Philosophy and fucking in vietnam

PHILOSOPHY AND FUCKING IN VIETNAM
A Travel Memoir
★

Isaac Simpson
Outlaw Publishing
Los Angeles
Author’s Disclaimer: I am not an expert in history, economics,
sociopolitical theory or international law. The following observations are
the immediate impressions and speculations of a common man as he
travels through a strange new world.
Words © 2015 Isaac Simpson
Cover design © 2015 Bjorn Johansson
Interior design © 2015 Beverly Butterfield
Imprint:
Outlaw Publishing
726 S Santa Fe, Apt 107
Los Angeles, CA 90021
ISBN-13: 978-0692501030
ISBN-10: 0692501037
The following is exactly 93% true.
Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Vision quests are an ancient Native American rite of passage. Boys nine to
sixteen years old travel alone to the wilderness and stay without food for one
to seven days. Visions occur, sometimes induced by hallucinogenic drugs.
The visions reveal to the boy his purpose in the world. Upon returning to
society, he is considered a man.
One of the only surviving accounts of a vision quest was written by a
famous Lakota Sioux medicine man named Black Elk. He described the
moment when he went over the edge, into his vision.

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more
than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in
the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one
being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many
hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the


center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one
mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
—Black Elk


[PROLOGUE]
The End and the Beginning
Fall 2010
New Orleans
A sickle of Asian coast. Heat and dust and people squatting on the ground,
eating fetuses out of head-sized eggs like the guts of a melon. A sweaty hulk
in a bus station smothering a pre-teen girl, the bows in her hair are buried
under his fat and dark with his sweat. Zombies creep into an orphanage and
pull the chubby orphans out of their beds and pop them open with their teeth
like bloody soup dumplings. The boat-sized stone head of a blonde patrician,
unflinching as jungle vines thick as sewer pipes weave through his eye
sockets. The white chocolate faces of the presidents of the United States
melting under fluorescent lights and a red flag rigid above, frozen in the air
conditioning. The perfect ass of a woman with the skin of an apple and the
flat face of a crab. An all-glass skyscraper protecting a heap of shimmering
human skulls piled like cinder-blocks all the way to the top. And an old
woman standing in the dark, watching me sleep.
I awoke to the bleep of a heart monitor, curled up in a lump on a skinny

cot. The room was cordoned off with a curtain the color of doctors’ scrubs.
When I remembered where I was, a vice of depression clamped my gut. It
was the second time in a month I had taken myself to the emergency room to
be sedated.
The shuffles and beeps of the ER triage at Touro Hospital in New Orleans,
Louisiana, filled my ears. There was a crusty glaze on my lips and my eyes
felt sticky. The freezing air-conditioning found the gaps in my paper gown.
I unfolded myself and rolled off the cot. The heart monitor clip was
attached to my finger and I pulled it off and threw it on the bed. My clothes
sat in a pile on the floor and I put them on and slipped my feet into my
sandals. I peeked out of the curtains and saw a few orderlies waddling
around. I moved through the curtains and past the orderlies. The double doors
of the main entrance slid open. I walked out of the fluorescent hospital into
soft purple dawn.
The air was damp and cold, the sort of chilly humidity you only find in the
bayou states. I walked through the parking lot in search of my truck and the
blood returned to my limbs. I found it where I had left it and climbed in and


turned the key. The thin neon numbers on the digital clock flickered awake.
5:00 a.m.
I was a second year at One Road University Law School, where, with
substantial effort, I had carved out a typical law student’s world—a clean,
quiet apartment, a daily schedule of reading and exercising, and a set of
friends in various stages of high-functioning alcoholism. I had spent my 1L
summer working as an intern at a law firm in Saigon, Vietnam. I had returned
to New Orleans from Asia two months ago.
By the end of the summer, I had tumbled into a pit of depravity so deep I
wasn’t sure I could climb out. I had hoped that returning to my boring
American life would allow me to convalesce, that the daily routine of it

would work as a sort of decompression chamber. But somewhere along the
way Asia had flipped a switch in me that I couldn’t turn back off. Readjusting
was more difficult than I could have possibly imagined.
It’s hard to explain what clinical anxiety feels like to someone who hasn’t
experienced it, but a good analogue is an endless paranoid high—a bad trip
that will not go away. Every moment I felt like something was profoundly
wrong. I could not relax. Nothing was enjoyable. I couldn’t have a drink or
watch a movie or eat a meal in peace. People with depression say everything
looks grey. For me, everything looked red.
The worst symptom of my anxiety was insomnia. It had started on the long
plane ride across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to LAX. My drug of
choice for flying is Xanax. Usually two.25mg pills put me in a slobbery coma
for up to twelve hours. That day I was feeling off so I took one-and-a-half
and slept in my cramped seat for maybe three hours then jolted awake in
claustrophobic fear. I spent the rest of the flight in the throws of a full-on
panic attack, getting up from my seat to stretch, sitting back down, ordering
water then coke then coffee then beer. Nothing helped. I was in the clutches
of something out of my control.
After several days of travel, I made it back to my apartment in New
Orleans, where I lived alone. I had interviews for lawyer jobs scheduled the
very next morning. That night I couldn’t sleep, but I passed it off as jet lag. I
went to the interviews red-eyed and full of coffee and was so tired and
unprepared that I made a fool of myself. A baldheaded lawyer with big
shoulders from the law firm Skadden Arps asked me what kind of law I
wanted to practice.


