2 1/2 Hours in Vung Tau on 4/22/24

As published at SubStack, 4/22/24:

[5:02AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]

4:31AM. I’m at that cheap café on Lý Thường Kiệt, about to drink an adulterated coffee for 31 cents. It’s likely to have as much soybean or corn as coffee beans, but for this price, I shouldn’t demand anything more than ground roasted Arabica, Ethiopian or Colombian rat droppings. When foreign friends visited recently, I took them to a similar dump, primarily to show them a lovely shelf shrine to Jesus. They couldn’t finish their black offering. Hipster run Enough is more to their taste. It costs ten times more. I’ve stayed clear of it the way I avoid trendy bars.

Across the street is Sài Gòn Mới, an optician. Again, Saigon is used all over Vietnam, even in Hanoi. On my Qatar Airways flight from Phnom Penh to Saigon two weeks ago, all inflight announcements referred to Saigon. I salute them for sensitivity to local usage. Only totalitarians demand sudden linguistic shifts, irrespective of history, heritage or popular preferences. Progressives, in particular, hate the working class and how they talk.

Since PC Americans don’t know or care about all these poems and songs about Saigon, some have given me shit about what I call my hometown. Tey can shove it up ter frontal or poop hole! I’m just not with it. I should identify as Lebron James. Tomorrow, I’ll be Taylor Swift.

In near darkness, a woman is washing vegetables, bought fresh from Cô Giang Market. Miss Giang committed suicide when her fiancé, Nguyễn Thái Học, was executed by the French in 1930. They led the failed Yên Bái Uprising. That she’s referred to as “Miss” betrays people’s affection. Across the street is a fine Colonial building with its steep roof, balustraded balcony and tall, louvered windows.

Is any of this interesting? Of course, not. Consider, though, this manifesto as spoken by a Henry James character, “I used often to stretch away for my daily ramble, with no companion but the stick in my hand or the book in my pocket. But in the use of my legs and the sense of unstinted open air, I have always found company enough. I should, perhaps, add that in the enjoyment of a very sharp pair of eyes, I found something of a social pleasure. My eyes and I were on excellent terms; they were indefatigable observers of all wayside incidents, and so long as they were amused I was contented. It is, indeed, owing to their inquisitive habits that I came into possession of this remarkable story.” With just legs, air and eyes, we’ll feast on stories.

Needing wifi, I’ve walked a block to the cafe on Uprising. The chubby seller of lottery tickets isn’t here. Often exuberant, she likes to make loud declarations. Talking about adultery last week, she said, “If I can’t even use my husband, why would I want to use anyone else’s?!”

Immediately, someone corrected her, “Since you can’t use your husband, you must use someone else’s.”

For cryptic or perverse reasons, this cafe’s owner doesn’t like me, so she certainly won’t use me.

Cafe or bar culture is about hearing and being heard. The beverages are secondary. Though this should be self-evident, I’ve had to defend my innate sociability to indignantly belligerent Americans. They can be triggered by anything. Consider this news story from 3/27/24, “A 79-year-old man was beaten in the bathroom of his own home after an intoxicated neighbor entered the wrong house, according to police in Texas.”

Since the drunk used his own housekey, he and his neighbor not only lived in cookie cutter homes, they had been issued identical keys. “I don’t play around,” Eric Collazo said when arrested. By that he meant breaking three of the old man’s ribs. Shouldn’t Collazo have recognized his nextdoor neighbor?

Done with Uprising, I weave through several alleys towards Cô Giang Market. At a noodle eatery on Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, I notice this T-shirt on a woman, “GOALIE Grandma.” Behind her is a fat schoolgirl with disheveled hair staring at a phone. Generations are being destroyed.

Passing a meat seller, I think of the young man who delivers pig carcasses before dawn. Shirtless, he merges with each dead body. With each cadaver carved in half, he doesn’t even get proper embraces.

At the corner of Tú Xương and Cô Bắc is Bitter Coffee. Glancing in, I don’t see a great grandma I love to talk with, so I move on. Cô Bắc is Cô Giang’s sister. Sentenced to five years of solitary confinement, she sneered, “Why don’t you people go back to France and tear down Joan d’Arc statues!” A single bon mot uttered at the perfect moment will sort of immortalize you. Nothing human is.

I’m at my third cafe at 6:10AM. At the next table is a schoolgirl with black rimmed glasses eating a pseudo baguette with condensed milk. Her dad is watching highlights of Manchester City vs. Chelsea. Twenty five years ago, Vietnamese would stare at week-old NBA games just for glimpses of the outside world. Now, they’re titilated each second, so of course, most would sign up to be an eternal janitor in Utqiagvik, Alaska. That skeletal seller of lottery tickets now appears for her iced tea before roaming streets that will quickly heat up.

Paying for her drink, she grasps her lottery tickets with her toes, which makes me think of this fragment by Lafcadio Hearn, “The foot of the halfbreed, never deformed by shoes, retains prehensile power, — grasps like a hand.” Blacks are closer to monkeys, in short, but you must step back to admire his greater humanity. Twain wrote “Noble Red Man,” and Dickens “The Noble Savage.”

Bicycling by, all schoolkids wear a grim face, for they must endure another day of indoctrination. As a child, I couldn’t wait to grow up, but school wasn’t my only problem.

With Cóc Cóc about to open, I trek back that way. On Ba Cu, there’s a man sunning a newborn. It’s just another incomprehensible act to outsiders. When vitamin D was most needed during the Covid scare, they demanded we stay inside, but what do you expect from those who violently insisted on Jewjabs?

In Osaka 5 1/2 years ago, I showed during a lecture at least a dozen photos taken in Philly in just one day. Its wretchedness is everywhere evident, even to tourists who pay the least attention. The same is true of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Denver and New Orleans, etc., all fabled American cities.

Even at their most squalid, Southeast Asian slums and alleys are still communities where smiles and laughter aren’t rare. Almost never will you find anyone cut off from everyone, as is common in the USA.

As for foreigners here, almost none can penetrate the language or society. Even if they were interested, it would take too much effort. Many, if not most, are merely sexpats hanging out in expat bars. With vehemence, they will insist that Thais, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos are mostly whores, pimps and hustlers. Whatever, man. People believe what they want to.

In Tirana, I must have spent a hundred mornings in Lami’s. Though I understood no overheard conversations, just lines from Italian songs, I was always delighted to be among people. When I referred to them as “my kind,” an Unzian moron got enraged. Constantly stoked yet castrated by Jews, it’s all they can do.

[5:58AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]

[6:03AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]

[6:11AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]

[6:20AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]

[6:57AM in Vung Tau on 4/22/24]