Puterbaugh ESSAY Living in the Tenses in Saigon by Andrew Lam The Puterbaugh series is a special feature sponsored by the WLT Puterbaugh Endowment. Learn more about the biennial Puterbaugh Literary Festival at puterbaughfestival.org. N ot far from where I live now, a kilometer or so, there’s that dock from which my father, a lieutenant general in the South Vietnamese army, boarded a crowded naval ship on the day that Saigon fell and set out to sea. A little further out, in District 10, there stands my childhood home in which I once lived with my family and our three dogs, and from which my mother, sister, and I fled to America, two days ahead of my father. I have not seen the house since I moved back. I have driven past the outer walls of my old school, Le Qui Don, and the nearby, now dilapidated country club—Le Cercle Sportif—in whose smallest (and coldest) of three swimming pools I lazed away many a happy sun-drenched afternoons as a child. But I haven’t found the resolve to enter either club or school. I see them all so clearly in memory, in dreams and reveries, having written about my losses and gains in books and radio commentaries back in America, that it felt like an act of betrayal were I to go to any of these places in actuality. I tell you all this because, while I have come back to the city in which I was born, I feel as if I live in yet another, a modern metropolis running on steroids, and not at all the sleepy town of my childhood memories. And it is rushing toward some complex cosmopolitan destiny at a breakneck speed. PHOTO: ROBERT METZ/UNSPLASH 48 WLT SUMMER 2019 It’s been a long, long time since I called Saigon my home. Still, here I am, steep in middle age, tentatively, trying to take up roots once more. And in Saigon, I discover that I live in many different time zones all at once. In the present: an energetic city where moneymaking is the name of the game. In it, I am a mere newcomer , an émigré of sorts, who needs to build new connections, and learn new idioms—the ropes. Despite knowing the language I struggle to navigate this enormous city, which constantly expands and changes. The various districts, neighborhoods, its young and fast-shifting cultures—I try to understand the complex society and various social strata that weren’t here before. The pop stars, the novels, the TV series, the new films, the social-media stars—I know nothing of them. Still, I try to listen to its rhythm, the conversation, the lyrics. Slowly, very slowly, I make inroads. More of the present tense: You can see it outside my window—high-rises lining the river, gleaming and shining at night like a promise. You can also hear it: day and night, the din of construction, the roar of the motorcycles. If I once contrasted backward Vietnam to modern America, I now need to compare a new modern world versus an aging modern world; these days the two countries seemingly run on parallel tracks. In a coffee shop where I go in the morning to write, I spend quite a bit of time eavesdropping. The phrase một tỷ is mentioned the most. And it means one billion dong, around US$42,000. It is often used to describe prices of real estate, as in “that property is worth about $70 billion and you need to get it before it goes up.” It follows that the other word is bán—or to sell. “Bán mau em oi”—“Sell it quickly, Sister!” The middle-aged lady tells this to her friend, so I wrote it down on my laptop. “Don’t wait. It will become lukewarm next week.” Property is the name of the game here. That is, buy, buy, sell, sell is the point. Indeed, the majority of the conversation, one way or another, somehow has to do with money, and money usually involves real estate dealings. “Let me tell you how to get him...
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Mar 18, 2020
Angelique Nairn 
Open Access
