Viet Nam

            This is an essay about Việt Nam. Viet Nam, the country, not Vietnam, the war. Viet Nam. Viet Nam, a country in Asia: located way east of India, way north of Singapore, and that abuts south China. Viet Nam, positioned near enough to the equator that its foliage defines the words “verdant,” “lush,” and “tropical,” and where rice farmers harvest after 2 growing seasons.

Viet Nam is the 13^th most populist nation in the world and 60% of Vietnamese were born after 1980. Viet Nam, where 80% of the population claims a complex religious mix of Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship crossed-Confucianism, but where youth prefer to buy and buy over tradition. Viet Nam is a country that the World Bank calls “Lower Middle Income,” a country that newscasts refer to as a “developing nation,” but where the national poverty rate dropped 23% in a single decade. This essay wants to describe Viet Nam, where Communism rules the functions of government in name only while Capitalism rules everywhere, including the government. Viet Nam, whose most famous city, Saigon, was re-named after revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh and whose capital, Hà Nội, is described often as “cold.” 

“Cold” can only be a comparative, not a statement of fact, when describing Hanoi. Or perhaps cold encompasses both Hanoi’s weather and its culture of restraint. When compared to Saigon, Hanoi is considered quieter, more influenced by the Chinese (Southern China is a 12-hour bus ride from the city), and traditional. In Hanoi, commuters in one of the world’s fastest growing cities zoom past Hoan Kiem Lake and its Turtle Tower where an ancient turtle affectionately known as "great grandfather" swims alone into extinction. Next to Hoan Kiem’s Confucian Ngoc Son Temple and its lacquered red “Welcoming Morning Sunlight Bridge,” sits a theatre where hundreds of tourists—mostly Western—crowd in to watch wooden puppets dance on and under the surface of a miniature lake. The puppet show’s lake is crowned by a Chinese-gate shaped backdrop while a troupe of musicians is seated on a raised platform to one side, lilting from bamboo flutes, đàn nhịs, guitars, hammered dulcimers, a tremulous instrument known as the đàn bầu, and drums. Puppets dance, tourists clap and leave the Thang Long theatre wearing smiles, ready for more.

Outside the theatre is Hanoi’s Old Quarter. By late spring, the temperature surpasses 88 degrees and humidity should be ranked at 1000 percent. Tourists suck air, wipe sweat from their brows, and gape when informed that the Vietnamese cool themselves with a helping of steaming Phở.  Pronounced /fuh/ and often described as Viet Nam’s national dish, phở is street food made with a rich broth of beef or chicken, best simmered overnight, ladled over special rice noodles, and served in Hanoi with only loose pepper flakes and slices of lime. At breakfast time in Hanoi, sidewalks fill with middle-aged Vietnamese men seated on low plastic stools near metal carts, twirling their chopsticks in bowls of phở while commuters whizz atop motorbikes.  

Motorbikes are ubiquitous on the streets of Hanoi and indeed across the entire country of Viet Nam, whose tropical climate and “developing” status renders motorbikes key to modern Vietnamese life. With smaller bodies and 2 wheels compared to 4, motorbikes are defter than cars and, with saddles able to seat a family of 5, the equivalent minivans in the States. Motorbikes are affordable to buy and maintain; therefore, according to the World Bank, nearly 20 million people in Viet Nam own motorbikes. This is approximately 22% of the population, a number which could sound low until you yourself see that motorbikes in Viet Nam are a picture unto themselves. In the city 700 miles south of Hanoi that officially was renamed Ho Chi Minh City upon reunification but is still referred to as Saigon, there are motorcycles. Lots of motorcycles.  

