by Pico Iyer
In Hanoi, I came to see how much the Vietnamese are still a people of simple, romantic pleasures, making do with what they have: playing badminton on the streets, or going for walks along the lake, or simply taking in the softness of the night air. Gambling and photography are still as popular as in Norman Lewis’s lyrical accounts from the fifties; and soft-laughing girls still promenade around the lake at night. In stores I entered, owners offered me tea and lotus-seed cake; in the distance, Johnny Guitar was playing “Romance d’Amour.”
Of course, Hanoi is changing with every passing season. Along Hang Ga Street, more and more places now are sprouting the magic word, in English, “restaurant” (and offering cognac and Cyndi Lauper, though their menus still have sections headed “River Tortoises” or, simply, “Birds”), and proprietors are more and more likely to invite you inside to see their lambada videos or discuss Samantha Fox. The famous mantra “Eric Clapton Number One” can often be heard in Hanoi now, and along the candlelit streets at night, crowds can be seen in houses, lined up in rows as at a cinema, their faces lit up by a new Nintendo screen. On this page of the local paper, Hanoi Moi, I found a discussion of Pretty Woman. Yet still there is an unhardened sweetness to the place, an innocence of the pleasures it is giving.
In the countryside, the changes are even more pronounced. Brand-new brick houses are popping up in every village, TVs are lighting up the dark, scooters are closing in on water buffalo. Every other child seems to be wearing a baseball cap that announces, enigmatically, THE RATS WON. And yet, and yet, there is a real sense of unexpectedness on the road, as one slices through the clouded mountains in the north, around a series of narrow switchbacks, the only figures materializing in the mist the tribal Montagnards, clad in their red and blue and yellow scarves and belts. We stopped for lunch at a tiny hut, eating, cross-legged on a platform, the standard street-stall fare of beef and pork lit up by mint and lemongrass; in the distance, ridge after ridge of dark-blue mountains receded into outline, the same color, almost, as the teeth of the tribal crone who served us tea. The minority Montagnards still measure their lives by the essential village rhythm of cockcrow and chopping wood. Exquisite, swan-necked beauties, jangling silver bracelets, draw water from the well or work old rice pumps with their feet; others go down to the water to bathe, and chatter away in classic, antique Thai. As visitors increase, the tribal peoples are beginning to learn how to play themselves (the altar in one hut I saw contained a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, a can of 7-Up, and a packet of Gitanes), but they are still at least five years behind their more photographed cousins across the border.
The single most beautiful sight in all Vietnam may well be Halong Bay, five hours south of Hanoi—a local version of China’s Guilin—its waters dotted with three thousand misty islets in the shape of tigers, unicorns, and fighting cocks. On the day I visited, it was rainy, and I spent most of the afternoon wandering around the deserted colonnades and lazy balconies of a French colonial hotel I had entirely to myself. Yet, despite the rain, one could still make out the watercolor beauty of the area, billow-sailed junks outlined against jagged outcrops, kingfishers skimming low above the water. In the early light, fishermen casting nets glided silent across the silent water.
Like most tropical countries, Vietnam gets up with the light, and one of the greatest pleasures you can find is to go outside at six in the morning and see the whole town out stretching its limbs, playing badminton or soccer in the streets, ghosting its way through tai chi motions. When fishing boats go out at midday, fireworks herald their good fortune. And at night, everyone heads for the water again, assembling at video cafés that sometimes offer “300-inch screens” (or Richard Chamberlain miniseries doing battle against kung fu classics).
It was gray and rainy every morning I was in the north, yet every morning, as I looked up at the sky, someone would assure me, “A very propitious day. In Vietnam, the rainy season lasts from September to January.” It was now mid-April. “This is the best season of the year.” Yet the gray only intensified the country’s matchless greens. All of us probably know by heart the classic landscape of Vietnam: the tiny stick figures in lampshade hats silhouetted on the hilltops, the quilted emerald rice fields, the slow-moving, pendulous water buffalo. Village girls still carry water in two-handled buckets, and men sell rice packed in banana leaves along the streets. And the streets themselves are a crazy gallimaufry of unlikely props: Japanese buses from the Kansai countryside and creaking De Sotos, Minsk motorbikes and carts loaded with rattan, Peugeot bicycles and ancient GMC trucks, “moving kitchens” and cross-country buses that break down only once every forty minutes. Wherever I went, 95 percent of the people I passed would stare at me, 75 percent would try out “Hello! Where you come from?” and 60 percent would break into the most radiant of smiles.
