by Tom Bissell
I had decided I would not learn any Vietnamese before going to Vietnam. At one point or another this had seemed like a good idea. At one point or another most bad ideas seem like good ideas. Language is culture, and the particularities of Vietnam's seemed at the time beyond the ken of whatever I might wrest from my father's and my trip. I was also not that interested. The war interested me, as did much of Vietnam's history, as did how entangled both had become in the double helix of the American psyche, but to me the only striking thing about Vietnam's language and culture was how unmitigatedly foreign they were, and, I suppose, part of me wanted to keep them that way. While I would eventually realize exactly how idiotic this was, the lesser stupidities of the idea were already clear to me by the time my father and I passed into Tan Son Nhut airport's wide, yellow-walled customs area.
I could not read a thing. Of course, most of the important signs had an English translation beneath them (how excellent of the world to accommodate its cheerful monoglots, its English speakers), but these translations did nothing to lessen the sensation of utter illiteracy that came over me. This preemptive awareness was so sudden and powerful that my father would later ask me why it was I had stopped cold when we walked into the customs area. I stopped because I realized I had never before traveled in a place where I was so thoroughly unable to communicate. During my previous travels I had always been at least able to fake a greater awareness than that which I actually had. Faking awareness was immensely useful in Communist and former Communist countries, as most are police states. The mere appearance of awareness was often garlic to secret-police vampires. But I could not say a single word in Vietnamese. Not one. I could not even say “one.” Gamma rays of cluelessness emanated from my body.
I had not expected this. My last six months had been spent doing little but reading about Vietnam. Only in the past few weeks had I felt as though I was beginning to know something of the place. (That feeling, I now knew, was illusory.) Rigging me to Vietnam were some powerful but extremely gossamer connections, all of them traceable to my father's service. Vietnam also subtended many of mymore abstract interests: the legacies of colonialism, the theory and practice of revolutionary Communism, the various forms of moral suicide committed by intelligent people in search of a consistent worldview. Now I was in the place I had been reading about and anticipating for months—and within my chest were fluttering streamers and within my head an absent white glow.
My father, on the other hand, was smiling as he helped an elderly Vietnamese woman with her luggage. Blinking, stunned, I followed him through customs and straight out into the humid facewash of the Ho Chi Minh City night. It was not that hot, but it was a wet and energy-stealing tropical heat. The representative from the tour service we had hired—a short, squat-faced young Vietnamese woman wearing glasses that looked like a sideways 8—coolly directed us toward a white four-door Toyota. I had not been ecstatic about procuring the services of tour guides, but I had known we really did not have a choice. We jumped in back, and the car began to move. I was in Vietnam with my father, and all around us was Ho Chi Minh City. All around us was Saigon. My father had been to Saigon only once, as a junior officer, for an hour, in 1965, to pick up some movies to show his troops. My mind, bludgeoned by sleep aids, worked out its new parameters while my father leaned forward and spoke to the young woman from the tour service in a very clear tone of voice, each word as distinct as it was loud: “Does anyone still call the city Saigon?”
“Most people,” she said.
My father waited for more, a pleasant, inviting look on his face. This look faded as the silence continued. “Right,” he said finally. He then asked, for still puzzling reasons, “And what street is this we're on?”
The woman took her time saying something to the driver before she bothered to answer my father. “Nguyen Van Troi.”
My father gave her a long look, then sat back. “Okay,” he said quietly.
I could tell he was hurt. This young woman was not a guide, though; she was simply the person who was picking us up, taking us to the hotel, and once again driving us to the airport in the morning for our flight to Hue. We were not staying long in Saigon, and we were not her responsibility. Still, I decided I did not like this young woman. Perhaps she was sick of Americans, who had been coming to a unified Vietnam in large numbers for only about a decade now. The biggest, most concentrated rush of Americans began in 1993, as the economies of Asia began to expand during what was called the Asian Miracle. Most of these incoming Americans were businesspeople and their various shield bearers. In 1995, the United States and Vietnam began to normalize relations. More Americans came. Then, in 1997, the prosperous economies of Asia once again began to obey the laws of financial gravity, and many of the American businesspeople left Vietnam. Next to go were the Americans who enjoy traveling to places rumored to be undiscovered by other Americans, a hard attribute to square with Vietnam, considering that in living memory it had been home to the most massive American incursion in history, but, all the same, they moved on to wherever it is such people go. So now in Vietnam you mainly had that happily unendangered species known as the American Tourist. Retired American tourists want to come to Vietnam and see everyone courteous and friendly and smiling and let bygones be bygones and stuff their faces with delicious Vietnamese food. Younger Americans want to come and buy a Ho Chi Minh T-shirt, and this is if they have brains, but most young Americans do not, in which case Vietnam is fucking awesome. Then there is the slightly older American male tourist traveling to Vietnam. Often he is alone. There are two types of these. The first is a veteran, who has simply no idea how to deal with you. The second, who will likely have a mustache, probably just wants to have sex with you.
