Along the busy Điện Biên Phủ Street that travels through the former districts 1, 3, 10 and Bình Thạnh is Hẻm 27, located almost next to Trường Sa Street along the Nhiêu Lộc Canal.
Entering Hẻm 27 feels like arriving at a typical, laid-back residential area of Saigon. You will notice two- or three-storied houses, a tiệm tạp hóa every 10 steps you take, and of course, delicious eateries packed with locals. But as you travel deeper, it gradually becomes narrower, with houses starting to look smaller and less well-built than those at the alley’s entrance. You start to notice even narrower alleys along the way; these smaller hẻms contain even smaller houses. There, you can catch glimpses of the ordinary lives of the people: light flickering from dangling lightbulbs, uncles smoking on scooters parked out front, aunties spreading out on the floors making food, most likely to sell as their livelihoods, and if you go down these narrower hẻms, eventually you would reach a channel called Xuyên Tâm.
Views of Xuyên Tâm Canal. Photo via Đầu tư.
Rạch Xuyên Tâm is a tributary of the Nhiêu Lộc canal, flowing through Bình Thạnh and Gò Vấp and ending at the Vàm Thuật River. For over 50 years, the banks of Xuyên Tâm have been the lifeline for thousands of low-income working-class families, including my own. We have relied on the channel to build our lives in a city that has become increasingly expensive. As of May 2026, hundreds of these families have moved elsewhere; many more will follow, as part of the city’s cleanup efforts and infrastructure improvements.
A theory on how this neighborhood came to be
As a city built with and upon a large network of rivers, canals, and channels, many aspects of life here go hand in hand with bodies of water. For a long time, local waterways have been used as means of transportation, creating a culture of economic activities right on their banks and surfaces. Many markets and neighborhoods have formed near the water. One such neighborhood grew alongside the Đôi channel in former District 8; District 7 houses the Tẻ canal neighborhood; and in Bình Thạnh, in addition to the one along Xuyên Tâm canal, there is a similar neighborhood in Văn Thánh.
My mother in the first home my parents built
For as long as I can remember, Xuyên Tâm has felt well-established. I suspect people were first drawn here for the same reasons people have always settled near bodies of water. The channel itself is less than one kilometer from Bà Chiểu Market; schools, supermarkets, churches, and pagodas are all within two to three kilometers. Furthermore, the area is adjacent to former District 1, Gò Vấp, and District 2. This proximity to so many other populated, developed neighborhoods creates abundant work opportunities while supporting a generally low cost of living. Many of the families who lived here were blue-collar workers with limited education who relied on that proximity to neighboring areas for work.
Before moving away due to the city’s cleanup efforts, my family had a long history living in the Xuyên Tâm channel neighborhood. It all started when my grandmother fled her hometown in the Mekong Delta during the war against the French and settled in Saigon, where she met my grandfather. Like many children born during the 1960s, my mother grew up in a family with more than 10 siblings and had few opportunities for a formal education. In the early 1980s, when she met my father, she was a single mother with two children, but my father pursued my mother and they eventually decided to start living together and work to provide for the children and each other. Then came my older brother and me.
The view from our kitchen window overlooking the canal. During low tide, not much water is visible.
My mother often told the story of how our old home came to be. “It was a pigsty,” she would say about the plot of land when she bought it. At first, they could only afford to make a house with old wood planks and metal sheets for the roof. My older sister and brother once told me how, when they were little, tides from the channel would rise and flood the house, and how they would enthusiastically and innocently splash around in the water while my mom frantically stacked things in the house up high. In the early 2000s, a few years after I was born, my father’s work finally started to look up and my family was able to renovate the house from wood planks to brick and cement. For more than 30 years, that humble home was my mother’s pride and joy. Thanks to her tremendous effort to build something out of nothing, it was where my siblings and I grew up, with all the glories of childhood, bad days included.
Growing up near Rạch Xuyên Tâm
The narrow alleyway leading to the our home.
Neighborhoods like Xuyên Tâm are quite distinctive compared to other Saigon residential quarters. They have existed alongside other popular areas like Chợ Lớn or downtown Saigon but their existence has mostly been obscure. You can’t find neighborhoods like Xuyên Tâm on Traveloka or Booking.com, even to some residents of Saigon, these neighborhoods are unfamiliar.
One thing I noticed growing up here was how the houses seem to be built on the essential need to put a roof over a family's heads, in the spirit of working with whatever little resource one might have. The houses were not constructed by architects or engineers, but men with some construction experience. Therefore, they serve the most basic and important function of a house, which is to shelter, and anything else is a bonus. The houses are often built packed together, in some cases sharing the same wall, leaving little to no space for ventilation or escape routes. This becomes more and more obvious amongst the houses further down the alleys.
