Six Years Of Alleys Somebody always opened the gate

One o’clock in the morning, in an alley too narrow for a car, and the city has finally shut up.

Not silence exactly. A dog three houses down, then a second one answering from somewhere behind that, then a third weighing in because apparently this is a conversation now. Crickets. The far hum of traffic that never entirely stops here. An electrical pole above me buzzing with the serene confidence of something that has never once been inspected, throwing the occasional spark purely for the drama. The light is that orange-yellow sodium wash, interrupted every ≈20 meters by somebody’s aggressively white LED, and between them run stretches of near-black where you just walk on memory. Most gates are down and dark. Some aren’t – a fan turning, a TV roaring at nobody in particular, two voices going back and forth about something that evidently cannot wait until morning. It is still hot. It is still wet. There is no wind at all, because the houses are packed too tight to let any through.

And I am not thinking about anything.

Eight years in Sài Gòn and that is still the part that gets me. Not that the alley is safe – that I stopped checking.

My sample is terrible and I know it

Let me get the disqualifiers out of the way, because they are real: I am a tall Western foreigner with no local debts, no local feuds, no family land dispute waiting to go bad. Nobody here has a reason to want me dead, which means “I have not been murdered” was never going to tell you anything about Vietnam. It tells you about me.

What I do have is six years of living inside it. District 1, District 2, District 3, Bình Thạnh – apartment blocks some of the time, but mostly actual Vietnamese houses, deep in the wildly grown areas, on hẻm too narrow for anything with four wheels. I have never once shared a house with another foreigner, and I have actively avoided the areas where foreigners cluster. Not out of principle. Because the other thing was more interesting.

The early years were not spotless, mind you. One taxi scam. A handful of market moments where I paid tourist prices for vegetables, which in hard currency means I was robbed of roughly the cost of a coffee. And one night around four in the morning, coming home from clubbing, somebody tried to take my phone out of my hand and failed, because I was holding it like a man who had recently learned to hold his phone.

All of that between 2018 and 2020. I was also brand new, it was my first time outside Europe, and I was naive in the specific way that people are naive when everything around them is simultaneously thrilling and illegible. The city has changed enormously since then. So have I. I would not build a theory on either.

The watchers

Instead, this is what I would build a theory on: every house I lived in had a security uncle out front. Mine kept an eye on everyone who came and went, and was reliably delighted to tell me a story or gush about women while working through his cigarettes. He also had a daughter, and he was not subtle about it. Neither were the landladies, the shop owners, or roughly half the women I bought anything from twice – all of them had a daughter, a niece, a very nice girl who works in an office, and all of them proposed her with a wink that made it impossible to tell whether this was matchmaking or theater. It kept happening after they knew me better, too. Possibly because they knew me better. I never worked that out and I never asked.

Around the corner sat the vegetable stall lady, in position from morning to evening, every single day, in any weather this country decided to produce – parked there like a load-bearing wall, and about as likely to move. She knew that neighborhood down to the individual face. A stranger walking past her registered. I have no doubt about that.

Then the old men and women in front of their houses, in the plastic chairs, talking, watching the alley move. The landlords and their guards behind desks with a CCTV feed running. The bánh mì lady. The orange juice stall lady. The lottery ticket uncle. The staff at the convenience store, all of whom I ended up on friendly terms with, because you cannot buy soft-drinks from the same person 400 times and stay strangers.

And the cameras, which by now hang next to basically every door and gate, plus whatever else has been bolted at random onto those magnificent catastrophes of power poles.

But the cameras are the least of it. The cameras are what you install because everyone else has one. The actual system is the vegetable lady.

You notice it most when it quietly does its job. Coming home at some indefensible hour, there was always somebody who heard the bike, or heard the gate, and pressed the button. Not once, in any of those houses, did I stand outside waiting. Somebody was still awake, or awake again, or had simply checked a camera. And the next day there would be a comment – where were you so long, did you have a good night, and who exactly was that leaving at six in the morning?

This happened repeatedly, in several places I lived, about people of every gender. And a decent share of them were colleagues who had come back with me to sleep off an evening that had gotten away from them. Blameless. Horizontal. Gone by dawn. The neighborhood had no way of knowing that, and to their eternal credit nobody ever asked for clarification – they simply logged it, filed it, and raised an eyebrow at me over the vegetables.

