Vietnam

Last Morning

2007-07-31T10:41:00.000-07:00

I stood on the train platform in the cool dark of the early morning, dazed, wishing the train back from Sapa were longer so I could continue sleeping. I also longed for the past, when the course was in session and I had a nice comfortable hotel room at the Bao Khanh. Now I had no place to go. I was welcome at Dung’s house but I didn’t think it was appropriate to show up before 10am. It was only 4am now. So I had six hours to wander around Hanoi.

That wouldn’t have been so bad under normal circumstances, but I was seriously short of funds. Of the more than 15 million dong that I’d come to Vietnam with, I was down to just 308,000, around $18, plenty for a day in Vietnam. The problem was that I would have to take a taxi to the airport that evening, which would cost 180,000 dong. And I had stupidly extended my visa to July 30, a day shy of my actual departure. I anticipated trouble from corrupt cadres at the customs office, and considered it prudent to save another 100,000 for a fine, a bribe, or both.

So I stood in the dark with no real place to go and only 28,000 dong, or about $1.70. I decided to go to Hoan Kiem Lake, which I knew well and I could sit on the park bench and wait things out. I began to walk in the direction of Hoan Kiem, but the sun was only just coming through and it was still dark. All the shops were closed and the streets were completely empty. The only sign of life was the smell of early breakfast cooking fires, which wafted out of narrow alleyways. I quickly became lost and decided to go back to the train station and find a cheap cab.

I bargained hard and got a driver to take me to Hoan Kiem for 17,000 dong, a good rate that I could ill afford. Now I was down to 11,000 dong, less than a dollar. I was dropped off in the familiar district just as the red sun was coming through the trees. I found a bench on the lake near the Bao Khanh, and sat there for a long time.

All summer I’d heard that Hoan Kiem comes alive at dawn, when cool weather brings thousands to the lake for their morning exercises. It was something I’d always wanted to see but not enough to wake up four hours before class to observe. Now I had nothing better to do than watch the masses of Vietnamese beginning their day with a slow jog or synchronized exercises. Ho Chi Minh had been a fervent advocate of calisthenics and he had hundreds of diligent followers that morning. Lines of women followed numerical instructions from a scratchy radio, where a female voice chanted the first eight numbers with maddening repetition. “MOT…HAI…BA..BOOON…NAAM…SAUU……”. The women followed along, lifting their knees and flailing their arms in unison.

Elsewhere men did pushups and some just stood around and took in the sunrise. A few sat on the edge of the lake in the lotus position, meditating in front of the rising sun.

Thankfully, the irritating MOT HAI BA routine ended and the speaker transitioned into a peaceful Vietnamese string tune. The women slowed down and began to perform tai chi, which made them look like the Backstreet Boys dancing at a tenth of the speed.

It was all very nice except that I was hungry, thirsty and incredibly poor. I circled the lake, trying various ATMs in the hope that somehow my credit card would let me buy money. It didn’t. I wandered around gloomily, buying a donut from a lady for 3,000 dong.

By then it was past 7am and I was struck with an idea. I was going to visit Ho Chi Minh himself. I’d been to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum twice, but each time they weren’t allowing visitors in to see his frozen body. I’d since learned that you have to go early in the morning and there was no better time than now. So I walked over there and found it open. I stood in line with hundreds of people who could be loosely thrown into two groups. There were the Vietnamese, who waited somberly with their families, dressed in their Sunday best. And then there were the Western tourists, clad in dirty shorts, flip flops and Tiger Beer shirts, who had to be told by the stern guards to quiet down.

We were all channeled into the cool marble mausoleum—the best air conditioning in Vietnam—and fed through the central chamber around a big mahogany box with windows on three sides. Slowly, the familiar face of Ho Chi Minh came into view, excessively illuminated with a strong yellow light. His skin glowed luminously in the dim chamber and everyone filed through quietly mesmerized by the revolutionary leader, who lay there peacefully, with a half smile, covered in a blanket up to his chest. He looked, in a way, like Snow White waiting to be kissed by the prince.

I emerged back into the hot sun and started to walk back to Hoan Kiem. But something went wrong and I found myself on big commercial avenues, plodding along endlessly in the hot sun on streets I’d never seen before. People eyed me amusedly, joking to one another about how I was obviously lost. I asked a few people where Hoan Kiem was but they gave vague directions that were less than helpful and sometimes patently wrong. I dug myself deeper and deeper into a hole, in a city that was suddenly so mercilessly foreign, where I was too poor even to buy a water. For a short time, I hated the city, hated the people who couldn’t tell me where the lake was, who couldn’t discount their water, who couldn’t move their stupid motorbikes out of the dirty sidewalk.

But I couldn’t stay mad at the city for long. After a full two hours I eventually made it back to the familiar Hoan Kiem district and rested in the Bao Khanh lobby. I called Mr. Thanh, the kindly assistant to American ambassadors in Hanoi and the logistical supervisor of our course, to return my cell phone to him. He showed up within minutes and brought a very welcome development.

Over our six week stay in the Bao Khanh, a number of things had gone missing from the hotel. Desaix and Mr. Thanh had confronted the ornery hotel owner who grudgingly agreed to refund half the value of a few lost items. In total, Mr. Thanh had received $250 in crisp American bills, which he now pressed into my hand so I could distribute it to the right people once I got back to school. It was a complete fairy tale. I had come into the hotel nearly penniless and left with hundreds of dollars, which I could borrow from to buy a water, food, and pay any customs bribe for my expired visa.

I skipped out into the city, suddenly enamored with the place, and cheerfully entered Dung’s house, where of course I wouldn’t need money after all. My impoverished morning of homelessness on the mean streets of Hanoi was over.

Tu and Dung at Dung's house

Sapa Day 3

2007-07-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 30

I started off toward the northeast on foot to see the last major section of the Sapa area. I had to go down a paved road full of vans shuttling tourists to and from Lao Cai. It was not a pleasant walk. The homes along the road were gated and bitter dogs snarled at me as I passed. It started to rain. My feet were burning with blisters. Motorbike drivers stopped to pick me up and looked confused when I declined.

I approached a woman in her home ostensibly to buy a six cent bag of crackers, but actually to find out how close I was to the side road I was seeking. I was naïve to expect much. She, like every other person I’d met in the area, was completely helpless with a map. She did, however, speak Vietnamese and invited me to drink tea. I sat there in the dim living room and eeked out a polite conversation with the woman and her shy son. She stared at me intensely, a 34-year-old housewife starved of excitement, and asked me to take a picture of them. After I snapped a few, I handed her the camera and invited her to take one of her son and I. Her eyes widened as she gingerly grasped the camera, squeezed the button and let off a flash. 20 years were removed from her face and she squealed with delight, like a young girl finding a kitten in a Christmas present. It was probably the first picture she’d ever taken.

I got on my way and decided to take a motorbike six miles up to Xa Xeng, a Dao village on my map that was supposedly home to some caves. On the way the guy’s motor bike conked out. He told me to wait there, ran up the road and reappeared fifteen minutes later on another newer motorbike. Where he got it is anyone’s guess.

Xa Xeng was a big village, by Sapa standards, where the dusty quiet was occasionally interrupted by Jeeps bringing tourists in to see the caves. I approached a group of old Dao women who were sitting in a circle embroidering handbags and they directed me to a “restaurant”, a tiny convenience store where the owner heated up some spring roles and bowls of rice for me, the only customer, to enjoy for just a dollar.

I set out searching for the Taphin Cave and ended up on the wrong path, walking with a small army of Dao women who spoke very good English. One girl astutely asked me if I lived near Hollywood and if I knew any celebrities. She was disappointed when I said that I didn’t count any celebrities as friends.

With her help, I got on the right path to the Taphin Cave. There was no entrance fee per se, but the family who ran the attraction charged 90 cents to turn the lights on. The fee included a complementary guide, a nine year boy named Li Lao who shimmied around the cave like a monkey. “Careful with yo head,” he constantly warned, saving me from many collisions with low lying stalactites. Had I been three inches taller or twenty heavier, I don’t think I could have made it through the tiny passages and dripping chambers.

I came out, tipped Li Lao and began a trek back to the Sapa-Lao Cai highway via a road that would take me through the small Hmong village of Ma Tra. Or so my discredited map claimed.

The route was extraordinary, beginning in a flat valley buttressed by mountains. The clouds hung so low that I was compelled to sit on a fence and watch them drift among the hills, wrapping themselves around the deep green slopes like ghosts. It was truly haunting, sitting there watching the clouds amidst the distant creeking of bamboo water pumps and the faint din of farm animals.

I continued on through the valley and the road took me up the western wall of the valley, affording me wonderful views of the whole area. It was a long, lonely walk up the side of the mountain, but I made it to the crest and began a descent into what I assumed would be Ma Tra. But there was no town in sight, just a scattering of farmhouses.

Confused, I began asking around. I asked a pair of teenage Hmong boys hauling huge loads of sticks up a hill where Ma Tra could be found. They looked puzzled and shrugged me off, peeking behind as after they passed me, trading a joke that I couldn’t understand. I approached a suspicious woman in front of her house, asked her about Ma Tra and got nothing but a blank stare. Exasperated, I sought out a group of children. Maybe they’ll know about a the flippin’ village that’s supposed to be right on their flippin’ road. I carefully pronounced Ma Tra but they just gaped at me, mouths open, unsure of what to do.

The area was beginning to creep me out. I was surrounded by sullen villagers, unfriendly by Vietnam standards, wandering somewhere quite different from where the map said I should be. I could not afford to be lost for hours. If I missed my bus, I’d miss my train. And if I missed my train, I’d miss my flight out of Vietnam.

I decided the best thing to do would be to find any village that was substantial enough to have motorbikes and people who had some geographical concept of where they lived. I spotted a hamlet, way in the distance, which had a brick building, something I hadn’t seen in hours. I headed toward it, hoping to be delivered from this very charming, but rather endless track of rustic wasteland.

I was in luck, because the supposed village I had sighted ended up being a way station on the Sapa road. I found a group of shifty idlers/motorbike drivers and bought a quick ride into Sapa, bringing to a close a three days of adventure in an extraordinary part of the world.

Sapa Day 2

2007-07-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 29

In the morning, I was woken up when maids began knocking, asking to clean my room. I just told them that I didn’t need my room cleaned, and I went back to bed, not feeling a bit guilty about sleeping in. I slept for 14 hours, until 10am.

Finally I rose and prepared for another day of travel. This time, I decided to walk west, to the village of Cat Cat, which was advertised in the tour offices. It was a short downhill walk to Cat Cat, but my legs and feet were aching so I was not so spry. Regardless, the walk was nice, descending into a steep mountain valley blanketed in clouds. Cat Cat wasn’t anything special—just a handful of tin-roofed houses. The main attraction was the river, where a long staircase leads visitors down to a small suspension bridge.

I ran into a group of students from the Hanoi International Technical Institute (or something like that), and ended up talking to Him, and by that I don’t mean that I was praying to God. Him was a Korean student at the Institute whose father works as the Korean Military Attache at the Hanoi Embassy. He described rampant corruption in the Vietnamese military, which I could have guessed. Him is one of many Koreans who supports the War in Iraq, and having served two years in the Korean marines, he was lucky not to have been sent there. His brother ended up in Iraq, but served as a tuba player, which spared him from patrol duties.

When I told him (Him) that I was focusing on Near Eastern Studies, he began talking about the Korean hostage crisis in Afghanistan. Surprisingly, he was not very sympathetic. “Of course we feel bad for them,” he explained the view of many worldwide, “but those people were so stupid. Our government warned them not to go, but they still did and now look what happened. Why did they have to go there, anyway? Were they expecting to convert people? They’re so crazy that many people in Korea don’t want them back.”

I parted with Him and kept going down the narrow road, weaving along the lower valley past quiet rice terraces and austere Hmong villagers. After a few miles I came to Sin Chai, which looked like a substantial village on my map, a place where I could buy lunch. It was not. The village was just a dense cluster of wooden houses, without a single store or restaurant. Apart from the little black pigs that scurried around the road, there was little movement. It was very disappointing, and I considered retracing my steps back to Cat Cat or Sapa so that I could eat.

I explored the village a bit, watching a team of women stretch roles of fabric that they had just dyed in vats of indigo. They hung the new cloth out to dry in front of their homes, like a clothes line from a very different age.

Just as I was about to turn back, I spotted a woman in western dress snapping a picture of some Hmong women posed in front of their house. That was very unusual for this village and I stood there, taking my own pictures. The woman, named Tiu, addressed me in basic English and asked me if I’d like to come inside to eat lunch with her friends. Um...sure.

I ducked through the tiny door and my eyes adjusted to the dim, smoky light. In the center of the house lay a long table stocked full with bowls of lunch food. Twenty Hmong men and a few visitors sat around the table on crude benches and everyone cheered when Tiu led me in, as if I’d been lost for a few hours and just been found.

I shook everyone’s hand one by one and then sat at the head of the table. Tiu had three friends who understood some English. They were Hanoi bankers but every now and then they came up to Sapa and spent an afternoon with this Hmong family. A few of the Hmong knew Vietnamese, so the two sides could communicate, enough to enjoy a lunch together.

And it was no ordinary lunch. I was passed bowls of pork, rice and a soft green vegetable that resembled honeydew. I also dipped my handmade chopsticks into a dish of something that looked like big calamari soaked in tomato sauce. It was bamboo—delicious rings of boiled wood soaked in squash sauce.

The food was only a sideshow, though. Throughout the meal, the family passed around a water bottle full of clear home made rice wine and my saucer constantly got refilled before I could lodge an objection. Everyone was guzzling the noxious spirit like water and they all wanted to make a toast with their unlikely visitor. Within a half hour, they’d snuck eight huge shots down my throat. Before long, I was pretty faded, still alert physically, but slow to grasp the developments going on around me.

Long, a Vietnamese guy whose name means ‘dragon’, helped me get directions for my next destination—Mt. Phang Xi Pang, the tallest mountain in Vietnam. According to my map, there was a nice paved road that could lead me there in about seven miles. Could one of the villagers walk me up there? Impossible, they responded. Too far. Bewildered, I asked if they could take me by motorbike. No. It would take two days. Negotiations went back and forth, drawing in the twenty men at the table and the thirty women and children huddled against the back wall. I was frustrated, but eventually accepted what I’d suspected for two days—my map was largely bogus.

Resigned to geographical cluelessness, I simply asked them where they could take me that day. After some back and forth haggling, I was led outside and saddled onto a motorbike between a teenage Hmong guide named Chi and a driver, who, I was careful to note, had not been at the alcoholic lunch.

The destination was thac Bac, or the “Silver Waterfall”, which was half way up the mountain. It sounded like a good compromise, and I was excited be on a motorbike again, buzz up the mountain. The cool mountain air began to sober me up. We drove slowly uphill along a wide road for at least ten miles, passing sections where we had to wait as workers stood on the mountainside, drilling by hand into the mountain to widen the road. During one stop I tried the local cuisine, which included spiced pork medallions on a skewer and white rice mashed into bamboo tubes. It was a very decent snack.

Finally we arrived at a half built park complex where a ranger met us at a desk and went through an elaborate procedure just to sell us an entrance ticket. He was not in the habit of getting visitors. Chi, my hardy guide started leading me down a path to visit the waterfall. At first the path was nice—a discernible artery through mountain meadows covered in trash from picnics. Then we submerged into the forest and the trail narrowed into a treacherous footpath. At one point I took a step and found my left leg calf-deep in mud, which sucked my sneaker clear off. I had to dig around with my arm to scoop it out.

Worse was yet to come. We reached the river and its tributary streams and I had to peel off my shoes and socks to ford the turbulent water. After the third fording, I opted to leave my footwear on a rock in the middle of the river, on Chi’s suggestion. We pressed on up the river, cutting along the bumpy bank when possible, or slowly fording up the current when fallen trees blocked the shore. It was not an ideal place to be hiking barefoot and I longed for water shoes.

Despite the precarious positions that Chi led me through, it was a thrilling hike, taking us through a bit of raw, unspoiled terrain in alpine Vietnam. There was not a single sign of humanity—not a piece of garbage, a sawed tree limb, or even a real trail. There wasn’t even any wildlife. It was just us, the river, and the hum of the water which grew louder as we approached the waterfall.

After a difficult section where we had to cross a fallen tree, the waterfall came into sight. It was a modest falls, no bigger than the others I’d seen in the distance for the past few days. But it was unquestionably majestic as I stood beneath it, catching its clean spray. This was a completely pristine natural shrine, unencumbered by viewing platforms and undisturbed by busloads of tourists. It was completely worth the unorthodox trip to get there.

Sapa Day 1

2007-07-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 28

The Hanoi train station is a jungle of taxis and unhelpful officials. There are no English signs. I pressed my way through mobs of European tourist and onto the grim train platforms, uncertain which aging train was the 8:40 to Lao Cai. Before I could say a word, a Vietnamese guy snatched my ticket and started speed walking down on of the platforms. He was a tiny little guy—no more than 5 feet—but he managed a blistering walking speed, so fast that I had to break into a trot. Abruptly, he turned into a car and showed me to my cabin. The cost of his unsolicited guidance--$2, a princely fee bargained down to $1.

Three men were settled into my cabin playing cards. I greeted the men in my cabin, squeezing in with my backpack and a satchel which I’d created with my Tower sweatshirt and a thin belt. I must have looked pretty funny coming in. I offered to take one of the two top bunks and started making small talk in my very limited Vietnamese. I sat there gesticulating, stammering barely comprehensible Vietnamese and they just looked at each other and smiled. It took me ten minutes to realize that they were from China. I should have known. The train was headed to Lao Cai, on the Sino-Vietnamese border and would go on to various destinations in Southern China. These guys were from Kunming.

I'd gotten off to a shaky start, but we became friends in a short time. Collectively, they only spoke a few words of English, but they invited me to play cards. At first the game seemed like the universal game where players go around in a circle putting down combinations of cards in an ascending order. But this version had twists within twists. I focused hard, taking their advice and studying their plays carefully, but I was completely mystified by this local variant. Li, a shirtless man who looked like Mao Zedong, and Chiang, his younger companion, yelled things in Chinese, trying to explain obvious elements of the game. But it was hopeless. I wished I knew Chinese or one of them knew English so that I could get to the bottom of their game. At one point, a tall wiry man named Deng entered the scene. He wore glasses and had the gentle serenity of a Chinese intellectual. I was sure that he would know English, would rescue me. No luck.

Even though I was a worthless card player, I got along fine with the group. They were full of questions, which they found a way to express. How old are you? What’s your profession? Are you really from America? Are you married? Are you going to Kunming? Would you like to go to Kunming? Are you traveling alone? They were very surprised when I answered that I didn’t have friends with me. They thought I was crazy.

At one point, Deng opened up his billfold and showed off some Thai bills. He even had one from Laos, which he proudly displayed. I suspected that they guys worked in Thailand and were coming home to visit their families. I discreetly dug into my money belt and dug up a Turkish bill. They all squinted at the engraving of Ataturk. “Ah, Tur Quia!”, Li yelled, giving a thumbs-up. I had defeated Deng in the exotic-bill competition.

I tried to sleep, squirming around on the plastic cushion and filthy pillow covered with black hairs. A dead insect, the size of a humming bird, languished in the cage of a rotating ceiling fan, which provided some relief to the tropical weather, but not enough to sleep.

Right as I was about to nod off, the train clanked to a stop. Li pulled up the window and course female hands popped into the cabin, offering eggs and snatching bills. The Chinese bought two dozen eggs and offered me one, which I warily accepted. It was scalding hot, just taken out of the boiling pot a moment before. I peeled it and it made a surprisingly tasty midnight snack. I wondered how many guidebooks would recommend eating eggs in Nowhere, Vietnam.

I managed to get about two hours of uneasy sleep, waking up at 4:30 when the train rolled in to Lao Cai. I was still dark as I found my van to Sapa. The bus ride was miserable. Light slowly came over the mountainous landscape, but the sky was overcast. A cold rain chilled the mood of the travelers, who sat in silence recovering from the red eye train. I looked out the window, watching the uninviting landscape abruptly twist by. I didn’t see any walking trails or resources for tourists. Were the Chinese right? Was I crazy to come here alone, without a tour group? A man vomited in the passenger seat, crowning the mood.

I was in Sapa before 7 and decided to start “trekking” (as they call hiking in Vietnam). I bought a map of the Sapa area, two big waters, and a sweet dumpling stuffed with squash paste for breakfast. A sharp drizzle was coming down so I put on my blue parka I started down the main paved road that connected Sapa with the villages to the east. Few cars passed by—only motorbikes. Motorbikers slowed down to offer me a ride, maybe for free, maybe for a small fee. I politely refused them all, wary of motorbikes and determined to see Sapa on foot. But I was glad that they stopped because it reassured me that I could speed things up in a pinch.

The main thoroughfare of Sapa

The road cut across steep mountains, covered in wet groves of bamboo. Children drove teams of water buffalo up the twisted road. I didn’t see a single tourist or tour bus—it was still too early.

Eventually, I reached the point in the road where the Lao Chai village was supposed to be. I stopped at a cluster of houses where a group of costumed villagers was gathered. I greeted them and inquired about Lao Chai. A cluster of short teenage girls surrounded me and talked to me in surprisingly advanced English. Hello. Where you from? What’s your name? You buy from me? Throughout the weekend, I would be constantly barraged by these questions, always in that order, priming me to buy some variation of tribal embroidery. Even local women who don’t work in the tourism industry full time carry around satchels of embroidery in case they run across tourists on the road.

Despite the constant harassment from women selling things I didn't want, Sapa had a very authentic feel. Before I went to Australia, I thought that kangaroos would be a rare curiosity only seen in zoos. But it turned out that kangaroos were found everywhere--on the roads, chewing up golf courses--everywhere. It was a similar situation in Sapa. When I first saw the women in their strange tribal dress, I figured that they only wore those outfits to help them sell handbags to tourists in search of the exotic. But as I ventured farther and farther out of Sapa, I noticed that everyone wore tribal dress, even in places that rarely saw tourists. And even if it seemed like every last person was born to sell things to tourists, it could not hide the fact that tourism was a minor sideshow to the main industry in the Sapa area--rice farming, using techniques that hadn't changed in eons.

I issued a hundred refusals to buy embroidery, but I distributed fake Oreos, which delighted the children. I agreed to let a couple women walk me down to Lao Chai and purchased a bamboo pole, sharpened with a machete, as a walking stick. The pole would stay with me through three days of trekking. I named it Joel. Joel the Pole.

I was instantly glad that I had bought Joel. The path down to the village was covered in a slick layer of red mud, deep enough to loose a shoe in. Without grabbing a villager in one hand and digging the bamboo into the mud with the other, I would have slipped into the muck several times. I edged my way down slowly, negotiating each difficult step. Little girls in rubber sandals sped down the hill without giving it a thought, making me feel geriatric.

I expended my small bills and told my entourage that I’d like them to come with me but that I couldn’t pay them anymore. They took off, leaving me alone with Joel to stumble down the slimy road into the river valley, full of farm houses and terraced rice fields. On the way down, I lost the main road and ended up on the other side of a farm. I spotted the road on the other side of the farm and followed what I thought was a narrow access road over there. But before I knew it, it led me onto the mud embankment that separated one rice terrace from the field below. The embankment was just eight inches wide and just as slippery as the other muddy roads. It was like walking across a balancing beam lathered in KY Jelly. I struggled with each step. Several times I lost my balance and were it not for last minute rescues by Joel, I would have gone splashing into the rice paddies three feet below.

Somehow I was delivered to the main path and made my way into Lao Chai, which, like most villages in this area, was a mere decentralized hamlet of tin roofed huts and an occasional bridge. I met a Hmong girl on the footbridge and we had a conversation, free of charge. She was amazed at how small my family was. “Just one sister! I have three sisters and two brothers.” The girl let me examine her dress, which on close examination was a deep blue, not black. She showed me the indigo plant, which the Hmong use to color their distinctive dress. All around Sapa, Hmong women have bright blue hands, which comes from dipping fabric into vats of indigo dye.

I continued through the valley, through miserable muddy roads into the villages of Ta Van and Giang Ta Van. I didn’t cross paths with a single vehicle, only the occasional water buffalo or Hmong woman. Tourists supposedly come down to these villages with tour guides, but it was still too early. I had caught the valley at its quiet morning routine.

I walked back up to the main paved road and continued east. The road narrowed to one lane and cut through the north side of the valley, affording magnificent views of the valley floor and the western mountains, Vietnam’s highest. Waterfalls cascaded down the distant slopes.

