First and foremost, Happy 22nd Birthday, Josh! Your dad and I love you very much, could not be more proud of you, and miss you a lot today.

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Saigon Airport, Jan.28, waiting for the “international” 55-min. flight to Phnom Penh: To think that when I was looking at international schools last year, all I had to go on was the different weather in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Don’s and my heads are spinning after 2 ½ days in Saigon. We’ve heard such different stories from North and South Vietnamese that our first instinct is to try and decide who to believe. Yet all these stories are true for the people telling them, and I have listened to each of our highly intelligent, sincere guides with a heavy heart. The Vietnamese we have spoken with do agree on a few things: China is an aggressive country that cares little about Vietnam; the chemicals in commercially produced food are causing all kinds of cancer here; the current government is corrupt and ineffectual.

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I expected to like Hanoi better than Saigon. Yet the opposite is true. While I can’t see myself living through the stifling heat here (it is 92 and humid in Jan.), I am more relaxed in this city. It is gritty, but more Western in feel. The French footprint is here in graceful old buildings and parks, and the streets have lanes and traffic lights. Other parts resemble NYC: the neon lights of Times Square, marquee shops of 5^th Avenue, and elegant hotels (like the Caravelle, where Nixon stayed). We were surprised to learn that the city itself has fewer wealthy VN, because they mostly live and work (and apparently, drive Bugattis and Rolls Royces) in Hanoi, the government seat.

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Saigon and Hanoi are, respectively, 300 and 1000-yrs old. In 1900, 46,000 people lived in Saigon; today there are 13 million. Whereas in Hanoi, our guide Hoing deftly towed the Party line while indicating her displeasure with the policies of the current Communist government, in Saigon, our guides projected, on the one hand, an entrepreneurial fervor, and on the other, a world-weary realism. In the North, people will say that they alone work hard to support and feed the “lazy” South. In the South, the expensive price of land is sending more and more young people into the cities, where they must string together several jobs to make ends meet. The revolutionary Ho Chi Minh is honored everywhere in Hanoi; here, we didn’t hear or see his name once.

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Meet 30-year-old Na (like Christina, she said), another overqualified tour guide. Na and everyone else here, will return home for the New Year, leaving Saigon virtually empty in a weeks’ time (56% of the Vietnamese still live on farms). According to Na, ½ the people in Saigon are straight from the country and ½ have grown up in the city. It’s interesting – given the highly patriarchal society here – that of the three women guides we’ve had, Hoing did not marry until age 42, our bicycle guide in Hoi An is a tomboy with an American boyfriend, and Na is a 30-year-old divorcée with tattoos and a wild story about having to sleep with the cows when her mother locked her and her dad out of the house after they’d been drinking. English instruction in state schools is bad, so Na learned to speak from watching “Forrest Gump” and “America’s Got Talent.” Na has a university degree in graphic design.

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When Na was a child, her father (71 now) was a drunk who physically abused her mother. He had three strokes in his 50s, the last of which sent him into a 30-day coma, at which point Na’s mother decided to sell the house so that she could take him to Danang for medical care. Today, Na’s mother cares for the father, who has Alzheimer’s. Na joked that when he is given a list to take to the market, he doesn’t remember that he has the list in his pocket. This man fought for the South Vietnamese and had to take care of his parents when his brother moved to the United States after the war. Of his 12 siblings, 5 died in the war and several others by stroke. Because he is a traitor, he never got a government job, nor the pension that comes with it.

Na is part of the “gig economy” here. She told us there are 3 shifts and she works 2.5 of them: for the Vespa tours, as a freelancer, and as an assistant bartender. She sleeps 3-3.5 hours a night. Nonetheless, Na is excited about her “plans.” Later this year she will move to Thailand and get a two-year international degree that will make it easier for her to find a job here. By passing an exam, she got 40% off tuition. Saigon has an international university, but the cost is exorbitant: $800 per month. When we asked whether her 5-yr-old son will go with her, Na said no, he will stay behind with her sister, at least for the first year. Na hopes to buy her sister (who likes to cook) a “small” restaurant and convince her parents to travel – for the first time ever out of their village – to visit her in Thailand.

