My beautiful quagmire.

Five stories below, the wandering soup seller is making his nightly rounds, clanging a spoon against an empty bowl to advertise his presence. Up the road, masseurs coast on bicycles, shaking little clackers, ready to drop a mat right on the sidewalk should anyone require a midnight massage. Motorbike engines whine and rev, voices murmur and shout in the dark in a language I recognize but don’t yet understand. The sounds of Saigon are becoming familiar; Saigon, this weird sprawling city, part booming Asian metropolis, part Dickensian curiosity shop.

Saigon, where I’m going to live for the next five months.

Backing up: as some of you know, I had been waiting most of the summer to start work on a travel guidebook project that would have taken me on a whirlwhind tour of Russia and Eastern Europe. The publisher, however, recently decided to postpone it until next year. It was a big disappointment, but fortuitously, I happened to be in a place that a) totally intrigues me, and b) has a superabundance of jobs which I can use to revive my extremely, extremely sleepy travel funds.

It took me two days to find employment that promises to be, at the least, surreal. For the next semester, I will be teaching literature at a Vietnamese private high school that follows the North American curriculum. We will read Chekhov and Frost and Navajo stories. We will read Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (If ever two were one, then surely we./If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee.) We will read “The Cask of Amontillado,” and I will inform my eager charges that T.S. Eliot called Poe’s thinking “puerile” and his writing “slipshod.” I am going to make them write stories and read poems out loud. I am going to force them to love literature. Maybe we will all rip out the first hundred pages of our textbooks together in a show of free-thinking defiance.

I didn’t expect to be here this long. I actually didn’t even plan to come to Vietnam in the first place. I just showed up to lend some military advice to the French, and look at me now. (I am right near Dien Bien Phu street, by the way.) But I’m hoping this will be one of those good quagmires. I have some friends I really like, I am in love with the food, I’m saving money and taking pictures and riding scooters around at night and seeing opportunities in bloom everywhere. More on all this. Plus, I have some very interesting travel projects lining up for after this semester.

So, this is where I am, this is where I will be, Saigon, somewhere on the margin between traveling and living.