It was now past nine and the tourists had emerged along the main road, although as I advanced east, they diminished and finally disappeared altogether. I walked another ten kilometers, a pleasant stroll because the road was flat and the weather was cool and overcast. I arrived in Ban Den, a dusty one-road town that reminded me of a Western mining town. Local men played pool on primitive billiards tables. I stopped for a wonderful $1 dish of fried noodles and beef, my first stop of the day. I was 15 kilometers east of Sapa and it was still only noon.

I was struck with a bold plan. I would walk fifteen more kilometers east, nearly to the end of the district, as far as the paved road goes. Sapa tourists often arranged homestays with the tribal people and I would find cheap lodging with a village family. It would be a real adventure—a vast trek to the edge of civilization and an authentic cultural experience.

Alas it was not to be. I left Ban Den on what seemed to be the main road. It took me up into the hills, past teams of rockbreakers swinging picks axes. The road turned north into a narrow river valley. Road traffic became as sparse as the farmhouses. After a few kilometers, the road switched around to the south and I kept going, hoping to end up on the main road near Muong Bo, the next major settlement to the east. Along the way, I stopped at a farmhouse to ask directions. The family was Dao (pronounced “Zow”), another tribal minority distinguished by their prominent foreheads and large red head scarves. They stared at me warily, unable to grasp why a strange traveler was pointing to a chart full of colored lines and place names. They, like almost every villager I met in the Sapa area, had little concept of a map. I snatched a glance into their wooden house, peering through the haze of a cooking fire into the dirt floor room. With the exception of the old lady’s iron-rimmed spectacles, there was nothing about these people’s lives that would have seemed foreign to their distant ancestors, as far as I could tell.

Several more miles passed and the road began yet another switchback into another huge side valley. It was only 2pm and I had plenty of energy left, but this time I wanted to know for sure that this road would lead somewhere. I interrupted a pair of Dao women who were watching over a gang of water buffaloes bathing in a muddy hole. Again, I pointed to my map and muttered questions in what must have been a bewildering concoction of Vietnamese and cave man grunts. They took a hard look at the map and then looked at me sheepishly, like a puppies who had just peed on the rug. I smiled and thank them, but I raged inside, exasperated with the simple villagers I’d encountered that day. What’s the matter with you people? Why do you never know where you live? Why don’t you know how to read a map? Why don’t you understand my Vietnamese?

As it became clear that I was lost, I was faced with a lonely six mile walk back to Ban Den. It was too much to bear. All day, motorbikes had passed me offering lifts, and finally I accepted. Just twenty bumpy minutes later, I was back in Ban Den, feeling self conscious in front of the villagers, who had watched me charge out confidently two hours earlier.

According to my map, I could walk down into the river valley and arrive at more villages to the east in just a few hours of walking. But I had already walked 30 kilometers that day and I was losing my appetite for questionable adventures. It was time to head back to Sapa. 15 kilometers of paved road lay between the dusty mainstreet of Ban Den and my air conditioned room at the Summit Hotel. I could take a motorbike. But I could also walk. That would be a 45 kilometer day—30 whole miles to brag about to friends and grandchildren. It was settled. It had to be done.

I set out retracing my steps. Groups of children greeted me yelling “Hello” and “Goodbye” as I passed. I started taking pictures of one group but the elder leader, a five year old girl, came forward and demanded “Picture money!” She’d been well trained by her parents and her unseemly demands netted each of her companions a six cent bill. Other groups of tag-alongs were less welcome. The countryside was teeming with mangy dogs which made me nervous. Rabies is a big problem in Vietnam and I knew that one bite from a local dog would force me to rush back to Hanoi or Bangkok for life-saving rabies shots. I eyed the dogs warily, gripping Joel tightly, ready to swing at any dog that attacked. Fortunately, none did.

The sun had at last parted the clouds and before I could slap on sunscreen, I got badly sunburned on my neck and arms. The walk was becoming less enjoyable. My hips were sore and my calves started to spasm and give way. Hot spots bloomed into full-blown blisters on the soles of my feet. It was miserable. But the 30 mile goal had been dangled in my imagination and there was no turning back.

Step by step, the kilometer markings slowly passed by. But it was painful. For the first time that day, I was forced to take breaks, collapsing in makeshift cafes to sip water. At the last stop I had just five more kilometers to go. That’s only like three miles, I reasoned. I peeled myself off the bench with a groan and got back on the road. I began to feel dizzy before long, considering yet another rest stop. I whipped my brow and froze. There was no sweat. I remembered from first aid classes that one of the first signs of heat exhaustion is the loss of sweat. I stopped to consider what I should do. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I’d stopped sweating because the weather was cooling and I had just taken a rest stop. I decided to be prudent, to end this masochistic bravado and scrap my quest for 30 miles. 40 kilometers would have to do.

A man pulled up beside me on a motorbike, probably the hundredth who had solicited a motorbike fare from me that day. I looked over and gasped, “Yes!”, resigning myself to defeat and a hotel bathtub.

(Left to right) Joel, my left foot, my right foot by late afternoon

The Economy

2007-07-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

Today we had a final review session for all the major topics that we've covered in Vietnamese history. Yesterday I wrote that there was remarkably little mention of the Iraq War during our class, but today we ended with a thourough discussion of the similarities as well as the many differences. It was a lively conversation and it demonstrated how Vietnamese history has shaped our class' perception of modern American policy.

The final component of the class was a paper on some aspect of Vietnamese society or history. Through our six weeks in Vietnam we were supposed to gather diverse impressions on a topic and consolidate them into an informal paper at the end of the course. My topic was the modern Vietnamese economy and the challenges it faces. It's not a formal, academic paper that cites books and articles, but a compilation of the things I've come to learn about the Vietnamese economy. In that sense, it's similar to a blog, so I've decided to post it. I apologize for its length and seriousness but I was too lazy to post anything else.

*****

In 1945, Taiwan, Korea and Malaysia were as poor as any other part of the Far East, but today they’re considered wealthy countries. By adopting market oriented policies early on, these countries became labeled the “Asian Tigers”. Vietnam, by comparison, still has a per capita nominal GDP under $1,000. Only in recent years has Vietnam begun to break out of bleak rural poverty. It is one of Vietnam’s many historical tragedies that today’s rapid growth did not begin many years ago. But Vietnam’s past is a history of lost opportunities. Today, the government is making up for lost time and works feverishly to promote economic development. Reaching First World standards of living within the next generation is the overarching goal of Vietnamese society, and many expect that transformation to take place. They should be proud of the gains that have been made in recent years but also conscious that there are vast hurdles to overcome before Vietnam can rightfully be called and Asian Tiger.

In the mid-1980s, the “social thermostat” readjusted, as Neil Jameison would put it. The country had been reunified for ten years, but the government, under the control of aging revolutionaries such as Le Duan, failed to achieve the expected socialist economic miracle. The government had boldly pushed forward with the construction of an economy based on subsidies, commune production and price-setting predicting growth of 15% each year. Not surprisingly, this didn’t come to pass—the Vietnamese remained desperately poor, indeed, hungry in many provinces. As the old revolutionary generation ceded control to a new moderate generation, change became possible and Vietnam began dismantling its socialist economy, a process that continues to this day.

As early as 1981 the government began allowing farm de-collectivization and an increase in food prices to stimulate food production, which was well below subsistence levels at the time. This was a cautious experiment with market forces and there would be many to come. In the mid-1980s, the Party abandoned the Stalinist strategy of promoting heavy industry in favor of policies that encouraged light industry and exports. The leadership decided that instead of wasting resources to build inefficient factories, Vietnam should only produce goods that it is good at making. It is simple logic, but this important acknowledgement formed the theoretical framework for the stunning growth in wealth over the past two decades.

In 1986, the government introduced a series of laws permitting foreigners to operate companies in Vietnam. This was the first in a series of measures that have broken down the barriers to foreign investment. Another major element of the market reforms was the revolution in rural production. In 1988 the state sharply reduced levies on farmers and in the early 1990s, farmers were granted long term rights to their individual plots of land.[4] No longer afraid that their land would be suddenly appropriated from them, farmers began to invest in their farms. Moreover, they were free to keep and sell more of what they produced, so, naturally, they produced more. Property rights and market forces created a miracle. While famine has long been a regular feature of Vietnamese life, wide scale food shortages are unthinkable today.

In addition to reducing restrictions on the economic activity of its own people, Vietnam has reduced its barriers to international trade. In the mid-1990s, Vietnam normalized relations with the United States and entered ASEAN and other regional market groups. Vietnam was accepted into the WTO in 2006. However there are still minor barriers to trade, such as American resistance to Vietnamese catfish imports.Despite these remaining barriers to trade, Vietnam’s bilateral trade levels have risen from $5bn in 1990 to over $90bn today, representing a twenty-fold increase in as many years.

Through this two decade reform progress, not only has hunger been eliminated, but poverty rates have been reduced to 15%, down from over 60% in 1990. The market reforms have allowed millions of Vietnamese to rise out of abject poverty and enter the middle class. Anyone familiar with Vietnam as recently as the 1990s remarks how far the country has come. Simple things like windowed storefronts were nearly unheard of in the mid-1990s. Motorbikes were rare, cars were reserved for a small elite. Bicycles were the primary mode of transportation. Today, Vietnamese roads are packed with armies of motorbikes and a healthy number of automobiles, including a few luxury models. The roads are just one of innumerable indicators of growing prosperity in Vietnam.

The market reforms provided the groundwork for Vietnam’s economic renaissance. But no country can raise itself out of agrarian poverty alone. Vietnam’s progress is largely a product of foreign markets and international investors, a few of whom I was fortunate enough to meet this summer. While over two thirds of Vietnamese people still work in agriculture, the backbone of the modern boom is industry. Vietnam is not a natural industrial country because it doesn’t have indigenous sources of raw materials, as in China, Japan or the United States. Nevertheless, manufacturers consider Vietnam a promising production center because wages are so low that they offset the cost of importing raw materials. Much of Vietnam’s growth has been made possible by the fact that it is extremely low on the international economic pecking order. Whereas many Mexican manufacturing jobs have moved to the cheaper Chinese market, many firms that once produced shoes, textiles and cheap electronics in China are now choosing to open factories in Vietnam. Perhaps one day low end manufacturing jobs in Vietnam will move to even cheaper labor markets in Africa or elsewhere.

Although millions of “Made in China” labels are being replaced by “Made in Vietnam” markings, cheap industry is only one element of Vietnam’s economic transformation. The country is working overtime to develop its IT and electronics industries. The government is pumping money into improving communications and National Assemblywoman Ton nu thi Ninh accredits the explosive rise in internet usage to these investments. When Chuck Searcy applied for an internet account in 1995, he became one of the first twenty internet users in Vietnam. Today there are millions of internet users. Internet use has surpassed Thailand and the Philippines and the prevalence of cheap internet cafes filled with young children is a real indication that Vietnam is becoming a wired country.

Vietnamese officials have displayed an impressive determination to wire their country. The trouble is that very few Communist Party cadres are experts in modern technology. Luckily, they are extremely receptive to outside advice and investment in technological development. Rahul Desai, a Tokyo-based Indian-American businessman, spoke favorably of Vietnamese progress in IT. American and Japanese investors, he recalled, worked with extremely open-minded Vietnamese officials to build a first rate stock exchange, banking network and other financial machinery. Rahul is convinced that the Vietnamese financial system has surpassed Japan’s in efficiency and technology. In this sense, Asia’s newest Tiger is leading Japan, the biggest Tiger of them all.

Only a generation ago, it was illegal for Vietnamese people to hold foreign currency. Now, Vietnam’s state-of-the-art financial system is successfully funneling billions of dollars of foreign investment into the fast growing economy. The booming stock exchange is growing rapidly as Vietnam’s state-run companies become publicly listed. Over 700 state companies are currently in the process of going public. Through these IPOs, stagnant companies are attracting the foreign capital to radically expand their operations. It has transformed Vietnamese business. TFP, an obscure Vietnamese company not long ago, is now considered “the Vietnamese Microsoft.” This summer, TFP partnered with a consortium of Japanese investors to create an investment fund in Vietnam. The fund currently has $100m but its capital could soon grow to $1bn as more foreigners pump money into investment funds. Major western banks are also entering the Vietnamese market. Not far behind a stature of Ho Chi Minh in Saigon, there’s a new CitiGroup tower. JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and many other financial giants can now be found in Hanoi and Saigon, where they handle private equity, mergers and IPOs. They’ve even began to offer financial services to High Net-Worth individuals.

The HSBC Tower behind Saigon's Ho Chi Minh statue

Thanks to the efforts of the pragmatic government leadership, the investment climate in Vietnam is one of the most open in the region. Vietnam is able to compete against major emerging markets such as China and India for big ticket investments. After a thorough search that included all three countries, Intel committed to building a $1bn plant in Vietnam. It’s the biggest American investment in Vietnam to date, but it may soon be surpassed by investments by GE, which is in the process of committing major resources to Vietnam. Microsoft may follow suit. If the original Asian Tigers built their economies on tech exports, then the United States is building Vietnam some big claws.

The United States is by no means the most important investor in Vietnam. It ranks well behind Japan, China, Taiwan and other Asian nations, although these official tallies obscure the reality because many “Asian” companies are actually branches of American owned companies. If these branch companies, such as the Singapore-based offshoot of Coca Cola are considered American, the United States becomes the second or third biggest investor in Vietnam. The Japanese have come to Vietnam in droves and their most notable investments are in infrastructure, such as the tunnel between Da Nang and Hue. More recently, Japan has paid lip service to helping Vietnam build a modern Hanoi-Saigon highway as well as a massive technology center. The Chinese, by contrast, are known for building large, smoke-billowing industrial factories.

New construction zone in Da Nang

Another face of the economic boom is the preponderance of retail expansion. Vietnamese imports exceed exports by a modest margin and the imported consumer goods can be seen all over the country, from Johnnie Walker scotch to German cars to Nokia phones. Domestic and regional companies have made multiple brands of food and drink available to grocery shoppers, whose parents would have had to stand in ration lines to buy a bit of rice and fish oil. The vast majority of Vietnamese food and consumer goods are still sold in small “mom and pop” shops, but retail chains are rapidly appearing. Nevertheless, there’s great potential for retail consolidation in Vietnam, as well as opportunities for foreign restaurant chains to expand into Vietnam, which still, to the horror of some, does not have McDonalds.

Grand Opening of a Saigon electronics outlet

The breathtaking rate of economic expansion may be attracting excess investment. James Kim, a Korean-American investment broker runs a firm that helps Americans find investment in Vietnam, even if they have no idea what they want to do with their money. James usually finds a suitable investment opportunity, but he says that there are vast numbers of Americans who want “in” to Vietnam because they hear it’s “hot”. In my opinion, the hordes of ill-informed Western investors should make one wary of an investment bubble.

A possible investment bubble is most conspicuous in the property market. Vietnamese businessmen tend to invest in property projects because they can produce short term returns on modest levels of capital. This investment is readily visible in the high rise construction sites and building cranes seen in Hanoi and Saigon. The trouble is that they are being built in uninhabited farmland on the end of the city, in the hope that urban growth will quickly reach the area and make raise demand for housing and offices. But nobody can accurately predict how a city will grow, so these developments are highly speculative stabs-in-the-dark.

High rise construction on the ouskirts of Hanoi

Property speculation is perhaps most intense along the coast. Vietnam has beaches that hold up to any resort area in the world. I believe that China Beach will one day look like Cozumel and that Nha Trang could get as many visitors as Phuket. Rahul thinks it could do even better, claiming that Vietnam’s beaches will become an Asian St. Tropez with seven star resorts. Whichever prediction comes to pass, Vietnam’s beaches have a lot of development ahead of them. But that still shouldn’t justify the property speculation in these areas. In some costal areas, small beach condos that sold for under $200,000 are fetching $1m today. That would be a steal in California or Florida, but Vietnam is still a poor country with 2,000 miles of underdeveloped coastline. Those prices may not be sustainable in the long run.

One of many pristine, under-developed beach in Central Vietnam.

The (questionable) speculative bubble in Vietnamese investment is only one of the long term threats to continued growth in Vietnam. Low cost manufacturing and export agriculture has rapidly pulled tens of millions out of poverty. But in order for Vietnam to become a middle class nation, it needs to expand its IT, R & D, financial and business sectors.

The number one complaint of American investors in Vietnam is that the human capital of their Vietnamese employees is too low. Without competent foremen, the new Intel plant will be held back, and without English speaking, modern executives, Vietnamese companies will have difficulty competing internationally. In order to advance in “New Economy” sectors, Vietnam needs to produce high caliber computer technicians, scientists and business professionals. At the moment, the Vietnamese higher education system is woefully inadequate for the task. Although an evaluation of Vietnamese education is beyond the scope of this paper, I will suffice to say that the many Vietnamese university students who I’ve talked with have expressed frustration with the quality of educational training in Vietnam, for which they hold the government responsible. Nearly all intend to or dream of studying abroad.

Nevertheless, progress is being made in some areas. The Hanoi National University Economics Department is working with American institutions, including Princeton University, to develop a modern business school, or a close approximation thereof. This is just one example where Vietnamese university administrators are seeking a crash course in the West about how to train professionals at modern standards.

According to an informal consensus gathered from a diverse group of officials, the biggest challenge to the Vietnamese economy is to promote continued growth without causing intense inequality and all the problems associated with it. One of the first things that struck me about Hanoi was that there are no obvious slums. In most developing countries, millions of poor farmers settle in ramshackle developments outside of the industrializing cities. These slums can become seething centers of crime and social instability, neither of which the cautious Communist Party is keen on promoting. The Vietnamese government recognizes that urban slums will develop in Vietnam if the cities grow rich and the countryside stays poor. Accordingly, one of the major objectives of the government is to bring jobs and prosperity to the countryside. Through a combination of subsidies and incentives, Vietnam is working to attract factories away from the traditional industrial centers of Hanoi-Haiphong and Saigon. The goal, described by Madame Ninh, is to bring jobs to the rural workers, so that the rural workers don’t bring slums to the cities.

For this reason she justified the recent project that would baffle economists. The government worked with Total, a French oil giant, to build the Dung Quoc oil refinery. Total wanted to build the plant near Saigon, because the sources of oil are located off Vietnam’s southern coast. The government leadership, however, intervened and insisted that the refinery be built in a less developed area of Central Vietnam. This location greatly added to the transportation costs of the Vietnamese crude oil, but the government hopes the Dung Quoc refinery will bring jobs to a poor region.

Madame Ninh is optimistic about the government’s efforts to bring jobs to the countryside, but the statistics are sobering. The province of Hanoi, with 3.1m people has received over $10bn in foreign investment, or around $3,000 of investment per head. By contrast, a mere $255m has been invested in Nghe An province, which has a population equal to Hanoi. This forty-fold difference in investment levels between the two provinces is a sign that inequality is likely to grow, with harmful side effects.

Containing excess investment, improving human capital, and stemming inequality are major challenges in the way of further prosperity in Vietnam. Each will require calculated, long term policies to overcome. But Vietnam is a country that has defeated the most powerful states in history. Its recent economic progress is no less impressive than its military record. A nation of collective farms and Stalinist economics now has one of the most advanced stock exchanges in Asia. A land of periodic famine now exports food of all varieties. Compared to the achievements of its past, the challenges of the future look minor.

The "I-Word"

2007-07-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

This course is about an American war, conceived with the best of intentions, escalated on false pretenses, fought against a headstrong people, and lost because we failed to transmit our values to another society.

If that sounds familiar, it’s for good reason—it very accurately describes the circumstances of the Iraq War. Just a generation later, we’ve become mired in a conflict that has followed the same trajectory as the Vietnam War. I can’t overstate how many times I’ve sat in class and had a “sound familiar?” moment…

Kennedy considered withdrawing aid to President Ngo Nguyen Diem but feared being labeled “soft on Communism” before the 1964 election.

Democratic senators consider opposing the war in 2003 but prefer to avoid being labeled “soft on Terror” before the 2004 election.

An American destroyer was “attacked” in the Gulf of Tonkin. Investigations later revealed that the incident was little more than a hoax.

Administration officials present damning evidence that Saddam Hussein is secretly developing WMDs. Post-invasion searches failed to turn up any such weapons.

A major American offensive swept the Plain of Reeds to clear out Viet Cong forces. The Communists were forced to flee the area. They returned the next year.

Coalition forces mount a massive strike on the insurgent stronghold of Falluja, suffering dozens of casualties. The city is subdued but the insurgents move to Anbar province and intensify hostility there.

President Johnson raised troop levels on General Westmoreland’s suggestion that increased military presence would put the Communists on the defensive.

President Bush raises troop levels because General Petraeus believes that a surge will allow us to flush out the insurgency.

American diplomats implored President Thieu to liberalize his government and implement wide ranging reforms that were supported by his people.

Secretary Rice presses President Maliki to reach a political settlement with Sunni leaders and form a coalition government with broad support.

In the wake of the My Lai massacre, the American people became disillusioned with their country’s moral character.

In the wake of the Abu Gharib scandal, the world lost faith in American moral standards.

President Nixon announced to the American people that the war is being “Vietnamized”.

Under increasing criticism over his handling of the Iraq War, President Bush declared that “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll down.”

In an effort to siphon off the Viet Cong supply networks in Laos and Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger plan secret campaigns in those countries.

Observing that many insurgents arrive via Syria and that a significant amount of arms are channeled through Iran, Bush administration hawks consider bombing both countries.

The parallels are endless. Yet it’s surprising how little the topic of Iraq comes up in class. We come upon a haunting similarity, skip a beat and then move on. There is little direct mention of the topic. Partly, it’s because Desaix, as an acknowledged liberal, is careful not to force conclusions upon his students. And there are some thoughtful students in the class who are uncomfortable with gratuitous criticism of the Iraq war.

I’m in the middle of the spectrum. I protested the war before it even began because I thought it was a disastrous idea. I’m like the small group of Americans who saw through the Tonkin Incident and feared sending American troops to Vietnam. Now that we’re in Iraq, however, I’m even more afraid of what would happen if we pulled out. In that sense I’m like someone who insisted that we hang on in Vietnam because the collapse of South Vietnam would all of Asia to fall to the communists.

The other students may feel that exploring parallels between Vietnam and Iraq is tacky. By comparing our noble efforts in Iraq to the worst fiasco in American history, we sound defeatist and unpatriotic. The Iraq War may be worth ending so that we can bring the troops home, but there is something callous about evoking the hopelessness and trauma of Vietnam.

Still other students, myself included, can’t help feeling that bringing up Vietnam is a cheap shot against Iraq. Certainly, there are ample parallels, but there are even more differences. The actors, motivations, circumstances, ideologies and geopolitics are significantly different, enough so to make blanket comparisons between the two wars sound naïve and ignorant. And then there are the moments, which comes every so often as we study Vietnam, where we conclude victory would have been possible, had the Americans and South Vietnamese changed their course. Maybe Iraq is just waiting to turn some corner and things will turn out ok after all. There’s a strong desire to pretend that this conflict is different, that it’s not quite like the Vietnam story. But there are no history books to tell us how Iraq ends.

And so Iraq is rarely brought up, but it lingers over the course as the “I-Word”, mocking us as we go along.

Women

2007-07-24T04:37:00.000-07:00

Vietnam is a poor country--$800 per capita—with many elements of traditional society intact. Given all that, it was rather surprising how liberated Vietnamese women are.

In many developing countries it would be unusual to find a woman driving a vehicle. Not so in Vietnam. Women can be seen everywhere zipping around on motorbikes and I even had a female taxi driver once, something you wouldn’t find in most liberal western cities. Men invariably drive when there are multiple people on a motorbike, but there does not appear to be any popular mistrust of female driving abilities. For instance, I told my Vietnamese classmate Dzung the joke that we used at Finnegan’s quiz night…
Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive?
Because she’s a woman.
Although I explained who Helen Keller is, he didn’t get the humor.

Some of the women making the morning commute are on their way to high level jobs. During this trip we’ve had the fortune of meeting some impressive professional women. In June we heard a lecture by Ambassador Ton nu thi Ninh, the Vice Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly. She spoke for an hour and a half in elegant, French-accented English, effortlessly convincing us of the good intentions of the Communist Party and skillfully dodging tough questions. More recently, we received an address by Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a proud octogenarian who headed the Viet Cong’s delegation to the Paris Peace Talks and later served as Vietnam’s Vice President. As far as I know she’s the most distinguished Vietnamese female since the legendary Trung Sisters, Vietnamese Joan of Arc figures who expelled the Chinese in 43 A.D.

