By Jim Feast, Tribes
Having just returned from Southeast Asia, I find myself asking an important if imprecise question: Why is the quality of life in Sai Gon something like infinitely greater than that in New York City?
Photo from the Tribes.
A lovely, moving though (to me) flawed passage occurs in Walter Benjamin’s impressions of Naples, a description that also captures the sense of life in the huge Cholon (Chinatown) section of Sai Gon, on which my ideas about Vietnam are based. (Note, nothing I say is meant to suggest that Vietnam is not a repressive society, a point I will return to at the end.)
Benjamin writes:
The architecture [of Naples] is as porous as [the] stone. Structure and activities merge in courtyards, arcades, and staircases. Enough room is left free everywhere to allow unforeseen constellations to form. The definitive, the sharply etched, is avoided. No situations seems to be conceived to stay forever just as it is … This is how architecture, that most concise and persuasive component of a community’s rhythm, comes into being here.
Everything in this passage seems just right, but it and the essay in which it is found stops short in one respect. The Italian city seems to have gained its life quality simply from the architecture, but, as I see it, what creates such a city, at least as I have experienced it in Cholon over the last four summers, are larger contextual differences, and it is these that so distinguish such a city quarter from those in America.
A lot of this difference is based on the simple fact that Vietnam is a tropical country, hot year round, one in which only the very few with money can afford air conditioning. But let me lay out some major differences, many of which stem from that.
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