Cu Chi tunnel guy

For many years (since my mid-teens) I’d heard about & read about & wondered about Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) – called Saigon then & still commonly called that today – and I had finally arrived. We started off at a well-known war site: the Cu Chi tunnels, located some 70 km northwest of the city. This was a network of tunnels – by some estimates, 250 kilometers long – serving as underground cover, & hiding a host of stealthy military activities (including weapons caches, meeting rooms, hospitals, and kitchens). It was initially dug during the French occupation in the 1940s, and expanded during the Vietnam War era of the 1960s. The tunnels frustrated American forces, and U.S. Army ‘tunnel rats’ had the extremely treacherous job of going down into them to search for – and eliminate – the enemy. Today, the open sections have been expanded a bit – for larger Western tourists like me! – but I can attest that the tight, narrow tunnels are scary enough, even without having to worry about booby traps, getting shot, or other wartime perils!

Other notable war-related sites in HCMC were the Reunification Palace (formerly the Presidential Palace), whose gates were crashed by North Vietnamese tanks on April 30, 1975 during the Fall of Saigon; and the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the Museum of American War Crimes). Especially notable in the latter was the Requiem Gallery, featuring photos taken by 134 journalists (of 11 nationalities) killed during the war.

But Saigon today is about much more than history & war, and we took full advantage of that….. by dining at some incredible Vietnamese restaurants, such as Nhà Hàng Ngon. I’ve really become quite a fan of Vietnamese food – and the coffee as well! Another interesting site was Cho Lon, Saigon’s Chinatown….. & a famous market & shopping area. We visited the Thien Hau Pagoda there, one dedicated to Mazu, the Chinese goddess of the sea…. yes, the very same goddess found in Nanjing’s Jinghai Temple (noted in my Zheng He posting). You can see that the incense was thick & heavy, & we bought some of their long-lasting, multi-day incense spirals that hang from the rafters, holding petitions for good luck & other necessities.

Air quality at Thien Hau Pagoda

On this part of the Vietnam trip I was reading the quintessential Saigon novel: Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. It’s truly amazing how prescient this 1955 book was…. & while the symbolism is very upfront – the cynical European journalist Fowler; the naïve, idealistic American aid-worker Pyle (looking for a ‘Third Force’ beyond colonialism and communism); and the beautiful, complaisant Vietnamese Phuong – it nonetheless is an extremely well-written and fascinating look into an interim (i.e., essentially post-French, pre-American) era. It’s really a shame that Americans didn’t learn much from such knowledgeable views.

Academics have had a field day examining Greene’s views about innocence vs. experience… a theme which runs through much of his work. Upon returning to Nanjing, I re-watched the 2002 movie starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser & Vietnamese actress Do Thi Hai Yen. Caine received a well-deserved ‘Best Actor’ Oscar nomination for his world-weary Fowler, & the movie – and its Saigon settings — was certainly very entertaining. Greene had disavowed a 1958 film adaptation of the book (a gung-ho, pro-American, Audie Murphy version), and the later movie was certainly more closely attuned to his novel. Pico Iyer’s comments on NPR about the novel are really spot on: The Quiet American has a “disquieting resonance,” he notes, but leaves plenty of room for complexity & dissonance: “The old in their wisdom, as he writes elsewhere, sometimes envy the folly of the young.”