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 13th 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.
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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 16th
and 17th 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 16th 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.
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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.
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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 17th 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 29th
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.
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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.