Selamat Pagi, Vietnam

During one sitting at a penthouse restaurant, observing a dispassionate grey Hanoi skyline while being bombarded by overly amped Vivaldi, my Mom spent nearly the equivalent of a Madiun-month’s worth of existence on cappuccinos and bruschetta. Having cleared my special visa for exit and reentry, I had blasted to Hanoi via Kuala Lumpur on AirAsia to meet my Mom and twin sisters. A lifelong obsession with Indochina and her sister’s multiple ailments sustained while in Indonesia combined to push my Mom towards a visit to mainland Southeast Asia instead of the archipelago. My week in Vietnam was a shock to my system, an influx of ephemeral four star living bookended by a mouse in the mandi and a poorly received lesson on the history of rock music at SMA2. They call it the good life for a reason.
Vietnam, while not suffering as badly as Indonesia did during the 1998 crisis, still took a major economic ass whooping. However, unlike Indonesia, the nation took the crash in stride, and since then has rebounded with nearly double digit annual increases in gross domestic product, nearing the skyrocketing rates of India and China. The country has capitalized on tourism, foreign direct investment, and homegrown educational policies, and is one of Asia’s most prominent leaders across the economic and political board.
The differences between Vietnam and Indonesia are striking. I arrived in Hanoi around 9PM, and after filing for my pre-arranged visa on-arrival, I was met outside the airport by a five foot tall, impossibly slim man named Tan. On the hour-long drive from the airport to central Hanoi, the Mercedes Sprinter van passed by sprawling miles of germinating rice paddies and dozens of cavernous boxes stamped with Yamaha, Canon, Samsung, and a host of other multinational brand names. “Tan,” I asked, screaming over the blare of Viet pop. “Do you Vietnamese feel resentment towards American tourists? I mean, it was only a generation ago that we practically destroyed your country.”
“Resentment, not my generation,” he drawled in his thickly accented English. “We have more important things to worry about, like making life and fashion. Some from older generation still mad, but Vietnamese people easy forgive.” It wasn’t the first time that I would wonder over the next week whether my kid would be holding a similar conversation in Tikrit or Basra some thirty years down the road.
After meeting my Mom and sisters for an Italian dinner at our four star hotel’s rooftop restaurant, I strolled around the old quarter, a cramped but elegant mish mash of French architecture, walkable sidewalks, and motorbike fumes. I found myself reflexively watching my every step, half-expecting the man eating holes of despair that I had become accustomed to in Jakarta, Surabaya, and any other Indonesian city of substantial size. But these were broad and clean sidewalks, albeit often blocked by crowds of Vietnamese eating pho, the national dish and pastime, or clogged by incredulously thick packs of silently snarling motorbikes. The newer more fashionable motorbikes were popular in Hanoi, and many of the seat cushions featured either punk rock style leather pleating or Louis Vuitton knock-off coverings. Multiplied by two million, those stylish seats and bikes contributed to the city’s unavoidable cosmopolitan and consumer conscious vibe.
Stumbling across the old quarter’s night market, only a stone’s throw from my hotel, I found myself transported down a conveyor belt of consumerism, pushed from behind by roving masses of teenagers, young couples, and middle-aged parents escorting one another down a half-mile long corridor of bags, sunglasses, fruit, electronics, and mountains of plastic knick-knacks. Most of the crap for sale was the same sort of Chinese manufactured garbage one finds anywhere in the world. But there were standouts amongst the piles that wouldn’t have graced the stalls and tables of a comparable Indonesian market. The broadly superior economic situation was evident in the MP3 players, advanced cell phones, massage rods, and scores of other medium-priced electronics not to be found on the street in Indonesia – perhaps within the confines of certain malls, but not at the markets. Markets in Indonesia are for the poor who can’t afford to shop at the malls, and the poor in Indonesia are in a different category from the urban poor in Vietnam.
I took a midnight lap around Hoan Kiem Lake, one of Hanoi’s most prominent landmarks, home to the magnificent Turtle Pagoda, floating in obscurity at that time of orange oxidized light. For a Friday night, the city of over five million was dead. The only sign of nightlife were a few stray motorbikes tearing around the broad tree-lined boulevard that surrounds the lake, where many Vietnamese gather daily for sunrise tai chi. I was making my way back along the water’s edge, when I spotted another late night stroller walking in my direction. I couldn’t make out his face in the moonlight spackled darkness, but the man was tall and heavyset, in at least his late fifties, with a salt and pepper ponytail, combat boots, camouflage pants, and an old Army issue backpack. Before I had left Indonesia for Vietnam, I spent two days with an American Vietnam veteran. He said he hadn’t been back yet, that he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to go back. “I stopped reading about the war and the country years ago. No one’s experience was the same.” As the man shuffled by without greeting, I thought many thoughts, and let a tear fall while no one was watching.

