Good boring, Vietnam!

By

Vedran Kukavica

version 2.3

October 2025

FIRST

Let it be noted at the outset that Martin M. ended up in Vietnam because of the alphabet. On that fateful Bordeaux evening, prickly sleet was falling, and it was so devilishly cold that not even a bottle of Bouchard Burgundy he had theatrically downed while chewing Comté could warm him. His penthouse swayed to the intoxicating rhythm of aloha music when suddenly he danced barefoot to the table, flipped open his notebook, and began typing "Honolulu" into Google Flights: ... H-O ... H-O ... and Ho Chi Minh popped up on the screen. Admittedly, he only noticed this after a pirouette and a glance at the screen. Still, he pressed enter to see what was offered: a cheap ticket, a flight via Doha with minimal layover, some kind of last-minute deal—whatever. He wasn't into ticketing, nor did he understand it much—just click-click, and he bought a round-trip ticket to Ho Chi Minh, wherever that was—to Vietnam.

It should also be noted that Martin M. believed in the positive outcome of following the seemingly meaningless roadside signs life sometimes throws your way. If it was Ho Chi Minh, then so be it— onward! He never went back—not to ex-wives, not to scowling waiters; he wouldn’t even take the same route home from his publisher’s. This was his small reckoning with Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return—he craved new experiences, even if they turned out to be worse than the old ones. Besides, what was so bad about Vietnam? At least it didn’t snow in Saigon—he could spend a few weeks sockless. That same moment, he filled out the online form for a Vietnamese visa and began packing.

Into the suitcase went flip-flops, a long-forgotten Hawaiian shirt, a diving mask, and a white Gatsby hat, while he glanced sideways at idiots out the window, skidding in their cars along the road, unaccustomed to the snow, which, this year, showed no signs of stopping. He had instructed the taxi driver to enter the underground garage, level -3; the bookie from the ground floor would let him in, he had said—just give him a wave. Martin clearly intended to step out of the elevator, into the car, and emerge straight onto the departure terminal at Mérignac Airport without ever again setting foot on French soil.

On the flight to Doha, he sat next to a bore who had tried to strike up conversation from the moment they took off—first about the cabin temperature, then the odd colour of the clouds, before launching into his theory on the unsolvable problem of armrest distribution on triple airplane seats. With undisguised mathematical superiority, he declared that four simply wasn’t divisible by three. Martin responded in what sounded like fluent Hungarian—his classic deflection strategy, which almost always worked. That "almost always" would have been "always-always" if, a few years earlier, that drunk Hungarian rapper on a flight from Malta—whom Martin hadn’t sized up correctly—hadn’t taken offence at what he called Martin’s "mockery of the Finno-Ugric linguistic heritage.

Anyway, the overeager, depilated dolt with a ridiculous piercing—a wood screw in his ear that looked like a splinter broken off during an ass-fucking scene in Deliverance or a similar film— obviously didn’t know Hungarian, so he now sought his next victim across the other side of the seat. The bore turned away; a big-nosed Arab sized him up with contemptuous disgust, as if he had just spotted tubercular spit on the sidewalk in front of a cathedral. All three fell silent, as befits people sharing a journey, due to gravitational constraints, the cramped Japanesque design of the cabin, and above all, the cost-cutting that had paid for airline executives’ bonuses.

Martin, as mentioned, avoided all conversation while in transit—taxis, elevators, and airports. In fact, he was one of those who, if sent on a space mission, would simply extend a hand at takeoff and nod to the crew upon returning to Earth. Truth be told, he always slept on planes; his psychosomatic altimeter was linked to a sleep switch that clicked at roughly ten thousand feet. His somnological system worked so well that when sleep eluded him for days, he would grab the first available round-trip ticket and fly anywhere for two nights just to sleep properly: east-west, Moscow-Washington, Northern or Southern Hemisphere—anywhere. His dreams were his alone; for Martin M., this was a journey of closed eyes—the blind passenger incarnate. He donned large headphones emitting no sound, then his sleep mask, and sank into his dreams. He could have skipped such conspicuous camouflage, but didn’t want to risk being recognised. Martin M, as critics noted, was a great writer in an era when literature had grown small. He’d renounced all social media, the internet, promotions, and hadn’t appeared publicly for five years—but you never know who’s flying to Saigon ahead of monsoon season. He disliked people: at first, he had thought it unfair to impose his views from positions of fame and power, but for a long time now, his absence had stemmed from sheer selfishness—that stupid crowd deserved neither him nor his commentary. With modern, long-failed Western society, Martin communicated only in Hungarian—and only between five and ten thousand feet above sea level.

After his connection in Doha, everything felt different—and easier. He had considered buying a business-class upgrade, but none remained. Luckily, he was flanked by two tiny Asians—likely second-generation Vietnamese on their way to their ancestral homeland for their first Tet. He had offered to switch seats so they could sit together, but it seemed the Viet Minh troop genetics were still too strong: everything had its proper place, and order always came before personal comfort. He felt good among Ho Chi Minh’s army: tall, broad men always enjoy being among the small—life, after all, is stacked in their favour. Except, perhaps, when gangs are stuffing them into car boots or when they’re crawling out of prison through a dug-out tunnel. Thus, any big lug who claims size doesn’t matter is lying like a son of a bitch.

He no longer camouflaged himself—no headphones, no sleep mask. Martin now freely watched the other passengers, measuring how long it took them to react to being stared at. By his calculations, Asians averted their gaze after 5 seconds; the girls he fixed his gaze on usually smiled—or, even sexier, they simultaneously smiled and whipped their heads away, as if burned by his stare. The Five-Second Rule—the maximum stare time before you’re reprimanded, fired, or even sued for sexual harassment in the advanced West—clearly meant something different here.

He fell asleep, hoping he had truly reached the gates of heaven.

MONDAY

He didn’t even blink before the landing began. Saigon spread out beneath them like an unmade bed—trimmed at the edges, shiny, lacy and silky, rumpled and creased in places, patched up everywhere and barely holding together at the seams that time had worn thin. There was something wild and pulsating about the city, even from this height, this bird’s-eye view. It was an anthill of a city, swirling, with fog rising above it like steam rising from a vast, overheated, sweating body. Beneath the Qatar Airways plane, the heart of Saigon was beating, barely pumping blood to its swollen edges—relentlessly stuffed with newcomers fattening the city like a goose hastily prepped for foie gras.

He had traveled the globe, completely indifferent to the cities he arrived in; most world metropolises struck him as more or less well-assembled giant Lego sets—urban plastic without scent, dull to themselves and to others. But this Ho Chi Minh City felt different—there was something in this city that called out to him, something more, waiting to be uncovered.

Martin’s suitcase was the first to peek out from behind the plastic curtain, wobbling slightly around the curve like a Renault 4, before righting itself and—almost as if of its own accord—cheerfully raising its handle into Martin’s large hand. They breezed through customs without a word; the officer didn’t even flip the passport to compare the smiling Frenchman’s face with the photo—which, somehow, always looked like it had been taken after a booking by the police. The customs officer, sporting a failed moustache, slammed a stamp onto a blank page as if squashing a fly in a Mexican restaurant. Martin gave a silent nod, and outside the terminal, the taxi driver was already holding the back door open.

