Saigon Outcasts: Examining counter-public spaces in Ho Chi Minh City

From October 2018 to the beginning of February 2019, I left my life in Melbourne behind to live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. For close to 4 months and for the first time in my life I was no longer a local. I grew up and live on the Mornington Peninsula, let’s just say if this place was a loaf of bread, it would be wonder white. It’s probably the one place in Metro Melbourne where a banh mi is hard to find, which can be incredibly frustrating. In my second year of university, feeling dissatisfied with my course and acutely aware of third year and beyond steadily approaching I began looking for opportunities to experience something different. RMIT offered the opportunity to study at their Saigon South Campus and due to my subjects being taught over there it was a pretty simple process to arrange. Prior to leaving my perception of Vietnam was formed by its violent past and Stanley Kubrick movies. Journalists reporting from rooftops, jungles on fire, Australia damaging another place that it didn’t really need to be in. I knew I wouldn’t be walking into a warzone but beyond that I wasn’t too sure what to expect. The Vietnam I met was an optimistic, young nation running headfirst to meet the developed world perhaps too eagerly. My experience over there was chaotic, eye-opening, confronting, and valuable. Throughout the course certain topics of discussion would bring new meaning to my experiences. Reflecting on certain things through a new context has brought me a better understanding of why some things felt strange over there but also lead me to ask myself more questions about it.

In the course we discussed the notion of a heterotopia, a place which is “perfectly other”. Heterotopic spaces among other vague definitions are spaces which “juxtapose in a single space several incompatible spatial elements” (Buchanan, 2018). I may be misinterpreting the meaning of the phrase but to me for that first couple weeks in Saigon the entire city was a bewildering heterotopic space. Lamborghini’s rolling along boulevards with potholes the size of Olympic swimming pools, fishermen angling over festering rivers choked with pollution. Nothing was familiar to me, and that was what I had been seeking. It was affirming to feel like “yes, this is the polar opposite to my home in every way” but it was disorientating. I didn’t know how to do anything or go anywhere or speak to anyone. If you’ve ever been to Vietnam, you’d know that the streets aren’t made for walking, you also probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it has one the highest rates of road fatalities in the world. Something which I witnessed first-hand on many occasions.

And yet even with Saigon feeling like another planet, I discovered enclaves of familiarity. Places where at the time, I felt acutely aware and uncomfortable with their exclusivity, but I couldn’t really put my finger on why. The first of these places was the RMIT Campus located in the south of the city. The bright red architectural marvel looked as if it had been pinched right out of the Melbourne CBD and dropped in amongst the cluttered open air markets on the banks of the Mekong delta. And the familiarity wasn’t just architectural, the classrooms, the study areas, were identical to the spaces back home. Most of the staff were either from Melbourne or had done a stint teaching at the CBD campus. It was strange that even in my first classes there, conversing with the staff about things ‘back home’ made me feel as if I had a greater connection to the space and the staff than the local students could have. In the Vietnamese higher education landscape, the RMIT campus was already exclusive, reserved for the offspring of the wealthiest citizens, but there was another degree of exclusivity that was placed upon me, and the other Australian students. Although we weren’t the wealthiest students there.

This exclusivity was on display in other places too. The Pasteur Street brewing company had craft beers that were as expensive as the ones back home, everything was built for expats and the clientele looked like you could have been in any swanky Melbourne bar. The Saigon Outcast was a rock-climbing wall/skatepark with a bar that prided itself as being a hub for the bohemian “traveller” community. Although it wasn’t explicitly said, these were spaces designed for expats to hang out with other expats. I never really acknowledged it but at the time these places were raising questions in my mind about race and class in Vietnam and where I fit into that.

I have been reflecting on these spaces in the context of counter public spaces (Fraser, N. 1990). In week 9 we discussed the idea of the counter public space as a place where groups excluded from the public can gather. Through a localised lens these places are counter public. The expat/ traveller/ western community are not local, they are not citizens and so through language, culture, citizenship and often their own indifference towards the locals, they are ‘excluded’ from the Vietnamese public. That definition is not satisfying to me, because none of these places felt ‘excluded’, instead they felt ‘exclusive’. These spaces were an extension of the western public space and as a result the entire country of Vietnam and beyond occupied a counter public space.

There’s a weird transformation that happens when you move from Australia to Vietnam. You might leave Australia as a middle class student with a $7000 study grant but the minute you step off that plane, you are a westerner with 23 times the average monthly Vietnamese salary. It’s an uncomfortable truth but in Vietnam race and class are intrinsically linked. Despite what class you occupied in Australia or elsewhere in the anglosphere, when you come to Vietnam you immediately occupy the upper echelons of society.

As an exchange student my foray into this lifestyle was always going to short lived, but I met plenty of people who’d made the change more permanent. When they justify it, it was always something along the lines of “why wouldn’t I want to live like a king every day?”.

Granted, it’s a figure of speech, but it’s an insight into the mindset of some expats and travellers in Vietnam. A king doesn’t just have the resources to eat whatever they want every day; they wield considerable power over their subordinates. This may be extrapolating a little bit beyond my own experiences, however, based on some of the people I met I think there’s certain type of person who experienced very little power or respect in their home country who then become intoxicated by it once they come to Vietnam.

In week 9 we talked about tourist desires and how they aren’t innocent as travel, particularly to southeast Asia, exists in a field of political and economic inequalities. I’m not so naïve as to believe that similar inequalities don’t exist within Australia as well. Exclusive spaces exist in all societies, however, in Vietnam the economic bar for entry into these exclusive places is more attainable for westerners, granting me access to a counter public space which I don’t qualify for within Australia.

I suppose whether you realise it or not the fact that you can arrive in a foreign country you have never been to and instantly be treated better than a large demographic of the local population has undertones of colonialism and orientalism. Said (1978) described orientalism as a western perspective of the east which is built upon “western intellectual authority over the orient.”

My travelling experience was eye-opening, reflecting on it is eye-opening too. The discussions throughout this course revealed to me the undercurrents of inequality which I hadn’t initially recognised as a student in Vietnam. Is it something that can be fixed? I am not sure as it is a subconscious mindset for the traveller and for the host population this small exclusive group would have a negligible impact upon their lives. However it is always worth educating yourself and understanding the historical context of the space which you occupy.

Bibliography

Buchanan, I 2018, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 Ed), Oxford University Press, UK

Mackie, V 1996, 'The Metropolitan Gaze: Travellers Bodies and Spaces', Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, no. 4 (September).

Fraser, N. 1990 "Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy", Social Text, (25/26), pp.56-80

Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin.

Places Referenced

Pasteur Street Brewing Company https://pasteurstreet.com/

Rmit Vietnam Saigon South https://www.rmit.edu.vn/

Saigon Outcast https://www.saigonoutcast.com/