Three and a half weeks after our move to Saigon, my mother wrote home for the second time. She’d abandoned all hopes of typing the letter since her manual typewriter had not yet been unpacked and my father’s typewriter was a “letter destroyer” (see July 26, 2023 post).
In this cramped handwritten note, she described Saigon in glowing and hopeful terms:
This city is fun like France or Korea -
will be anxious to get out and about to check out the scene
- that will come in time!
It’s not a coincidence that she mentions France, for Saigon is one of the places that’s been pinned with the appellation “The Paris of the Orient.” It is a somewhat sideways compliment since it came about due to the French colonization that spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
One of my childhood recollections involves staring at piles of French bread in confusion: What were they doing in an Asian country? I had not seen such things in Seoul or in Taipei, our two previous posts (’70-’72 and ’72-’74 respectively).
In addition to French bakeries, there was the French architecture including the church where we attended weekly mass during our 10 months there.
The elegant design of the Saigon Post Office has often been mistakenly attributed to Gustav Eiffel, but according to historicvietnam.com, it was designed by Marie-Alfred Foulhoux, the Chief Architect of Cochinchina, at the end of the 19th century.
I don’t recall ever going there as a child but I do have to wonder if my mother used to frequent it to post her many letters. At the beginning of the aforementioned letter she refers to some trouble with posting her previous correspondence:
Hope by now you received my “torn up” letter. [I was] trying to mail “registered mail” here but it turned out to be “something else!” We’ll all eventually learn the ropes . . .
I can’t leave this story of Vietnam without touching on the scourge that the French brought as well. No sane soul could say that delicious bread and some fine buildings are worth the cost of being colonized. That is easy to see now and how I wish it were taken into account during the 1950s.
Despite such editorial cartoons as Herblock’s, America moved forward with “assistance” plans. According to Historian Edward J. Rotterdam, author of The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to Southeast Asia:
President John F. Kennedy . . . secretly sent 400 Special Operations Forces-trained (Green Beret) soldiers to teach the South Vietnamese how to fight what was called a counterinsurgency war against Communist guerrillas in South Vietnam.
Unfortunately, those berets, which were seen as prestigious at home in the U.S.A. just signaled to all Vietnamese, whether from the north or the south, that another wave of unwelcome domination was cresting over their long-embattled country.
But of course, I knew nothing of all that then, when as a young girl I nibbled on toasted French bread and proudly held my dad’s hand in the fine cathedral on Sundays.
Some months later, we would learn that our cook’s first husband had been French and had been killed by the Viet Cong. Now she was frightened to death that her son would be killed in battle as well and was there some way my parents could help her out?
My mother’s earnest hopes about learning the ropes and settling into the beauty of the Paris of the Orient were to be well-tested in the months to come . . .