To me, my trip to Cư xá Thanh Đa in summer 1982 was a serendipitous encounter. It was Saigon’s largest-scale residential complex in the first half of the 1970s, with nearly 4,000 separate units housing about 50,000 inhabitants. Cư xá refers to a residential quarter reserved for gainfully employed citizens, with a vision to establish a model community with a high quality of life. Here, in their three-bedroom apartments, civil servants, professors, doctors, and military leaders ranked major or higher lived in pride of being a part of a cư xá like that.
As a visitor
When I visited Thanh Đa for the first time, it had been seven years since 1975. Seven years wasn’t a long time, but the tumult of time had shaken up every corner of life. I could hazard a guess where the people whom I esteemed ended up. A filtering process, both straightforward and subtle, left the laypeople alone in their resignation to have a normal life, while filling in the gaps with more faces from the battlefields and northern regions. The silent lived silently, the eager lived eagerly. I managed to witness first-hand the formation of the rhythm of life here, one that was leaning pastoral in its collectivity: laundry lines hung low on balconies, honeycomb coal briquettes put nonchalantly on the park grass, shirtless men trying in vain to squeeze out droplets of water from taps that hadn’t dried up yet, ladies who wore wrinkly sleepwear to the market or gathered to gossip anywhere their hearts desired.
Morning around the numbered blocks.
Our nephew’s rustic Honda motorbike finally taught us how long Xô Viết-Nghệ Tĩnh Street dragged on that year. It meandered through wards 15, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, and 27 of Bình Thạnh, and came to a halt at a boat landing as ramshackle as our Honda bike. From then, we would need to travel from Thị Nghè, passing Hàng Xanh, over the Kinh Bridge, and across another 8 kilometers of Bình Quới’s wilderness. Those living on the other side had to coexist with this river crossing if they wanted to access districts 3 and 1. There were few motorbikes; the boat operator nimbly arranged passenger bicycles into rows as neat as those in a bike shop to make room for standing guests. The oil engine quacked loudly as we watched with a mixture of both weariness and amusement. Writer Nguyễn Quang Thân, my husband, quipped in his distinctive self-deprecating humor: “Well, the ruralization of Hanoi was complete, so now it’s Saigon’s lucky turn, but maybe it’s more appropriate to leave Bình Quới as pastoral as it is now.”
Communal life in Thanh Đa is still as cordial as ever.
As a resident
Internal staircases are well-lit, but inhabitants had to make metal cages to protect the light bulbs from theft.
In 2005, we relocated to the south, not because it was trendy, but because Thân’s mother passed away in Thanh Đa, and her ashes were kept at the Thập Phương Temple near Kinh Bridge. From serendipity to a stroke of fate. We endured 15 years in Hanoi — as I see it, just like anyone else who once lived here before 1975. I believe nobody would live with their face craned up into the sky waiting for fallen riches, regardless of which side of history one belonged to. Once we had chosen Thanh Đa to settle down, we found dignity in the labor of our own hands. Back then, compared to the well-heeled living conditions of my contemporaries, 20 years after Đổi Mới, for us, settling down in Thanh Đa was a step into acceptance, peace, and sufficiency. Thân was 70 years old, and I was about to retire.
A hand-drawn map showcasing the initial layout of Cư xá Thanh Đa.
Let’s not delve into how our nephew had to lend us his name on the papers because “only those in a registered household [hộ khẩu] of Hồ Chí Minh City could buy a house in Saigon.” Indeed, those grievous, gatekeeping episodes would only sour the mood for the readers of today. It was only after we had settled in that he could transfer the ownership to us; and only after the unit was in our names could we move the household registry to Saigon, and subsequently start receiving our retirement pension. I can only sigh when I recall those times; it’s not worth our remaining years on Earth to attempt to unravel these entanglements.
We realized that the apartment blocks were more or less tilted and severely water-damaged. During a time when water towers became purely ornamental, and the Đồng Nai River surged with water, Thanh Đa could only access public water at night. This led to the need for rows of plastic water tanks installed on the back balconies of units: one tank for the less well-off and two for the “elites” — it’s no wonder that the buildings started leaning. Small metallic roofs were set up in the back to protect bedrooms from neighborly water leakages; in the front, ground units extended their roofs to allow room for some entrepreneurial activities, to park bikes, and to… prevent cars from reaching deep into the inner walkways — the paths and sewer system’s low quality also contributed to this. Bàng trees were indiscriminately grown for shade, alongside fruit trees like mango and coconut. Their canopies were squeezed in between distinctively Hanoian metallic cages that sectioned off balconies. Our sighs became more frequent because Thanh Đa, to us, had turned into somewhere we loved too much to leave, but too burdensome to stay. Maintenance turned scant from the moment that numbered blocks became stuck in development limbo — you can stay in place waiting for the future, but you can’t sell or transfer; you might be tempted to engage in improper dealings, but risk losing everything when site clearance starts.
Just a short walk away from the blocks is a park that's quite spacious, albeit in disrepair from lack of maintenance.
A hard farewell
We must play by the rules of time, of change, and of in-with-the-new and out-with-the-old. The Bình Quới-Thanh Đa Peninsula is hoped to be an urban point of pride in the future. In Hungary’s Budapest, I’ve seen many old apartments with strong Soviet influence that have stood the test of time. Elevators were available from the get-go, unlike Saigon’s old tenements. There, heritage is something to preserve, to admire — somewhere the elderly like us could languidly coexist with the legacy ecosystem and slow pace of life that were once our own.
Thanh Đa has been neglected, so it can’t be an aesthetic focal point for preservation or tourism. Thanh Đa, in the eyes of urban planners who love planning and megacities, is a patch of golden, diamond land. What would I miss, apart from the roaches and rodents playing tag on the apartment floors and scaring my children, who have all resettled in high-end residences? No, I will miss things that I feel indebted to for the past 20 years. Those special 20-centimeter walls, both thick and cooling, were a blessing from an era when blueprints were carefully crafted, and contractors were ethical and transparent. The balconies in the front and the back. The rooms with many windows to maximize ventilation and minimize the need for fans. The large-frame doors and exit path for the kitchen during emergencies. These are all design decisions made thoughtfully in the hopes that whoever occupies these spaces will feel they are living in civility and generosity.
All will be bygone. Births are followed by perishment. Over half a century, even human bonds will fade away, let alone cement and stones. Some residents have started accepting site clearance orders, hoping to resettle soon — at an oasis that boasts several degrees of cooler climate compared to the heat across the river in Hàng Xanh-Thị Nghè. The tender river branches and strong winds that are impossible to ignore wherever one stands on the Bình Quới Peninsula are both worthy of affection. They’re miraculous and deserve to be yearned for, or to dream of returning to, in one’s quest to settle down for the rest of their remaining time.
I hope that the tamarind tree in front of my apartment — a witness of history for the past half a decade — will stand strong no matter how deep a foundation they will dig and how tall a skyscraper they will construct in its face. The bodhi tree and the kapok tree too, would they survive? The sparrows that crowd the sky, the long-tailed squirrels in their tamarind kingdom, the butterflies, the geckos, and the bees, would they survive?
History is once again contorting its body and calling out for Thanh Đa in this terrifying tumult. Let it.
Dạ Ngân is an award-winning writer and journalist based in Thanh Đa, Saigon. She has published 22 books, including An Insignificant Family, which was featured in Saigoneer's literary series Loạt Soạt. Read our profile of Dạ Ngân here.
