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Mekong Review
Fall for Saigon
Connla Stokes
Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon
“Old
Paris is no more (the form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than
the human heart)”
In Ho Chi Minh City a year ago, the last of the central bia hoi
joints on Thi Sach, where colourful characters drank cheap watery beers
from morning till night, bit the dust. On its final evening, a bunch of
expats all took a break from drinking IPA and craft cocktails to toast
the end of an era, exaggerating how often they went and how much they’d
miss it.
Meanwhile, increasingly on social media, postcard-worthy images of the
swinging ’60s are being shared, and Vietnamese, many of whom were born
after 1975, write longingly of the quiet, quaint scenes. But was it ever
so? When the writer Mary McCarthy came in 1967, she described it as an
“American city, a very shoddy West Coast one”. Frank Snepp, the author
of Decent Interval, went further a few years later, when
confronted by a “grimy imitation of Dodge City” where cashed-up horny
GIs had the run of the place, eating burgers made of water buffalo meat
at girly bars. “Locals had either withdrawn or were cooking up schemes
to profit. Shabbiness clung to the city like a scab. It reeked of
urine.”
Snepp also came across a returning US army vet in ’71, reminiscing of
the long-gone days of 1965, when there were “more tree-lined boulevards,
the best Chinese restaurants in Southeast Asia, and equally superior
brothels”. Not that the brothels had gone. Indeed, according to a memoir
by Scott Laderman, recently published in the New York Times, when
the last US combat forces withdrew in 1973, the director of the National
Tourist Office of South Vietnam was considering the promotion of sex
tourism to boost arrivals flying into Saigon. Many people wanted to
visit, the official told a reporter, not to see the mountains, or for
the shopping, but “to try, just once, our girls”.
If that’s not depressing enough for you, let’s fast-forward to late
1979, when a chap by the name of Gabriel García Márquez arrived to find
“an enormous city, lively and dangerous, with almost four million
inhabitants, who go about the streets at all hours because they have
nothing else to do”. The Yankee occupation, wrote Uncle Gabo, had
created an artificial paradise, and the cost of this delirium was
stupefying: “360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000
prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculars and more than a
million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to completely
rehabilitate into a new society”. All of which makes me better
understand why a generation of Vietnamese leaders aspire for Singaporean
levels of order, cleanliness, modernity and yes, let’s not forget
business and economic growth: they lived through the bad old days.
The powers that be are also not the only ones who hope that this
megalopolis-in-the-making will one day have the look and feel of a
“world-class city”. Ask any taxi driver or street cleaner; they won’t
see shimmering modernities made of concrete and glass cynically. They
believe it’s for the betterment of the municipality, and if the city
gets richer, so will they, or at least their kids.
Even so, development is a thorny issue. In the introduction to Luxury
and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon, Yale
anthropologist Erik Harms writes, “City residents simultaneously marvel
at and curse urban development, and in the process they often share the
planners’ desire to bring order to chaos by building utopian projects,
even as they often disagree with how the projects are implemented and
even as they fight for greater compensation when they are forced to give
up land for development projects”.
Luxury Rubble
underscores the human costs of master-planned, profit-driven urban
development while also reminding us of the scale and complexity of the
expansion of the city, which needs to better accommodate somewhere
around 10 million people (14 million by 2025). Old Saigon may monopolise
our memories — real or imagined — but it is increasingly a kernel set
within a sprawling, monstrous twenty-first-century city.
Harms’ book focusses on two urban developments, Phu My Hung, which has
already been developed in the south, representing “luxury”, and Thu
Thiem, which has required the eviction of 14,600 households to make way
for a “sustainable, dynamic, mixed-use central business district”.
Regarding the latter, Harms dug up a 1973 article by Gus Wright, a
columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, who wrote: “On my desk
is a beautiful picture of how Saigon might look someday. I keep my
fingers crossed that it will happen.” He was looking at a proposed
master plan for redeveloping Thu Thiem, a “2,500-acre godsend cradled in
a loop of the Saigon River … that begs to become the centrepiece of the
Saigon of tomorrow”.
That short spiel is enough to make you long for an imagined alternate
reality, in which wars, divisions and impoverishment hadn’t thwarted the
development of Thu Thiem thirty or forty years ago, sparing District 1
from today’s overcrowding, chronic congestion and structural implosion —
not to mention the quixotic footpath-clearing campaign being led by the
district’s deputy chairman, who is revelling in his role as the sheriff
who will transform this dirty old town into a “little Singapore”. In his
mind, that’s a euphemism for “a super clean, orderly, developed city”.
