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M and I weren’t having any breakthroughs in terms of French culture in Vietnam. At one point I said, “Even Louisiana takes more pride in its French heritage!” If we were interested in just snapping pictures of more French-style buildings, we could have gone up Highway 20 to Dalat in the Central Highlands. This is a hill station (the very term puts the Indo in Indochina) to which the French would retreat at certain times of the year to escape the crippling heat down below. When most French nationals finally fled the city and the country, they left behind an estimated two thousand villas. Unfortunately, Dalat then reinvented itself as the honeymoon capital of Vietnam, coating itself in all the tacky charm of, say, Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Niagara Falls, New York. Suffice it to say that Dalat boasts a replica of the Tour Eiffel. Such is its reputation for the finer things in life that Dalat is also the name of perhaps the most popular brand of Vietnamese-made wine. The stuff tastes like poor quality grape juice, and its alcoholic content is so low as to be barely measurable; but it’s cheap. So rather than explore the wine country, M and I followed the gorgeous coast of the South China Sea northward toward places whose names have a different resonance.

We came to Nha Trang (Apocalypse Now: “The generals back in Nha Trang would never believe this!”), and there we caught a break, or so we thought. We got invited to relax for a couple of days on a little island, two hours offshore by small boat, run by a French beachcomber-type. It is here, we were told, that Jacques-Yves Cousteau in the 1930s came up with the idea for the aqualung, which he and an engineer, who was his partner in the venture, developed shortly after the Second World War. The island is now being operated as a diving resort. In conversations at the six-stool bar, the proprietor would reveal little about his background in France beyond admitting that he had been in the military. The bar was made of thatch, like the scattering of huts and the open-sided dining area (the chef was French, as well). There was a pleasant little beach, complete with impossibly slim French women, topless, standing in the surf up to their knees, smoking cigarettes and talking, occasionally gesticulating with their long red fingernails. On my first venture into the sea I was savagely attacked, without provocation, by a sea urchin the size of the Sydney Opera House, and so hopped to safety on one foot, cursing mellifluously. A couple of days later, returning to the mainland with the French women and others, we were delayed by some malady involving the boat’s motor. Departing way behind schedule, we thus arrived back on the mainland at low tide. We had to set up a kind of bucket brigade to move our luggage to dry land, passing it overhead from person to person, one piece at a time, as we slowly sank into the mud and sand.

We proceeded in a leisurely zigzag manner up the coast, passing the famous but not particularly impressive China Beach, and reached Hoi An, whose old quarter is another UNESCO World Heritage Site, like Luang Prabang, but whose reason for existing is bound up with trade rather than religion or royal politics. For centuries, before European colonialism reached full force (and before the river connecting it to the sea silted over), Hoi An was one of the most important ports in Southeast Asia and one of the most cosmopolitan. Arabs, Portuguese, and Dutch were numerous. So were the Japanese, until their culture entered its long period of hibernation in the seventeenth century. Such people were traders, merchants, sea captains — buyers and sellers (and transporters) of all sorts of goods. Many of them stayed seasonally, while others become permanent residents. The Chinese, however, had the largest presence in Hoi An, where they were treated respectfully and lived in peace. Chinese, including many direct descendants of the long-ago traders, still make up a sizable minority.

Hoi An has wisely banned automobiles in its old streets, which exude a sense of attentive decay. To make what first sounds like a ludicrous comparison, it’s one of those cities, such as Venice, where you keep passing the unremarkable facades of private homes, wondering what treasures have lain inside for generations, even centuries. But it’s a living community. M got up at five in the morning to witness the fish market, where she had been promised a virtual sea of women, standing and crouching over the day’s catch, their conical straw hats, called nón lá, brim to brim almost as far as the eye could see.

“I wasn’t disappointed,” she said, exhaustedly, when we met up later at a little café we found at the end of a narrow lane. Its logo, puzzlingly, was the Boy Scout symbol, which the owner probably believes is a surefire way to attract Westerners. The place was an almost bare room with thick masonry walls, and so was quite cool.

