Sights and Sounds of Saigon

Mother and child and moped

View Photos (12) Image © 2000 Garrett Culhane

I follow the long, wide street north out of Cholon, that notorious place of reprobates and "rebellious barons," as noted by Graham Greene, where "it was like Europe in the Middle Ages." I'm on the back seat of a Honda Om, a new and shiny moped. My hands are firmly fixed on the metal rails of the rear seat rack. My driver is negotiating the traffic--trucks, cars, taxis, mopeds, tricarts, buses. Cyclos and bicycles follow in our wake.

At the intersections, traffic comes at you from all directions. There are few stoplights. Where they do exist, they're ignored. Each vehicle moves slowly anticipating the trajectory of others. All flow like schools of fish--curving, weaving.

We pass peeling facades of still beautiful French colonial buildings. Large trees, painted white at their trunks, line the road like towering sentries. Sidewalk kitchens serve pho and delicious fresh as well as fried spring rolls. Nothing in the world can prepare you for the sights and sounds of Saigon. Girls on mopeds. Mothers and babies on mopeds. Entire families on mopeds. Four generations of families jammed into cyclos--all smiling. Everywhere in Vietnam, people are smiling. Life is good.

We stop at the market. I spy a young noodle knocker banging away with bamboo and stick calling out: one knock, two knocks...once the signal for two bowls of rice. I follow him on his beat. I see produce--all kinds of produce. Long crunchy green beans, fiery-looking rambutans, smelly durians, shiny-red roseapples, ripe papayas and mangoes, mangoes, mangoes. For those carnivores out there, there is also plenty. Beautiful lean pork, lots of thinly marbled beef, fresh fish and fowl, frogs and dogs. Some sights in Vietnam are not for the queasy. Dog lovers might well object. Snake lovers, too. Viperine food is a delicacy here. The meat is eaten. Imbibing the blood is good for one's virility; so too is ruou ran, a "snake liquor" flavored by the corpses of the lively looking cobras with visible fangs and flared hoods. The snake-handling specialists drive about the city streets with their corked bottles of curled up vipers and cages of very live (and very lethal) serpents.

I return to my hotel room to seek refuge. I'm exhausted. I'm on the 8th floor. Below is the din of traffic on a hot and humid late afternoon. I can hear hundreds of mopeds, cyclos, tricarts, trucks, buses, bicycles and cars--all beeping and honking. Beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeep--the pitch altered by a Doppler effect. Some are loud beeps. Others sound tired like the beeps of a dying battery--beeeeeeeeee. Taxi horns are chipper. Trucks honk to music. Two-stroke cycles with half mufflers--tat-tat-tat-tat-tat--pass below. The four-stroke cycles putter--pup-pup-pup-pup. Cars back up to the tune from The Godfather--du da du da du da duuu, da du da duuuu...In between, I can hear the muffled melody of the ice cream man pushing his cart of frozen goodies. Faintly, I can hear a noodle knocker and rattling beer bottle caps as well. The latter is a sound signature of the masseuse. Knock, knock, knock. Rattle, rattle, rattle. Beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeep.

I slip in and out of light sleep. I try to make sense of the noise I can not avoid. An audio experience, a hundred layers dissonantly, inchoately, sounding off. Saigon is first and forever an audio experience. Somehow it all works.

Published on 9/1/99