Vietnam is Ghostly

My friends Vinnie and Tina and I weren’t afraid to visit Vietnam. Just the same, we were haunted by ghosts familiar to most Americans of our generation. As children during the '60s, we heard about Saigon as a scary place. We arrived for the first time at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport and instantly had flashbacks to news footage narrated by Walter Cronkite. This airstrip is of course the same one where so many American soldiers formed their first impression of Southeast Asia forty years ago.

Our first impression was of motorbikes. The streets can’t hold them all. People drive them as if they were boats. They flow onto the sidewalks, in all directions—upstream, downstream, into the eddy—as if following the tide or the current rather than the painted lines on the streets. We saw no sign of anyone in uniform; there were only people who tried their best to make some order of the chaos by standing in a central place and making what looked like tai chi movements.

Prayer helps when crossing the road on foot. “Just be Moses,” advises one guidebook. You have to trust that the surges of helmeted riders will part and pour around you. I’m told that in Hanoi things are even more chaotic.

We exorcised our ghosts with a visit to the War Remnants Museum and some walks along the wide boulevards. The old notions didn’t take long to break down: watching people walk their dogs or play hacky sack in the park made the place feel anything but war-torn. Just the same, we didn’t stay in town long. The hum of Hồ Chí Minh City wasn’t what we had come for.

Soon we were in the countryside, bicycling along long straight riverside roads on which motorbikes were in the minority. In an hour I estimated we saw something like 500 bicycles, 200 motorbikes, a dozen trucks, and only three passenger cars. This was the Mekong Delta, where waterways are much more common than pavement.

Two of my stereotypes did hold up in this part of the country. First was the cone hat. It was nearly universal among people on the road. It wasn’t our bikes that made us stand out—it was our bike helmets! The other stereotype was the áo dài, or traditional women’s costume. They were everywhere, especially on teenage girls biking home from school.

Our guide, Tiger Nguyen, provided the bridge between the Vietnam of our imaginations and the genuine article of today. He was born after the war ended, but both his father and grandfather were veterans of the South Vietnamese army, and he wasn’t shy about echoing their anti-communist rhetoric. Tiger wasn’t shy about much: he loved to talk and had an amazingly wide English vocabulary.

Over the course of two days, from Saigon to Châu Đốc, Tiger shared his opinion on subjects ranging from government corruption to the superior play of the national soccer team. He also loved jokes of all kinds, and had great comic timing. We came away with many new impressions of modern Vietnam (Cần Thơ seemed to me more capitalist than Chicago), as well as countless glimpses of the timeless (at the Cái Răng floating market, the produce du jour is hung on flagpoles in the bow of the boats that sell it).