Imagine for a moment, if you would, a creek with islands of rock flushed with water. If you were to zoom in and peer at the molecular level, you’d find that each molecule is shaped a bit like Mickey Mouse’s head with a glob of oxygen with two little hydrogens—or, turned upside down, like a large person on a two-wheeled motorbike. Imagine that creek and its rush of water in constant motion, without pause, flowing around rocks. Now take that imaginary creek, expand it to four lanes, change the rocks to cars and the occasional bus and water molecules into the motorbikes and you get a rough picture of Saigon’s traffic. The World Bank estimates also that 60% of all vehicular trips in Vietnam take place on a motorcycle, which goes some way towards explaining Saigon’s traffic.

Although few words besides astounding describe rush hour in Saigon. When you look out a bus window, you will see a husband driving a motorbike with a child in front of him along with a second child and wife behind him, a man driving with a woman in a white lace skirt riding side-saddle behind him, 2 male construction workers holding fast to a ladder between them, along with hundreds, thousands of single motorcycle riders, often men, sometimes women. Every motorbike driver’s goal is to not stop, to go with the flow, in a literal sense. So packs of people on motorbikes ride through Saigon, dodging, turning, honking and weaving.

Who knows where these motorbikes are going? Not to rice patties, that’s certain. Throughout its history, the country of Viet Nam cultivated wet rice, but after respite from some 100 years of colonization followed by 30 years of war brutalization, the Vietnamese government reformed the economy from idealist Communist to something closer to a “socialist-oriented market economy.” The world was doubted the effectiveness of these reforms; however, by the early 1990s, Viet Nam was able to establish industrial production, commerce, agriculture, and tourism. Around the world, Viet Nam began to be noticed for remarkable annual growth and a subsequent raise in its people’s quality of life, and a steep fall in their poverty. In 1998, the World Bank tallied the country’s poverty headcount ratio at 37.4% but by 2008, that ratio had fallen to 14.5%. Today, manufacturing, high-tech industries, and even oil production form large and growing parts of Viet Nam’s national economy, although services related to tourism is Viet Nam’s largest industry. Perhaps those motorbikes in Saigon are off to a factory, an office or a restaurant.

If you travel to Viet Nam and become a tourist there, you would barely need to be told, “Viet Nam has a socialist government and a capitalist economy.” Instead, you would ride within a gaggle motorbikes through the streets of Saigon and marvel at government adverts artistically rendered in a style that Westerners call, “Communist Propaganda”: posters of Ho Chi Minh with a little girl’s arms hugging his neck or billboards with stylized Vietnamese people, dressed in primary colors, and posed on backdrops of prosperous cities.

But this is an essay about Viet Nam whose north and south, tradition and modernity, development and poverty meet in the country’s center. Meet in cities such as Đà Nẵng, a city some 375 miles equidistant south from Hanoi, north from Saigon. Once the location of South Vietnamese and American military operations, Danang is now watched over by a towering 236 foot-Lady Buddha statue built atop a hill known to locals as Monkey Mountain. The city is hard at work developing beach front condos for the rich and ushering crowds into International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) soccer matches in a stadium that appears to have been piloted from Area 51. Danang, determined to take its economic place among Saigon and Hanoi, is building high-rise buildings that cast shadows over fishing boats anchored in its harbor, near its busy port. Its university is also adding teachers and buildings—not at all keeping pace with need—while tourists collect their bags and step from the city’s airport, shudder at its functional visage and board buses for more picturesque cities such as nearby Hội An.

           A visit to the old Silk Road port city of Hoi An is, tourists are told, a visit to “Old Viet Nam.” Home to just over 100,000 people and notable as one of the few UNESCO sites that feels alive, the city shelters under palm trees that border line a sluggish river. In the “Ancient” city center, buildings are as Asian as can be—indeed, the town could be used as a period piece film set for a movie such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—with its ancient brown wood or painted buttercup yellow faced-buildings, roofed with curved tiles, and hung with silk lanterns trailing tassels. Decorative trees heaped with periwinkle-colored flowers, a yellow-flowered vine that resembles honeysuckle but is not, and bougainvillea liven up the town’s old streets. Lanterns hang from dark wood second floor balconies, often in the company of twittering birds in yellow cages. Each building continues to be utilized to the fullest: first floors are commercial enterprises such as clothing shops, purse shops, souvenir shops, open air restaurants, t-shirt shops, painting shops, open air bars lit with strings of white lights, jewelry shops, tiny museums, and more clothing shops.