Madame Binh with Desaix

The Trung Sisters liberate Vietnam

These two women are products of the French-educated elite. But modern Vietnam is also producing impressive females. I’ve butted heads with Van, a serious, outspoken international trade student who intends to go into finance. I’ve also gotten to know Hoa, a well-liked girl with impeccable English who’s off to study at Johns Hopkins this fall. When she returns she intends to open a school and then enter the government, probably the foreign ministry. Desaix thinks she could become the foreign minister one day.

Beyond the well educated elite, Vietnamese women are proving adept entrepreneurs in the current economic boom. Pinky and Moon, two sisters who own the bar of the same name, have built a small nightlife empire that includes two bars, a restaurant and the Lighthouse Club, one of Hanoi’s largest nightclubs. They employ at least 30 people, most of them men. Their gender doesn’t hurt them in this business. Indeed, by courting European boyfriends they’ve secured reliable lines of capital.

Pinky and Moon at the Pinky Moon

Pinky and Moon are not rare exceptions—there are lots of female entrepreneurs all over the country. On our trip to Central Vietnam, two of our restaurants and one of our hotels was owned by a woman who was in the process of expanding her business.

On a lower level, female participation in business is even more prevalent. A great number of shops are run by females and over half of all street peddlers are hard working women. In the covered city markets, no less than one hundred percent of the booths are owned and run by women. In Vietnam, I’ve told dozens of women that I don’t want to buy a shirt, but I’ve never had to tell a man that.

Shopkeepers in the Hue

The presence of Vietnamese women in large, medium and small business is impressive, and it has traditional roots. According to Neil Jamieson, rural Vietnamese men did the majority of the farm work while Vietnamese women were expected to go into the village and sell extra produce and small handmade crafts. In this traditional division of labor, it was the women who became the petit bourgeoisie of rural society and they controlled the purse strings of their families.

Nevertheless, Vietnam is not a feminist paradise, even after decades of gender-neutral Communist ideology. Vicki, a Vietnamese-American girl who I talked with at the Dragonfly, was critical of the social order. I told her that I was impressed that every merchant in the indoor markets was female but she dismissed my enthusiasm. “Sure they’re all women,” she said, “but that’s because small shop keepers are considered lowly.”

It’s an important point—in Vietnam all trash collectors are women as well. Women are found in all sorts of difficult, undesirable jobs. In fact, the legal female retirement age is lower than that of men. Why, a classmate asked an official. “Because women work harder,” he answered, without a hint of humor.

A hard working woman in Hanoi

Women are not entirely liberated socially. Although they’re never required to have a male chaperone, all unmarried women have curfews. They’re shockingly rigid by American standards. Hoa, the twenty three year old future Foreign Minister, disappears from Dragonfly at 11pm, without fail. During high school, she would have been home at 10. These curfews will stay in effect until the woman marries. As 11pm approaches at the Dragonfly, Elias invariably offers to marry Hoa so that she can stay out later, but she politely declines.

Marriage is very often forced on young Vietnamese women. Tu, a stunning student at Hanoi National University, has been dating her boyfriend for eight months. Her boyfriend is extremely jealous, forcing her to stay at home until he comes to take her out. His parents have exerted intense pressure on Tu to marry their son, and Tu had tacitly accepted her fate, unable to imagine an alternative. They set a date for the wedding. Her friend Dung, who reads a book version of Sex in the City to improve his English, told her that she's not ready to make that kind of commitment, that there are other options out there. But it was the arrival of the Americans that made the difference. We showed up with our permissive attitudes toward dating and Tu had a small renaissance. With the support of her family she made the bold decision to stand up to her boyfriend and his family. The wedding has been postponed indefinitely. She goes out without his permission. Now she thinks dreams of career opportunities and studying abroad instead of impending marriage. Her liberal, middle class friends are happy that she made the transition. But how many Vietnamese women are that fortunate?

Red Tape Follow-Up

2007-07-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

For anyone following my tense predicament with the Vietnamese visa authorities, described in "Red Tape", I'm pleased to announce that I indeed recieved my extended visa on Thursday, which made my wonderful trip to Saigon possible.

On Tuesday, I had been frantic that I wouldn't get my passport and visa back in time for the flight to Saigon and I desperately begged the administrative assistant, Mr. Vinh, to do whatever it takes to get it back in time. I was greatly relieved when Mr. Vinh brought out my passport on Thursday. It had a small sticker reading $10--the official visa extention fee that I was happy to pay. "But," Mr. Vinh added sheepishly, "there was a special 200,000 dong [$13] fee that you need to cover."

I happily forked over this modest fee, the first, and probably not the last bribe I'll have to pay in my time.

Saigon

2007-07-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

It's a miracle that we even made it to Saigon. We had all been out at Finnigans the night before, finally winning quiz night, to our astonishment. We took the $100 prize money, thinking that we'd come into some real wealth. But they failed to inform us that quiz night winners are expected to buy pitchers for all the other teams. So we didn't really win much of anything, save the immense satisfaction of finally beating all the Wankers.

Needless to say, none of us were pleased to be woken up at 6:30, and a few of my companions seriously considered sacrificing the trip in return for six more hours of sleep. But with a little prodding, we all made it out of the Bao Khanh.

We landed in Saigon and drove through the city to the Happy Inn Hotel. Saigon's streets are wider than Hanoi's but there are almost no trees. Instead, chaotic webs of black power lines line the roads. Saigon is also more commercial. The buildings are plastered with endless advertisement for Japanese electronics, and there are far more new towers housing banks or five star hotels. Nevertheless, I didn't sense that the average person is much wealthier than their Hanoi cousins.

Pyramids of lychee berries on the sidewalk

By the way, I've decided to call the city Saigon, rather than the official Ho Chi Minh City. I found that most of the locals refer to their city as Saigon, rather than HCMC, which is a mouthful. Saigon was the scene of some of the most traumatic events in American history, and as an American, it feels appropriate to call it Saigon. Plus, Saigon just sounds cooler.

After checking in, we set out to see the sights. We at a quick lunch at Loteria, a fast food burger chain that's much more common in Saigon than in Hanoi, and then arrived at a huge traffic circle beside an indoor market. We watched Adam insist to the wily saleswomen that they in fact didn't have any shirts that would fit him and we got on our way, dodging book sellers and lightermen to reach a glimmering square with a Louis Vuitton shop and a French opera house.

Further down the avenue, we came across a statue of Ho Chi Minh tenderly holding a child, in front of an impressive municipality building that's now eclipsed by a new HSBC tower. In general, I've found that major French buildings are well maintained in Vietnam. Instead of letting the relics of colonialism crumble, the government keeps them in mint condition, although this may have something to do with France, which gave a whopping $13 million to repair the Hanoi Opera House. In Saigon, we may have seen this money in action when we came across a team of painters repainting a French building. They used long, flexible bamboo ladders to rope themselves up to the higher windows.

Tim, Adam, Me, Mark, Duane, DJ E.J. Hicks

We moved on to the Reunification Palace, the modern name for the behemoth that formerly served as the headquarters of the French and then South Vietnamese regimes. The facade was a standard, unappealing 1960s lattice grill, but the interior was strange and eerie. It's an undefined mixture between a museum and a government convention center. Sections were roped off because some conference was in session, while other wings were left open for tourists to navigate their way around vacuous, unmarked corridors.

In the basement, there were concrete command bunkers with a few sample maps and American-made communications equipment casually left around to stimulate what it would have been like in the tense war era. The upper floors were much more luxurious. Marble reception rooms were filled with stylish couches and post-modern paintings. The building was a monument to 1960s and 1970s hedonism. On the rooftop, next to the helipads, there was a wooden performance stage, which must have once been crowded with jazz bands. I could picture the place in past evenings, crawling with corrupt generals, white-gloved wives and friendly American diplomats.

On April 30, 1975, the party ended. Communist forces stormed the building, capturing the South Vietnamese leadership and ending three decades of war. From the rooftop, I had a nice view of the gate which Communist tanks knocked down as they overran the compound. Tank 390, the first through the gate, was on display not far from the momentous scene.

That evening we took a cab out to a French restaurant, but were dismayed to find that we couldn't have eaten there without a reservation. That mistake cost us almost two hours and a lot of angst. We drove to another restaurant listed in the guidebook, but it simply didn't exist. Frustrated, we walked around a traffic circle that was in the middle of a bustling set of cafes. The cafes were huge, lively places, many seating at least 500 people, all Vietnamese. We went around to each and asked to look at the menus, but astonishingly, they didn't sell food. We looked at the tables, and only saw drinks. It was scandalous. What type of mega-cafe doesn't serve food?! In despair, we ordered a taxi to the one place in Saigon we knew for sure would have food--an Italian restaurant that we'd walked by earlier when we were near the Opera House.

By the time we were done it was almost 11 and we decided to go to Vietnam's most famous nightclub. We pulled up to Apocalypse Now and were eyed by several unfriendly security guards. Inside, people were sitting at densely packed tables sipping cocktails. There were groups of Chinese businessmen, Vietnamese socialites and solitary Westerners, but not a single Western female. Swimming around these islands of men, were hundreds of done-up Vietnamese women. It was immediately clear that this place was a massive front for prostitution. We left before too long and went to bed early.

The next morning we were taken to a tourist bus rendezvous and forced to wait for our bus to the Cu Chi Tunnels. As we stood on the sidewalk, we noticed a guy in a nearby bar dancing wildly with two Vietnamese girls. It was almost nine in the morning, and this guy was rounding out his evening. I started taking pictures and the guy came out to talk to us, or, in his mind, party with us. He posed with Tim for a while and then introduced himself as Keith, whipping out a business card for a sports bar...

Kieth Halterman; Director; The Office and Boardroom

He told us to come to The Office that evening and hang out with him. Since his night was obviously much more interesting than ours had been, we considered it. He took off with his companions. An attractive woman started peeling off Kieth's friend's shirt in the middle of the street. We later found out that she was a transvestite.

After a bumpy van ride into the countryside, we arrived at the Cu Chi Tunnels complex and were led by an old, jovial guide who had fought in the South Vietnamese Army. He showed us around the grounds, the site of an elaborate defense network that defied American and South Vietnamese forces for years. At varying points along the trail, there were exhibits to show visitors the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Viet Cong. One hut displayed a dozen types of ferocious booby traps. Another showed Viet Cong manequin models making land mines out of unexploded American bombs.

Other exhibits were more hands on. In the middle of a clearing, there was a shoebox sized hole in the ground representing the entrance to one of the many underground tunnels. It was barely big enough for me to squeeze in. Further on, there was an actual stretch of tunnel, and with great difficulty we were able to crawl through the narrow, pitch black passageways. I was happy to get out after five minutes and did not envy the soldiers who spent weeks in there as bombs shook the ground above them.

As we made our way through the displays, the distant pop of automatic weapons grew louder until we reached a break stop, where the violent blasts were strong enough to make me jump. We'd reached the firing range, where tourists pay money to shoot period weapons. At $1.30 per bullet, I was not about to try it out, but several of us got to shoot automatic machine guns, AK-47's and M16's. I was incredibly struck with how loud the guns were. I've fired high caliber rifles, shotguns and pistols, but always with earmuffs. And I've shot an AK-47 without earmuffs, but the bullets were very small, so it wasn't too loud. These guns all used very large cartridges and the blasts were so violent that I could feel the destruction from a few feet away. Each time I forgot to cover my ears, I regretted it. I can't imagine what it would be like to be on a modern battlefield with hundreds of these fearsome things go off at once, especially if many were pointed at me.

Having acquired a more intimate sense of what the Vietnam War might have been like, we went back to Saigon and I decided to take a solitary walk down to the river. The walk to the river took me through a casual residential neighborhood with wide streets. I stopped at an Internet cafe and paid six cents for the privilege. Later, I spotted a young girl reclining in front of a shop, writing a text message.

After a few blocks, I reached the edge of the minor river that is the traditional southern border of Saigon. It was less than beautiful, because the entire river district was one long, construction sight. On the other side, there were tiny restaurants and shops among piles of trash and old produce. The entire area smelt like old fish.

Understandably, the neighborhood was not a tourist destination, so I drew some attention. One group of old men invited me to take a sip from their red bucket. It was a cold mix of ice blocks, soda water and something else. I passed by a group of women practicing some sort of traditional medicine and they were happy to chat with me. One women sat with small glass cups stuck on her back so that she looked like like the dressing mirror in an actor's studio. The woman behind her yanked off the glasses one by one, leaving purple welts, and then warmed the cups with a small torch before sticking them back the other's back. The patient told me that she was feeling sick and that this would help. I don't see how.

I rounded the bend where the small river empties into the larger river which forms Saigon's eastern waterfront. The area became a dreary business district with few pedestrians. Restored French hotels were sandwiched between hideous Communist buildings, which seemed to be all but empty.

I had expected the Saigon waterfront to resemble Shanghai's Bund, a lively riverside commercial district built up by Europeans and Americans in the beginning of the century. But hardly anyone walked around the pathetic park that buttressed the brown water from the main road. The reason, undoubtedly, was that the opposite shore was not very appealing, consisting mostly of old rusted factories and bilboards.

I made my way back to the hotel through the busier heart of the city. Unlike the riverfront, it was crawling with tourists and busy shops. At one corner, security guards waved red wands to attract shoppers into a new electronics store. Special arrangement were made for the hundreds of motorbikes that showed up to the opening sale.

This time, we were prepared for dinner and made reservations at a small outdoor French restaurant, which was delicious. Beside us, a French women chatted with an old Vietnamese man in rapid French.

We decided to go find Keith at The Office, which turned out to be large and new-looking. We found Keith upstairs, fooling around with some of the bar girls. Amazingly, he remembered us and was happy to hang out. Over the course of about an hour he revealed that he was actually a high functioning person. Or was. He had had an extremely successful business career in New Zealand, owning magazines and other business. Three years ago, in what must have been a major mid-life crisis, he came to Saigon and opened three bars, of which The Office is one. He still lives in New Zealand with his wife of 25 years but spends a good deal of time in his new kingdom in Saigon. That night he was wearing a newsprint-motif shirt that was at least four sizes to small for him. He went around the whole night, dancing in place like someone who missed the glory days at the Whiskey-a-Gogo. Keith had been rolling Ecstasy nonstop for three days.

On Keith's suggestion, we all went to Lush, an awesome one-room club in the middle of the city. Huge murals of graphic art decorated the tall walks and they played international techno. We met a group of girls visiting from Toulouse, and hung out with them for much of the night. Unfortunately, their respective English abilities were inversely proportionate to their attractiveness.

We decided to leave Lush at about two and Keith came out after us babbling about some other place that didn't sound appealing. He had a fit when we decided not to go with him and he started off on foot toward the morning, moving in bizarre gyrations that only made sense to him. We ended the night at Q, a bar/club where it was difficult to hear the French girls jabber on about their travels.

The next early afternoon we went to the War Remnants Museum, which began with an amazing outdoor display of tanks, aircraft and various other heavy American weapons. Adam complained that Americans should be allowed to bring them back to the United States. Tim stared at the massive mobile Howitzer that had a range of 20 miles and wondered aloud, "How did we not win the war."

Inside, there were exhibits of gruesome atrocities commited by American troops. It was truly sickening what we, as the supposed guardian of freedom, did in an effort to "free" Vietnam. Nevertheless, I was disappointed, but not surprised by the narrow scope of the museum. There was no attention paid to the Viet Cong attrocities and mistakes. Nor was there any indication that the Americans were even targetting the Viet Cong in their horrendous bombings and security sweeps. One would have thought, leaving the exhibit, that the Americans came to Vietnam simply to exterminate the Vietnamese people.

But before we left, I noticed that we'd missed part of a part of the museum housed in two side buildings. I went in and found the walls covered with famous photos of American troops holed up in Khe Sanh or pinned down in villages. They effectively conveyed the pain of the American presence in Vietnam, the fact that both sides had suffered immensely.

It was as if a Holocaust museum had a devoted a wing to the plight of ordinary Nazis in the Second World War. It impressed me. All countries build museums dedicated to various national tragedies. But how many of these museums comment on the suffering of the enemies who brought about the terror? Well, I suppose if I've learned anything this summer it's that the Vietnamese are no ordinary people.

Teaching English

2007-07-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

Since my last post about teaching English, I’ve become more enthusiastic about it. After the first session, I was not very into it because the kids I was teaching were just six or seven years old and the “lessons” were little more than pointing to pictures and asking them to yell out random words like, “Aaalligator!!!” or Eeeegloooo!!!” It was a tolerable two-hour ritual but as soon as I deviated from the simple lesson plan, they were completely lost.

First year students

Lately, though, I’ve been teaching nine and ten year old kids who know much more. I demonstrate the difference between “usually” and “sometimes”, instead of having to teach them the colors. The older kids give me something to work with and I take them through exercises, introducing new words and grammatical twists that stretch their English abilities.

From the beginning, I’ve always felt that as native-English speaker, it’s more worth-while for me to work with older kids who know some English already. The very young kids just go through simple memorization games and the Vietnamese teachers do a fine job of extending their short attention spans. When I work with these young kids, I’m an interesting novelty, but at the end of the class, they haven’t learned anything that they wouldn’t have picked up from their Vietnamese teacher.

With the older kids, I can truly make a difference because the Vietnamese teachers usually speak very basic English. It was often very difficult for me to ask them what lessons I should be doing. These teachers have no problem teaching their students what an alligator is, but they’re shaky on the finer points of English grammar. They know very few colloquial phrases.

The other American students don’t mind teaching the younger kids because they disagree with me that older kids benefit more. They point out that younger kids generally learn languages quickly and that it’s important to learn proper pronunciation early. These are valid points, but I still disagree.

Maybe my view is colored by my own experience learning Spanish. I had five years of Spanish lessons in elementary school, all taught by fluent Spanish-speakers. Yet by the time I was in sixth grade, I still didn’t know much beyond the colors and numbers. But when I got to seventh grade, the teacher began to systematically teach grammar and tenses. There were weekly vocabulary tests. By the end of middle school, I knew what I was doing and was prepared to become fluent by the end of high school. I wouldn’t have been any worse off if I’d started Spanish in seventh grade.

Because of this, I don’t put much stock in learning a language very early to “get ahead”. Young minds are good at internalizing new words, but they are not able to think abstractly or digest systematic lessons. For the same reason that we don’t teach algebra to seven-year-olds, we can’t teach them the future perfect tense.

It’s true that pronunciation is a major problem between Vietnamese and English. The small amount of Vietnamese that I know is almost entirely incomprehensible because the sounds are so alien. Likewise, the Vietnamese students have terrible pronunciation issues. Today I thought a group of students wanted to be called the “Sock” team, and I wrote down “Team Sock” on their side of the board. They laughed hysterically because they had actually tried to say “Shark” team. The teachers are usually unable to help them because their own accents are poor.

I think a native speaker can help older students more with pronunciation. Older children can rationalize. I can explain that “scissors” are pronounced “sizzers” because the “sc” in English is normally pronounced as an “s”. What little logic there is in the English language can be explained, and the older students can apply one example to many situations.

In the end, the instruction is only going to be valuable if the students are motivated. Millions of American students learn Spanish and other languages from competent teachers, but only a small minority attains proficiency, because Americans have little incentive to learn languages that they’ll hardly ever use. Vietnamese students, on the other hand, quickly realize that English is a major key to prosperity, as well as a window into the outside world. Like all children, they lose focus from time to time in class, but they’re not entirely checked out, like so many American students in Spanish classes.

I strongly believe that most of the kids in my classes will one day speak English, and I’ve enjoyed helping them get there—especially when they’re ready.

Red Tape

2007-07-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

Getting a visa to Vietnam was like pulling teeth. Susan Bindig, on of the trip organizers, had to jump through all sorts of hoops to file fifteen visas at the New York Consulate. Through several months in the spring, there were endless rounds of Fed Ex-ing, revising, and redundant forms and fees before the visas finally arrived.

When I picked my visa up from her office in May, I noticed that it expired on July 15, half way through our trip. I asked if we would need to get an extension during the trip, and she said no. I figured that something was in the works and that we’d be given an additional visa in July. As July 15 approached, I started to wonder about the situation and brought it up with Desaix. It turned out that July 15 was a typo—everyone else’s expires on September 15.

As angry as I was that after months of wrangling with the consulate, they’d botched my visa, something had to be done about it. I’d prefer not to travel illegally in Communist Vietnam. And as much as I’m enjoying Vietnam, I’d like to be able to leave when the time comes.

So on Monday, Desaix and I took a cab to a plush government agency where Desaix had been told I could get a visa extension. Before we’d even passed through the gate, however, an official told us to go to another agency. The second agency was at the end of a long alleyway and was full of Vietnamese people, most of whom seemed to be there to update their national ID cards. They sat in plastic chairs waiting for their number to be called by white-shirted officials who were in no particular hurry. It was the Vietnamese DMV.

Desaix talked to a woman behind a glass window and after a bit of bureaucratic wrangling, she declared that the university authorities could take care of my visa. I was elated, thinking I’d go into a friendly university administrator’s office, get a simple stamp, and once again be a legal visitor to Vietnam.

The next morning I gave the passport to Mr. Vinh, who organizes the logistics of the course. He returned an hour later with a handful of complicated forms which I signed and then he disappeared again. As we were leaving class, I asked him when I’d get it back, expecting to have it by the next day. To my horror, he casually estimated that it would take a week. That’s too bad, I thought, it means that I’ll have to manage with my remaining cash, since I won’t be able to change any more travelers checks.

A WEEK!! Wait a minute! I’m flying to Ho Chi Minh City in three days! How am I supposed to get on an airplane without my passport!?! It suddenly dawned on me that this was a disaster. I need the passport back immediately or I need them to expedite the visa extention.

Desaix helped me out again by calling some university staff and expressing my predicament. He learned that I couldn’t get my passport back because it was already taken to the authorities and now that they knew that the visa is expired, they wouldn’t release it. So there was no choice but to go through the visa process. The challenge was to cut a week down to two days.

I thought of myself spending my last weekend lying in my hotel room and I got desperate. I frantically stammered, “Tell them I’m willing to pay any “fees” that they need. I’ll pay whatever it takes. WHATEVER it takes.”

People in the West constantly criticize people in the developing world for being corrupt, for giving and taking bribes. I’ve personally asked Vietnamese officials tough questions about corruption in their country. But here I was, in a desperate situation, and my immediate reaction was to throw money at the bureaucracy to make it go away.

Desaix told them to “feel free to pay any expediting fees that may be necessary” and by the late afternoon, we heard welcome news—the passport and renewed visa will be in my hands by Thursday, before my flight to Ho Chi Minh City. I still have no idea if some sort of bribe did the trick or if I was just lucky, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something shady went down.

Since I last wrote about corruption in “Politics”, my assessment of government corruption has changed. I had written that corruption was substantial but that the government was taking important steps to combat it. I’m now convinced that corruption is extremely widespread and that anti-corruption campaigns are mostly for show.

Part of this reassessment emerged through a briefing by an official at the U.S. Embassy, who painted a sobering picture of corruption in Vietnam. Corruption, he claimed, is present at every level of government and is likely to remain a formidable challenge for a long time because the system is self-perpetuating. Like most bureaucracies, the Communist government favors passiveness over initiative. Officials who maintain the status quo will slowly rise in the administration. Those who rock the boat are inevitably purged.

The Embassy official cited a recent example to illustrate this. For years, parents have been bribing exam authorities to boost their children’s test scores. But recently, a brave official stood up and publicly exposed the well known exam corruption. The Party was embarrassed but pretended that it was pleased by the official, who was promptly promoted. Many observers saw this as a sign that the government was serious about fighting corruption. But when the official tried to run for the National Assembly, the Communist Party vetted him and prohibited his candidacy. There was no room for an upstart whistle blower in the National Assembly.

Corruption is firmly engrained in Vietnamese government because of its scale. Because it is prevalent at all levels of government, everyone is complicit and has a stake in minimizing reform. The junior official won’t denounce a senior official for accepting a car from Chinese construction firm because the senior official knows all about the junior official’s special “expediting fees” at the immigration agency.

VIETNAM VO DICH!!

2007-07-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

In the afternoon, a number of us visited the American Embassy, dressing up a bit and passing through fortress security to chat with Deputy Chief of Mission Aloisi.

