ate, but his eating wasn’t like mine. It was like he was sitting on something itchy. He kept moving around, looking around, and sometimes he’d just stare at something like he was trying to memorize it. Or remember it. A couple of times he shook his head. So maybe he wasn’t trying to remember. Maybe he was wanting to forget.
“So I figured it out,” I said as I dabbed toast in runny egg yolk.
“What did you figure out?”
“Why we’re here.”
“And why’s that?”
“You fought here in that war, the Vietnam War. The one the U.S. lost. You and Tal probably fought together. And now you’ve come back here to see what’s happened to the country since you left. Am I right? Is that it?”
“Something like that.” He was still looking around while we were talking, but then he looked at me. “This hotel and especially this restaurant were a big deal with American soldiers, especially officers. I came here a few times. It was a good place to forget … forget what was happening when you weren’t in places like this.”
“Were you an officer?”
“No,” he sipped coffee. “But sometimes the grunts … the regular soldiers, came here. Not often. A few times.”
“Nice place.”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t say any more. We concentrated on eating again, and he seemed less jumpy, less intense for a while. We shared the backup order of bacon and eggs. Ate everything. Sat back afterwards like stuffed hogs.
3
I have to admit it was a pretty good day. It was like the old man suddenly realized he had a kid with him, and it might be nice to do some stuff that a kid might like.
First, we went to the City Zoo, but we didn’t stay long. It pretty much sucked. I’d been to zoos back home, and they were all better than this one, even the smaller ones. The City Zoo in Saigon didn’t have many animals, and the ones that were there didn’t look like they got fed all that regularly.
I could see the old man was feeling bad that the zoo wasn’t great, so I said something about the gardens and the flowers being real impressive, but I don’t think he bought it.
Next we hit the Reunification Palace. When I hear palace, I think old. Like Buckingham Palace. This palace wasn’t actually all that old, 1960s. As we wandered through the halls and the grounds outside, I read some of the plaques that explained stuff. It was designed by a Vietnamese architect who got his training in France. Before the war and during the war, the place was known as the Presidential Palace, but when the North Vietnamese overran the country in 1975, their tanks smashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace. And pretty soon the place got renamed — the Palace of Reunification.
I noticed that references to the war didn’t exactly heap a lot of praise on the Americans. Lots of stuff about how they used cluster bombs to slaughter women and children and committed every atrocity you can imagine. The old man didn’t spend a lot of time looking at that stuff.
More of the same when we crossed the street and went into the War Remnants Museum. Not a happy place. And if you’d fought on the side the old man had, it had to be tough going through there. It wasn’t all bad. There was a cannon that had a range of twenty miles, a tank, and a helicopter — all in the grounds around the museum. It was American equipment that got left behind when they pulled out. I think the old man wanted me to learn something about the war, but this wasn’t what he wanted me to learn. Inside the museum there were endless pictures of all the bad stuff the Americans did to people and to the countryside during those years. That was another short visit.
Next stop was Dam Sen Park, sort of Disneyland-Vietnam. The best thing was the elephant ride. Real elephants. The old man and me, we both went for a ride. It was cool, I have to admit. I asked the guy running the elephant place if mine had a name. He just shrugged like he didn’t understand me. I named mine Elly. I told the old man, and he named his Fant. Buddy movie stuff.
I was getting hungry, so we went to the downtown area called Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown. The old man told me Cholon means “big market.” To me it was big chaos. Plenty of shouting, people in a major hurry, lots of Asian architecture, pagodas, and statues of dragons, and these lion-dogs that sent jets of water into goldfish ponds.
“This is where we came for excitement when we had time off. Opium dens, sex, gambling — it was all here. Looks like they’ve cleaned it up some since then.” The old man had to shout that whole speech so I could hear him over the human noise.
“So which ones did you do?” I yelled back.
“All of ’em. The opium less often than the other stuff.”
We found a place that looked like it had pretty good food. We were right … the most amazing won ton soup ever. Not that I’ve had it a lot — Mom and I don’t dine out a bunch — but I’ve had won ton soup a few times and this stuff was awesome.
We didn’t talk — or yell — much during lunch, and it wasn’t until we were out of the busiest part of Cholon that we tried conversation again.
“There’s something I want you to see,” the old man said. “It’ll take us a little while to get there.”
We walked for a while, then got on this bus and sat about halfway back. I wanted to ask the old man where we were going, but by then I knew better. He’d tell me if he felt like it. We drove through the city, and this time it was my turn to stare out the window. I can’t say I was liking Saigon, but it was definitely interesting. Okay, maybe I was liking it a little.
It seemed to me that a lot of the people on the bus were tourists, not a lot of Vietnamese. Several different languages were being spoken around us. Not much English. Quite a few backpackers.
There were three people sitting across from us. They were Caucasian and speaking English, with an accent. Husband, wife, daughter, about my age. The daughter smiled at me. I gave her a little smile back. Reminded myself I was saving my love for Jen Wertz. The two adults — they looked about Mom’s age — nodded at us and we nodded back.
“Where you from?” the old man asked.
“Australia. You? Yank?”
“Canadian.”
“You going to Cu Chi? The tunnels?” the lady asked.
“Yeah.”
I looked at the old man, wondering why it was so tough for him to tell me the stuff he could tell somebody we’d only just met.
The Australian guy leaned forward, looked at the old man. “You look the right age to have been here during the war. You a veteran?”
The old man didn’t answer, just turned and looked out the window. Not real friendly, I thought. The Australian guy sat back and looked at his wife. I couldn’t tell what the look meant. The daughter smiled at me again. I figured I knew what that look meant.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Jennifer.
Jennifer. Jen. Whoa, what are the chances?
As
