VIETNAM: REVISITING FOR THE FIRST TIME

One of many great buildings left by the French is the famed Metropole, Hanoi's iconic hotel, linked with Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, et al in the Vietnam War era, mere celebrities (and us!) today.

Brides and grooms use the front of the hotel as a backdrop for photos

Hoan Kiem Lake in central Hanoi with the Turtle Pagoda opposite

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!

Above the entrance to the men’s toilet it said “NAM.”  I realized “Vietnam” meant Viet people.  That’s how little I knew about Vietnam, never mind that it was a place I thought I knew all about in the 1970’s.  It’s as if I had been here before in some way, and was here again, but this time for real.  It’s an odd feeling, visiting a country whose history is so intertwined with ours, and not––until very recently––in a good way.  (Those early days are remembered here:  http://www.lexingtonbattlegreen1971.com/)  If I were French my feelings might be equally mixed.  The buildings the French built remain grand.   They lost their war too, in 1954, with the battle of Dien Bien Phu, remembered in a large diorama exhibit at the Military Museum.   Memories, artifacts of wars past are everywhere.

At the Military Museum, Hanoi, remnants of ruined planes, are stacked in a war monument (below).

The "Maison Centrale" is actually the infamous old Hanoi prison built by the French early last
century during their occupation of Indochina.  Behind it, incongruously, there is now a tall apartment complex.

Mannequins stand in for the live prisoners held by the French during their occupation.  The prison was later dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam (American) War and housed John McCain, among others.  Shackled Vietnamese like these were mostly political prisoners.  At least they had others to talk to, unlike those held
alone in dark, almost medieval, dungeons to either side.

Instruments of torture and two guillotines, of which one remains, were also on display.

We were not in Hanoi (two words in Vietnamese, Ha Noi) a full day before we met four young people from Hanoi University who were overjoyed to practice their English on us.  Their enthusiasm was overwhelming:  Ken’s blue eyes (“We all look the same!  Black hair, dark eyes!”) caught their attention.  If they wanted to, they said, they could study in China, but where they really want to go is America.  “We love America!” 

Students from Hanoi University.  Why the "V" signs?  No clue, but it's common in China as well.

Students celebrating a graduation at the Temple of Literature, a Confucian center of learning,
dedicated in 1070.  The women are wearing the national costume, the Ao Dai

It wasn’t only students.  Everyone seemed welcoming.  Even people who lived through the US bombing of Hanoi in the 1960’s.  A long-time employee of the Hotel Metropole led a tour of the bomb shelter below the hotel, recently rediscovered when contractors enlarged the swimming pool. Even people like the food vendor who wanted me to buy a sweet, but even as I said no, asked where I was from, and when I answered “America” she reached out and took my arm, gave me a broad smile, and said, “Oooh, nice.”

In Hanoi's old quarter one street will sell only shoes, another silk, another hardware 

In another street, chickens

Vendors everywhere

We noticed this warmth especially in the north, the home of what had been the “enemy.”  I refer to the “American War,” as of course it’s labeled here.  A guy on the street sells zippo lighters with what look like US military insignia.  “One dollar!” (Zippo lighters!  Symbols of destruction––images of troops setting the thatched roofs of farmers’ homes on fire come to mind.) Were they even authentic?  Maybe, maybe not.  In tourist-visited shops there were T-shirts for sale that resemble the Vietnamese flag––a red field with a yellow star:  The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.  They were selling well.  A member of our group picked up a Tee in Saigon featuring heroic Cold War era Communist warriors and read, “Communism–Worth Fighting For!”  It’s obviously made for westerners, but you wonder, does everyone get the irony?   Can we really say we've gotten to that point?

Houses in Hanoi's old quarter

Houses are tall and narrow, 12 feet wide.  Balconies atop catch the breezes and are often quite fanciful.

Typical housing in a typical town main street, much of it fairly new

In a village, a more modest house.  Above the man is a photo of Ho Chi Minh.

Some live on their boat

One of our guides mentioned how after the end of the war (the American War) the victorious new government of the North Vietnamese gave the people of the north and south ninety days to decide whether to move to the south or to move to the north.  This was wrenching for many families.  No one we talked with in the north appeared to harbor bad feelings about the south.  Quite the contrary.  In Saigon (rarely referred to as Ho Chi Minh City), however, our guide, whose father worked for a South Vietnamese general, was deemed to have a tainted resume and said he was forever blocked from holding certain positions. 






A delightfully many-denominational church or temple in Cai Be with symbolism from everywhere (Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, and perhaps others) along the Mekong

The inside is quite spectacular!

Stored next to the church/temple is a funeral compartment built upon a pickup truck–– talk about leaving in style!

We forget, too, that there was another war on the heels of the American War.  (I was unaware there had even been another war.)  In 1979 China launched an offensive against Vietnam in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia the year before.   That was the act that, thankfully, ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge. (Strange alliances:  the Khmer Rouge had once been supported by the US because they opposed the Viet Cong, but by 1978 the Khmer Rouge had the support of China, at the time our potential foe.)  In that short war––it lasted only a month––Vietnam lost another 16,000, according to our guide. 

Rice fields to the horizon.  The rice is about a week or so away from harvest.