“Hotel Majestic! Ma-je-stic!” said Martin.

He sank into the back seat of a new electric car of some unfamiliar make, which smelled strongly of plastic. It was clear the driver didn’t understand him, so Martin typed the hotel’s location into almighty Google Translate and showed it to him on his phone. The young man simply nodded, and the taxi pulled away.

Saigon pressed right up against its airport, squeezing it tightly, as if at any moment it might spill over onto the runway itself and spawn yet another neighborhood. The urban planners of the Vietnamese Communist Party didn’t try to hide Saigon from visitors—nor could they if they wanted to. There were no expressways cutting through greenery or wasteland, no buffer zones where planes puffed out kerosene fumes as they groaned into the sky, or the smell of burning rubber as they broke on landing. Here, the message was clear: “I’ve landed in Saigon,” if you could even send it out, immersed as you were in everyday life without delay, without the camouflage of a guest, with curiosity fully satisfied and unnecessary anticipation denied.

The taxi meandered down the road, heading toward the city center like a red blood cell from an IV drip. It jostled with scooters, cars, and buses in a chaotic traffic jungle where the constant honking was the only means of communication—a motorized shout with just one meaning: “I’m not braking, do as you please!”

“Welcome! We wish you a pleasant stay in our hotel, our city, and our Vietnam!” the receptionist began, and judging by everything, that greeting would have gone on endlessly if Martin hadn’t simply snatched his passport from the young man’s hand and headed for the elevator.

“I am Lam Lam. The first one is my family name,” he heard him say, offering a bit of onomastic clarification.

The Ho Chi Minh Majestic was a completely Western-style hotel, but only on the surface. In truth, it was like a perfume bottle filled with water. It lacked all the easygoing attitude of staff that Western guests are accustomed to, resembling more a spotless general’s office inside a military camp than a five-star hotel. Predictability, rigidity, and fear had destroyed every trace of comfort: Martin felt that the young man who had carried his suitcase to the room—placing it gently on the carpet as if laying a sleeping baby in a cradle—might have thrown himself out the window if Martin had so much as pointed in that direction. That kind of submissiveness was utterly intolerable to him. He was the kind of guest who didn’t like being an awkward fact for the host—but at the same time, he wasn’t about to devote his Vietnamese trip to a joint struggle with the local service industry to protect their more-or-less decent wages. He took a shower, quickly changed into the garb of a clueless tourist, and dashed out to look for another Vietnam—one that deserved respect, unlike this hotel, ruined by hyper-servility.

At the Two Ducks restaurant, everything was already much better. He drank the best Korean soju of his life—some no-name Vietnamese local brew—and for starters ordered spring rolls with marinated shrimp. He liked the combo so much that for the rest of the evening, he just kept waving at the waiter, pointing alternately at his plate and his glass. He gorged and got drunk so barbarically that he nearly let out a burp, slouched back with his ass on the edge of the chair. Eventually, he glanced around the room and looked at other diners for the first time: they were appalled, stunned by his total lack of manners, wondering how anyone could eat in an elite restaurant like a coal miner coming home at night. He looked at them like a drunk Russian, smiling. He asked for the bill, paid with a card, and then reached into his pocket and began flipping through banknotes like a teenager leafing through an erotic magazine looking for the centerfold—a paper porn hub for Generation X. He tossed what felt like two or three million Vietnamese dong onto the table. He had no intention of making sense of all the zeros on the bills. One note fluttered over the soup plate towards a girl with the bare back at the next table. Martin snatched it mid-air and crushed it in his fist with a look of reproach—directed at the freckled old man across from her. The old man—whose granddaughter, in a fairer world, would be copying homework from this Vietnamese companion of his in a London boarding school—nodded approvingly in a conciliatory manner. Martin found the old man as repulsive as the whole environment, where half-literate retired dockworkers from Manchester were screwing local freshman girls—nerds from the Saigon Technical University. If Rambo were an erotic film, Martin M. thought, then in that XXX version, Rambo 9 – Fuck or Be Fucked, the main character would probably be embodied by an American shoe salesman, some voyeur with three heart bypasses kicked out of his home, a farting, reeking loser exiled by his family to Indochina.

“Go for it, young man,” Martin M. whispered to the old geezer as he was leaving, “A dick’s the only thing that grows in someone else’s hand.”

The old man said nothing, just kept tirelessly chewing away at a slimy, raw fish cheek. The girl across from him didn’t pay Martin much attention either. She had clearly given up any influence over the surrounding events long ago—especially the kind that would arise from her initiative. Her entire existence seemed reduced to a caricatured revitalisation of that American codger sitting across from her. She batted her eyelashes at him like a traffic light with three shades of green.

On the way out of the Two Ducks restaurant, Martin brushed past another gangly westerner well into his seventies—naturally, with his own Vietnamese trophy. Vietnamese women always look baby-faced, but this girl wouldn’t be allowed to buy alcohol or cigarettes anywhere without an ID. The Yank, unfortunately, was so tall he had to hunch just to put his arm around her neck, let alone her waist. She barely reached his belt, so Martin lobbed a comment about the obvious convenience of oral pleasuring, which for once didn’t require kneeling.

“Congratulations!” he said, already slipping through the door, feeling the old man’s stern gaze on his back.

Martin was a different kind of man. To him, all these unfulfilled Westerners looked like someone taking their young car mechanic or dentist out to dinner. He simply couldn’t grasp why anyone would show off these high-end service providers to others, or what on earth would make these professionals an interesting company outside their workplace, for example, here at a restaurant table. He also wondered whether these girls, parading around Indochina with old men, actually knew anything about sex, and whether that even mattered to the old-timers, who, realistically, were closer to palliative care than to tantric orgies. “I love sex—I remember it fondly!” The scene reminded him of that famous bit of graffiti on the wall of a Yorkshire nursing home.

The writer preferred to pay for such services with tried-and-true professionals: in advance, by the hour, or by the night, and everything to be done behind closed doors. He saw no point in parading girls around, or proving to anyone that he had got his money’s worth. We all drink a little milk now and then, that doesn’t mean we have to walk around town with the cow, does it? Martin M. generally, outside that commercial context, had connections for sex, for evening company, even for diving. I’ve yet to meet a woman who’s good in bed, sharp in literary theory debates, and solid underwater with SCUBA gear, he used to say.

From Two Ducks, he went to a nightclub not far from Bui Vien—a nice place with soft instrumental Western music, and it turned out they served the same Korean soju. Two women approached him, seemingly just shy of thirty—the best vintage, in Martin’s opinion—and they were conspicuously dressed and styled almost identically. Martin wasn’t a fan of threesomes; ménage à trois was not his game. But it felt somehow inhumane to split them up when they were clearly signaling they came as a package deal. Once in Colombia, he had been with three escorts and concluded that the Creator hadn’t really designed the male body for that sort of thing—after all, He only gave man one dick. “It’s just not natural,” he told his building manager René upon returning. “I mean, what’s a bull supposed to do with three cows at once?” One of the girls in Bogotá, he claimed, he sent off for coffee—or just told her to go take care of whatever she needed to. In any case, Martin chatted with these twins, asked them what they could do, and within half an hour, they were headed for the Majestic.

