Ping Pong

And so we have travelled to raise our own awareness, to see sights not seen and to embrace a reconstituted sense of home in a foreign place. And we needed things we thought we missed. Consumables and desirables. Products unknown in Saigon.

You learn things so they say by travel, it broadens the mind while it saddens the heart. You learn things about yourself thinking about how on earth you can possibly be in such a place and if you tavel far enough, long enough, how you can possibly be. A crazy westerner, a souped-up, sexed-up farang investing in hitherto obscure sports like table tennis. It is everywhere on the Bangkok street after dark, a sport so promoted no wonder it is so well attended.

We have to weave through throngs of men who have had too much; in sarongs lifted laughingly to reveal too little as eyes bleary yet somehow alive look for songs of the night, like sirens wailing, snared by their own thong. There is pattern and rhyme. This is why they are here and this is why they are here. There is no chicken and egg; no desire and satisfaction; only a continuum of the expected, a flirtation with the exotic, a taste of some stranger's bitter fruit. Yes, we have no bananas.

And then later. We miss Elvis but catch an Easy Rider soundtrack. A different show, a different city, now back in the rush of Saigon. There is less cool and more kitsch, there is less freedom and more control. But self control ? There are no bananas nor ping-pong, but there are transactions in the corner, there are the glammed-up with the paunched-out and all listen in to falsetto, soundtracking so many different moods in the small cabaret where middle-aged couples sup gently next to business men who roar loudly next to hostesses who smile by the Dong while all are next to a few foreigners agog, grinning ironically hopefully knowing they know best. And the old man, speaking in French, comes on with an acoustic guitar and strums his way into ' Born to be Wild.