Terrible

I was in Saigon a few years ago with a friend for a couple of days, and on one of those days we went on a tour to see the tunnels. We were on a bus full of random strangers (and isn't there something fun about that? there's always upside) and we had a guide, a vietnamese man in his, I guess, late 50s. As we drove out of Saigon I was as always favorably impressed with the sheer busy-ness of the place. In most other southeast asian countries there's a lot of sitting around, doing nothing (someone once told me that there's a word in Thai which means 'Yes, but not yet'. As in "Have you done that thing I asked you to?" "Yes... but not yet") but in Saigon everyone's busy as hell, making stuff, transporting stuff, buying and selling stuff.

Anyway, our guide was telling us something about the history of the Vietnam war (or as they call it, the American war), and his part in it. Which turned out to have been fairly nuanced, as he'd been a translator or something for the US Army, and had then been put in a re-education camp. His narrative trailed off, he looked out the window and said "My life is very terrible...". I was so impressed I wrote it down.