TRAVEL | Eat drink man woman

The NS boy wanted to meet girls on New Year’s Eve. Bak really, really did, never mind that he was with the whole clan in Saigon and that if he was to go clubbing, it would be with at least three chaperones: his cousin, Young Master Y, his brother, Fei, and his sister, me. The four parents were having their party of wild shopping in Chinatown – an area called Cho Lon by the Vietnamese and Tai Ngon by the Cantonese, to which two grandaunts were among the many to migrate years ago and which is famous in my family for its Cantonese food, quite untouched by time, capitalist time-is-money tenets and the evils of the food court – and so we hit Catwalk club, chosen out of the hotel’s Time Out guide by the clerk after Bak asked with all his NS urgency, “What’s a good club to go to? Good one, good one.”

Oh, it was first-rate. An ad at the door mentioned hip-hop music. “Looks okay,” said Fei, the sensible one. We paid, popped in and there they were, 10,000 prom queens. Okay, maybe 231. Necklines were going down, down, down; hemlines were going up, up, up; feet arched on high, high heels; but to a woman, they were classier than Britney Spears. They looked expensive, not cheap. No one was dancing. Everyone looked like they were waiting. Not for us – it was nine, we were too early and we were embarrassed – but maybe for johns who had booked the booths all around us. (One card read “Mr John”, really.)

“Good one, good one,” Fei and Y said. “Sexy time!” Bak whooped with his best Borat accent. But we kept to ourselves and our drinks. They are good boys, good boys. Okay, they didn’t look away when short skirts and long legs would zip past the cabs we were in on motorcycles – the skirts are more mini in Saigon than Hanoi, which, up in the hard-line north, has a different climate, meteorologically and socially – then again, they didn’t do more than look and share such info as, “Three o’clock, 2564, skirt damn short.”

So off we went to a posh part of town, in search of a better party. Except so many motorcyclists and their pillion clans were riding there, no cabbie would drive there. We had to go on a Long March through the mad traffic. I, in my inappropriate high heels, was tired out from trying not to be killed. When we arrived in the posh part, the parties were so truly posh, alas, we voted, three to one, for nibbles at a cheap café.

Bak’s bubble did burst then. “Never mind,” said Fei. “We love you long time,” chirped Fei and Y in one Vietnamese singsong voice. “20 years is a long time okay,” said Fei.

It is. Time flies though, when you are having fun.