The DCM gave some fresh insight on the situation in Vietnam and his profession. “Unlike so many people,” he remarked, “diplomats tend to see things in shades of grey rather than black and white. For instance, if your sole interest is human rights, then you probably consider Vietnam one of the worst places on earth. But if you’re an average Vietnamese person, you’re probably pleased with the vast improvement in personal freedom throughout the last ten or twenty years. An anti-abortion zealot may come to a country and make reproductive health their sole policy priority, while an industrial lobby doesn’t care much about what’s going on in the country so long as they’re buying our Boeings. We diplomats have to see things from all sides.”

The Marine sergeant returned our passports through a slit in a reinforced glass compartment and we left the embassy, which is guarded by well armed Vietnamese soldiers and blocked by two brown shipping containers. A few in the group had tickets to the Asian Cup match between Vietnam and Japan, and Mark, Zach and I got the idea to go over to My Dan stadium to try our luck at the box office.

As soon as the taxi dropped us off in the middle of a throng of excited Vietnamese fans streaming toward the brand new stadium, we realized that the box office wouldn’t be necessary because every other guy on the sidewalk was scalping tickets. We managed to get in for $9 by driving a tough bargain. The scalper shook our hands, smiled and told us to enjoy the game and to make sure to root for Vietnam.

We rushed past the gates, through a furiously beeping metal detector and into the roaring stadium. Just before we reached the seats, the crowd erupted. Vietnam was up 1-0 in the 8th minute.

It was an exciting game, although things went downhill for the Vietnamese. Japan is a World Cup team and clearly outplayed the red players. In the 30th minute, a Japanese forward headed in a beautiful cross and a few minutes later the Japanese kicked a free-kick into the top corner. In the second half they sunk two more goals.

From my experience with foreign soccer matches, I would have expected the crowd to become bitter and violent. But the Vietnamese were different. Even though this was a much anticipated, important game, there was little negativity. The crowd didn’t whistle or curse the referee when things didn’t go their way—even when the referee overlooked the tripping of a Vietnamese forward in the penalty box, the crowd let it go. They cheered wildly when Vietnam made a big play, but sat down in quiet acceptance when the Japanese scored. Rowdy guys tossed bags of water but it was done in jest, not bitterness, and everyone laughed when it happened, especially when it landed near one of the stern army soldiers who stood waiting for a riot that would never come. The crowd was mellow and happy, which I think matches the tempo of the country. A massive portrait of Ho Chi Minh watched over the game.

In general, the crowd expressed their support of their soccer team by chanting, “Viet Nam Clap Clap Clap!”, the equivalent of screaming “U! S! A!” at a hockey match. Occasionally, a section sang “Ole Ole”. In the second half, a massive flag was unfurled over the crowd and it was slowly passed around the entire stadium, engulfing our section for an exciting moment.

The game wound down and defeat became certain, but just as the crowd seemed ready to take off and go home, a fan would stand up and rally a cheer. A few times, the whole stadium rose up spontaneously, as if to tell the players, “You may not be doing well this game, but you’re our team and we’re proud of you.”

We streamed out of the stadium and took a taxi back to the Bao Khanh. After dinner, I was about to go into the hotel but I heard a faint buzz in the direction of the lake and decided to check it out.

It was a wild victory procession. Although Vietnam had lost badly against Japan, the United Arab Emirates had beaten Qatar, which allowed Vietnam to advance to the next round with just one win and one tie. Hoan Kiem Lake was a crimson red ring of frenzied celebration, as motor bikers pored in from all over the city to circle the lake and proclaim their love for Vietnam. Hundreds of bikers swung red and yellow flags, children piled on the roofs of cars and makeshift bands played from the balconies. People were hysterical, bringing traffic to a standstill as they stopped to dance in the street. I doubt this type of thing happens after elections.

For my part, I took lots of pictures and then joined the fray. I was still wearing my red headband from the game and as a rare foreigner, I was a convenient outlet of patriotic jubilation. Two youths enticed me to hop on the back of their motorbike, which was inching forward through the thick cloud of bikes and flags. I hopped off soon afterward when the speed picked up and stood on the sidewalk trying to rile people up. I probably won’t ever have an easier time inspiring people. All I had to do was extend my hand and every biker would cheer and slap it. The stream of bikers would chant “Viet Nam!” and I’d cause a sensation by yelling “Vo Dich”, which I’d learned meant “Victory!”

I stood among the frenzy for about half an hour, sharing a good victory with a good people.

Water Puppets

2007-07-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

The last touristy thing I’d had left to do in Hanoi was to go to a water puppet show. The theatre is nearby, across the Hoan Kiem Lake and as we walked up to the box office, the street was packed with tourists trying to get tickets, standing around in the bright sun.

The theatre ended up being much bigger than I’d envisioned—about the size of an American movie theatre rather than a small salon. The stage was a green pond backed by an elaborate temple structure. On the left there was a platform for the traditional orchestra to play various scores.

The mostly foreign audience settled to a low hush as the puppet show was introduced in Vietnamese, English and French. The art of water puppetry, we were told, has been traced as far back to the 12th Century Hanoi court and is one of Vietnam’s “most precious traditional art forms”.

The musicians took the upper stage and began playing a lengthy piece. An older woman plucked away at a one stringed instrument that vibrated shrill psycadelic frequencies. Traditionally, only men played this instrument and unmarried women were forbidden to listen to it because it was assumed that they would be overcome by the beauty of the tunes and fall in love with the players. The other instruments aren’t known for their seductive powers, but they sounded fine to me. There was a long, narrow guitar instrument that was manipulated with flighty hand movements. The orchestra also abounded with various harps, clicking sticks and percussion instruments, to polish off the very busy, exotic sound. Two young women sang on top of the orchestra, with stammering nasal voices, which completed the traditional music.

After the first musical scores, wooden puppets popped out of a green mat screen and began to dance robotically around the water. There was no real plot since the only objective was to entertain nobles, or in this case, European tourists. The crowd chuckled at the petty antics of the human and animal puppets. A crowd of young children would have laughed uproariously.

The scenes had names like On a Buffalo with a Flute or Unicorns Play with a Ball, each more visually spectacular than the last. For a medieval art form, it was technically elaborate. Dragons spewed water and smoke and children hoped onto each others shoulders. In one scene, the king returned a sacred sword to a mystical giant turtle after defeating the Mongols in a famous battle.

After the Dance with the Four Holy Animals, the puppeteers emerged from behind the green screen and the audience packed into the lobby. I was shocked to find that the city had been caught in an thunderous rainstorm. The rain came down in thick pellets, covering the roads in inches of rain. An eight foot dive into a cab got me decently wet and the drive to the restaurant was like a scene from Jurassic Park.

We found the Highway 4 restaurant and climbed up a few stories of slippery stairs to get to the roof level tables. The rain pounded the tarp roof and the sky flickered with frantic heat lightning. The seating was on ground cushions and the six of us squeezed into the cramped spaces as the waiters brought elaborate menus.

Highway 4’s claim to fame is its exotic selection of traditional Vietnamese spirits. The drinks menu began with a few dozen straightforward Vietnamese brandies—apricot, mushroom, rice, etc, but the last few pages got interesting. For about 50 cents, the menu offered samples of liquor distilled from silkworms. Or geckos and starfish. Or black bees. I took the dive and ordered those three with my meal.

Oddly, the three shots tasted more less how you’d expect them to. The gecko shot was tangy and the silkworm had a bitter, musty taste that lingered. The bee liquor had a very obvious hint of honey and was the only one that was objectively enjoyable.

The food was no less wondrous and most of us tried to get something relatively unusual, although none of us took full advantage of the restaurant’s cornucopia of Asian delicacies. Mark ordered huge fried frog legs, which everyone enjoyed and Clelia received a delicious beef dish served in a flaming package of tin foil. Emily tried out the grey water buffalo meat and Susan enjoyed stuffed squid. Elias and I both felt the urge to eat crocodile, which turned out to be very tasty as well.

Vietnam has to be the only place where it's possible to eat or drink almost ten animals in one meal.

Clockwise from lower left: Crocodile, frog legs, strange assorted liquors, stuffed squid, water buffalo, beef

Cadre Camp

2007-07-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

"Cadre Camp" has been a running joke throughout this trip. In our imaginations, there's a dark, sinister Vietnam underneath the friendly captialism of Hanoi--where people go to labor camps to be "re-educated", or where urban youth march around the countryside to become one with the worker. It was, of course, a silly fantasy. Such places no longer exist.

But this weekend we found ourselves at Cadre Camp. We'd driven two hours northeast into the extremely rural Bac Giang Province. After driving into the well organized, brightly painted provincial capital of the same name, and checking into a nearly empty "government hotel", we made our way deeper into the countryside. The landscape was completely dominated by flat rice fields surrounded by bushy hills. Thousands of workers tilled the fields, replanted rice sprouts and bossed around their water buffaloes. At first the roads were lined with new, four-story housing developments, like the ones found in Hanoi. But as we entered Yen Dang District and the village of Lao Ho, the van shuddered over the uneaven red dirt and the houses tended to be simple one-story brick hovels. I learned later that Lao Ho is the poorest town in the poorest district of Bac Giang, which in turn is one of the poorer provinces in Vietnam.

As we roled into a narrow gate, we still had very little sense of what we were about to do. We had a vague idea that we were going to help the locals by building some sort of road and that we'd be joined by other student volunteers. The van came into a small concrete courtyard surrounded by grim, windowless buildings. Young Vietnamese in blue uniforms swarmed around the entry of the main building and ushered us in to the front of a small auditorium. An ancient, rusty fan hung by a chord from the rafters and pushed around the soupy air. Beside a handful of socialist expressions, a bust of Ho Chi Minh looked out at the audience.

A young official began the opening ceremony by going through a roster of who was here. "...and we thank the Social Science Department of the Hanoi National University...and we thank the International Studies Department of the Hanoi National Univeristy...and we thank the delegates from the Hoan Chi District Youth League...and we thank the students from Princeton University..." Several speakers exhausted every possible form of greeting to each represented group, Desaix gave a speech in Vietnamese and then Mr. Bien, a serious official, took the podium. Mr. Bien is the Deputy Party Secretary of Yen Dang District, and a member of the Central Committee, the closed-door body that runs Vietnam. He delivered a very martial speech entreating the youth intellectuals to unite with the rural proletariat through hard labor. It was at that point that Mark leaned over to me and whispered, "Oh my God, I think we're actually at Cadre Camp." I looked around, thought about it and completely agreed.

The next part of our journey into the twilight zone were three visits to local war veterans and their relatives who are afflicted by Agent Orange. We packed into the one-room houses which became overcrowded with dozens of uniformed youth, cadres and a television camera that filmed the entire day, likely for a propaganda story on the state news channels.

The first house was inhabited by a crusty old veteran who fought in the 1960s until he lost his leg in combat. At one point he pointed and burst out laughing as he revealed a dented plastic prosthetic. Throughout the short interview and gift ceremony, his 27-year-old son sat beside him silent and dazed. His back was contorted in hunch, an effect of Agent Orange poisoning. Despite his distressed circumstances, the old veteran was proud and cheerful. He pointed to a framed certificate above his family's shrine and announced that it was an official recognition of his father's martyrdom in the French War. Above that hung a tattered poster of Uncle Ho.

In another house we visited a fierce looking veteran whose five year old grand-daughter stuck to his side, silent and awkward, little more than a small human shell poisoned by Agent Orange. Her face was strained and her limbs flailed uncontrolably. Two weeks ago she took her first steps and it was grounds for celebration. In the last house the situation was even worse. A mother, herself afflicted by Agent Orange, stared sadly at her visitors as she cradled her limp son.

After paying homage to these families, we went to a nearby elementary school which is now being used by the various Youth Unions working in Lao Ho. We joined about fifty uniformed students at a row of food dishes on the ground, and ate sandwiches stuffed with various pork products. The youth were all chattering loudly, obviously enjoying their time together. During the school year they study together and in the summer they go on more-or-less mandatory two week labor trips in the countryside. Since summer jobs are unheard of, there's not much better to do, and nobody seemed especially angry about spending their summer sleeping on hard floors and doing intense labor in the middle of nowhere.

After lunch, the work caravan slowly walked down to the road that we were to be working on. We roled our bamboo worktools in a rickety wooden cart.

I was surprised to find that the road was already paved, which was unusual in this area. Our job was to pack dirt on the side of the concrete strip in order to widen the road with a safety shoulder that could easily save lives. Piles of rocks and dirt had already been placed at intervals along the road, but we had to level them along a 100 meter stretch.

The youth swarmed around the piles of red earth, like ants carrying away a piece of bread. Teams of white-shirted young cadres carried away bigger stones in reed baskets. Older cadres loosened the piles with a pickax while others shoveled earth onto white sacks, which were used as makeshift stretchers to move dirt.

As strightforward as it sounds, the work was utterly gruelling. It was over ninety degrees and the humidity soaked the shirts of people sitting in the shade. Any type of exertion, even the laziest strike of the shovel, created rivers of sweat on every inch of our bodies. The Vietnamese generally sweat very little and have a high tolerance of the sun. The Americans, on the other hand, looked like they'd been dunked in tubs of baby oil.

Yet we managed to work extremely hard, rarely taking breaks through the three hour work-period. Several times I saw Duane lean over as if to vomit, but it passed and he went back to shovelling. Elias had to take take a break because he was about to pass out but he came back before long. I had to stop briefely a few times to sit on a shaded part of the wall, but I still felt like a chestnut roasting on a bunch of coals. Still, I did pretty well because I'd challenged myself to a personal water-drinking competition. My goal was to drink obscene ammounts of water and that day I downed 6.5 liters--more than 14 pounds.

The Vietnamese youth were a bit less gung ho, but I don't blame them. For two weeks straight, they rise at 5 to begin work at 7am. This was their second work shift of the day and I wasn't surprised that they spent more time resting than the Americans.

Throughout the afternoon, groups of locals sat in the shade and watches us, gawking at the Americans and lauging uproariously when we yelled "Xin Chao" ("hello") at them. I learned later, that our visit was causing a sensation in Lao Ho. No foreign service groups had every joined the Youth Union in the province and no foreigner had even been to Lao Ho in modern memory. We were not just off the beaten path, we were off the road entirely.

The locals, I heard, were extremely impressed with their strange intruders. They appreciated how hard we worked and were in awe of our physical strength, especially when they saw the handful of athletes in our group.

But as excited as they were by our presence, they never picked up shovels and helped us out. According to Mr. Bien, these work programs were intended to unite young urban intellectuals with rural workers. But in Lao Ho, the students and workers were not shoulder to shoulder. It seems to me that the purpose of the program was to make the future Vietnamese elite conscious of the daily toils of the peasant class, rather than bonding them to individual farmers. Or maybe it was just meant to give students something to do in the summer so they're less nervous about the lack of summer employment.

Either way, I think it's an amazing experience. The National Univesity students that we worked with were extremely sophisticated. Many will become bankers or ambassadors. Hoa, a lovely girl who we've hung out with in a sheek nightclub, translated the various speeches into impeccable English. She's going on to study at Johns Hopkins. Desaix insists that she'll one day become Foreign Minister. But no matter where she ends up, she'll always be shaped by weeks and months of hard labor in the poorest parts of Vietnam. In fact, the next morning, she worked so hard that she suffered heat exhaustion and had to spend the day lying on a mat.

We left at 5pm to peel off our soaking clothes and take shower. We had an eight course meal at the hotel that cost a mere $20 for 17 of us. Through the dinner, we had a nice time talking to Professor Minh, who was accompanying us on the labor trip. He's a well respected professor who bought an "FBI...Female Body Inspector" t-shirt on a visit to Los Angeles. We thought it was priceless.

Mr. Minh. Distinguished professor by day, Female Body Inspector by night.

Most of us rode back to the elementary school base of the Youth Unions for a night concert. Cadres roamed around a stage setting up sound equiptment for a gala preformance. At about 8:30, villagers began streaming in from all over the surrounding villages, forming a thick semi-circle around the stage. Most had never seen a foreigner and hoards of children huddled around us to stare and ask us our names. They were especially drawn to Tim, who is about twice the size of the biggest human being in Lao Ho. He created a big hit by arm wrestling young boys and pretending that he was about to lose.

An enthusiastic cadre came on the stage and read a repetetive litany of introductions and salutations. He welcomed everyone to the night's preformance which was titled "Ho Chi Minh: The Most Beautiful Name." Blue-shirted Youth Union members came up and sung patriotic songs.

All of a sudden the power went out. It was completely dark except for the light from the stars. The Youth Union continued singing their songs without a microphone, but it was barely audible. Then, as quickly as it had gone, the lights came back on and everyone cheered. But it went off again, and on again for twenty minutes, as cadres scurried back and forth trying to fix the problem. It was something that I would expect to happen at Cadre Camp.

The nice thing about the blackouts is was that the kids became restive and I got to play with them. I took dozens of pictures of excited groups and they all laughed uproariously when I played back the pictures on the digital screen. I let a few of them take their own pictures and that too was a big hit. Once the power came on for good, a stern cadre had to shoe the hoard of kids away because a crowd had formed in front of our table and it was distracting the preformers.

The preformances diversified a bit. Women in traditional dresses sang melancholy songs backed by a local band. An older man in Confuscian dress came up and belched a long, heartfelt ballad. Then a cadre introduced the Yen Dang District Hip Hop Club. Eight youths, all from this poor rural district came up and amazed the audience with break dancing moves and various other creative maneuvers. I would say that the entire audience all got served, big time. Ho Chi Minh would have been proud of the break dancers.

After the Hip Hop performance, we were ushered onstage, one thousand pleased faces peering out at us. A local Party bigwig said a few words of praise and then pinned a Youth Union pin on our breast as a recorded drum beat played on the speakers. Then we were handed microphones and began to sing the National Anthem as planned. We were not very good. Desaix later joked that we sounded like the "Whifenpoofs", not a complement coming from a Princetonian. But the crowd enjoyed it. "and the laaaand of the freeeeeee." Cheers. "and the hoooome of the braaaaaaavee." More cheers. The Hanoi University group chanted "Princ-e-ton!...Princ-e-ton!" It was an utterly amazing moment. We had just sung the National Anthem of the United States in front of a thousand North Vietnamese at a Cadre Camp preformance titled "Ho Chi Minh: The Most Beautiful Name."

We ended our time on stage with an awkward rendition of "Old Nassau", which only about three of us knew the words to. No matter. It was also a hit. I'm convinced that we could have sung anything and drawn immense applause.

The last few songs were well recieved. A woman sung a cheerful song and several of the Americans went on stage and danced. A group of blue shirted guys sang a famous army marching song and then rejoined their delighted companions in the front of the crowd. Everyone was pumped for the final song, a patriotic song that's often sung in place of the National Anthem. Everyone, including the Americans, came on stage and sang the catchy song to the excited crowd. "Vietnaaaaam...Ho Chi Miiiinh......Vietnaaaaaam...Ho Chi Miiiinh..." It was a spectacular grand finale to a day at Cadre Camp.

We were back the next morning mingling fluidly with the Youth Union students that we'd gotten to know the night before. We all headed to the war memorial, which I've learned, nearly every village in Vietnam has. About fifty headstones announced lives cut short during the French War or the American War. The American students placed incense in front of the red memorial stone as a television camera rolled.

We got to work tidying up the cemetary, scraping away weeds with hoes and whitewashing the rain-stained walls with homemade paint brushes. It was comparatively easier than the roadwork, but the late morning sun made it no less oppressive.

Mercifully, the workshift ended at about 11 and we retreated to the school to hang out with our new Vietnamese friends and play soccer. Our van loaded up and we ended a weekend at Cadre Camp. We'd seen the archaic underbelly of Vietnamese Communism and found it difficult but not harsh, nationalist but not xenophobic, warm instead of grim.

Hopes and Dreams

2007-07-12T07:09:00.000-07:00

Adam and Tim met Van at the 4th of July party and she invited a few of us to a small café in a new part of town. We had a vague idea that we were going to meet some of her friends, but otherwise didn’t know what to expect. As we came to the second floor of the café, eight eager faces turned to us and politely introduced themselves. Names sounded like alien whispers and went in one ear and came out the other. We sat down awkwardly, exchanging pleasantries, but before long their intense desire to learn about the outside world burned through any natural shyness.

They were dutiful students in subjects like physics, economics or finance. They all wanted to study abroad, especially in America. What, they wondered, were the best graduate schools in America? How does one go about applying? What does it cost? One timid girl explained that she majored in physics but had a great interest in astrophysics, which is not taught in Vietnam. What did I consider the best astrophysics program in America? Having rarely thought about graduate school for myself, I was utterly unequipped to answer their questions. I replied with broad answers—there are hundreds of graduate schools in my country and their rankings and applications can be found online.

All through these interrogations about graduate school, I wondered how many would actually make it. Most spoke comprehensible English, but their phrases were awkward and I had to speak slowly and simply to get my points across. They had a long way to go before they could hope to do graduate work in America. But they were full of hope and stared at me with a vague sense that I was a window into a world that they wanted to enter and that my irregular, unpronounceable language was its key.

I suddenly felt obscenely privileged. I grew up knowing English reflexively, mastering the intricacies of its written and spoken form while they are left struggling to understand the difference between “hidden” and “secret”. I’m studying at a university where tuition is 200 times greater than theirs and who’s endowment is larger than their entire government budget. I can study interesting, but impractical subjects and still be primed for rewarding jobs in the field of my choice. And I have the time to socialize, act, participate in athletics, and help run a social club, while their academic load is so great that there’s little time for any of that.

As these students learn about higher education in America and elsewhere, they inevitably become deeply dissatisfied with their own situation. They explained that their universities are overcrowded, under funded and that the instruction is poor. These glaring deficiencies were to be blamed on the government, which has more money than before, but has failed to improve things. On top of things, they’re very nervous about the job market. Yes, they acknowledged, towers and hotels are going up everywhere, but the growth is not reaching most people, and jobs are not being created fast enough. I asked them if they though the government could meet its goal of creating one million jobs each year and they were not optimistic. None of these skilled, intelligent students worked during the summer and good-post graduate jobs are at a premium. The finance major had landed a job at a Vietnamese investment firm but the others were still looking. Van, a girl with unusual spunk and advanced English, explained that she was going to switch from international trade to finance in the hope of finding better employment.

If I had asked them the flat question, “How is the Vietnamese economy”, they would have said that it was weak. This shocks me because I know that trade, income and consumption are growing so quickly. Their parents and grandparents rode bicycles. Now everyone rides motorbikes. In relative terms, Vietnam is far better than it was ten years ago.

The problem is that the new generation of educated Vietnamese doesn’t want to ride motorbikes—they want to drive cars. They don’t want to be shopkeepers or bureaucrats, but hope to become investment brokers and lawyers. They have first-world ambitions, but their country is still struggling to leave the third world.

Naturally, the void between expectations and reality is producing latent political tension. I pried a bit, and uncovered it. They resent the government for not improving the universities. The economy is growing, but not enough to catch up with the rest of the world as quickly as they’d like. They know that corruption is a problem and that their elections are a sham. I explained that in America, the people directly pressure the government to pay attention to their interests because voters can change the leadership. They liked the sound of that.

I was curious about their views of America and what they knew about our political situation. “So what do you think of George Bush?”, I asked. They looked at each other timidly, following the Vietnamese tradition of not rocking the boat. A silent consensus was reached and one guy declared, “I like President Bush.” They explained that Bush earned their support by helping Vietnam enter the WTO and inviting President Triet on a much celebrated visit to Washington. Vietnam is one of the only places in the world, save Kurdish regions, where a group of educated college students would have nice things to say about George W. Bush.

Van interjected with an outspoken statement. She said she though Bill Clinton was better for Vietnam because he had made bigger efforts to allow Vietnamese students to study in America. By appealing to her consummate dream, Bill Clinton and the Democrats had cemented her devotion. Van hoped that Hillary Clinton or another Democratic candidate becomes president. I pointed out that the Democrats have traditionally been more susceptible to protectionism, which would hurt Vietnam. It didn’t shake Van.

Tim told everyone that no matter who gets elected, relations between our two countries will probably remain very strong, and everyone agreed with that. Even if Congress slaps tariffs on Vietnam or if the State Department makes it harder for Vietnamese to study in America, these students will always have a very high regard for the United States. Their frustrations will be aimed at the undemocratic government, while the America will remain an outlet for their expectations.

The aspiring astrophysicist asked me what Princeton’s campus is like and I described it as a large park with old majestic buildings sprawled out across the grass. Her eyes widened, and I think the image reinforced her conception of America—an idyllic utopia where dreams are made.