At the reception front desk Lam Lam—or his twin brother, possibly with the same name. He bent down as if rummaging through paperwork, pretending not to notice them, but very clearly signaling that the rules about the number of guests per room were not open to interpretation.

Martin went to the bathroom and spanked the monkey. A strange habit, and somewhat sadistic. With all that alcohol, next time it would be hard to reach a climax, so the girls would feel guilty and incompetent.

What happened next, Martin didn’t really know—his memory was a bit foggy. He only remembered that one of the girls had seriously impressive silicone breasts, an extra feature, pricey ones at that, and presumably a fiercely competitive investment in this no-boob region. As for him, he felt ridiculous, like he was at a bowling alley.

The girls mostly hovered around him as if tending to a corpse; he lay there so indifferent that at one point he even found his hands laced behind his head, fingers interwoven, like someone trying to stay awake during a bad movie. They say the kind of sex that isn’t just sex—the kind entangled with passion or, God forbid, love—is the trigger for all the world’s troubles. But then again, sex that really is just sex is the height of emptiness. Even the traditional Slavic variety—where the female orgasm is treated as a kind of mental disorder, and bodily cavities are seen as mere seed repositories—is still better than sex that’s nothing but sex.

He handed the girls a wad of cash as they were leaving; they counted it and asked when they should come back the next day. He gave them the rest, asking if that was finally enough for him not to have to see them again.

He felt no guilt: goods–money–goods—the magic circle of the economy. Besides, Martin M. was firmly convinced that girls were the best way to get to know the culture and society of any place you arrived in.

As it turned out, he couldn’t have imagined just how right he would be in this Vietnamese adventure.

TUESDAY

SECOND

“Lam Lam! Is there a pharmacy nearby?”

“Of course, sir. Just go right, then around the corner, and immediately on that street it’s the seventh, eighth, no... ninth, ninth house! So, even numbers are on the right, odd on the left, so that makes it number 5!”

It was far too many words for Martin, who nearly clapped his hands over his ears. Sounds were swelling beyond control—a passing scooter roared like a Russian tank—and the Saigon sun bore down on him like it meant to melt him. He scraped his back along the building’s façade, clinging to a narrow strip of shade.

“Good afternoon! Do you have anything for a hangover, something natural?”

“Indian fig, ginger, pickle brine, pickles, chamomile...?” listed the girl behind the counter at Long Chau pharmacy, number 5. “But, sir, if I may say so: that’s food, not medicine, just as your hangover isn’t an illness.”

“And what is a hangover, pray tell, if not an illness, Miss...?”

“Thy, my name is Thy!”

She leaned in—unexpectedly close—and whispered her name directly into his ear, smiling.

“A hangover, I’d say, is the memory of the body. Sometimes the body jumps in and remembers what the mind can no longer bear.”

From that moment on, nothing in Martin M.’s life would ever be the same. He couldn’t recall ever hearing such an unpretentious yet piercingly clever line—not in the halls of the French Academy, nor all the smoky haunts of Montmartre. In Vietnam, where houses had no walls, cities had no streets, and people had no money, a pharmacist delivered the precise diagnosis to a foreigner who had barely set foot inside and reached the counter.

He lifted his head: Thy was staring at him unflinchingly—firm, not coy, without that timid, doe-eyed gaze so common across Indochina. She was a lanky girl on the brink of thirty. Beneath her coal-black bangs, her hazel eyes glowed with something unusual—an amber, tobacco-tinged gleam, something that would flash even in a black-and-white photograph. You really noticed those subtle nuances in Asians eyes: all brown, but not one identical. The Creator, Martin thought, truly knows how to work in slight variations.

“Where can I get pickle brine?” he attempted to start a routine conversation from a distance, mumbling the words as he watched her eye light up as the sound intensified, like an indicator light on a mixing console in a recording studio, “Or that Indian fig?”

“At Ben Thanh market—that’s where foreigners buy everything,” Thy replied. “But you don’t need anything, your affliction is passing on its own.”

“Perhaps you could—take me there? You see, I’m not well at all...” he said, looking at her, trying to produce a pleading expression, turning himself into a caricature, like in a cartoon when a cat sobs before a mouse over its wretched life.

Thy was serving another Vietnamese customer, they smiled and bowed to each other repeatedly—a people who would bow to an ant crawling across the counter during a simple medicine purchase were reaching the limits of hyper-gratitude.

“When do you finish work?”

“Our hours are on the door,” Thy replied, as if he were some drunk in an American drugstore.

He smiled and stepped out into the hot, still Saigon air, every particle of which rushed toward his sweat glands like a street beggar. He stood, wrung out, in the middle of the street, where a river of scooters wriggled by: lacquered office shoes peeked out from under bureaucrats’ capes, whole families sped by on motorbikes, cages strapped on carrying entire poultry farms—and there, between two scooters sagging under weight, a set of doors! The man barely managed to grab the frames with outstretched arms; he couldn’t see a thing.

“And now what, Martin?” the Frenchman muttered to himself, almost aloud. What was his plan in this city—with this headache hammering in his swollen skull, which seemed so large he had to check whether the door of the chocolate shop across the street was even wide enough for him to pass through. Next to it were cafés, but he wanted Thy to see him through the pharmacy window, so he sat directly opposite. Inside, he was the oldest—and the only man—looking like a grandfather buying sweets for his granddaughters. A double espresso helped him collect himself, somewhat. Vietnamese robusta was good, strong enough to wake the dead. Ask any waiter for two shots, no milk, no sugar, no ice, and he’ll give you a look of an Olympic anti-doping agent. Out of politeness, he also picked up some cinnamon-dusted chocolates, figuring he’d sit there for over half an hour. That way, after downing the two shots—which would be too strong—he wouldn’t look like he was just loitering, or—God forbid—some pedophile eyeing and luring underage girls.

If only he had brought his laptop, so he could pretend to be one of those remote-working types, an IT nomad tinkering with something. But his tinkering was over. He watched Thy bow to an elderly couple, who bowed back over the counter, and it seemed to him she smiled back to him, tilting up her sweet, round face. He resolved he would give her no more signals; a hungover Westerner among the children across from the pharmacy in Saigon’s First District was signal enough. He knew she could see him, so she could do as she wished—surely she’d nod to him as she passed. He surrendered to the initiative of a woman he had just met five minutes ago, drawn to a girl with whom he had no plan, nor did he want one. He let himself sink into a lookout above chocolate cubes with cinnamon and the sugar-coated smiles of adolescent girls. From outside, in this display window, he probably confused passersby, who wondered if some international schoolteacher had brought his class for cakes or if the scene was some nasty twist on Amsterdam’s window prostitution.

