Saigon, 19-09-09

I am running in pre-dawn darkness trying out several new things.

I’m trying out one-way routes for the first time in Vietnam.  This one will cover most of downtown Saigon, cross the river and end in the expatriate golden ghetto on the other side of the river.  I’ve tired of the loops around my house near the airport. This will be one of the longest of the long runs. In a few weeks I will begin to taper.  To run these distances on my normal Tan Son Nhat airport loop would be as boring as track running even though the circuit is 7-8km long.

I am running with my daughter Charlotte’s iPod on shuffle because something went wrong with mine as it charged last night.

And I am running the first few kilometers in the dark.

This is strange.  Visually and audibly.

I have to start this early partly because it will be at least 3 hours until I finish running.  I don’t want to catch the heat that starts building by 8am.  I also need the early start because the first stretch is down the main road that connects the airport and hinterlands of this sprawling city of 8 million to the old downtown quarter.

This road, called Nguyen Van Troi, is busy at nearly all times of day.  Road works that have persisted like an incurable case of foot fungus for the past 18 months make the congestion even worse.  But at this early hour, a runner can manage to make it through the gauntlet.

Long ago, a few months before I was born, Robert McNamara, ‘architect’ of the Vietnam War, had to run his own gauntlet on this same road during his first visit here.  In 1963, a group of Viet Cong fighters attempted to detonate a bomb as McNamara’s car crossed the small bridge that marks the beginning of Nguyen Van Troi Boulevard.  The assassination attempt failed.  Only one of the Viet Cong was caught.  His name was Nguyen Van Troi.  He was executed by firing squad some time afterward, refusing a blindfold or a priest’s absolution.  Idealistic to the end his last words were ’Long live Vietnam’.  The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army considered him an early and important martyr during the war.  His story is still held in high regard today.  So it’s appropriate that this road I am running on is named after him.

I first heard the story of Nguyen Van Troi, or a version of it, from my friend Tran Khang Thuy.  Thuy was our company’s first business partner in Vietnam.  He managed a commercial unit attached to the University of Economics.  His appointment to the University was probably due, in part or whole, to his own service as a Viet Cong guerrilla during the war years.  He never struck me as much of an academician.  But he is a one hell of a deal maker.  He has gotten me out of a few difficult predicaments over the years.  I am sure he was well-liked in whatever guerrilla cell he belonged to during the war.  He is resourceful and dependable.

Thuy says he knew Nguyen Van Troi as well as some of the others who were not caught.  When I guessed that Troi must have been the leader or at the very least just the unlucky one, Thuy just laughed and said, “No, he was just a slow runner.  That’s why he was caught. And definitely not the leader!  He was just the kid that carried the bags.”  Troi was 17 years old when he was executed. My daughter’s age today.

Remembering this, I pick up the pace and sprint across the small bridge beneath which bombs were planted 45 years ago.  Now that I think about it, this bridge probably marks the end, not the beginning of Nguyen Van Troi.

I pass a small flock of catholic nuns as I start across the bridge then a pride of Buddhists monks walking in the other direction as I come off the bridge.  I wonder what they will say to each other when they cross paths at the top of Nguyen Van Troi’s bridge.  What would he say if he saw all of us on his bridge at the same time?  Mixed emotions, I am sure.  I guess he would only be in his early sixties today.

It is light now and I am in the older streets of Saigon in what was once an area for wealthy French, Chinese and Vietnamese traders and fonctionnaires in the colonial days.  I’ve never really noticed until now how much wider and in better conditions the sidewalks are in this part of town.  Also, more trees.  Behind the walls are many grand French villas.  Some of them are nicely renovated. Ten years ago, the renovated ones would have exclusively been expat homes repaired on company expense accounts.  Today, I am more likely to find Thuy or some other successful tycoon behind these gates.

One stretch I pass through was gated and guarded by armed police until five or six years ago. This is where the local government officials live.  I am not sure why they felt the need to block their streets off from the public back then but it is evidently no longer needed.  Small changes like these make me realize that Vietnam has progressed immensely in the fifteen years that I have lived here.

