by Ross Munro

Created on: May 14, 2009

So I arrived. There's nothing else to say. I arrived knowing only that I had come from somewhere else and was now faced with what could only be imagined. Saigon. And even that wasn't real any more, having been renamed Ho Chi Min City sometime in the forgotten years between the departure of America and the open door policy of doi moi a decade or so later. To my mind Saigon consisted of grainy, sepia tinted images of the Tet offensive or the last helicopter leaving the American Embassy in chaos, trailing bodies as it lifted into the sky, like ants on a stick. Saigon was thickly racist Hollywood. Saigon was the western worlds guilt, a heady combination of napalm and dope and every bad thing we could think of to visit upon a country that wasn't ours. It was broiled children, that gunshot to the head, battered boats in pirate waters and razor blades in vaginas. It was everything in my head that I knew it couldn't possibly be yet wasn't sure what it possibly could. So I write to understand what can't be written because what it is can't adequately be described.

I arrived and waited while the rich folk in the front of the plane got to get off first. But because the air bridge was broken they had to get off through the second door in the economy section and everyone in economy had to crush to make room for them. Pricks. Eventually we got to walk the same stairs, down on to the tarmac to a bus that drove us to another air bridge that wasn't broken but wasn't attached to another aircraft. The air was so thick it was like swimming and the heavens opened with thunder and lightning just as we got there, along with three plane loads of other passengers whose air bridges were equally useless. And we were crushed and soaked and sweaty as everyone at the same time tried to get onto the stairs that would take us up to where the working air bridge was; up there in the sky where I imagined there was a helicopter lifting off, trailing bodies like ants. To the Vietnamese psyche if you arrive from overseas you arrive by the air bridge. It was the only explanation I could conceive of in this struggling mash of humanity as we fought and clawed our way to the top and in to the airport so we could walk downstairs again to collect our luggage on the other side of a door on ground level about ten feet away from where we had started the struggle to go up and then come down again in the first place.

The airport seemed to be nearly brand new. Maybe it was, certainly hardly any of it worked.

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