The holiday coming up this week is pretty significant -- 35 years since April 30, 1975, which is known around here as Reunification Day. Westerners usually refer to it as as the Fall of Saigon.The iconic images of that day to Americans are of helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy, landing on crowded naval carriers and then being shoved into the sea to make room for more evacuees. To the North Vietnamese, the American evacuation was a sideshow, and the iconic images in Vietnam now are more like the one included here -- of the tanks smashing into the gate of the presidential palace.
The park in the photo is still a park, a few blocks from our apartment, where young people gather to make out in the evenings. Two blocks up the street, at the end of the park,towering over the Notre Dame Cathedral, is Diamond Plaza, a modern shopping mall and office building. On the top floor is the gym we go to, and from the treadmills there we can look down this street. The gym is our largest extravagance here, an overpriced respite from the heat and noise. Being from southwest Missouri, I always say hello to the people I've met there who went to college in Oklahoma -- oil industry people who now work for Conoco Phillips, which has offices in the building. (Another oil connection: After 1975, the Vietnamese government used the U.S. embassy as the headquarters for Petrolimex until the resumption of diplomatic ties.)
After my workout I like to go to a French cafe on the edge of park to get a ham and cheese sandwich, probably my second-biggest extravagance here, and watch the comparatively sane traffic. As I was sitting there today, I watched workers setting up bleachers and scaffolds in the street, which had been closed off in preparation for public celebrations this Friday. I'm curious to know what that includes, so I'm disappointed I'll miss it, but we'll be away on a holiday during Ilene's only real break during the school term. (May Day is also a holiday here, and the two days together make for a four-day weekend for most workers.)
In going away, though, we're not so different from any other Vietnamese I've talked to, who all seem to have an attitude about it pretty much like the attitude most Americans have about Memorial Day; if they can't make it to the beach, then it's a good day to hit the sales at Diamond Plaza and see a movie. Green Zone, the new Iraq War movie, is playing.
-Robert
