Vietnam - A Few Impressions

Before the trip to Vietnam, I had a number of questions that I was wondering about, including what it meant that Vietnam was officially a communist country. I had done some reading, including Vietnam: Rising Dragon by Bill Hayton about contemporary Vietnam but was interested in what I would experience first hand. One can’t learn much in a 3 week trip, but I will still share a few impressions, based on experiences and conversations with some Vietnamese people.

We knew before hand that Vietnam is a one party state and no organized political opposition is allowed, yet a visitor does not experience the heavy hand of the state in daily interactions with Vietnamese. We were surprised by the amount of openness we encountered and the differing views expressed on issues from environmental protection to income/wealth inequality to the role of the Chinese in the economy. We were also surprised by the diversity of viewpoints that we found reported upon in the English language press. While organized political opposition is not tolerated, the government still has to contend with political power at the local and provincial level - it can’t always set the agenda and enforce whatever it wants as we saw in various reports in the press about contentious local issues. NGO’s like Oxfam work with people in government at various levels to move ahead on particular development issues. We did not have any conversations with Vietnamese about jailed bloggers or human rights abuses though we are aware from the Western press that such problems exist.

In the larger Vietnamese cities like Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, and Hanoi, economic development - such as new factories and big hotels for new tourists - are very evident and much of the development is financed at least in part with private money from Vietnam or China.    There is a strip of hotels along the beach in Danang (the old China Beach) where you feel like you must be in Miami or maybe Nueva Vallarta in Mexico. Working age adults increasingly go to the cities for work in factories, the hospitality industry, or selling goods on the street - while the elderly and children work on the farms in the rural areas, still doing much of the work by hand or with water buffaloes as far as we could tell as we traveled through the countryside. Housing and rental prices in the cities are high and we were told a lot of young workers live in dormitory type situations. We did not see homeless people on the street but would not be surprised if there were. Some Vietnamese people we spoke with, including some young folks, expressed concern about inequality and that the government should do more to help the poor. We did not see evidence of the kind of robust social safety net one can find in European countries with social democracy though there still is more of a family safety net than one would find in Western countries.

The impact of the wars, especially the American war, remains, though we found younger people we talked to knew little about the war and wanted to focus on the future. Many Vietnamese families were divided by the war - with members on different sides of the conflict. We heard stories about such families and how reconciliation has happened over time, but also heard that some families remain divided, including some of the South Vietnamese who fled to the US. A major legacy of the war is the ongoing impact of Agent Orange, now impacting a 4^th generation of Vietnamese children, as well as unexploded ordinance.

Vietnamese told us again and again that they hold no hatred for the American people, despite the war. We personally experienced warmth and friendliness from everyone we met. While we told almost everyone we had been active in the anti-war movement, and the older people really appreciated that, I expect we would have had just as warm a welcome if we had been vets. We experienced Vietnamese again and again as practical and well organized, flexible to respond to changing circumstances (all partly why they won the war), and experiencing joy in daily life.

It is no surprise to me that a number of Americans have chosen to live in Vietnam long term. As I said in one of my Facebook posts about Hanoi, there is something about being in Vietnam that feels like one is at home.