Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

Economically, Saigon makes no sense. The average income is about two hundred dollars a month, but almost everybody seems to ride a two-thousand-dollar Honda. The standard of living is low, but shops teem with goods—at one stall, I counted twenty-one kinds of rice. If you compare the number of closed and shuttered storefronts in Saigon with those in Manhattan, you would assume it was America that was rising from the ashes of economic devastation.

With so many major Southeast Asian cities saturated, or at least running out of space for office towers, Saigon is a natural outlet for the economic energy of Asia. The price of property is already eight to ten times what it was two years ago. I heard stories of Vietnamese who hold long-term leases on property costing them forty dollars a month and charge three thousand a month in rent. The economic redevelopment of Vietnam is just about the only topic in the local news, and only a very few suggest that it isn’t going to be as easy as generally believed.

Hoang Mgoc Nguyen, the managing editor of a semiofficial newspaper, the Saigon Newsreader, told me that an absence of skilled edu-cators will curtail Vietnam’s progress. “You cannot blame the Russian education in physics and chemistry, but it fails with economics and management,” he said. “My staff is trained in the Soviet system. It has no idea how a free market operates. That is why I am cautious when I hear foreigners say, ‘Your country will be a dragon in five years.’ It is all rubbish to me.”

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Nguyen Ngoc Bich, a Harvard-trained lawyer and businessman who spent twelve years in reeducation camps and now practices commercial law in Saigon, believes the United States will not be a significant economic factor in Vietnam’s reeducation. “If you analyze what America can give us—and what we can take from you—it is the leasing of oil and gas to American companies, telecommunications, and software.” When Ron put in a plug for American medicine, Bich shook his head.

“Too expensive. It must be a charity, not commercial.” The oil-and-gas industry, he said, will operate in remote areas and have limited impact. The software industry will back away as soon as it learns that Vietnam has no copyright law. And telecommunications is for the wealthy. He said that nothing America offers Vietnam is valuable enough to make the leaders of the country turn away from Communism, their lifelong philosophy. Not Kleenex, not computers, not Coke.

During the war, I often went to the roof of the Rex Hotel to eat dinner and listen to Filipino singers imitate Elvis Presley. They did a pretty good job, although the overall level of government-issued entertainment in Saigon wasn’t that great. The guys actually fighting saw Bob Hope and Joey Heatherton. Those of us working in Saigon got the cruise-ship bands.

The Rex became a distasteful symbol of the Vietnam War, and rightfully so. The body counts and napalmed villages were the truly appalling images of the war, but the Rex was, in its own small way, loathsome. It was comfy quarters for coddled officers who paid Vietnamese attendants to spit-shine their boots. They were so removed from the war that even I felt contempt for them.

The roof of the Rex has become even more surrealistic since the war, which is hard to believe. Back then it offered slot machines, cheap steaks, and endless arrangements of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Today it is a vista of outdoor tables amid a menagerie of cats (real), birds (real), fish (real), elephants (statuary), horses (statuary), tigers (statuary), and deer (topiary). It has every sort of imaginable outdoor ornamentation, as 9 6

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though the manager rented a station wagon and went shopping along U.S. 1 in Maine.

If the roof was a welcome sanctuary during the war, it is even more of one today. It is a place to escape the relentless begging on the streets.

Walking along Dong Khoi and Le Loi, I came to recognize them all: the lady with the head-lolling drugged baby, the man with no face, the maimed kid who walked on his hands. Once I barely outran a footless man who dashed across the street to head me off. The rotten little-boy pickpockets are ruthless and the nasty little-girl postcard hawkers pinch if you don’t buy. I learned to say, “No postcard, no stamp, no change money, no girl, no beer, no want nothing.” Late in the afternoon, Ron and I would take the elevator to the roof for beer and an order of Imperial Rolls Saigon style. It became my favorite tourist food.

To the table would come a jack-o’-lantern carved from a pineapple.

Stuck on toothpicks and protruding from the face were myriad crisp, two-bite-sized spring rolls. The normal accoutrements for wrapping—

lettuce, mint, and a vinegar-based dipping sauce—were served alongside. On one occasion, when the hotel’s usually overworked kitchen wasn’t too busy, the presentation included the word REX and a crown, both carved from carrots. The cost: $2.34. Food prices tend to be low and not rounded off at government-sponsored restaurants.

The most famous hotel in Saigon, now and probably forever, is the Continental, constructed in the late nineteenth century and situated in splendor across from the Rex and the Municipal Theatre. I was never an admirer of the hotel’s terrace, made famous by Graham Greene in The Quiet American and by Somerset Maugham in The Gentleman in the Parlour. To me, the place was too crowded with the kind of people who read Greene and Maugham. The hotel was taken over by the Socialist Republic in 1975, just after the fall of Saigon, and used as a government guest house until 1987, when it closed for two years of renovations. When it reopened, it was clear that the government felt the same way about the terrace that I did. It was no longer there.

Today