He felt a sudden pounding in his temples, snapped to, and peeled his head off the cold glass of the window, which had felt oddly comforting. He saw across the street that the pharmacy was closed, and suddenly, in front of him, appeared a bright, sparkling pink orb: Thy was already on her scooter, holding a pink helmet by its strap. He bolted outside, and when he emerged, she pointed—not with a finger, because here no one pointed with a finger there,  but with a tilt of her head and her eyes—at the candies he had left behind inside. He obediently went back, packed them into his backpack, put the helmet on, and climbed onto the bike behind her.

“Sir, it’s not polite to buy things you never meant to have. I guarantee you Mr. and Mrs. Ngyan would spend all night in bed discussing what was wrong with their dark cinnamon candies.”

“Martin! My name is Martin,” he said as he settled onto the scooter. 

He wrapped his arms around her waist, holding on tightly—it was his first time riding a motorbike, and already he was preparing to lean left and right on the turns, like in the movies. It turned out there would be no leaning; they inched steadily through the traffic. He mustered courage and opened his eyes, pressed against her neck like it was the load-bearing wall of a bunker, and only when the light turned red did he realize everyone was watching, smiling discreetly. The other riders sat upright: foreigners filming behind the backs of scooter-taxi drivers, locals on phones, nibbling food, sipping frappés through straws, eyes peering from under helmets. Martin glanced down and finally noticed the handles at the edges of the seat. He grabbed both, and when he let go of her waist, Thy glanced in the rearview mirror—presumably thinking he’d fallen—nodded approvingly, and they drove on.

He grew bolder and began to turn his head freely as they rode. They were still in District One; he spotted a Starbucks at that roundabout—a bizarre testament of mental colonialism: in a country that produced the most robusta in the world, coffee there was three times more expensive and three times worse than in local cafés. And then there was KFC—a sad example of global culinary arrogance: in Vietnam, locals have no trouble sharing a chicken, since they eat the feet, neck, head, ribs—everything the Kentucky crowd wouldn’t dip in rancid oil.

Suddenly, the tourists were gone—along with Western signage, glowing billboards, and any writing above doors. Unlike Westerners, these people apparently could remember where the shop was, the tailor, the foot massage parlor...

The few cafés and restaurants didn’t have big Western chairs on their terraces here, only those tiny plastic kindergarten stools spread across the street. There were no curbs anymore, no sidewalks, no left or right side of the road, no boundary between private and public space—this was no longer a street or a square, this was Vietnam’s living room. Martin saw how the grill guy tossed a towel around someone’s neck and switched on the hair clippers, waving “Just a minute!” to the two waiting for chicken skewers. A mechanic’s shop had taken over two-thirds of the road: dozens of scooters everywhere, some lying on their sides, others flipped upside down. Everyone chatting over their bikes—and if Martin had to pick out just one person and say, “This one’s the mechanic,” or “That one’s the customer,” he wouldn’t have dared. Here, people live—and let others live. The Frenchman—not drunk, just hungover—spotted two enormous rats passing by, strolling almost as if they were having a discussion, weaving calmly through the crowd like two rabbis in the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris.

This was Saigon’s District 8, the soul and heart of Ho Chi Minh City, the Vietnam that Vietnam wants to be: calm and peaceful, relaxed like a household unburdened by guests. Here, you didn’t need to be ashamed of yourself. Your feet made a different sound in old slippers on these dusty roads, and you knew you were in the real Vietnam by two things. First: no green Grab taxi helmets. If you owned a scooter, you rode it. If not—you walked. Second, and even more telling: old people. In District One, or in the expat zones of Thao Dien or Phu My Hung, you would never see the elderly. They were bad for tourism, or for the peaceful illusion of Western expats, to whom this host country had to prove continuously that aging didn’t exist. But here, in the Eighth, wrinkled grannies sold lottery tickets—or even offered a quick fortune telling if you were in the mood. And if some old man had forgot to buy his cigarettes, he could just pop out and get them—in broad daylight.

Martin took it all in . Not that it mattered to him where they were going. He was just a passenger riding the shock absorbers of pharmacist Thy’s Honda Vision. And he was perfectly fine with that. So fine, in fact, that even his migraine vanished.

They reached the Binh Dong wharf—Martin recognized it from a few YouTube videos he had seen before arriving. They glided along the canal: water, even if dirty and yellow as horse piss, was everything in Southeast Asia. Either you were linked to the Delta or you weren’t—it was the only real divider in South Vietnam. Thy clearly had that link; that vast yellow river was right across from her street. She pulled up before a set of garage doors, opened them, and rode the scooter in. These entryways were a classic architectural feature of Saigon—a scooter parked in the foyer separated from the living room by just a step or two. The boundary wasn’t defined by brick or wall—it was hygienic. She not only made him take off his shoes, but handed him a civilian kimono to wear after his shower, and even a petticoat of sorts—because, truth be told, putting on the same underwear right after a bath is no fun. The Vietnamese were obsessively clean, hygiene fanatics, and it was laughable that the West considered them dirty. The criticism became especially absurd when it came from peoples like Martin’s own, subjects of the Élysée Palace—a building with hundreds of rooms and not a single tap, let alone plumbing or water supply, which the French aristocracy rejected for centuries with indignation, considering soaking the body in water a great risk to health and the balance of the four humors.

Be that as it may, a descendant of those French filthy stinkers though he was, within ten minutes he appeared in that white kimono embroidered with a slightly faded red dragon, smelling fresh and clean. The robe was too small for him, so he tried to pull the hem at least below his knees, and he slicked his graying hair back, almost asking Thy for a hair tie to make a proper samurai ponytail.

“Grandpa, this is Martin. He’s the one who brought you those wonderful cinnamon chocolate cubes.”

THIRD

The old man sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. He wore an olive-drab military shirt, seemingly still adorned with a small pinned medal. On his head was a garrison cap—an American pilot’s cap bearing USAF wings and a gold officer’s insignia— draped over his thighs was the yellow silk flag of South Vietnam with three red stripes. Yes, that banned banner—the one that could still interrupt national TV broadcasts, and for which Vietnam’s Communist Party would gladly throw anyone who waved it into prison for a few months, even today. A weirdo, Martin thought. There were always people like that—like those oddballs wandering through the fields of Azerbaijan in Barcelona jerseys, or transvestites at pride parades wearing original Nazi helmets.

During his layover in Doha, Martin had briefly skimmed through some Vietnamese history, so he knew a little about heraldry. But the whole thing—the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese, then the Americans, and finally the communists, especially that strange relationship between North and South Vietnam—he didn’t understand any of it. Let alone that infamous Seventeenth Parallel supposedly running right beneath their feet. He figured: We French are probably passé in Indochina, like all promiscuous predators in history—greedy scoundrels with no political convictions, who’ve been everyone’s enemy and ally more times than anyone can count.