Because of all of these factors, fire was always a looming concern. Each month, on days when it’s customary for households to burn votive papers as offerings for dead relatives, neighbors would remind each other to pay attention to the smell of burning or smoke. On such occasions, everyone in my alley would stop whatever they were doing and go ask around until they found the source of the smell and were sure that everything was under control. Most houses also didn’t have a proper waste disposal system and no septic tanks, meaning that all the household liquid waste got flushed directly into the canal water. Most families would pay for trash pick-up to handle their solid waste, but some just treated the canal like their personal trash chute.
Those living along the canal are not always concerned with keeping it clean. Photo via Đầu tư.
Our Xuyên Tâm neighbors
The people of Xuyên Tâm canal are a mix of those whose families had lived there since its early days, and those who came to live there over time. Many are diligent workers, often making their living through street food carts or stalls, and small home businesses like tạp hóa or tailoring services. Among those who make an honest living are others who were stuck in bad gambling and drug habits. Growing up surrounded by people whose career was selling food, I started to notice how labor-intensive the work is, especially when they are not professionally trained or do they own any proper kitchenware. The dishes that they sell are often noodles or desserts such as chè that include many components, which are mostly homemade. For this reason, they spend the majority of their days cooking. In my old alley, the atmosphere would be lively as early as 2–3am as people got up to prepare food to sell breakfast. The people here are hard-working, simple folks.
My mother and aunts making bánh tằm at home, a common scene among many households in the neighborhood. Bánh tằm is a type of rice noodles used as the main ingredient for bánh tằm bì, a Mekong Delta specialty.
They work long hours to survive and take care of their families, but they can be inconsiderate at times. Their idea of entertainment and leisure often includes drinking parties with blasting music or karaoke without concern for the whole neighborhood that has to hear it. Their idea of conflict resolution between neighbors often resembles the way Vietnamese parents cut fruits for their kids after smacking them instead of talking and saying sorry. Two neighbors could cuss each other out one day and yet, weeks later, one would help the other with parking, going back to talking as if the quarrel had never happened. One time, my mother agreed to let the neighbor next door use our house’s right wall as their own when they built their house. While this was a gesture of kindness, it resulted in multiple incidents when the neighbor's son got drunk and slammed our wall to harass us. The sense of community was always present here, but at times it could feel toxic and thoughtless.
Despite all of that, I would not describe my childhood as anything but fulfilling. As a child, I never felt the troubles of the adults here, and the neighborhood didn’t have a negative effect on me, despite seeing and hearing many fights and incidents. I was fortunate enough to live most of my life in the brick house my parents renovated, which was much sturdier than the one made from plain wood planks that preceded it. In my memory, childhood was the days spent in the care of my parents, going to school on weekdays and church on the weekends, having friends, community, warm meals, and play. For that, I have the Xuyên Tâm canal to thank, as it provided the stability that was foundational to a childhood I enjoyed. It allowed me to stay in one place and thus have set down roots and feel grounded while developing my sense of self and building relationships. I realize now how much the time living here has shaped who I am today. My special bonds with it that were not always apparent before. As this realization arrived, so did the final days of the Xuyên Tâm canal.
Happy moments during birthday celebrations in the home after it was renovated.
A new beginning for the canal and for us
In the months leading up to the day when our family would be moving to our new home, I watched the houses around mine being torn down. As I saw the scenery I grew up in gradually disappearing, reduced to bricks and dust, I was filled with conflicting emotions of hopelessness and hopefulness.
I was sad to see the excavators tearing down house after house, knowing that soon, my very own house would suffer the same fate. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of hopelessness amidst everything. I was hopeless to think of one day when the house that has sheltered our joys and sorrows for so long would no longer exist. The presence of the house and the place were physical evidence to all the hardships of my family and all the turmoil of growing up there. Once the scenes are gone, what would be left of our history? I have come to terms with the fact that it would only exist in our memory from now on. And each time I felt down, I reminded myself that this was for the best, that our family had emerged from this ordeal with the best outcome possible.
My mother with a neighbor's child in front of our former home.
I was also hopeful when thinking of our new place to live, an apartment located in a nearby building that my family was eligible to buy at a discounted price, because we were losing our only house. I was hopeful that we would have a stable place without having to go into debt to the bank for it. But above all, I was hopeful about my mother finally being able to own a place of her own, with legal papers acknowledging her ownership, an achievement after decades of her hard work and never spending anything more than the bare necessities. In addition to my family, I was happy to think of the Xuyên Tâm canal being cleaned and its environment improved; it will no longer be a dumpster for household waste, and soon, it will be a neater and nicer place where the community can enjoy themselves.
Soon, the Xuyên Tâm canal will be given a new identity. After the cleanup, there will be no more shabby houses. It will become legitimate, and the real estate price will inevitably skyrocket. People will consider it more “civilized,” but it will never again be a place for those with nothing looking to build something from scratch in Saigon.
Photos courtesy of Ngọc Hân.
