed a Huey helicopter, an A37 plane, a menacing seven ton bomb, a tank and a guillotine that had harvested heads, first for the French and then for the Diem regime in the South. There was also a replica of the tiger cages used to punish prisoners in Southern detention camps. All of them were sickening illustrations of man’s inhumanity to man. The display inside the buildings included latter-day atrocities of the west, such as heavy metal music.

Another day I tried again to go to the Natural History Museum. I pointed it out on my map to the cyclo rider but, surprise, surprise, once more I ended up at the War Crimes Museum. On the footpath outside it I met Nigel from the Hanoi-Danang train again and we arranged to meet for dinner at Kym’s.

Cyclo riders would sometimes rip off tourists if they got the chance. Who could blame them? They are so poor and they think that we are all rolling in cash and it doesn’t matter to us. But you could get one who would look after you. Once I stopped to buy a coconut and the seller asked me for 3000 dong. My cyclo rider argued with him that the price was 2000 and that he shouldn’t cheat me. It seemed that if they decided you were their property, they took care of you.

Another time I negotiated a cheap price for the trip back to my guest-house. The rider had insisted that it was a long way and when I got there I realised that it had been a lot further than I had thought. I said, ‘It
was
a long way,’ and gave him twice the fare. He nearly fell off his bike with shock, but he was pleased. The next day I came across him again. You couldn’t help but get known to them, we westerners stick out like country lavatories among the neat Vietnamese. When I met yesterday’s cyclo rider again outside the post office. I said, ‘How much to Cholon?’ and he replied, ‘Oh, with you there is no problem. You will give me what is right.’ And from then on we saw a good deal of each other, to our mutual satisfaction. He took me to places I needed to find but had no directions for and often found me shops where people gave me better deals than the regular tourist places. Nye was, like so many Vietnamese I met, a genuine and friendly person.

I finally got to the Natural History Museum on my third try. Well, I was actually taken to the zoo, but it was next door. I had to pay 10,000 dong to see both the museum and the zoo, so I was obliged to get my money’s worth. For a person who doesn’t like to see anything in a cage, I had done a lot of zoo-going lately.

The museum was dark ochre in colour and looked like a cross between a pagoda and a temple. Inside it was very grand and decorated in an eastern style. Among the exhibits was some antique porcelain, but it was mostly Chinese. Regrettably I saw few good pieces in Vietnam. The best collections are in Jakarta and Taiwan.

In the grounds of the museum, which were also the botanical gardens, I rested on a comfortable stone bench under one of the great trees that stood on the grass. At one time these were the best botanical gardens in Asia and they were still enjoyable. There were small trees contained in large urns, little formal gardens that were spanned by willow bridges and pretty, wing-roofed stone pagodas with stairs on their four sides that were guarded by seated stone lions. It was Saturday and courting couples and families with children strolled the paths, but it was not crowded.

In the zoo, the animals were enclosed in various pens. A large beautiful space was allotted to a couple of dozen ibis, who seemed perfectly content among masses of trees and a stream that ran through mock mountains. The monkey cage was an enormous nineteenth century wonder; a lofty edifice of wrought-iron domes that were open to the sky and in which big trees had been left growing for the monkeys to climb. This prison did not look nearly as bad as that of the big cats who were crammed into minute spaces. The elephants, poor things, were all chained; the big ones in a cage and three young ones in a row outside. A couple of beautiful big black panthers, some bears and the exotic birds had the worst of it. They were all incarcerated two or three to small cages.

I appreciated the food, prices and service at Kym’s even more after I had been downtown and discovered the tourist ghetto that surrounds the expensive hotels. Walking along the High Street in this downtown tourist area, it was hard to pass some of the pathetic beggars. But some of the young women had the look of professionals. The first time an old lady held out her hat to me as I went by, I thought she was trying to sell it to me and walked on. It only hit me later that she had wanted help.

Outside one restaurant window I came upon a little boy of no more than six years old, who was hopefully pressing his box of Wrigley chewing gum up against the glass and trying to entice someone to come out and buy a packet. I sat on the window ledge and bought a couple. The wee one had a card pinned to his diminutive chest. It assured the world that he was a legitimate orphan and as such was entitled to support himself in this trade. Almost everywhere I went, beguiling tots flashed their Orphan Permits at me and sold me Wrigleys chewing gum. By the time I left Vietnam I had purchased enough gum to stock a shop.

One day I asked one of the little girls who sold postcards outside the post office why she wasn’t in school. I thought that she was playing the wag, but she replied that she had no money to pay for school.

In the shops of the high street you could buy all the consumer items you could possibly want, and more. I found things that I had not been able to get for love or money in China. And in this country where so many people didn’t have enough to eat, or were actually starving and many didn’t have work, merchandisers were trying to convince the populace that they needed air fresheners, toilet cleaners and all kinds of useless junk.

I saw some funny things on a few of Saigon’s many motorbikes. The Vietnamese could get up to four people on a bike. Sometimes children were placed on the handle bars, or on the petrol tank, and sometimes mother and father would ride with a child between them, as well as one in front of father. One day I was stopped in my tracks by a classic sight; a man steering a motorbike with one hand while he cradled a sleeping baby under the other arm. Another time I saw a young couple who were obviously in love. He was driving, she was riding pillion, but they were holding hands. Ladies driving, or riding pillion, protected their skin by wearing the kind of long, above the elbow, coloured cotton gloves that we would wear with a formal ball-gown.

I read that Hanoi and Saigon have the highest traffic accident death rate in the world. Once I saw the tangled wreck of a motorbike lying on its side in the middle of the road with one pathetic sandal underneath it. I shuddered. No one walked away from that. Crossing the street in peak hour traffic was also not without its dangers. I would get to the middle, breathe a sigh of relief that I had made it this far with all the legs and arms that I had left the curb with. Then, lulled into a false sense of security, I would suddenly be shocked out of my tranquillity by a blast, a screech and a rush of air as a motorbike came at me on the wrong side of the road!