The way Hoi An earns foreign exchange is through tailoring. No one can count the number of open-front shops filled with large bolts of real silk (and also “Vietnamese silk” or polyester), with tailors standing by to take the measurements of overseas visitors, even out on the pavement if necessary. They can whip up anything from pajamas to a ball gown or a smoking suit, sometimes in a few hours, but more often overnight. They can replicate any Western garment you might care to have cloned. They can even produce passable facsimiles of outfits pointed out to them in magazine adverts. To Westerners, the prices seem absurdly low — ten dollars, fifteen dollars — but of course the cost rises with the quality of the work. One can often tell a non-Vietnamese who’s been to Hoi An for a day by the soft-looking square-cut shirt closed by toggles and with only the shortest stand-up collar. Like bolo neckties from Texas and turquoise cufflinks from Mexico, they begin to look ridiculous in the unforgiving daylight of one’s natural habitat. They must linger in men’s closets throughout Europe and the Americas.

It was nearly dusk the following day when we arrived at Danang, the place where the United States, after twenty years of covert interference in the region, finally launched its full-scale invasion of Vietnam. The first Marines came ashore here in the early spring of 1965. I find the timing significant because it coincides with the release of Beach Blanket Bingo in their cinemas back home. The beach at Danang is now very like an amusement park, with Ferris wheels and knick-knacks. Parasailing is popular where paratroopers strutted about in their big arrogant boots less than fifty years ago. I draw no special conclusions from this fact, except to remember that the tide comes in and the tide goes out again.

We headed north, over the Hai Van Pass, en route to Hué, stopping at some of the Cham towers. These brick sanctuaries are the most prominent physical reminders of the Champa kingdom, the society that flourished along this section of the coast for about 1,200 years. The Chams, who were prolific pirates, as well as builders, often found themselves at war with both the Khmers and the Vietnamese. The latter eventually overtook and completely metabolized them four centuries ago, but only after most Chams had become Hindus or, in a minority of cases, Muslims. This is yet another statement on how cosmopolitan this part of the country once was, with a brisk trade in ideas and beliefs as well as in goods.

Above the entrance to one of the temples was carved the familiar figure of a female Shiva, characteristic of Champa. Another temple was in easy sight of a much later structure: a large six-sided pillbox of poured concrete, with slit-like gun ports in the sides and a steel canopy on top to protect soldiers who once must have kept watch by peering over the rim. I wondered if this was an Army of the Republic of Vietnam position dating from the American War or possibly a leftover French construction? Somehow it looked quite French.

Even going at our own lazy pace, we soon slid into Hué, a magnificent city (another UNESCO World Heritage Site) whose survival has been imperilled so often by the same fact that makes it so interesting now. For it was the seat of the Nguyen Dynasty, which was established by the Emperor Gia Long in 1802 and lasted, in weakened condition, of course, until the close of the Second World War, when the last emperor, Bao Dai, stood on a belvedere and abdicated in favour of Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government, whose out-and-out war against the French was just getting underway. As dynasties go, the Nguyen one did not have a long run, but it was certainly a transformative one. So much so that Nguyen is the family name of approximately half of the people in Vietnam. The mausoleums of the Nguyen rulers are spread out south of the city along a dozen or so kilometres. They are peaceful, as mausoleums should be. There are sculptures galore, including many one-third-life-size stone mandarins charged with handling the emperors’ mundane daily affairs in the afterlife. One of the tombs is on a man-made lake so thickly covered in lily pads that you might suppose a green carpet had been laid down. It is best viewed from an elaborate wooden pavilion whose temple-style roof is decorated with huge bejewelled fish.

