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I'm at Cua Dai Beach, sitting at a small table that faces nondescript beach umbrellas and flat sunning chairs and the tan uneven sand and the deep blue and aqua water, and the mountains and islands beyond. This is one of the best and most popular beaches at Hoi An, a city notable for its scores of eye-stopping French-flavored hotels and small shops catering to those looking for custom-made shirts and dresses and suits, ordered one day and ready the next. Compliments of young girls sitting behind old sewing machines in a sweat shop where the going wage is less than two dollars a day. These numbers proving one again that colonialism within is invariably more exploitative of labor than that infamously carried out by colonialists who come from distant shores. Hoi An, to my eye, is doing a good job of imitating a niche for which Bangkok is famous, different it seems in a stronger emphasis on making clothes for women, those with a distinctive Vietnamese cut and flavor, those with ominous-looking dragon logos. Street shops run by heady women with big boy voices and large mouths who address men like me passing by with words like: Hi, Honey, come to me. And, Come in and get a special deal as my first customer of the day!

I've been slowly pecking away at a plate of mixed fried vegetables planted on a flat-topped hill of white rice, not nearly spicy enough for my palate after weeks in Thailand. Vietnamese food is losing out to Thai food fast in my small book of what's most desirable to eat. I'm waiting for the boiled crab to arrive, a beautiful little beast longer than my forearm and hand, ivory white with large pink splotches covering the shell. Nothing I've ever seen at home.

I've got everyone's attention because I'm the only person to have come to this particular beach rest spot and eatery today. Mom and two daughters, one twenty and one twenty-seven, both of whom speak quite good English, have been grilling me about where I come from and what I do and how many kids I have and my age, and teasing me about the barely visible, to my eye, "monkey hair" on my arms. They love me anyway, monkey that I am, they say, laughing, engaging me with smiles that are more gum and jaw than teeth. Likeable daughters, I find them. Anyone would like them. One works part time because she's in school, the older one is here all the time because she's needed all the time. She's never been married and marriage is not on the horizon, she tells me. There's simply too much to do to keep this beach tourist-oriented enterprise going.

It's low tourist season and a bad day, and perhaps a bad year, one which, the older daughter opines, may be a losing year. The family rents a small slab of cement from the government on which they have put up a thatch roof, brought in several cheap tables and chairs, a cold unit to make beer and soft drinks and bottled water drinkable, and what's needed to cook a surprisingly varied array of beef, pork and chicken dishes that's all there in Vietnamese and English on the menu they brought to me.

They're on a three-year rental contract with the communist government, at fifteen million dong a year, payable in three equal installments. Once they signed the contract, they were locked in, and if they lose money because tourism has turned sour and they didn't build an attractive enough infrastructure to catch the fickle eye, or they proved not to be price and product competitive with neighbors--then tough luck. The government is shock proof; it gets the same money no matter what happens. After all, rent is rent to a capitalist by any name. Which means that if a controlling centrally directed government, as communists invariably are, miscalculate, businesses go dry and disappear. The small entrepreneurs lose, the government loses, and then every one loses because growth proceeds at a rate less than it would be under a less rigid system of control. Communists everywhere as far as I can tell refuse to believe in the magnificent conspiracies of the invisible and always well-oiled hand of the marketplace.

This Commie government, however, has more than an average street man's sense of location theory. A couple of hundred yards down the beach a similar sized restaurant is being charged eighty to ninety million dong a year for land rent, all because it sits directly adjacent to the main road coming to the beach, a one-legged blind man's stroll from a major hotel and convention center. It's the first area to be hit by tourists, and, as this lively sister who looks twenty-two and not twenty-seven explains for my benefit, all the big money people from Hanoi and Saigon are too lazy to go much farther than the first or second beach restaurant they come to. No surprise, then, that the prices for beer and pork and beef and seafood dishes are higher on the prime real estate sites. They have to be to pay the runaway land rent that goes up when times get better; and they can charge higher prices because people from the cities that matter, and where the many permutations of the mafia and corruption generated money accumulates more quickly, don't fuss much about higher prices for the same product. Accessibility, ease of getting in and out, what they heard from others-these are the factors that rule. Geography is never a logic just about space and proximity.

The picture I get is that these commies do sell land, in particular for all the hotels that have been built in and around Hoi An. And owned primarily, I'm told by another source, by policemen, those more equal that others in a society that extols the virtues of equality. So some land gets sold--to the best connected people, and some does not, because the government, it would seem, is smart enough to know that the land fronting the heavily used strand is certain to inflate greatly in value as tourism grows to levels as yet unknown. Every good capitalist by any name whatsoever thinks ahead.

I don't finish all the rice and vegetables, and the older daughter asks me why not. I pat my flat stomach. She laughs and tells me that this is no longer the case with Vietnamese. Three years ago, she says, things began to change. The Vietnamese are getting fat in the stomach and fat in the thighs and fat in the head, she says, laughing with greater energy, making fun of how they like to eat and nap and have no interest in exercise. And so, like Westerners in a land not yet Western, the Vietnamese, I am informed, are beginning to resemble all those unsightly and shuffling human pigs now populating America and Europe and Australia.

I've come here with Nguyen Viet Chuan, a sixty-one year old local who tries to hustle tourist business, riding around town behind him on his motorbike. Chuan is a portrait out of a time past: half his front teeth are missing, and he's got a wispy mustache and a goatee that can't find their identity. His eyes sag like sandbags with too little sand in them. He wears a floppy white cap with the Vietnamese red star in the middle of it, the front brim flipped up, like a university student trying to show that he's hip.

