Saigon time and the cyclical time of exile

Saigon time and the cyclical time of exile names a condition in which displacement is measured not only by distance from home but by a time that cannot move cleanly forward. A clock carved in the shape of the homeland turns that contradiction into an object: its hands pivot in the south, its dial encircles Saigon, and its apparent error becomes the refugees’ own unsettled chronology. The unnamed narrator recognizes that exile is a life divided between here and there, present and past, with return always imagined but never securely dated.

Exile as a geography of waiting

The unnamed narrator writes to his aunt on the first anniversary of Saigon’s fall, or liberation, or both. The anniversary does not offer a simple point from which to measure a new life. Instead, his letter gathers a year of tribulation into a history told from the exiles’ tearful point of view, a process that stirs his own tears and draws him into what he describes as a fog bank of memory. The uncertain naming of the event itself reflects the unresolved time in which the refugees live: departure has happened, but its meaning and ending remain unsettled.

That year has been shaped by sponsorship and dispersal. No refugee is released without someone guaranteeing that the newcomer will not become dependent on public assistance. Those without immediate sponsors appeal to former employers, soldiers who once advised them, former lovers, churches, and even casual acquaintances. Some leave alone, some as families, and some families are split apart. A few are settled in warm western climates reminiscent of home, while many are sent to distant states whose names are difficult for them to pronounce. Their altered pronunciations of Chicago, New York, Texas, and California make the new geography audible as a series of unfamiliar distances.

Before leaving the camp, refugees exchange addresses and telephone numbers, relying on a refugee telegraph to learn which cities offer work, where taxes are lowest, where assistance is best, where racism is least severe, and where more people share their appearance and food. The imagined network reaches across the country, but it does not undo the bureaucratic scattering that has separated its members. The unnamed narrator suggests that, if allowed to remain together, the refugees might have formed a self-sufficient colony, complete with the range of occupations, beliefs, politics, and dispositions found in any society. Their dispersal prevents that collective from gaining a political voice of its own. The communities nevertheless reassemble in basements, churches, backyards, and beaches, carrying fragments of shared life into their new locations.

The clock that makes exile visible

At the General and Madame’s restaurant, a clock hangs between a flag of the defeated Republic of Vietnam and a beer advertisement. Unlike the familiar flag and poster, the clock is new to the unnamed narrator: a craftsperson in exile has carved it from hardwood into the shape of the homeland. The hands pivot in the south, while the numbers form a halo around Saigon. Its design gives the lost country a working face, but also makes the city the center around which the clock’s time turns.

The unnamed narrator first treats the clock as incorrectly set. Madame corrects him: it is set to Saigon time. The difference is fourteen hours, yet the clock complicates which location should count as the standard. By its measure, it is the displaced people who are out of time. Their distance from the homeland is finite, the narrator observes, but the number of years before they can close it may be infinite. Return is therefore the question organizing their lives, even when no answer can be given.

The clock challenges the idea that refugees simply inhabit two cultures. They inhabit two time zones as well: the present where they have been resettled and the past that continues to orient them. This is not the forward or backward travel of science fiction. The clock’s exposed mechanism of meaning is circular movement. Exile does not carry its subjects steadily away from memory toward a completed new life; it repeatedly turns them toward the place they have lost. The wooden homeland is at once a timepiece and a small model of that suspended motion.

Repeated clocks, unsettled belonging

The same kind of clock reappears in Sonny’s apartment. The unnamed narrator finds it above the dining table, among a typewriter, papers, and cigarette smoke. Its presence connects Sonny’s domestic space to the General and Madame’s restaurant: two different interiors are oriented by the same Saigon-centered time. The clock is not simply a decorative emblem of nostalgia. In both settings, it locates people physically elsewhere while keeping the lost city central to how their time is understood.

That repetition also gives the idea a formal shape. The clock returns in another room, as the exiles themselves return in memory and in gatherings, without restoring the home they remember. Its repeated appearance makes the past present without making it recoverable. The refugees are not depicted as having simply exchanged one stable identity for another; they remain caught between locations and temporal registers, their daily lives proceeding while their sense of home circles back toward Saigon.

Departure and the time still ahead

On the evening before their planned departure by sea, the unnamed narrator and Bon prepare to join tens of thousands of people fleeing as boat refugees. Their route is set out in practical intervals: families will leave their homes as if taking a short trip, travel by bus to a village three hours south, meet a ferryman, and cross by skiff to a larger fishing trawler. The narrator, Bon, the navigator, and the navigator’s family will carry a cipher and the manuscript in a rucksack protected against water. The journey promises movement through space, but no certain arrival or release from the temporal condition represented by the clock.

The manuscript becomes part of what they carry into that uncertain future. The unnamed narrator describes it as their attempt to represent themselves against those who have represented them, while the cipher they share with the commissar replaces the gold hidden in the rucksack’s false bottom. The objects make the departure both material and political: the escape involves fare, a route, a boat, and the danger of the hold, but also the preservation of words and a secret connection. The plan is not presented as an achieved return or a guaranteed safe passage. It is a decision to leave again, this time toward an unknown harbor.

At the threshold of that voyage, the exiles remain aware of the possibility that they may be unwanted wherever they arrive. They reject the condescension carried by the name boat people, yet do not claim exemption from the human tendency to turn away from others in need. Their hope is correspondingly tentative but not extinguished: they still consider themselves revolutionaries, now searching for a revolution, and they hold to the immediate cause of wanting to live. Saigon time thus ends not with the clock reaching a destination but with people preparing to move while carrying the past, their account of themselves, and an uncertain future together.