“Definitely not transactional.”
“I’m transactional.”
“Oh… ” I laughed. He didn’t. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me. I just

returned from Vietnam and I’m super jet-lagged. It’s not that I don’t want to
do transactional… I guess it’s just that I… I don’t know what I want to do.”
He didn’t ask me why I’d been in Vietnam or any other questions at all.
We spent the next three minutes in awkward silence then he said “pleasure to
meet you” and pointed to the door. The other interviews went just as well.
Two more nights passed with nothing more than a few minutes of halfsleep. I would roll around in bed, alternately reading, watching TV on my
laptop, and trying very, very hard to force myself to sleep. Like all
insomniacs, the harder I tried, the more awake I felt.
On the third day I managed to doze off for a few hours, but then something
even stranger happened. I woke up with the same excruciating feeling of
panic I had experienced on the plane, but I was disoriented and could not
remember where I was. The objects in the room, some of which I had owned
for years, seemed strange and foreign. I was overwhelmed with the feeling
that there was an intruder in my space. At the foot of the bed stood a dark
figure. When I saw it, my heart jolted like in the first moments of a freefall.
“Who’s there!?” The faceless figure didn’t respond. After about thirty
seconds, reality started to fall back into place and I remembered the desk and
bedside table I had bought at IKEA. It had taken me a whole afternoon to
build that desk. It was a sunny Saturday shortly I had moved to New Orleans
and I had smoked a spliff and blasted a classic rock mix and the desk had
come together without much trouble. It was a happy day, a tranquil one, and
now I felt about as far away from that happiness and tranquility as one could
get. The dark figure melted into my desk chair with a heap of dirty laundry
on it. I grabbed my phone from the table and checked the time. It was after
two. I collapsed back into bed, my heart beating like a methed-out
metronome, and tossed and turned until morning.
The pattern continued. Every night around the same time I would wake up
disoriented. More than disoriented, amnesic. I couldn’t have told you where I
was, or even my first name. The objects in the room were empty of meaning.
Then I would see things that weren’t there, usually in the shape of a human

intruder—sometimes a large man, sometimes an old woman—causing the


anxious feeling that I wasn’t alone.
There were other visions, too. On one occasion, a cloud of colors flew out
of an open closet, about ten feet off the ground. It moved slowly to the bed
and hovered over me. I reached out and tried to touch it, only to find myself
grasping at nothing but air. Other hallucinations were auditory. One night, a
dripping sound trickled loudly in my ears for a full minute after waking, even
after I had tightened the bathroom faucet as tight as it would go. The worst
hallucinations had a smell. Unearthly, like death, they lingered in my sinuses
until I brushed my teeth.
Whatever the hallucination, the fugue state lasted about thirty seconds to a
minute, and then slowly melted away. I could remember everything, and felt
terrified about the malleability of my own mind.
I developed rashes on the crux of my left elbow and behind my left knee.
They were red itchy circles, raised skin like ringworm. For months they
didn’t fade, nor spread. They just sat there, like coins of interminable red
etched onto my flesh. Sometimes red bumps would rise on the tops of my
hands, right below my thumb joints, and vanish almost as soon as they
appeared.
I averaged two or three hours of sleep a night, all while working ten-hour
days at school. I had graded onto the Law Review, a sought-after distinction
that rewards students by forcing them to edit and cite-check complex legal
articles in a bi-yearly periodical. Making Law Review is a pie-eating contest
where the prize is more pie. It is notoriously time-consuming, brain draining,
and boring beyond measure. Since I couldn’t sleep, each hour in the Law
Review suite felt like Saran Wrap cinching tighter and tighter over my brain.
I was stuck in a hamster wheel of work, fear, insomnia, and hallucinatory
sleep patterns, and I thought for sure I was going insane.

On the tenth night, I couldn’t take it anymore and I took myself to the
emergency room. I explained that I had slept only six hours in nine nights.
The doctor gave me a shot of Valium and told me I was exhausted and that
the nightmares were normal symptoms of jetlag and that I just needed to
relax. I slept for four or five hours on a cot in the ER, and woke up just after
dawn.
I drove myself home and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t get it done.
I became angry and frustrated with myself beyond any point I had ever
experienced. Twin engines of rage and depression cycled through me in rapid


rotation. I was in a state of disbelief about what I was going through. Despite
every neuron screaming for sleep, the only thing I could do was start my day
again. I folded laundry in a black cloud. It was the closest I have ever come
to suicide, which was until that day something I had never understood.
Trying to juggle law school while sleep deprived creates enough anxiety
on its own to make most people cry, but trying to process an experience that
had essentially turned me into a different human being caused my brain to
seize up like a frightened armadillo. My whole being was inflamed. After a
few weeks of nighttime hallucinations, I noticed that my vision had become
blurry. I couldn’t focus on a TV screen even if it was only a few feet in front
of me. The image would wobble, as if the pixels were being mashed together.
If I tried to focus on a specific spot, it would wobble even more. I went to an
eye specialist who sprayed air into my eyes and dilated my pupils with drops.
He couldn’t find anything wrong and told me to go see a neurologist. I didn’t.
It got worse. The night terrors continued. I got accustomed to being
greeted by a dark presence in the middle of the night. A doctor in the family
suggested that if it didn’t stop, I should go back to the emergency room and
ask for a brain scan.
That night, I laid in bed, mind racing, fear ramping up to the point where I

