Tackling Saigon as a family vacation
ALMOST as soon as we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I set out to make my family miserable. This was not difficult. It was late August, nearing 32 degrees and humid. All I had to do was propose we walk through the streets of the former Saigon to a restaurant for lunch.
At first, my wife, Jean, and our daughters Sasha, 7 and a half, and Sandy, almost 4, were game. The road outside our Airbnb – an air-conditioned two-bedroom, with tile floors and brick walls, carved into a crusty ocher art deco building in central District 1 – was oddly calm. Shade trees spindled past skeins of electrical wire, while the low plastic chairs of an open-air cafe sat neatly in the shade of a long, blank wall.
Soon, though, the sun bore down, and we sweated our way along a market street. The rough pavement was at once dusty and damp, the din of shoppers and small trucks inescapable, the ripe scents of fruits and vegetables, fish and pork, as unrestrained as their vivid hues. All about was action, noise, aroma, drama – the kind of whirling vortex of energy I feed on.
Not so the ladies. There was whining, dawdling, worry. One child had to be carried. (I bore that burden.) It is entirely possible that someone asked, “Are we there yet?” Finally, after 15 endless minutes, we reached a fluorescent-lit restaurant, Chi Tuyen, where we sat on blue plastic stools at a lightweight metal table and ordered bun thit nuong, nubs of pork grilled to carameliaed sweetness, on a tangle of cool rice noodles, shredded lettuce and herbs like mint and perilla. Outside, rain began to fall, harder and harder, and then even harder. We were trapped, but there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be.
Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, I had moved here to live. Vietnam and the United States had only recently re-established diplomatic relations, and I was a fresh college grad embarking on an adult life of adventure in an unknown land. Over the course of a year, I fell in love with the city everyone still called Saigon.
Yet I’d never brought my wife and kids. First we would hit Ho Chi Minh City, then spend two days at a beach resort near Nha Trang. Still, I worried: Would the people I love most love the land I love most?
How could they not? All around were visceral pleasures. At the entrance to our building sprawled a sidewalk restaurant, and every morning it would send up breakfast on a tray: bowls of bun bo hue, a spicy beef-and-pork noodle soup, or banh mi op la, fried eggs with baguettes as light as air.
Every excursion was an opportunity to compare the Vietnam I remembered with the Vietnam it now was, mostly to my delight, occasionally with disappointment. A road along the Ben Nghe Canal, for example, had been widened and landscaped into sunny modernity, but the project had wiped out old buildings, including an auto garage that, at night, turned into a secret shellfish restaurant.
Sasha, however, approved. “I like this part of Vietnam,” she said, gazing out the window of our taxi, “because it looks well trained. Nice and clean and it looks good – like it works. The other parts . . .”
She trailed off, and I knew why: Vietnam was not a hit with my family. The heat was rough. ( What did they expect during summer in Asia?) They were not fans of the dirt, the chaos, the insects. The kids kvetched about being bored. ( Just like at home!) Jean remarked, “I don’t think Southeast Asia is for families.”
I didn’t know quite how to take that. For decades, I’d seen foreign families all over Southeast Asia – a major reason I’d wanted to bring my own family here. On the other hand, I understood: Like New York, Ho Chi Minh City exists not for tourists but for its own lively populace; this metropolis doesn’t care about coddling outsiders – it’s too busy entertaining itself.
So the task of entertaining fell to me. Whenever the heat grew too brutal, we would stop for sinh to, cool fruit shakes sold everywhere from the alleys of the backpacker district to market stalls in Cholon, the city’s Chinatown. We took taxis and Ubers, not motorbikes.
A friend, Vietnamese-American artist Trong Gia Nguyen, led us through the downtown gallery scene. At Galerie Quynh, which opened in 2003, I gushed over one of Trong’s works, a laser-cut facsimile of a brisesoleil, the sun-shielding patterned screens that you see everywhere in Vietnam, cut to the size of a window or an entire building’s facade. At the gallery, Sasha sat on the ground and opened her notebook to draw, engrossed and uncomplaining. Sandy, meanwhile, was kept entertained by Trong’s friend Athésia, a Canadian musician passing through on her way to gigs in Australia. I’m told they discussed Frozen.
Occasionally, my ladies even entertained themselves. While taking an Uber through Cholon, Jean pointed out a trio of early 20th-century shophouses, slightly decrepit but charming still. “Is this where The Lover was filmed?” she asked excitedly, referring to the 1992 movie based on the Marguerite Duras novel. If she could muster such enthusiasm, maybe my experiment was working? Love might be out of the question, but I’d settle for like.
Instead, I got ambivalence. For every grand dinner of grilled pork and sour fish soup with old friends, there was a scary cockroach on some sidewalk. At the oddly named Somewhereland-Madam Fatty Fatt, a Colonial-era villa that had been renovated into a Hogwarts-like castle, the kids seemed content to work on crafts projects like cutting felt into hats and cloaks for wooden witch figurines. But this was too chill for Sasha. “When you’re young, you don’t want to sit down and relax,” she insisted. “You want to move!”