Tourists stroll while proprietors call, “Hello! Madam, hello! Please come inside my shop!”

Inside the shops, tourists may loose interest in the wares when they see that many of the buildings were constructed of hardened, black wood, the majority of which remains unreplaced since the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Often the second floors of each building are surrounded by a low balustrade that looks down on the first floor. Special trap doors with woven slats were built into the second story’s floor, which allow people to watch their shops flood inch by inch when the Thu Bồn River flows over its bank during September – December’s rainy season. With experience that comes with centuries, families hand their first floor wares and furniture up through the trap doors and into the safety of the second floor. From outside balconies looking down, you will see Asian tourists, posing for pictures with two-fingered peace signs while motorbikes putter down streets, steering around slow-moving Western shoppers, clutching purses and asking each other, “Which shop is next?”

Wandering in and out of Hoi An’s tourist shops, or even better its custom tailoring shops, is okay but a visit to Hoi An’s traditional market is genuine fun. The people from Hoi An do not require supermarkets in Danang, instead they buy what they need local and very fresh from their fresh food market. Although there is no formal entrance into the market, you will feel adequately greeted by colorful fruits atop crates. Mangosteens, slightly larger than golf-balls, purple and capped by a green stem and leaves. Jagged durian, Asia’s “king of fruits,” a delicacy so malodorous that hotels forbid it, brown grape-sized longan with its thin white pulp that covers an easy-to-accidentally-bite-into black seed. Long green papayas with the bland orange flesh are popular here, as are finger-sized bananas, intense, delicious: sellers string bunches of them up, and they hang in upside down fan-shapes. As you walk by, you will find that fruit sellers are less interested in selling to western tourists, which is also true of the flower sellers across from them.

Stalls selling flowers in Hoi An do not overly differ from anywhere else: sellers stuff white plastic buckets stems attached to pink, peach, and yellow roses, so perfect that they must not have traveled far to be sold at market. Also for sale are red, orange, and yellow Gerbera daisies but they are not nearly as entrancing as the national flower of Vietnam, the pink lotus. Lotuses are sold, unopened, in bouquets of four coupled with shower-head lotus head seed pods.

When you ask a flower seller if you may take a picture of her stall, she will probably agree and say,

“Yes. Where are you from?”

Perhaps you’ll reply, “America. Where are you from?”

“From Hoi An!”

Next, you may walk into an alley used as a parking lot and count 10 motorcycles and 3 bicycles and find yourself bowing your head to an old lady in a conical hat. Bowing is an expression of respect in the country of Viet Nam, and to bowing to an elderly woman comes surprisingly easy. Another lady will approach you from the side.

“Madam? You want pedicure? I do nice. 2 dol-lar.”

Your response to such approaches will be automatic at first, practiced in just a few minutes. “Nooo, thank you.”

