it’s more like an oncoming, thunderous tsunami wave of about a billion cars, motorbikes, scooters, and odd-shaped large and small vehicles that I’ve never seen before. They stream around the front and back of us as if they were a surging river and we were a rock, except we’re moving too. Incredibly, we make it across in one piece. The new street is a tad less congested.
“The man could have been just teasing,” Mai says.
“Teasing?”
“Not the best word? Being a… jerk?”
“You don’t think he knew us?”
“No. Maybe he does not like white people, especially a white man with a Vietnamese woman.”
My cop instinct is telling me otherwise but then what do I know? I’m a white guy in Saigon who’s been here less than two hours. “Will there be much of that? People not accepting me with you?”
“You are going to be with me?” she asks, struggling against a smile. She leans on the horn and swerves around a Toyota.
“Thinking about it,” I say, faking a lack of enthusiasm.
“I see.” Her smile begins to win the struggle.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask, then blurt, “Holy!” as half a dozen motorbikes from a side street to my right accelerate directly across our lane.
Mai leans on her horn and swerves just enough not to kill them, still wearing that faint smile. “I am taking you… here,” she says, turning onto what appears to be a dirt, potholed alley between two buildings. She guides the car a short distance and pulls into a small parking lot next to one of the structures. Scaffolding on its front extends all the way to the roof, one, two… eight floors. Tape crisscrosses some of the windows on the ground floor.
“You live here?” I ask, not having to shout this time since the buildings and trees substantially reduce the traffic roar.
“I wish. No, this is a new building, called Vinh Tower One, owned by a friend of my father and me, mostly Father’s friend. It is still a few months away from being finished. He has a… what do you call..? A business on his side?”
“A side business?”
“Yes, a side business. He is a building contractor but he enjoys buying and selling jewelry on his side. The side. My father sometimes buys from him for our stores.”
“So can I kiss you now? No one is around.”
Was that too abrupt? For a hair of a second, the intensity of Mai’s smile reminds me of the movie Christmas Vacation when Chevy Chase plugs in the cord that lights up all twenty-five thousand Christmas lights that envelop his house.
“No kissing, sorry,” she says, reaching for the door handle. “Come, I want to show you something inside.”
My face is either hot from embarrassment or from the wet blanket of heat that greets me outside of the air conditioned car. I start to say something when a lone motorbike enters the alley from the steady mass of traffic passing by the opening. It’s not a man wearing a blue shirt, dark sunglasses, and armed with a pointy finger, but a young woman, her black hair blowing behind her. She smiles at me as she passes and continues down the alley.
“Many pretty girls in Saigon,” Mai says. “They think you pretty handsome.”
“Not one of them is as pretty as you,” I say.
“Good answer, soldier.” She points with her chin toward a small door under the scaffolding. “We enter over there.” She slips a card into the door’s card lock and it clicks open. “Follow me,” she says, leading me down a hallway illuminated only by outside light coming in through a high window. “I think you might enjoy what I will show you.” We stop at what looks like a service elevator.
“An elevator! Awesome!”
“Funny. I am laughing on my insides.” She slips her card into a slot. “I think I understand what you are feeling right now. Like I said, it was hard for me to readjust to Vietnam after Paris and Portland. I think life is more intense here: so many people, the noise. I think it might be hard for you to make the transition.”
We step onto the elevator and she inserts her card into another slot. She pokes the eighth floor button and turns toward me. She drops her chin a little and looks up at me. “I will help you.”
“Nah, I’m good.”
She smiles. “Same Sam as before. Always joke.” She looks at the digital numbers on the panel. “Our friend loan me this key card so I can show you something. I hope you will like it.”
“What is it?” The elevator stops.
She makes a dramatic, sweeping gesture with both hands as the doors swoosh open. “It is… Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City.”
The open and empty floor is at least a hundred feet wide by a hundred fifty feet long, with the smell of freshly laid carpet. Beige. There are four-foot thick cement pillars here and there, and floor-to-ceiling windows on all the outer walls, creating a sense that we’re floating in the sky.
“Wow! And wow again! What a magnificent view, Mai,” I say, as we cross the floor to the windows. Large rolls of beige carpet lay off to the side. “Saigon is huge! It goes on and on in all directions.”
“Yes,” she says, her voice pleased at my reaction. “Nine million of us. That cluster of tall buildings way over there is the center of the city. That is the Ho Chi Minh River beyond that. To the right, way over there by that small river, that is –Cholon where many Chinese people live. There to the left, maybe five miles away, you can see the top part of the Reunification Palace. That used to be Presidential Palace during the war. Maybe you have seen the famous film of the North Vietnamese tanks smashing through the gates.”
“I have. In fact, the only image I’ve ever had of Vietnam is the Vietnam at war. You know that I thought my father had died here. I compulsively watched all the movies that came out, and lots and lots of documentaries, The History Channel and The Learning Channel. The only image I had was of exploding rockets, rolling tanks, and street battles. But this… this is just incredible. Magnificent.”
Mai nods. “Yes. If this building were here during that time, this would be a different view. My mother said that every night, beginning when the sun went down until it came up again, there were flashes in the distance and the rumble of artillery. Most people who live here now were born after the war. So they do not know. They do not even think about it much.”
“It’s just magnificent,” I say, scanning the panoramic view.
“The sun will be setting in a few minutes and it is even more beautiful then with all the lights. But we cannot watch it tonight because we must go to see Father. We can come another evening.” She is looking out the widow but I can tell she is watching me in her peripheral. “Maybe we will bring a bottle of wine and glasses.”
That doubled the ol’ heart rate, and I barely manage to wheeze, “That sounds fantastic.”
“Good,” she says, watching a plane descend in the far distance. “Since our friend gave me the key card I have come up here many times. I sit on those rolls of carpet or on this
