Sole Searching in Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh City, a schizophrenic about its communist past, is tumbling toward the future.
Motorbikes clog city streets, the heels of executives click and clank on French colonial sidewalks, and skyscrapers negotiate space between crumbling supermarkets selling live fish and intestine soup. A woman wearing a straw hat and a top that slits along the sides like a lost curtain carries a latte past a portrait of the city’s revolutionary leader.
Organized in perfect complexity near the Notre Dame Cathedral, Ho Chi Minh’s burgeoning concrete jungle is a testament to the city’s ambition to become an Asian tiger. But it’s the interplay between the past and present that makes this Vietnamese metropolis a traveler’s dream.
Sitting down one recent day on a park bench to eat a rice dessert I bought from a vendor carrying buckets of food that hang from a wooden pole balanced on her back like a seesaw, I gaze at the sun, trying to take it all in.
“I fix your shoe, no problem,” interrupts a young Vietnamese cobbler with rotting teeth who appears over me, gets down on one knee, and produces glue, a knife and an elastic band to fix one my haggard shoes. “You money, I no money.”
Speechless, I watch him work, watch him delicately change instruments like a surgeon as he tightens the elastic around the throat of my foot.
“You pay 120 thousand,” he says when he finishes.
“No way, my friend, I pay you 80 thousand, no more.”
Getting up from the ground, he sees me notice his shoes coming apart at the seams. Still, he smiles and play fights me for a second, lightly punching my shoulder, before taking the money and starting off. “Thanks you miss.”
As I slip my shoe back on and walk along Ho Chi Minh’s wide boulevards, lined with lush trees as tall as the sky and extending into eternity like a postcard, I can’t help but wonder if the city’s growth would make invisible the real cultural gems of this colonial wonder: the cobbler, the vendor and the haunting spirit of Ho Chi Minh.