To finish what has turned out to be the Vietnamese Trilogy series, I’m reminded of another story about my time in Vietnam. I traveled fairly regularly from Saigon to various other locations outside of Vietnam but within the region.
Often, trips included a stop in Hong Kong. As many of you may know, Hong Kong was, at the time, a shoppers paradise (even more so than today.) It was a duty free port and all sorts of things could be purchased about as cheap as they could be found anywhere in the world. The US Navy had a large presence there and the China Fleet Club was well known, pretty much world wide. It was (among other things) a huge duty-free PX.
If anyone from Saigon was going to (or through) Hong Kong they always left with a huge shopping list from people that wanted things like stereos, sewing machines, china, crystal, silverware and even furniture as well as lots of other stuff. Hold that thought for a moment…
I mentioned before that I lived downtown Saigon and one of the restaurants I frequented, usually several times a week, was the Tài Nam. I became friends with the owner and his wife whom were extremely nice and obviously good business people. The owner’s brother owned and operated a tailor shop in Saigon and specialized in making men’s and women’s clothes. It turns out that the Tài Nam owner’s uncle owned a clothing making business in Hong Kong. One of the items that was apparently hard to come by in Vietnam was zippers. So… one night while having dinner at the Tài Nam I mentioned my upcoming trip to Hong Kong. The owner asked if it would be possible to pick up some zippers from his uncle for use in his brother’s shop. (During the war, things couldn’t just be shipped into and out of Vietnam via international mail because they’d be stolen and sold on the black market.) I agreed that it’d be no problem to pick up the zippers and send them to myself, via FPO, at the embassy.
Okay… now back to the story. My boss in the embassy had asked me to pick up a new stereo receiver/amplifier for him at the China Fleet Club — again, I said it wouldn’t be a problem because I didn’t anticipate being pressed for time in the few days I’d be in Hong Kong.
I met the Tài Nam owner’s uncle one evening in Hong Kong and he and his wife took me to dinner and a couple of clubs and drove me back to my hotel. When we arrived at the hotel, he handed me a box filled with zippers — a big box filled with zippers. There must have been hundreds of various sizes and colors of zippers. The next day I took the box of zippers with me to the China Fleet Club and purchased the stereo for my boss and a few more things for other people back in Saigon. I wrapped them all, addressed them to myself at the American Embassy in Saigon and took them downstairs to the Fleet Post Office and mailed them. It turned out that the stereo receiver and the box of zippers were just about the same size and the largest two packages — all the other packages were noticeably smaller.
I left Hong Kong the next morning for stops in a couple more countries and didn’t return to Saigon until a little over a week later.
I returned to Saigon on an evening flight and didn’t go into the office until the following morning. As soon as I walked through the door, my boss was standing there, and said, “What’s with the zippers?” Not, “Welcome back” or “How was your trip?” But, “What’s with the zippers?” Apparently what had happened is that the packages that I had mailed arrived in the mail room at the embassy over a couple of days time and the “zipper box” arrived a day or so before the stereo receiver. My boss saw it and it was just about the right size, so he opened it thinking it was his receiver/amplifier — but — it was a box full of zippers. (“His” package arrived a day or so later, so he was happy about that.) He kept asking me about the zippers until he finally realized he wasn’t going to get a straight answer from me.
I delivered the zippers to the Tài Nam shortly after I returned to be passed along to the tailor and everyone was happy.
My boss kept asking be about the zippers every so often until he finally decided it was useless. But he apparently took one of the zippers and kept it in his disk drawer and periodically, until the day he left Vietnam, I’d see him take it out of the drawer and look at it. I kind of feel bad that I never told him the true story…..
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