I Am Watching...

Every newcomer to Saigon has a honeymoon experience. The people are positive, hardworking, and friendly. The energy is good. The country is booming. There is an emerging middle class. The food is good. There is no violent crime. The taxis are cheap, and there is no winter. The honeymoon seems to last about six months.

There is no defining event that brings the honeymoon to an end. It could be an encounter with the government bureaucracy or an emerging awareness that people around you seem to know what you're doing before you do. Eventually, you realize the everyone knows your business. That's when someone tells you about "the watchers."

The conventional wisdom is that every street has a watcher - someone who watches the daily comings and goings of all the neighbors. It's so stupid but then again no one says that the government attracts the best and the brightest - maybe the ambitious, the corrupt or the lazy but not the best and the brightest.

The guy with the piercing look and the Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt is an enigma to me. I have passed him every morning and every afternoon for almost a year. He never smiles or says hello, and I get a perverse delight in giving him a big smile and xin chao on my way to and from the office. I get nothing but this stare in return. Everyone else on the street is amused and delighted to play the game, but this dude is not playing. There is nothing covert about his watching. It's hard to believe, but he sits in his plastic chair on the sidewalk from sometime before 8am when I walk by until after 5pm when I walk by going the other way. The Vietnamese prize light skin. Women go to great lengths to cover themselves so that no skin will be exposed to the sun, but this guy is the George Hamilton of Saigon. He sits there in his little plastic chair all day long as the sun passes overhead - watching life go by. He never moves, at least I've never seen him move.

In Vietnam men are the weaker sex. Women do all the hard work - from hauling and mixing concrete to running small enterprises on the sidewalks and keeping their families together. The men sit in their little plastic chairs and drink tea until about 4pm when they switch to beer. During the day they gossip and at night they gamble and get loud. I haven't figured out how the guy in the picture fits in with all this, but maybe he's a retired watcher and doesn't know how to do anything else.

The Breakfast Cafe

This couple has one of the many tiny businesses that set up on my street every morning. I'm not even sure what their niche is. It's some specialty breakfast item. There are many like these two - probably half a dozen vendors serving a limited menu in the two and half blocks between my apartment and office. Some have a small heat source; some not. Some serve pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup. Some serve a kind of dry cereal or biscuit. Most have an array of soft drinks or tea. All of them have a cart to transport whatever is needed. Then they sit or squat and wait for their customers. I'm particularly drawn to this couple. There is an unfathomable sweetness to their dispositions. I pass them each morning about 8. I seldom see anyone buying from them, but they are always smiling and always pleased when I say xin chao (good morning). My simple greeting always gets a big return smile and a little chuckle. I know they are curious and amused but we don't have a common language so we share our interest and respect for each other by smiling and saying hello.

The mystery of small enterprises like theirs is how they subsist. Do they have other jobs? Do they have extended family that cares for them? I can't imagine that their little cart provides anything like a living. I was even more mystified when I discovered that they were gone before noon. I always imagined them sitting all day by their food cart until the day I walked home for lunch and noticed that they had packed up and departed. The same was true of most of the other mobile enterprises. Where do they go? What do they do for the remaining hours of the day? The Vietnamese are incredibly industrious, so I feel certain that when they pack up and leave it is for another spot and another Mom and Pop effort - maybe a better spot for lunch traffic or another job.

The Security Detail

The guys in the picture are the security detail for the Hollywood Cafe and Bar just down the block from my apartment. I don't know the exact nature of the Hollywood. Does a neighborhood cafe and bar really need 5 security guys 24/7 to keep things under control? And then there are the two good looking girls (not seen here)in black satin and stilettos greeting the customers. There never seem to be many customers but the big TV screens visible from the street make it seem more like a sports bar than love for sale. I stopped once with a friend for a quick beer at an outside table, and I still don't know exactly what the core business is.

I'm lucky to live just a short walk from the office and that has made me a bit of a local celebrity. As I make my way down the street, holding close to the curb (the sidewalk is reserved for motorbike parking) the locals wave and say hello to the white guy with the shoulder bag. The big guy in the center is the leader of the band and every morning he steps off the curb with a big smile and gives me a meaty "high-five." The other guys smile and nod but Mr. Big is The Man.

Vietnamese Social Security

I'm always startled by the contrasts in Saigon. As we sit drinking our $3.00 lattes at Gloria Jean's we look out on the early morning street life. This woman passes our window every morning on the way to deliver her load. The load is always like the one in the picture - two baskets filled with potatoes, yams, cassava, taro, bananas, avocados, etc. It has to weigh 50 or 60 pounds and she manages it with a serious limp. I don't know where she starts her journey, but she always pauses, puts down her load, and rests as she turns the corner into this little street. This is the Vietnamese Social Security system. There is no free ride or retirement age in Vietnam. You work until you can't work any longer and then your family provides. Families are large and close and very supportive. We have a Vietnamese friend who lives with his wife and 21 children and grandchildren in a 5 room house. Social Security is not perfect, but it is a safety net of sorts. That's what the family is in Vietnam. I don't know which system is better. I think it might be a combination. We warehouse our old and infirm. The Vietnamese work them until there isn't anything left in the tank.