They ate a magnificent Phở and Martin could tell Thy had prepared it herself—likely unsure of how skilled he was with chopsticks. With this soup, unlike many saucier dishes that clumsiness could somewhat be hidden using a spoon. Yet Martin meticulously sorted through the ingredients in the bowl with the precision of a watchmaker going over a dismantled timepiece. In his world, adapting to the environment was more about deflecting unnecessary attention than showing respect. He would often tell his building manager René, who regularly ordered Chinese food, that the cutlery bias was real: If an Asian asked for chopsticks in a Paris restaurant, people would stare at him blankly. And the numbers, if you wanted to get into that, were on his side—there were more chopstick users in the world than fork users. Granted, both were outnumbered by people who ate with their hands and who would no doubt prevail in the end, especially as new touchscreen generations emerged—for them, using any kind of utensil was already high-precision mechanics. Look at young Westerners piling into African restaurants—they get their food served in a wooden trough in the middle of the table, eat with their hands, make a mess like pigs, pay ten times the price, then hop into a Tesla and head home.

But Martin wasn’t that type. Leaf by leaf, gently as if he were handling a crumbling manuscript from before the time of Christ, he rearranged herbs in the clear Phở, even the mint after eagerly devouring the mung bean sprouts. At the end of the meal, he rolled a quail egg from one side of his mouth to the other, like a child savoring the last piece of candy. When Thy and her grandfather saw him playfully slurping a bit, everyone felt slightly awkward—and the Frenchman, completely flustered, let the egg slipp down his throat like a token into a jukebox.

The three of them sat in silence, not saying a word—one of those rare, unusual moments in life when the lost habit of not verbalizing the precious time spent with a stranger, with someone other and different, briefly returned. Martin was an experienced non-talker and he took pleasure in the depths of silence, in the void that had swallowed up all words, aware of their own insignificance. He continued to admire the girl openly: her long fingers clearing the table with the deftness of a croupier, her geisha-like steps—movement coming only from the ankle joints—and the uprightness of her posture, which existed solely to emphasize the act of bowing. To him, Thy was a goddess—a superior being ennobled by the restraint of her own superiority, embodying generations of Indochinese women who instilled a sense of significance in a man as a man—a skill long extinct and scorned in the West.

He didn’t care in the slightest why she had brought him to her home, even less about the old man. He simply enjoyed those little trickles of life that occasionally spring up and carry you wherever they please, like a lost ant drifting in a walnut shell. Besides, the writer in him wanted to meet Vietnam, not sit around scratching his belly, farting, and sipping beer with Westerners on some random Saigon street corner across from the hotel.

“We are Hmong — not Vietnamese, not Chinese, not Khmer...” the girl said.

“Hmong? Oh, I know! The Hmong people! Free people! Mountain folk from the north!” Martin blurted out excitedly.

“Free?! Ha—if only!” she cut him off. “We survived by smuggling opium — that is, if there was any left over for us. Because to a Hmong ‘free man,’ poppy sap is still considered food!”

She went to fetch some vanilla cookies—three yellow triangles, each pointed at one of them. They each took theirs and began to chew. Martin was the only one nodding approvingly. There’s that infallible culinary test, he thought, it shows itself in simple dishes like these flour-egg-sweetener cookies that are made everywhere, and no one can ever quite say whether it’s the exact baking time measured in seconds, the direction of stirring, the way the dough is smoothed with a palm, or simply some moment of careless surrender where the cook’s essence ends up inside the cookie. Martin believed it was the last one: the vanilla biscuit carried the same intoxicating aura that Thy somehow infused into everything she touched.

“You see, Mr. Martin, the Hmong aren’t just opium smugglers or jungle guides for opium smugglers.”

“Oh no? What else, then?”

“Those are peacetime jobs! My grandfather didn’t lose his legs on some opium run—he only came across opium in the hospital. Like most of our people, he responded to the CIA’s call. He fought the communists—a platoon commander, a senior officer in General Vang Pao’s secret army. When the Viet Cong found him legless, they didn’t kill him—that’s the rule: it’s dishonorable to kill half a man. So instead, they executed my grandmother. She was whole.”

The old pilot calmly finished his cookie, then nodded, smiled, and wheeled himself back to his room.

“You're lucky he doesn’t understand you,” Martin muttered.

“Him? Who do you think taught me English? Grandpa’s been to America several times—he was a negotiator for the Secret Army at the Pentagon. A colonel. Pilot Kub Lee is the only Hmong ever to serve as a flight commander in the U.S. Air Force! General Vang Pao kept sending him letters for years after the war, offering to bring him to the U.S., but he never accepted. His photo’s still hanging in Minnesota, in St. Paul — right in the lobby of the Hmong Cultural Center.”

“And why didn’t he go? What did he tell them?”

“He didn’t say anything to anybody. Not for years. He went silent about fifteen years ago—watching a military parade on TV, on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon. He saw people in the crowd wearing traditional Hmong costumes. Since that day he hasn’t uttered a single word. I tease him a little,” Thy added with a smile, “but Grandpa knows there’s no hard feelings.”

“Must be interesting,” Martin said thoughtfully, “trying to get someone to speak. Usually, people are trying to shut each other up.”

“Yeah... I guess that’s true. Let’s go out to the porch.”

She passed by him with a tray carrying a teapot and cups, heading for the open door, beyond which a patch of green shimmered in the light.

“Imagine that,” she said. “A people who has survived five thousand years by talking—who has passed down its entire identity through oral tradition has a leader, a commander who refuses to utter a single word.”

“Thy... are you some kind of Hmong activist?”

“Oh, no!” she laughed. “I just figured my grandfather seemed strange to you, so I was trying to explain. It doesn’t really matter. Forget it.”

She poured him tea, expertly lifting the teapot from the cup at just the right millisecond, so that the drop beginning to fall obediently pulled back—like a sailor tipping overboard who somehow managed to haul himself back onto the deck. Her eyes sparkled beneath her raven-haired bangs, illuminating Martin with the light of generations of Laotian highlanders, Hmong night hunters, and jungle foragers from the most vibrant patch of earth the Creator ever made. An unbearable wildness radiated from her precise, elegant movements, while the restraint of social graces—gentleness toward the weak—kept the volcano inside her in check. Martin M. looked at her and nearly whispered a prayer: God, thank you — this girl is a rocket bound for your paradise.

“Why did you bring me to your home?” he asked, needing to start somewhere, and thinking the quote might amuse her. “Maybe you’ve got some Indian figs, ginger, pickle brine, pickels, chamomile...?!”

“I’ve got all sorts of things here, Mr. Martin. If you must know, I’m a Txiv Neeb. Sort of like your Dr. House in the West—but without electricity, internet, CT scans, or health insurance policies.”

“A shaman?”

“Call it whatever you like. See that yellow bush down there, beneath the cherry tree? That’s frog stomach—and its tonic will clear up that flaky psoriasis on your elbows in two weeks. And over there to the right: Japanese knotweed. You Westerners ignore it so thoroughly, it’s started making itself seen—bursting through the asphalt at intersections. And this tea will help you grow old without needing to run to the bathroom every hour.”

