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. There were no signs on the luggage carousels to indicate which luggage came from what flight, nor was there anyone to ask apart from a couple of chain smokers who didn't speak English and failed to look like anything you would expect to see in an airport anyway. The massed herds of passengers wandered like grazing wildebeest from carousel to carousel looking for their bags, or for other passengers from their plane who may have got lucky as a clue to where their own might be. I saw a passenger from my flight retrieve his suitcases so I stood where he had found them for what seemed like a decade as my own bag went merrily round and round three carousels behind me.
By now I had been travelling for more than a day, not always in the air but always in the grip of that particular form of torture that passes for international travel nowadays: extraordinary rendition. 24 hours of bad sleep, cramped conditions, stale foetid air, incessant noise, exquisitely inedible food, and surly, officious asses in epaulettes and trousers. I had long passed boiling point. Having endured the travel, having arrived, after finally getting my bags I was standing at the end of a queue that stretched from here to the other side of everything that exists in the universe where there were rank upon rank of the ugliest customs officials I have ever seen anywhere. Going slow.
There was no smiling, but you leave smiling behind 3 hours before you start flying, so that was nothing new. It was the uniform. Crimson red and gold braiding against dun-green that somehow mixes visually into acid yellow, with totalitarian hats. The sight of it was like a narcotic where all time crawls, where all options evaporate other than dumb acceptance as each officer takes a month checking a passport and a visa, hands it back, then asks for it again so they could take another month checking that they had checked it. And behind each one were two other officials checking that the checker had, in fact checked that he'd checked your passport. I was barely conscious by now. It was as hot as hell, humidity was in the stratosphere and I was wet through from the drenching we got as we struggled up the staircase to get back down again. I wasn't even in the country yet and the place already seemed like nothing else on earth.
Somehow, sometime my turn came. I was comatose, glazed. He took my passport, checked me, checked my picture, checked the visa.
And I was done.
Out of sheer habit I stood there. It was over, but I could only stand there. I wasn't quite ready to be human again, to be my own person. The shock of it was palpable. I just stood there staring blankly back as the official waved the passport at me, you can go. The moment stretched on. The two checkers of the checker glanced at each other, then looked back at me and frowned. The checker himself was beginning to scowl. They were all speaking but nothing coherent was coming out. With a shock I realised that the overall effect of international travel had left me incapable of autonomous action. In only 24 hours I had been reduced to the pure function of response. I felt like a beloved pet being released to the wild and didn't quite understand what was expected of me. Then through the fog and the confusion and the ear-splitting din in my head I heard my own name being called. It hit me like a flash of clarity. The spell broke. I took the passport and smiled. And for the first time in 24 hours someone smiled back at me. The customs official in his acid dun uniform and red epaulettes with the gold star, braiding and hat smiled and said we'come to Vietnam. Thank you, thank you and I turned and walked through the gates to my brother who was waiting, who had seen me and yelled over the heads in the crowd and had called me in to this place that no words can describe.