Nonetheless, she will follow you chanting, “How much you want pay? I do. Very cheap.  There. 2 dol-lar. Pedicure. Very nice!” as you walk by a stalls frying noodles under shady umbrellas. A wrinkled old lady wearing a cloth Hello Kitty face mask and what appears to be cotton pajamas rolled to her knees, will be selling a perplexing combination of pieced raw pork on cardboard and bouquets of marigolds for sale. Another lady, of similar age and taste in fashion, may be selling bundles of lettuce and a vegetable that can be translated as both “water spinach” and “morning glory” from faded blue baskets. Across the fresh food market’s aisle is an egg stall. Eggs are, of course, common in Viet Nam and this seller’s crates will likely brim with brown eggs, whitish eggs, smaller brown eggs, and tiny speckled eggs. 
Behind the egg stall is the fish market, and beyond the fish market is the river where the goods in Hoi An’s fish market are fresh, fresh: their eyes are hard and clear, their scales are shiny. Old ladies, with serious faces and dressed in thin cotton clothing that could be purchased from Walmart’s sleepwear section, squat on their haunches behind low tables with baskets or cardboard covered in silver fish, fresh prawns, and squid. They wave jade bracelets in the air as they quibble with each other or, without customers, with small Nokia mobile phones. A woman tourist with white skin, bleached hair and tanned shoulders may pace between their stalls, photographing fish with a long lens. Some of the vendors might glance sideways at you, but mostly they will pretend to ignore you. Concrete floors around the market are wet but they appear clean as are the fish, hacked pieces or piled in re-used grocery bags. A scrub brush shall go swiiiiiish swish as one vendor puts aside her wooden basket filled with silver-dollar sized fish and scrubs her table.

On the river side of the market, a black sun umbrella collapsed a long time ago and is now decorated with a ladies hat and belt. A generous blackened teapot will boil while seated on red bricks. A green vegetable that could be sliced zucchini or perhaps green-colored peppers will probably being drying in the sun. A visit to the Hoi An fresh food market is a visit to Viet Nam’s past, present, and (hopefully) its future.

Once again outside the market, a man vendor will approach a child and toss a spinning toy into the air while the child’s mother says, “No!” and drags the child away. Another vendor will kneel on the stone sidewalk, fanning a small charcoal fire, with a basket of something wrapped in banana leaves by her side. The smoke trails into the street, the smell of something unfamiliar will make you hungry, but the sound of sizzling will be drown by soothing Western piano trills piped through small speakers seated at each intersection. At the center of Hoi An, literally and metaphorically, is an arched bridge built by the Japanese and supplemented by Chinese traders and residents of Hoi An in the 16^th century. A sign inside the covered bridge boasts that “Chùa cầu [bridge] is a symbol of cultural exchange between the Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese people.” Many tourists will never see the like.

Near the bridge, you may hear an Australian accent ask, “May I take your picture?”

“Yes!” a fruit vendor holding a basket of mangosteens will reply. “1 dol-lar!”

 This is an essay about Viet Nam, a country that is developing, that is finding new ways to earn dollars, or Dongs (as the local currency is known) to be sure, but still poor enough to have pockets of great need. If tourists board a bus destined for Huế from Danang, the bus won’t travel much more than 50 miles but it will take hours winding up a steep mountain road before heading down and through the countryside. Along the way will be farms marked by ancestor grave plots. In the south, graves are marked by squat, tile-covered mausoleums pre-fabricated for an ancestor’s pleasure. But in central Viet Nam, the graves take on the colors of temples: bright yellows, pinks, periwinkle blues that contrast with Viet Nam’s verdant foliage. And the graves are marked by 2 dimensional altars, waist-high, with Chinese writing framing bas-relief dragons or unicorns.

Before the bus reaches the outskirts of Hue, a breeze will lift a vague but pungent smell, mixed with smoke, to your nose. Outside the windows, orchards of silver-green eucalyptus leaves will sway, just a little. Semi-rickety farmstand tables will host lines of clear bottles, with labels calling the bottles Thanh Binh, an oil that Vietnamese people believe treats illnesses of all kinds. Few of the roadside tables will be manned but to the side of each table is a sentry formed by two metal barrels, one welded above the other. Smoke will waft from under the barrels and somehow, eucalyptus oil will be released into a pipe on top. Western tourists rarely purchase eucalyptus oil; you are likely to read stories of Vietnamese war refugees who smuggled bottles of eucalyptus as if oil was life-saving gold.

