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      — GONGS AND OTHER REMNANTS —

      The first time I ever set foot in Saigon (many residents still don’t call it Ho Chi Minh City), I was astonished to discover that I already knew my way around much of the city centre. How could that be? Was I experiencing déjà vu? No, it was simply that, like so many others of my generation, I once had been so deeply involved in the movement protesting the American War that my imagination had taken on some strange geographical understanding of the place that my contemporaries and I constantly read, wrote, talked, agonized, and obsessed about and just as often despaired of.

      There, in Nguyen Hué Street, District 1, across the way from the Rex and right where I knew to expect it, was the former South Vietnam government’s National Assembly. The French had built it as the Opera House, and these days it’s known as the Municipal Theatre (where I was tempted to see a Saigon production of Miss Saigon). Next door: the Continental Hotel where much of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set. And so on. Greene knew the Continental as being in the rue Catinat. During the American War the street became Tu Do — Freedom Street. After the war, it was changed again, to Dong Khoi — Uprising Street. In fact, it sometimes seems that most place-names in Vietnam have changed at least twice in my lifetime.

      For the city and the country are made up of people who have moved on. I don’t mean those who were too young to have known the war if indeed they were even alive. I don’t mean only those who were adults during the war, with all its death, destruction, and hardship. I mean rather that the nation as a whole had shoved the entire period behind because that’s what one does if one is Vietnamese. Through my subsequent stays there, I have come to admire their resilience. It is the kind of resilience that cannot be separated from patience and perseverance, though these qualities are mixed with anger.

      An obvious symbol of this cocktail of stubborn virtues is the country’s great military hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu, who, at the time of this writing, is still alive, age ninety-nine. His staggering victory was the dramatic conclusion to decades’ worth of ambushes, bombings, skirmishes, harassments, and guerrilla actions. When, following the French withdrawal, the Americans decided to step in themselves and take on the self-commissioned task of defeating communism, the result was years of war between the northern Vietnamese on the one hand and southern Vietnamese, Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders on the other. The fight may have lasted until 1975, but its outcome became apparent to most everyone in 1968 when General Giap launched the brilliant Tet Offensive, breaking U.S. resolve. And it’s well to remember that these Vietnamese who fought the French and Americans for a combined hundred years were the direct descendants of those who forcibly resisted the Chinese invaders for a thousand years — from our eighth century to the eighteenth. (And as we’re constantly being told, a millennium is a long time in politics.)

      The Vietnamese, northerners and southerners alike, know how to pull through, get by, and prosper. When I saw my friend Christopher Moore in Bangkok, he recalled:

      When I first went to Hanoi in 1990, everything was still pretty basic and grim. There were many bicycles on the streets, but very few private cars. The cars you did see weren’t like the 1950s ones you found all over Havana, which the Cubans have kept in immaculate condition because there aren’t any others to be had. The Vietnamese weren’t restoring or rebuilding cars that way, they were reinventing them. When some vital piece of the engine broke down or actually fell off, they’d replace it with something from an old tractor, plough, lawn mower, or air conditioner: anything they could find to rig up. This made for some strangely unique vehicles. They looked like the crazy inventions in Rube Goldberg cartoons of the 1920s and 30s. No, that’s not right. What they often looked like were the vehicles in the Mad Max movies.

      I think this leads to an important point. At the end of the American War, large areas of the country were littered with military detritus. Pieces of tanks, lorries, helicopters, and winged aircraft, not to mention weapons, communications equipment, and all the untold tonnes of other stuff necessary to maintain in the field an army of, at its peak, half a million people, seemed to be everywhere. One sees virtually no such evidence today, apart from what’s displayed as memorials — for example, the partially submerged aircraft in Hanoi that protrudes above the surface of what’s called, in English, B-52 Lake (though it’s actually a pond). The amount of American war surplus that survives being almost infinitesimal, I’m always a little surprised to discover, for example, metal boxes that formerly held belts of .50-calibre machine-gun ammunition being used by sidewalk shoeshine boys to carry their polishes, rags, and brushes. For the Vietnamese turned nearly all abandoned war junk into scrap metal for export. Theirs is not a melancholy or sentimental society, but rather a culture that is always pulling itself up by what in this case could be called their sandal-straps. Practical people, sometimes aggressively so. Practical enough to also do a brisk trade in war nostalgia.

      Not long after the war’s conclusion, former U.S. servicemen began returning on nostalgic visits, if nostalgic is the correct word. They were generally well received by a forgiving population. Two million Vietnamese had died in the war. The survivors included one entire generation, possibly two, that had come of age without much knowledge of how a market economy operates. The government saw the great potential in tourism, but worried that not enough U.S. dollars were being spent on admission to such places as Saigon’s Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. I’ve never been able to confirm this, but my understanding is that the relevant government ministry hired consultants from the West. “Oh, now I see,” I can hear top officials saying as they read the commissioned report. “If we desire their hard currency, we should not insult them to their faces — at least until they’ve bought a ticket.” As a result, the institution is now called the War Remnants Museum. The transition involved no change to the exhibits, and it took place virtually overnight.

      M was still doggedly pursuing her job of seeing how much French culture still lingered in Indochina. She was meeting with the director of the Maison de la Francophonie and even found someone who was visiting from France as a representative of the Association d’Amitié Franco-Vietnamienne. She charmed her way into the cozy flat of a welcoming, somewhat French-speaking, Vietnamese family. They lived in the artists’ quarter around Notre-Dame Cathedral, whose priests, in a nod to Western travellers, have special permission to give short sermons in French and English after the regular service in Vietnamese. Our most interesting research discovery was that, unlikely as this sounds, the Rex had begun life as a storage garage for Renault motorcars.

      We decided to visit the War Remnants Museum, supposing that even though only China and the U.S. had been mentioned in the original name, there just might be some displays on French war crimes, as well. Well, the museum does possess a guillotine that was used to dispatch captured Viet Minh insurgents in the 1940s. (There is another such instrument on display in Hanoi, at the old prison the French called Maison Centrale and the Americans knew as the Hanoi Hilton — thus confusing Saigon taxi drivers today who hear the phrase and try to drop off their American passengers at the new Hanoi Hilton Hotel, next to the Opera House.) Execution by guillotine ended in Indochina with the French withdrawal in 1954, but continued in France itself until 1977. Another exhibit referred to France at one remove. It was a representation of the so-called tiger cages, which people in the West may remember from the film The Deer Hunter. These little bamboo cages were used by both the Viet Cong and their enemies, though the model at the museum refers specifically to Viet Cong held on Côn Son Island, which the French, in one of their first acts after capturing Saigon, turned into a notorious prison for anti-colonial agitators. (It is now a resort, with a spa.)

      Outside the War Remnants Museum sit restored American aircraft (how tiny the jet fighters of the 1960s seem), tanks, and other weapons. What’s striking on the inside, horrifyingly so, are the photographs and other evidence of systemic American brutality in many forms. The museum is housed in what used to be the Saigon headquarters of the United States Information Agency, the same organization that ran the rooftop bar at the Rex as part