“Well... Your grandfather got off easy!”

“Oh, sorry! I spend all day giving advice. Sometimes I get carried away.”

“So how’d you end up working in a pharmacy?”

“In Vietnam, people don’t have money for doctors, and the pharmacy is practically the last stop in the healthcare system that an ordinary person can reach. Everything is bought here—you can forget about prescriptions. We trust people, and the Vietnamese health system is built on the idea that most people aren’t inclined to poison themselves, and those who do can’t really be helped anyway. Here your Western medicines are stripped down to their market price: a good antibiotic costs three dollars. In the West it’s probably thirty, or three hundred!”

“And when something can be free, that’s even better: Indian fig, ginger, pickle brine, pickles, chamomile...” Martin said.

Thy laughed, and a soothing warmth spread through Martin’s body the way hot chocolate forms a crust over ice-cream in factories.

“Besides,” she said, “where would you put a Hmong shaman, the granddaughter of an enemy of the order, of society, of the state? If Grandpa ever spoke, he’d say, ‘The communists kill us—we heal them...’”

“Are your parents alive?”

“Parents?! After five camps across three countries—you have to agree that question is rather pointless. We Hmong passed silently through those decades when parenthood could no longer be a biological fact. I was brought here at the age of six from somewhere—from an orphanage or a camp—and they told Grandpa, ‘Colonel, we found your granddaughter Thy!’ And before he stopped talking, he never even mentioned having children.”

“So he’s not your real grandfather?”

“He isn’t—but precisely because he isn’t, he is! A grandfather by blood is a trivial thing. A grandfather by duty is more serious. But a grandfather by choice—that is a true grandfather. You don’t really understand that, Mr. Martin...”

“I never imagined the Hmong people were so open-minded. Adoption, parenthood, or rather grandparenthood by choice? I thought it was all genetics. I read that you are stricter than the Jews—that Jewish matrilineality is nothing compared to your rigid clan structure.”

“You understood correctly. But the transition is over, the line’s been redrawn, and here we are again: eighteen tribes, eighteen surnames. For example, if I ever found myself in trouble in any city in the world, all I’d have to do is find a phone book and look up the surname Lee: ‘Hello, I’m Thy Lee, I need this or that...’”

Martin fell silent, remembering how his mother—back when he still visited her in the nursing home—once mentioned a relative somewhere. He hadn’t listened all the way through; he left early. He couldn’t stand that institutional smell of death.

“‘Hello, I’m Thy Lee’—not so bad from my point of view. I’ve got no kin, my ex-wives would fire me out of a cannon, and my children wouldn’t even come to my funeral...”

“Where there’s no nation, there’s no family,” the Hmong woman recited an old saying. 

She was a member of a people without a state, territory, or administration; a group of two million kept together by oral tradition and images of a glorious past embroidered on colorful sheets sold in souvenir shops, farted on by the fat bottoms of overweight Western tourists.

“Let’s drop that,” the girl said, waving it off as she poured his tea, holding a silk napkin under the teapot like a hand under a baby who might spit up. It might, but it wouldn’t, because here in Colonel Kub Lee’s courtyard by the Binh Dong canal, every drop of tea possesses restraint.

“I know the limits of privacy, Mr. Martin, you don’t have to reproach yourself for being discreet, or respond with improper confessions. I’m telling you all this about Grandpa and us Hmong because I know it must seem odd to you to see a silent old man without legs, draped in a flag, whom no one has visited for at least two decades.”

“Thy, if that’s the case, then at least stop with the ‘Mr. Martin’ stuff. I’m sitting here on the porch without any underwear, you’re offering me remedies from every corner of the garden, I’m almost ready to sign up for the Hmong brigade if they start up another action against the communists. What kind of foreigner am I, what kind of ‘Mr. Martin,’ for goodness’ sake?”

“You’re Mr. Martin, who came in for Indian figs, ginger, pickle brine, pickles, chamomile...” the girl smiled, and a tenderness swept over Mr. Martin—the kind, he imagined, that only a baby feels when it finally latches onto its mother’s breast after a long cry.

“But if you’d like... can I call you Marty?”

“You can! Agreed, Thy!”

They sat on the porch, his legs stretched halfway onto the lawn, hers tucked geisha-like under her kimono, her hands hidden in the wide sleeves. Wrapped like a candy, frozen like a figurine on a souvenir shelf, to Martin she was a volcano of desire, a fountain of estrogen, a beauty never experienced before. He shamelessly gazed at her velvety face with its touch of chocolate darkness; she wore that complexion proudly, the very Indochinese duskiness for which girls spend fortunes trying to whiten their skin. He watched her because, in the Lee family garden, a man was allowed to look at a woman—in fact, it was his duty and a compliment to her allure. Here, staring at a beautiful woman was also timed with a stopwatch, like in Silicon Valley offices— except not because of lawsuits or harassment complaints, but as a genuine compliment. What’s the point of beauty if you’re not even allowed to look at it?

This, if you asked Martin, was sex—the sex that was left after it had become aggressive, ubiquitously cheap, and utterly ruined. These glances, meeting and pulling away like headlights winding along Greek mountain roads; these wild compressions of heart muscles, revving engines of life, the hydraulics of erections, the release of turbine lubricants, injectors, nozzles—the entire machinery of man. In Martin and Thy life roared beneath the hood of their kimonos. It was some kind of adult film co-produced by the Vatican and Sharia law—erotica the ancient Greek poets had meant to sing of before some drunken barbarian tore off his pants and jumped on the first person nearby.

He held back. He knew all about that irresistible seduction of Indochina—that system built to serve the white adult male, that bottomless abyss into which many a worldly Western man had fallen even before unpacking his suitcase. He had heard of the scentless bodies, waiting to absorb the stench of the West; of that wide, almond-eyed gaze from below; of the strict hierarchy of innocent pleasure—but also of the unparalleled skill. Like that circular motion of the lips that could squeeze the very last drop of semen from the stunned shaft; that flawless timing that knows exactly how close you are—perhaps the greatest proof of superiority over the amateurs in even the finest Western brothels, who still get surprised every third time.

He knew it all, and rejected it all because he wanted it to be different. He didn’t want to rush anything. He wanted it to last. He looked at her, and his hand moved on its own toward her chin, to hold it, so he could kiss her. Not even all of Hollywood’s output had ever managed to show how a man and a woman simply know when the exact right moment for the first kiss was—those few milliseconds that could hold an entire lifetime. Better to ask first. Maybe not even a kiss. More like, kind of, dancing around it, Martin thought.

“Thy, why did you bring me home?” That was going be how he tried to procede.

“You Westerners always ask why something is done! Doesn’t it seem rather arrogant to search for the reasons behind your actions? Isn’t it simpler to ask yourself whether you have any reason not to do something? Marty, is there any reason why you shouldn’t be here today?”

“There isn’t!”

“So, Marty, if there is a reason why you’re in Colonel Lee’s house, it will reveal itself to us.”