felt totally out of control, enveloped in a mental anguish I couldn’t begin to
fight back against. Again I threw my covers aside, put on my clothes and
glasses and drove myself to the ER. This time I told them not just that I could
not sleep, but that I had rashes and that I couldn’t see and that I thought
something was wrong with my brain. The doctors were skeptical but agreed
to perform a CT scan. Then they shot me full of Valium, and again left me to
sleep in a green-curtained triage room. I awoke, snuck out of the hospital into
the cold air and started my truck. It was 5:00 a.m.
I turned the radio on to an early morning talk show. My truck rumbled
through the empty, craggy streets of New Orleans, the wipers cutting paths
on my cracked windshield through a glaze of frost. The regret and depression
I had still felt upon waking dissolved. About two blocks from my apartment,
I experienced a feeling I can only describe as spontaneous happiness. It was a
sort of profound tranquility, an almost meditative state, something like what
people say they feel when they’re certain they are going to die. All of my
problems seemed trivial and distant. I felt supported, held up by the world. I
am staunchly agnostic; otherwise I might say I had been touched by God. The


fact that I was going insane stopped bothering me. I had given up. For the
first time in two months, I relaxed.
I recovered steadily from that morning on. The hallucinations faded. Sleep
came easier and easier. The constant stress I had felt during the day was
dotted with stretches of tranquility. Eventually the anxiety became something
I could control.
I never received a concrete medical diagnosis. The CT scan came back
normal and none of the doctors I saw while accruing $5,000 in medical bills
had an explanation for what was wrong with me. They had only prescribed
medications to treat the symptoms, everything from anti-nausea meds to antidepressants to muscle relaxants to pills to inhibit puking. I never took any of
them.

I googled my hallucinations and arrived at something called sleep
paralysis, a condition in which the sufferer awakes frozen in place,
sometimes while experiencing terrifying hallucinations, and often involving
the belief that there is an intruder in the room. It is a common condition
similar to night terrors and has been linked for centuries to demonic
possession. Cases have been recorded for over six hundred years, and have
never been explained.
Whatever it was, it had been the most painful time of my life. Why did it
occur? I don’t know exactly. There were aggravating factors, one of which
was that I didn’t have an explanation for why I felt so bad all of the time. If I
could have pointed to a disease with a name, it would have made things a lot
easier.
There were also transitions happening in my life that were causing a great
deal of pressure. I was losing an important childhood best friend, not to death
or sickness, but to growing up. I had an insurmountable responsibility at a
school I hated. I was on course toward a successful career I did not want.
Yet I believe the true cause was my experience in Vietnam. Four months in
Southeast Asia had poked a hole in me where everything drained out, the
good and the bad bile, the dark and the light humors, and I had to reanimate
with new fluids. Before Vietnam, I had been a run-of-the-mill young
American narcissist, certain that my country was the best and the free-est, and
that I was entitled to fame, wealth and “greatness” simply for being born. My
identity was built on faulty foundations, blind spots I didn’t want to face, and
certain beliefs about myself, my country and the world, all of which had me


at the center. That system of belief just could not last after the things I had
seen that summer.
Thus my life is divided into B.V and A.V. It was in Vietnam that I started
writing, which led me to escape law and start doing what I wanted—creating,

exploring, not shifting money back-and-forth between big corporations. After
my months of anxiety hell, I stopped viewing myself through the eyes of
others. My warped ethics unraveled and I joined the human race. I chose
warmth and freedom over achievement and control. Before Vietnam I was a
hypochondriac, worried constantly about my health, which would make me
sick. I had severe asthma and terrible allergies. Constant sinus infections
forced me to have sinus surgery. Every time I took a flight I got a cold for
several days afterward. A week didn’t go by when I wasn’t convinced I was
dying. Quite frequently I was feverish and missed work or school because of
it. Before Vietnam I was sick more than anyone I knew. In the five years
since my return, I have been sick only once, with food poisoning. My asthma
and allergies are gone.
I’m a practical person, and not a particularly spiritual one. I do not believe
in ghosts or spirit animals or fairy godmothers. I don’t think Jesus is staring
down from heaven while people are dying all over the globe for no reason at
all. I am not suggesting that Native American vision quests are real
communions with the spirit world, or that I gained some sort of
enlightenment simply by working in Vietnam for a few months.
Still, this is not a novel. It is true. Something really happened in Vietnam
that changed my life. Something that almost killed me. Something I had to
write a book to explain.


