Sai Gon: Beginner’s Vietnamese (cont.)

We stopped at a place that didn’t have anything recognizably bar-like. Girls sat in lawn chairs in the entrance of a deep, open-faced building, eyeing me like a horse (or expecting me to eye them like a horse?). Although I was naïve, I wasn’t in a coma. I understood then what he had meant by “happy hour” and why I had been a gigantic, grade A moron.

I have never been with a prostitute, and I have never felt the desire to do so. I understood that some men do this, but in my head this happened in a far off, imaginary fantasyland. Yet nothing registered in my brain. Sometimes, as I live my life, I see it as a story, removed and distant as if I’m watching myself. Babies are born, people die; planets collide; and I just drift through, unaffected because it’s not happening to me — it’s happening to a character I’m writing.

So I let the proprietor lead us to an empty room with harsh pink lighting, a hard plastic couch around one wall and a karaoke machine set up opposite the couch. He brought beers and snacks, leaving them on the coffee table. A few plastic wrappers littered the floor from the previous patrons‘ stay, two older Vietnamese men whom I passed on my way in. I felt anesthetized, floaty and detached. Tuan sat back and drank his beer, actually twitching with excitement. I sat on the edge of the couch, didn’t touch my beer, and didn’t feel anything. The whole experience was so far removed from anything I had ever done that it just didn’t feel real.

When two girls opened the door and the proprietor pushed them into our room, it felt real. I snapped back into myself and looked at the two women, wondering how I had let myself even enter the room. They sat beside us and sang karaoke. Tuan started caressing his partner and reaching down her dress. I sat absolutely still and stared at the karaoke screen. The girl beside me pressed her nose against my cheek and half sucked and half snorted. I looked at her for the first time — a girl who’d be attractive without so much eye shadow and blush — and she pointed to her cheek for me to do the same. I laughed and looked away from her. She sucked my cheek then pointed to her own again. I looked over to Tuan who had uncovered his partner’s breast. He looked at me and grinned.

The girl beside me looked at them as well; then placed her hand on my thigh and scooted closer to me. I told Tuan that I wanted to leave, that I had misunderstood what he meant by happy hour. He didn’t understand. He said, “yes, yes, happy hour. Your girlfriend and your girlfriend.” After a minute of this, Tuan offered to switch women. He thought I was unhappy simply because I didn’t like the girl who picked me. I stood up and left.

The proprietor charged me 500,000 Dong, which I paid. Tuan dropped me off on Pham Ngu Lao at ten or eleven when the area’s night life began. Fat, middle-aged white men, gray-haired and balding, walked by with beautiful young Vietnamese girls in their arms. The men spoke loudly and slowly in English while the girls smiled and nodded. Women in strappy tops and tight jeans stopped beside me and offered their services with the few English words they knew:

“Hotel?”

“Go to bed?”

A xe om offered to take me to other women by saying “boom boom?” then, more quietly, “marijuana?” That night, I saw the poorest people I’ve ever seen in my life, prostitutes way too young for me to believe, and other things that I still haven’t accepted. I didn’t feel any of the excitement from earlier. I felt depressed, confused, and guilty for being born into the American middle class. I walked back to my guesthouse but couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get rid of the smell and taste of makeup. The thick, cakey smell permeated every breath I took. I blew my nose, washed my face, and brushed my teeth, but it still filled my nostrils.

Makeup stayed in my lungs and nose for days. Soon, however, I left Pham Ngu Lao and moved into a house with three Vietnamese Americans. I began writing for English publications in Sai Gon and editing at Viet Nam News, the national English daily. The smells of noodles and newsprint replaced that of makeup.

I spent a year in Sai Gon, learned Vietnamese and made friends. And I again had days when I fell in love with Sai Gon and Viet Nam. But when I remember my time in Viet Nam, I always come back to that first night; I think about the faces of those two girls. They weren’t what I had expected. Previously, I imagined that all prostitutes wince when they work, that if they sacrifice themselves for money, it’s obvious in their expressions. But the faces of those girls didn’t reflect suffering, nor joy, nor sadness, nor anything else I would have guessed. When I told my brother this story, I said their faces showed acceptance, but that’s not right either. I thought that I knew all the possible reasons for prostituting oneself: poverty, desperation, nymphomania, enslavement, blackmail. Their eyes betrayed none of these, however. And no matter how often I return to Viet Nam, I don’t think I will ever understand what I saw in the faces of those two girls that night. But when I close my eyes and see theirs looking back at me, I wish I wish I wish I’d known how to say I’m sorry.

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