The most obvious is xenophobia. Thirty thousand girls work in the 1, bars in Saigon, Gia Dinh and Bien Hoa, but very few of them will spend the night with a foreigner. There are 14, brothels in Saigon, but most of the women, girls and children who work in them will refuse a customer who is not Vietnamese. Another feature of prostitution in Saigon is that it has all the appearances of prostitution right up to the moment when the money is paid. Payment is always in advance, and as soon as it is made the woman almost always disappears.
Prostitution is only one of the many cogs in the mechanism of the immense swindle that lies at the basis of the Saigon economy. The simplest and oldest law of economics β paying out money to receive something in return β does not apply in this city. This extraordinary situation, which can make you feel like a sleepwalker in a dream world, makes Saigon and South Vietnam unique. The Vietnamese women are among the most beautiful women in the world.
To describe a Vietnamese woman one must describe the way she moves: she has the natural elegance, the litheness and the authority of a fox headed toward some prey. This prey is the United States. The Americans, to find a girl, go to the thousands of bars that are lined up, like booths at a fair, along the main streets of Saigon.
Every evening they wander around the streets where the asphalt is warm and soft and studded with beer-bottle caps and where the air is a white and poisonous cloud of exhaust fumes. If they do succeed in escaping from this swarm of motorized pimps, they still have to get beyond the cyclo-pousses bicycle rickshaws waiting in ambush in every dark corner or at cross-.
This is the moment when tens of thousands of Vietnamese girls begin their fraudulent, parasitic work, clinging to the body of a GI like smiling and very delicate little spiders; and every evening, in the darkness of the private rooms, there begins once again a colossal practical joke at the expense of the conventional, industrial and puritan ethics of American civilization.
