My Tho is the girl from the sticks who went off to business school abroad.
MBA in hand, multilingual, she came back with a killer business plan.
Sharp little thing.
She figured out that tourists are in a hurry, herd-minded, and obsessed with ticking boxes.
So she smiles at everyone, hands out conical hats and coconut candy, then packs the sheep off for a boat ride down her clogged-up canals.
She knows her role inside out, the crafty little fox.
The one playing at being the delta girl
The show only lasts a few hours.
Long enough for everyone to head home with their photos, their little souvenir, sugar-glued teeth, and the satisfaction of having “done” the Mekong.
But this quick-and-dirty show is her smokescreen.
She sells folklore out front so the rest gets left the hell alone.
By three o’clock, the herd has cleared out.
The boats are back in.
The conical hats are put away.
The tourists are already back on their coach, headed for the next box to tick.
I find My Tho again, down by the Bao Dinh Canal, counting the day’s takings while sipping a 333. She’s ditched the ao dai, wiped off her makeup, thrown on denim shorts, a T-shirt and a trucker cap.
The girl from the sticks lights a cigarette, staring at the stilts of the old trading houses, the tired façades, the warehouses that have seen better days but keep grinding on.
She smiles at me.
She knows exactly what she’s doing.
Because the town she’s just hidden from the tourists is precisely the one that deserves a slower look.
Its urban fabric.
Its old shop signs.
Its tropical modernism of the 1960s and 70s.
Its cinemas in tears.
Its façades crumbling under the monsoon rains.
Its rusted latticework power poles, pure relics of colonial infrastructure.
Its relationship with the river.
Everything that doesn’t fit into a boat ride, a conical hat and three coconut candies.
The missed encounter
By jumping straight from coach to boat, the tourist herd misses the physical reality of My Tho entirely. Its urban stitching.
Do they even register the town they’re passing through?
Do they know that My Tho was the terminus of the first railway line in French Indochina?
That, by the late nineteenth century, trains were already linking Saigon to this delta town, making My Tho one of the colony’s first laboratories of railway modernity?
Laying seventy kilometres of track through the mud, the swamps and the delta’s rạch canals was an engineering nightmare.
Probably not.
Truth is, the programme runs like clockwork.
Coach.
Dock.
Boat.
Canal.
Coconut palms.
Candy.
Photo.
Back to the coach.
My Tho isn’t a town anymore. It’s become a layover.
And while the tourist herd crams onto the canals to gawk at two rows of water coconut palms, the town just sits there, right under their noses.
A whole physical city nobody takes the time to look at.
The delta is right there in front of them.
They’ve simply come looking elsewhere for what they’re already passing through.