None of it was any excuse for hurting my merely curious father's feelings. Thankfully he already seemed over it, squares and orbs of Saigon's primary-colored light moving across his still, watchful face. How to describe Saigon, the awesome unreality of Saigon? To imagine Saigon, for more than a decade the American capital of Asia, one must first consider that after 1975 the city had been forced to wear Marxist handcuffs for fifteen years. Once released, it had enjoyed throughout the 1990s one of the most steroidal economies in Asia. Today Saigon was responsible for consuming a third of Vietnam's entire state budget. This was only fair, as it provided 80 percent of Vietnam's tax revenue. It was the richest, biggest city in the region (some say 60 percent of all Indochina's money sits in Saigon banks), a place where the Citibank logo now glowed with iconic confidence on the side of a modest skyscraper. It was also an extremely poor city in which many gainfully employed Vietnamese lived two, three, four to a very small room and shared toilets by the dozen. “Saigon is no longer the charming mix of colonial grace and 1960s kitsch,” Robert Templer writes in Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam, “but a late twentieth-century urban disaster-in-waiting with many of the failings of other cities in the region.” A city of the future, then, a city of the past. And it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Saigon was amazing, it was vaguely disappointing, and in it one could imagine every kind of life making its home here, every kind of experience. It was a city of people who moved through it looking slightly stunned.
Saigon was also louder than a tractor pull in an aluminum stadium. Flowing through its streets, as quickly as platelets through veins, were approximately 3 billion scooters. “My goodness,” my father said as a ver-sicolor flash flood of beeping little scooters overtook us on all sides. “Look at them all!” Thanks to these scooters—a sort of half-moped, half-motorcycle hybrid—we were now learning about one of Vietnam's more extraordinary innovations. This was the incredibly busy intersection that did not have a stoplight. What happened at the incredibly busy intersection that did not have a stoplight was this: fifty scooters and three cars came from the north, forty scooters and five cars came from the west, and then without stopping they all passed through the intersection at the same time. This went on all day, at all hours, all over the city. I
t sounds impossible. But then fish do not collide, flocks of birds do not collide. Phenomena of the type we were witnessing are not unknown to nature. It all seemed to work phenomenally well and would continue to seem that way until I read a report about Greig Craft, the founder of an advocacy group known as the Asia Injury Prevention Foundation. The report noted that 40 percent of the world's road deaths occur in Asia and that Vietnam has the most road deaths in Asia. Thirty-seven people a day were killed in Vietnam in traffic accidents. As the report noted, this is the equivalent of a 767 fully loaded with Vietnamese crashing thirty times a year. (It is also a little more than half the number of civilians who used to die every day during the American War.) “No one saw it coming,” Craft is quoted as saying in the report. In one generation, “Vietnam went from buffalo to bicycle to motorbike.” The leading cause of death for U.S. tourists in Vietnam? Road crashes.
I began to pay close attention to the way people here handled themselves on the road. Few Vietnamese wore helmets, and in many cases entire families (father, mother, two children) were riding on a single scooter. How better to shear away an entire branch of one's family tree? Despite how much the Vietnamese adore children (the nation has one of the highest childhood inoculation rates in the world, and nearly every Vietnamese child can read), numerous smiling and horrifically imperiled children were riding draped over the handlebars of their families’ scooters. One father smoked a cigarette while steering his scooter with one hand. With his other hand he held a cell phone to his ear. Nestled in the crook of his arm was what looked to be a several-month-old baby.
We were coming upon District 1, which provided Ho Chi Minh City the same deeply unrepresentative mask that Midtown provides Manhattan. District 1 was where many worked and few lived, where less adventurous visitors came to base the entirety of their impressions, where the night sky's every star was consumed by terrestrial light. Here in the updated Babel of District l's confusion there was an overabundance not of language but of product. Citibank was the least of it. Around us were doors and awnings emblazoned with names such as the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery. There was a bar called Heart of Darkness and a club called Apocalypse Now. Here was an Isuzu showroom, there a L’Occitane boutique. Yamaha, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Sheraton, Sanyo, Bulgari, HSBC, Ford, L’Oreal. Across the streets and upon the people fell the softly invincible radiance of all this neon.
The common thing to say after noting the incorporated roll call of Saigon billboardry was that the Communists of North Vietnam won the war but lost the peace. But any Communist regime that stayed in power after the dissolution of the Soviet Union had some idea of what it was doing. It should be recalled that Vietnam's Communist leaders had attempted to apply the tenets of formal Marxism as long as they could, though there were Party members who questioned the logic of Marxism as early as the late 1960s. In its insistence on implementing Marxism, though, the core leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam nearly accomplished what thirty years of warfare could not: the unconditional destruction of the country.
