In this place, nothing is certain.

It’s not just the language barrier, although that certainly creates its own set of problems. It’s the people themselves. Ask any ex-pat Westerner in Saigon and they’ll tell you: The Vietnamese are an unpredictable and confusing lot.

They say one thing when they mean another; they act inexplicably, according to unseen forces. Time to them is ‘rubber’, elastic, meaning appointments and dates are hopeless before you set them. The very streets appear to change configuration overnight, and no store or roadside is exactly the same as it was yesterday.

The Vietnamese always seem to be preoccupied with something else. Perhaps this is why I’ve found it so difficult to speak to them about their history. Whenever I ask our hosts about the American War, or what this or that local shrine represents, I am at best given a curt, cursory response. People find it incredibly hard to speak about anything before 1975. This contrasted greatly with my experiences of Europe, where it seemed like every person we met knew the history of their local town by heart, and was proud to speak of it.

Gradually, I grew to suspect that the Vietnamese cared little for their own history. Clearly it was the fault of the Communist government. History was suppressed and hidden in order to keep the people in line. The ‘Reunification Palace’ was filled with Party-sponsored faux history; so too the War Remnants Museum, in which crowds of schoolchildren laughed and strolled between American helicopters and artillery pieces. This nation, I thought, had not healed its war wounds; it had hidden them beneath a cloud of ignorance.

Two days ago, I was forced to rethink my conclusions.

We were awakened at 6.00am by an incredible noise from the local Buddhist pagoda across the street: jangling guitars, wailing voices and pulse-pounding drums. The noise went on all morning, and eventually we went to investigate. It was a festival of some kind, with many of the neighbourhood people attending, but we didn’t go inside for fear of causing offense (our travels in Italy had instilled a healthy sense of respect for other peoples’ sacred spaces).

The music went on all afternoon and into the night. We learned from our hosts that the festival was in honour of a local woman who had rebelled against the Chinese in centuries past. Late that night we ventured out onto the street again, cameras in hand, hoping to snap a few shots from a safe, respectful distance.

But no sooner had we reached the pagoda than we were swept up in a tide of smiling, happy locals. Insistent, they ushered us inside. The temple was beautiful, bedecked in blood-red and gold, filled with offerings of fruit and heady with the smell of incense. More than a hundred people, from the very young to the very old, were crowded around a brilliantly-decorated stage, on which stood actors in elaborate Chinese-style costume and make-up. They played the parts of the rebel woman and her compatriots, hamming it up to the delight of the audience. Opposite the stage, children burned incense sticks and bowed in front of statues of ancient warrior-heroes, patriots who had fought the Chinese invaders.

Far from being outsiders in that ceremony, we felt like celebrities. Every face was warm and kind. They all but demanded we take photos, even rushing to bring us stools to stand on for a better shot. One toothless old lady, in charge of ringing the temple’s bell, virtually manhandled us into the prime viewing positions. Smiling all the while, she implored us to pray before the altar, but we excused ourselves on the grounds that we didn’t know how. All the while I was thinking one thing: This woman is old enough to remember the War. What happened to her? To her family? After that horror, that Holocaust, how can she be so kind to a bunch of Westerners she’s never met?

That experience opened my eyes. Far from being ignorant of their history, the Vietnamese are fiercely patriotic, stoic, fatalistic and proud. The Americans were only one in a long chain of invaders to be repelled; they were not the first nor last empire to threaten this country. The Communist government might twist the facts, repress the real history, but the people do not forget. They do, however, forgive. After all, they won the war. And whatever historic pride they cannot express in public, they can celebrate within the sanctity of a pagoda, surrounded by their community, even welcoming in outsiders to share in the experience.

At least, that’s what I think.

But in this place, I can’t be certain.