Yet the real center of yin in Vietnam, as New Agers (or old mandarins) would say, is Hue, which, like all university towns, moves to a bicycle rhythm. For many of us, the name most instantly connotes bombardment, and the savageries of the Tet offensive; but the nineteenth-century capital of regal pavilions has never lost its air of gracious reserve and a faded glamour as picturesque as that of the black-and-white shots of local Lana Turners pouting down from every streetside Photo Shop. At one riverside pagoda, a head monk unfurled for me the banned Buddhist flag, talking all the while of Hermann Hesse and Krishnamurti. The students on their bicycles carried themselves like ancient porcelain. And my guide in Hue, a soft-spoken, scholarly man in spectacles, talked warmly of Tagore.
Had he been here during the Tet offensive, I asked. “Yes,” he replied quietly. “My mother was killed by a bomb. I was still quite young.” But there was no melodrama in his voice, and no self-pity: the people I met seemed much too dignified to dwell on onetime sufferings.
The shadows cast by the war grew deeper as we drove along the spectacular “Pass of Clouds,” high above the golden beaches, to Da Nang. Though now it feels like an industrial city, this onetime fishing village is still graced with two extraordinary sights. The first is its Cham Museum, whose lovely, delicate statues of apsaras (or angels) and of Hindu deities, as well as of Lord Buddha, evoke the sinuous, curling beauty of a culture of proud aesthetes. The second sight is even more astonishing. We drove out of what was once called “Rocket City,” past the abandoned Quonset huts, past the huge American airfield, past land laid waste by Agent Orange, and past the airport, blasted now with Soviet rock ‘n’ roll. Then, getting out, we climbed up the Marble Mountains, steep hillsides scattered with Buddhist shrines and huge caverns, lit up by sticks of incense and haunted by the looming shadows of twenty-foot Buddhas and Goddesses of Compassion. At the base of one hill is “China Beach,” the celebrated R and R center featured in series and song. For years, even as Americans reclined on the sand, their enemy, unbeknownst to the GIs, were five minutes away, licking their wounds in the god-filled caves and shadowing the Yanks’ every movement.
Yet for all the freshness of such memories, and for all the bullet holes that scar the mountain, the foreigner has only to say he’s from America, and he is greeted with shiningly genuine smiles. “For us, French is the language of power and love,” a Vietnamese friend explained. “English is the language of commerce. Russian is the language of quarrels.” There are, of course, some practical reasons why Vietnam is so eager to be friendly with America. Every time I changed a traveler’s check, the stack of dong I received in return was equivalent to a whole month’s wages for most of the locals who would gather round in a circle. Once, in Nha Trang, a woman came up to me and asked, in fluent English, why I didn’t simply deliver my postcards by hand after I got back home. It was more fun, I said, to send them from here. “But so expensive,” she replied. Chastened, I realized that the ten dollars I was spending on stamps was equal to her salary for a month.
Central Vietnam has always been a kind of shadowy no-man’sland, not quite North Vietnam and not quite South, and liable to go either way. Today these mongrel influences ma
ke for a kind of homemade surrealism. In Hue one night, in a deserted French villa where backpackers stay, and chat over five-course dinners each night, a half-black kid came out and motioned for a cigarette. In the background, “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” was floating through the night. Other aromatic French villas now advertise their versatile attractions: “Telex Coffee Dancing Massage.” In Da Nang, the hot item at the local theater was the Originals, a four-piece all-girl Soviet rock ‘n’ roll band—glasnost on eight legs—accompanied by four scantily clad dancers performing post-Madonna dance routines (“like Henry and June,” remarked one astonished spectator). And as we drove through a smiling village pastoral one day, my guide slipped in the only tape he owned, and suddenly, amidst the huts and rice paddies, lined now with neat white graves, Willie Nelson was singing duets with Merle Haggard and George Jones.
