PREVIOUS PAGES | 1 | 2

THE GUIDEBOOK WARNED about "staring squads," but I wasn't prepared for it happening, anyway. Everywhere we were met with curious stares, whispers and smiles-the only difference being that some people were more willing to hide their curiousity than others. Sometimes it's just a matter of people elbowing each other as you pass by; other times, it takes the form of a boy scurrying up to you and gaping in awe at your foreign face, or a man hanging over your shoulder to listen in on your foreign speech. Travelers weren't made to feel very welcome by the authorities just a few years ago, but that's changed a lot recently. Certainly the citizens are open about their curiousity about their visitors, and perhaps as a form of trade for your stories, they are very willing to tell their own. Despite-or perhaps because of-the many tragedies, the many twists, the many contradictions in the confusion of their history, everyone wants you to hear their stories.
      There's no avoiding the Vietnam War, of course, seeing as how it belongs to all of us now as part of our pop history. But the frankness with which the topic is embraced sometimes comes off like the nervous, sometimes embarrassingly lighthearted chatter of a family that has gone through a recent tragedy. (Why is it that, with a culture enriched by its long history and 54 ethnic groups, it's the war that Vietnam chooses to showcase?)
      "I was wrong and I am sorry." reads a note from an American war vet who'd donated his memorabilia to Saigon's Museum of War Remnants. The museum was originally named the Museum of American War Crimes; officials decided to rename it the War Crimes Museum in order to avoid offending American tourists, before finally settling on the present diplomatic nomenclature.
      The museum attracts all kinds of people, from tie-dyed hippies looking to see what they'd protested all those years ago, to former GIs looking for perspective or for closure. If the museum's operators wanted to drive home a point, then they do, very powerfully. No matter how ugly you imagine war to be, the reality will always be more terrible.
      The museum makes its message clear, although the methods by which this message comes across are sometimes questionable. The GI's memorabilia is kept in the Weapons room, where everything from land mines to experimental bullets to antiaircraft missiles are on display. In the next room, you'll find the exhibit of War Crimes, where they keep pictures of American GIs smiling next to the severed heads of Viet Cong prisoners. Which hangs across the glass jars where they keep fetuses (one of the labels reads "monster") horribly deformed by Agent Orange. Public catharsis is difficult to watch, and it gets a different reaction from every witness. After the War Remnants Museum, I didn't know whether to be moved, appalled, angry or ashamed.
      After the emotionally confusing trip to the War Crimes Museum, I cooled my heels at the park in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral. There were surprisingly few tourists there--from the looks and stares I was drawing from the vendors and park habitués, I gathered that the cathedral wasn't a big tourist attraction at all. After less than half an hour (all the while trying to ignore the stares and whispers of the park habitués), an old woman wheeling her bicycle past me stopped and peered into my face.
      "Are you Vietnamese?" she asked. As soon as I shook my head no, "Tôi dên tú Philippin," she smiled and started making gentle inquiries: where was I staying? Have I been in Vietnam long? Where have I been? She listened to my replies, and sighed gratefully when I patted the seat beside me in an invitation for her to sit down. When was I born? she wanted to know. "Nineteen seventy-four," I told her, and she nodded. She took out a ballpen from her bag and wrote on her palm: "1975." In 1975, she said, many things happened. That year after my birth, she explained, was the year Saigon fell, and things were never the same since. She was 54 years old now, but she was a young teacher when the south fell to the Communists. Nineteen seventy-five, she encircled the year to emphasize the point, was when the war ended only for the rest of the world. Her husband died as a soldier, leaving her with two young children to raise. Nineteen seventy-five, times were very hard back then. But she survived, and now her children are both finishing up their studies at the university. She used to sell coffee inside the courtyard of the cathedral, but had been driven out just last summer by the police. Times were still hard, she said, and now she's learning palmistry and fortunetelling to earn a few bucks.
      I tried to get her to read my fortune, but it wasn't my money that she wanted. There was no catch, no soft sell underneath the conversation. All she wanted was for me to listen to her story.
      She was one of the last people I met in Vietnam, and so it was that my stay in the country both began and ended with encounters in parks. Early on in the trip, sitting on the banks of Hoan Kiem in Hanoi, one of the young girls who were peddling maps and books to tourists struck up a deal with me. Instead of buying postcards I didn't want or maps I didn't need, I offered a barter: money in exchange for language lessons for me and my friend. She'd enthusiastically taken the job, and taught us the basics of the language. Before the end of the hour, we were surrounded again by the children, each one more curious than the other and eager to help us practice our Vietnamese--where do you come from? Ông tú dáu dén? What is your name? Tên ông là gì?--all of them a flurry of happy voices, friendly smiles, warm touches.
      Later, I learned that these children were probably orphans, authorized by the government to peddle their maps and postcards to visitors. Their parents were probably either killed in the many smaller wars that followed 1975, or missing as part of the hundreds of thousands who'd fled the country as boat people.
      As part of our language lessons, the little girl sang to us a folk song in the dialect: it was, she said, about how "when you leave, you still remember this place."
      "Tên ông là gì?" I ventured. She shook her head at my atrocious accent. "Hoa," she replied, "Tên tôi là Hoa." Her name, she said, meant "flower" in English. But, poetically apt, I learned later that the Vietnamese word "hoa" also stood for the ideals which are familiar to us by the names "peace" and "harmony."