60 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FEATURE Scooter Wisdom Life Lessons from the Streets of Saigon For this author, commuting via scooter offered valuable lessons in how to survive—and thrive—in a complicated world. BY JOHN HARRIS John Harris’ career as a USAID Foreign Service officer brought him and his family to Vietnam, Ukraine, and South Africa. He was RIFed in September 2025 and currently lives in Cairo. As we prepared to move to Vietnam two years ago, which we often did in our itinerant Foreign Service lives, we found ourselves looking around for cultural portals through which to learn about our new home. Given the rich history of the country, not to mention our complex bilateral relationship, there was much to choose from. An obvious place to start was Anthony Bourdain’s decades-long obsession with Vietnamese cuisine, or Ken Burns’ searing history of what is referred to here as the “American War,” or Viet Thanh Nguyen’s extraordinary novel, The Sympathizer, now an HBO series. Somehow, however, it was the BBC’s hilariously absurd “Top Gear” episode about three middle-aged Brits’ disaster-strewn motorcycle trip from the south to the north of Vietnam (more than 1,000 miles) that really spoke to us. This wacky adventure stuck with me as we subsequently made our way around the country. I began to see the streets as one massive and connected organism, made of millions of individual parts but somehow behaving coherently as a united, kaleidoscopic whole. e Of all the planet’s megacities, few are as synonymous with motorcycles and scooters as Saigon. Saigon—or Ho Chi Minh City, as it has been officially named since reunification in 1976 (though its residents use the two names interchangeably)— pulses with relentless two-wheel energy. Several roads are designed exclusively for scooters, and many of the city’s gleaming new bridges across the storied Saigon River have dedicated, walled-off, scooter-only lanes. Cars are an annoying afterthought; unlike the capital, Hanoi, its northern, traffic-filled rival where cars choke the streets, Saigon is resolutely of, by, and for the scooter. Driving a car, you feel like a whale swimming through a school of nimble fish, moving slowly, deliberately, in a traffic pattern ruled by packs of agile, darting scooters. With a population of nearly 10 million in Saigon, with likely at least as many scooters, its streets should be noisy and polluted. But every year the streets get cleaner, mostly because of the rise of electric vehicles (EVs). With U.S. government support, Vietnam is now a global leader in EV technologies. Two-wheeled EV entrepreneurs, in particular, are booming and, in some cases, preparing to export their technologies to the U.S. Keep an eye out for Vietnamese start-ups, like VinFast, DatBike, and Selex, any one of which may change the global EV market in the decades to come. ISTOCKPHOTO/TATIANA TEREKHINA
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