Freedom Street
[one] A Xe Om
Day 1
Ho Chi Minh City
A city’s identity is formed in part by the way people move through it. We
remember its roads, its bridges, its subway system. There are other defining
characteristics of course—people, language, food—but the infrastructure is

the body. For me, that is most important.
Saigon has one of the ugliest bodies of any city on Earth. It’s flat, dusty,
crumbling, and devoid of almost any recognizable landmark, manmade or
natural. The skyscrapers are short and awkward. The streets smell like
gasoline from the endless streams of loud motorbikes. These smog pumpers
flow through the city’s vast network of veins, which cover 809 square miles
of featureless terrain. There are often so many motorbikes that they make a
full unbreakable line from street corner to street corner, like a swarm of
runners at the start of a marathon.
Today Saigon is technically called Ho Chi Minh City, HCMC for short,
but that name exists on paper only. The country that Saigon exists within
covers the southeast corner of the Asian continent like a thin coat of paint,
forming a narrow path 1,000 miles from the southern border of China to the
South China Sea. For 2,000 years, a single ethnic group has occupied this
coast, a people called the Kinh.
According to the origin myth, the Kinh are descended from the dragon lord
Lạc Long Quân and his wife, the immortal mountain fairy Âu Cơ. Âu Cơ
bore an egg sac of 100 eggs, from which hatched the 100 families of the Kinh
people. Afterward, Quân changed his mind about Âu Cơ. “I am a descendant
of the Dragon, you are a descendant of the fairy,” he said. “We are as
incompatible as fire and water.” So they divided their egg children. Fifty
followed their mother to the mountains, 50 followed their father toward the
coast and what would become modern day Saigon.
For 2,000 years, the Kinh have been subjugated, time and again, by foreign
powers, beginning with the Chinese, then the Japanese, then the French.
Today, finally, they are independent—the self-governing masters of a land
they have tilled for millennia. The Kinh are also known by another name, a
name given to them by the Chinese all those centuries ago. That name is the

Bách Việt, and their country is called Vietnam.
•••
The motorbikes make the streets of Saigon difficult to use. You can walk, but
with the smog, broken sidewalks, squatting gamblers and sleeping
construction workers it is a challenge. At one of the lightless intersections,
you have to creep across the street at a slow, steady pace so the drivers can
adjust and whizz around you. There are stories of mowed-down pedestrians
and drive-by purse-snatchings. Expat women learn to walk with their
shoulder strap on the sidewalk side.
Navigating a taxi through the hordes of reckless bikers is as slow as it is
terrifying. More than once a green VinaSun van pulled off while I still had
one foot on the pavement. Other times I was price gouged, and still others the
driver could not understand me and I would end up miles from my intended
destination.
The last, best option, before renting a scooter yourself, is flagging what is
called a xe om. A xe om is like a motorbike taxi, except there is nothing
official about it. Anyone riding through the streets wanting to make a couple
of dollars can be deputized a xe om. It’s Uber without the app. Stand near the
street with your hand in the air and within seconds someone will drive up and
say, “Sih, sih! Whey you go!?” It’s not just for tourists. Everyone can be a
passenger. Everyone can be a driver. Even the stodgiest, most elite lawyers in
Saigon take xe oms now and again, gripping the backs of sweaty strangers to
and from their lunch meetings.
The first xe om driver I encountered was named Tsan. After 24 hours of
traveling, shirt still crusty with drool and chunks of snorted Xanax, I dropped
my bags off at the hotel and went out in search of a bowl of Pho. Somehow I
had gotten it into my head that a bowl of real, authentic Pho, not the weak
broth I got in New Orleans, would be a cure-all for jetlag. But I didn’t really
have jetlag yet. I was filled with adrenaline.
I stood on a street corner and stared hopelessly into the school of

mechanical fish, trying to figure out how to get across without being mowed
down, when a young man peeled out from the flow. His motorbike was loud
and dingy with worn down tires. The front wheel bounced up onto the
sidewalk and he cut the engine. He was chubby and had jagged yellow teeth,
and was warm and gregarious when he spoke.
“Hey, sih! Whey you from?”


“I’m from America.”
“Whey in America?”
“Chicago”
“I study in Chicago!”
“What? really?”
“Yes, I do eschange in Chicago.”
“What? That’s crazy! Where?”
“With university.”
“Which university? The University of Chicago??”
“Yes.”
“That’s awesome!” and with that I was instantly comfortable, which, in
retrospect, was so obviously idiotic.
I told him I needed to buy some shoes for work. He said he knew just
where to go and handed me a black helmet. The stuffing was coming loose
from the padding inside and I had to hold it up to slip it over my head. I
snapped the plastic latch together and it pinched my chin skin. He gestured to
the space behind him on the threadbare leather seat. I shrugged, hiked up my
jeans and straddled the bike. “Hold me!” he said, so I clutched his shoulders
and the bike jostled and accelerated into the stream of scooters.
I noticed a makeshift marijuana pipe in a cubby on the steering column of
the scooter. It was made from a plastic water bottle with a pen stuck into it.
The pen was shoved through a hole burnt into the plastic. A few ounces of

yellow water sloshed in the bottom. I pointed to the pipe and shouted in his
ear, “Do you smoke weed?” He hesitated for a moment, and then understood
me.
“Yes, wee’! You wan’?”
“Is it good?”
“Yes, vewy goo’. You wan’ smauk?”
“Uhhh, ok.”
“Wha?”
“Yes, smoke weed!”
“Okay, we stop.”