Hué’s other attraction is its citadel, which is defined as a fortress built to protect a city (hence the term). In European usage, citadels often overlook the city from a high perch (as in, say, Quebec or Halifax). But the one that Gia Long built is on the same level as the community that it both surrounds and is itself surrounded by. It occupies an alluvial plain on the north bank of the Perfume River (whose beauties I recall Charles Taylor describing to me, though he saw the city at one of its unfortunate moments, when it had been besieged by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops). The citadel, which enclosed much of the civilian population as well as the Forbidden Purple City, accessible only to the emperor, his concubines, and his eunuchs, was reinforced by the French in the 1880s, following the rules of military geometry set down by the great Marquis de Vauban (1633−1707). The complex has ten huge gates, and the whole affair is surrounded by a moat. One corner of it is still known as the French Concession.

The citadel isn’t an historical monument that has been left behind by modern history. On the contrary, during the Tet Offensive of 1968, it was captured by North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas. The U.S. Marines were otherwise occupied at the time, under siege at Khe Sanh, not terribly far away, until General William Westmoreland, the most out-generaled general of the war, ordered U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to retake Hué regardless. Many people my age recall news footage of U.S. troops and CIA forces crouching behind one of the outside walls, unable to show themselves as they shot at the citadel by merely raising their M16s over the top and firing blindly. The Viet Cong ensign flew atop the flag tower for twenty-five days. About ten thousand people died at Khe Sanh, most of them communist troops. The same number, but mostly civilians, were killed at Hué, about a third of them by the occupying communists. Back in America, the ground seemed to have shifted under people’s feet.

My most lasting impression of Hué is an odd one, perhaps, but also highly symbolic. M and I were taking a boat upriver to see where a bridge under construction would soon, alas, be eliminating the traditional ferry service. We passed part of the citadel where there were small, round sentry posts made of concrete, somewhat like miniatures of the multi-storey affair we had seen going over the pass. I couldn’t get anyone to confirm that the French had left them, but such was my intuition. Later, I learned that the Vietnamese had recently turned them into public toilets. The genius of that! Here, located in the areas of busiest pedestrian traffic, were these private little kiosks, semi-subterranean and obviously almost indestructible, with slot-like firing holes high up near the roofs to provide good ventilation. There’s something quintessentially Vietnamese in that idea.

Another and rather famous example of Vietnamese resilience can be seen in Hanoi. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, only one bridge, the Long Bien span across the Red River, linked the city with Haiphong, its vital seaport. The bridge was designed (by Gustave Eiffel no less) for rail traffic as well as foot and vehicular use. It is 2,500 metres long and looks like a giant Erector Set construction. Between 1965 and 1975, it was attacked numerous times by American warplanes intent on cutting off Hanoi’s food supplies. The bombers concentrated on the centre sections, which would crash into the deepest part of the channel. They went so far as come up with new types of bombs for this purpose. But each time the bridge was attacked, the Vietnamese rebuilt it, sometimes using American prisoners as part of the labour gangs to ensure the repairs would go ahead without interruption — only to be knocked down again. In this story, many people see confirmation of the view that the Vietnamese are realistic, pragmatic, and pugnaciously businesslike people: apostles of the doable.

I’ve mentioned earlier in certain parts of central Vietnam, where the Americans used the same sort of carpet bombing as they did in Laos, residents have incorporated the craters into their irrigation system with enough ingenuity to give themselves an extra crop of rice. It is as though they said to themselves, “The gods have given us all these free holes. How can we turn them to good account?” I’m also thinking of one of the famous places to eat in Hanoi, a family-run restaurant called Cha Cha La Vong, located in an old building at the top of a gruelling flight of worn wooden stairs. It serves only one dish, made from whatever fish the family has caught that day, prepared cha cha style, ground and highly seasoned. The dish has given its name to Cha Cha Street, which is now full of other establishments of the same type. When eating in one of these places I chanced to admire the little altar on the wall honouring the owner’s ancestors. Beside the customary incense, paper offerings, and fresh oranges, was an unopened bottle of Mekong Whisky. I enjoyed the meal so much that I returned the following evening. Everything was just the same except that the whisky bottle was now only half full.

As I say, an immensely practical people.