Others, however, will hear the words “little Singapore” and envisage a
sterile, uptight city where a pint of beer costs $10, and wonder if it’s
time to move to Havana. Well, I certainly do.
When I moved from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City in 2012, the country was in
the midst of a financial crisis, triggered by the collapse of a property
bubble and the arrest of high-level bank executives who had exposed a
malfunctioning financial sector, widespread macroeconomic vulnerability
and colossal levels of debt. I was following my partner who — in a sign
of the times — had been transferred from a financial institution’s
investment wing to its taskforce dealing with toxic debt. As a layabout
man of letters in search of the easy life, none of this bothered me too
much. With its wider roads, my new place of residence felt a little
roomier compared to the capital. The traffic was less feral. The weather
more bearable. With rosy reflection, I even like to think that in those
good old days I enjoyed the sight and sound of each and every thunderous
downpour that broke up the otherwise incessant heat.
With nothing much to do by day I spluttered around on my old Vespa PX
trying to familiarise myself with the city, its people and dialect. With
even less to do by night, I sat at quan nhau (local bar and grill
joints) with the few people I knew, drinking our way through crates of
bottled beer and snacking on southern dishes. At that time, a number of
unfinished high-rises loomed over the Saigon River and central
thoroughfares, symbolising the economic and real estate development
inertia that had fallen on the city.
But now the economy is back in gear, and development is once again set
to “rampant”, so fall for the anatomy of this city at your peril, for
who knows what will make the cut. From the razing of heritage buildings
to the accelerated rates of gentrification and “modernisation”, Ho Chi
Minh City is in the midst of a dizzying makeover — and for now, in many
places, is something of a mess. Old Saigon? If we’re to believe the hype
— promulgated across hoardings that line the streets — she will be no
more. Whoever sticks around will soon be sealed in a sanitised vertical
suburbia. The view from their high-rise apartment block? Another
high-rise apartment block.
Hence all of the nostalgia that currently renovates our memories of what
has been torn down and lost, and even what “it” meant to us. The facade
of the now flattened Tax Centre, for example, is already being recreated
by artists, not as its unattractive, tacky 2014 self, but as a much more
romanticised, previous incarnation from the 1920s or 1960s. Nobody,
however, reminisces about the shops inside that nobody shopped in any
more.
But is “old Saigon” disappearing? Is it gone? “Each time I land in the
city, I invariably look for what is different because it has undergone
tremendous change,” writes Annette Kim, whose book Sidewalk City
was inspired partly by being unable to point out to friends what was so
wonderful about Ho Chi Minh City from a map. “Still, I am usually
pleasantly surprised to find how much of the city’s charms have
remained.”
Just as French colonials hyped up Saigon as the “Paris of the East” with
its Haussmann-style boulevards and replicas of Parisian buildings, Ho
Chi Minh City is hyped up as more of a futuristic, vertiginous financial
powerhouse than it really is. The urban network of alleyways still
accommodates about 85 per cent of city dwellers in inner districts,
according to Gilbert-Pham. So, if you’re seeking to get a sense of old
Saigon, all you need to do really is duck down an alleyway or side
street.
In that way, we might conclude plus ça change. When the British
travel writer Norman Lewis came in 1950, he was initially underwhelmed,
mocking the tag “Paris of the East” (might as well call Kingston,
Jamaica, the Oxford of the West Indies, he sniped): “Its inspiration has
been purely commercial. There has been no audacity of architecture, no
great harmonious conception of planning. Saigon is a pleasant,
colourless, and characterless French provincial town, squeezed onto a
strip of delta-land in the South China Sea …”
Impatient with the showpiece Saigon and its westernised welcome, Lewis
“plunged into a side-street”, and if he were kicking around District 1
today, we safely assume he wouldn’t be bothered with the skyscrapers
that supposedly define the city in 2017. Instead, he’d be perambulating
down alleyways and side streets, perhaps concluding that the most
fundamental elements of the city remain the same. As a relatively young,
multicultural place that has hosted foreigners and migrants since its
inception, and as the ultimate and only Vietnamese melting pot, Ho Chi
Minh City is exactly what it’s always been: a barrelling, motley and
variegated centre of commerce. Old Saigon is still here, even if its
form continues to change, more quickly, alas! than ever before, and more
than a human heart can bear. |