I was surprised at myself. Back then, before my mental breakdown and
subsequent recovery, I was a much more anxious person and not one to
embrace unnecessary risks. Smoking illegal drugs with a stranger only hours
after landing on the far side of the world was uncharacteristic of me. I loved
to smoke weed, sure, but it made me paranoid, and in uncomfortable
situations I was afraid of freaking out. This was one of those situations, but
for some reason I was feeling calm and steady. For the first time in my 25
years of existence, I was truly alone, separated from everything I knew,
without a safety net of any kind. The closest institution responsible for my
wellbeing was 9,000 miles away. I had thought that would be terrifying, but it
had the opposite effect. I felt empowered. You’re stronger alone, maybe
because you have to be.
After a few minutes of silent driving we pulled into a park under some
palm trees. Tsan went to a water fountain, poured out the yellow water and
refilled it with clean. As he returned, a scraggly boy, probably 20, appeared
from behind a tree. “This my friend. He smauk, too. Okay?”
“Fine with me.”
I sat and they squatted on the grass under an enormous tree with a thick,

vine-covered trunk. It was painted white around its circumference about
halfway up to the branches. Many trees in Saigon are marked with this white
paint, which, I was told, protects against parasitic beetles.
We sucked bubbly hits out of the plastic bottle. It crinkled with every pull.
The weed was a dirty Indica, but I felt a light body high anyway. We tried
speaking but were frustrated because I spoke no Vietnamese and Tsan spoke
little English and his friend spoke no English at all. It got silent and awkward
and Tsan suggested we go get those shoes.
Saigon is divided into 24 numbered zones, called districts. District One is
downtown, the main drag, a well-bordered box for rich people to stay
comfortably within. The only other district visited by tourists is District Five.
It’s famous for bargain basement tailors who cut custom suits for $200.
District Five was where Tsan took me.
On the way, clinging to Tsan’s back, I asked him if I could get a massage.
The wind and the collective din of a thousand motors were so loud we were
yelling.
“You wan’ massagey?!”


“Yes, maybe! I don’t know!”
“I take you massagey!”
“Like happy ending massagey!?”
“Haha, yes, happy ending massagey! You wan’?!”
“Uhh, I dunno? Is that weird?”
“Wha?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never gotten one before.”
Wha?”
“Yes, I want happy ending massagey!”
“Ok, we go! Firs’ you buy shoes.” Tsan was the first person I met in
Saigon. I had been in town for a matter of hours and I had already outed

myself as a horny, ignorant Westerner eager to buy buy buy everything from
flesh to leather. In the moment I was somehow blind to it. I thought I was so
down with him, that we were really bonding, that I really didn’t think I was
better than him, and that he could tell I was different from the average dumb
white tourist. Why else would I have smoked weed out of his disgusting
contraption? We were friends for sure.
We stopped at a shoe store on a nondescript corner, boxed in a row of
stores selling leather goods. Knock-off purses hung on racks on the sidewalk.
Inside, Tsan said hello to another friend, a salesman. He led me to a back
room with rows of shoes stacked to the ceiling. Both Tsan and the salesman
assured me, over and over, that the products sold here were of the highest
quality.
They were very convincing. I left with a pair of pointy black knock-off
Italian derbies that I had been coaxed into believing were real Italian leather
and that one million dong, $50, was the bargain “local’s price.” Tsan insisted
on paying himself, because only he could get the local’s price. He said I
could pay him back for everything later. This might have raised red flags in
anybody else but me; indeed an ignorant American who thought everyone
was, like, totally his bro.
Lunch was at a café on the corner of a square near a stadium-sized fabric
wholesale market. People sat in close proximity at communal tables sticking
chopsticks in bowls of simple, no-frills piles of meat and rice. It was hot and
everyone had damp shirts and shiny foreheads.


Tsan suggested the “Com Ga,” chicken with rice. I said okay and Tsan
ordered it for me. “You wan’ bee’?” He motioned toward a humming, glass
refrigerator filled with bottles. I said yes and he got up and pulled two bottles
from the refrigerator and brought them back to us. The bottles had a white
label with a circle around the numbers “333.”

A pink plastic bowl arrived full of rice with a gooey honey-colored
chicken mixture in the middle and scallions sprinkled on top. It was bland,
but not terrible, and at least tasted fresh, fresher than American fast food for
sure. We drained our beers and again Tsan insisted on paying. “I get bettah
price! You get touris’ price. Vewy high!”
We went inside the huge market. It was a beehive of tiny stalls with
proprietors hawking fabrics. Person-sized bolts of cloth were propped up in
colorful rows like stacks of enormous crayons. Tsan stopped at a stall and
introduced me to a pale, pretty woman in her 40s.
“She Chinese.”
That was abrupt.
“You’re Chinese?” She only nodded, so Tsan answered for her. “Yes,
Chinese. Many Chinese in this market.” She continued nodding vigorously
and smiled so wide that her eyes disappeared completely.
Tsan excused himself to go outside and smoke a cigarette. The woman
measured me using a paper tape measure. I tried to make small talk, but the
language barrier again made it impossible. After measuring, she told me to
choose a fabric for the suit. The colors and textures were endless. I pinched
the color rolls in succession and decided on gunmetal gray, the softest I could
find that didn’t feel like fake silk.
The woman gave me a big smile and said, “Good one,” and then pulled out
a pad of paper. She scrawled a dollar sign and then the number “190.” All the
travel guides had been clear to enter Saigon with a lot of cash, because
American money was accepted in most places and who knew where you
could find an ATM. ATMs were everywhere, though. I’m not sure why the
guides were so cautious.
I pulled a sweaty wad of green out of my back pocket and peeled off 10
twenties and handed them to the woman. She took it and went to a gray metal
box sitting on a chair and put the money inside and fished out some colorful
dong and handed it to me. I folded the dong on top of the dollars and shoved