“The war is not over in Vietnam” sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. More accurately, the war is woven into the fabric of everyone’s lives. Most obviously, bombs still explode as they excavate to build more highway. And veterans are everywhere, missing legs and other body parts. Yet there are also lasting economic impacts, as illustrated by Na, whose family is still denied the benefits extended to “loyal” Vietnamese.

Meet another one of our guides: Hil or “Huey,” because at 18 (1972), he was trained as a pilot by the GIs. Huey believes that the country was better off under the French and the Americans, and I can understand why. While the NVA and Vietcong were expert fighters, they were woefully unprepared to rebuild their country. April 30, 1975 is a huge watershed here dividing “before” and “after.” Between 1975 and 1980, 1 million people starved to death in the North, while in the South, hundreds of thousands died of diarrhea from eating only tapioca and sweet potatoes. Rice fields were either destroyed or were deathtraps of unexploded ordinance. Huey described the period between 1975-1985 as “hell” (this, in a country that is resource-rich in rubber, rubies, oil, and coffee). These are hard conversations, but Huey wants to talk, likes Americans, and does not fear reprisal. Me: do you think there would have been less suffering if the Americans had never been here at all? Huey: there was no suffering under the Americans. They were fighting for freedom, like we were. Then, they betrayed us in July 1972. At the end of the war, he tells us, several South Vietnamese generals had lunch together then committed suicide rather than surrender to the NVA. Huey claims there are still spies and he always knows who they are: they clinch their fists Kung Fu style, they carry pistols, and they know he worked for the Americans.

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I know all the reasons why we had to leave Vietnam, and I know that we gave help where we could, for instance, getting the Agent Orange out of the soil around Danang. I know that the Vietnamese would still have had a civil war and the Catholics educated by the French would still have been persecuted, leading to the waves of Vietnamese boat people. But no other country dropped the bombs and used the chemicals that we did. There is still Agent Orange here in food. People like Huey (now 64) who cooperated with us will grow old without pensions or anything approaching adequate healthcare. And “we” just left, just like that, the Saigon airport overrun with flights grounded and the last helicopters lifting a very few of the people we had promised to defend off the roof of the American embassy. Huey spent 9 months in a “reeducation camp,” but he knows people who were imprisoned for 10 years. The French have their own guilt-ridden history. After the Vichy government handed over Vietnam to Japan in 1940, 2 million Vietnamese died of starvation in the next 5 years. In the 43 years since 1975, Vietnamese lives have improved in some ways, but gotten worse in others. Tourism is a huge aid now, but that did not come about until Bill Clinton decided to visit Vietnam in 1995 and work with the Communists to allow Western investment so that all people, not just the fat cats of the party, would have enough to eat and live on.

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Politics matter. It matters who we choose to be President. It matters that we protect our democracy and the rule of law. Those of us lucky enough can insulate ourselves against the pain and suffering happening in other parts of the world. But we kid ourselves if we think that our money can protect us. When Don and I turn on the TV here to CNN, it’s only the American version that runs the Trump Show 24/7. Other CNN-sponsored “news”casts report on the dam breaking in Brazil and other important events around the world. Watching the Trump Show (and our journalists’ willingness to participate in it) is no longer just mindless and mildly consuming to me, it actually turns my stomach. The 1927 film “Metropolis” comes to mind – the drones in lockstep working underground in the dark, while the effete cavort in champagne fountains above ground. We cannot close our country to foreigners, for so many reasons. We cannot pretend as if global warming is not happening, or is only something that poor people have to deal with. We cannot accept that the climate is warming without electing leaders that are going to do their best to save our planet and save us from our own materialism and greed. Example: last summer was the 2^nd year in a row in Seattle that smoke and ash from forest fires turned the air toxic, with levels registering higher than in Beijing for several days. Two years ago, it was all that people could talk about, the ash falling on our cars, the importance of not spending time outside walking or exercising. This past summer, it didn’t get talked about nearly as much, as if we had just accepted that dirty air is something we cannot change and should expect moving forward.