“Adversity breeds wisdom,” my idiom-happy guide assured me. “Life’s no bed of roses.” He had translated the book of Born on the Fourth of July into his native tongue, he went on, and he was much concerned with “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He talked about Gorbachev’s struggles and the greenhouse effect, Rushdie’s conversion to Islam and the death of Graham Greene. “But I’m not going to nickel and dime you to death,” he concluded, reassuringly.
The most haunting reminder of the war for me, though, was seventy-five miles south of Da Nang. We turned left off the main highway and bounced along a quiet dirt road, bordered on both sides by tall stalks of maize and by children waving at the passing car. It was hard to believe that this quiet village of flowers and wide-eyed toddlers had once seen rivers of blood eight inches deep. Wisps of white floated along the ground from overhanging cotton trees, birds sang from the branches, water buffalo padded through their ageless cycle. But there was also a quiet monument in My Lai, and a few small graves, and a museum in which are preserved the memories of all 504 people who, according to the Vietnamese, were slaughtered on a single morning.
The woman who tends to the memorial pointed out the skinny coconut palm that was, she said, the only witness of the massacre. I asked her where she had been that morning. “I was eleven years old then,” she said softly. “I lived a few kilometers away. I saw the helicopters, I heard the explosions. I saw the fires burning. My aunt was killed that day.” No less affecting are the comments in the visitors’ book that she showed me over tea in the flower-bordered guesthouse: agonized apologies, most of them, from returning GIs, who often wrote simply, “I have no words.” My Lai is one of those places, like Hiroshima, that raise difficult questions about peace and truth, and make one quiet when one leaves.
The very quality of the air seems to change as one drives south. The sun comes out, the shadows lengthen, and the coconut palms begin to multiply. Here one is indisputably in tropical country. And as the visitor approaches Saigon, Saigon comes up to greet him: words of English begin to appear, little kids sprout shades, fashion plates in banana-yellow shorts replace the silken ao dai girls of Hue. Traveling south in Vietnam, one is effectively going West.
By the time you get to the beach resort of Nha Trang, or the hill station of Dalat, you begin to see more and more chic tourists, in Giordano T-shirts and “U.S. Mondial 94” (!) sandals, oozing wealth and modernity, as incongruous as Manhattan fashion models in a North Dakota village. They are, in fact, from Ho Chi Minh City, affluent sightseers in their own country, so different from the world around them that they seem, quite literally, to belong to a “new species” (as the Japanese call their yuppies). Around them, as the road goes south, you also begin to feel corruption in the air: Vietnamese Bruce Springsteen sound-alikes growl from every café, pirated cassettes fill the marketplace, and the line between tourist and native blurs. One is back, one senses, in Marlboro Country.
Dalat, built by the French as a summer resort in the hills—a kind of Simla East—is still a favorite holiday place for the wealthy of Saigon, who gather for photographs along the rolling lawns of the Palace Hotel, a musty, antique shooting lodge, with oil lamps and black rotary phones beside every bed, and “Bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu …” always playing on the sound system. The whole city, with its tidy Provençal cottages tucked among alpine lakes and waterfalls and forests, bears almost no signs of its Eastern origins, and on a late afternoon I saw men in suits with rolled-up brollies, and women in silk gowns, assembling in the piney hillside light, outside the Catholic church, for a stylish society wedding.
For me, the most interesting tourist sight in Dalat was just that: the sight of the tourists from Saigon, making the circuit of the scenic spots—the honeymoon couples posing for photographs on tiny ponies or going for rides on romantic paddleboats; the wealthy holidaymakers admiring the hibiscus and bellflowers in the pretty gardens or posing for snapshots with locals who impersonate themselves in cowboy hats and buckskin jackets. Sightseers make themselves at home now—true revolutionary gesture!—in the house that once belonged to the last emperor, Bao Dai, lounging at his desk, testing themselves at his exercise machine, browsing through his copies of Mrs. Dalloway and La Vie de Walt Whitman. At night, across “Sighing Lake,” long-hair bands from Saigon play note-perfect versions of “Hotel California,” while the racy young in drop-dead fashions follow glamorous hostesses into darkened nightclubs.