the whole mess back into my pocket. She scrawled an illegible receipt on the
pad of paper, ripped it out and gave it to me, like a doctor’s prescription.
“Three day.” She held up three fingers to my face.
“Three days I come back?”
“Yes.”
“And all I need is this paper?”
“Yes, bing dis.” She touched the paper in my hand.
“Ok, great. Thank you!”
I gave her what I wanted to be a beaming grin and eyes that said, “Look at
what a nice white boy I am! Please don’t steal my money!” She beamed back
with a look of amusement and I felt okay. Tsan led me out of the market. I
noticed now that the majority of merchants had pale, round faces, much
lighter and less angular than the Vietnamese. They looked up at me as I
walked by, but, unlike the Vietnamese, they did not smile.
Tsan’s bike was waiting for us outside. We got on and I clutched his
sweaty back once more. Just as we were backing up, about to drive off, a
Vietnamese woman in a tight blue and red Superman shirt waved at us from a
raised ledge in front of the market. She appeared to be in her 40s and was the
apparent proprietor of a store that sold shoddily made Western-logoed crap,
like the t-shirt she was wearing. She shouted something I couldn’t hear over
the sound of the bike. Tsan stopped backing up and looked up at her. She
shouted something again.
“What is she saying?” I asked.
“She say whey you from.” Tsan seemed annoyed.
“U.S.A.!” I shouted to her, and waved back.
“Whey you from?” she shouted again.
“U.S.A., Chicago!”
“Chee Cago!?”

“Yes!”
“Ooohhh! So cold!” she said and did a mock shiver. I laughed. Even here
on the far side of the world, people say the same shit when you tell them
you’re from Chicago.
“Yes! Very cold in Chicago!”


She was really smiling now. “You vewy handsome! Vewwy handsome
man!”
This was the first time a stranger had shouted something like that at me in
public, in my entire life, and it made me feel great. The fact is that stuff like
this happens to Western men in Saigon all the time. (Not just white men, as I
learned from an African-American friend, but all Western men). Whether
Vietnamese women are genuinely friendly, curious people or want something
from you is hard to decipher. Regardless, you can imagine the effect they
have on the ego of a narcissist.
“Time for massagey?” Tsan said, rolling out of the square.
“Okay!”
He drove for 15 minutes or so. I still had a nice body high and felt happy
and adventurous. The wind blew my hair and cooled my distressed ears, still
popping from the flight. We arrived at a two-story building on a desolate
street. I had no idea where we were. It could have been District Four or
District 24. I didn’t care. I was excited.
We entered what looked like a dirty suburban garage. Three girls loitered
at a tiny reception desk. They wore spandex and lace outfits that were
somewhere between Wal-Mart Halloween French Maid and American
Gladiator. They frowned when they saw us. They looked tired.
Tsan spoke with them and they nodded. He grabbed one by the hand and
walked through a door in the side of the garage that led up some stairs into
darkness. I stood there staring for a few moments, sizing up the women as

they sized up me. One of them held out her hand. She had a square face and
was not bad looking, but was strapping and thick and reminded me of a girl
on my high-school’s swim team. I felt pangs of disappointment.
I followed her inside and up the creaky stairs. It was dark, the only light
permeating through the pilled fabric that covered the windows. I could hear
my heart beating in my ears and I started thinking about being alone. Panic
snuck in but I shooed it away.
We came to a room divided by hanging curtains that screened off small
rectangular massage areas. In each space there was a skinny white cot dressed
with a patterned sheet. I lay down face forward. She started immediately,
scratching and rubbing my neck in a hurried way, and going to great lengths
to show she wasn’t trying. Barely a minute had passed when she said,


exasperatedly, “Ok!” and motioned for me to turn over. I turned over and she
abruptly reached into my pants and grabbed my dick. I have had my fair
share of rub-and-tugs in the years since, and normally the hand job doesn’t
come until after a lengthy, lotion-y massage that makes you so horny you’re
literally humping the table. But this was my first time, so I thought the
abruptness was normal and didn’t object. I was soft and she frowned.
“You no howny?”
“What?”
“One momen’,” she said and disappeared behind the curtain. She came
back moments later with a bottle of lotion and squirted it into her hands. She
went at it again. I was nervous. Nothing was happening.
“You no howny?”
“No, I am horny. Just… you know… nervous.”
“You no like me?”
“No! No, not at all. It’s not that. It’s just… ” As a vote of confidence, I
reached down and grabbed her butt. She rolled her eyes.

“You no like me. One momen’.” She disappeared again. I sat in the dark
disappointed and embarrassed. I thought about the familiar lavender smell of
the lotion and wondered where she had gotten it. I jerked off a little bit. Now
that I was alone, things started working properly.
The girl returned with another girl. This one was prettier, with long hair
and big eyes and a small heart-shaped face. Ahh, this must be the closer.
They each grabbed a part of me. The pretty one reached down and twisted my
nipple. I yelped and swatted her hand away and she giggled. I came in about
a minute. “So now you howny.”
They left and I put my shirt back on and went downstairs. I waited a few
minutes for Tsan, who came down buckling his belt. I asked him how much
we owed and he ignored me, handing the girls a wad of dong.
It was dusk now and the sky was turning violet. The air had cooled down
and the dust wasn’t so visible. We motored in silence back to District One. I
was tired now, finally, and very much in a daze. I felt guilty about what had
just happened—dirty and guilty. I vowed not to pay for it again.
We arrived in front of my hotel and I got off the back of the bike and
pulled my helmet off and ran my hand through my sweaty hair.


