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By Root 681 0

I’d gone to see Madame Dai in her tiny law office-turned-café/salon, and after the spring rolls and the rice-noodle cakes and the beef wrapped in mint leaves dipped in nuoc mam, she’d asked in her perfect, elegantly inflected French if I’d care for a ‘digestif.’ I’d said yes, of course, utterly charmed by the diminutive but stately Vietnamese woman in her black dress – a former man-killer if there ever was one. She’d disappeared for a moment into the kitchen while I’d looked idly at the photographs of old friends on the wall: Pierre Trudeau, the Pope, the head of the Central Committee, François Mitterand, various war correspondents, former lovers, a portrait of herself as a young woman in the 1940s, looking absolutely Dragon Lady in a slinky ao dai. When Madame Dai returned, she held a large glass jar filled with snakes – a single full-beaked bird still in plumage, entangled by serpents deep in the clear rice wine.

I can still taste it.

When am I awake? When am I asleep? All Saigon has a dreamlike quality for me. Wandering down Dong Khoi Street, the former rue Catinat, headed away from the river, past the Majestic, I turn the corner and there’s the Continental Hotel, the Caravelle, the gaudy Rex; I wade through a sea of scooters and cyclos and motorbikes to a narrow side street where, among the dusty pillboxes, broken timepieces, foreign coins, used shoes, cigarette holders, and dented dog tags, there peek out stained Zippos (both real and fake) inscribed with the poignant personal mottoes of their original owners:

vietnam

Chu Lai 69–70

Always ripped or always stoned

I made a year. I’m going Home.

I find one by the compasses, feeling absolutely ghoulish as I read another plaintive commemoration of one young man’s long-ago year abroad:

hue

DA NANG

QUI NHON

BIEN HOA

SAIGON

On the other side of the lighter, the sentiment:

When I die, bury me face down

So the whole world can kiss my ass.

This is a city named after a cook. Maybe you didn’t know that. Ho Chi Minh was a very fine, classically trained culinarian. Prior to helping found the Vietnamese Communist party, he worked at the Carlton Hotel in Paris, for no less a chef than the great man himself, Auguste Escoffier. It is said he was a favorite of the old man. He worked as a saucier there, later as a cook on a transatlantic liner, then as a pâtissier at the Parker House in Boston. He was – the Commie thing aside – one of us, like it or not: a guy who spent a lot of hours standing on his feet in busy hotel and restaurant kitchens, a guy who came up through the ranks the old-school way – a professional. And yet he still found time to travel under about a zillion aliases, write manifestos, play footsie with the Chinese and the Russians, dodge the French, fight the Japanese (with U.S. help, by the way), beat the French, help create a nation, lose that nation, and organize an ultimately successful guerilla war against America. Communism may suck, but old Uncle Ho was one interesting guy.

And this is where his dream ends: on the tenth floor of the New World Hotel, an overchilled high-rise mausoleum in the city center; with a swimming pool elevated from the noise and exhaust of the city’s streets, where one can look up from one’s blender drink at poolside (though the developers have done their best to mask the view with foliage) through trellised flowers and see the ramshackle apartment blocks of the Workers’ Paradise, where barefoot old women live on less than a dollar a day.

At the New World, one can walk directly from the maddening heat of the streets into the gigantic, sweeping lobby, past the gingerbread house display for the holidays (‘Festive Table!’), past the cocktail lounge, where a Vietnamese cover band, the Outrageous Three, are playing note-perfect Barry Manilow tunes, ride the silent elevators up to the Executive Floor, or to the health club, the driving range, or tennis court. One can sit on the enclosed tenth-floor terrace, sipping 333 beer (pronounced bababa), or enjoying a little port wine and Stilton from the complimentary buffet while