ASIA | VIETNAM
Vietnam, the perfect place to ride out the recession
The cost of living is cheap, the people are extremely friendly, and the country is beautiful. It's a great spot to ride out the recession.
So we are here in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in the hot, sticky southern section of the country. Robin finished a month-long course for teaching and will find work soon. They are desperate for English teachers. Whether you're at a language school or a public school, the pay is $15 to $16 an hour, plenty to live on. For now, I'm home schooling Kai, with the help of two local university students, and doing some writing. After 27 years of working nonstop in the same career, I am glad to be doing something different.
We live in a tall, narrow house -- 9 feet wide -- with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. (Apparently, the Vietnamese build this way because taxes are based on the width of your property.) It's 900 square feet, spread over four stories, with a rooftop deck. We pay $500 a month.
We rent a motor scooter for $45 a month. (Very few cars here.) Monthly telephone is $1.80. Cable with all the cool movie channels costs $4 a month. Nightly trash pickup is 60 cents per month. When our landlord warned us that day-and-night air-conditioning could push the electric bill to $60 a month, I gasped in horror -- for his benefit.
An iced tea costs 6 cents and a nice meal runs 85 cents. I never cook anymore. What for, when prices are so low?
Our neighborhood, District 4, is densely populated and only five minutes from the city center. We can see newly built high-rises from our balcony -- the city is growing up fast -- plus we can see the Saigon River, which is just five blocks away and a fun place to take a boat ride or a dinner cruise.
The Vietnamese have big, extended families in each house, so our alley is packed with kids. Sometimes, we'll have six or seven kids here at once, squealing and running up and down the stairs. The games of tag, keep-away and hide-and-go-seek are all the same, so Kai does great despite the language barrier. I no longer have to schedule play dates. He's never had as many eager and readily available friends.
The kids call me Mom, not because they know what it means, but because Kai says it and I answer.
A day in District 4
The bread man starts at 6 a.m. yelling "banh mi nong" (hot bread) through the alley. Across and down two doors, a woman chops meat with a hatchet every morning and sells it to neighbors seven days a week, also beginning at 6 a.m. These noises and a rooster make it impossible to sleep in.
The morning is nice, though. It's cooler. On our balcony, Kai and I watch the people on their balconies do morning exercises. Everyone starts the day with exercise, even the tiny grandmas.
The other day I opened the doors at 7:30 in the morning to get some cool air into the living room. In walked four kids, who all wanted to help me stir the oatmeal on the stove for our breakfast. I figured they'd want to try some, so I made six little bowls with banana slices, a little sugar and some milk.
They politely took a bite, and all four kids made little faces as if I'd just given them a bowl full of worms. So as not to waste, they lined up to dump their bowls' contents back into the oatmeal pot and ran off to play. Later, when they graciously shared some dried sheets of salty shrimp paste sprinkled with hot chiles, it was my turn to make a face.
A quick mention about shopping: There's almost no variety. My curtains are exactly the same as several of my neighbors' curtains. So are my plastic trash cans and laundry bucket. So are my dishes, electric fans and my standard-issue bicycle. I had to put a big pink bow on it to set it apart in a lineup.
But so many aspects of Vietnamese life are healthy: family bonds, neighborliness, tolerance of each other's off-key karaoke singing late into the night. They don't get mad about the frequent, sometimes daylong power outages. They just use them as a chance to throw open their doors, visit, play, nap. People cross back and forth in the alley, sharing food, playing mah-jongg. There is no chance to become lonely or forgotten.
One day my local interpreter pointed to a house four doors down. "Only two people live there," he said. "Very sad."
Why is that sad?
"Only two people," he repeated in an "isn't it obvious" tone. "Three rooms in house. Very sad. But son moves back soon with wife and daughter. Then everyone happy again."
Every move we make, I'm certain, gets talked about the same way. People know how many appliances we bought and ask how much we paid for each. They peer into my shopping basket as I return from the market.
My Vietnamese language tutor, who doesn't live in this neighborhood, came over this morning and said, "I hear Mr. Robin left this morning in a taxi with two suitcases and a backpack. My aunt [across from us] want to know where he go."
Another morning, a neighbor rode her bike, in the rain, to get noodle soup for her family and brought me a plastic bag filled with hot soup. Her English-speaking son, Hung, interpreted: "She know you have cold. She say you Americans eat bad breakfast. You need soup to warm stomach. No bacon and egg, no cereal. Soup!"
At the outdoor market a vendor will ask how old Kai is. I answer "tam tuoi," which means 8 years old. She yells out "tam tuoi" to the next vendor, who yells it to the next one, so we hear it repeated all across the marketplace. (Your age is important because people need to know how to address you. It's always the first question, even before asking your name.)
Tourists, ladies, orphans
Kai and I play tourist sometimes. One day we hopped in a cyclo (a bicycle rickshaw) and went to the 18th century Giac Lam Pagoda in District 10, then climbed seven stories to the top for a wonderful city view.
Though I love my local market, the Ben Thanh Market in District 1 is a wild place filled with exotic foods, fake Rolexes, fake Gucci bags and kitschy souvenirs.
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