Prices

2007-07-11T01:32:00.000-07:00

The first thing I bought in Vietnam was a much needed morning snack during a break on the first day of class. I found the university canteen and grabbed a water and a bag of shrimp chips. The woman at the counter held up four fingers, indicating that I owed 4,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND). I mentally divided that by 1,600 and estimated that my snack cost about $2.50. Pretty reasonable for chips and a drink. But as I was walking back to class, I remembered—the exchange rate is actually 16,000. The entire package set me back 25 cents!

That first purchase set the tone for most of the rest. Almost everything here is delightfully cheap. Excluding hotel arrangements, I’ve averaged about $13 per day, and that’s covered two meals per day in decent restaurants in the tourist district, taxi rides, snacks, and entertainment. It's a nice relief from America, as well as some of the other places I've travelled. I’m hardly living on a shoestring, but my daily budget wouldn’t even cover one lunch in London.

Here’s a list of local prices…

Moonshine Rice Wine FREE (See “Central Vietnam”)
Shrimp chips $0.12
Fruit Menthos $0.18
Tourist entry fees $0.30
Vietnam Daily News (English) $0.30
Bag of Ly Chi berries $0.30
1.5 L Water $0.36
Local draught beer $0.60
6 Bananas $0.60
Internet café, 1 hour $0.75
Coke at restaurant $0.93
Big bag of chocolate wafers $0.93
Gym entrance fee $1.25
10 minute taxi ride $1.40
Tiger beer (bottle, decent bar) $1.55
Cigarettes $1.55
Souvenir T-Shirt $2.20
Complex cocktail $2.50
Sit-down Vietnamese lunch $3.50
10 minute taxi rid (ripped off) $4.10
Pasta lunch at trendy restaurant $4.40
Vietnamese dinner $4.75
Nice Tapas dinner with Sangria $8.20

Feeling rich in Vietnam: PRICELESS

There are many things a few dollars can buy
For everything else, there are expensive imports

Finnigan's

2007-07-10T03:45:00.000-07:00

On Thursday nights, a group of us goes to Finnegan’s for a good time. It’s a two story Irish bar, patronized exclusively by “wankers”, young obnoxious British people. At least that’s what we call them collectively. In reality they’re friendly people from all over the Commonwealth, most often from Australia.

We first came across Finnegan’s walking back from Lexi’s birthday dinner. It was crowded with people lounging on soft benches and we had to go in. We sat down upstairs and since we were in an Irish bar, we all knew exactly what to get. The waitress dutifully brought us seven Irish Carbombs—Warm shots of Bailey’s dropped into glasses of Guinness Stout spiked with Irish Whiskey. They tasted like warm chocolate milk and another round was duly brought out. And then another. And another. I stopped at three, sensing danger ahead, but a few in the group broke the double digits.

Against this background of extreme drunkenness on the part of half our group, we entered a quiz competition. Every night, Finnegan’s invites teams to compete in their trivia game, which is broadcast through speakers around the bar. We had seven Princeton students, a Vietnamese local student and a career diplomat, so we thought we had a fighting chance at the $300 prize. We entered the competition and the first category was geography, which turned out to be my main contribution. But we floundered on the most northerly national capital. Reykjavik. Not Helsinki. Obviously!

During the break between rounds, the announcer invited each team to tell a joke. Having just finished his sixth Carbomb, Elias eagerly volunteered. The rest of us listened as Anglo accents recited relatively innocent sexual jokes. Then we heard Elias’ voice. “Why couldn’t the baby fit through the revolving door?” Oh no, not a dead baby joke. “Because of the javelin through its head.” Silence…Not a sound. Finally the announcer broke the silence by calling up another group.

We’d gotten nine on the geography round and were really confident of victory. One person claimed that he could order as many Carbombs as he wanted because the prize money would cover it. The four-part answer category was next and we did ok until they asked what four words comprised ‘Goodbye’. We were all stumped, exchanging blank glances. Out of nowhere, Dzung, one of the Vietnamese students in our class, announces that he knew the answer. You’re kidding me, we all thought, aware that his English was good but not perfect. We hovered over him as he calmly wrote “God be with you” on the line, as if it were commonly taught in intermediate English. That astounding victory brought another round of Carbombs.

We were doing well, but the situation was deteriorating. The last question of the round asked for the four American states that begin with North or South. We were competing with several other “wanker” teams in the room and Elias and Adam got the notion that they could fool the other players by yelling out false answers. “North Virginia!...South Jerseeeeyyyy!!...EAST YORK!!” I think the other teams still got the question, though.

We fell apart in the third round, which was about musicals. With difficulty, we identified the Chicago themes song, but the round was not happening. The fourth round sounded more promising because it was sports, but it was equally disastrous. We had a few jocks in the group, so I was really hopeful, but they were too busy walking around with their shorts off or looking across the balcony to see if they could make a quick getaway when the bill arrived. The other problem was that the questions were about “wanker” sports, like darts or snookers, things we had no clue about. “This is AMERICA!” Tim yelled. “We don’t play darts!”

We all huddled downstairs to watch the scores get tallied. We all sensed from the last two rounds that we were doomed, but when the scores came in we acted horrified, as if we’d been cheated by the “wankers”. Then the bill came. I stared in disbelief at a tally of 45 Carbombs, among other things. The total was even more astounding—no less than 3,375,000 dong. To put it in perspective, the eight of us could have eaten a nice dinner at a high end Hanoi restaurant for under one million dong. This was an absolutely sickening bar tab, and I felt glad that I wasn’t liable for much of it. It took 20 minutes to pay and we swore we’d be back to redeem ourselves and recoup our losses.

Last Thursday, we were indeed back, and we avoided Carbombs like they were cancer. Only four of us started out the competition because the other taxi was taking the other group on a wild detour to the outskirts of Hanoi. The frightened occupants swore they were on their way to get their way to “Rape Village”, and their mini taxi adventure has become part of the trip lore. Nonetheless, we made quick work of the first section, history, which we’d selected as our double-point category.

The others arrived just in time for the joke break, which we’d plotted all week. It was decided that it would be funny to somehow insult the audience, who were almost all from the British Commonwealth. So Adam went downstairs and his loud Long Island accent came through the speaker. “Ok, our joke is as follows…..Canada.”. Our table erupted and we heard lots of amused commotion downstairs, although it would have been much better if there were other American groups in the bar. Still, it was deemed one of the top three jokes of the round.

After we aced a category on movie quotations, we were way ahead of most of the groups, but one group of two was ahead of us by one point. That was unacceptable. We were not going to loose this time. The next section was album titles and we cringed when a question stumped the group. We arranged to bribe one of the waitresses to give fill in one of our blanks. Ten minutes later she came back with the right answer.

We did fine on the fourth category and went downstairs, earnestly expecting victory, especially when we saw that we had 47 points out of a possible 50. But the other couple had 48. The announcer congratulated the two, and it sounded as if he knew them well. We cursed our luck. This whole thing had probably been a massive scam, we thought. Two people could never have gotten more than us. They must be in cahoots with the bar owners. What filthy “wanker” cheaters!

4th of July

2007-07-09T04:58:00.000-07:00

On Sunday the American community of Hanoi celebrated Independence Day. The American Chamber of Commerce threw an extravagant picnic for the event and Americans came out of the woodwork to attend. It was held at the American Club, a walled facility where Americans and their friend hang out, mostly to play volleyball.

I walked to the picnic with Desaix and several of our group and was stunned when we approached the American Club. The outer wall was covered in flag bunting and bulging strings of red, white and blue balloons. A big sign announced the event to all. My first reaction was, “my God, we’re going to get bombed!” These days Americans are so resented in the world that it would be ludicrous to advertise a 4th of July celebration in most places. Almost every country has people who would love a chance to attack a congregation of Americans. But there aren’t any in Vietnam, so the mini flags were flying high on the wall. That’s the way it should be.

We passed through a metal detector on the way in. It beeped but the guard glanced at my shorts and sandals and waved me along. It opened up into a packed courtyard, full of black heads. For some reason I had imagined the picnic being full of old American businessmen smoking cigars. In fact, 80% of the people were Vietnamese. I learned that many were embassy employees. Still others were the attractive wives or girlfriends of expatriates. Mixed blood children ran around everywhere, stopping to gape at the snake handler who played with two massive boa constrictors.

And over in the corner was food. Fried chicken! Catfish! Cole slaw! Quesadillas! Barbeque ribs! Corn! I was really hungry and it was like seeing a bunch of old friends again. The meal completely justified the $20 entrance fee.

The picnic slowed down when four marines came out to present the flag, supported by an awful rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. People cheered and then a few average-Joe looking guys came out and talked about how pleased they were with the improvement in Vietnamese-American relations. It’s a truly remarkable time to be in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are completely infatuated with America and all the real and perceived things it has to offer. For our part, we have just about the best relations that we could hope to have with any country. Our businessmen get to make fortunes helping Vietnam become a mid-income country. Our diplomats are free to prod the friendly government to democratize. And our NGOs are doing great work in the field. It’s the ideal relationship, one that we’d like to have with every developing country. Sadly, that won’t happen anytime soon.

I met a few interesting people at the picnic. There was Alfonso DeMatteis, one of Desaix’s friends from the ‘90s. Alfonso was a construction manager in Brooklyn but things weren’t going so well and he came into debt. Somehow he landed in Vietnam and now he provides Vietnamese work crews with the technical know-how to build modern towers and hotels. He’s doing much better now, boasting to Desaix about how he bought a new Vietnamese beach condo two years ago for $200,000 and just sold it for $600,000.
It’s a good time to be in construction, but James Kim, a young acquaintance of Desaix, was wary of real estate speculation. While foreigners make long-term, cash intensive investments in infrastructure and factories, locals tend to build smaller structures on the outskirts of cities. These ventures bank on the assumption that the city will soon reach the new developments, but nobody can actually predict something like that. James is a pretty credible source on this. A trained lawyer, he partnered up with a Vietnamese friend to form a company that brokers foreign investment into Vietnam. Americans come to him with a chunk of capital but know little else except a desire to make money in Vietnam. James’ firm finds promising Vietnamese investments and they take care of the bureaucratic procedures to get the venture started. The fact that serious investors are pouring money into Vietnam without having an advance idea about what they want to build is a sign of a true boom.

On the other end of things, was Jeff, a genial Californian who some of us already knew from the gym. He’s teaching English at a university and having a nice time in Vietnam. At the picnic he drank too many Budweiser’s and in the middle of the conversation realized that he had lost his wallet. “Oh, shit! My girlfriend is going to kill me. This is the third time I’ve lost my wallet this month. Oh maann. And her mom’s here too.”

Central Vietnam

2007-07-08T02:28:00.000-07:00

Thursday night was hard on my stomach. A bunch of us went to check out a Tex-Mex bar-restaurant called R & Rs. It's run by a greying American guy with a Willie Nelson-esque ponytail. He's brought a little bit of Texas to Hanoi. I loaded up on peanuts, french fries, a hamburger and onion rings, all washed down by cheap beer. Then we left for Finnegans where we had more beer and I didn't drink much water when I got home.

The next morning I woke up before my alarm went off, which is rare for me. My stomach was angry at what I'd put it through. After several weeks of excellent health and appetite, I'd succumbed to the inevitable Ho Chi Minh's revenge. The main symptom was a persistent, tired achiness that ate at my whole body. It was not the type of illness I wanted to have during a weekend of fast-paced travel. Last year, this happened in Istanbul, but I rested and it was gone the next day. But the year before in a hotel in Eastern Turkey, I'd woken up feeling much the same. By the mid afternoon, I was wasting away in the back seat, unable to drink water or eat anything. That bout of dysentary left me 15 pounds lighter than I was going in to it. So I was worried. Was my discomfort routine traveller's sickness? Or was it recurring dysentary?

We had a short flight into the very tropical airport of Da Nang, Vietnam's third biggest city after Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. We were met with a mini-bus and a tour guide who pointed out absolutely everything. "On the left is the third district middle school. And up ahead is the biggest drug store. All sorts of medicines sold there."

Da Nang was clearly a city on the move. There was construction at every turn. Rows of shopfronts had been leveled to make way for widened roads. Gleaming hotels and business towers were rising out of sandy wasteland areas. In ten years Da Nang may look more like Seattle than the Vietnamese fishing port it once was.

The road to Hoi An was nice, lined with tiny homes facing the road. Like most houses near the beach, these were painted brightly and often well decorated.

Before reaching Hoi An, we stopped at China Beach, so called by the American servicemen who enjoyed it during the war. The hotels and shops along the beach were generally very shabby. Women sat in hovels selling water and charging beachgoers to use primitive showers and changing rooms. But within the sleepy concrete zone, big new hotels were going up. I would guess that the whole beach will be lined with luxury hotels by 2020.

I can understand why developers would be drawn to China Beach. It has a thick belt of fine white sand, sparkling clean water, gentle waves, and views of distant peninsulas and islands. This beach and others like it could become major attractions, as big as Cozumel or Cabo San Luca. For our part, it was a real treat jumping in the warm water, having the entire beach to ourselves. If we ever come back, I'll probably have to share it with alot of other people.

The swim felt good, but in the aftermath, I started feeling intensely achy again and could barely muster the strength to tour around Hoi An. We had a nice stroll through the very picturesque town, but it felt like a long trek.

First we saw the main temple, built in honor of a harrowing sea voyage faced by a group of Chinese settlers took in ancient days. Inside there were reliefs of sinking ships as well as the mythical figures who saved the doomed passengers. Large red incensce spirals hung from the cieling, creating the pleasant aroma common to all Buddhist temples and shrines. Bought by families to commemorate important events or wish good luck upon friends and family, these incense spirals burn for exactly one month.

Even in my exhausted, feverish daze, I could appreciate the scenery in Hoi An. The town was built by Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the 18th and 19th century and many of the two story houses are very fine inside, having been built by merchants. One house is occupied by 9th generation Chinese immigrants, who let tourists inspect their house (and buy tourist junk, of course). It was a cool house--dimly lit and covered almost exclusively in wood the color of dark chocolate. The wall on the first floor showed signs of water damage. Apparently these homes flood several feet during the rainy season. For this reason, the second floor has a large trap door, which they use to hoist raise first floor furniture when the rain starts to come in. During the dry season, it is used to scare tourists, like the Spanish woman who almost had a heart attack when she looked down to find that she was standing on a wooden grate.

The most iconic sight in Hoi An is the wooden bridge that crosses a canal dividing the Chinese and Japanese quarters. It was built in 1930 by a Japanese entreprenuer who charged people to use it. It has to be the shortest toll bridge I've ever seen.

The authentic Hoi An footbridge. My smile was not authentic--I was feeling miserable.

The guide took us to a silk making workshop, which annoyed me, because I was in no mood to be dragged through another tourist trap. But it was actually pretty interesting. They had beds of leaves squirming with lazy white silk worms. From there the worms are put in a grate where they spin balls of silk fuzz which women thread through spinning machines to create spools of silk string. The string is fed into a clanky wooden weaving machine that produces shiny silk cloth. The silk is crafted into all sorts of products that I'm not interested in buying.

My strategy for travellers sickness was to drown it, starve it and shoot it with Imodium and Tylenol. But I thought it would be good to break the fast at dinner, so I ate some soup and white rice. Then I rested in my room and went to bed early, hoping that I'd feel better in the morning.

SATURDAY

And I was in luck because I felt fine the next day. I certainly felt better than the rest of the group, who had stayed out late the night before. The drive north along the coast to Hue took us through dusty fishing hamlets and newly-painted businesses. The beaches continued to be first rate, and there was even the ubiquitous hillside pagoda.

Outside of Da Nang, we passed ghostly concrete barracks. The guide lost no opportunity to talk about everything she saw and announced that these were American barracks, which surprised me. Although the Americans built a massive military infrasturcture in and around Da Nang, I never thought the Vietnamese would have left anything standing.

After we passed through Da Nang, we faced a huge green mountain. The Japanese recently built a 12 mile tunnel underneath, but we decided to take the scening route over it. The bus wheezed up the steep passes but it was worth it for the commanding views. Desaix reminded us how these mountains weren't always so pleasant by recalling how the Viet Cong once shot at his jeep as he was travelling to Hue.

After we crossed the pass, what had been a bright, sunny day turned into a wet journey through the lowland. The landscape was extremely lush and rice farming peasants were visibly poorer than people around Da Nang.

We came to a clearing in the middle of nowhere and came upon an elaborate tomb of the first Nguyen king, who ruled in the early 19th Century. Vietnam is covered in modest family burial stones, but this monarch rests in style. His tomb is a series of three elevated shrines rested on islands in a man-made lake. The water is as calm as a mirror. It's a big place with only a few tourists so it has a very serene atmosphere.

The king's tomb is nestled in the countryside, but he built an even more maginficent palace in Hue, and we headed there next. The Citadel is a massive block in the center of Hue, nearly a square mile in size. It's the Versailles or Topkapi of Vietnam, although only a few of its 150 buildings still remain. With the help of UNESCO, Vietnam is rebuilding them one by one. The front section facing the river is the least destroyed and best maintained. Visitors arrive at a large tile square from where they cross a moat to enter the thick, imposing South Gate. The area reminded me of pictures of the Forbidden City, and in fact, the tour guide grudgingly admitted that the architect of the Citadel had studied in Beijing. So that explains that.

Inside the South Gate, there were deep ponds filled with lotus leaves and dense schools of coi, which clamored over each other to be fed. Beyond the ponds, there were a series of additional temples and other buildings, including the vacuous throneroom, which has been meticulously restored to its former glory.

Beyond that, the Citadel was mostly a sprawling green pasture. As a naturally defensible complex, the Citadel was used by Vietnamese resistance forces against the French in 1947. Later, Viet Cong forces siezed the Citadel in the 1968 Tet Offensive, where it became the center of a month long standoff. In both campaigns, the Citadel was badly damaged, and I saw a number of ruins destroyed by American bombs. Even near the less affected areas, there were bullet marks all over the place.

After walking around the Citadel, we hung out in front of the South Gate, in the square. Kids ran around flying kites in the warm wind and we couldn't resist. Unfortunately, 20-year-old Princeton students aren't much good at flying kites.

The bus dropped us off at the "market", a dimly-lit bazaar stuffed into a grim concrete relic of communist days. Hundreds of tiny booths were squeezed among one another and the goods were arranged in ways that defyed physics. All the shopowners were women, in contrast to the less hectic Covered Bazaar in Istanbul, where all the shops are run by men.

I walked to the hotel and we had a set course dinner in a shiny new restaurant built by a female entrepreneur who owns three restaurants and a hotel. After, we all headed over to an outdoor bar/cafe called DMZ. I talked to the owner for a while. He spoke very good English--even knowing what a B.A. and a B.S. were, although that may have something to do with the fact that his friend teaches at the University of Kentucky. He, like just about all Vietnamese, are wildly optimistic about the future of their country. The economy will always be strong. The government is liberalizing and will soon be a democracy. Health care is poor but getting better.

I got into pool matches matches against some guys from Brazil. I took Marcelo and BT down in close games but then Marcelo redeemed himself with a win, forcing me to sit back down with my group. In the middle of an old '60s tune, Desaix leaned forward and remarked that this bar made him feel as if nothing had changed in Hue since he was there in 1967.

Some of us went on to a club which made it clear that things actually had changed. The place bumped with techno and the back patio looked like a Rainforest Cafe. I decided to head in on the early side, so I set out on foot to the hotel, which was nearby. The road crossed over a grassy island that divided the Perfume River and a small lagoon. Off to the side of the road, between two cows, a group of seven Vietnamese guys sat in a circle and called me over. I've gotten very used to shrugging these type of things off, but I reallized that they had nothing to sell me, so I walked over to them. They were right next to a brightly lit, well traveled road, and I was bigger than them, so I judged that I wouldn't be in too much danger. I sensed that I might be in for an interesting cultural experience, and I was right.

They gestured for me to sit down in the circle and asked me friendly questions. We've been learning handy introductory phrases just for this purpose, so I was able to carry on a reasonable exchange with them, with the liberal use of gestures and grunts. To the left of me, Phou, a twenty-six-year-old with a scar over his eye, helped me out with a few extra English words which sometimes made all the difference. We managed to entertain each other for more than about an hour, and when none of us had anything else to say, the snores of their passed out, shirtless friend filled the silence.

As they learned that I was 20, from the U.S., and learning Vietnamese, I learned some things about them. Apparently, they're all motorbike or cyclo drivers and I'm convinced they're some sort of motorbike posse of some sort.

In the middle of the circle, lay leaf bowls stuffed with various strange morsels that they insisted I try. One looked like sliced liver with herb seasoning, but it didn't have the consistency of liver, so I'm not sure what it was. Another snack was an unknown white meat which peeled off a thick bone. I gave them some of my cold water; they kept handing me tiny porcelin bowls filled with clear liquid poured from a waterbottle. It was absolutely foul, tasting like a rotten combination of vodka and tequila. I'm guessing it was some sort of moonshine rice wine. As a kid I used to watch Operation Dumbo Drop and I recalled the scene when Danny Glover almost vomits when the Vietnamese villagers force him to sip some of their homemade rice wine. I empathized with Danny Glover, but the moonshine at least complemented the meat snacks.

The most excitable of the group had too many little bowls of moonshine and stumbled around a bit, sticking cigarettes in the mouth of the passed out guy. Then he mounted his motorbike, jolted forward and rode off for about twenty minutes. I looked around the group and half-heartedly raised an objection, but they didn't take an issue with their drunk friend, who may well have gone off to go pick up some fares. Remind me again not to ever ride motorbikes.

At one point in the night, two girls stopped their bikes and talked to the guys from the road. The guys seemed to be enticing the girls to join them but the girls sped off. Half an hour later, they showed up and joined us on the grass. But they just squated there uncomfortably, looking numb and not saying anything, as if they were dreading their fate. It was a very strange dynamic. The guys became shifty, and I said goodbye and left, wondering how I'd be able to convey to my friends how crazy an evening I'd had.

Things I Miss

2007-07-08T01:59:00.000-07:00

Fast internet
Air conditioned restaurants
Latinos
Ivy League social clubs
The Economist
Traffic lights
Words with more than 5 letters
Dry heat
Sports
Weight racks at the gym
Professional restaurant service
Front lawns
The Office
Real showers
Not being harassed by:
Fruit ladies
Lighter salesmen
Hat peddlers
Book sellers
Travel agents
“Lady Boom Booms”
Opium dealers

Politics and the Past

2007-07-08T01:55:00.000-07:00

On Thursday we had a lecture by Professor Mun Van Nhat and I came away with a much better knowledge of revisionist history. The premise of the lecture was the ideological nature of character of the Vietnamese resistance, and we got just that—ideology rather than history.

Vietnam, he began, has always been resisting the twin troubles of feudalism and foreign domination. In ancient times, they fought the Chinese, who oppressed the masses through feudal oppression. The French came and allied themselves with the big landlords and exploitive capitalist class. In the early 20th Century, a group of bourgeois intellectuals attempted to gain independence by imitating Japan and Europe. But they failed because they did not seek to tackle Vietnam’s other big problem—feudalism. Luckily, Ho Chi Minh arrived and realized that the only way to achieve independence was to mobilize the proletariat to rise up and create an independent socialist paradise. Nearly all Vietnamese came to support the communists, who won the support of the people by liquidating the bourgeois landlords.

Professor Nhat may be a distinguished Vietnamese scholar, while I’ve only been studying Vietnamese history for a few weeks. But I can poke holes in all these assumptions.

First, the anti-Chinese wars weren’t anti-feudal. They were waged by Vietnamese nobles who no longer wanted to pay tribute to Chinese overlords. The Vietnamese kings who won these wars were every bit as feudal as their Chinese counterparts.

The French did support some of the large landlords and created a small class of capitalist bourgeois industrialists. By levying excessive cash taxes, the French forced the Vietnamese to work on awful plantations and mines for a pittance. Thus Vietnam’s first experience with large-scale industry was very negative, but the problem was that the French were using their power to manipulate the labor market so that working conditions were poor and wages low. Any post colonial government could have remedied the situation by lowering taxes, improving working conditions and allowing unions. Shutting down businesses and liquidating capitalists, as the communists did, may have seemed just, but it prevented the natural industrial development of Vietnam. By contrast, South Korea and Taiwan, both poor agricultural countries in mid-century, promoted their burgeoning capitalist class and they’re now ten times wealthier than Vietnam.

