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Our guide called Vietnam “the land of 10 million
motorbikes,” and they all seemed to be zooming down the street
between the Lucky Hotel and Hoan Kiem Lake, the centerpiece of old Hanoi.
There is no tidy stoplight or crosswalk; pedestrians just step out into the
traffic and most survive to the other side. Avoid eye contact, we were told:
“If you look, they won’t stop.” A little old lady was
crossing, so I walked unchivalrously on her nontraffic side till we got to
the far curb. I told the church group I was traveling with that crossing
the street is good for one’s prayer life. Everyone is in a hurry in Vietnam. Energized by an 8
percent rate of economic growth for the past two years and sustained growth
since the doi moi economic
reforms of the mid-1980s, people we met were intent on making enough money
to buy a better scooter or move their family out of their parents’
house. From the bikes, motorized and people-powered, streaming out of the
Panasonic and Canon factories at shift change, to the new five-star
Sheraton where President George W. Bush holed up on his recent visit, Hanoi
offers a picture of vitality. Vietnam’s cities have no vacant
storefronts, and every rural road is lined with entrepreneurs selling
something. I saw one bicycle with two live pigs strapped to the back
heading to market; two others carried baskets of dogs destined to become
restaurant food. These days, visitors have to go out of their way to find
hot dog on the menu, but a growing number of restaurants cater to the 4
million Western tourists who come to Vietnam each year. One menu, for which
English was definitely a second language, offered us a choice between
“chicken swings,” “Hawailin pizza,” and “beef
fajitass.”
I’ve always thought of Vietnam as a war, not a
country, but the people here are way over that. To Americans they cite
their proverb: “A thousand friends are not enough. One enemy is too
many.” Half of the nation’s 82 million population was born
after the United States pulled out its troops in 1973, and the rest see the
“communist takeover” of 1975 as just the end of a long
continuous struggle for independence against first the French and then the
Americans. Nobody is saying that no bitterness remains from all the years
of blood and death. The most visible reminder of what Vietnamese call the
American War is the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, which
describes its mission as providing exhibits of “war crimes and
aftermaths.” This was largely photographs from Life and Look that we who’d lived
through that era had already seen, along with a new display on the
long-term effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese children. The museum was a
sobering reminder but not shocking. I saw nothing not to believe about that
dark chapter.
Still, getting my picture taken with a bust of Ho Chi
Minh under the hammer and sickle gave me pause. I enjoyed a young party
bureaucrat’s enthusiasm for the economic future of her beloved Thai
Nguyen province, until she said the source of her inspiration was
“Uncle Ho” and I realized that I was sitting next to a cult
member. I shuddered when I read in the newspaper that the party Politburo
had met to review the performance of the news media. I chafed when I heard
Mennonite church officials describe the elaborate regulations they must
satisfy to earn from the government the right to worship. I can’t
help it; I was raised in the anti-communist era and still have some John F.
Kennedy idealism in my bones. Though military might doesn’t seem to
work anymore, bearing any burden for the success of liberty still sounds
good to me. My hope is that the Internet-savvy young
professionals of Vietnam will eventually act on their growing realization
that there’s more to freedom than the freedom to make money. At
dinner, one of them — a Hillary Clinton fan who had not yet heard of
Barack Obama — was complaining to me about Bush. He said that when he
traveled to Denmark once there was a street demonstration against
Bush’s Iraq policies. “I joined it!” he said with a
guilty grin, looking around to see who might be listening. I asked whether
there are ever protest demonstrations in Vietnam. His smile faded:
“Not yet.”
Fletcher Farrar and his wife, Mary, traveled to Vietnam
Dec. 31-Jan. 12 with a 13-member delegation from the Church of the
Brethren. They visited Church World Service school construction and
sanitation-development projects.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2007.