My iPod tells me that I am now past 10k.  I am settling into a comfortable pace.  I haven’t been paying much attention to the music but I realize now that most of it is really quite good.  If it weren’t, I would have been fumbling for the forward arrow button long ago.  Do my kids have such poor taste in music that I actually like what they keep on their iPods?  Or is it just that there really are no new musical styles anymore?  It does seem increasingly the case that popular music and movies are remakes of concepts first produced 20 or 30 years ago.  Or maybe I have grown accustomed to what the kids like? It’s true that I have discovered from them some of the music I like the most today.

Something fundamental has changed in popular culture I think.  If there were a legislature where unwritten rules are debated and promulgated I would have to surmise that the rule that said each generation must despise the musical tastes of those that come immediately before and after them has been repealed.  This is good, I think.  Then I find myself reciting the words to a particularly insipid set of lyrics by Eminem and I think, “Maybe this change in rules isn’t so good”.  But I must admit that foul-mouthed skinny fuck Marshal Mathers is a clever little prick.   I admire cleverness.

Eminem is still venting when I find the big park behind Diem’s presidential palace.  I am planning to run a few loops around the park and the palace.  This is the one built after a dissident air force pilot in Diem’s own air force bombed his first palace, the former French governor-general’s residence.  Somehow Diem and his wife survived in the half demolished building.  So he built an even bigger palace by clearing a full city block and erecting a monstrous building that is now called the Re-Unification Palace.  The building has a particularly unattractive feature that attempted to pass itself off as architectural art in the 60’s. I refer to the latticed cement curtain that is fastened around the building’s exterior.  Its functional purpose is to protect the occupants from rocket propelled grenades or other projectiles.

Unlike today’s leaders, Diem had reasons to wall himself behind such protection.  It wasn’t just the Viet Cong that were after him.  In his short reign he managed to antagonize just about every faction of Vietnamese society.  He spent more time and money intriguing against his perceived political rivals amongst the Buddhist, Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and countless other religious sects than he did worrying about the Viet Cong and the NVA.  The only person with fewer friends than Diem was said to be his wife.  Her diffidence would have put Marie Antoinette to shame.

In the end, the huge fortified palace did Diem little good.  Realizing that he was about to be overthrown by his own generals with tacit backing from my government he tried to high tail it out of Vietnam.  There are apparently lots of tunnels running under Saigon and one set of these was connected to the palace.  They led out of the palace under the park I am running through right now.  It seems there is a lot of history literally under my feet today.

Diem and his brother, who ran the secret police, apparently made it out of the palace and exited the tunnels.  But they didn’t make it much further.  They were executed in the back of a military van after being picked up in Saigon’s Chinatown, Cholon.  You can buy just about anything except friends in Cholon, then and now.  Few tears were shed for Diem.

Fortunately, I am not heading towards Chinatown.  I’ve clicked off nearly 16k and will be heading past the Opera House, the military boat works then across the river to the foreigner’s outpost in An Phu where I hope to find some friends and a cold beer.  Downtown Saigon really is magnificent today.  The Opera House marks the very center of Saigon.

I’ve spent a lot of time at the Opera House over the past 15 years.  Not to see the opera or the orchestra. Nor the occasional over-the-hill French singer that books into the grand theatre.  I’ve never even seen the infamous Elvis Cong, the Presley impersonating, Viet Kieu from Orange County who used to appear to great fanfare from time to time.  One year he was a singer. The next he was a magician.  Obviously an entrepreneur.

Truth be told, I have rarely been inside the Opera House proper.  I am not much of a culture patron.  But I have spent many hours in the Opera House basement home of the Q Bar, which is owned by close friends.  On at least one occasion I have left the Q Bar around this time in the morning.

As I pass the red brick Notre Dame cathedral, which would look at home in Toulouse on account of its bright red brick construction, I can see a crowd gathering in the distant square in front of the Opera House.  A lot of shit has gone down in this square over the years.

Today there are 300 or 400 people in matching t-shirts being corralled together to start a march down Dong Khoi Street to the river.  I think it might be some kind of protest, genuine or perhaps manufactured by the government to make some esoteric point as they sometimes do.

