From the second I stepped out of the airport I was hit with a cacophony of sights and sounds, and I immediately fell in love with this city.
I love Saigon for what Hanoi is not. Saigon is harder-edged, faster, grittier, filled with scenes of normal people living their lives.
They make up a picture of grace in daily habits, from the nonchalant way the guy behind the counter at Pho Le unfolds a thick wad of bills and counts the cash one slip of paper at a time to give me change. It’s the young man who, in a series of smooth moves, swings one leg over the seat of his motorbike, uses his other leg to kick up the stand, revs the engine with his right hand and balances a tray of hot noodle soup and two smaller dishes in his outstretched left hand as he glides off the curb and into traffic. He doesn’t slosh a drop.
And yet it’s clear this city is bracing for huge change, the sort of modern transformation that will upend the old way of life and cause younger generations to ask themselves, who are we?
Change is slow now, as tunnels for the city’s first subway line slowly snake their way by landmarks such as the Ben Thanh Market. Giant blue walls shield pedestrians from the construction work due to be finished in a year or two, though locals guess it’ll be more like three or four.
But with the completion of a metro, new architecture is bound to change the scenery of the city. The most prominent sign of that new future look is the shark fin-shaped Bitexco Financial Tower, a gleaming skyscraper that was the tallest in the city until 2011. It looms over humble streets with broken concrete pavement and white smoke rising from meat being grilled on barbecues in the street.
Not far away from Bitexco, a row of peach-colored low-rises sits opposite a luxury shopping mall. The view of the four- and five-story buildings is now blocked by the tall blue walls of the subway construction. The row will probably get demolished as property values soar and depersonalized chain stores move in.
For now, however, the identity of the city core remains intact. Not being Vietnamese, I can’t understand what that fully means. I can only see glimpses of it, in the ways that locals eat pho for breakfast in 90-degree weather, that store-bought chili sauce the color of neon orange-red sits next to a cup of homemade chili, that some restaurants don’t shy away from putting containers of pungent raw garlic gloves and extra fish sauce on the table. Clearly this is intended for the people who really live here, not just tourists or expats.
It’s also how a 24/7 local coffeehouse is still busy at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night as people relax and drink iced tea and coffee and watch other people.
And it’s how Ha Tam, a jewelry store on the corner of a side street, isn’t a jewelry store at all. The walls display red busts with gold necklaces, but the main transactions here are foreign exchanges in hard cash.
A local journalist gave me a ride here on his motorbike when I complained that local banks didn’t want Chinese money. “This place is really quite famous,” he said. I guess he meant among locals, because I would never have known.
That day as rain drizzled down, crowds jostled at the window counters, waving cash. A man counted crisp American hundred-dollar bills and tossed them in a tall pile on the counter for an older auntie. It had to have amounted in the thousands. Another worker punched buttons on a calculator to show me the going exchange rate.
It’s how there are some rules to traffic – practically all riders wear helmets, most obey the red stoplight and about half wear a face mask against dust and pollution – but then other times there are none at all. Just like in Beijing, motorbikes zigzag in all different directions at intersections, ride up onto the pedestrian walkway and zoom the opposite way down a one-way street.
One of the most telling things of their identity, to me, is the angle of the mini lawn chairs at many coffee shops and bars. Instead of facing each other, like they would in the West, they all face toward the street, as if they’re part of an audience watching a show together.
