Saigon 2 More pictures

Sleep is so profoundly healing. Every once in a while there is nothing better than an afternoon nap.

Saigon

Saigon

I’ll be taking the train north to Hanoi in a couple of days.  I am skipping Hue, and will probably regret it, but I have to leave Ho Chi Minh City later than planned because of train schedules, and the only fixed event in my itinerary is a flight from Hanoi to Kunming, which is already booked.

Saigon has 13 million people, and 7.5 million motorcycles.  If you have to superficially sum up this city that might be it.  For a foreigner, the primary skill you must learn for a short visit is how to cross the street.  On the main thoroughfares, waiting for a break in the traffic is pointless.  There are traffic lights, but, (with one or two exceptions  I have seen) there are no yellow lights and everyone starts about five seconds before the light changes anyway.  So you just have to walk in front of the speeding motorcycles, buses, and occasional cars, and never look at the drivers and riders - you can’t hesitate.  Hesitation can be fatal.  They are timing their moves based on you maintaining a predictable pace and direction.  And of course if you can join up with a group, that always seems to give you a better chance of making it to the other side of the road. Saigon is a city you can see most of (for the short 3-5 day visit) on foot.

map of downtown Saigon

I don’t want to get too wrapped up in disputable history, but for an American my age, Saigon has a significance that salted ruins of Carthage might have had for a Roman longing for the republic during Augusta’s time, or Moscow might have had for a Frenchman during the Bourbon Restoration of the 1830s; it is the place where everything changed, where it all went wrong.  In the fifties we were taught as kids that “America never lost a war” and never would because our heart was pure and intentions were noble. We were told so many lies about Vietnam in the early sixties, and the costs of those lies were 55,000 dead Americans, maybe three million dead Vietnamese. American society that has not been the same since. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead.  It isn’t even the past.”

The first morning after I arrived I went walking. The outside of Saigon proper, it is a commercial city, with little family-owned factories and warehouses, but the city itself is small, and like Portland Oregon, it is the junction of a couple of rivers.

It was Easter Sunday and I had no plan for my first day.  Strangely I wasn’t too jet lagged, but I think I did sleep some on the plane during the 25 hour trip from Portland. On the street in Saigon it was over 100⁰ F so after coffee and some great pastry, (as befitting a former French colony) I went looking for some sunscreen.  The entire city seems like a giant kiosk/bodega, which seemed to follow neighborhood patterns - some blocks everybody sells plumbing supplies, other shoes, etc. But I found my way to a street with lots of travel agencies, and eventually found some.

My Dad loved Saigon, he was a merchant seaman (Chief Engineer) and was over here a number of times during the Vietnam War, making big money for the time bringing ammo (double hazard pay mostly to Da Nang) and other stuff.  “Wide open” he used to say, but as I searched my memory of his stories all I remembered specifically was the long trip up the river to the city with jungle on both sides, from where the Viet Cong never fired on the ships. He said that in return, a certain percentage of the supplies were guaranteed to Charlie. I have no way of knowing if that was true.

I remember when I was in high school, and was much more conservative in my political outlook than I am now, I asked him if we were winning. I remember we had at least one guy from our high school who died over there, and several more were on there way, while several from my class soon would be.  Anyway, he said we were getting beat, and would never ever win there. He drank with officers and soldiers in Da Nang and they told him horror stories of whole platoons getting wiped out. He didn’t want me anywhere near the place, and gave me some sage advice as to how to go to the end of the draft line at the end of the year (“Drop your deferment” he said just before Christmas, 1969, so my low (50 something) draft number would be before the following years crop of cannon fodder.)  At the time my grades freshman year in college didn’t bode well for a long stay in academia.

The following spring was Cambodia and Kent State and I did my best to express my discontent with American actions and policy, (recorded elsewhere). That Spring 1970  semester ended early and we all got passing grades  (so we would have leave sleepy Lawrence Kansas for summer break before we burnt it down). So you can say that the war ensured I would I make it through the first year of college.

