This past weekend, Vietnam marked a big anniversary: 35 years since showing the world’s greatest military superpower the door and uniting the two halves of the nation under the grand banner of communism. That last bit actually didn’t work out so well for everyone, as you may know, but that hasn’t stopped the government propaganda machine from pumping out platitudes extolling the unspeakable wonderfulness of freedom, independence and money-grubbing happiness under socialism, or the new communism, or whatever they’re calling it these days. All weekend there were the requisite dancing in the street, parades, celebratory speechifying and solemn tributes to Ho Chi Minh, who’s worshipped pretty much as a god around these parts, despite the fact that he bears what may or may not be a coincidentally uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders (who, in point of fact, also occupies a pretty high spot on the local totem pole). The celebrations fell back-to-back with Vietnam’s Labor Day holiday this year, so posters like the pair below blanketed all of Saigon for the week preceding, giving the whole city the feel of being trapped in a retrospective of 1920s Soviet Union constructivism.

These posters all sort of neglect to mention that every house, every vehicle, every thimbleful of dirt that had previously been owned by a resident of South Vietnam before 1975 was ‘reallocated’ to someone from North Vietnam immediately following the events of 35 years ago. For them, ‘independence’ tastes a lot  like a shit sandwich. You don’t hear them complaining, though – perhaps because it’s illegal to complain.

Freedom! Independence! Happiness, goddamit!

Very rough translation: "Celebrate 35 years of independence and a united country with a bucket of KFC Original Recipe®"

If you ever start to feel as though life is no longer the challenge it’s billed as being, that you’re drifting through your days like a celebrity poodle, coddled and catered to by an endless parade of attentive sales clerks, obsequious cashiers, too-helpful bathroom attendants and timely pizza delivery service – if you find yourself being accommodated, assisted and indulged into a drowsy, zombified kind of emotionless stupefaction by the ease of living in a hyperdeveloped world superpower, well then: Vietnam is the place for you.

This is a country where the customer is not always always right. Quite the opposite, in fact. The customer in Vietnam is generally considered wrong or at least mistaken, especially if the customer is a foreigner. The words “fast,” “friendly,” and “customer service” rarely appear in the same sentence here, and promptness is seen as a personal vice.

The Vietnamese people seem to pride themselves on erecting obstacles to getting any job done. In a communist nation, it’s a political imperative that every person must have a job, no matter how menial or trivial. Popular thinking follows the logic that if one person can do a job well, then five people must be able to do that single job five times as well. A corollary principle maintains that no job should be done by a machine which could be done by a person (or five). Roads and highways, for example, are kept clean by street-sweepers – not the truck-sized kind but the people-sized kind, an army of elderly men and women who’ve been handed crooked straw brooms and can be seen every morning cleaning streets that (one can’t help noticing) are mostly composed of dirt to begin with.

Another result of this arrangement is that every person becomes far more committed to justifying his or her job than to actually doing it, which usually means spending ten times as long undertaking it as necessary and making it appear much more complicated than it needs to be. Layers of bureaucracy pile up atop each other here like breakfast at a Waffle House. Each person in this bloated machine is dedicated to wringing as much relevance as he can out of his little niche, and also to wringing as much under-the-table lucre as he can out of any poor slob over whom he has the slightest leverage.

Case in point: I recently spent close to a month trying to lay hands on a DHL package that my old flatmate in Osaka, Will, had sent to me here. DHL does not deliver to your actual shipping address in Vietnam, nor does any postal carrier. That would be too easy. Rather, knowing how much foreigners here must enjoy a challenge, the government sees to it that all packages are delivered instead to a remote warehouse way out near the airport, where they are opened, rifled through, their contents appraised and often liberated. If you’re expecting a package, the onus is on you to get to it before its contents have disappeared forever.

As to what are they looking for, who knows. Electronic items raise flags, because if they are not pilfered outright, then they can they be taxed to kingdom come when you pick up the parcel. What’s more, while you are spending weeks wading through the red tape piled up between you and your package, they can replace all the inner components with cheap Chinese facsimiles. So you end up paying an exorbitant additional fee to pick up a package whose shipping cost to Vietnam was already preposterous, and then the electronic geegaw inside breaks within a day of getting it home. No wonder the locals tell you not to bother having anything shipped here.

