Who is in the Zoo?

 

The old Saigon Zoo is located at one end of the great French-colonial presidential boulevard, some few city blocks up from the old U.S. embassy, which was fortified to keep the Viet Cong out and the South Vietnamese in. On April 30th, 1975, Chinese-made Soviet T-54 tanks rolled onto the boulevard, some approaching the embassy with guns up towards the helicopters hovering around the roof, some tanks rolling up to the gates of the zoo, inside of which a pitched battle was taking place.

The zoo’s inhabitants in the first few years following lived about as well (or poorly) as the citizens of the ancient regime settling into life under communism, or as the refugees (“boat people”) on the high seas or in transit camps. Then came the famine.

And then came renovation. Gorbachev.

And openness. Clinton.

And eventually I came.

One afternoon I came to the zoo’s yellow-washed walls, the iron front gate, the narrow entrance. I came to meet a girl.

It was a weekday and I played hooky from my job as a sales manager, which I did a lot of in those days. I took a cab across downtown (the old U.S. embassy is still standing) and met her inside the gate (the ticket was maybe 24,000 dong, maybe $1.50).

The girl was thin like an Asian, of very fair skin (the type that they called porcelain), and the way she carried herself made her look taller than all the other Asian girls. Her hair was black and straight, of course, with some western style highlights (she worked at the hairdressers on the ground floor of my boardinghouse). Her face reminds me of Daphne from “Scooby Doo.” Her name was Thao, and in old high Vietnamese it meant “grass,” as in ‘meadow,’ or ‘field,’ which you might guess made it all the more special for me.

We saw lions and Asian elephants, and of course mind-numbing numbers of crocodiles and old-world monkeys. The cramped, dirty enclosures and the general weekday emptiness made the whole experience sad, in an old colonial-era zoo kind of way.

A propos:

We were driving down Highway 61 into Lutsen a couple weeks ago, me and Foxy the Brittany and Daphne the cocker, but I had to slow down for a deer way up ahead. It was on the right, on the shoulder, and seemed to be getting ready to slowly cross, and then I realized it was a wolf. So, I continued slowly, and the wolf just stopped in my lane, and looked toward us, and I pulled up and stopped.

So, it’s me, and Foxy in the passenger seat staring, and Daphne on the console staring, and the wolf just staring back.

It took a second, but Foxy finally realized what that thing was, and she starts baying, and then Daphne starts in. And the wolf just walked up to the truck alongside my driver’s door looking at us and listening, and Foxy and Daphne reacting like a couple of red rubber balls let loose inside the cab.

The wolf looked healthy, if a little lost; not mangy. So, it walked back behind the truck, and we slowly pulled away, and the pups are huffing and strutting and sticking their chests out in the backseat.

I wonder what he saw, that wolf, when he looked through the windshield at us? Maybe a dirty, mangy driver, cramped together – penned up, really – with a pair of mind-numbingly loud old-world colonial-era canids.