To go home, I had to take a taxi to Saigon's airport, fly to Hanoi, then on to Hong Kong, where during a 5 hour layover I'd take a train to Central to hang out a bit, then back to the airport to fly to JFK, then hop on two trains just to get to Manhattan, then two more to reach Philly's 30th Street Station, from where I could, finally, take two subways to my South Philadelphia neighborhood. With so many legs to a trip, a thousand things could go wrong.
Riding through Saigon at 3:30AM, I noticed a bunch of restaurants were already open, with people sitting at sidewalk tables, eating noodles or drinking coffee. Tired, I said nothing to the driver. No jokes about a national homosexual policy, strictly enforced for half a century, to reverse the runaway population growth.
Before taking off from Saigon, the Vietnam Airlines stewardess warned us that to open any aircraft door during flight would result in a $880 fine.
The express train from the airport to Central Hong Kong runs every 10 minutes from 5:54AM to 12:48AM, and takes but 24 minutes to cover 23 miles. Nearly every world-class city has a direct train to connect its international airport to downtown, but Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC simply don't, and Americans just don't give a flying, exploding cockpit! We're number one!
Since the Washington Metro opened in 1976, politicians have talked about extending it to Dulles. Forty-one years later, it has crept within seven miles of the badly designed, unfriendly and decrepit airport, opened in 1962. It may even get there before the much welcome controlled demolition. In 2014, news.com.au asked of Dulles, "Is this the world's worst airport?"
Year after year, East Asian top airports rank as the planet's best, with Seoul's, Singapore's, Tokyo's and Hong Kong's nearly always in the top five. In Europe, London's, Amsterdam's, Frankfurt's and Zurich's are also first-rate.
With twice the population density of Saigon's, Hong Kong's streets are nowhere nearly as clogged, thanks to its excellent subway system and a vast fleet of private buses. Like Singapore, Hong Kong is also a hundred times cleaner and more orderly than my native city. Most impressively, Hong Kong's murder rate per 100,000 people was only 0.4 for 2016. With 7.347 million people, it had 28 murders. By contrast, Philadelphia tallied 278 homicides for a population of 1.568 million.
Year after year, American blacks commit murders at roughly seven times the rate of whites, a fact that's blamed by many on socioeconomic factors, historical resentment and/or ongoing racism, while others attribute it to a low IQ, innate lack of impulse control and/or propensity for violence. A century from now, will blacks still be an underclass in any multicultural societies still existing? How about in five hundred years?
Without a significant black population, East Asian societies don't have to deal with this debate or problem. I've wandered unfamiliar Saigon, Hanoi and Singapore streets in the middle of the night without any fear of being shot or stabbed, and I've done the same in many European cities, including Istanbul and war-time Kiev.
In recent years, Africans have started to emigrate to Vietnam, and in Saigon's GÃ ² Va' º ¥p District and on Pha' º ¡m NgÃ... © LÃ £o Street, there are even black male prostitutes, a phenomenon that's particularly pleasing to certain middle-aged Vietnamese women. The Africans' prices are high for local standards, around $25 for a quickie, $50 for an overnight. A recent police raid brought in 50 Africans for questioning.
Wandering around Hong Kong's Central, I spotted a graffiti, "DESTROY RACISM." Nearby, there's a pretty, young, blonde model on an ad for a high-end real estate firm, Man Hing Hong. A few steps away was another blonde, this one merely a teenager, on an ad for an ordinary hair salon, mina dev' wil. Noticing racial differences means having racial preferences. We will never be color-blind.
As an adult, I've had two 2-year stints away from the US. Living in Saigon from 1999-2001, I missed Mexican food, Seahawks games on TV and some jazz, so I asked a friend, traveling to Saigon with the Philadelphia Orchestra, to bring me Django Reinhardt, and Lester Young accompanying Billie Holliday. Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, I asked my brother to drive me straight to a Mexican joint. Now, there are good Mexican restaurants in Vietnam, and you can listen to anything on YouTube.
Living in Italy from 2002-2004, I missed decent fried chicken, tolerable Chinese food, bullshitting in bars and watching the Seahawks on TV. The Italian ways were so wonderful, the people so hospitable and sweet, I had several nightmares in which I suddenly found myself back in Philly. Opening my eyes, I discovered, with tremendous relief, that I was still in Italy.
Flying into Dulles, I noticed how wide the freeway medians were. So much space wasted, I thought. The currency exchange girl gave me several hundred dollars too much. Catching her mistake, I returned the cash. "Whoa!" She laughed.
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