My internship ended in early April. Conveniently, so did the contract for the room I had been renting in District 9. My next university semester would not begin until May, which left me with almost an entire month where I technically had nothing to do and nowhere I needed to be.
I could have gone back to Can Tho. That would have been the sensible move.
But April 30, 2025 was the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of the South and National Reunification, and Saigon was preparing for a national-level military and civilian parade. The army, police, militia, mass organizations, aircraft, helicopters, flags, formations, and what felt like half the country were all becoming part of the city for a few weeks.
I am not going to pretend I stayed because I casually stumbled into a cool air show. I am a communist and proud of it. This anniversary mattered to me, and there was no way I was leaving Saigon right before it happened.
So instead of going home, I moved into the place Hnhat and Aba were sharing and stayed there for about a month.
Aba was busy. He was also, respectfully, too lazy to spend entire days crossing the city and standing in rehearsal crowds. That left Hnhat and me.
The city started feeling different well before April 30. You could look up on an ordinary morning and find helicopters carrying the Party flag and the national flag over the buildings. Then the Yak-130s and Su-30MK2s would appear, and whatever normal plan you had for the morning stopped mattering for a while.
On a typical day I would wake up, head toward District 1 in the morning, and try to catch the aircraft practice. Then I would come back east. In the afternoon, Hnhat had university, so I went with him but skipped the actual university part and waited at an internet cafe instead. Once he finished class, we met up and headed downtown together for the evening rehearsal.
The rehearsals happened at night because the parade route ran directly through central streets. Closing those roads during the day would have been even more disruptive than closing them at night, so the formations usually started moving around 8 PM or later.
This meant we could easily spend the whole fucking day outside just to watch a few hours of marching.
Saigon Metro Line 1 had only opened a few months earlier, so it was already an attraction by itself. Add a once-in-fifty-years anniversary and thousands of people all trying to reach District 1 at the same time, and the trains became completely unreasonable.
We were staying in District 9 and needed to travel west toward the city center. The obvious plan was to board a westbound train. The problem was that everybody else had the same obvious plan, and by the time a train reached us there was barely room to breathe, let alone sit.
So we did something stupid that worked.
We boarded in the opposite direction, rode farther away from District 1 to the end of the line, then came back with the train before the main crowd could fill it. It cost us extra time and made absolutely no geographical sense if you looked at only the destination, but we secured seats on one of the most crowded nights of the year.
The second combined rehearsal happened on the night of April 22 and continued late enough that I remembered it as April 23. By then, the center of Saigon was full of flags, uniforms, barricades, spectators, and the constant feeling that something much larger than a normal city event was moving through the streets.
When the rehearsal ended, everybody tried to leave at once. We reached the metro and found a line that looked about a kilometer long. Maybe it was shorter. It did not feel shorter.
We waited because there was not exactly a better plan. The crowd crawled forward, the station swallowed people a few at a time, and eventually we finally made it inside.
Then the metro closed.
After an entire day built around reaching District 1, we had successfully stranded ourselves there late at night with home still on the other side of the city.
I do not remember every logistical step that followed. I remember that Thao's bike became the rescue plan, and I remember Hnhat and me finally getting back around 2 AM, completely exhausted.
Reasonable people might have treated that as a warning.
On April 27, we went back for the full-dress rehearsal.
This one happened in daylight and was effectively the final version before the official ceremony. The formations were complete. The streets were packed again. Helicopters carried the flags over the city, fighters crossed the skyline, and rows of soldiers moved past crowds that had been waiting for hours to see them.
The official event was still three days away, but we had seen the night rehearsal and the full-dress rehearsal. We already knew how crowded those had been. April 30 itself was going to be on another level, so we made the rare intelligent decision not to force our way downtown again.
Skipping the official morning did not feel like missing the story. For most of April, the story had already been happening around us.
It was in the aircraft that kept appearing over the city. It was in the soldiers and police practicing late into the night. It was in the flags on streets nowhere near the main route. It was in Hnhat finishing university and meeting me afterward so we could do the same ridiculous trip again. It was in Aba deciding, correctly for his own sanity, to stay home. It was in a metro full of people who all wanted to be there, and in Thao's bike getting us home when the metro could not.
I came to Saigon for an internship. When that ended, I stayed because I wanted to witness something that mattered to my country and to me.
That empty month between internship and university could have disappeared without leaving much behind. Instead, I remember every part of it: the aircraft noise, the red flags, the formations, the crowd, the exhaustion, my friends, and the stupid route we took just to get a seat on the metro.
The month began because I had nowhere I needed to be.
It ended with me getting home at 2 AM on someone else's bike after spending the day trying to watch history walk past.
Honestly, worth it.