Banh is tiny but strong, leathery, almost hairless, with eyes and teeth that seem too large for his head. He could be twenty, he could be sixty. He tells me that he is forty-five years old, and for the last twenty-five of them he has driven a cyclo.
Picture a giant tricycle, ridden back to front, with a passenger seat mounted between the two front wheels. In other countries’ version of the cyclo, the passenger seat is typically behind the driver. Riding in a cyclo in Vietnam is like riding in the shovel of a very small digger, a digger that at any moment may dump its load into oncoming traffic. Driving a cyclo around a city whose major landmarks are scattered over an area of 25 square kilometers is … hard.
It’s not a sought-after job anywhere, but for many of the men - always men - who drive cyclos in Vietnam, the job is a form of internal exile. Soldiers, sailors, doctors, tailors, they were supporters of the defeated South Vietnamese regime. Many were ‘re-educated’ following the war. Even then, driving a cyclo was the only job that they were allowed to hold.
Banh’s crime was to be the son of collaborators. When Saigon fell Banh was only 15. Proudly, he tells us that both of his parents worked at the American embassy. What happened to them, we ask? Ho Chi Minh kill them, he claims.
Things have improved a little for Banh in recent years, since the Vietnamese government began its program of economic reforms and courtship of the west. For most of the last thirty years the cyclo drivers were denied property rights and lived on the streets, making a family impossible. Banh now has a wife and two kids, aged 5 and 7.
But capitalism has left Banh behind too. Thanks to the free market there are now many fine schools in Saigon, but Banh can’t afford to send his children to any of them.
If Banh has a lean and hungry look, Bao is plump and well-fed, with a full head of hair. Coming from America, it’s oddly familiar - the successful small-town businessman who was a football star in high school, but now has love handles. It’s not at all familiar in Vietnam.
Bao was no football star. He drove a cyclo for eight years. While Banh and most of the other drivers go wide - with a few words of English they can pitch most of the world’s tourists - Bao went deep, specializing in Japanese passengers and teaching himself the language from a book late at night.
Then he began to organize coach tours for them. That needs no money down if you can fill a bus by word of mouth, and Bao could. His reputation grew, and when Asahi TV decided to make a documentary about touring Vietnam, Bao was interviewed.
Some Japanese place a very high premium on foreigners who can speak their language. I once asked a Japanese businessman - hypothetically - whether he would rather work with a first-rate supplier in the U.S. who required an interpreter, or a second-rate supplier who spoke Japanese. Without hesitating he said the latter.
So it doesn’t surprise me that Bao’s appearance on Japanese TV led to dozens of inquiries from firms seeking partners in Vietnam. Among other things, the cyclo-driver-turned-tour-operator was asked to source local furniture manufacturers; shoot photos of Vietnamese landmarks for a Tokyo newspaper; and recruit textile workers for short-term contracts in Japan. When we met him, he was sitting in a cafe, with a laptop and a webcam, waiting for a web conference with one of his Japanese clients.
Bao doesn’t talk about the life before. Only the future.