We visited the site of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum.  But he was not there to be viewed—the body was off for its annual cosmetic repair.   Ho didn’t actually want his body to be preserved like Lenin’s, preferring to be cremated, his ashes placed in three jars to be scattered in three regions of a united Vietnam.   But that was not to be.  The country was not united until six years after his death––he died in 1969––following the final withdrawal of American troops.  The years following unification were rough economically, and the country began a slow march to some measure of prosperity only after the lifting of US sanctions in 1994. 

The market at Cai Be, a vision of plenty.

The wholesale vegetable section

Innumerable kinds of fish

Fruit on the right, frogs at the left

This elderly woman has been selling food here for many years

Selling in the market draws the whole family

Rats for dinner:  These are "country rats" that ate rice and whatever else, not city rats.
(Note:  Eating of dogs is not approved of.)

I felt that within a few more years the cities, and maybe even the countryside of Vietnam, would look a lot more prosperous.  After I got home I checked the labels of some of my clothes and was surprised how many read “Made in Vietnam.”  We saw several major construction projects that are being financed by Japan.  Korea recently built an immense Samsung complex outside Hanoi.  In the cities electric wires, strung thickly and haphazardly on city poles, attest to constantly increasing needs for power and make-do solutions.  Shops, like the most common housing all twelve feet wide, fill every conceivable niche.  Everyone seems to be an entrepreneur.   

A rice wine with, yes, snakes.  Cobra rice wine, in fact.  We actually drank some.

Making rice "popcorn" involves adding black sand, then sifting it out.  Later something sugary and sticky is added and it is rolled flat and patted into squares.

Workers in this rattan weaving workshop work 8 hours a day to earn $5 per day, and tend to work 7 days a week to make ends meet.  After, say, 10 years or more  of work they will still make $5 a day.  The room is very hot, incredibly noisy, and the equipment looks dangerous.

In Hanoi the bicycle rickshaws fight for space with scooters and cars.  In some pedicabs, rickshaws or tuk-tuks you are propelled from the rear, others from the front.  It can be unnerving to sit in front as half the scooters on the road look as if they’re coming at you from all directions, like so much incoming shrapnel.  In Saigon the rickshaws have already been replaced by even more scooters.**   The city is striving like mad to become the next boom city in Asia.  Its tallest building, the Bitexco, is a replica of Dubai’s Sailboat Hotel with its circular protruding helicopter pad at the top.  In Saigon, however, a helicopter has yet to land.

Saigon's new skyline with the Bitexco Tower, copy of a building in Dubai

The Saigon Post Office, designed by Gustave Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel)

As in Cambodia, people worry about the environment.  Dams on the Mekong are on the minds of many, and with the increase of industry, so is pollution.  The entire Mekong Delta area (hard by Saigon) and towns along upper parts of the river depend upon the river for food and for their livelihood––and for drinking water.  The Mekong in flood spreads to fertilize rice fields, as it does in Cambodia.  We were there at a time when the river was relatively low––the hoped-for flooding did not happen this year––but it was nevertheless brown with silt, carrying along islands of water hyacinth at a good clip.  In a month or so, we were told, it will even look blue. 

Small scale fishing traps near a village whose economy is based on fishing

Commerce along the Mekong; carrying sand that will likely be used for fill in construction

In beautiful Ha Long Bay near the border with China coastal development is moving fast.  There are new high rise hotels and a good many tourist “junks”*** that ply the waters.  We had a lovely kayak trip in the bay.  Since our guides were forgetful and not experienced kayakers––they couldn't seem to keep to a straight line––we had an especially interesting trip, longer than the other kayakers in our group.  (For one thing, our mother ship moved without our knowledge to another bay while we were on the water so we were lost for a time, and when we found our hapless guides they managed to lead a kayak they were towing into a situation that caused it to overturn, nearly drowning one passenger.)  Monkeys inhabit the miniature island mountains that offer little access to humans.  We visited a cave there as well, nothing like the enormous caves we've heard exist in the mountains of central Vietnam..

Ha Long Bay, with its limestone mountains, near the Chinese border

Ha Long Bay in the evening, with "junks" in the background

Vietnam sorely needs prosperity.  With the US and Vietnam now becoming fast friends, or at least good trading partners with parallel political motives (for instance, we support their assertion of rights against the Chinese push to claim ownership of the sea near Vietnam), and Vietnam appearing more and more in travel news (the NYTIMES featured "36 Hours in Hanoi on 11/1/14) the future looks pretty bright.   I certainly hope so.  We owe it to them.

                                            *****

*Joan Baez returned to the Metropole for the first time post-war this past spring, presenting the hotel a portrait of a young Vietnamese boy that now hangs in their lobby. 

**The proliferation of scooters, totally out of control, is the unfortunate result of a lack of government support and funding for public transportation at a crucial stage of the country’s development.  Now it’s too late for buses (they would only increase the traffic jams), but Saigon is at least beginning to build a subway system.  No saying how long that will take, but no one is optimistic.  Most of the women on scooters have arms, head and much of their faces covered;  the reason, according to a guide, is less pollution than keeping their skin from the sun.

***They are really only pretend junks, as the ships are quite large and comfortable with no actual need for sails.