Anyway, Dad told me he loved Saigon and its beautiful the women in their slit skirts, and the easy-going colonial, tropical atmosphere, even during the war. He said he just missed being blown up after leaving a  floating bar in the middle of the river by a few minutes, but I have never been able to confirm when or how that happened.  

So, I was craving shade, and found a little park with some big trees, and a place to sit.  What I would subsequently discover that as an older western man, walking in a park, a market or near a museum, that there would be many old Vietnamese men with well practiced self introductions. I was called over by an old man sitting on a bench.

“Hey, come, I show you!” It was my first morning of my first day in Saigon.  “You fight in 1973? What outfit?”

No, I was a student. Protest.” I pantomimed waving a sign.

He smiles.  “Good. No more war.  We all live in peace. Americans the best.  Here look! This was me.”

He shows me a picture of a young man maybe mid-30s. He had a mustache and reminded me of Colonel Ky, the “dashing” South Vietnamese Air Force Colonel who was in power for a while in 1967 or so.  I think I remember he ended up running a liquor store in Miami.

“Henry Cabot Lodge!” It took him a few tries saying it before I understood. “1955, I work for Colonel P- (French). Then Westmoreland.  I run the motor pool for Westmoreland. Chevrolet.”

“What’s your name?” I interrupted.

“Toch Dey,” I think he said.   He goes off with some French words I don’t understand. “No money, no pussy!” He cackles.  “Sucky fucky. How old are you?”

“65.”

“So young! I am 87. Here look.”  He has some postcards -

“1974 - Vietminh come. 1968 - Blow up embassy. Here take postcards.  

I took them. “How much?”

“American dollars?  Not much.”

I hand him two. “Enough?”

“Maybe more. My wife needs medicine.” I give him two more.

“You be careful - They steal your money.”

Later another one, closer to my age, comes up on motorcycle. He pointed at the back.  “Get on, Let’s go, I take you.  Very safe.”

No, I say, I want to walk, remembering Toch Dey’s warning.

“Look!” He shows me a leather bound notebook, lot’s of testimonials from satisfied Americans.

“I need the exercise.”

“No, no, I’ll show you.” I shake my head. “You fight?” he asked.

“No. Student.” I do my sign waving dance.

He frowns. “This government treats my family very badly.” Still he persists. “I take you to war museum.” I shake my head and walk away.

A guy offers me a coconut with a straw. “How much?”

“1,2,3”

“What?”

“He cuts the coconut. “50,000.”

“What?” I go to walk away.  He pouts, because he has ruined a coconut for me.  I relent, give him the 50,000 dong. (a little over $2, outrageous!)

Not many people smoke here, which is pretty cool.  Cigarettes are available, but it appears to be an open black market. Everyone wears a helmet when riding a motorcycle. (except for the little children riding on the gastank.)

Anyway here are some pictures.

Retirement

I have recently read two books by well-known authors about retirement. They are The Great Leader by Jim Harrison and Condominium by John D. McDonald. Harrison is most famous for Legends of the Fall, which was made into a Brad Pitt movie, and which I have not seen yet. Nor have I read anything else by Harrison, although I have been well aware of his reputation for some time. I guess there was something about Harrison that has scared me, even as I filtered the praise of his work through my own filter for books I eventually plan to read. I'll come back to Harrison, because I am still trying to figure out what I think about his novel.

McDonald is easier to discuss. McDonald is rightly famous for his Travis McGee mystery series of books. Travis McGee was the guy that soon-to-be Florida transplants imagined themselves as. McGee lived on a low rent, but very well maintained 52-foot houseboat called the Busted Flush, (won in a poker game) , lived high by his wits, and was a speaker of complete sentences with a mid-century American competence, a type that we are likely never to see again. He was a retired salvage consultant, occasionally salvaging stolen wealth from bad guys for a piece of the take.