Embracing communism was not the only way to expel the French. In the two decades after World War II, dozens of colonies succeeded in mobilizing their populations and throwing off colonial rule. Only a small handful of these liberation movements were led by communists. Millions of Vietnamese were drawn to Ho Chi Minh in 1945, because he was a proclaimed nationalist. Ho purposefully obscured his communist leanings so that the Viet Minh could gain a wide range of support in the French War.

Vietnam suffered periodic famines and most peasants didn’t have enough land to live comfortably. It’s no surprise that land reform was widely supported in Vietnam and that even the Americans tried to implement it in South Vietnam. The problem was that there weren’t enough big landlords to take land from. Rural Vietnam was nothing like the plantation society of the American South or the serf system of Russia. Vietnamese “landlords” typically owned just a few extra acres and hired a handful of seasonal workers to help harvest. They were local peasants who happened to own a bit more property than their neighbors, not absentee landlords who owned entire districts and distributed their land to sharecroppers. Nevertheless, there was a case for modern land reform and the peasantry supported the idea of peaceful land distribution. Instead, they got terror. Communist cadres, more often urban intellectuals or jungle warriors than common peasants, marched into unfamiliar villages and turned them upside-down. Based on suggestions from their Chinese counterparts, the Vietnamese Communists decided that 5% of the population was to be classified as landlords, publicly humiliated, punished, and stripped of their land. However, in most villages, only a very few farmers could be properly considered landlords. Yet the cadres forced the community to denounce 5% of the population. As a result, land reform turned into a vicious, paranoid witch-trial, rather than a constructive economic measure. Tens of thousands of “landlords” and other “class enemies” were killed in these land reform campaigns, and the fiasco remains widely reviled by modern Vietnamese.

One major assumption underlies Professor Nhat’s version of history—that Vietnam needed a socialist revolution and that the Vietnamese people supported communism. Like most Americans, I don’t accept that. So after the lecture, I asked him, “If Vietnam was in need of a socialist revolution, and so many of the people supported communism, then why was the system so undemocratic?” Professor Nhat was surprised by the question and asked me to clarify. “I mean, why didn’t the Viet Minh allow free elections, free press, and rival parties.”

Professor Minh’s answer was perplexing. “National independence was associated with democracy. The Viet Minh were democratic because they addressed the interests of the biggest groups. Farmers were the biggest group, so land reform was a big priority. Workers wanted jobs so we built factories.” The argument was as follows: there was (and is) no need for electoral democracy because the Communist Party knows what’s best for the people and acts accordingly.

But surely the communists would have benefited from more input from the people. If they had allowed the peasants to criticize the land reform process, would the zealous cadres have botched it so badly? If they’d given factory managers and shopkeepers direct representation in the government, would the government still have driven the economy into the ground in the 1970s and early 1980s?

Today the government is using Professor Nhat’s argument to slow down democratization. The Communist Party, it is argued, is performing well and pursuing popular policies. The Vietnamese want to replace their bicycles with motorbikes, and government policies have raised income levels to do it. Rural communities need jobs, so the government is encouraging foreign investors to build factories in the countryside. Most Vietnamese are happy, so what’s the problem?
The problem is that governments almost always loose touch with their people unless they’re held to account. Vietnam’s past shows this clearly. The country suffered under the French, because the French weren’t concerned with social welfare. Land reform was disastrous because it was mandated without much thought about actual conditions. The socialist economy failed to lift Vietnam out of poverty because it failed to motivate people to produce.

Every un-democratic government gives arguments why their country doesn’t need or can’t handle democracy. As the throngs of motorbike traffic show, the Communist Party is performing well and has succeeded in addressing the aspirations of the population. But this was not the case in the past and may not continue in the future.

Vietnam’s record shows that unelected leaders can occasionally do what’s right for their country. But why not let the people decide for themselves?

Politics

2007-07-04T07:55:00.000-07:00

What happens when a communist state abandons the communist experiment? In most cases, the state gets taken over by brutish strongmen, or, more happily, passes into the direction of its people through representative democracy. Only in East Asia, have communist leaders initiated profound economic reforms without losing political control.

Vietnam’s communism is like an old restored house. The house is old in the sense that the structure and style remain archaic, but inside, the occupants no longer build fires to heat the home. Vietnam still has the quaint relics of communism. Soldiers still loiter all around Hanoi, wearing oversized green uniforms and starchy caps ornamented with red stars. The government still uses billboard ads with happy proletariat scenes to publicize new initiatives. And a gang of old men still run the country through the Politburo, but these days they’re more likely to discuss foreign investment in IT, rather than production quotas.

Vietnamese citizens are no longer classified by their class backgrounds or judged by their revolutionary fervor. The government no longer tells them what to grow or what to make, nor does it seize their property at will. The Vietnamese are free to produce, to keep, to consume. But they aren’t free to decide the direction in which their country moves, nor do they select the leaders who move it.

The Vietnamese do vote. All over the city, there are ads depicting a wholesome group of workers—an engineer joined with a student, a soldier and a farmer. The posters entreat the public to vote in a May election of the National Assembly a legislative body that meets in a relatively humble building to agree with the decisions of the Communist Party. 90% of the National Assembly are party members. The remaining 10% are labeled independents, because there are no other political parties in Vietnam. The National Assembly is in place to provide an electoral façade for the communist government, so that the Vietnamese can at least go through the motions of elective democracy. But they’re electing followers, not leaders.

National Assembly Building

The Vietnamese media is controlled but not stifled. Newspapers discuss politics openly and tempered criticism of government policies is permitted. The banned books list is still around but it’s smaller than it once was. It currently includes Paradise of the Blind, a modern novel about a family torn apart by cruel land reform policy. The government has long since acknowledged that the 1950s land-reform was a disaster, but would still prefer that people read about other things. I’m reading a bootlegged version that Desaix bought in an alley.

The media is not 100% free in Vietnam but overall the government does not use every means to control ideas. The internet is completely uncensored, in sharp contrast to neighboring China, where a friend could not access this blogsite. Millions of Vietnamese can now communicate freely online, publish their thoughts, and read what foreigners have to say about their country.

Government censorship is for the most part extremely half-hearted. Several people have told me that while the government discourages some topics, the Vietnamese can basically say whatever they want. Even democratization is widely discussed. But there’s one glaring exception to the government’s tolerance—suggesting that the Communist Party should relinquish its control over Vietnam is absolutely taboo. It is the only thing that Vietnamese actually go to jail for saying.

But remarkably, there are only a small handful of activists who’ve been locked up for promoting the overthrow of the party, and none of them equal the stature of Aung San Suu Kyi, the jailed Burmese freedom activist. Most of the locked up activists are fringe characters, considered loony by most Vietnamese.

Oddly, there’s not much of a serious opposition to the Communist Party. With a growing middle class that has fairly open access to news and ideas, it’s remarkable that there aren’t daily democracy demonstrations in Vietnam. There’s clearly something different about Vietnam’s communist government, something that distinguishes it from all the other un-democratic systems that struggle to survive amidst popular resistance.

The main reason for the security of the Communist Party is that almost everybody thinks it’s doing a good job running the country. Unlike most autocratic governments, the Communist Party remains in touch with the population. The Vietnamese want jobs and development, and the government is delivering spectacularly. Growth averages 9% annually and the private sector is adding thousands of jobs per day. Middle class expectations are rising, but so are incomes. Out of rural poverty, the Communist Party has brought an industrial boom to Vietnam.

Rahul Desai, an Indian-American financier involved in many Vietnamese business deals, told me that government officials are high-quality—eager to learn and adaptable to change. He described a government lacking charismatic figures like Ho Chi Minh, but run by competent technocrats who work feverishly to deliver growth and development to Vietnam.

The Vietnamese are very pleased by their country’s long-overdue economic growth. After so many decades of poverty, there’s a sense of euphoria which mutes potential democratic opposition. The Communist Party recognizes that it must keep the population content to maintain its monopoly on power. Madame Minh, a senior party official, told our class that the government’s most pressing concern is to ensure that the countryside benefits from the growth. If the cities grow richer, but the countryside stays poor, there will be millions of dissatisfied peasants and slum dwellers in years to come. That would spell trouble for any government.

When pressed, Madame Minh admitted that the process of democratization is moving slowly. But she did contend that it’s moving, which is true. Desaix told us that ten years ago, the National Assembly wasn’t “any more useful than a rock”. Now, the number of independents is growing and the assembly occasionally challenges some of the Party’s policies.

But at this rate, it would still take a hundred years for Vietnam to evolve into a true democracy. Luckily, there are signs that the Party leadership eventually intends to speed up the process. Desaix related that during his time reopening the American embassy in Hanoi, Party officials often asked him about foreign democratic systems. They were especially curious about Mexico’s PRI, and Taiwan’s Kuomintang, two revolutionary parties that stayed in power well after their countries democratized. A new class of Communist Party leaders, now trained in Europe and the United States instead of the Soviet Union, may one day decide to allow real opposition, with the expectation that the Communist Party will remain dominant.

For the individuals who run the Communist Party, there’s a lot at stake in ensuring that the Party stays in power. As Vietnam grows wealthier, there is more and more money to be made by governing it. Corruption in Vietnam is widespread, but top Party officials do not typically steal directly from the treasury, in the manner of African dictators or Latin American strongmen. Instead, they’re involved in networks of patronage and protection which are less criminal, but equally lucrative. Large foreign investors still work through the government, so top officials have opportunities to enter the choicest investments on favorable terms. Officials and their families can expedite permits, and circumvent laws. Until a few months ago, there was an infamous, debauched Hanoi nightclub which regularly blasted music until the early morning. Even though bars are supposed to close down at midnight, the owner was never fined and made enough money to cruise the streets in Vietnam’s only Hummer. It turns out that the owner’s father is a high Party official.

The Communist Party is no longer an ideological movement, but its leaders have a personal interest in its continued management of Vietnam. They may move toward democracy, but it will be at their own speed and their own terms.

But at some point, the people may take things into their own hands. The Communist Party is secure today because society is pleased with the tremendous wealth creation, but tomorrow there may be dissatisfaction. Most Vietnamese seem to think that their country will soon catch up to Japan or Singapore. But there are many, many obstacles to overcome before that happens, and if the government fails to deliver further growth, it will loose vital support. Additionally, if urban-rural income gap widens, millions of disaffected peasants could agitate for change.

The long term dominance of the Communist Party depends on its future economic success, which is far from certain. But for now, Vietnamese people will remain happy, docile, and un-free.

Restaurants

2007-07-02T03:15:00.000-07:00

Vietnamese menus have section headings like “Eel” or “Pigeon”, and at some restaurants you feel like you could order anything that walks except human, and anything that flies except airplanes. The menus are big—really big. Some are so big that they begin with tables of contents so that diners don’t have to spend five minutes finding some obscure delicacy.

For the most part, though, the exotic delicacies are for show. Oftentimes we’ll try to order something and the waiter will come back ten minutes later and announce that they don’t have the right type of meat in stock. Sometime they run out of things as basic as beef. Duane and Adam once had to rock-paper-scissors for a hamburger because the restaurant only had enough beef for one. It makes you wonder how often restaurants actually have, say, river turtle, which many menus offer for about $30, ten times the price of a standard dish.

In the Hoan Kim Lake District, there are hundreds of sit-down restaurants and most have English translations. With hundreds of menus offering hundreds of dishes, there are bound to be some linguistic foibles. To indulge the guilty pleasure of anyone who reads this, I’m listing a few gems below…

Pigeon braised with traditional medicinal
Baked Mullet
Sour Baby Egg – Plant
Frog fried stir with sour and sweet

Apart from the questionable delicacies and occasional hilarious menu translations, Vietnamese food truly is delicious. The standard dish contains meat mixed with fried noodles. Almost all dishes have wild celery, carrots and chunks of a very mild type of onion. Another option that I often pick is a beef dish smothered in pepper sauce served beside a hot clay pot full of steamed rice. These types of dishes are safe, tasty, and like most things in Vietnam, absurdly cheap.

Many restaurants also serve great fruit juice concoctions, such as mango lassies and watermelon juice. And of course there is always a full selection of sodas and Southeast Asian beer brands. But the scotch culture is out-of-the-ordinary. Almost every menu has a list of expensive scotches, priced by the bottle. I’ve seen larger Vietnamese dinner groups go through a bottle or two. Ordering bottles of scotch seems to be customary. If the dinner celebrates an important event, such as a graduation, or the conclusion of a business deal, the host orders Chivas Regal 18 to mark the occasion. Otherwise, the dinners are content with Jameson or Red Label.

Ordering food can take a long time, although it’s almost always worth the wait. I’ve been impressed with the overall familiarity of English in Hanoi, but even at restaurants in Hoan Kim, the language barrier can be huge. Pronunciation is usually the root of the problem because the Vietnamese language is entirely unsuited to English words. One time I ordered a beef dish and the waitress asked me, “Chi-o-lye?” The poor girl had to repeat it several times before I gathered that she was asking whether I’d prefer “Chips or rice.” In other cases, the waiters know all sorts of terms for food but can’t understand sentences or complex ideas. One night we were at a nice restaurant that generates income for a local school. The waiters were very eager but any deviation from the normal serving process became a fiasco. One girl asked whether the waiter would recommend the pot-pie or the baked fish. A question like that dug us a deep linguistic hole. It was about five minutes before we made it out of that confused exchange. So the language barrier can complicate things, but I should say that I emphasize with the struggling waiters, because I’ve started taking Vietnamese and would not want to work at a restaurant in Vietnam.

Once the ordering gets taken care of, the dishes come in haphazardly. One person will get their food and have time to finish it before the last person gets theirs. A meat dish will come but the steamed rice will trail it by fifteen minutes. In the beginning, we used to sit around awkwardly waiting for everyone to get their food before starting, but by now we’ve realized that it makes sense to start when each dish arrives.

Finally, after an invariably delicious meal, it’s time to begin the paying process. Since our meals often have more than ten people this becomes a ten minute arithmetic nightmare. It doesn’t help that the 100,000 bills are the same color as the 10,000 bills. And it’s not as if one has Abraham Lincoln and the other shows Andrew Jackson—all money sports the fatherly countenance of Ho Chi Minh. Oftentimes we’ll all throw money into the pile but end up 100,000 short. After a bunch of chaotic backtracking, we’ll conclude that someone mistook a 10,000 for a 100,000, but there’s no way of knowing who it was.

So a meal in a Vietnamese restaurant can be confused and disorganized, but it never fails to be interesting and enjoyable.

Walking Tour

2007-07-01T00:30:00.001-07:00

Camera. Water. Malaria pill. Map. Rain poncho. I gathered them up and left for a long walking tour of Hanoi, intending to see parts of the city that I hadn't yet visited.

The sky was full of dark clouds. Rain came down in violent sheets, only to tapper off moments later. It's July now, the month of the monsoon. I walked west through busy commercial streets, my sandles slick from stepping in murky puddles on the sidewalk. Travel agencies and restaurants gave way to light bulb shops and fruit vendors.

Finally I came to the Temple of Literature, built in 1070 by an enlightened king. Beyond the gate there were lush sanctuaries, ponds and various temple complexes, all devoted to the worship and study of Confucius. Scholars would come from all over Vietnam to study the teachings of Confucius and his disciples. After years of intensive study, students took lenghty exams, a sort of SAT for Confuscian scholars. Successful applicants became first level mandarins, and after further years of study and exams could become second and even third level mandarins, the exquivelent of masters degree or PhD. The first exams were administered by the king himself in the year 1076, and the confuscian exam system dominated Vietnamese education until the beginning of the 20th Century. The Temple of Literature is a shrine to Confucius, but the Vietnamese also consider it to be their country's first university, as old as any Aristotelian university in Western Europe.

Grave markers for Confucian physicians, 17th Century. The animal heads are turtles, the one non-mythical sacred creature in Buddhism.

Within the temple, the shrine to Confucious

Two women paying homage to Confucius.

After I'd taken in the Temple of Literature, I walked north through the giant Ho Chi Minh Masoleum area, which was nearly deserted due to the rain. As usual, two white uniformed guards were standing in front of the door to Ho's tomb, which was closed, so I'll have to see his body another day. So I continued walking toward West Lake, through broad avenues lined with tall trees and yellow government buildings.

I came to the edge of West Lake and at a non-touristy burger joint. My burger, fries and coke set me back just two dollars. The food descriptions were in Vietnamese, but I was able to point to what I wanted. I noticed that the title of the burger combo contained the word "My" in it, which as of Wednesday, I know means "American". Nevertheless, it was radically different from any American burger--there were cucumbers and the meat was a sort of spicy beef paste. It wasn't bad at all, but you won't find it at Burger King.

I walked out along the causeway that divides West Lake. It was a very calm, peaceful part of the city, but visually not very spectacular, espcially not with all the threatening rainclouds and puddles.

At the end of the causeway, I came into quiet, non-touristy residential neighborhoods surrounding a corner of the lake that squeezes into a dirty canal. Despite the filthy water, I saw entire schools of fish leap out into the air and several men were fishing with homemade bambo poles.

In the middle of a residential neighborhood I noticed a sidewalk shrine that peaked my curiosity. There was a plack with hundreds of names and dates about twenty years appart. The second row of dates ranged from 1946 to 1976 and included every year in between. I'm pretty sure that this is a memorial to local boys who were killed in Vietnam's various wars.

I came out of the dense residential neighborhood and to the edge of long yellow walled complex. At the start of it, there was an old wall tower. On its wall, a marble French sign commemorated some military even that happened in 1882, probably describing French capture of Hanoi around that time.

View across from the tower

I supsected that I was at the sight of Hanoi's old citadel, based on the tower and the cluster of military buildings that I came upon. I began heading down a mile long street flanked on both sides by high yellow walls, and the scene becam a bit surreal. Between well guarded, high metal gates, I could see imposing military headquarters.

I snapped a picture of one of the gates when I thought the guard wasn't looking. But he saw me and blew his wistle. I shoved my camera in its case and walked past the soldier, a meer teenager holding a submachine gun. He gave me a dirty look, like I'd just taken a dump on the sidewalk and I walked away, embarrassed, crossing the street as quickly as possible.

On the right side of the road, the wall opened up into a fence protecting relics of Vietnam's wars. There were Russian tanks used in Cambodia and artillery captured from the French. And fifth in the row, there were torpedo shafts used to attack the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The sign said, "Used by Battalion 135, Regiment 172 of the Navy to chase the American destroyer Maddox out of Vietnam's Territorial Waters on August 2, 1964." I was wary of taking pictures, but this was really special. I looked around and there were no soldiers in sight so I snapped one.

After that unexpected find, I ended up by the War Museum and had an easy walk back through commercial streets to the narrow touristy streets of my hotel. I was just in time, because as soon as I got to my room it started raining so hard that I got alarmed. Even with a poncho it would have been miserable to be caught in that. Of course I know that that will happen many times this month.

Halong Bay

2007-06-30T08:04:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I was drifting lazily among sharp islands in Halong Bay. I sat in lawnchairs with classmates, surveying the scene. "Is this the most beautiful place you've ever been?", one of them asked. I thought a minute, flashing back to scenes of Bulgarian meadows, snow-capped Sierras and South American waterfalls. I was supposed to say yes to the question, but I remembered how awed I was by each of those places, overcome by the serenity of our planet. "Well," I began, "it's one of them."

Our trip to Halong Bay began unpleasantly--a bumpy, early-morning minibus ride through Vietnam's industrial heartland and then a long wait at a dock with dozens of wooden boats (junks) and hundreds of eager tourists. Our boat was a mini-cruise ship, complete with a sundeck, a dining room, outdoor lounge, and bedrooms. I'm almost surprised it didn't have wate-volleball competitions or babysitters for kids.

The dock at the mainland port of Halong

Waiting for the boat to leave. Desaix (left) and Ray, the PAW correspondent

As we headed out toward the jagged coastline in the distance, the boat staff brought out an amazing lunch beginning with succulent shrimp and enormous red crabs. That was followed by fish, squid, rice and cabbage. It was the kind of lunch you would expect to have on the way to one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Once everyone had their fill of seafood, we resettled on the upper sun-deck, resting in wooden seats, reading novels and taking in the scene. We reached the archipelago just as the sun was coming out, shining a bright haze onto the green cliffs. The islands were immense shafts of limestone which poked out of the sea like broken posts of a washed away pier. Each new inlet, each new cove brought new piles of rock that were even more unlikely than the last.

Left to right: Susan, Mark, Dierdre, Me, Elias, Dzung

We drifted for hours among the uninhabited cliffs, seemingly without any purpose, although we were all well aware that the end of the day would bring swimming. At about 4pm, we entered a cove that looked like the type of place Carribbean pirates would have gathered. And then we explored a cave where they would have hidden their treasure. The cave cut into the side of one of the limestone cliffs, one chamber extending deep into the island, big enough to be a convention center. Its walls were standard cave fare--enormous stalactytes and stalagmites lighted by eerie filtered light. And of course there was graffiti, names like Jean-Marie Devault, dated 1907. More unusually, however, the ceiling was an unusual surface of gentle, geometric white stone that reminded me of Butler's ceilings.

The view from the cave

The climb up to the cave left everyone drenched in sweat and even the crisp air inside the cave was little relief from the tropical heat. By the time we walked back down to the dock, we demanded in no uncertain terms that we go swimming. The crew obliged and stalled us in an open area. As soon as the engine stopped, we all leaped off the upper deck into the warm water. For more than an hour we jumped, each time trying to outdo ourselves with various airial maneuvers and synchronized diving. It was intensely fun, as good as any summer afternoon as a kid. And the setting, was, well, world class.

Gradually, the sun ducked behind an island and warm breezes pushed tropical storm clouds our way, where they dumped rain on us before setting off in the distance. The sky turned into a brilliant watercolor painting as we ate an Vietnamese dinner. By the time we all reconviened on the upperdeck, it was dark but the moon lit up the clouds above the islands. We stared out lazily, drinking Halida beers and sharing our views about the Iraq War and how America should be fighting terror. Our arguments were now heavily influenced by the Vietnam War. We were, after all, in Vietnam, floating in the Gulf of Tonkin.

One by one the group diminished as people headed below deck to sleep off a day of sun and jumping off boats. Finally, it was down to a handful, one claiming that there was bound to be a nuclear attack on America in the next ten years, the other arguing that total war will one day be necessary in the Middle East. It was a gloomy discussion. But I was on a boat, about to fall asleep in Halong Bay, and it was impossible for me feel worried.

The Johnson Conspiracy

2007-06-30T02:01:00.000-07:00

On Thursday we had a lecture by General Uoc, an 80-year-old genial fellow who commanded troops at Dien Bien Phu. He showed up in full short-sleeved general’s uniform and spent an hour telling us all the reasons why Americans could never have beaten the communists—the insurgents weren’t afraid of casualties, the Saigon government was corrupt, the Americans didn’t understand guerrilla war, etc. It was great to have a Vietnamese General in the class, but after all the past lectures and readings, his concepts were no longer novel.

Except for one. At the end of the lecture, he claimed that Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassinations. “Johnson never got along with Kennedy,” General Uoc noted casually, “and had him killed. Then Robert Kennedy became a dangerous critic of the Vietnam War, and he too was eliminated.”

The General paused, noticing our surprised looks. “Oh, yes,” he continued, “it’s true. There’s a Cuban documentary about it. After JFK was assassinated, there’s a picture of Johnson holding up one finger. Then after Robert Kennedy was killed, there’s another picture showing Johnson with too fingers. This is true, you know.”

No, it’s actually not true. But it’s considered common knowledge in Vietnam. Even Dzung, a Vietnamese classmate completing a degree in International Relations, insisted that Johnson killed the Kennedy brothers.

Of course the Vietnamese aren’t any more foolish than the rest of us. Many Muslims, for instance, are convinced that the U.S. Navy purposefully triggered the Tsunami with underwater nukes, and mainstream Arabs firmly believe that Israel was behind September 11th. Not to be outdone, the majority of Americans still think Saddam Hussein masterminded the attacks.

Rahul

2007-06-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

Madame Nguyen gave us the Communist Party’s perspective on the fast-developing Vietnamese economy but on Tuesday I met with one of the foreigners facilitating massive investment in the country. After dinner, I lay down in my hotel room looking ahead to a solid night of reading. Then my cell phone rang. It was Mark, who said, “Uhh, I’m at a bar with an American businessman who’s a friend of Desaix’s or something. We thought you might want to come by.” So I went over there to say hi and the four of us ended up hanging out for several hours.

Rahul Desai is an Indian-American, thirty-something, emerging Asian business tycoon. He carries some of the same mannerisms and speech patterns of Kumar in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. An adolescent sense of humor pokes through lucid explanations of Japanese banking or Indian retail. When waiters or bartenders approached him, he would yell, “No, no, I no speak English” and begin making requests in Japanese, at which point the baffled server would smile and walk off.