A Family Affair

Gloria Jean's Coffee has floor to ceiling windows that are meticulously cleaned every morning by a middle-aged woman with an exquisitely beautiful and friendly face. I can only imagine what she looked like at 20. I'm sorry I don't have a picture of her to include here, because she is part of our day every day. Nevertheless, through these spotlessly clean and clear windows we look out, as we drink our morning lattes, on a narrow street that connects the two main arteries in downtown Saigon - Dong Khoi and Nguyen Hue. It's a fascinating contrast. The little family enterprise in the photo is a thriving street restaurant similar to what existed here 50 or 60 years ago - maybe even in the same location - but not 100 feet away across Dong Khoi Street is the flagship Gucci store just down the street from Louis Vuitton and the Sheraton Hotel.

Every morning this little family sets up shop on the sidewalk. Mama works the stove while Papa, in the baseball cap, serves the customers and washes dishes in two plastic buckets curbside. The daughter does take-out deliveries on her bicycle, riding with a perfectly straight back and the tray held up like a New York waiter as she rides out into Dong Khoi traffic. This is the essence of free enterprise in Vietnam. I'll show you more examples in the next few days.

Around the Neighborhood

When I'm at home in Seattle people are curious about what life is like in Saigon, and I sometimes struggle to describe what the neighborhood, neighborhood life, or neighbors are like. It's definitely different but it has its own "normal." Our normal day starts with a 5:45 taxi ride to the Rex Hotel fitness center and an hour swim or workout, then a quick walk over to Gloria Jean's Coffee on Dong Khoi Street. The coffee culture in Saigon is every bit as pervasive as it is in Seattle. It's robust and omnipresent, and even though Starbucks is thankfully absent, there are chains from the US (Coffee Bean), Australia (Gloria Jean's), Italy (Illy), and local brands like Highlands and Nguyen Trung.

Gloria Jean's happens to be our haunt and we know all the people who start their day there at 7am. There is Mike a venture capitalist and Hong Kong born expat from Dragon Capital, Andrew the vice-provost at RMIT the Australian technical university, Binh who sells beauty products and calls herself Brittany, Nga a single mom who has three kids and whose family business sells everything from flour to used cars. These are the hard core but there is always a sprinking of other regulars and some irregulars as well. Kurt Vonnegut says that everyone has a "karass," a small group of people they end up running into and spending time with. Gloria Jean's is our coffee karass.

I'm particularly taken with Saigon's "coffee art". Check out the swan in the cup above. Every morning the baristas strive to do something different. It might take a little longer to get the coffee but the pleasure is all mine.

More about the neighbors tomorrow.

Saigon's Trendiest Place

Yesterday's post was all about the inconspicuous entrance and passageway leading to L'Usine. L’Usine means factory in French, and L’Usine here is an old factory loft space in downtown Saigon that could be in NY’s Soho or the Marais in Paris. It is an ultra hip restaurant, gallery, fashion outlet and gathering place.

As I said yesterday you'd never find the place if you didn’t have insider information. You enter a covered alley off the main shopping street and pass through a dark passageway lined with stalls selling traditional Vietnamese paintings of women in conical hats. At the end of the stalls you turn right into a motorbike parking passage that leads to a stairway where the only clue to something more is a sign with a finger pointing up the stairs. The entrance to L'Usine itself is off a tile hallway on the second floor and is open to the outside with a view of the galvanized tin roofs that cover the inner courtyard. There are many secret spaces like this in Saigon. You often catch a glimpse of some wonderful French colonial villa or garden court through an open gate or door on a dingy street.

L’Usine’s space is huge, with the restaurant at the front and the interior space divided by a couple of walls but no separate rooms. The ceilings are high and floor is a distressed dark wood that is probably the original factory floor. L’Usine’s offerings are eclectic – art, fashion, food, design, furniture, and antiques but all in the very good taste of its owner.

Tib Hoang is a Vietnamese-Canadian born in Vietnam but raised in Montreal. She started returning here 15 years ago but didn’t make the permanent move back until two years ago when she married a Vietnamese who works for IDG, the venture capital firm. She is lovely and good taste obviously runs in the family. Her parents own one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in town, where President Clinton and his successor, who shall not be named, both dined. That restaurant, named after her, I presume, is called TIB.

The lunch crowd at L'Usine is as eclectic as the gallery – artists, ex-pats, US consular officers, venture capitalists, Africans, Europeans, Americans and a lot of upwardly mobile Viet Kieu. There are a few small tables, but the majority of the seating is around a large communal table where food competes with laptops for space. Another thing that sets L’Usine apart is the unfailingly good service, always with a smile and whether it’s male or female a good looking face to go with it. And, I forgot, the food is the best lunch fare we've tasted since we got here. Individual Quiche Lorraine, baguette sandwiches, fresh fruit smoothies, and cupcakes that are all to die for.

Tonight there is an art opening at L'Usine. I previewed it today. It's wide ranging, mixed medium, in both style and content, but very contemporary. The artist is a Vietnamese American woman, Tammy Nguyen, who trained at Cooper Union and came to Vietnam two years ago on a Fulbright. It's the first cutting edge, high quality art I've seen since we came to Vietnam 14 months ago - and we've been looking.

Try L'Usine if you come to Saigon. The inconspicuous entrance, with no sign, is at 151 Dong Khoi Street.