One way ticket to Saigon=One way to myself

I have wanted to go to Vietnam for many years. But I never knew why. I can’t even recall when I first got the idea to go to Vietnam. Something is drawing me there without my knowing what it is. Is it my fascination with Communist and post-Communist countries? (I’ve lived and/or worked in Hungary, Bosnia and several former Soviet countries and have traveled to Cuba.)

It surely is not because I like the sound of the monosyllabic Vietnamese language. Actually, the language irritates me.

I know that many people don’t understand my itinerant lifestyle. My errant ways confound those who aren’t avid globetrotters themselves. People often think that I am running away from myself or my life when I board a plane for a new foreign location. But, being a traveler is my life. If anything, I am running to myself. Vietnam magnetizes me to myself.

Baptized with a silver star of Lenin on my Soviet birth certificate, I have a lot more in common with my fellow refugees from Communism than they could tell from my skin color. We all fled the Reds. I was branded a second-class citizen in the land of equality and the Vietnamese refugees in San Jose escaped from having their children be born into the propaganda of Ho Chi Minh.

I grew up in San Jose, California, in one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the country. My family was often one of the few white families that went to the San Jose flea market to buy fruits, vegetables, fish, clothes and random household items. The Mexican farmers sold their fruits and vegetables and the Vietnamese sold fish from aquariums and cheap clothes and toys made in China. I never felt white and when I was one of the few white kids with a fake Cabbage Patch doll bought from a plastic tarp on the cement at the Flea Market and not from Toys R’Us, the popular toy store. I felt much more like the Mexican and Vietnamese kids following their parents shopping at the Flea Market than a white Silicon Valley girl. But my white skin color made people think that I was just another white suburban girl and not an immigrant.

No, Vietnam is not my soulmate when it comes to language or culture. I know in my heart, that I can understand a lot of the Vietnamese strife because I too have suffered by Communism. Even though I grew up in the US, my Communist bred parents raised me and I inherited much of their pain. Both my parents grew up during World War II and their fear of food scarcity from that time period still pervades their eating and food buying habits even though they have been in the US for over 25 years.


Little did I know that one day I would buy myself a birthday present of a one-way ticket to Saigon and a one- entry visa to the Communist government of Vietnam. Back in the late 60s and 70s a one-way ticket to Saigon was the last thing an American would want for a birthday present. It was a possible death sentence. But for me it was a present I knew that I wanted for a long time.

The girl born under the silver star of Lenin lands in the city of millions of motorbikes. I have no hotel reservation. I take a pre-paid taxi from the Ho Chi Minh Airport to the backpacker area of Saigon called Pham Ngu Lao. I see an advertisement in the window of a hair salon in a small alley. I inquire about the room and quickly settle into a small room with a fan. Surprisingly, the TV has a Russian television station. I didn’t think the Russian influence would still be felt in this post-Soviet period, but evidently, some Vietnamese still speak Russian and watch Russian TV. I walk around the tourist filled streets and see some seamstress shops and am amazed at the handmade silk Vietnamese tunics for sale. I am not an avid shopper. As a matter of fact, I hate to buy clothes, but these silk wonders are gorgeous. In about an hour, I walk into two tailor shops and order two outfits.

Cobbler on Saigon street repairing my shoes.

On my way back to my “hotel”, I see a shiny blue dress in an another seamstress shop and am lured in. When I see the array of silk fabrics, my jaw drops. This is silk heaven. I order another Vietnamese tunic and the blue dress I saw in the window. As I am discussing the fabrics with one of the clerks, a man walks in and takes a seat on a stool. He speaks to the women in a few words of Vietnamese. Seeing that I am obviously a foreigner, he speaks to me in English. Hearing his French accent, I switch to French and introduce myself. He helps me bargain with the shopkeepers. Denis tells me that he is half French and half Vietnamese and is visiting his father’s native country for the first time. We chat for a while and he gives me his address in Marseilles. After I pre-pay for the outfits, Denis casually mentions something about reading palms.

“Vous etes un devin? You are a fortune teller?” I ask.

“Non, j’ai juste des pouvoirs. No, I have intuitive powers,” he responds.

Curious, I ask him if he would tell me about myself.

He reads my palms and writes down some information about me on a piece of paper.

I am stunned. He’s right on target. He says a couple things about my finances that I don’t completely understand until I realize that he’s calculated the price of my Oakland condominium into his estimate of my net worth.

He’s no fake. This guy knows what he is talking about.

At this point, I realize that I have to disclose to him what encouraged me to come to Asia in the first place. In July 2004, I was at a dinner at Emporio Rulli, an Italian restaurant/wine bar/sweetshop in San Francisco for an Italian wine event for my job as an Italian wine marketer. Sitting next to me at dinner, was Massimo Covello, an Italian chef working at Emporio Rulli in Larkspur, California. After speaking to me for just a few minutes, Massimo tells me that there are three books that I must read because he can tell I am a person who is passionate about life. The first is The Alchemist, by Paolo Coelho. I explain to Massimo that I’ve read most of Coelho’s repertoire. The next two: Un Indovino mi disse (A Fortune Teller Told me) by Tiziano Terzani and Seda (Silk) by an author whose name I can’t recall. I wonder why this guy who barely knows me is telling me I should read a book about a fortune teller.

Without completely understanding Massimo’s recommendation, I follow it and find Terzani’s book at the library. Too lazy to read it in the original Italian, I get the English translation.