The city of Hue, Viet Nam, was once famous for its rulers. But what every tourist should do is visit the Duc Son Pagoda and Orphanage. As the bus parks, children tip torsos over walls, fastening grave eyes on you while they wave. Behind them, more children will run after soccer balls or giggle with their friends. You will be greeted by Buddhist head-nun Minh Duc, wearing gray linen with frog closures, who will explain the Pagoda’s goal of preparing orphans for life beyond the orphanage by ensuring they are healthy and educating them. After spending some time in Viet Nam, the beginning of this visit may feel like a shake-down for dollars and it will be hard to take Minh Duc seriously when she urges you to, “Do not hold anger in your heart.”

But your heart will change when you meet the Pagoda’s children to the point that you will fantasize about plopping onto your bum in the middle of the orphanage’s open playroom and bawl. Not because the children appear unhappy (they may even be contently sleeping) nor because they’re not well-cared for (they will appear clean and healthy) but because each baby has irreparably lost his/her family. Damn the cliché: tragedy upon the young is heart-breaking.

But perhaps tragedy has also taught the orphans at Duc Son Pagoda to live the moment, enjoy what they can have. A toddler in a yellow dress may well appear from nowhere and throw her arms around you. You won’t be able to help yourself from picking her up and giving her your heart. You’ll smile and perch her on your hip as you carry her to a circle of other tourists and other children. You’ll entertain her and the other kids by putting your left foot in, your left foot out, your left foot in and shaking it all about. When you dance and shake her, gently, she’ll cling fast and grin as you perform “I’m a Little Tea Pot,” “Old Macdonald,” and “The Itsy Bitsy-Spider.”

You may loose some of your appeal when Minh Duc hands colored markers and sheets of paper for the children to draw on. Groups of toddlers will cluster around all visitors to the Pagoda, gesturing for you to draw pictures for them. And you will. Really, you will happily draw suns or flowers or even the children themselves while the children walk from visitor to visitor.

At some point, your little girl in yellow will reclaim you by sitting down, hard, on your left knee. Other children will continue to beg you to draw for them while your little girl will probably wave her green marker around until her chubby legs and cheeks are marked with enough slashes to resemble Indian War paint. Time with Minh Duc and the children will demonstrate that she is mother to her orphans, and she will notice the little girl’s marks, smile, wet a ready wash cloth and demonstrate how to wipe the pen off. Later, you may play with the little girl in yellow, bouncing, chanting “You can go to Boston, you can go to Lynn, but don’t fall iiiiinnnn!” while cupping the back of her head and tipping her so that her hair hangs in spikes and she grins in perfect happiness.

These children need the care and it is really easy to give.

The problem? When it is time to leave and the little girl in yellow’s face crumples. Like a scar, you will carry it your entire life.

But this is an essay about Viet Nam, whose city of Hue was built by its last royal dynasty, the capital of Viet Nam’s imperial Nguyễn Dynasty. The Nguyen’s were the last family to rule Viet Nam, beginning in 1802 when Nguyen’s carved a moat and built a refined but less demonstrative Chinese-style Forbidden City and then ruled as best they could through colonization and WWII. The thirteenth emperor abdicated into the power vacuum of 1945 and fled with his family to France. The Vietnamese Crown Prince, Bảo Long, passed in 2007. Unfortunately for the city of Hue, not far from its borders was the divide between North and South Vietnam.

This is an essay about the country of Viet Nam, today. This is not an essay about the war in the country of Viet Nam. The war that Americans know, in short-hand, as “Vietnam.” But without searching very hard, you will learn that Americans were the last, and arguably the most destructive of an entire millennia of invaders, military and trade-oriented alike. Despite—or more likely because of these invasions—the country developed and retained a singular culture, including its own language and a spirit of independence combined with dogged perseverance that allowed the Vietnamese to collect positive aspects of invading foreign cultures into their own. From the Chinese, the Vietnamese obtained a vocabulary, Confucian hierarchies, Confucian respect for ancestors, a flavor or two of Buddhism, ying-yang roof curvature, and noodles. From the French, the Vietnamese gained coffee, baguettes, a Latin lettering system, pâté, and all those funny little tonal marks that they use to express themselves. From Americans, it must be supposed, the Vietnamese acquired a country in ruins, a diminished population, the image of “Uncle Ho,” pride at having vanquished the mighty American military, and desperation to build and re-build to a better future.