My Mom and sisters left Hanoi early Saturday morning a week later, and I found myself with the rest of the day to wander about engaged in that solitary but surrounded headspace possible only amongst the crowds of the world’s great cities. We spent a fantastic week together, bouncing from an overnight boat tour of Ha Long Bay to the UNESCO heritage sites of Hue and Hoi An in the central coastal provinces. The country, while diminutive when compared to Indonesia, is still vast, spanning some two thousand miles of coast. A week being led by the hand constitutes the most basic old-school definition of tourism, but was only sufficient to cover the northern half of the country, and at a break neck pace at that. After a whirlwind of culture, cuisine, and ab cramping laughter, I was back alone in magnificent Hanoi.
The French may have royally screwed the Vietnamese for nearly two centuries, but they left behind food, architecture, and art that at the turn of the twenty-first century puts Hanoi on par with Paris, Krakow or Berlin, as opposed to the sprawling chaos of its less aesthetically endowed Southeast Asian neighbors. I bought a few loose Vinataba cigarettes, and proceeded to waste the rest of the day cruising along wide boulevards, skirting dreamy trees fighting through diesel fumes and haze, staring through wrought iron gates at balmy yellow ambassadorial palaces. I wandered, got lost, hired a motorbike taxi, and got lost again snaking through the intermittently tangled and tumultuous streets that criss-cross the remnants of France’s flirtation with Indochina. I found myself in front of the Hoa Loa Prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, where a twenty-something year old John McCain had spent six years after his bomber was shot down into a nearby lake. The city breathes a millennium and a half of bewilderingly accessible courage, doggedness, and irrepressible history.
Vietnamese families and crowds of friends were spending their Saturdays lazily chatting, perched on ankle high stools while slurping away at steaming cups of pho. It was chilly enough that most people were dressed in wool coats or down jackets, wrapped in scarves or trendy hats. It was Saturday, but most men were in button down shirts and suit jackets – a marked change from the flip flops, t-shirts, and sarongs that mark casual Indonesia. The women, skinny, refined, and effortlessly trendy, drooped themselves over their men’s shoulders while zipping around the crowded and horn filled streets on the year’s newest motorbike models.
I made my way through L’Espace Center Culturel Francais, which was holding a retrospective of French cartoonists, and on to the breathtaking opera house, a four storey colonnaded building surrounded by green gardens and the ceaseless bustle of the French Quarter’s epicenter. Navigating my way through the onslaught of grime covered buses, undaunted helmetless riders, and screaming lime green taxis, I crossed to the marble stairway of the cultural relic, still home to operas and ballets in a city of online gaming and burgers. Three separate wedding processions were arranging themselves on the stairs. Grouping together and sharing bouts of laughter, the marital entourages looked on as the brides and grooms, all in modern Western tuxedos and lacey white gowns, posed for posterity. The brides smiled radiantly, the grooms glowered, and friends giggled from their motorbike perches while shooting cell phone photos.
In this land where the American War was only the most recent rejection of unwelcome foreign invaders, I began to comprehend how the country could be so successful despite its recent history. Only thirty five years ago, the U.S. had dropped two million tons of munitions on Hanoi alone, destroying would-be guerilla outposts along with imperial palaces, urban infrastructure, and tens of thousands of innocent lives. On our drive to Ha Long Bay three hours east of Hanoi, my Mom, the girls, Tan, and I stopped at a roadside gift shop staffed by mentally and physically disabled twenty-somethings suffering the generational knock-on effects of Agent Orange. Inside the sprawling complex, while crafting marble statuettes and weaving silk shirts, these hunchbacked and deformed kids no older than me would look up and smile, exchanging glances daily with those responsible for their disabilities.
Sitting on the stairs of the opera house, watching newly married couples prepare to embark on their way through life, I couldn’t help but think how the U.S. had torn this place apart. And for what? Someday will I find myself and my family on a tour of the Tigris and Euphrates, listening to a post-adolescent Iraqi explain the harrowing significance of yet another opaque American war?
A pretty girl with fashionably dyed hair, couture jeans, and big trendy sunglasses smiled at me as I strolled away from the historically bewildering imagery of a nation at peace and in control of its future. I smiled back and said ‘Hi.’ She turned away giggling.