Five hours south, the stench of kerosene, mingled with the scent of French perfume, tells you you’re in Saigon: suddenly, the bicycles have been replaced, entirely, by scooters, and the scooters are being steered by girls in elbow-length white gloves, their friends hanging on to their backs as if on to excitement itself. The bikers rev up, the lights change, the signs flash past, and one is back, ineluctably, in Everymetropolis, Southeast Asia—a version of Bangkok, crowded into ten tiny blocks and hopped up to the max.
As we arrived at my hotel in the “Paris of the Orient,” a bellhop in a blue-and-golden uniform came up to open the car door, the electronic doors of the hotel slid open, and the girl at the reception desk, punching the keys of her computer, handed me a coded card. There was a basket of fruit awaiting me in my brand-new room, a wicker basket for laundry, and bottles of toiletries in the bathroom. Luckily, however, Vietnam Tourism has still not quite memorized its lines. I pressed the tap and there was no hot water. I put on the TV and got nothing but static. I looked for shampoo and found I had two bottles of bath foam instead. And though the floor guards jumped up and bowed each time I walked past, they could not—or would not—read Do Not Disturb signs. Nonetheless, the hotel seemed a perfect microcosm of the new Saigon: one morning, as I walked through the lobby, it was a cacophony of saws and blowtorches and sweating laborers; by the time I returned that night, a spanking-new bar stood in one corner of the lobby, complete with tables and spacious shelves and smiling girls waiting to serve up coconut cocktails.
My first night in Saigon, a haggard man with shriveled cheeks and a baseball cap came up to me in the street. “I was in a concentration camp for eleven years,” he said in perfect English. “While I was there, my wife and three children tried to escape by boat. That was the last I heard of them. I am very eager to go to your country; but I have been waiting two years, three years. The list is very long.” What could I say? “How old do you think I am?” Aim low, I always tell myself. “Sixty?” He looked put out. “I am fifty-four. Maybe it was the camp that made me look so old.”
There are a thousand more like him now, beached in the new order and able to find work only as cyclo drivers or as street peddlers of some kind. They race up to any foreigner they see, glad to have a voice at last, but when they talk, their stories sound almost like language tapes. “Let me introduce you to my niece,” the old man called out after me, as I tried to make my polite escape. “She is twenty-one, a student. She would like to speak English with you.”
Such legacies of the war are everywhere in Saigon: Vietnam Tourism even offers organized tours to see war orphans and a drug addicts’ rehabilitation center. And the War Crimes Museum, once the U.S. Information Service, contains not only
the statutory U.S. howitzers and tanks in the garden, but also six well-planned rooms methodically chronicling American atrocities: pictures of GIs carrying severed heads, detailed descriptions of American torture methods, even some Lomotil tablets belonging to “reactionary elements” and an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt in a special case devoted to “Cultural Ideological Sabotage.” But for all the pro forma references to “quislings” and “barbarians” and “diabolic imperialism,” one feels that the bulk of the country’s resentment, such as it is, is reserved for its centuries-old enemy, the Chinese; one of the most violent of the rooms in the museum is given over to Chinese atrocities and to a list of “6 Ways of Barbarous Killings Used by the Chinese Aggressors.”
Besides, the main ideology apparent in Saigon is sheer survivalism. On May Day, the only parade that I could find in town was the reckless procession of motorbikes. And on Liberation Day, the sixteenth anniversary of the moment when North Vietnamese tanks dramatically crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace and retook the south, I went to the Museum of the Revolution, the War Crimes Museum, and the Reunification Hall itself in search of some celebration. But there was not a single thing in sight. Just another quiet day as usual, busloads of villagers from the countryside filing through what was once President Thieu’s private cinema to watch a stirring twenty-minute video about the Revolution (featuring priceless footage of French garden parties and “Nich-xon,” looking shifty forty years ago). Was there no commemoration of the day? Not in secular Saigon. “It was a sad day for me,” said a woman who pointed out the 555 cigarettes in which the Vietcong had disseminated details of their plans. “Before 1975 I was a teacher. Now I am just a museum guide. We have nothing to celebrate.”