Pho sho

What more appropriate place to spend Thanksgiving than in Saigon? Well...any. After snaking through a gallery of photos of American GIs torturing small Vietnamese children, watching a "documentary" that described our soldiers pouncing on unassuming villages "like a wild pack of wolves", and gagging at jars of preserved fetuses mutated by Agent Orange, one only really wants to give thanks that she's been around enough kiwi backpackers to fake an Australian accent when she orders her pho.

Though even American history records the mistakes of the Vietnam War, to see it from the Vietnamese perspective is jarringly different: it is the American War, and Vietnam triumphed proudly.

I've never pledged allegiance with feverish pride, or welled up at the sight of the bald eagle. And I rarely dissented with the trendy armchair cynicism that accompanies a young liberal education (you know what I mean: wittily bashing W. and America's imperialism, while smoking cigarettes that bought the last election and feeling solidarity with countries whose GDPs are a fraction of our tuition bills and trust funds...). But I've also never thought America evil. To see the absoluteness of that perspective made me step back: in the narrative of the Saigon museums, the war in Vietnam had none of the complicated tensions or frustrating ambiguity that marked it in America. From the start, the American War was a straightforward match between good and evil. And we were the bad guys, coming in to ruin this country just to prove we could--making sport of burning villages, sniping babies and raping old women. What is real of it is horrifying: the chaos that we suddenly created, punishing places and people who deserved no greater concern than the yield of their rice paddy; the devastation that perpetuates itself even now, in villages stunned to see entire generations of babies born with severe defects. But what isn't real...well, that's frightening too, to see how easy it is to incubate hostility and how hard it would be to cultivate a more nuanced perspective. Sobered by all this, what surprised us more was that we didn't feel any of that resentment from the locals. No one seemed to care where we were from, really--the expat population in Vietnam has swelled with its economic growth, and tourism has surged, so our white skin didn't incriminate us.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) struck me as a more modern Phnom Penh. (And indeed, the Cambodian government follows Vietnam's progress closely, trying to simulate the latter country's recent growth.) When the bus made its way over the Cambodian border, into Vietnam, the landscape noted the switch immediately: the same lush green, but now peppered with a swarm of antennae, popping out of every visible surface. As we rumbled closer to Saigon, the stilted houses and mango and coconut grooves gave way to multi-floor concrete buildings and the thick black bunting of powerlines. The city had taxis, ATMs, and real showers, oh my! It was bustling, and clearly still negotiating the duality of an emerging market, straddling both avenues of luxury shopping and dirty alleys of delicious pho.

Before meeting Peter (who jetted over from Hong Kong) for Thanksgiving, Tara (who flew in from Tokyo) and I rendezvoused for a weekend honeymoon on Phu Quoc, a small, undeveloped island in the gulf of Thailand, off the southern coast of Vietnam. It was exactly the same white sand, clear water and fluorescent sunsets I picture when I imagine a tropical paradise, but...real. After inadvertently betraying the receptionist at our first hotel by booking our own flights ("Why you no care for me?!") we hastily moved down the dirt road, to a sweet, quiet garden bungalow. There wasn't much more to do than lie on lounge chairs under bamboo umbrellas, swim in the warm Pacific, or walk along the beach to find the next plate of fried rice. It was heavenly. We spent one morning riding around the island, past the short string of hotels, to the villages on the other side. The red of the dirt road, the rich green of the palms and grasses, the strip of pristine white sand and the stretch of deep blue beyond it patched together a vibrant, clear tableau. Fishing boats casting large, triangular nets dotted the water’s horizon. Thatched fisherman's huts punctuated the coast, and cows sought shade under palm trees. And every small child we saw ran after us, waving and shouting "Hello!" excitedly. (These children--in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--melt me. I feel too ridiculous to coo about them here, especially since I have so repeatedly avowed my disinterest in anything that crawls, but I am beguiled by them all. I've suppressed my Angelina instinct thus far, but make no promises that I won't come home with a newly adopted brood.)

Our week in Vietnam only whetted my appetite. Culturally, the country is diverse, from the many native populations still living undisrupted along the Mekong Delta, to the French colonial charm of Hanoi (mostly missing from Saigon), to the hill tribes that live up north, in Sapa. Vietnam is also the poster child for the southeast Asian economy; its own is expected to surge 9% this year, and it opened a booming stock market in 2000 that would send Uncle Ho into convulsions. This is the act that the region’s other emerging powers--Cambodia, Malaysia and the Phillippines--hope to follow.

(…And more importantly, yes--they really do wear those cone hats.)

Picture credits to Tara & Peter: the dutiful tourists underneath Ho Chi Minh's scraggly beard, the dregs of the sunset over Saigon, seeking haven in the city's cathedral. Unfortunately, our Phu Quoc photos were victims of a camera malfunction.