On a few mornings I had seen a gentleman Claude resting at a table outside a bar on Bui Vien Street in Pham Ngu Lao the backpacker district, with his walker / ambulatoire next to him. Yesterday I said hello, he smiled and I stopped to talk to him. Today I saw him again. The story I heard, told over the two get togethers and put in what I think is chronological sequence goes something like this.
He was in medical school in France when in 1966 the Israel-Egypt 6 Day War was threatening. Being Jewish he wrote a letter to the dean of the school saying he was going to Israel to join the army and if he survived he would return to do his final exams. When he arrived in Israel and tried to volunteer they laughed and said they have a perfectly competent army and don’t need any untrained French volunteers. They sent him instead him to a kibbutz on the Jordanian border where he worked on a farm owned by a Holecaust survivor who taught him Hebrew. After 4 months he returned to France finished his medical training and for 18 years was a practicing surgeon.
He retired and moved to the Caribbean and opened a clothing store in St Martin, eventually over 5 years ended up owning two in St Martin, 1 in St Barts and 1 in Puerto Rico. He said some tourists thought it was chic to shop in an upscale store owned by a retired French surgeon and would pay a fortune for a silk tie. He says he made a lot more money selling clothes to tourists than he ever made as a surgeon. However his wife of 26 years and his daughter raised their consumption levels and expectations along with the growing income from the business and this became an increasing cause of friction. They already had a large remodelled home in Provence with a few hectares of property and he became increasingly fed with the life he was living. He and his wife divorced, he gave them the property and the business, got no thanks, and retired to Chiang Mai in Thailand with his personal pension. At this point we changed to speaking French. Remember it is Claude’s story.
In Chiang Mai he frequented a French bakery L’Opera and the French owner told him he should definitely visit Vietnam as it was for him much better than Thailand. The owner had previously owned a business in Saigon but moved to Thailand at the insistance of his Thai wife. So having read extensively about Indochine when he was young, we both like Jean Hougron’s Les Asiates, he also recommended Andre Malraux and Lucien Bodart on the same subject, about 14 months ago he moved to a couple of rooms off Bui Vien street in the back packer area of Saigon.
He very much enjoys his new life, his 42 year old girlfriend, she said she is 36 but she left her ID card sitting out, he sits at a table on the sidewalk in the morning, always at the same bar and watches the street come to life, in the afternoons he watches the tourists roam, he eats at or orders food from the nearby Singapore Chicken Noodle restaurant which he said had 300 choices on the menu. On my way to the French owned Marou chocolate shop, excellent local chocolate, I stopped by and picked up the carry out menu at his restaurant and there are actually 310 items with a an average price of $2.50.
He initially estimated it would cost him $1,000 a month to live on Bui Vien street but now thought $800 covered it. For his air conditioned room with ensuite bathroom, laundry, drinking water and daily cleaning he pays $16 a day. However one surprisingly high cost from recent experience was emergency health care.
I asked about the walker / ambulatoire and he told me that when he fell and fractured his upper left thigh they took him to the French International hospital. There they advised him he had to have an operation to pin and repair it. They proposed a choice of two possible operations, one for D170,000,000 (€6,476 / $9,524) and another more complete for D250,000,000 (€7,322 / $10,786). He said logically at 78 years of age with how many years remaining he opted for the cheaper one where they jam the two pieces together on a spike and the recovery time is about 3 months. But when he was in the recovery room he learned they had done the more expensive and complex one and he had a 6 month recovery period with 2 more months to go, he was most unhappy with this. But during his earlier discussion with the Vietnamese surgeon he had revealed that he himself was a retired surgeon and thus at least received the fellowship of the scalpel 50% reduction in price. http://fvhospital.com/
I commiserated with him about the cost of the operation suggesting that the dangers of the badly broken sidewalks and also of travelling on the back of motorbike taxis were particularly hazardous for people our age. Oh non, non, non he replied laughing, I slipped in the shower while “dancing”with my girlfriend.
When does he plan to return to France ?, never he doesn’t want to hear anything more about les gilets jaunes, President Macron, immigration, politics, his ex-wife, or own a car, none of it. He wants to sit in the sun in the morning, watch the world go by, eat off his extensive inexpensive 310 item Singapore Chicken Noodle menu. I suggested, in light of his dedication to the terpischorean art while damp, and to avoid future emergency health care expenses he consider the installation of a safety grab bar in the shower. He found this uproariously funny.
He says his next scheduled operation is for macular degeneration because, among other things he can no longer clearly appreciate some of his girl friends finer aspects.
Yesterday I purchased some chocolate for him, for the children of my AirBnb, landlady, for my friend Gaetan the best patisserie, chocolatiere in Toulouse and of course for myself. I gave Claude his this morning. All of that for saying hello to, smiling and sharing a coffee with a stranger.
Definitely LOL and now too old to die young.