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I am mad at my own ignorance here. Why do Asian people wear masks? – because they are sick or afraid of getting other people sick; for this reason, I have always steered clear of them. But Asians wear masks for different reasons: one, they need them in cities polluted by gas and diesel and wood-burning fires; two, they want to keep their skin as pale as possible, because only “poor” people have dark skin. Their mask is like our sunglasses. People forget or just get so used to them that they keep them on indoors. Why do Asians do “silly” (to me) things like karaoke? In part, because they can’t afford to travel and do the things we get to do. And those bowls filled with little hard candies in the International District (and at my Chinese Foot Massage place)? They are throat lozenges for the smog.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, please….

Come to Vietnam! This is a beautiful country, with amazing food, affordable everything, and people to fall in love with. Parts of Vietnam have four harvests per year and the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables and grains blows the mind (2 kinds of coconut, 3 types of basil). The cuisine is complex and fascinating. Everything is in balance, yin and yang, with sweet and sour or spicy, dry and wet foods. Garlic, lime, pineapple, lemongrass, and chilies are the foundation, with Southern VN dishes slightly sweeter than elsewhere. The old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” could not be more true. Farmers here use every single part of their plants. Take rice. Rice is eaten and made into wine, its husks burned to make clay bricks, and their ash used to fertilize the soil. Prior to 1999, when electricity was not widespread, tools, mats, and baskets were fashioned from coconut and bamboo. Staples like coconut and rice today make oils, perfumes, candy, food, mats for sleeping, fuel for fire, “wine”, soup, tea, and medicine. Everywhere we go, we learn about natural remedies: honey and ginger for hiccups, kumquat skin for cough, pollen tea for muscular health. This stuff works, because we’ve seen women (especially) in their 80s and 90s, cooking street food, poling passenger boats up-river, weaving mats, and caring for children.

The operating expression for our time in Saigon was YOLO (you only live once). In the space of 24 hours, we took 2 boats (motor and row), a van (it took us 5 1/2 hrs. to travel to the Mekong Delta 120 miles round-trip), a Vespa, and an airplane. We ate every single thing that was put in front of us, including mussels and dried shrimp, catfish, stuffed rice pancake, and “jumping chicken,” because the fishermen knock bamboo together to make the frogs jump higher and grow bigger legs and they taste like slightly tough chicken. As my eyes adjusted to the stream of traffic, I picked out individuals. Anything we use a car for, the Vietnamese use their motorcycles for. You see families of 4 or 5 on one 110CC bike, women carrying bouquets of flowers, bags of food, infants, live chickens. Toddlers sometimes stand on a stool in front of the driver; young women in dresses ride side-saddle or carry infants.

So Don and I, too, got on the back of a Vespa for a progressive dinner tour that took us to each of the major districts of Saigon. My fear factor was high at first (8 out of 10), mostly because now I was the one weaving, driving full-throttle into oncoming traffic (many intersections have no lights), and inches away from other moving buses, cars, and motorbikes. My 20-something driver was adorable and protective, gushing at the end, “I am very happy to be your driver.” We stopped five times, including a restaurant with all kinds of live seafood and a coffeehouse that could have been in Greenwich Village circa 1955. Couples sat close together on cushion benches with low tables, leaning back against the walls of what resembled a long, narrow garage with a small balcony and lights strung across the ceiling. There were no phones out and you could have heard a pin drop as the beautiful Vietnamese woman crooned…”Fly Me to the Moon,” accompanied by a violin and a guitar.