Traveling 20-something

“What do you know about Vi?t Nam?” my Aunt Thúy asked me.

We were taking a taxi through Sài Gòn’s District 1. The rush of xe mô tô zipped passed our taxi, with children or women in the back, their engines sputtering as they sped through the chaotic streets. Traffic here made no sense, but it somehow worked. Ba’s face glistened even though he sat in front of the air conditioning. The air pressed itself against my body and lungs.

“Just the war,” I said in ti?ng Vi?t. I knew nothing about Vi?t Nam. It was the stuff of myths and fables. So many stories of an alien world my parents once knew as home, and shadows of strangers they once called family or friends. Stories of a noble lineage now severed and separated by the sea.

“That’s a shame. Sài Gòn is a beautiful city,” she muttered, almost as if she was making a promise. She gazed at the lively city through the window, seeing the Sài Gòn she knew decades ago.

“A little more,” Aunt Thúy informed us.

Sài Gòn—the name that they and my dad still use. The war was over, but they were still fighting, resisting the tide of cultural and political change. H? Chí Minh City was always Sài Gòn. It was their history, their home.

A war once took place here years ago; a war that ba fought in; a war that fueled many stories and bitter memories. Now, it was both old and modern, communist and capitalist, colonial and independent, and destroyed and rebuilt.

Designer boutiques and knockoff shops and upscale and hole-in-the-wall restaurants lined the streets, with countless xe mô tô parked on the sidewalks. Neon signs in English were attached alongside printed signs in ti?ng Vi?t. Advertisements hung on French-colonial buildings, selling new phones, ph?, and skin cream.

The grandiose Sài Gòn Notre-Dame Basilica, and the statue of Virgin Mary upon her pedestal, stood in the heart of Sài Gòn, against a backdrop of high-rises. Sài Gòn was a beautiful city—not in the same way I imagined France or Spain were, but Sài Gòn had an old charm, with a growing sense of character and identity, too. This was the fabled Sài Gòn.

“We’re going back,” Ba repeated. It was the exact phrase he said when we boarded the plane, his voice bland but full of grief for a lost history, lost home, and lost family.

We arrived at my grandparents’ modern three-story house in District 5 and its many pagodas.

The smell of fresh Vietnamese food and my grandfather greeted me for the first and last time. But only my grandfather. My grandmother wasn’t here.