Dragon Apparent by Norman Lewis
Author:Norman Lewis [Norman Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906011796
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2011-05-05T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 12
Cholon and Cochin-China
AIR FRANCE PLANES from Dalat were booked up three weeks ahead. By what I thought at the time was a miracle I got a seat on a plane run by a small company, without any delay. It turned out later that there was not much demand for this plane as the company had had one or two crashes on the run. There was not much hope of a successful forced landing in those jungles.
While waiting to take off, I chatted with a fellow passenger, a Vietnamese student, who wanted to know what I was doing in the country. I told him, and the conversation immediately took a political turn. Which Vietnamese intellectuals had I met? I confessed that I had met none. The student didn’t see how I could form any objective opinion of the conditions of his country when the only opinions I listened to were those of French colonialists. This reasonable point of view had already occurred to me and I said that the chief reason why I had made no contacts among the Vietnamese was that, judging from their manner, they would be difficult to approach. The student said that this was natural enough, as I would be taken for a Frenchman. He persisted so strongly that I should meet certain intellectuals that I was sure that he was about to suggest how this could be done when the plane took off. We were seated on loose camp-stools and as soon as the plane began to lurch in the hot air-currents we were thrown about rather badly. My friend, who was flying for the first time, was violently ill and I did not have the chance of speaking to him again.
Saigon was as rumbustious as ever, with lorries full of Algerians patrolling the streets and the cafés full of German legionnaires. I dined at a Chinese restaurant on the main road to Cholon. This was outside the European quarter and I enjoyed the district because of the turbulent processes of living that went on all round me. Although I noticed in my newspaper that this restaurant advertised itself as having an Emplacement discret, the walls were much scarred from a bomb which had been thrown in it the previous night. Perhaps for this reason it was crowded, in deference to the theory that two shells do not burst in the same crater. The waiter said that they hoped to have a wire-grille fitted by the next day, which would keep the grenades out. Their little incident had only contributed two casualties to the grand total of seventeen for the night. But a colleague had been one of the unfortunate pair. His condition, said my waiter, was very grave, and, curiously enough, all this had been foretold by the resident fortune-teller, who I now observed to be approaching my table carrying the tools of his trade and smiling in anticipation of the grisly predictions he would unfold for suitable payment.
I had happened to read that a Vietnamese nationalist newspaper had been suppressed and this gave me an idea.
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