Old Saigon's deep literary seam secretly mined

THE street hustler's throaty offer of 'Hey Mister, you want books?' may not immediately quicken the pulse, but on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City it is one tip worth following up.

You may be offered a collection of photocopied foreign texts on Vietnam or led discreetly to one of several shops now doing a roaring trade mining the rich seam left from more literary times in the old Saigon.

Given deep Communist Party sensitivities about anything deemed 'cultural pollution' in a city run by 'puppet capitalists' up until 1975, it is an underground trade, but one - for the time being - that seems tolerated.

Most shops operate under cover of selling coffee or fabrics but once inside you find shelves stacked high with French texts and moulding American-era works.

Incomes are supplemented by supplies of pirated reproductions of modern books on Vietnam that may not make it into the country officially. Others are classics such as Graham Greene's The Quiet American or Sorrow of War, the controversial memoir of disenchanted North Vietnamese warrior Bao Ninh.

'Unfortunately there are few secrets in this city,' one shop-owner said.

'They know we are here so I guess we all fear the knock on the door sometime. We are basically okay, but we have to be careful,' he said with a passing nod to a large framed portrait of Ho Chi Minh.