Saigon Central Post Office

This guide to the Saigon Central Post Office centers on Duong Van Ngo, who joined the postal service at sixteen in 1946 and, decades after he could have retired, asked instead for the hardest job left in the building: public letter writer, one of only six left in the whole country. He worked in Vietnamese, in French learned as a boy under colonial rule, and in English picked up later from American teachers, inside a vaulted hall the French raised between 1886 and 1891 and often wrongly credited to Gustave Eiffel.