THE TYPHOON THAT was big news, a dark ominous blob on a TV weather map four days previously, hit Vietnam the day I left: heavy rain pelting sideways in glittering slashes on the open platform of Saigon Station, crackling on the old blackened cement and drenching the food stalls that had been set up to provision travelers. But I was smiling. Nothing like terrible weather to make a simple departure memorable and dramatic.
Even in the rain and wind and brimming puddles, the station was orderly; the take-away food for sale included rice and chicken, dumplings and sausages, fruit, bottled water, cookies, beer. I bought my bagful and noticed that there were eight daily newspapers in Vietnamese, no noticeable police presence, no baggage check, no hassle at all, not the slightest intrusion into the traveler's privacy or solitude. My conductor was a polite and attractive thirty-year-old woman in a smart blue uniform. All this order, prosperity, and efficiency the Vietnamese had found for themselves after decades of war, in spite of us; we could take no credit for it.
Travel in Vietnam for an American was a lesson in humility. They had lost two million civilians and a million soldiers, and we had lost more than 58,000 men and women. They did not talk about it on a personal level, at least not in a blaming way.
In my compartment in the soft-sleeper coach were two conferring twenty-somethings: Mr. Pham Van Hai was seeing off his wife. They sat in her berth, which was opposite mine, holding hands.
"She is getting off at Qui Nhon," Mr. Pham said. "I am not going. She is visiting her family."
I saw from my map that Qui Nhon was halfway to Hue, the capital of Binh Dinh Province, once a place of heavy fighting. But Mr. Pham did not mention that. He spoke of having grown up there, and, as there wasn't much work in Qui Nhon, he and his wife had left to look for jobs.
"That's why we came to Saigon." No one I had met so far had used the name Ho Chi Minh City. Mr. Pham was in real estate, he said. "We're very busy. Everyone is looking for property."
"It's a busy place."
Mr. Pham shrugged and said, "Saigon is not a beautiful city. But it will be. I've seen Singapore and Bangkok. We need more foreign investment, like them. More companies coming here. We'll make it a beautiful city."
Real estate was booming, he said. Apartment houses were going up, new buildings to meet the demand. He was also involved in construction, so he knew. While he spoke, his wife sat placidly listening. She was tall and slender. She looked athletic in her sweatpants and a sweatshirt lettered
"Have a good trip," Mr. Pham said and gave me his business card. He stepped off the train as the whistle blew. That was surely one of the oddities of rail travel here and in many other places, the man leaving his young wife and a foreign stranger in a little compartment, and waving goodbye as they sat on their shelf-like beds, about to spend twelve hours together in congenial propinquity, rocking along side by side, pretty little woman and big hairy foreigner; yet he didn't seem bothered.
Her name was Phuong. She was young and shy and very sweet. Later she told me with pleasure that she was one month pregnant and that she was heading home to tell the family the good news. She made her bed as the train left the Saigon suburbs, and she got under the covers and went to sleep while I watched the last of the city slip past, diminishing from apartment houses to bungalows to huts facing canals and paddy fields, the rain still coming down, and Phuong sleeping with her lips slightly apart and a kind of waxen color, a beguiling pallor that steals upon the face of someone in deep slumber. I made an effort to look out the window.
It was all peaceful—the green fields, the children playing among fruit trees, the little stations with red tile roofs, the swamps and cornfields, the pigs snuffling, the chickens strutting in the orchards. I was thinking, Idyllic.
I remembered Saigon as tense and deserted, the countryside gray and fortified; few people were planting anything then, many places off-limits. In my memory Vietnam was very dark, existing in a penumbra of fear—a sea of land mines where idle walking was unthinkable and many bridges were rigged with command-detonated bombs.
That shadowy world was not my imagination. The war—its temporariness and its urgencies—had turned the whole of the south into a sea of mud and rutted roads from the heavy truck and tank traffic. Because of the relentless chemical defoliants we had dumped, none of the trees were very old or very large.
We passed Bien Hoa, where I'd been before, and then the open countryside, hours of it. The big green and empty landscape was the reality of Vietnam; Saigon was exceptional in its dense population and its size and its cacophony. The rest of the country was just banana trees and buffaloes and farmers bent over their rice fields.