Instead, it’s an even stranger corporate event for a Swiss pharmaceutical company that sells truck-loads of ginseng based energy pills.  It’s a mystery to me how a Swiss company became the biggest seller of a supplement based on a traditional Asian medicine.  An even bigger mystery is why they want to get several hundred people together to march four blocks down Dong Khoi Street.  Who in their right mind would sign up to do this at 7am on a Sunday morning?  Bonuses must be involved.

If nothing else, the Swiss are organized.  The march starts in perfect formation at exactly 7am just as I am passing the vanguard.  Leading the way, they have a team of out-riders on motorbikes with corporate flags attached to small poles on the back of the bikes.  If the out-riders are actually off-duty policemen, I know this might mean the end of today’s run but I can’t resist this opportunity.  I move to the middle of the street and run down Saigon’s most famous boulevard with an escort.  My timing is perfect.  As I cross the first intersection where a group of out-riders are holding up traffic, the next team speeds ahead to halt traffic at the next intersection.

I tip my hat to curious pedestrians who can’t yet see the marchers.  I pretend I am finishing in the lead of the first International Ho Chi Minh City Marathon.  This is even better than having a support team!  I wish someone were here to photograph it.  Of course it wouldn’t be any more authentic than the film of that German student who came trotting through the tunnel of the Munich stadium minutes before Frank Shorter at the 1972 Olympics.  But it sure is fun.  It’s just a shame the march only goes for four short blocks.

The rest of the run is along the river and over to An Phu. It’s starting to get crowded.  Without the motorcycle escort I need to start paying attention to traffic and side step the street vendors who are setting up shop. Some of these crowded roads are probably quite unhealthy to run on.  I see and taste the traffic fumes.

In cleaner air, I cross a newly built bridge to the other side of the river.  Saigon desperately needs an infrastructure upgrade and this is part of that effort:  a very nicely made four-lane bridge with wide sidewalks for me to run on.  Traffic is light on the bridge because there is very little on the other side of the river, for now at least.

I’ve never been in this particular part of Saigon.  I know from Google Earth that a left turn will take me towards An Phu.   This small road turns into one of the most dangerous I have ever run on.  It becomes narrow and very congested .  This is one of the poorer parts of Saigon.  Overcrowded homes have illegally extended towards the street and incorporated sections of public sidewalk into their living spaces.

Certain parts of Saigon are famous for specialized types of street food.  This area seems to be known for some kind of barbecue pork dish.  Where the sidewalk isn’t being used as a delivery depot or factory floor for some small home business, there are makeshift barbecues bellowing plumes of smoke across the traffic.  The scent is a mixture of coal, exhaust from passing buses and the marinated meat, which has a faintly sweet smell.  Probably a fish sauce marinade. This part smells good and I realize I am a little bit hungry.

With all this activity, my only choice is to run on the street against the on-coming traffic.  I must trust that the drivers will make some small space for me.  This is not a sensible wager.  Vietnam has one of the highest per capita road death rates in the world.  I am tired.  I have been out here running for over two hours now. I have no phone and only about 35,000 dong (USD 1.94) left in my water fund.  I check to make sure I’ve brought my ID with Odile’s number written on a piece of masking tape attached to the back. I forgot it.  She will be angry.  It will take weeks to identify my corpse if one of these bus drivers screws up.

I finally get through to An Phu.  This is Saigon’s equivalent of the fictional SoCal suburb of Agrestic in the very funny Showtime series Weeds.  The streets are wide and safe.  I pass a friend taking his daughters to soccer practice and stop for a quick chat.  One quick 8k loop around the enclave and I’ll be done.

I pass by Sam’s house with only 2k to go and see that he just has arrived back from a bike ride.  I know he has lots of cold beer so I decide that 27km (17 miles) in just under 3 hours is enough running for today.

I would normally feel a bit guilty about drinking alcohol at 8am.  Not today.  As Homer Simpson so eloquently once said: “Beer….Mmmmmm…. Good”.