Thang Nguyen 555

Long ago, at Saigon Central Market, Hynos toothpaste billboard featured a smiling man showing his white teeth. Back then Vietnam had just done away with blackened-teeth, the way China’s shelving away their bound-feet. A society in transition. The last Samurai!

Kids wore BATA shoes (a popular brand in the US during WWII, when men were enlisted and women connected phone calls – switch-circuit technology – or mobilized to churn out army uniform and weaponry,)

Vietnamese women, on the other hand, would model after Madam Nhu’s collar-less “ao dai” (she herself perhaps took a page from Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany).

One would find simple advertising: Co Ba Soap, or Tiger ointment. Not fancy television ads as seen in the West that featured Gibson lunches or a ride on a Pontiac. We weren’t at surplus phase…with programming “brought to you by….” (corporate sponsors that sold soap, cereal and soup).

To brand products back in the days, merchants used animal symbols to fit in societal undercurrent: animism (tuc “Xam Minh” i.e. sea-creature tattoos for divers and fishermen) or Zodiac signs.

Vietnam had been predominantly an agri-aqua economy. Its people were well-integrated with other species: even whales got a proper burial. Clever marketers would go along and not against the grain: Eagle batteries and Black-cat Craven-A cigarettes (incidentally, at the movies, MGM opened well with its signature Lion’s roar).

Mothers would feed babies with condensed milk (Birdies), and housewives shopped for Elephant rice.

Children’s lanterns are in various animal shapes: butterflies, fish, elephants and birds. “Tet Trung Thu dot den di choi” (our version of annual Halloween).

One ill-researched professor at Stanford went so far to conclude after being there just one week that the eerie absence of birds, rats and dogs in the cities was due to the aggressive – or lack thereof – protein diet of the Vietnamese.

(I found many dead rats after heavy rain on the street. He apparently chose to tour Vietnam during dry season). I would say he arrived at the city with a pre-conceived notion (like Buckley’s “They eat dogs, don’t they”, a fiction about China). Incidentally, there has been a growing trend to raise pets (cun cung) now that Vietnam has experienced peace for 5 decades.

And when it comes to choosing among multiple mobile carriers, one must consider Beeline (as of this edit, this Russian-backed carrier didn’t fan out, being a late entry into an entrenched duopoly). Unlike in the States with Cricket Wireless (BTW, our own To Hoai already had his fictional character as “De Men”, cricket, more than half a century ago).

In some shopping malls, it’s Lacoste brand that rules. The ubiquitous crocodile may someday get proper burial as well.

Such as the harmonious nature of the Vietnamese consumers who often smile amidst tense confrontation (more than often, it’s indirect conflict-resolution). But with that ubiquitous smile, I still miss the Hynos man when boarding a bus at Saigon Central Market with my grandma on her monthly trip to the bank (grandpa’s retirement payout), As a kid, I often cherished both her still “blackened teeth” and those cosmetic-white Hynos.

Today’s students carrying RMIT backpacks don’t realize and perhaps missed out on blackened teeth ancestors who greeted you with sincerest of smiles (at Gio, anniversary of grandpa’s passing), people who took time for Sunday stroll, when love and music were in the air against the backdrop of looming war. Since when did it ever go away, those invaders and intruders!

Stoically, we took things as they came: wrapping personal belonging, went South and started over. Magnanimous and harmonious with nature and among ourselves:

“Sunday Morning, I walk in the park, hey, hey, hey, it’s a Beautiful day”.

Do you know where Saigonese often end up? Where else but the city zoo.