What has happened to the city formerly known as Saigon?

Vietnam

ONE OF THE greatest shocks I recently received came when I was roaming the streets of Garden Grove in Orange County, California, and suddenly found myself in Little Saigon. The colors and textures of the storefronts as well as the signage I could not read but intuitively recognized as Vietnamese, instantly took me back more than 40 years. I was back, really back in another time and another place. 

Saigon, 1967

I'm not sure if that was the incident that first made me conceive of writing a book about the Vietnam War. I know that I was egged on by all the nonsense I see about it on TV and what I was hearing from children that they were being taught in school. I often have been tempted to kick in the screen when I see a Mike Wallace retrospective. But, recently there was a show that gave me the greatest shock of them all; House Hunters International aired an episode of an Swedish family moving to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), and searching for a new home there.

The last time I was in Saigon, there was just one working traffic light in the whole city. There were bunkers at each end of every bridge and warnings were prominently posted to keep you from stopping anywhere on the bridge or you would be shot (to prevent saboteurs from detonating car bombs). Although it was once known as the Paris of the Orient, it's beauty was masked under a patina of peeling paint. At first glance, there's little in this episode of House Hunters International that even remotely resembled my memory of the place other than the plethora of motor scooters and motor bikes crowding the city streets. 

If you watch it, keep an eye on the parts of the city surrounding the modern edifices and beautiful homes that they focus on. There's a lot of old Saigon still in evidence. Like Communist China, the leaders of Vietnam are putting a lot of lipstick on the pig. There is the illusion of prosperity, but still the ravages of a centrally controlled economy are in evidence.