This is an essay about Viet Nam, not an essay about the war. And yet, even in 2012, it is hard to avoid the war. Although exact numbers are elusive, over a million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died after skirmishes were escalated into war by the United States in the 60s. But the war’s roots were planted an entire century earlier when France co-opted Vietnam’s ruling Nguyen dynasty, colonized a good part Asia between India and China, christened the area “Indochine,” and exploited Vietnamese people along the length of the South China Sea.

Colonization continued until World War II when the French were superseded by Japan, allies of the marauding Germans. After the US and Western Allies forced surrenders from Germany and Japan, an independent-minded Ho Chi Minh declared independence, American-style, for the whole of Viet Nam. And yet, in place of independence, world powers divvied the responsibility of re-colonizing Viet Nam at France’s behest, sparking a confrontation between the French and Independence-minded Vietnamese that resulted in a Geneva Conference divide of North and South, Communist and Republican, Buddhist and Christian, along the 17^th parallel. Neither North nor South were satisfied with this compromise. The South deteriorated politically while the North, under the rule of Ho Chi Minh, chaffed at the country’s division, and then set out to war. Again.

At first, the US, in full anti-Communist, Cold war stance preferred the periphery of Vietnamese politics, especially as it was already embroiled, in inscrutable Asia, in a similar proxy war of division between Communism versus Democracy: the Korean War. But when North Vietnam turned resolutely Communist and position itself to re-take South Vietnam, the US couldn’t resist intervening in opposition of the Communists, utilizing 2 1964 incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1 actual and 1 fictional, as rationalization. Hundreds of thousands of US military troops were sent into harm’s way in Viet Nam.

50,000 were killed.
          Again, over a million Vietnamese, soldiers, civilians were killed.

The Northern Vietnamese asserted territorial and strategic advantages while the American government claimed that loosing battle after battle spelled success. Atrocities were committed. On both sides. On 29^th of April, 1975, Northern Vietnamese troops smashed into the city of Saigon as US troops and CIA personnel evacuated from helicopters landed on rooftops. The US marked a historic first military loss. Today, the prevailing theory is that Americans have yet to recover from losing a war. That seems questionable but what seems clearer is that the collective American psyche remains mired in 1975, when Viet Nam was both victorious and destroyed and when there were so much blame and to blame: politicians, guilt, grief, other Americans, and people on both sides of the divide in Viet Nam.

Even the Vietnamese, poverty-ridden but not dispirited, blamed. During the war’s 1968 Tết Offensive, a fierce battle was fought in the then-Southern city Hue: American bombs damaged Hue’s Forbidden City while the Northern Vietnamese massacred an estimated 2800 to 6000 of their own people. After reunification, the Communist party wrote off the Nguyen dynasty and ignored "relics from the feudal regime," refusing to restore the Forbidden City and other historic sites. Yet in a sign that Viet Nam prefers to look towards its future rather than its past, these sites are being restored so that crowds of tourists will boost Hue’s economy. 

In the end, this is an essay about Viet Nam, in 2012. Viet Nam, a country where tradition and modernity meet, not collide. Viet Nam, where the landscape and weather resemble Hawaii but where the people have learned to cool by eating hot noodle soup. Viet Nam, where one can visit a towering Lady Buddha, attend a FIFA soccer game, and go fishing within a few miles and a few minutes. Viet Nam, where tourists enjoy water puppet shows, playing with orphans, visiting the newly restored Forbidden City or may buy a really fresh fish.

Here in 2012, it is time to break our learned association between the country of Viet Nam with the War in Vietnam, and see the country for what it is: Viet Nam, a country exhausted of being invaded and impoverished, eager to hop a motorbike and speed into the future.