But in my case I had no choice. My parcel contained old clothes, a pair of iPod speakers, three books (carefully vetted to avoid confiscation by the sticky-fingered censors at Customs) and some mail that had been delivered to me in Japan after I left, including an envelope with 5,000 yen ($45) from Will as payment for my bicycle. To claim this bounty, I had to write and fax four letters in Vietnamese (I had help from my girlfriend, Malo), make two trips to the airport warehouse, and navigate a legion of shuffling bureaucrats whose only job seemed to be telling me, in Vietnamese, that they could help me with just one small part of this process before directing me to another godforsaken, unairconditioned office in the bowels of this vast building. I also had to produce not only my passport but the Customs declaration stub I’d received on my first entry to Vietnam six months previous.

Do you know what I’m talking about, this document? It’s an insignificant little piece of paper they give you on the airplane just before you arrive in a foreign country. It’s covered in rows of square boxes the color of anti-nausea medicine. On it, you write your name – one letter per box, I always run out of boxes – your flight number, how much gold you’re carrying on your person, whether or not you’re entering with live animals or uncooked vegetables, that sort of thing. You fill it out in about 60 seconds flat, hand it over to the guy at the Customs counter when you land, he tears a piece off and hands you back the rest with your passport, and that’s that.

Who on earth thinks to keep such a thing? It doesn’t have value even as a memento, because the cheap paper it’s made of biodegrades almost instantly in the festering reaches of your unwashed pants pocket or in your carry-on or wherever you’ve stuffed it once you’ve cleared Customs and have your mind set on retrieving your luggage and finding one of the few honest cab drivers with a meter that actually works rather than the demonic spinning slot machines most have attached to the dash.

I, for one, do not keep items like this. That piece of paper had no sentimental value for me, and I have never, ever been asked for it anywhere, at any time. Who knew what I’d done with it on landing in Hanoi in June 2008? It’s probably still on the floor of the cab I took from the airport into Hanoi, just another layer of history in a rancid pile that was six inches deep back then. But that little piece of paper was exactly what the DHL goons wanted. After the faxing of the letters and the passport, after the first futile visit to the giant airport warehouse, where I was treated to the sight of scores of Vietnamese men and women gleefully tearing open hundreds of foreign parcels and pawing through their contents like a sick satire of a Norman Rockwell Christmas morning – after all this, I was asked for my Customs declaration form.

Of what possible use could this thing have been to them? Even my girlfriend, who is Vietnamese and no stranger to the byzantine protocols required to get anything done in this country, was flabbergasted. I half suspected these two men had merely invented this step out of thin air as a prelude to shaking me down for a bribe. Nothing of substance is accomplished here without palms getting greased – at every level of organization, from the lowliest street cleaner to the loftiest Party member. The more official their position, the more money they rake in. No task is completed, no form filed, no ticket issued, no stamp stamped, without somebody getting a little something to ease the process along. This I was prepared for, even having already spent close to $400 to have DHL deliver a battered piece of luggage full of old clothes, books, out-of-date mail, and an iPod speaker set.

But no, they didn’t want money. Well, more accurate to say money was not the fix to this problem. They wanted – needed – that Customs declaration, and there was no way around it. Without it, my suitcase was going back to Osaka. Struggling against the rising need to throw a raging apeshit fit, I looked over at Malo for help, only to find her quietly sobbing in frustration. You know you’ve encountered an epic achievement in organizational ineffectiveness when it can make a lifelong Vietnamese resident weep openly.

Frantic, I claimed suddenly to remember all the information I’d written on the form six months before. Was that good enough? Wary, the two men in the cramped, sweltering office said it might be. What was the date I’d flown in? I tossed off a date that sounded likely, then fabricated an airline and flight number from the clear blue. One of the men wrote this information down on a pad. How much gold had I been carrying? Definitely less than an ounce, I replied, in the same breath disavowing live animals and vegetables in general. The man nodded, said something in Vietnamese to Malo, and left the office.

Malo had stopped crying, spent. We sat, not having anything else to do. We talked about this and that, trying to turn the subject to something less overtly Kafka-esque for a few moments. After about 15 minutes, I wondered aloud where the other man had gone.

“He went to find the paper,” she said.

“What paper?”

“Your paper, the one you told him.”

I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me she was joking. She looked back. “The other part, that they tore off,” she said. “He’s finding it.”

“Where?!”

“Up there,” she waved at the floors above us. “Somewhere. They have them in boxes, he said.”