Rahul is a jetsetter—he estimates that 70% of his year is spent traveling away from his home in Tokyo. Today he’s in Hanoi to close a deal, tomorrow he’s off to Paris to do who-knows-what. I spent the entire evening in a futile effort to understand what exactly Rahul does. As soon as I’d gotten my head around one enterprise he’s involved in, he’d mention another country and another business venture.

But if I had to describe what Rahul does, I'd call him a 21st Century capitalist who modernizes the financial structures of Asian countries. He’s worked with the Vietnamese government and their state-run companies to set up a modern stock exchange and banking system. “The Vietnamese are very eager to innovate,” he enthused, “and are receptive to new ideas.” I was reminded of the American intelligence agents in World War II who were amazed at how fast the Viet Minh guerrillas learned to operate modern weapons.

With the help of foreign consultants like Rahul, Vietnam has built a state-of-the art financial system from scratch. Rahul contended that the Vietnamese banking system is far more advanced than that of Japan, where the moribund banking system hasn’t improved much since the 1970s. Vietnam, a country where people were once arrested for owning foreign currency, now has the financial machinery to attract billions in foreign investment. “Capital is becoming borderless which is making Vietnamese investment possible,” Rahul explained.

Vietnam once had about 2,500 state-run companies, about half of which remain. Of the remaining state companies, over 700 are in the process of listing themselves on Vietnam’s new, advanced exchange. Foreign investors, eager to invest in a booming economy are snatching up Vietnamese stocks, pouring billions into the firms.

Not all Vietnamese investment is coming through IPOs, though. Rahul was actually in Vietnam this week to close a deal between Japanese investors and TFP, a large telecom, software and outsourcing giant, which Rahul described as “Vietnam’s Microsoft”. TFP was establishing a joint investment fund with the Japanese, who were contributing most, but not all, of the initial capital--$100 million now and likely to increase.

“What are they investing in?”, I asked, sitting at a nice lakeside restaurant eating foot-long river shrimp.
“They’re mostly interested in big development projects,” he explained. I flashed to the view from our classroom balcony—dozens of cranes lifting new towers into the air.
“Resorts are a big growth area,” he added.
“Really, does Vietnam have nice beaches?”
“Yah, some of the best in the world.”
“Oh, wow, so they’re going to build a new Phuket?” I guessed, referring to Thailand’s famous resort area.
“No, better. Phuket is for young backpackers. Vietnam’s beaches are going to attract new wealth from Japan and China. So they’re going to build seven-star resorts.”

Ho Chi Minh spent much of his career fighting the French from remote jungle hideouts and he never would have dreamed of seven-star hotels in Vietnam. Yet Ho’s party is quickly adapting the business climate of the country to attract investors of all stripes. “Everyone wants a piece of the action,” Rahul commented. “Count me in,” I thought.

China Beach, near Da Nang

New hotel construction near China Beach

Madame Nguyen on the Economy

2007-06-27T04:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve only ever heard Desaix call two people “dazzling”—Hilary Clinton, and Madame Nguyen. As of yesterday morning, I’ve now heard both speak. Madame Nguyen walked into our room and cast an aura over the class. In her early sixties, she carries herself with grace and speaks impeccable English with an elegant French accent.

She gave an interesting talk about the South Vietnamese resistance movement and she was well qualified to explain the subject since she was a member of the Vietcong. Not that she spent years in the jungles setting booby-traps for Americans. She came from one of Saigon’s elite families and studied at French universities. But she rankled at the corruption of the Saigon regime and the foreign domination of her country, so she dropped out of college to secretly join the Vietcong. In Saigon she used her family’s intimacy with top Vietnamese generals to provide the resistance with important intelligence.

Unlike many pro-government Vietnamese, her parents stayed in Vietnam after the regime fell in 1975 and it was only then that they learned of their daughter’s involvement with the Vietcong. Madame Nguyen went on to have a brilliant career in the government. She’s the Vice-Chair of the National Assembly, the rough equivalent of the Senate Majority Whip, and she’s led the Assembly’s Foreign Relation Committee. She’s the top female figure in the Vietnamese government and is privy to most of its decisions.

Several of us took the opportunity to probe her on the Vietnamese economy, and we were rewarded with a profile of a fast-growing economy from the perspective of a nominally Communist regime concerned with stability.

Madame Nguyen attributed the stunning growth of the Vietnamese economy to market reforms and good “governance”. The government could claim a record of good governance, she argued, because it had succeeded in reducing red tape, discouraging corruption, and attracting investment from abroad, especially from the Vietnamese Diaspora, much of which was once strongly opposed to the Hanoi regime. Despite these successes, she cautioned, the country faces “management” challenges, which she differentiated from “governance” issues.

Madame Nguyen is concerned because there is a growing divide between the urban and rural economy. Market reforms have greatly increased incomes in the cities, but the rural rice-growers who make up a huge section of the population have only barely felt the effects of liberalization. In fact, some rural inhabitants were actually better off during the days of the command economy, when the government heavily subsidized daily necessities. The government’s decision to reduce subsidies jumpstarted urban commerce but reduced the purchasing power of poor farmers. This trend disturbs Madame Nguyen and the Communist Party leadership. “Of course these are economic issues,” she diplomatically conceded, “but if you let the economic differential grow too large people become resentful and then it becomes a political issue.” And for a party looking to stay in power, negative political issues must be kept to a minimum.

According to Madame Nguyen, her government is attempting to channel growth into the countryside. In a recent symbolic gesture, the Ministry of Agriculture changed its name to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The government is giving out cheap credit to farmers to finance farm improvements and technological investment. There’s plenty of room for improvement. As I drove through the fertile province below Hanoi I saw very few tractors or reapers. Work is still mostly done by hand and water buffalos provide the most common form of plough-strength.

The mechanization of Vietnamese farms is an attempt to raise productions and incomes in the countryside. By improving the lot of rural inhabitants, the government hopes to prevent rural disaffection, which could mount a serious challenge to the regime and its market-oriented policies. But the government also hopes to avoid the massive rural-urban migrations that are so common in developing countries. So far, Nguyen claims, Vietnam has been spared by mass movements of millions of poor farmers who come to cities in search of jobs. I agree with her. On the ride into Hanoi from the airport, I had expected to see ghastly slums like the shantytowns found in India or Latin America, but there was nothing of the sort. Still, Madame Nguyen is concerned that the widening divide between urban and rural Vietnamese will eventually drive millions of farmers into the cities, creating slums filled with poor, dislocated people.

For this reason, Madame Nguyen concluded that, “To avoid urban slums, you have to bring jobs to the countryside—you need to encourage investors to build factories outside of the two or three big cities. She cited example of several plants far removed from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City which strongly boosted the distant provincial economies, and, in her opinion, reduced rural pressure to migrate to the cities.

The problem is that most companies don’t want to build plants in the middle of nowhere. They prefer Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City because these areas have concentrations of industry, infrastructure and easy access to deep water ports. Therefore the government has to coerce companies to build outside the traditional industrial centers.

Unlike so many government officials explaining a controversial policy, she gave a specific example of government intervention in industrial expansion, citing the case of the new Dung Quoc oil refinery. Total, the French oil giant, wanted to build the new refinery near Ho Chi Minh City, which, she admitted, made the most sense economically because it’s located near the offshore oil pumps. But the government leaned on Total to place the refinery in a less developed central province, and Madame Nguyen defended the decision because the region needed jobs.

To me, Madame Nguyen’s discussion offered interesting insight into how poor, rural countries have to make difficult choices on their path to development. Economic liberalization is now widely accepted as the primary source of the global economic growth and the reduction of poverty levels, which have fallen in Vietnam from 60% in 1990 to 15% today. But as incomes shoot up in parts of the big cities, rural laborers become increasingly dissatisfied with their relative poverty and if tensions boil over they can demand the overhaul of the whole system. We’ve seen this type of tension recently in Bolivia, Ukraine and elsewhere. The Vietnamese Communist Party, it seems, is trying its best not to rock the boat, even as global markets create waves of change.

My Neighborhood

2007-06-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

Today I went around taking pictures of all the typical sights of the Hoan Kim Lake District, the leafy, cosmopolitan neighborhood where I'm staying.

Houses in Hanoi are puzzling. They're often seven stories high but only ten feet wide. Someone told me that this is because property taxes used to be based on the width of the streetfront. Owners responded by building impossibly narrow houses. The houses below are only three or four stories, which is generally the case in Hoan Kim, although they are just as chaotic as taller buildings all over the city. The first floors house small shops, restaurants, bars, etc and some don't have doors or window. In fact, I've heard that in the 1990s, hardly a single Hanoi shop had windows. Along the whole building there are bewildering arrays of air conditioning units, TV antennas and power chords. The upper floors tend to have balconies and open rooftops. In poorer districts, these are used to dry laundry, which must take days in this humid climate.

Hoan Kim has hundred of indoor restaruants serving every type of local and international food. Menues usually have 150 items ranging from rabbit to turtle to even dog. And on top of all that, a four course dinner at a nice restaurant costs less than $10. But by Vietnamese standards, that's a small fortune to pay for a meal. The rank and file Vietnamese diner eats at sidewalk cafes like this one situated across the street from my hotel. The mostly male patrons sit on short plastic stools, drink local beer and eat food cooked in plain view. I've been wanting to eat at these places, but my companions are wary, mistrusting the food. But I've heard that they're pretty safe as long as there's a "high turnover" of food. In other words, big street cafes like this one are fine but avoid the tiny restaurants with one stove and two customers.

Streets in Hoan Kim are mostly narrow and relatively quiet, but the one-way boulevard which circles the lake is bonkers. Take a look at "Traffic" for an explanation. These pictures were taken in the afternoon, when the streets are more mellow, but the evening is twice as busy.

Street vendors, almost excusively women, sell seasonable fruit and they're all adept at overcharging me for produce. It's probably worth it, because the bananas are very rich and lychie, a fleshy, peelable berry, are a treat as well. Women carry produce, laundry, air conditioners and just about anything else in litters. They can also be used as a marketing ploy. When Lexi declined to buy pinapples from a street vendor, the lady suddenly heaped the litter onto Lexi's shoulder and insisted that she buy something.

Through all hours of the day, no street is complete without a pack of men squatting over a strange board game that looks like a Chinese version of checkers.

Waterpipe is another traditional diversion. They look like bamboo bongs but are presumably used to smoke tobacco. Some smokers become addicted.

The Hoan Kim district surrounds a small artificial lake which includes an island temple pictured below. All along the lakeshore there are shaded benches and walkways which are very crowded with locals and foreigners. The guy in a dragon vest might be an American veteran.

And the Bao Khanh Hotel is right in the middle of all this. It's a comfortable place with a friendly staff and air conditioned rooms, both of which are important for a long stay.

Chuck

2007-06-26T02:13:00.000-07:00

Desaix arranged for us to meet an American veteran who is now working in Vietnam to remove unexploded bombs around the countryside and help Vietnamese disabled by the war. We met him in a swanky lounge with comfortable, zebra-striped chairs. Chuck Searcy was a mild-mannered Georgian who vaguely looked like Jimmy Carter. He sat down and told us about his life. This is as close to a transcript as I can remember:

“Like so many Georgian families, mine was a military family. My father was in a German POW camp and all my uncles fought in World War II. So in 1967, I joined the army having been told that I could chose where I’d be stationed. Actually, they shipped me straight to Vietnam.

I worked in the Military Intelligence Unit, on the outskirts of Saigon. It was our job to read classified reports and figure out what was going on in the country, and as a result I got a pretty good picture of what was happening there. A lot of guys in my unit grew skeptical of the war and thanks to our open minded commanders we were able to openly debate the situation.

In the beginning of 1968, we were hit with the Tet offensive. The Vietcong were in the streets of Saigon, bombs were going off, and nobody knew what was happening. We were on the outskirts of town, but it was still a very scary time. Tet really got me thinking. The Vietcong were able to mount a coordinated attack in nearly every city in South Vietnam. That would have taken months of complex planning, and yet we never got a single warning about Tet. In the entire country, not a single Vietnamese person came up to us and said, ‘hey, you’d better watch out, something’s about to happen’. How could we be arguing that the Vietnamese public supported our war against the Vietcong if not a single one of them even dropped us a hint about Tet?

Tet scared us but our reaction only made things worse. When I got to Saigon, my post was in an area full of shacks, rice paddies, screaming children and old men smoking water pipes—you know, a typical Vietnamese city. By the time I left Vietnam in late 1968, the only thing left in the neighborhood was our base. The neighborhood was leveled, gone. Now I don’t know how that fixed anything.

By the time I left, I was seriously convinced that the war was wrong and when I returned to the University of Georgia, I joined the student protest movement. My parents didn’t know what to think. They said, ‘What’s the matter with him? He doesn’t love his country. He’s not even an American anymore.’ We started getting into arguments and eventually they asked me to move out—said they didn’t want to see me anymore.

Two years went by and one day I got a call from my dad who said he was in the area and wondered if I wanted to grab some coffee. So we met at a diner and talked about the weather for half an hour. Finally he told me, “son, your mother and I have been thinking…and…we were wrong. This war just isn’t right. We want you to come home.” So I moved back in and we’ve gotten along fine since then.
Now I went through all sorts of jobs, wives and careers since then. In 1992 I was talking with my buddy from the war and we decided that we’d really like to go back to Vietnam and see the place. So we just did it. We flew into Ho Chi Minh City, rented a car and drove around every part of the country for 30 days.

When we were flying in to Ho Chi Minh City, we watched rice patties turn into slums and slums turn into city streets and suddenly he and I became terrified. We were scared to think how everyone would hate us for what we did to their country, and we got cold feet. If we could have turned the plane around right then and there we would have. But as soon as we started going around the city, we found that everyone was completely friendly and pleasant, even those who found out that we were veterans. Nobody held it against us. People asked us about the war, but mostly because they were curious not because they were angry. One person told me, ‘It’s alright, we’ve forgiven the Americans because the war is a tragedy for both sides. We are brothers now.” The whole experience of meeting Vietnamese who had put the war behind them helped me come to grips with it.

I’ve seen American vets come over here and meet with former Vietcong. And the American, sometimes a big linebacker type, is just bawling, embracing the little Vietnamese man. And you just see this tension, this crushing weight lift off the American’s soldiers as he leaves behind all the horrible things that he saw and did. You know, the government spends millions of dollars every year on psychological counseling for Vietnam vets, but I think it’d be way more efficient to just buy every troubled vet a round trip plane ticket to Vietnam. They’d be cured in a day.”

Chuck’s trip to Vietnam was so rewarding that he came back and has been here ever since. He runs an NGO that sends teams out to diffuse or destroy unexploded “ordinance” the subtle military term for bombs, mortars, rockets, mines, shells, and anything that can blow off limbs or worse. They’ve systematically removed thousands of explosives from farms and communities in rural Vietnam, but even at the impressive rate that they’re going, Chuck thinks it would take 200 years to clear out North Vietnam. In one small province, little bigger than Connecticut, the United States dropped more explosives than they did in all theatres of World War II. “Just what were they looking to do there?” Chuck asked, shaking his head.

Chuck is just one of many Vets who have returned to Vietnam to help rebuild the country. “In general,” Chuck observed, “the U.S. has put its best foot forward here. We have lots of American NGOs that are doing good work here and even more businessmen who are part of the economic boom that’s happening here. As far as I know, they’ve all been appreciated and well received by the Vietnamese. In the past, the war made Americans do terrible things in Vietnam. Now Americans are doing all sorts of great things and I think that’s part of why Vietnamese attitudes are so favorable right now.”

*****************
I’ve been to several countries that have nasty streaks of anti-Americanism. Naturally, I was worried about coming to Vietnam, where I thought anti-Americanism would be particularly intense due to our tortured history there. But I’ve been hearing from Chuck and many others and seeing for myself that Vietnam is actually one of the most pro-American countries on earth. Strengthening ties with the U.S. is one of the government’s highest priorities. And the Vietnamese public is now becoming familiar with a new type of American, people like Chuck who are turning history on its head.

Vietnamese

2007-06-25T01:33:00.000-07:00

As part of the seminar, we’re learning elementary Vietnamese so that we can eventually converse with Vietnamese who don’t speak English. I was really gung-ho about starting a fourth language until reality set it…it’s really, really hard.

Each morning before delving into the historical concepts of Vietnam’s past, we get an hour of language instruction. Teaching a language from scratch is not easy, and our teachers have been very nice and patient. After three days we were pretty solid on the numbers and a bunch of useful greetings.

We’ve also made difficult forays into the six tones in Vietnamese. Some sound like a pebble splashing into a pond while others are what I would image a dying pterodactyl once sounded like. The teacher writes examples on the board…

“ma mà má
mả mã mạ”

****(The blog doesn't recognize two of the symbols, but the first square is supposed to be an "a" with a question mark above, while the second "a" has a dot beneath.)

He sounds them out for us…

“Maaa….maaohh…maaah…mooahh…muaauah…mahhh”

Then he goes around the room asking each of us to give it a shot…

“Maaa…maaaa….maaaaa…maaaaaa…maaaa…ma”

He does his best to help the poor student out but it’s like trying to teach a drunk to walk straight. Our pronunciation has improved a little bit, but it’s still frustrating. Turkish has sounds that are unnatural for an English speaker, and in rapid conversation, I often let the proper pronunciation slip. But if I focus, I can in fact get my mouth to make the sounds. With Vietnamese, on the other hand, I feel like I could spend my whole life trying to master the “ma’s” and never sound quite right.

Unfortunately, the little thingamabobs on the vowels matter. The teacher illustrated this by pointing out that each “ma”, for instance, is an entirely different word, writing each on the board…

ma = ghost
mà = but
má = cheek
mả = tomb
mã = horse
mạ = (young) rice sprouts

OOF! But there is one silver lining to Vietnamese being unbelievably hard—I no longer consider Turkish very difficult. Just as I started thinking Spanish was easy when I began Turkish, now I look back to easily-pronounceable Turkish words with nostalgia.

Maybe in order to motivate myself to study Vietnamese I need to take a week of Chinese lessons.

Ninh Binh

2007-06-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

I had a strong desire to get out of the city and see some of the Vietnamese countryside, so I spent part of this week looking for weekend trips. I found a great day trip to Ninh Binh province, complete with an air conditioned car, guide, lunch and entrance fees—all for $17—and I convinced most of our group to go.

The two hour drive south took us through the heart of the Red River Plain, aptly described as one of Vietnam’s two major “Rice Bowls”. The farmland was as flat as a pool table and covered in lush rice paddies. Harvest has begun and huge numbers of peasants stood hunched over the fields, yanking out the shoots. Exotic-looking brown cows grazed on the high ground and with great excitement I water buffaloes for the first time.

The countryside was very dusty in some areas, but as far as I could tell, not destitute, at least not by the historical standards of Vietnam, whose people used to always be on the brink of famine. The farms are still largely un-mechanized and labor intensive but small shops and business now line the roads, providing extra income.

We took a right, toward the foot of an impossibly-shaped limestone mountain range. I’d always thought that Chinese and Japanese nature paintings were fanciful, but now I understand that the painters weren’t exaggerating the dramatic shapes of the local mountains. I’ve head that local legends posit that these mountains are formed from the spine of dragons. If I believed in dragons, I’d believe that legend.

The landscape by the Hao Lu complex

Our first stop was at the Hao Lu palace complex, which 10th Century Vietnamese kings built here because the severe mountains made it easy to defend against competing warlords or Chinese invaders. It was used as recently as the 18th Century and has been well preserved. The complex is a twin set of Buddhist temples, one for the King and the other for his Chief General. Before visiting the elaborate, incense-filled temples, we passed through a series of gates that were each blocked by an inconvenient step which deliberately forces visitors to bow their heads toward the temples. Inside the gates, there were a progression of gardens, dragon sculptures and elegant pools filled with lotus flowers.

The first temple, capped with dragons, the symbol of royalty

Statue of 19th Century king behind buddhist offerings

On our way between the two twin temple complexes, we ran into a peasant who entreated us to ride his water buffalo. The buffaloes are truly amazing creatures, something like a mix between cow and rhinoceros. We’d resisted all types of pestering by local peddlers but this was too much to pass up. Tim hopped on and complained that the beast was tired, because, he guessed, it was old. I think it was tired because it was carrying Tim.

We drove a few miles and came to the head of a small river, which bustled with steel rowboats. We split up into twos and got rowed several miles down the marshy river, which cut through the limestone hills, each one more impressive than the last. The river had long ago eaten its way beneath a few of the hills, so at three points, we floated beneath dripping stalactites to emerge on the other side of the hill.

Clelia and I rode together and our little ocean liner was staffed with two crew members. In back, a small man pumped the oars, and when he grew tired he used his feet to row. Next to me sat a middle aged woman wearing a Vietnamese peasant hat. She helped the boat along by paddling with a small oar made of bamboo and a piece of tin. After about 20 minutes, I felt bad, so I pointed to the oar and said “toi” (me), and I took over for about half the trip, fancying myself an intrepid explorer.

The woman ran a real racket with us. When we got to the end of the river, she pulled the boat alongside her friend’s boat which was full of refreshments. I asked to buy water and was about to offer the crew a bottle when the merchant pointed at them and said “you buy for them”. Before I knew it I had bought them three drinks and some food which they didn’t even eat. I was charged what amounted to a princely sum for Vietnam and the merchant asked if she could keep my change as a “souvenir”, to which I replied that she already had enough “souvenirs” from me.

On the way back I was smarting from the incident when the woman tried to sell me embroidery…
“You buy this?”
“Oh, no thank you.”
“You buy table cloth?”
“No thanks”
“You buy. Very cheap”
“No”
“You buy bag”
“NO I don’t want the bag”

As we approached the end I was planning to give the crew a decent tip but the woman pressing her fingers together and asked “Cheep? Cheep? Cheep?” I was tired of all the pestering, which would have embarrassed a Covered Bazaar shopkeeper, and I ended up giving a very small tip.

It was an incredible day of sightseeing, but the nonstop harassment by the locals soured the afternoon, because it put me on the defensive and made me feel miserly.

Pinky Moon

2007-06-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

I got to Vietnam a few days after the other students and by that time they had already scoped out the bars down the street. They kept talking about this mysterious place down the road called the “Pinky Moon”, where they tried “snake wine”--liquor that soaks in a jug stuffed with a cobra. The Pinky Moon sounded really seedy. In fact, it sounded a bit like a brothel or an opium den. But I’ve been there a few times now and I’m convinced that it’s actually a respectible establishment. It’s clean, well lighted, and cold beer costs about 90 cents. It even serves good food. A few days ago they made the best fried rice I’ve ever eaten.

The Pinky Moon has become the unofficial common room for the trip, a nearby place to hang out when we finish our daily readings (or maybe well before that). I’ve even gone there to meet Desaix, the early-70s former diplomat who’s running our program. He wears white shorts with sock-sandals, and we meet to talk about le Indochine.

No matter what time you go to the Pinky Moon, you’re sure to meet the co-owners and barkeepers, Pinky and Moon. Pinky is the younger sister, distinguished by here black-rim glasses and relative shyness. Moon is in her late thirties and is more outgoing, giving us lychee berries, Pinky Moon t-shirts and even taking us to The Lighthouse, a riverside club that looks like Terrace’s taproom. We’ve shown our appreciation, as well. Those of us who went to the Cultural Palace to teach English were each given a bouquet of flowers which nobody knew what to do with. So yesterday we presented two bouquets to Pinky and Moon who were delighted.

Pinky (left) with sister Moon.

Some other people in the group spend much more time than I do in the Pinky Moon. Elias, a sociable Pike brother, can be found there through much of the afternoon and evening. A few days ago, Desaix needed to talk to Elias and the first place he looked was “The Moon”, as Elias calls it. Elias enjoys the place so much that we joke that he’s going to start working there soon. Yesterday he took a big step in that direction by compiling the Pinky Moon a new music mix, which mostly consisted of The Doors. Pinky let him play it and Elias cranked up the volume.

As The Moon’s best customer, Elias has come away with amazing stories. One night he was in The Moon at about 12:30 when suddenly Moon shut the metal door, turned off the lights, and told Elias to keep his voice down. In Hanoi, bars are supposed to close down at midnight, and Moon had heard that the police were raiding bars down the street. Pinky, Moon, and Elias huddled in the dark for a half hour until the police passed and then they reopened until at least two o'clock.