That is surveillance. It is also affection. In a local area those turn out to be the same substance, and I have never managed to fully separate them.

It got very obvious during the lockdown in 2021, when I spent three months sealed into a house in District 1 (I briefly touched that period here, though mostly the gaming). News moved through the neighborhood faster than through any app. Who had food, who was sick, who got a delivery through, whose relative was stuck in another district. Nobody organized it. It simply is how people live here – with their surroundings rather than beside them.

Frankfurt, for comparison

Park a motorbike on a Sài Gòn street overnight and it is there in the morning, with both wheels attached. Park a bicycle in Frankfurt overnight and you may find a rear wheel, a lock, and a lesson.

Build a wall in public here and paint it, and months later it is still a painted wall. Not a sticker, not a tag, nothing. Walk through any larger German city on a Friday night and the ambient volume of shouting alone will tell you where you are. Aggression is a background texture there. Here it mostly isn’t, and I have gone entire years without seeing a fight.

To be fair to Germany: the visible mess is partly the cost of a system that will also hand you a lawyer. Nobody gets to have everything.

And the loud drunks I have run into in Vietnam were, with a consistency that got funny after a while, foreigners – Bùi Viện, Thảo Điền, the party strips in Nha Trang and Đà Nẵng. Not just Western ones either. Yep – some of the most enthusiastically wrecked human beings I have encountered in this country arrived by direct flight from Seoul.

The art of falling asleep on a motorbike

Vietnamese drinking has a shape to it. My friends get loud, warm, extremely social, and then they hit a threshold and go quiet, and then they go to sleep. Wherever they happen to be. A bench. A patch of park. My couch, on a few occasions, because I dragged them there.

And sometimes the motorbike.

I want to be clear that I have never made peace with this. You will see it in daylight too, along eight-lane roads in the full heat of the afternoon: a man draped across his parked mototbike like a coat over a chair, arms hanging, feet hooked somewhere, asleep. On a machine with two wheels and no meaningful width. Balanced.

How the hell do you sleep on something that falls over? I have tried to reverse-engineer the physics and gotten precisely nowhere. It is a national skill, it is passed down by some method nobody has offered to show me, and on this one specific point I remain a foreigner in the deepest possible sense.

Nobody bothers them, by the way. That is the part that matters. A man unconscious on a motorbike at the edge of a major road is not a target here. He is just a man having a nap.

Phú Mỹ Hưng, which is the expensive version

I moved here in late 2024, and it is a different planet.

Wide streets. Wide sidewalks that are actually empty, like a rendering somebody forgot to populate, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to stop finding that eerie. Parks. Green everywhere. Birds. Insects, actual insects, making actual insect noises. Security booths at every corner, guards patrolling on motorbikes around the clock, cameras public and private. Everything new, everything maintained, serious money going in continuously to keep it clean and modern. Korean corners, Korean stores, residential towers that could be lifted straight into Taipei.

And no street sellers. No side vendors. No lottery uncle. All prohibited.

So the thing I spent six years describing as the reason this city feels safe – people, permanently outside, seeing EVERYTHING – has been zoned out of the neighborhood I now pay to live in. What replaced it works. It is guards and cameras and rules, and it delivers order with a reliability the alleys never promised.

It just isn’t the same thing, and I feel the difference every day I ride across town.

Both, then

I love the quiet here. And I miss the noise there. I sleep better in Phú Mỹ Hưng. And I was never once lonely in a hẻm. I like the greenery, the space, the parks I actually use. And I liked knowing the woman who sold me juice, the man who sold me tickets I never checked, the uncle who guarded a gate and wanted to discuss my love life at 11 at night.

One of those neighborhoods watches me because it is somebody’s job. The other watched me because I was theirs.

Is Vietnam safe? I have no idea. I have a metropolitan area of 22,552,900 [≈22.5 million] people, one foreigner’s eight years, and a set of experiences that a Vietnamese woman, a highland farmer, or a Kinh teenager in Bình Thạnh would all describe completely differently. What I have is my own answer, and it is yes, and it is not built out of statistics.

It is built out of an alley at one in the morning. Dogs arguing. The pole buzzing. Somewhere behind a gate, a fan turning and a TV nobody is watching.

Nothing to check. Never was.

Peace out & ngủ ngon 🛵