I pictured a vast room the size of a football field, filled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes containing every torn off stub of every Customs declaration of every passenger who’d ever flown into the Ho Chi Minh City airport. And I pictured this man, ant-sized, peering into box after cardboard box for a useless stub of paper that didn’t even exist. I saw into the very depths of the Vietnamese mind in that instant, and I quailed.

“I made all that stuff up!” I whispered at the top of the whisper register. “I don’t have the slightest idea what my flight number was! I don’t even remember what airline I was on! I just said that so we wouldn’t have to go through all this again with somebody else in another week!”

“They knew you were lying,” she smiled.

I gaped. “So what’s he doing up there?!”

“The date was correct?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I think so.”

“He thinks he can find it.”

“But I didn’t arrive in Ho Chi Minh City. I arrived in Hanoi.”

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a minute. “He might not find it, then.”

I did get my package, eventually. The Customs stub was apparently not as all-critical as I’d been led to believe. A week later the parcel was delivered to another office, where I handed over a “tax” of about $30 and left with a battered suitcase filled with old clothes, some six-month-old mail (missing the 5,000 yen, naturally), and three carefully vetted novels. But no iPod speakers.

It’s just as well. They’d have broken within a week anyway.

This one’s for the folks back home. The other day, I did a double-take as I was walking down the aisles of a local supermarket. Anyone notice anything familiar about the friendly brand logo on these cans? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Piggly Wiggly has probably not begun producing Vietnamese-style beans ‘n’ franks (suòn hâm dâu) in which the “franks” are gristly chunks of ham and bone. (Of course I tried it.) What we have here is a pirated pig.

The other day I was shit on by a gecko. I was sitting with a friend at a Vietnamese pizza place, eating pizza that tasted very little like real pizza, and a suddenly a little turd blossomed on the crook of my elbow, like a hairless, slightly watery black mole that had appeared on my arm in one second flat.

Observing this, my Vietnamese friend tried to convince me it was a happy event. “That’s good luck,” she said.

“Sure, it is,” I replied. “For you. You weren’t just shit on.”

To be honest, I didn’t actually mind that much. It didn’t land in the pizza – not that I would have noticed. And, fortunately, it was a one-wiper.

Geckos are ubiquitous in Southeast Asia. They’re as common as South Carolina palmetto bugs, but less disgusting. Like their bigger cousins the garden lizards, they pretty much ignore you until you get within grabbing distance. Then they disappear in a frantic graygreen blur. They seem to pop in and out of existence like tiny illusionists. One moment they’re there, the next they’re not.

They’re also more playful than bugs, if you can call a dozen of them chasing each other around the sun-smacked walls of a café ‘playing.’ What looks to me like frivolty might actually be a life-and-death battle royale for mating rights or territory. Or a complex traffic control system in which they’re calculating critical pooping trajectories. Meanwhile, the big-brained primates below them are patronizingly attributing all this activity to random luck.

Once, in a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia, as I lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling, I counted thirteen geckos on the walls of my room. I didn’t realize there were that many until I spotted several and decided to do a full inventory. And who knows how many were hiding behind cabinets, curtains, and framed, slightly crooked paintings of the Angkor Temples at sunset.

That’s a lot of little reptiles to be sharing a room with.

I found that these guests didn’t unsettle me the way thirteen of some other creature on my walls might – rats, for example. Or cockroaches, or spiders, or even houseflies. Thirteen tiny snakes in my room and I’d have been looking for another guesthouse in a pounding heartbeat. But for some reason I was perfectly ambivalent about sharing my sleeping quarters with a baker’s dozen or more of Hemidactylus frenatus.

A superstitious person might have found some dark meaning in the number thirteen. Not being superstitious, I didn’t have to worry about that. “There’s no such thing as a black cat,” somebody suggested to me the other day, in a line that I loved, “only cat-shaped holes in the universe.” I’ve never been much of a believer in luck, or its supernatural cousins fate and destiny. What I believe, what I know for fact, is that a few billion years of evolutionary biology as both predators and prey have made our brains predisposed to attribute anthropomorphic forces to random, undirected events. It’s perfectly natural. But that’s all it is.

It’s not that I haven’t considered the more tempting alternative. But if God has a plan for everyone, how does He choose? How does He select who’s rescued at sea and who contracts ebola and dies in bloody agony? Or who becomes a Hollywood celebrity and whose Cambodian child is tortured to death in front of her parents by Khmer Rouge prison guards because her father is a teacher?

Maybe He has their souls draw straws. Random chance. It sucks to be an unfortunate soul, I guess.