McDonald's novel Condominium was written in the late 70's so most of the residents are from the World War II generation, and have had some success in life, but are still filled with angst about the threat of losing all their investments: Most of their wealth is in their condominium. Condominium life in Florida in the 70s, was a bizarre scene, where the newly minted geezers were stored in giant concrete chests of drawers, with little balconies, that (in the good one's) overlooked the water. The novel is set on the West Coast, near a city like Tampa, called Fiddler Key. It could be St. Pete Beach, a place I know because my parents spent their 'mid-retirement' years there.

The Retirement Experience for my parents has to be seen as a success, at least now, ten years after their deaths which occurred nearly within the same year. They worked hard, saved their money and saw their NJ home appreciate to the point that they were able to sell it and buy a beautiful two bedroom bungalow with a perfect sawgrass lawn and an orange tree. Or maybe it was mango. That part of their retirement lasted about ten years. Mom sailed, Dad played golf and drank. They had parties, joined the Yacht club, gossiped, flirted with the other 60 somethings, and traveled in the State Rooms on cargo ships, where my Dad could shoot the breeze with his former shipmates, and Mom could be the belle of the ball. They went ashore into exotic, now too dangerous ports, and had some real adventures.

Then, in their early seventies, they started to slow down. It became too much to take care of the orange, (or mango) tree and the lawn, so they moved into a condominium on an inlet on the Tampa Bay. This was around the time McDonald wrote Condominium, so you see I have a bit of insight into the setting.

The story is set around the shoddy construction and shady business practices of the phony corporations that 'owned” the Condos, (the real owner was a shaky bank). The tragedies of falling condo resale prices are juxtaposed against a coming Hurricane. The people are so familiar and yet, so different than their children, (me), who are retiring today that it struck me as worth examining. McDonald catches people in the act of getting old. Some are getting sick, and some are finally beginning to live when it is almost too late. Sex is tacky, usually in the afternoon when the betrayed spouse is taking a nap, and dark conspiracies are hatched over poolside card games, plotting the overthrow of condo board members who proposed new rules that are denounced as stupid if not communistic. Antisemitism is rampant, and blacks are nearly non-existent except as cleaning crews. The maintenance superintendent is feared by all, as he has to power to decide when and how much repair to the units gets done. When I would make my Christmas pilgrimages to visit, it was always a trip down the rabbit hole. The old rules of the family were void because Mom and Dad were now part of a new community, a cult almost,  where the greatest sin imaginable was to leave your wet bathing suit hanging over the balcony. Many had grown up in tenements during the 30s and the sight of clothes drying on the fire escape was a terrible memory, one that brought back the poverty of their Depression Era upbringing. You don't fuck with the Condo Board.

"No flip-flops in the clubhouse." "Nixon got a raw deal." "Six-month CDs (certificates of deposit) pay 12-15%." "You can set your watch to the 4 PM afternoon thunderstorm." "Somebody's been drinking my scotch!"

I secretly prayed for a hurricane during my summer visits.

McDonald's Condominium was made into a TV movie with lots of B-actors. McDonald was a brilliant man, who's analysis of the financial structure of condominium construction and the engineering of building them was worth the read for me. But like the Condos themselves, he had too many characters in this novel. The part that detracted the read for me was the ordinary lives he illustrated - they were too close to real life, an affluent version of Hobbes' dictum that life is nasty, brutish and short.  It takes a special writer to make ordinary interesting, and McDonald misses it with this book. Unless you are looking for some old-people-in-the-seventies nostalgia, I would not recommend this novel – any of McDonald's Travis McGee books are a better read, even if the fiction is more fictitious.

So – lesson learned, don't move to a Florida Condo to retire. Check.