“Woooh!” I said, exhaustedly. “That was fun!”
“You lihe’?” he asked, pointing to the bag in my hand which carried the
shoebox.
“Yes, I like the shoes. Thank you.” We stared at each other awkwardly.
“Hey by the way, so what should I do tonight? Where should I go out?”
“I show you good bars. Best bars.”
“Girls?”
“Yes, I take you to best bars. Many girls. Vietnamee girls, not espats.
Good bars.” He put his number in my cell phone, a crappy little silver flip
phone I’d bought from a kiosk at the airport just after I landed.

“I test you.”
“Ok, yes, you text me later. Tell where to go.” I was already pidgining my
English. It happens automatically; you start removing words from your
sentences and speaking louder, as if to a deaf child. Who knows if it makes
you easier to understand. “I down to go out, for sure!”
“Ok, you pay me now.”
Very abrupt.
“Ok. So I owe you, let’s see, I owe you $50 plus what?”
“Four million dong.”
That sounded like way too much, but I was still getting used to the
exchange rate so I opened the calculator program on my phone. I mashed the
numbers and it kept taking me to the wrong screen, so I had to start over three
times and said, “Fuck!” louder each time. Finally, I was able to put in
4,000,000 and divide it by 19,000, the exchange rate. That equaled $210,
which did not include the $190 I had already paid for the suit, for which all I
had to show was a tiny piece of paper with scribbles on it. The reality sunk
in. I had spent $400 in the few hours since getting off the plane. That is
double what the average Vietnamese person makes in a month.
I was despondent. The walls started closing in. I gave Tsan a pleading
look.
“Dude, are you serious?”
“Yes, it is good price. Much cheapah. For you they give touris’ price.
Vewy High.”


“No way, man. What did you spend four million Dong on?” He raised his
hand and started counting off on fingers. “Shoes, fifty dollah. Weed. Food.
Bee’. Massagey.”
“Oh, come on. I had one hit of that weed!”
“Weed vewy espensive. Massagey vewy espensive because you take two

gihl. Much mo’ money.”
“How much was one massage?”
“One million dong each. And you take two gihl.”
“I didn’t ask for two girls! They just brought two girls!”
“They say you no howny, canno’ do, need two gihl.” My face felt hot. I
could feel tears welling up.
“Tsan. I’m not giving you four million dong.”
“What you mean?” His cherubic face scrunched forward with genuinely
intimidating anger. His eyes squinted to tiny lines and his nostrils flared.
“Tsan. Give me a break here, man!” I scanned his eyes for traces of
integrity. I thought he might say, “Jus’ joking!” but he didn’t. He paused for a
long time and stared me hard in the face. I thought he might hit me.
“Tsan. C’mon. Give me a break here.”
“Noooooooo… ” he breathed out while shaking his head, as if he was
figuring out, for the first time, that I was some sort of imposter, though of
course the opposite was true. “You no fair. You no fair, man.”
“Tsan, you mean to tell me that a beer and that shitty lunch and a massage
cost $150?” It was indeed ludicrous, though I didn’t realize how ludicrous
until later. The chicken and rice probably cost 50 cents, the beer a dollar. The
massage couldn’t have cost more than $30, even if I had used two girls.
Weed is indeed more rare in Vietnam than in the U.S., but it’s not that rare.
Tsan couldn’t have spent more than $40, after the shoes.
“Nooooo… and weed and massagey. You no fair, man. You a liar!” He
was still on his bike and was rolling back and forth in angry juts. His face
was bright red. I was scared. “I spend the money already!” he shouted.
“Tsan, I mean, I’ll get you money out of the ATM, but we need to talk
about this.”
“Ok, you go to ATM.”

“Where is there an ATM?”
“I know whey is one.”
He motioned for me to get on the back of the scooter again. I looked at him
right in the eyes, hoping for some inkling of the brotherly warmth he had
exuded earlier, but he only turned his head and started the bike. I got on the
back. We drove about 100 yards down the road and pulled up to an ANZ
bank ATM. It was inside a tall glass phone booth-like structure, illuminated
blue on the inside.
I had requested the ATM trip to buy some time. I did the equation again in
my phone and was overcome with guilt. $400 on my first day. What a
fucking idiot. I shook my head and punched in my pin code and retrieved the
cash. Tsan was waiting for me frowning, breathing hard out of his nostrils.
We drove back to the front of the hotel and he stopped. By now it was almost
dark, a little grey still in the sky. Pallid light from the lobby of my hotel
glowed onto the street. It made me feel a little safer.
I got off the bike and handed the helmet to Tsan. He scooted up onto the
sidewalk and left the bike running.
“Tsan, I’m going to give you three million dong. I think that’s fair.” He
became livid and began shouting.
“You no fair, man! You no fair! I spend the money already!” He looked
around. People on the street were glancing over. Would they back him up?
Was I about to be overtaken by a Vietnamese mob? Was I, in fact, in the
wrong?
“Tsan, you and I both know you did not spend four million dong.” He
began shrieking now, really screaming. “Tsan, if you’re going to yell at me,
I’ll just go back to my hotel.”
“You assho’!” he shouted. He revved his engine and jolted toward me,
screeching to a stop just before my foot.
“Whoa! Are you crazy!”
“You crazy! You steal my money!”

