If you turn off the Pharmacity on Thảo Điền Street, and drive down a bit, you’ll see one of my favorite cafes in Saigon: Bluish Cafe. I stopped by recently on a Wednesday afternoon. It was quiet, and the quiet felt good. The quietness slowed things down. So slow, in fact, I could finally hear.
The clicking of mice, the clacking of keys. Bike exhausts and the roll of five-wheel construction trucks. The chime of glass straws. The slurps of final sips. The jingle of keys. The crispness of a page turning. The slither of a fresh record shedding its plastic skin. The place is called Bluish and I don’t know why. Maybe the owner likes blue. So I take a moment to look around and scan for blue.
There’s a small blue ribbon wrapped around the pvc pipe above the doorway and a blue neon sign next to it that says, “Jump in!” On the bookshelf are blue books like All The Light We Cannot See and Ed Ames is wearing a blue polo on the cover of his 1967 album, My Cup Runneth Over. There’s a tired blue leather couch with an even more tired cat enjoying a midweek siesta with what appears to be a blue collar around its neck. The front desk has a bunch of blue Bluish stickers, the same sticker that’s on a guitar upstairs where the cafe sells records—Bluish records. The barista has a blue denim apron on. The phone on the table in front me, my phone, has a blue Shazam’s logo that I keep pressing every three minutes. Supertramp, Francoise Hardy, plus Toro y Moi & Khruangbin Live at the Fillmore Miami in September 2023. What color is the cover of the last of the trio? Blue.
The most intriguing blue in the room is the shade of blue on the dozen or so photographs on the walls including eight on the wall in front of me — a two by four collection of crooked pictures featuring eight snapshots into eight different worlds. The pictures are crooked but they all seem to balance each other out just like all of the photos are from different worlds, but somehow all seem connected. Maybe they’re all actually black and white, maybe I drank too much coffee and not enough water and maybe I’ve been looking for blue for too long now and my eyes are playing tricks. After all, I’m wearing all blue. Maybe I need some blue light glasses. I’m beginning to spin head to toe like the record player filling the room with tunes.
The final blue I noticed was in the book in front of me. It was the word blue, well, technically blue-and-white, as in “Blue-and-white striped streets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.” This blue is Joan Didion’s blue. These words come from the final essay, “Goodbye To All of That’ in her 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Didion’s writing makes me think she had the blues while covering Southern California in the 1960’s. Her prose is melancholic, detached, and cold—cold like a blue glacier. Cold like the cold late spring of 1967 when she was wandering around Haight Street in San Francisco, watching the Summer of Love’s romantic ideals begin to wilt in the shade. Regardless, the name of this place most likely isn’t related to Southern California, Joan Didion, the photographer of the bluish, black and white photos hanging perfectly crooked in front of me, the Live at Fillmore Miami album, or any of the other inanimate, blue objects lying around.
Blue is an interesting color though. It calls forth feelings of calmness, sadness, and vastness like that of the inescapable sea and sky. It’s universally loved and universally put to use. The likes of Picasso, Van Gogh, Miles Davis, and Johnny Cash come to mind. Maybe the name Bluish is designed to calm you down so you can meditate on the vastness of the sea and sky. Or ponder the inescapability of the universe. Or reflect on all the ways artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers thought about the color blue and made sense of it.
Then again, it probably has nothing to do with any of that. Maybe there’s no reason the owner of this cafe called it Bluish. Maybe there doesn’t have to be. It just is. It’s just called Bluish Cafe. One of my favorite cafes in Saigon. If you turn off the Pharmacity on Thảo Điền Street and drive down a bit, you’ll see it on your left. I stopped by recently on a Wednesday afternoon. It was quiet, and the quiet felt good.The quietness slowed things down. So slow, in fact, I could finally hear.