Jim Harrison also writes about retirement in The Great Leader. Harrison a Charles Bukowski-like figure, who seemed to do his writing while drunk, and who recently died, in his late 70s. The Great Leader  is a cult leader whose followers are pre-pubescent girls who he initiates into the cult by having sex with them. Sunderson is a recently retired cop using his new free time to bring him down. But on nearly every page, Sunderson is mooning over the bent-over tushes of every woman who turns her back to him. He is a basket case, divorced of course, whose lonely predicament is his own fault on every account, and he knows it better than anyone.

There is very little plot, no transition, no continuity in The Great Leader. But of course, I have yet to discern any of that in 'real life' either. You get the feeling that Harrison might have actually written those transition parts, or at least thought about them, but didn't keep because it bores him, so he just jumps to the good parts. He gets beat up, has drunken, consensual sex with a lesbian who is associated with the Great Leader, and muses about the life he has led and the books he has read, and hunting, dogs, and the land. His land, like his people, is the land that others find ugly, trashed, clear-cut, and mined over, but he is in love with it anyway. He finds beauty in the low end of ordinary.

He is chasing a guy who is much the same as he is, only worse because the Great Leader is without remorse. Sunderson's life is nothing but remorse, and you feel that it is the lack of remorse that is his great white whale.   His regret in part consists of  his dreams of three naked women in his bed, even as he describes with frightening accuracy the mechanics of his own sexual decline. His dreams bring him a kind of comfort because they bring the only justice he knows to exist.  He is a cop after all. 

So what did these two books tell me about retirement, a state into which I have recently entered?

They teach me retirement is just like the rest of life, I am on my own, with no map, only a definite destination.

Retirement

I have recently read two books by well-known authors about retirement. They are The Great Leader by Jim Harrison and Condominium by John D. McDonald. Harrison is most famous for Legends of the Fall, which was made into a Brad Pitt movie, and which I have not seen yet. Nor have I read anything else by Harrison, although I have been well aware of his reputation for some time. I guess there was something about Harrison that has scared me, even as I filtered the praise of his work through my own filter for books I eventually plan to read. I'll come back to Harrison, because I am still trying to figure out what I think about his novel.

McDonald is easier to discuss. McDonald is rightly famous for his Travis McGee mystery series of books. Travis McGee was the guy that soon-to-be Florida transplants imagined themselves as. McGee lived on a low rent, but very well maintained 52-foot houseboat called the Busted Flush, (won in a poker game) , lived high by his wits, and was a speaker of complete sentences with a mid-century American competence, a type that we are likely never to see again. He was a retired salvage consultant, occasionally salvaging stolen wealth from bad guys for a piece of the take.

McDonald's novel Condominium was written in the late 70's so most of the residents are from the World War II generation, and have had some success in life, but are still filled with angst about the threat of losing all their investments: Most of their wealth is in their condominium. Condominium life in Florida in the 70s, was a bizarre scene, where the newly minted geezers were stored in giant concrete chests of drawers, with little balconies, that (in the good one's) overlooked the water. The novel is set on the West Coast, near a city like Tampa, called Fiddler Key. It could be St. Pete Beach, a place I know because my parents spent their 'mid-retirement' years there.

The Retirement Experience for my parents has to be seen as a success, at least now, ten years after their deaths which occurred nearly within the same year. They worked hard, saved their money and saw their NJ home appreciate to the point that they were able to sell it and buy a beautiful two bedroom bungalow with a perfect sawgrass lawn and an orange tree. Or maybe it was mango. That part of their retirement lasted about ten years. Mom sailed, Dad played golf and drank. They had parties, joined the Yacht club, gossiped, flirted with the other 60 somethings, and traveled in the State Rooms on cargo ships, where my Dad could shoot the breeze with his former shipmates, and Mom could be the belle of the boat. They went ashore into exotic, now too dangerous ports, and had some real adventures.

Then, in their early seventies, they started to slow down. It became too much to take care of the orange, (or mango) tree and the lawn, so they moved into a condominium on an inlet on the Tampa Bay. This was around the time McDonald wrote Condominium, so you see I have a bit of insight into the setting.