“I didn’t steal anything from you.”
“You no fair. You steal.” He revved the engine again. He rocketed forward
and stopped inches from my foot, a definite threat. I didn’t think he was
really going to run me over, though, so I didn’t budge. Now I was angry,


ready for a fight. I calmly took the dong out of my back pocket and handed
them forward. “Here’s three million.” He wouldn’t take it and his shouting
got louder and louder, his face bright red and contorting. His jagged yellow
teeth gnashed and his eyes were slits. He kept jerking forward on his bike.
I put the three million on his front handlebars and dropped it. It fell to the
ground next to his front wheel, and he lurched forward to grab it. He rose and
began to shout again. I raised my finger to my throat and I made a slitting
motion and shouted, “Enough!” It came out high-pitched and strange, too
distressed, too panicky, but it worked. Tsan was silent. I turned my back and
walked up the stairs into my hotel.


[two] A Prostitute
Day Three
Ho Chi Minh City
The woman yelling that I was handsome was just the beginning. My sexual
market value inflated from “law school student” to “rock star” overnight. I
got catcalls on the street and long stares in the stores. One of the nice old
clerks at the hotel desk insisted I meet her granddaughter. Another time,
alone at the movies, I was accosted by a group of teenagers who asked me to
take them for ice cream. My yoga teacher hit on me after class. Where back
home I was middling, indistinguishable bait, in Vietnam I was a tuna dropped
in a tank of sharks.
My experience was not unique. Vietnamese women are drawn to Western

men. The reason for this is not something people like to talk about, but the
simple answer is that women mate for social status. Western men are from
countries that are much, much wealthier than Vietnam.
Across from my hotel there was an Indian restaurant. I would spend
evenings there alone, with a book and a beer and an exquisite spicy curry.
There were always three or four other foreigners there, always men, also
dining alone. One night, a waitress named Ruby wrote her number on my
check. I texted her and took her out. We went back to my room and I tried to
kiss her, but she acted like she didn’t understand.
Such is dating in Saigon. They flirt with you aggressively, but they expect
a lot out of you before anything happens. And by “a lot” I mean “money.”
There is no going Dutch with a Vietnamese girl. I tried that several times and
was met with quizzical looks or anger, one time even tears. To date a
Vietnamese woman you must be both a lover and a provider. There is no
arguing about it.
Part of the reason for this bare reality is that birth control is much less
prevalent in Vietnam. Every time a Vietnamese woman sleeps with a man,
she faces the real risk of pregnancy. So flirt she will, but before she has sex
she must make sure he is committed, and if not, that he can at least support
the child. At first I thought of them as a bunch of gold diggers, but after
awhile I learned to enjoy their shallowness as a more natural and honest
courtship ritual.
To describe Vietnam but omit the shift in my sexual reality would be


disingenuous and cowardly. To include it is banal and in bad taste. I reject the
latter perspective. The fact that sex is on our mind more than anything else
yet we are terrified of talking about it is psychological transference on a mass
scale. In other words, we act as if sex is the last thing on our minds precisely
because it is the first. This habit imputes layers of dishonesty upon our

discourse. The single most strange and fascinating part about traveling in
Southeast Asia for many men is their newfound attractiveness and it should
not be avoided just because it runs counter to traditional notions of decency.
Some think of having sex with women in third world countries as
exploitative. They are right. Like many books about white men abroad, this
one is about exploitation. Unlike those books, however, this one doesn’t
apologize for it. What is sex, in any country, besides mutual exploitation?
This story explores its limits. It presents the raw thoughts of the exploiter in
all their ugliness and occasional beauty. It is a story about freedom. Whether
exploitation is necessary for freedom is for you to decide.
•••
The Adderall peaked around 2 p.m., after following it with a Red Bull and a
cigarette on a rooftop balcony, 50 stories above the fat brown slug of the
Saigon River. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, but I had decided that in Saigon I
would because they fit the image of the whole thing. I found them to be little
cures for loneliness.
I flicked the butt into a stone planter and re-entered the building. The
firm’s office occupied the entire top floor. Enclosed glass bullpens housed
clusters of lawyers’ desks. My own desk was isolated, tucked into a private
nook, as if I merited some distinction.
Sweat from my sun-soaked cigarette break stung cold in the air
conditioning and I used the sleeve of my pink Brooks Brothers shirt to dab
my forehead. My navy blue suit jacket, also Brooks Brothers, also purchased
by my grandmother during a post-college-graduation shopping spree, hung
on the back of my leather desk chair. I clacked away on an ancient white
Compaq, searching LexisNexis for cases about Vietnamese trademark law.
It was the summer after my first year of law school and I had gotten a job
as an intern at Affini & Clarke, a semi-prestigious international corporate law
firm with headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City. In 2010, two years into the
recession, there were few paid summer jobs for any law students, other than

for those who had attended one of the top 14 law schools (the “T-14”), which