Chuan found me or I found him about two hours ago, and though we agreed on a price, I know that before I'm finished with him today it's going to be three or four times this amount. Deals mutually agreed upon out the gate, I'm discovering, are not the ticket price at the exit. The Vietnamese, I'm starting to conclude, have a flooding river's sense of where a deal ends.

Chuan says that during the war he worked for the Americans and did communications work, but what kind he doesn't specify and his English is not good enough for him to elaborate for my benefit. Now he's on poor times, and it's a point he won't let me forget. Eight, nine, ten times in the first two hours or so, he says to me as we're cruising about Hoi An: You help me when you get home. You don't forget me and send me money, okay? Okay? There's nothing at all subtle about what he's got on his mind. This is all about my obligation by virtue of being an American. He keeps giving me these lines while I'm insisting that he do the small favor of finding me a pharmacy or something similar so I can do something about this congestion in the chest and head--my Manila cough, I call it-that's got me nearly choking to death at night when I'm trying to sleep.

Without my asking or even hinting I want to see where he lives, he drives me to his home. It lies on a watery distant edge of Hoi An. Along the way he points out markers so I'll remember how to get there when I return. He's got me nailed into a two-part coffin that breathes green and not much else. I will send him money when I get home, and he will get all my business when I return to Hoi An. None of this is a matter of my saying yes or no; it's just how things will be--in his mind.

His house is an unpainted shack of boards and sticks and rotting driftwood, and out front, or rather the center of the front of the house, is a small wooden and glass case packed with crackers, soft drinks and a few household items that I assume his wife sells to neighbors to bring in a few thousand dong a day. Maybe we're only talking two or three sales a day, perhaps twenty or thirty cents profit. But then every little bit counts when you're down and out and trying to hang on. This I do believe--a truth as certain as death for one and all.

We enter on the left and he asks me to sit down at a small, unpainted wooden table. Before I can get oriented, his wife, who is seated on a bed across the room, gets up and comes to greet me and shake my hand. She is bent in the back and wearing a purple dress. She's barefoot. There's an enormous ugly mole to the right of her nose. Her hair is gray and disheveled. She's got twisted feet with some notable scars on the right leg. She might be in her fifties; she looks like she's in her eighties, and not the healthy eighties with at least a couple of good years left to enjoy this life.

I don't ask who the young boy is who's sleeping on a bed; I assume a grandson. Not far away is a fan blowing in his direction. The only fan I see in the house. This fan, I am sure, has legs, walks as well as I do. Maybe it's older than me.

Behind the bed is a smaller bed with a mosquito net that's down. The centerpiece of the room, which occupies almost a third or more of the space that begins at one o'clock from where I sit, is a three-tiered Buddhist shrine. Elaborate, showy, a many-layered distraction of brass and reds and yellows that is much more than my pattern-seeking mind can make sense of. Buddha is no minor figure in this household, in a country where there are surprisingly few signs of Buddhism--compared to Thailand, that is.

While I sit and let my eyes roam, Chuan scratches and roams with his close-focus eyes, glasses on the bed, among a pile of old papers that he has put next to the boy on the bed. The immovable youth, who could sleep through another Vietnam War, I'd bet.

He's looking for proof to show me that he was really working for the Americans way back when. I didn't ask for any of this, and in fact had showed little interest when he mentioned that he'd worked for Americans in the war years. Is this his way of showing me that I owe him something? Or...?

Chuan can't find what he's after and we leave, my trying as best I can to say goodbye to his wife who had offered me some water that I'd refused, still not eager to find myself with nine visits or more a day to the nearest toilet. We get a hundred yards down the road and Chuan realizes that he forgot his glasses and has to return for them; he really was distracted, I think, trying to find that telling document amid all that ancient history.

Three, four, five times he gives me small geography lessons on the return to the hotel. The purpose is clear; if my memory is any good I'll be able to find my way to his home when I return to Hoi An. I make no effort to disabuse him of his hopes about what I will do, that the address he gave me after the first hour we were together will be added to a pile of such addresses that have been given to me in half a dozen countries in recent years: Cuba, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico.

At the steps of the hotel, where I've got an incredible room with high elaborate ceilings for which I am paying a paltry seven dollars a night, I give Chuan more than three times what I'd agreed to pay him when we met. But this isn't enough. He asks for more, not once but twice. He smiles with that mouth of half missing teeth: You do understand, don't you, he is telling me.

I look at him and shake my head and my tongue goes to a new cap that never really liked the fit. I'm beginning to feel like I am back in Cuba, where shameless begging is so rampant that after a week or ten days that I wanted to scream. On every one of my four trips. And I did, on every one of my trips. I screamed and I shouted at the person who just happened to be unlucky number nineteenth or twenty-ninth, that person who said, Give me, Give me, Give me...

I shake my head again and turn away from Chuan and wish that what happened hadn't happened. I kind of liked the old man--so much older than me in so many ways--and I did not want my last image of him to be that of someone demanding more than I'd generously given him. Forcing me to conclude that no matter how much I would have put in his hand he still would have asked for more.

What, I wonder, is it about these communist tyrannies that have so thoroughly robbed people of any sense of personal dignity?

 

 

 

© Korski. All rights reserved by the author.