As for most people of our generation, Vietnam has always represented war as depicted in movies by Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, and Stanley Kubrick. It has been a while since the 70's: wounds have heeled, the markets have opened, things have changed. First of all, it has become very easy to travel in Vietnam. We encountered none of the hassle and confusion of India nor the safety apprehension we had felt in the Philippines. Instead we found hordes of package tours welling out of buses in addition to a large collection of ex-pat ladies who lunch. The Vietnamese are very keen on cashing in. They practice languages, service, efficiency, and consumer satisfaction with hopes of becoming the next booming tiger economy. It must be working, at least for some segments of the population. On Halloween we ended up in a night club where hipsters and yuppies ordered Remy Martin like it were tap water.
Like the Chinese, they probably weren't very good candidates for communism to begin with, but the ghosts of a dead ideology are still around. There is of course only one political party and it's enough to turn on a TV to see how humble the government is about running the country. Three out of five news segments are about the happy farmers cultivating rice, the increase in rice production, and the success of Vietnamese industry. On another channel we caught Who Wants to be a Millionaire where we are sure the producers also work for the Politburo. The studio audience looked like an army of robots clapping and smiling stiffly in perfect unison. Out on the streets, a city-wide network of loudspeakers plays military marches and updates on the wonders of rice production at regular intervals. And those who don't like to change continue working at the government owned department stores where you never feel welcome, the shelves are still empty, and help is a four-letter word.
We spent the majority of our time in Hanoi's Old Quarter next to one of the pretty inner-city lakes. The Vietnamese are very early risers so by 6:30 in the morning our street was already an ocean of conical hats, birdcages, water puppets, and postcard vendors. There is a strong French influence in Hanoi's architecture. The colonial facades look like sets from Indochine and The Lover. The cuisine was an eclectic mix of Vietnamese ingredients with a French touch. Our favorite dishes were rice paper spring rolls and a savory salad made with banana flower, sliced beef and crunched peanuts.
Linguistically, the French are being faced out by the Anglo-Saxons, but communication in either language provided many laughs. The Vietnamese language consists almost entirely of monosyllables, so that's how they speak English as well. It took us a couple of days to understand what our waiter wanted to serve us. When he announced that breakfast was: "foo zoo, zam and shit" we were surprised to find fruit juice, jam and cheese on our tray. And we never did figure out which was which of our coffees. Was "wa co fi" black coffee and "way co fi" white or was it the other way around?
It is also quite difficult to understand what the Vietnamese are thinking by looking at their face. Like many other Asians they use it as a mask in order not "to lose face". We met two French psychologist trainees who talked about the difficulties of applying psychoanalysis to a culture that doesn't show its emotions. After three weeks in Vietnam we still felt like we figured out a thing or two about the people, without much analysis. |
