ChuChi

Through the tide of weaving bikes, we departed Saigon up Rt. 22, bound for the famed tunnels of Cu Chi. Along the way, we paused alongside the road to visit a family making rice paper. The woman and her daughter have a little stove in a wicker house. They burn peanut shells to heat an inverted shallow bowl-shaped griddle. The daughter poured rice paste over it and covered it with a wet straw hat for 5 seconds. She then rolled off a disk of rice paper about 14 inches in diameter and spread it on a bamboo trellis to dry in the sun. The paper is translucent and is used to make spring rolls for restaurants. The woman through our guide claimed to make 120,000 per day. Assuming that she kept her daughter at it for 10 hours each day, I calculated more like 600 on a good day. They smiled and off we went, heading north toward an area where I once spent a strange year. I watched as the urban sprawl changed into open rice paddy, and remember traveling this road with jeep and driver years ago. It was about there I lost my mother's shoe, perhaps exactly there. I had asked her to send me a shoe without telling her why. I had intended that it be an old one I could discard, I just wanted a template. I had found a little shop on the north-west side of Saigon which made elephant skin shoes, but I needed the size. 

Mom sent a new pair of shoes along with a note saying that those were her best, so please send them back. On a trip on some business, I dropped the shoes off at the shop, then had to figure out how to get back there to pick them up. I worried about this until a mission came up to take me to Cu Chi and on to Tay Ninh, where I was the Liaison Officer to First Philippino Civic Action Group. I had my driver go down to the edge of the city, and in to the shop I went. When I came out with two pairs of woman's shoes, his mouth dropped. We had risked, I had risked, both our necks and a rough trip for this purpose. An MP waved us down to say that if we were heading for Cu Chi, we had better go now and go fast. He reported that there was VC activity and they were closing the road now. We headed off at top speed, and right along the section of rt. 22 described above, perhaps at that very rice paddy, one of mom's shoes she had sent bounced out of

the jeep. We weren't about to stop. [Note:  The photo above is of the road to ChuChi in 1967 and the one to the right of the same road in 1999.]

So, there I was, 33 years later on this same road, being driven toward Cu Chi. The shoe was nowhere to be seen; neither is mom now, for that matter. I have an uncomfortable feeling. We rode in a new 626 Mazda with air conditioning, a driver, and a guide. John was beside me. Thousands of people on bicycles and some motor bikes made way as our driver blew his horn aggressively and we charged down the center of the road at 100 kph like some kind of mandarin. We were in the only car we could see anywhere. A 3 wheeled cyclo went by with 14 people on it. How is it I can go to this land and command such resources, receive such perks? Part of it is that they really do expect there to be a mandarin class, an elite class of wealthy rulers who will be conspicuous. It was the Mandarins in the time of the Nuguyn Kings. It was the officials and generals of the corrupt South Vietnamese Government when I was last here. Now the Communist Party constitute the new mandarin class.

Crawl in the:   Tunnels of ChuChi