A Room With a View

My new apartment is up on the 16th floor, which gives me a fine view of downtown Saigon:

The first thing I noticed: no skyscrapers to speak of. I'm living in one of the tallest buildings in the city and it's only 17 floors high. THE tallest building is the Saigon Trade Center and that reaches 33 stories tall and is still shorter than the Washington Monument.

Saigon is a city of about 7 million people and the amount of available space is rapidly declining. Logically the only place to go is up, but development of high-rises and other tall buildings has been very slow.

Why that is I couldn't really say; it may have something to do with inflation or the very high cost of real estate.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

I found an apartment with a great view of the city. It's not the nicest building but it's a pretty good location and the apartment itself can be made nice and it has a bathroom, kitchen, living room, and spare bedroom/study.

My landlord demanded one month's rent up front plus two months' rent for the security deposit, for a total of $1200, or 20,000,000 VND. In cash.

It is difficult to exaggerate what a momentous sum $1200 US is in Vietnam. That's roughly the national per capita GDP. Demanding it in cash is like asking for a suitcase full of money.

But, when in Rome...

From the beggining, there was trouble. The money I thought would be in my account on Sunday wasn't there on Monday. Then I couldn't take out enough from the ATM on Monday. The I still couldn't take out enough on Tuesday. The nadir was having my Vietnamese motorbike driver take me from bank to bank seeing if they would dispense the necessary cash (they did not).

Finally I had my Vietnamese fixer show up in the middle up the night with the last 4 million VND. I was finally able to pay him back today.

So I survived. But it wasn't easy.

All's Fair...

The other day I was wandering around Diamond Plaza, Saigon's swankiest shopping mall, when I noticed the following advertisement pasted onto the wall:

Goodness, that's an unusual-looking Vietnamese woman; she rather looks as if she's been bleached. What's she selling?:

Ah.

I can't say I wasn't warned. Most of the women here wear hats, gloves, and masks when they go outside - partly because of the pollution but also to avoid a suntan. My own pallor has gotten a number of admiring comments from women (men don't seem to care whether they tan or not).

At heart, this is a class issue and not a racial one. Yes, Vietnamese people want to look 'white' - but white as in the literal color and not as in Caucasian. This stems from the agricultural nature of society, where only the rich and leisurely can afford to stay out of the sun.

In one sense I suppose it's unfortunate that people feel the need to alter their appearance so drastically to feel beautiful, on the other hand people in the West do the exact same thing in the other direction, going to tanning salons and giving themselves skin cancer on the beach.

I am curious, though: as a practical matter, wouldn't a whitening deodorant (assuming it comes in powder form) make a person look uneven and streaky?

1 Class Down...

300 to go?

A few days ago I taught my first genuine English class. Unfortunately, due to this being the transitional week between summer school and regular school, some genius decided to schedule three 45-minute 6th-grade classes in a row. With the same students. And that's what I had to teach.

It could've been worse. I actually taught for the first session and by then their attention was pretty much used up, so I played some high-energy games with them in an effort to wear them down.

Really, though, the important thing is that I survived...

Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City?

Most history books will tell you that after crashing through the gates of the Presidential Palace in 1975 the first official act of the victorious Communists was to rename Saigon, that symbol of Western decadence and imperialism, after the late hero of Vietnamese unity and the People's War, Ho Chi Minh. Now, the clumsy title of Ho Chi Minh City is rigidly enforced by the nation's Communist overlords in stark denial of the city's rich history, and woe betide anyone caught calling it 'Saigon'.

The truth is a bit more complicated. For one thing, the vast majority of what is now Ho Chi Minh City is manifestly not Saigon. After the end of the war and reunification the city underwent such massive and rapid expansion that many suburbs and outlying small towns were swallowed up. The most famous example of this being Cholon aka Chinatown aka District 5, which until the 1960s at least was several miles away from Saigon. Of the city's 24 urban and suburban districts, only three or four were even partially incorporated into Saigon before the 1970s.

Also, there's nothing subversive about using the old title. Most Vietnamese will use the terms interchangeably, and if they don't it's usually to distinguish the modern city from the old historic center. The government itself doesn't seem to care; the airport code is SGN, and even the official city tourism office is called SaigonTourist.

Of course, Saigon is a lot easier and sexier than Ho Chi Minh City, so I'll stick with that.