“Don’t ask why you do something, but rather is there a reason not to do it,” the Frenchman added.

“That’s it exactly, Marty!”

She beckoned to him, and he followed her. She showed him to the guest room, the Japanese-style bed, and then left. That evening, in the Lee household in Saigon’s Eighth District, Martin M. masturbated, pulling his shaft for the first time in maybe thirty years. His astonished cock peeked out from his fist like an innocent drowning man just waiting for it all to be over.

WEDNESDAY

FOURTH

Martin’s clothes were folded in a neat rectangle beside the simple floor bed, aligned with the slippers already pointing toward the dining room. Martin M. smiled at them, tilting his head as if checking the direction himself, aiming alongside them toward the door. He adored those little signs, the way Thy guided him like a child. He remembered how even the building manager, René, would claim that a man truly in love was really in love with motherhood, that he was only ever looking for his mother. René would often remark, peering over his reading glasses, which would perch low on the bridge of his knobby Gallic nose, that there was no other sexological explanation for our pathological fascination with boobs. “The life of a heterosexual man is nothing but extended childhood,” René had put it plainly. He hadn’t had the luck, as a straight man, to also be a wealthy Jewish heir like Sigmund Freud. So despite his psychoanalytic and other credentials, he had ended up taking care of that six-story building on Chestnut Street No. 13 in Bordeaux.

The Frenchman got dressed, pressing his clothes to his face, inhaling Thy’s scent from every piece of fabric, rolling his eyes like in a laundry softener commercial. He clomped over in his wooden clogs to the table, where the colonel smiled at him—seemingly more warmly than the day before—and even poured him some tea.

“Good morning,” Martin blurted instinctively, and the old man returned the greeting with a gentle nod.

Breakfast unfolded just like in a hotel: if you didn’t feel like talking, you didn’t have to. The person across from you, as you would soon discover, clearly wasn’t going to say a word. He ate a clump of purple rice, so delicious that he didn’t add a single drop of sauce—just washed it down with the colonel’s decent-enough tea. At the end of the meal—tit for tat—he simply nodded and made his way to the door, placed his clogs on the floow pointing back toward the house, and put on his shoes. The heavy metal garage door rose effortlessly and clicked neatly into place when he lowered it again from the outside. He wondered: did the old man drape himself in the banned flag so he wouldn’t have to go outside—or is he staying inside because he was wrapped in that yellow banner with three bloody stripes? Seemingly minor nuances, but Martin was starting to learn that in Vietnam, everything comes down to nuance.

All around him, the street along the Binh Dong canal had already come alive. Dozens of wooden sampans, loaded with fruit and vegetables since early morning, were gliding through the muddy water toward the Delta’s tourist spots. A Grab driver appeared out of nowhere, handed him a green helmet, and Martin got on the scooter. He didn’t even tell the guy where he was headed, but at the first red light, as they made their way toward District One, the driver pointed at his phone. Martin typed in: Majestic Hotel. They arrived quickly. The city center was much calmer: the tourists were still asleep, and even the locals had no reason to be out on the streets just yet.

He didn’t feel like going into the Majestic, so he just stood there, confused—which only confused the hotel doorman even more. The man was trying to read Martin’s subtle sideward shifts and was tugging at the hotel door handle, clicking it open in anticipation, while the Grab scooter driver helplessly pointed at Martin’s head. Snapping out of it, Martin finally removed his helmet, and the young man rode off on his little scooter—not without first flashing a smile and offering a bow. “I’m going to have to learn those kinds of smiles and bows,” Martin thought. “If that’s the only way to communicate, then there must be different types, degrees of cordiality.”

As he stepped into the street, he figured the best, simplest thing would be to head to the chocolate shop, order those cinnamon-dusted pastries, and wait for Thy.

No point in wasting time—Thy had gotten under his skin, so why pretend otherwise? He wasn’t that headstrong, arrogant French intellectual anymore, the one who defies Islam one day, the Third Republic the next, then Brussels, and whoever else needs challenging the day after that. He was ready to submit. Submissively, Martin admitted it to himself. From now on, it wasn’t about what needed to do, but what Thy would want him to do—that girl who had made him a hearty bowl of Phở the day before, in whose bed he had pleasured himself. Still, he found a reason not to go to the Ngyan family chocolate shop: Thy probably wouldn’t want that.

Why risk it? He would take a walk instead. Something would come to him eventually.

That morning, Ho Chi Minh City felt different. After the conversation with Thy, and the silence with Colonel Lee Kub, Martin no longer felt like a tourist. First of all, he realized, this wasn’t really Ho Chi Minh—it was Saigon. And nobody actually called it by its official name—unless they were a state TV news anchor, a Communist Party official, or someone chasing a government job. Viet Cong rabble. The red gang! Oh, if only Martin had the same radar the Saigonese had—that sixth sense for spotting Northerners from a mile away: by their accent, their gait, their everything. Then he could step right in front of one, block his path, get in his face, and shout: What are you staring at, you damn commie?!

His literary soul drifted off once again—he had always been guided by his pecker, always quick to choose his side. But this wasn’t just that: probably no other city in the world had ever lived—or ever would live—in such a false harmony, a place built entirely on illusion and silence, like Saigon. Those who once pitted them against each other—the Chinese, the Russians, the British, the Americans—had since reconciled, several times over. But North and South Vietnam? They never would. Here, in the heart of a captive metropolis—which, in true Communist fashion, wasn’t even allowed to keep its name—a cradle might drift up to a riverside café, carrying a bastard child fathered by a Marine from South Dakota and a local girl who had no luck at all. And his colleague, some stoned hippie from ‘68, couldn’t even be bothered to shut the door of the rescue plane—a Lockheed C-5A. Because this wasn’t history. If those children hadn’t fallen into the flooded rice paddies, they’d be Martin’s age today. They were not some distant ancestors—they were us, we today. Every Vietnamese knew that, in a country where there wasn't a single family left whole. This is where the plow hits bones in the field—bones with more meat on them than in a bowl of Phở from the Saigon suburbs. Here, in Communist Vietnam, the re-education centers were officially closed because the entire South had been turned into one giant, semi-open correctional facility. Here, Buddhism and Catholicism existed side by side—but not together. Cafés, hotels, auto repair shops—they all had portable pagodas or fold-out altars. Christians often place, next to the Virgin Mary, the mustachioed blessed one, Father Francis Truong Buu Diep. A fitting figure, one might say: torn to pieces by the Japanese in 1946, he offered himself up to die in place of his fellow villagers—and they accepted. He died a blessed death. He didn’t live to see them murder the rest anyway.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Father Diep was elevated to the honors of the altar, and the Southern Catholics began to emphasize him precisely because he had died at the hands of the Japanese—the only conqueror suitably cast as a butcher under the newly rewritten circumstances. No one else, of course—especially not the Northerners—killed anyone. Among the millions wiped out by the communists, the Holy See still, after eighty years, hadn’t found a single soul worthy of beatification. No, it wasn’t just Colonel Kub Lee who kept silent here—everyone was silent about everything, and the whole of Saigon was propped up above water on stilts of silence.

