But there is also something else I need to explain, and I don’t know if it will be easily grasped or not, but it’s an important aspect of this part of the story and should be told, even though it may only be understood by those whose origins are similar to mine. In a significant part, I grew up on the pews of a church that believed in individual salvation and, despite the wave of social change and summers of love, large swathes of my fellow countrymen and women remained immune to the Age of Aquarius, registering only bewilderment and clinging to the age-old beliefs that had appeared to nurture the nation and preserve its soul. By the end of my teens I was no longer a traditional believer but something to which I can’t give a name stopped me embracing the new world on offer even though it wasn’t exactly rushing towards me with open arms. I had been taught that I was in the world but not of it, even though that now sounds to me like a hopeless negation of what life offers – a sin in itself – and so I found myself leaving the world that I had known since childhood but never feeling I could belong completely to any other that wasn’t shaped by some evident moral code. And the moral code wasn’t about sin and punishment but rather something as vague as trying to do the right thing and not shutting yourself down to spiritual possibilities, wherever and however they could be found. But whichever way I try to explain it, it felt as if I lived then in my own self-created limbo, unable to connect to my own happiness because I didn’t fully know in which world it might be grasped or how I might journey there.

So although it feels embarrassing to reveal, and possibly even difficult to believe, I went to Saigon and left it in the same virginal state. All around me were some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, whether they wore the traditional ao dais or skimpy Westernised clothes. There were, too, the wealthy women with recently Westernised eyes that you saw window-shopping in the expensive Eden Arcade who exuded a superiority to all those around them and who wouldn’t deign to glance sideways at such as me. But you couldn’t be an American in Saigon for very long before someone came on to you willing to trade themselves for as many dollars as they might get. And of course there were times when I was tempted, times when I came close, but always I wanted something more than I knew I would get and I was frightened to do what I thought was a bad thing both for me and for them. If someone had offered me love, I would have grasped it with both hands, but what I couldn’t do was disfigure that desire for what ultimately was an economic exchange. And I hated what I saw so often in that city – pretty, petite women hanging on the arms of much older, pot-bellied American contractors with coarse hands and mouths; young women with smack-deadened eyes needing you only for a fix; girls hustling with the learned and obscene language of the street. As much as physically I wanted the experience, there was always something even stronger holding me back.