The story is set around the shoddy construction and shady business practices of the phony corporations that 'owned” the Condos, (the real owner was a shaky bank). The tragedies of falling condo resale prices are juxtaposed against a coming Hurricane. The people are so familiar and yet, so different than their children, (me), who are retiring today that it struck me as worth examining. McDonald catches people in the act of getting old. Some are getting sick, and some are finally beginning to live when it is almost too late. Sex is tacky, usually in the afternoon when the betrayed spouse is taking a nap, and dark conspiracies are hatched over poolside card games, plotting the overthrow of condo board members who proposed new rules that are denounced as stupid if not communistic. Antisemitism is rampant, and blacks are nearly non-existent except as cleaning crews. The maintenance superintendent is feared by all, as he has to power to decide when and how much repair to the units gets done. When I would make my Christmas pilgrimages to visit, it was always a trip down the rabbit hole. The old rules of the family were void because Mom and Dad were now part of a new community, a cult almost, where the greatest sin imaginable was to leave your wet bathing suit hanging over the balcony. Many had grown up in tenements during the 30s and the sight of clothes drying on the fire escape was a terrible memory, one that brought back the poverty of their Depression Era upbringing. You don't fuck with the Condo Board.

"No flip-flops in the clubhouse." "Nixon got a raw deal." "Six-month CDs (certificates of deposit) pay 12-15%." "You can set your watch to the 4 PM afternoon thunderstorm." "Somebody's been drinking my scotch!"

I secretly prayed for a hurricane during my summer visits.

McDonald's Condominium was made into a TV movie with lots of B-actors. McDonald was a brilliant man, whose analysis of the financial structure of condominium construction and the engineering of building them was worth the read for me. But like the Condos themselves, he had too many characters in this novel. The part that detracted the read for me was the ordinary lives he illustrated - they were too close to real life, an affluent version of Hobbes' dictum that life is nasty, brutish and short. It takes a special writer to make ordinary interesting, and McDonald misses it with this book. Unless you are looking for some old-people-in-the-seventies nostalgia, I would not recommend this novel – any of McDonald's Travis McGee books are a better read, even if the fiction is more fictitious.

So – lesson learned, don't move to a Florida Condo to retire. Check.

Jim Harrison also writes about retirement in The Great Leader. Harrison a Charles Bukowski-like figure, who seemed to do his writing while drunk, and who recently died, in his late 70s. The Great Leader is a cult leader whose followers are pre-pubescent girls who he initiates into the cult by having sex with them. Sunderson is a recently retired cop using his new free time to bring him down. But on nearly every page, Sunderson is mooning over the bent-over tushes of every woman who turns her back to him. He is a basket case, divorced of course, whose lonely predicament is his own fault on every account, and he knows it better than anyone.

There is very little plot, no transition, no continuity in The Great Leader. But of course, I have yet to discern any of that in 'real life' either. You get the feeling that Harrison might have actually written those transition parts, or at least thought about them, but didn't keep because it bores him, so he just jumps to the good parts. He gets beat up, has drunken, consensual sex with a lesbian who is associated with the Great Leader, and muses about the life he has led and the books he has read, and hunting, dogs, and the land. His land, like his people, is the land that others find ugly, trashed, clear-cut, and mined over, but he is in love with it anyway. He finds beauty in the low end of ordinary.


He is chasing a guy who is much the same as he is, only worse because the Great Leader is without remorse. Sunderson's life is nothing but remorse, and you feel that it is the lack of remorse that is his great white whale. His regret in part consists of his dreams of three naked women in his bed, even as he describes with frightening accuracy the mechanics of his own sexual decline. His dreams bring him a kind of comfort because they bring the only justice he knows to exist. He is a cop after all.


So what did these two books tell me about retirement, a state into which I have recently entered?

They teach me retirement is just like the rest of life, I am on my own, with no map, only a definite destination.