While sifting through the realities of Vietnam, Martin stumbled upon a church, in front of which flowed a soft murmur of tonal English—a spectacular auditory bait in a city that had more speakers of basic English fifty years ago than it did now. Martin, truth be told, wasn’t particularly religious, but he always went to mass, since shrines and taverns were a writer’s natural feeding grounds. Besides, a bit of inspiration—of any kind—would have done him good that day.

The mass, unfortunately, was utterly bland. To the Frenchman, long soaked in religious events across the globe, it had seemed for some time that local-language masses were far more vibrant, and that at these international services, the same few dozen Filipinos and two Spanish families had been following him all over the world, from city to city for years now.

Here, for a change, the novelty came in the form of unusually attractive young women—small clusters of them positioning themselves beneath the projection screens, those tacky light boards displaying the Eucharist in English. A clever, free language course—for the Roman Church was vast and generous. Why, just the other night, with those twins in the Majestic apartment, it had struck him that their entire English vocabulary consisted of lines from adult films and verses from the Gospel of John.

“Let us offer each other the sign of peace!” called the well-fed priest with slicked-back, coal-black hair.

“Peace be with you!” chirped two sweet girls with fluttering eyes as they turned and bowed to Martin—who nearly asked how much that kind of peace might cost per hour.

“And with your Spirit!” he replied instead, falling back on habit.

He didn’t see them again on the way out of the church—in truth, he didn’t even look. Martin M. had become a different man since the day before. Booze, women, wild parties—all that was behind him now. What interested him was Vietnam as Vietnam, a country that could speak for itself. The writer had stripped away all preconceptions; he wasn’t a missionary bringing anything, but at least he wasn’t there to take anything either.

He slipped into the narrow backstreets of Saigon, where the locals live—cramped little boxes from which the poor spill out each morning in search of work. In those corridors, one had to step over bare outstretched legs, climb over sleeping, exhausted people—most of whom, it seemed, had no other home. This was the backstage of Saigon’s tourist stage—a gaudy illusion, where the Viet people, for a fistful of dollars, feign joy at the arrival of Westerners. To be fair, the West had come some way in recent decades: this was the first generation not marching in with rifles slung over their backs.

He passed what could only be described as a reservation for morons, crowned with a massive sign screaming STREET FOOD—though it was neither street-based nor was it food in any local sense of the word. At this cluster of grill stalls, with cartoonish picture-English menus above the doors—menus clearly designed for the cognitively impaired—the meals consisted of slabs of meat that could have fed three generations of Vietnamese families. Brits, Aussies, and Frenchmen shoved it down their gullets, washing it down with flavorless beer poured by girls who looked like some Pacific parody of Oktoberfest hostesses—minus the tits. Crude barroom English buzzed over the wooden tables, the joy palpable on the faces of people who, finally relaxed, could admit to themselves—and to each other—that they had never had a single decent reason to come here in the first place. This was the grand celebration of modern tourism’s ultimate triumph—as defined by building manager René: to go as far away as possible with people you can’t stand, so you can all enjoy hating the unfamiliar together. Indeed, this Saigon “Street Food” scene was like a metastasized airport lounge from Ho Chi Minh City’s terminal, overrun by a semi-literate mob with no business-class tickets in their pockets. Not a single Vietnamese in sight—just two or three men standing on the street in front of the joint, holding glowing sticks, in what may be the most picturesque humiliation of the West: stopping traffic and helping the cattle cross the road and enter the pen.

Suddenly, he found himself in front of Bến Thành Market and slipped into the crowd. No true Saigon local—unless he was a tour guide—had set foot in there for years. The vendors were mostly Chinese, failed scholarship students of the Communist Party who had washed out of Moscow universities, people who, one way or another, had access to the reject goods funneled out through the main gates from local camps—the ones the West proudly declares “manufactured in Vietnam” on textile labels. As René would have put it: “Going to Vietnam? That's great! Your clothes have already been.” Bến Thành Market, a staple of every tourist guidebook, had long bored even the vendors themselves, who, after decades of stepping in the path of rivers of giddy Westerners, have simply slumped into plastic chairs behind their stalls. Sometimes even the most seasoned hustlers are worn down by the sheer idiocy of the customer. It’s the kind of place where nothing costs what they tell you: before noon, there’s a discount because you’re the “first customer,” after noon, a discount because they’re “about to close.”

He crossed the street from the market and stepped into a building, spotting a few restaurants that were starting to fill up. He decided to grab lunch. Singles eat earlier—the reasons are technical, really, a mismatch between hospitality logistics and demographic trends. Or, as diagnosed infallibly by René: “Tourism always lags behind reality—the world is full of loneliness, but it still hasn’t invented tables for singles.”

A waiter intercepted Martin on his way in, but didn’t give him that idiotic “just one?” look. He simply gestured toward one, then another free table. Martin chose the nearest one, sitting down with his ass to the restaurant. Across from him sat a skinny, stoned Vietnamese guy slouched in what looked like a salvaged truck seat. A massive rat circled around him—a fat, swaggering rodent in rat heaven, surrounded by overturned trash bins and a row of small eateries. The thing had grown so bold that Martin could swear it stood up on its hind legs, as if waiting for a sip of beer from the guy, who more and more looked like the landlord of the entire passageway. And if that were the case, then surely the title of rat of the landlord of the passageway would be a status far beyond reach for the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese population.

This Bếp Mẹ In restaurant was really a strange place, Martin thought, turning his head away from the sight of a rat drinking beer. Then he noticed a Michelin sign next to the entrance: half-hidden beneath a rag lazily tossed over the railing by a neighbor on the first floor. With growing curiosity, he dove into the menu and quickly realized that here, meals didn’t cost the usual 1,000 or even 100 euros—at most, ten. They served street food, the waiter had whispered, adding conspiratorially that his own mother cooked just as well at an intersection three streets down—and imagine, for just a fifth of the price.

The stuffed squash blossoms with smoked yellowtail catfish seemed like a solid choice—and they truly were enchanting. For 4.50 euros in a Bordeaux restaurant with a Michelin nod, they wouldn’t even hand you a colour photo of the dish. He also decided to try the shrimp spring rolls, to compare them with those from the Two Ducks restaurant, where he had stuffed himself two nights ago. He was already certain these would be far better. He nodded at the waiter, closing and handing over the menu, having decided that—while he was at it—he would ask exactly which intersection the waiter’s mother cooked at.

“Is this seat taken?” said a voice. But it wasn’t the waiter—it was a chubby man in a white shirt and black wool trousers, perfectly creased, who looked like someone inducted into the Young Pioneers about thirty years too late.

“Are you waiting for someone, sir?” the official repeated, already halfway to placing his bag on the chair across from Martin—a polite signal that he didn’t intend to sit directly across, so they wouldn’t bump foreheads while shoveling food in with chopsticks.

“Go ahead,” the Frenchman replied, palms turned upward in approval.

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