Of course, there will always be people in the world who think it’s good luck to get shit on.

We all think like geckos some of the time. I know I do. The oldest parts of our brains are the parts we share with reptiles: the ancient, atavistic regions that are at the wheel of our central nervous systems and our behavior at its most primitive: aggression, reproduction, self-preservation.

These regions lie darkly at our brain’s center like a pit in a peach, deep beneath the fresh-off-the-showroom-floor thinking machine we know as the cerebral cortex, below even the relatively newfangled amygdala and hippocampus, wherein lie the levers for fear, anger, memory, and identity. They develop before any other part when we’re in the womb, and they predate all other gray matter in the fossil record.

Here, in the shadow-filled basement of your brain, that most primeval part of you still sends out reconnaissances – chemical emissaries speeding toward the hinterlands of limbic and neocortical borders like winged messengers, bearing dispatches from your brute past. Eat! Run! Fight! Fuck! Don’t forget to breath!

Down at the very bottom, our reptilian brains are the uncharted zones from which dreams bubble up and nightmares stalk. Here, we all chase each other around walls.

*

One Saturday night shortly after I arrived in Saigon, I found myself with a small group of friends in a local bar popular with the young backpacker crowd – not the sort of place I’d normally hang out, but they served beer, and there were no signs of a drunken brawl breaking out near me in the immediate future, so I stuck around. Pretty quickly I noticed a girl looking at me. She was sitting at the bar, alone and lovely, sending me postcards with her eyes: wish you were here.

Topped off with liquid courage, I walked over and took a seat next to her at the bar. Close-up, she was even more striking. Half-lidded, gently slanting eyes with lashes like wet palm fronds, a tiny faux dimond peeping from one side of a button nose brushed with freckles the color of warm milktea. A tiny mole bobbed in the ocean of her nape like a lost soul, caught in the perilous cross-currents of her bosom and her throat. She smiled shyly with that rarest of Southeast Asian gifts – perfect teeth – and the room lit up.

I can’t remember her name, but she was a hooker. I realized this about one minute after I’d taken a seat, which was about 60 seconds longer than it should have taken me. Beautiful girl, very well-dressed, speaks good English, sitting alone late at night in a bar full of lonely young tourists: in what world could this girl not be on the clock?

We talked for about ten minutes, but my interest nose dived after minute one. Seeing this, she made to intercept it.

“You live near this?”

“No,” I said. “I live in District 7. Long way.”

“Not too far. We go there?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thanks, though.”

She frowned. “You want go hotel room with me?”

“No,” I said, standing up. “You’re very pretty. I have to go.”

“We can only for one hour, if you wish,” she said. “Very nice. You like.”

Vietnam lacks much of the basic social infrastructure and capital assets of more developed nations, but one area where this country is fully invested is in its prostitute resources. There’s no shortage here of what expats euphemistically call ‘working girls’ to save themselves the embarrassment of having to consort with whores.

I’ve never been very good at sex without affection, and any small capacity for it I may once have had has vanished altogether in my middle adulthood. I also have zero tolerance for phony and feigned attention from other people, which is what these girls specialize in. Taken together, these qualities make me a poor target for the prostitutes in Vietnam, who are numerous enough to be able to populate a small country and set up a decent government, if they ever got together and did something about it.

Walk into most any club in Ho Chi Minh City frequented by tourists or expat foreigners, and the first thing you’re likely to notice is that you are a Star Attraction among the ladies, for whom Western = rich, caring nothing for the niggling distinctions we foreigners assign to levels of wealth or its lack. The next thing you’re sure to pick up on is that almost any given one of them wants to leave the club for your house or a hotel within minutes of meeting you. This can be heady stuff for a guy looking for an excuse to believe that he’s Special.

These are attractive women. Very attractive. They look like the same kind of girls you see at stylish, cosmopolitan nightclubs anywhere in the developed world: sleek as gazelles, hard-eyed, soft-bodied, purposeful, and dangerous, like sharp things swaddled in velvet. And they speak excellent English, at least compared to your Vietnamese.

The typical lizard brain is no match for weapons of this caliber. With their practiced hands they can slip right through the locked doors of your frontal lobe, knocking down traffic cones and pushing past the police tape at your limbic regions to lay a perfectly manicured finger right on the shuddering center of your most primitive defenses.

