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Bình Phú Park, half a mile from my in-laws. When in Saigon, I often take my nephew, Suki, here. Twenty-seven-months-old, he's gotten bigger, so it's a bit of a workout to carry the little guy here and back, but it's usually not safe to let him walk on the cluttered sidewalk, street or in the alley.

Paul Theroux wrote about the country in 1973, "In Vietnam the children play alone, and the adults appear to have been swept away; you look for the parents among large groups of children, for the background figure of an adult. But (and this distorts the landscape) they are missing."

That's no longer true. Now, you constantly see parents or grandparents taking kids to parks, malls or just for a walk through the alleys.



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