welcome, double agent

Ten years ago, I was living in Saigon/ HCMC, Vietnam. At arrival, I followed other tourists from the airport because I had predicted that would be the simplest way to find shelter. At the time, foreigners were not allowed to live in private households. My hotel room cost four dollars per night and included breakfast. One morning, a white man was eating breakfast in the living room. He wore a white suit and had white hair. Beside him on the couch was a young Vietnamese man and I assumed the young man was his lover. The white man told me that street orphans were locked in the Saigon Zoo at night and that was the safest option. I had lived near the zoo in Seattle and knew you could hear lions roaring in the night. I remember thinking this but I also remember staring at the white cuff of his blazer, the thin hand, the metal fork, the yellow omelet. It was a simpler image for me, simpler than the imagined acoustics drifting across the imagined skin of abandoned boys. That was the origin point for the article, “Saigon Zoo”.

The owners of the hotel were a couple with one teenage daughter. The father often sat in the alley in a lawn chair. He was smoking. I remember only one conversation. He was describing a rice field full of ghosts. All of the ghosts were dead soldiers. He was smiling. There wasn’t any punch line.

My mother’s stories about the American-Vietnam War (ruined hometown soldiers, anti-war protests and her own stepfather’s six tours of duty in Vietnam) produced a compulsion in me to bear witness to the aftermath. I set up house in a district that was rife with prostitution. We, the hookers and me, ate at the same cafes, drank together, and hung out with the same men. What I mean is that my American friends purchased sex from these neighborhood women. One night, one woman prostitute showed up on the street with a newly shorn head. Her scalp was clean of hair. She was grinning and laughing to herself. It was difficult to match her smile. At that time, it was only the Buddhist nuns and monks who shaved their heads and I was wondering what she was claiming- holiness? Exemption?

I can’t describe her further except to say she was exceptionally tall and frighteningly beautiful; in that moment I gave up my preparations for a documentary on the sex industry during the Vietnam War. I suddenly knew the material was deeper and more ruinous than my abilities. This article is the sum total of my six months in Vietnam. Not long ago, one of my student’s in Chicago relayed that her sister was assigned this same essay in her urban theory course at Vassar.

I hear that the Saigon Zoo has much improved in the last decade.

The original article regarding the Saigon Zoo: http://www.loudpapermag.com/article.php?id=36

Because I have no pictures of the Saigon Zoo, I have attached a picture of a man baking bread for the bears at the National Zoo in Washington DC. I’m searching for the recipe.