District 4: The Neighbourhood I Keep Going Back To

District 4 is small. It sits just across the canal from District 1, separated by a few hundred metres of brown water and about fifteen minutes of traffic noise. Most people visiting Saigon never cross it. They stay in the big hotels near the river, eat the pho that the concierge recommends, and leave without knowing this place exists.

I go there a lot. Not for any particular reason I can explain cleanly. Just because it feels right. The streets are narrow and the buildings push in close and there are always people eating on plastic stools outside and the whole thing has a pace to it that I don't find as easily in the parts of the city tourists tend to visit.

It's not the most beautiful neighbourhood. It doesn't have the colonial architecture that people photograph in District 3. It doesn't have the galleries and coffee shops of Binh Thanh. What it has is a kind of ordinariness that I find more interesting than most things that get called interesting.

Why nobody goes there

District 4 has a reputation, and the reputation is old. Fifteen or twenty years ago it was rough. It had a gang presence that Saigonese people talked about in the way you talk about places you don't go. The streets around the old port were dark and the nickname people used for it was not flattering.

That version of District 4 is largely gone. The gangs moved or dispersed or grew up and became something else. The neighbourhood changed the way all Saigon neighbourhoods have changed, which is fast and not always gently, but it changed. What stayed was the food. And the people who cook it.

The reputation, though, stays too. People still avoid it. Their parents told them not to go there and they don't. Visitors read that it's one of the "local" districts and they put it on a list and then don't actually go because they're not sure what to do when they arrive. I understand this. There's nothing to do there in the tourist sense. No landmark. No museum. No experience you can point to later and say "this is what District 4 gave me."

It gives you less than that. That's why I like it.

The food on Hoang Dieu

If you cross the canal on Cau Kho bridge and turn right, you're on Hoang Dieu. This is where I usually end up. The street runs parallel to the canal and gets busy from around five in the afternoon, when the food vendors start setting up and the office workers from District 1 cross over for dinner because it's cheaper and better here.

There's a woman who has been selling bun mam from the same spot on Hoang Dieu for longer than I've been walking that street. Bun mam is a fermented fish noodle soup that a lot of foreigners find challenging. The smell is strong. The flavour is stronger. It's a very southern dish. Her version is very good in the way that things cooked by someone who has been cooking the same thing for decades tend to be very good. Not surprising. Not innovative. Just correct.

Next to her, some evenings, there's a man selling banh trang nuong — the thing people outside Vietnam call Vietnamese pizza, which is not accurate but is descriptive enough. Thin rice paper on a grill, egg and spring onion and whatever else is on hand. He moves quickly. His hands don't waste anything.

I don't usually tell guests what they're eating before they eat it. They try it first. Then we talk about it. This works better.

The canal in the evening

Dong Nai canal runs along the northern edge of District 4. It doesn't smell great. It never has. But in the evening, when the light is going and people come out to sit along the banks and there are kids on bicycles and old men with nowhere to be, it has something. I don't know the word for it exactly. Not beautiful. Not peaceful in any obvious sense. Just alive in the way that water in a city is alive, even dirty water, because the city uses it and moves around it and has a relationship with it that goes back further than anyone remembers.

There are newer parts of the canal now with clean walkways and young couples taking photos. Those parts are fine. But the older stretches, where the concrete is cracked and the boats still tie up and someone has strung lights between two trees for no clear reason, those are the parts I keep coming back to.

What to look for

The morning market on Ton That Thuyet

There's a wet market that starts very early on Ton That Thuyet, near where the street meets the canal. I mean very early. By six in the morning it's already going. By eight it's mostly done. The herbs go fast. The fish goes fast. The live crabs go fast.

I go there sometimes before a morning tour, to pick things up or just to walk through. The vendors know each other. They've been selling here for years, some of them for longer. There's a rhythm to the market that you can feel after a few visits but that you miss if you only go once. People moving around each other without looking. Transactions happening faster than I can follow. A language of small gestures that I understand now but couldn't have explained when I first started going.

You don't need to buy anything. You can just walk through slowly and look. Most people won't notice you much. You're not the main event.

Why I keep going back

I'm not sure I can explain this fully. Part of it is that I grew up in this city and District 4 feels like the city I grew up in more than some other parts do now. Part of it is the food, which is honest in a way I find comforting. Part of it is that nobody is performing anything there. The vendors are selling what they sell. The people eating are eating. The old men by the canal are just sitting. Everyone is doing what they're doing without wrapping it in something else.

Saigon changes fast. I don't think that's bad. Change is how the city stays alive. But District 4 changes a little slower. It has held onto some things. I don't know how long it will hold them. So I go while it's still this way.

I take people there sometimes on tours, usually toward the end of the afternoon when the food vendors are setting up. Not everyone loves it. Some people want something more obviously photogenic or more obviously significant. That's okay. But the people who are curious about what a Saigon neighbourhood actually looks like on a regular evening, District 4 is a good answer to that question.