[ESSAY] “Saigon, in a Previous Life” by Yun Li

Yun Li’s note on “Saigon, in a Previous Life”: “Saigon, in a Previous Life” was originally written in Chinese and published as “西贡的前世今生” in the Night Light Cup section of Xinmin Evening News in Shanghai on 14 April 2025. I translated the piece into English myself.

I wrote the piece because Saigon struck me as a city with both historical depth and an unexpectedly romantic undertone. Its past is not light, yet its present does not feel imprisoned by memory. In recent years, the city’s economic energy and urban momentum have made me feel that it is entering a new stage of historical life. What moved me was not only the visible development, but the emotional atmosphere of a city standing near a threshold.

As a writer from Shanghai, I could not help thinking of Shanghai around the year 2000, when the city seemed to be standing in the wind of a new era. Cities at such moments often possess a deeply affecting vitality: a mixture of ambition, uncertainty, restlessness, and beauty. They are not merely changing; they are trying to imagine themselves into a different future.

I wanted this essay to be read in English because Saigon is often approached through war, memory, or travel. Those are important frames, but they are not the whole city. I hope the English version allows readers to encounter Saigon as a living urban presence: layered, wounded, sensual, resilient, and still becoming. Translating the essay also allows my own Chinese-language city writing to enter a wider conversation about Asia, memory, and the emotional lives of cities.

Saigon,
in a Previous Life

by Yun Li

Let me call it Saigon.

Saigon by the river. Saigon as Duras knew it. Saigon with the scent of green papaya drifting through the air.

Ho Chi Minh City is, without question, the city’s banner in this life. Saigon is something else: the soul of a previous one, more hesitant, more wounded, more stubborn in its pain. There are places in this world that seize our imagination more completely through art than through arrival. Saigon, for me, was the white hem of a French girl’s skirt stirred by the wind, while in the back seat a well-dressed Chinese man felt desire rise against his better judgement. It was also the damp heat of the tropical forest, the dust, the frogs, the ants. It was Mui, running through the fields, then bending over kitchen work, splitting open a green papaya to reveal a spoonful of white seeds gleaming like pearls.

The Lover and The Scent of Green Papaya had woven the Saigon of my imagination in warp and weft. In one ran a desire that refused to die, climbing over the scaffolding of fate; in the other, a womanhood that moved within inherited rules and was rewarded for it. Both films are patient and sincere, rich in pauses and suggestion. Yet The Scent of Green Papaya keeps placing screens between the eye and the world (leaves, doorframes, bits of furniture) as if borrowing the cool gaze of a bystander.

Duras and Tran Anh Hung look backwards from different positions. One girl is rebellious and self-directed; the other gentle, composed, and compliant. Their bodies may be made of the same flesh, but not their destinies. To the girl in The Lover, Mui’s fulfilment might have looked less like liberation than happiness imposed from without.

The Saigon I inherited from literature and cinema was stubbornly itself. French colonial influence seemed to float only on the city’s surface, condensed into architecture, coffee, and baguettes, all of them already altered. By day, it resembled a faded colonial photograph; by night, Asia’s sweat and desire seemed to rise through it. There was no spring there, no real change of season, only a climate that held its own intensity year-round.

What stood before me was another matter.

Hurried, crowded, noisy, overheated: motorbikes everywhere, vendors everywhere, the whole city seemed determined to grow greasy with ambition. What struck me first was the raw smell of commercial life, still unfiltered, still close to the street. This was Ho Chi Minh City: not languid, not wistful, but aggressively alive. Economic change had entered it with astonishing force. The old literary Saigon had not disappeared so much as been cut off mid-sentence.

And yet it did not feel unfamiliar.

Not because it resembled the films, but because it overlapped with another memory of my own. Many people arrive in Ho Chi Minh City and say that it feels like Shanghai twenty years ago. Twenty years ago was also my fifth year in Shanghai. Only now, with that distance behind me, could I understand what had been good about that earlier Shanghai: its restlessness, its grease, its hunger, its almost embarrassing vitality.

I was staying at the Renaissance by the river. The lobby manager was a pretty young woman with the textbook eight-tooth smile and the impeccable posture of luxury hospitality. She spoke to me earnestly in Chinese (not fluent, but certainly serviceable). She told me that she spoke five languages: Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and English. None perfectly, she admitted. She was still trying.

Later, I saw her again outside the hotel, off duty in a T-shirt and jeans, running towards her boyfriend waiting on a motorbike. They laughed into each other’s faces, all flirtation and brightness.

She was neither Duras’s girl nor Mui. She belonged to a city that had learned to move faster than either of them: a city whose desires came dressed in language skills, hotel uniforms, motorbike helmets, and the unembarrassed rush towards the person waiting at the kerb. I watched the two of them disappear into traffic. Reading Duras, I had come to think of love as more than skin or sustenance: a refusal to die, a heroic dream that persists within an exhausted life. For a moment, Ho Chi Minh City looked less like the city I had come to find than the Shanghai I remembered: still hungry, still a little greasy, and absolutely alive.

^{How to cite: Li, Yun. “Saigon, in a Previous Life.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Jul. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/07/09/saigon-previous-life.}

Yun Li is a Shanghai-based literary non-fiction writer whose work explores cities, historical memory, freedom, and the moral atmosphere of ordinary life. A longtime Chinese essayist and former newspaper columnist, she has published widely in Chinese, including in Xinmin Evening News and other literary venues. She was a 2026 participant in the Banff Centre Literary Journalism Residency, where she developed English-language literary non-fiction. Her English essay “Dublin Without Snow” appeared in Outhouse Magazine in the UK. She is currently working on The Air of Cities, a book-length project about urban memory, civic life, and inner freedom.