Yet just as, in our American pseudo-realities, there are gradients of western wealth, and many of us are aware of not even being able to see the lowest rung, so too are there gradients of interest in it here among women. There is the short-term interest, which can be lucrative in a hurry, underwriting stylish outfits and manicures and perfect teeth. But for at least as many, possibly more, there is the longer-term interest.

In the U.S., the American dream inspires millions of people to work themselves numb in the entrepreneurial ideal that anyone, no matter how humble or poor, can become a cigar-smoking, Mercedes-driving, suburban-home-owning millionaire. In Vietnam, achieving the American dream means marrying an American.

There’s a girl who works in the lobby of a hotel near where I live. The lobby also has a chain coffee shop with wifi and a small supermarket in it, so I’m in there a few times a week. I’m nothing special to look at: middle aged, receding hair, invisibly thin blond eyebrows, bags starting to form under my eyes. But when I started going to this coffee shop, every time I walked through the lobby this girl began pulling faces as if the video crew from Fashion TV had just walked in. It took me a while to realize this was for my benefit, because it’s been quite a few years since I could motivate that kind of activity, and even then it was as rare as a planetary transverse of the sun.

We became friends. Her name is Hai. She’s 22 years old, and she wears the long, flowing traditional Vietnamese tunic called an ao dai for ten hours a day, seven days a week, in the lobby of the hotel, escorting visitors to the elevator behind her. Hai can only speak a few words of English, and she doesn’t have a phone of her own, but she asked for my cell number anyway, scrawling it onto the back of her hand like a prayer inked in Henna.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a cryptic text message on my cellphone from one or another number I don’t recognize.

“You ok? Today you go to world 11am you me coffe ok? Hai.”

If I’m free, I’ll go to the coffee shop and Hai and I will sit awkwardly and fumble with our coffee and steal glances at each other like schoolkids, and I’ll crack bad jokes in English that she doesn’t understand, but she’ll smile anyway.

It’s a kind of courtship, I suppose.

If I’m not free, there’s no point in replying to the text message, because whoever the owner of the phone she borrowed is, he or she generally ignores any message I send, as if they have no idea someone had borrowed their phone. For all I know, Hai sneaks a complete stranger’s phone out of her pocketbook while they’re all standing at the elevator and dashes off a text message to me before slipping it back home as the doors open. She’s never offered an explanation, and she doesn’t speak enough English to understand me when I ask her about it anyway.

But one time, someone did reply. I’d received a garbled text message from Hai, whose broken English encryption I couldn’t crack, no matter how many times I read it. An hour so so later I replied with a quick message asking for more detail. I received a quick response.

“I do not know you.what you name?why are you know number telephone of me?”

I wrote back. “I replied to a message sent to me from this number. Did Hai use your phone to send me the message?”

The answer was fast and, it seemed, furious.“Dua vay thoi.ban hoc gioi tieng anh qua m kohieu.ban ko noi ten m ko noi chuyen dau!”

Whatever that meant, I decided to cut my losses.

“I don’t understand Vietnamese,” I wrote. “Only English. Sorry for bothering you.”

I got a reply immediately. “Where are you from? Im really sorry.I hope to understand to me.”

“I’m American,” I replied. “It’s ok, don’t worry about it.”

Almost as soon as I’d hit send, another reply arrived. “What are you doing?How do you do? How long have you been vietnames? Can I make friends with you? I was born vietnam.I am poor so I have to do part-time job in restaurant hotel. Did you have lunch?are you feel about people vietnam?do you marry?”

What human heart lay behind those words? Chasing something, anything, across the walls of her life. Blind, heedless, hopeful. Before I was even finished reading it, another text pinged my phone.

“I am name Loan and you?do you think about girl vietnam?do you teach the school?do you love someone?“

*

If you ever manage to catch a gecko, you have to take care with it. One of the most interesting things about them is that if they’re in a tight spot with a predator hoping to make a meal of them, they can drop part of their tail and scramble away while the tail continues flailing about, flopping madly as its owner watches from a safe, secret hideway. Eventually, after a long time, the tail grows back.

But it’s always shorter than it was to begin with.

The product is manufactured from the modern technology chain; assuring the foods hygiene safety and obtaining high crispness and sponginess but always maintaining natural colour and flavour of fresh ripen fruits and especially the chemical substance is not used in the process of production. The ingredients of the product have many nutritive facts, Vitamin which are to necessary for human body and are also a delicious meal for tourists and travel days.”

What’s not to like?

Does this place sound like it was made for me or what?