Another night, Elias ran into trouble as he was walking out of The Moon. The email he sent out right after the event describes it best…

Dear Gang,

I just thought I would let everyone know that I was just approached by two Vietnamese prostitutes who, like every other merchant in this city, would not take no for an answer. As one revealed herself to me, the other grabbed me by a part of my body that I reserve only for myself and for my significant other. Both were simultaneously shoving their hands into my pockets, probably in search of valuables to steal. At this point, I decided to raise my hand as if to strike while yelling fiercely for them both to get away from me--they got the message and bounced like fucking kangaroos. In any event, this should be a lesson for all to be careful after 11:00 when shit apparently starts to go down in Hanoi.Why does this sort of balderdash always happen to me?

Elias

The War Museum

2007-06-23T01:28:00.000-07:00

This morning we visited the Vietnam War Museum, which is across the street from a large steel statue of Lenin. In the U.S., a Vietnam War Museum would contain lots of American weapons and pictures of G.I.s from the late 1960s. This museum, however, could be properly called the Vietnam Wars Museum, since Vietnam has been involved in one struggle or another since ancient times.

A nice statue of Lenin

The first room had a fanciful painting of Vietnamese soldiers sinking a Mongol navy in a raging river battle. But the majority of the museum was devoted to the campaigns against the French, Americans and the South Vietnamese Regime, who were referred to as the colonists, imperialists, and puppets, respectively. Significantly, the 1979 war against China was omitted.

The most impressive part of the museum is the room covering the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. At the end of the room there was a very snazzy diorama of the terrain at Dien Bien Phu, which lit up to mark the troop positions. The narration led us through each Vietnamese offensive, as the red dots surrounded the green dots in an ever tightening noose.

A bunch of captured French artifacts were proudly displayed, as well. I saw a steel helmet punched through with dozens of holes. The caption demurred “French helmet shows colonist failure.” But it looked to me as if the French helmet showed helmet failure, more than anything else.

Another room had Vietcong artifacts used in the struggle against the United States and the various puppet regimes in Saigon. Once caption read “gun used by heroic soldier Vo Trinh Quoc to shoot 10 United States soldiers at Battle of Hill 585.” It was a gun used against us at the imfamous Hamburger Hill.

As in the French war, the Vietnamese had very limited supplies and they had to improvise to fight a modern war. A bicycle with two hundred pounds of sacks hanging from the seat demonstrated how the Vietnamese managed to supply the resistance forces with food, ammunition and even artillery pieces. Other artifacts were just as impressive. Sandals were fashioned out of the tires from downed B-52s. American parachute rope was weaved into a hammock. And on the gun display, there was a pistol entirely crafted with bamboo.

The Vietnamese were able to defeat the world's most powerful armies with bamboo and trash!

An instillation made out of downed French and American airplanes

An early 19th Century flag tower next to the museum

Ground Zero

2007-06-22T02:45:00.000-07:00

This morning we took our first excursion into other parts of Hanoi. Until now, I’d mostly seen the Hoan Kim Lake District, which is packed with shops and trendy restaurants for tourists. It’s a bit like the Vietnamese version of Nassau Street, only the prices are about a tenth what they are in Princeton.

We drove to the north of Hoan Kim and the narrow streets became wide boulevards lined with imposing French mansions. Once the home of Indochina’s colonial officials they now house government ministries and foreign embassies.

French colonial official residence, now an embassy

The avenue opened up into a huge grass-covered square that was reminiscent of the Washington mall. At the end of the square lies the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, an imposing neoclassical building made of grey marble stained from years of rain. It looks like a mix between the Lincoln Memorial and Lenin’s Tomb, which is quite fitting because Ho idolized both figures.

What is not fitting is the way Ho Chi Minh was buried. Although he became a larger-than-life figure Ho always remained humble and thrifty through the end of his life. As President of Vietnam, he spurned the palatial Colonial Governor’s Palace in favor of a modest, three room house on stilts. In his will he requested to be cremated, but his country decided to embalm him and put his preserved body on display in the mausoleum. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say hello to Uncle Ho today because the place was closed when we arrived in the square.

The French Governor-General's residence, now the presidential palace. Ho Chi Minh rejected the mansion in favor of a simple house on stilts (below)

Feeding Coi fish in the bond beside Ho Chi Minh's residence

Across the square, Desaix showed us the palatial headquarters of the Communist Party, which is housed in a French complex painted marigold-yellow. The guards eyed us testily as we snapped pictures but never actually confronted us. The Communist Party is the government of Vietnam and most of the country’s important decisions are made behind these walls. But there are signs of change. Desaix told us that when he opened the American embassy in 1995, Communist Party officials often probed him about the American political system and they were also interested in how Taiwan’s Kuomintang and Mexico’s PRI, both authoritarian revolutionary parties, stayed in power after their countries democratized. Even in the 1990s, it seems, Vietnamese Communists were considering political liberalization.

A small section of the Communist Party Headquarters

By 2007, the process has begun. Further down the square, we stopped in front of the National Assembly, Vietnam’s 437-member legislature. The building is far humbler than the neighboring Communist Party Headquarters, which makes sense because until a few years ago, the assembly was a politically powerless body which served as a rubber stamp. “10 years ago,” Desaix explained in a low Mississippi accent, “the National Assembly wasn’t any more useful than this rock. Now there are a good number of independents and the committee is beginning to challenge some party decisions.”

The National Assembly

Maybe one day the Communist Party and the National Assembly will swap buildings.

Listen Listen Carefully

2007-06-21T09:11:00.001-07:00

On Thursday afternoon we do community service. Half took a bus to the Friendship Village, a compound built for victims of Agent Orange, while the rest of us headed to the equally grandly named Cultural Palace to teach English. The building has been described as “Stalinist”, a large block building supported by immense concrete pillars. Through the building’s side lattice we could hear the shrill chants of a classroom… TWOOOO!!...THREEEE!!!!....FOOOOO!!!!....FIIIIIIIYYY!!!

We were greeted by a succession of smiling faces, including the director, vice director, and all the top brass of the Cultural Palace. They led us into a conference room with high ceilings and a huge, lively painting produced by “3000 children”. On the polished table lay six bouquets of flowers, which they distributed to each of us, and we were invited to sit. They entreated us to eat lychee, tropical berries which they told us were once reserved for the Vietnamese emperor. The director of the Cultural Palace introduced the English program through an interpreter. There are 12,000 students at the Palace, and over 3,000 students receiving special English instruction this summer.

I was impressed. The Vietnamese government was clearly putting serious resources into this tremendous English factory. I asked the director when the Palace began teaching English and he replied 1985. It made sense. In that year the Vietnamese government decided to abandon the socialist experiment, orient toward global markets and begin a rapprochement with the United States. Learning English became a high national priority and remains so. With exports to United States booming and President Triet visiting Washington, Vietnamese believe that improving relations with America will bring prosperity. English is seen as the way forward and that is why each of us was holding bouquets of flowers.

Mrs. Hoan, a businesslike English teacher, lead me to a small classroom, where I was startled to find that the kids were only about six or seven. Hellooo!! I said enthusiastically. Tien, their young teacher spouted off some instruction and they all shouted back HELLOOOOO!!! Tien handed me a level one workbook and told me to teach. A little bit shocked at how quickly I’d been given that responsibility, I began pointing at drawings and asking questions about them. Sometimes I’d point to a student who seemed especially with-it and ask them to answer a question. But they didn’t really understand. Apparently they had just started learning English and only knew a few phrases and nouns according to the beginner’s workbook. Trien saw that I wasn’t getting through to them and whispered to me, “Do the exercises”. So flipped down a few pages and came to a page that had a cartoon of a boy asking a girl what something is. Below there were pictures of classroom objects. “What is this?!” I yelled. A few yelled back hesitantly, “THIS IS A PENCIL”, although the kid in front of me continued to color in the previous page with a crayon. “Very good!...Is this a chair?!”. “NO IT ISN’T, THIS IS A DESK.”

I went on like that until they knew everything there was to know about pencils, erasers, and desks. I glanced at Tien for guidance and she flipped to a page with a teacher’s propaganda song.

“Listen listen listen
Listen listen carefully
Listen very carefully
Please be quiet, sshhhh

Please stand up
Please sit down
Close your book…”

Before long, I had them standing up and cupping their ears in their hands.

Finally, Tien asked me to teach them a song and all I could think of was “Head, shoulders, knees and toes”, which was a big hit. Who knew that touching your toes could be such a riot?

Although I detected a tiny bit of progress when I was with them, I could hardly imaging how they’d ever become proficient. But I sense that when Vietnam wants something it’ll spare nothing to achieve it. After all, the country spent 20 years fighting the Americans, 100 years fighting the French and 1,000 years resisting the Chinese. Now the Vietnamese wants to learn English and I see no reason to doubt them.

Uncle Ho

2007-06-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh both secured freedom from foreign domination and introduced communism in their countries. But the similarities end there. By the time Mao died in 1976, the Chinese people were tired of him and held him accountable for the damaging excesses of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Tellingly, most Chinese were far more grief stricken when Zhou Enlai, the pragmatic and sensible foreign minister died the same year. The Chinese Communist Party reflected public opinion, but passing legislation that declared that “Mao was 70% good and 30% bad”. It was a bureaucratic way of admitting that the Great Leader was discredited.

Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, has not been cast into the dustbin of history. Even as Vietnam dismantles the command economy and moves forward with deep free market reforms, the great communist leader is as revered as ever.

Today we heard an important lecture by Duong Trung Quoc, a member of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the General Secretary of the Association of Vietnamese Historians, a government-linked group of intellectuals who determine how Vietnam’s past is to be viewed. Quoc recounted how Ho vigorously sought an alliance with the United States, which he saw as a powerful counterforce to colonialism. Ho lived in the United States between 1913 and 1915 and grew to admire the American Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, and other symbols of freedom. In 1944 and 1945, he went out of his way to rescue downed American pilots and in return the Americans supplied him with a modest amount of aid and advisors. American began its relations with Free Vietnam as an ally, claimed Quoc.

Now things have come full circle. After half a century of war and American embargo, Vietnamese-American relations are better than they’ve ever been. Bilateral trade has grown from around $1bn in 2000 to over $10bn this year. This week President Nguyen Minh Triet visited Washington at the invitation of President Bush, the first time a Vietnamese president has come to America.

Vietnam’s alliance with America is very popular with the Vietnamese, whom a Hanoi-based American immunizationist told me, “are in a terrible, almost frenzied hurry to modernize their country.” The alliance with a former enemy is even more favored because the events of 1944 and 1945 suggest that Ho, the revered national founder, would have been delighted to form an alliance with the United States. Now that the alliance with America is en mode, groups like the Association of Vietnamese Historians are revisiting Ho’s interest in America to justify the new course that Vietnam is pursuing.

Ho’s courtship of America at the end of WWII is also being broadcast to Americans in an effort to reduce the stigma Vietnam’s communist and war torn past. Quoc distributed glossy copies of the Vietnam Economic Times, a special supplement printed in honor of Triet’s trip to Washington. The publication, which was produced to woo foreign investment, features a prominent article listing evidence for Ho’s desire for an alliance for America.

But in my opinion, the whole thing doesn’t quite seem to fit. Surely it’s academically dishonest to use the memory of a famous communist to promote Vietnamese-American commerce, the majority of which is dependent on the cheap manufacture of bourgeois consumer goods by the Vietnamese proletariat.

In my opinion, the level of respect that Ho showed toward the United States is significant, but it should be viewed in the context of the times. In 1945, Ho recognized that he would need a powerful sponsor to achieve a peaceful post-war break from French rule. While the Soviets were sympathetic to the cause, there were already deep tensions between Stalinism and the revolutionary movements in Indochina. The United States, on the other hand was an ascendant power in the Pacific and in 1945 the emerging Cold War fault lines had not yet ruled out American support for communists movements. In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt created the Atlantic Charter in 1941, which declared that all peoples had the right to self-determination. Furthermore, the O.S.S. officers in southern China who met Ho were largely convinced that his movement was innocuous and advised Washington to support the Viet Minh. Ho pursued a strategic partnership because it seemed possible at the time and it would have greatly advanced the Vietnamese independence movement.

Anyone who studies Vietnamese history will constantly come across the big question—was Ho Chi Minh a communist or a nationalist? Undoubtedly, he was both. Although until late in his life he chose to show a nationalist face to the world and his own people, his belief in communist principles cannot be questioned. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party and received several years of advanced Marxist instruction in the Soviet Union. Ho earnestly believed in the eventual triumph of socialism, although he stood apart from many of his colleagues in how he intended to reach it. He recognized that the unpopular land reform of 1956 was too bloody and arbitrary and publicly apologized for it even though he did not have a direct hand in it. Against the wishes of many party members, he sided with those who wanted to achieve reunification before embarking on the transition to socialism. Through most of his career, he was the voice of reason, slowing down socialist reforms when he though the country was not ready for socialism.

But he still believed that Vietnam would one day evolve into a socialist society. Yet Quoc’s lecture on Ho’s life was strikingly absent of this simple, but very vital reality. So at the end I asked him what Ho thought of collectivization, the reduction of private property, the command economy, and all the features of socialist economics. Quoc dodged the question by noting that Ho often said that Vietnam needed to become rich before socialism could take hold.

That may be true, but the economic policies that grew out of the communist state kept Vietnam poor. They were not nearly as disastrous as China’s Great Leap Forward, but the command economy thoroughly failed to produce the enormous wealth produced in neighboring Asian Tigers. To Ho Chi Minh’s credit, he was not in power when the socialist economy was built. But the younger generation which introduced the ruinous policies did so in Ho’s name, inspired by his teachings.

Thirty years ago, the Association of Vietnamese Historians might have painted Ho as a leader in favor of class struggle and collectivization. Now that the folly of those policies is freely acknowledged by all in Vietnam, his memory is used to legitimize an alliance with America so that Vietnam can grow rich.

Ho Chi Minh is the great Vietnamese figure and is as much admired as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln combined. It’s not surprising that the public sees such a deified figure as infallible and the harbinger of all subsequent stages of development. But historians should be more objective in their evaluation of past leaders. Evoking Ho’s life to justify a new alliance with the United States is not history—it’s politics. And there are already enough political reasons for our two countries to unite.

Weight lifting

2007-06-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

Princeton students tend to take care of ourselves, so on arriving in Hanoi finding a suitable gym was as high a priority as renting cell phones and connecting to the internet. About a blisteringly hot twenty minute walk from our hotel, there’s a modern gym at the end of an alleyway. A large poster of an American woman in full-body spandex covers the front wall. The man behind her is turned around and seems content to wear a speedo.

We each paid 20,000 dong to use the three story facility--$1.25. The first floor was dim and echoed with the low murmur of about three dozen Vietnamese men lingering around rusted machines and weights. The majority were shirtless, a few had impressive dragon tattoos that made me imagine that they were gangsters until I reasoned that Vietnam has relatively low crime levels.

I was dreading the cool stares that were sure to come and I was relieved when Tim joined me in the area. At least there were now two foreigners in the middle of all the weight lifters. As it would happen, Tim made a very good impression. He’s a shot-putter, and although we were amidst Vietnam’s stronger stock, he pretty much doubled anything that people were lifting in the room. He drew a small crowd as he lifted and each time he finished, a friendly Vietnamese guy would put on more weight and insist that the exhausted shot-putter clear it. The crowd was amused, curious to see how much weight Tim could take and as he passed each test they became more and more congratulatory.

For my part, I wasn’t strong enough to create a spectacle, but I still felt pretty good about myself. In Princeton, the machines are built to accommodate the type-A bodybuilders, but in Hanoi I found myself placing the pin near the bottom. Besides for Tim, no one in the room made me feel weak. I sweated profusely. It was at least 90 degrees outside and the air felt like a jacuzzi. A few slow ceiling fans offered a small relief but the heat was still intense. To top it all off I was still wearing jeans because my luggage was still somewhere in Eurasia. So after about half of a day’s routine, I gave up and got ready to leave.

I found that the rest of the gym was equally crowded, even though it was the early afternoon of a workday. The Vietnamese are not especially athletic, but Ho Chi Minh did daily calisthenics and during a later campaign to “emulate Uncle Ho”, exercise was popularized. This may be a minor factor in why there are absolutely no fat people in Vietnam, although genetics probably plays a larger role. After all, there were no shot-putting types in the weight room.

Traffic

2007-06-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

Hanoi’s traffic is madness. There are not very many cars but for every car there seem to be about one hundred motor bikes. They charge along the avenues like bats coming out of caves at dusk. Luckily, they don’t seem to go that fast. On the main highway from the airport, the official speed limit is only 60 km/h, probably because speeding cars would endanger the slow bikes.

It’s a good thing that the bikes are slow because driving in the city still takes a lot of skill. Bikes jostle amongst each other and the riders always seem aware of other bikes or vehicles coming from behind. Intersections further complicate things. There are a few stoplights but I saw a five way intersection without a single light. It was mayhem. Bikes charged through narrow passages in oncoming traffic. From above the scene would have looked like hundreds of marbles spilling onto the floor.

To add to the chaos, many bikes carry passengers. It’s very common to see adults sitting on the back of the bike clasping the driver. Three riders are not unusual. Another student even claims he saw four on one bike. To top it all off, the bike riders carry every imaginable type of item, from groceries to vacuum cleaners. I spotted a rider toting a 27” TV set.

Despite their insanity, Hanoi’s traffic does not seem to be very destructive. The swarms of bikes are extremely condensed but the drivers are much more timid than their counterparts in Turkey, where taxi drivers routinely miss pedestrians and oncoming traffic by mere inches. Hanoi drivers pass slower drivers cautiously and they make sure that other vehicles are aware of their approach by gently tapping the horn as if it were a telegraph. The streets are safe but the city is noisy.

Without stoplights to break the traffic, pedestrians have to be nimble. The trick is to wait until the traffic thins out a bit and then walk deliberately into the middle of the street. It's unlikely that you'll make it to the end, but by stopping at a hole in the traffic, you've staked out some territory and you wait to make the final maneuver to the other side. Any bikes that catch up to you will slightly alter their direction to avoid you. It’s in their interest to—the bikes are small enough that a collision with a pedestrian would knock over the bike, throwing off the passengers and breaking their TV sets.

King of Siam

2007-06-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

I spent just a few hours in Bangkok airport and noticed a few things. First, the alphabet is made up of theatrically loopy letters that are reminiscent of the Hindi alphabet. When I saw that I silently thanked the missionaries who invented a Latinized script for Vietnamese. While the Vietnamese alphabet has all sorts of bewildering accents and other markings, it is at least comprehensible on a basic level. It will surely make a difference in getting around Vietnam.

But the most striking thing about Bangkok’s airport is the unavoidable presence of Thailand’s King. As we came off the runway, every jet way was adorned with his bespectacled face. Inside the airport, I was followed by his peaceful glance. It reminded me of Mao in China or Ataturk in Turkey, only these men are dead and they actually made major important contributions to society. As far as I know, the Thai King is merely a figure head, a national symbol that stays out of politics. But judging by the coverage of his deeds, you would think that he’s behind everything pleasant and honorable that happens in Thailand. Waiting at the gate, the Thai news service ran a five minute retrospective on his long rein, flashing pictures of the bookish monarch opening schools, greeting dignitaries and making speeches. Many pictures showed the ruler in an ornate throne greeting prostrated subjects. At the end of the Thai Air flight, they showed another feel-good retrospective in honor of the 60th anniversary of the King’s coronation. But I noticed that he was crowned in March 1946.

While flying over Laos, I read the English language Bangkok Times, which carried a three page feature on the King’s initiative to help drought-stricken farmers by paying for rain-making planes. Supposedly, planes spray a type of cloud-attracting material that brings much needed rain. If we accept what certainly sounds like dubious science, then the modern King of Thailand makes rain.

It all seems rather illiberal—a rain making King who’s face adorns state-run planes, buildings and media and takes credit for many of the achievements of those actually in power. But the King is probably much more popular than Thailand’s corrupt politicians, none of whom, it would seem, can make rain.

Gallipoli

2007-06-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Strong Aegean breezes sift through wheat fields on the Thracian plain. In July the sunflower farms will be ready for harvest, adding bright yellow squares to the golden landscape. The plain extends deep into Greece and Bulgaria, the heart of the early Ottoman Empire. But unlike the masses of vehicles which drive past Edirne and into the Balkans and beyond, we stuck close to the northern shore of the Marmara Sea. For a hundred miles, the entire coast was covered with humble summer homes. 2.5 million Istanbul residents own homes on the Marmara, where they move in the summer to escape the traffic and chaos of Istanbul, which for all it’s cultural and historic charm, is a nightmare of urban planning. The endless expansion of these summer homes is as much a testament to the crowded conditions in Istanbul as it is to the rapid growth of the Turkish middle class.

The Gelibolu (Gallipoli) peninsula juts into the Aegean Sea. It’s narrow enough so that when we drove down it, we could often see the Aegean on our right and the Dardanelle strait on our left. Rather abruptly, the roadside cafes and summer villas give way to dense green shrubs and poplar trees. On the Aegean side, steep cliffs rise along the coast, and it is here that the Battle of Gallipoli was fought.

In 1915 Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the peninsula in a bid to control the Dardanelle Straits, which would have knocked the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. The ANZACs forced open two beachheads but once they reached the top of the hill they met ferocious resistance from Ottoman soldiers under the command of Mustafa Kemal, a brilliant general who would go on to carve out the modern Turkish state and initiate far reaching pro western reforms that brought Turkey into the modern world. The combat conditions were horrific—in some places only 8 meters separated the front lines. The ANZACs pushed hard for several months, trying to break through the Ottoman trenches on top of the cliff, but they never gained much ground. By the end of the year it was clear that the allied campaign had been checked, so one night the ANZACs crept down the cliffs and sailed away.

They left tens of thousands of dead behind and today the hills are covered by well manicured cemeteries of both sides. The graves are truly in a surreal location. Some lay on the very tip of the peninsula, watching out at the boats that float by on their way to Istanbul and the Black Sea. Others sit on breezy hills facing the blue silhouette of the Island of Limnos. The place is pristine—the only sound comes from the wind. It is almost impossible to fathom that less than a century ago these hills roared with thousands of rifles.

Gallipoli is a terribly beautiful battlefield and it’s a wonder that anyone had the heart of fight a bloody battle in such a place.

Texan in the middle seat

2007-06-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

When you go off on two month adventures around the world, you generally want the first leg to start auspiciously. So when I boarded my Frankfurt flight, I was disappointed to see a bulky man stoutly occupying the middle seat, next to mine. His cargo pant-covered-leg poked across into my Lufthansa magazines and his thick arm decisively claimed the armrest and even managed to spill into my seat, which meant that any attempt to break out of my cross-armed posture put me at risk of awkward nuzzling and brushing his arm. Occasionally I tried to resist this large man's tyranny. I would inch my elbow against the corner of armrest that he hadn't laid claim to, hoping that my aggressive gesture would make him retreat to a more modest position. It didn't, but it was worth a try, because when you're flying from California to Germany, these things matter.

I figured that if I couldn't outmaneuver him in guerrilla limb warfare, I may as well strike up a conversation, at least to drown out the racket of a half-dozen Egyptian children wreaking havoc in the next row. So I broke out the ubiquitous traveller's conversation filler. "So where you headed?" "Anbar." he replied, in a deep Texan drawl. I was taken aback, not sure whether to reply "Sweet!" or "Yikes" or "Wow!", but before I could say anything he added that he was going as a privately contracted security agent. It took me a minute to register register what that meant, but I then realized that I had been arm jostling with a real live mercenary. "Sweet!YikesWow!" I thought, having read that mercenaries in Iraq were hard hitting Rambo types who get solid pay for taking on jobs that the military won't or can't do.

It started by chance, he explained. Apparently he was doing a run of the mill "door kickin' shift" with the 8th Airborne in Baghdad when he ran into a team of mercenaries and casually asked one of them if they were looking for fresh recruits. They certainly did, and replied that the bulky Texan looked the part. All they needed from him was a resume, which he pulled out of a pocket full of excess ammunition. An now here he was, drinking Chardonnay on his way to the bloodiest province of the bloodiest country in the world.

He mused about his new job, like someone who'd just gotten a huge promotion. "You know," he said matter-of-factly, the Mexicans come to this country and make 4 or 5 times what they would in their country. They get a chance to build a life here and send money back to their families too. But what does Uncle Sam offer the rest of us?" he asked bemusedly , aware that most of his six-figure salary would originate in Washington.

Well, there's no one path to the American dream.