The author, a journalist who has been living in Asia for many years, decides not to fly at all in 1993 because a Hong Kong fortune teller told him in the 1970s that he would die in a plane accident in 1993. Though he is a logically minded Westerner, the Italian journalist follows the fortune teller’s forecast and convinces his bosses at the German daily Die Spiegel to allow him to remain based in Bangkok, Thailand and travel in Asia by land or boat. For a whole year, Terzani travels all over Asia without stepping on an airplane. He visits local fortune tellers in each place he visits to see if they predict the same about his death by plane. Through the fortune tellers, Terzani tells about the local cultures. The ethnic Chinese fortune tellers always tell him that he won’t have any money. The other ethnicities concentrate more on topics of love, family and work. I have never read a book that shows me various cultures through the eyes of a traveling journalist visiting palm readers and psychics and the book totally engrosses me. I turn off my home phone, work mobile phone and personal mobile phone for the entire weekend.

Wow! I want to publish a book about my world travels!

Almost a year after reading Terzani’s wonderful memoir, I am walking a few blocks from Emporio Rulli on Chestnut Street in San Francisco’s Marina District and a woman stops me on the street.
“I have to tell you something,” the dyed blonde woman tells me.

“Ok,” I respond.

“I’m a psychic and when I saw you on the street, I read something through your forehead and I just had to stop and tell you.”

She goes on to tell me the exact things that a Mexican parapsicologa told me in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2003: there is something that I don’t understand about myself and it confuses other people and keeps them away.

The Marina District is a posh, mostly white, neighborhood in San Francisco. This is not a hippy area with stores selling relics from the Flower Children of the 1960s. Psychics don’t usually stop people on the street in the Marina. I realize this woman is telling me something important. I reflect on what she told me and the following weekend, I realize that I am not using my creative energy to its fullest. I am taking a screenwriting class, but I feel a block in my writing and am not giving it 100% of my energy and I am frustrated.

A month later, I decide to quit my job and write my memoir, One-Eyed Princess in Babel (http://www.susansword.com/memoirs.html), about my world travels and experiences learning and speaking various languages.

Through a series of events, Massimo’s suggestion to read Terzani’s book leads me become aware of how much I want to be a writer. It also plants the seeds for my interest to travel to Asia.

I tell this to Denis after we leave the seamstress and go to the second floor of a fast-food restaurant nearby.

Denis and I spend a lot of time together in the next days in Saigon. He takes me to the big Ben Thanh Market near our hotel and makes me bargain for stuff I don’t want to buy. I get super annoyed at him since the noise in the market is disturbing me and the aggressive Vietnamese shopkeepers can’t stop bugging me to buy stuff. He tells me that he is training me to be able to keep my calm in a noisy and stressful place. On another day, he takes me on a public bus to a hair salon in a Cambodian refugee neighborhood near Saigon’s Flower Market. We visit a Vietnamese family that he knows and have tea with them. I definitely never would have gone to these parts of Saigon on my own. There aren’t any tourists roaming these streets. Denis speaks very fast and at times I understand his words, but not the meaning of what he is telling me. I get frustrated. Sometimes, I have to ask him to be quiet because I can’t think or hear myself. I have to separate myself from him to clear my head.

He rips apart the introduction to my book and tells me what’s wrong with it even before he even reads it. Later on, when I re-read the introduction, I see that he’s right. I give away my book at the beginning. I need to leave the reader is suspense.

I tell him that I want to return to New York and find a stable job. He balks at my idea of “being stable”.

“You have to accept the fact that you are a traveler. It’s part of your nature. You will never have stability. You will often be living on the margins. The only peace you can have is in yourself when you accept who you really are,” Denis says.

I fight him in my mind and tell him that I want to have a “normal life”. He laughs.

During the rest of the Vietnam trip, I am surrounded by posters of Ho Chi Minh and advertisements for mobile phones and all sorts of capitalist goods. I visit lovely Hanoi and go one a two-day tour of the gorgeous Halong Bay and see the incredible limestone and stalagmite caverns on the bay. I consciously don’t visit any war tunnels or other war related areas. I know that any site of the war will ruin my trip. Yes, this is very egotistical of me, but I know myself. I’ve seen the war tunnels in Sarajevo. I lived in Bosnia for over a year and saw many war related miseries and I don’t want to color this vacation with memories of the war. Surprisingly, I feel no hatred towards Americans in Vietnam, despite the war. I expected to feel more disdain for my passport, but I think my skin color is all people care about. They want to sell me stuff all the time. If I sit in an outdoor restaurant, in any five minute period, a shoeshiner, a bookseller selling photocopied guidebooks and popular Western books, a banana vendor, a watch seller or other vendor will approach me. After a week in the country, I am sick of people getting in my face all the time to sell their goods. At each corner, I get offered a motorcycle taxi ride. I would be insane if I stepped on one of these motorbikes because people drive like maniacs and there are lots of motorbike accidents daily.

A week later, when I am back in Bangkok, I realize that I don’t want to go back to New York. I want to continue traveling. I extend my trip for two more days, but I want to stay. I have a Leadership Program in New York to which I need to return and my money is running low.

Denis was right.
I call Denis in France when I return to New York. I realize why I had felt pulled to visit Vietnam. It was to meet him. He is my guardian angel.

I decide to sell my Oakland condominium. I want to keep on traveling and not feel tied down neither physically nor financially. If I hadn’t accepted my own errant soul, I would not have had the courage to sell my property with all my family’s scorn at my choice to end my homeownership status.

Other countries I’ve visited touch me emotionally or at a linguistic level. Vietnam makes me look inside of me. I realize that Asian culture has always been a part of me because I’ve grown up around Asians. The food is familiar to me. I feel completely comfortable being the only white person on the street. In many ways, I don’t feel like an impostor. It’s not just that I don’t feel white, it’s that I realize that I want to be on the move. Maybe there’s no place where I will look like the people around me and feel like I am home.

My home is inside of me.

Merci Denis.