The Vietnamese Communist Party was not known for its quick studies. Hanoi erected its first statue to Lenin in 1985, and three years later parts of Vietnam were afflicted with famine despite First Secretary Le Duan's 1975 promise that after ten years, every full-tummied Vietnamese family would have a television and a refrigerator. To have abandoned formal Marxism by the late 1980s was not particularly surprising or any kind of hangdog admittance; it was dire necessity. For all the reform the Party had allowed, it maintained a rigor mortic grip on most of Vietnam's industries. Its current leadership was a colorless, anonymous lot at best. Its prime minister had a third-grade education, a deputy in its equivalent of our Drug Enforcement Agency was convicted of drug smuggling, and its minister of trade was caught with more than $1 million in cash taped to the bottom of his dining room table. Frustrating masters, certainly, for what was, by most accounts, one of the planet's most resilient and hardworking populations.
The squat-faced woman from the tour service dropped us off, established the implausibly early time she would be back in the morning, and lickety-split drove away. I picked up my big red duffel and began to walk toward our hotel's glass doors to check in. But my father hooked my arm in his and asked if we might just stay here for a moment. So we stood on the curb outside our hotel, looking around at Nguyen Hue, District l's main drag. A huge, busy, bright, vibrant, vaguely seedy city center. And Vietnam. No use minimizing the psychic impact of this, or blowing it off. As wildly unrepresentative as this may have been, it was Vietnam. “Tremendous,” my father said after a while. “lust tremendous.”
“I know. You wake up, take a couple plane rides, and suddenly the trees are tropical and the urinals have different shapes.”
My father squinted at something down near the end of the street. “What's that over there?” He was pointing across a clogged traffic circle at a large, beautiful palace, formerly a French hotel, now “the most photographed building in Saigon” (I was basically reading the guidebook aloud to him), that, of course, the Communists had commandeered and made the People's Committee Building of Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese flag—yellow star, red field—hung with humid limpness from the pole fixed atop the palace's highest, most central tower. The People's Committee Building, which on the outside was as fancy as a wedding cake and on the inside was reputed to be breathtaking, was of course closed to all actual people.
“Why would they take such a beautiful building like that and close it off?” My father shook his head. “Communism is funny stuff.”
He intended this as a friendly jab at me. For many years now my father had operated under the belief that his youngest son was a Communist. The evidence: at seventeen I had announced I was a socialist and adamantly carried in my back pocket a copy of The Communist Manifesto that I occasionally attempted to read. Years later there was apparently nothing I could do to convince my father that I was not a Communist, not even publishing a book that was essentially a 3 53-page attack on Communism's horrible legacy in Central Asia.
“That's nothing,” I told him, passing back his guidebook. “Stalin had Moscow's Temple of Christ the Savior—a thirty-story-tall building that took sixty years to build and was probably the greatest architectural achievement in Russian history—razed to the ground. Its foundation for years was a public swimming pool.”
“Speaking of Stalin …” Again he was pointing, this time at a granitey black statue that stood at the center of a small park before us. Among all the lights the shape of the stone was easy to make out: Ho Chi Minh, an adored child in his lap.
The book I had been reading on the plane was William J. Duiker's biography Ho Chi Minh. (Professor Duiker, in speaking of his Penn State students over the years, once uttered some of the truest, most memorable words ever about the Vietnam War: “They still cannot grasp that the war had something to do with other people.”) That his Communist son was reading a book about Ho Chi Minh had greatly bemused my father. All day he had been asking for updates—How's Uncle Ho? What's he doing now? Oh, yeah? Now where is he?—and then sadly shaking his head. Here on the streets of Saigon I looked at my father and said, “You're equating Ho with Stalin?”
He put up his hands and smiled. “Oh, of course not. I wouldn't dream of it. Oh my goodness, no.”
“Because I'm not sure that comparison holds water, actually.”
“Oh, I know. Absolutely not. Charming man.” Again he shook his head, smiling at me as though I were, at most, seven years old. “Come on, you twerp. Let's go check in.”
A little later, electrically awake thanks to sleep-aid blowback, I lay clothed atop a tightly made bed, thinking about the Ho Chi Minh statue. It had replaced an earlier statue that honored ARVN soldiers slain in battle, which was yanked down by Communist lassoes soon after the 1975 takeover. The position of the Communist Party of Vietnam, essentially unaltered since 1975, is that South Vietnam never existed. What existed was a “puppet” state. What of ARVN? ARVN never really ex
isted either. Puppet army. Also, there was no Vietnamese civil war. What happened in 1975 was not a violent takeover but a revolution against this puppet state.
Despite the Party's obfuscation, many people believe that North Vietnam and South Vietnam still exist. Some Vietnamese, once you have come to know them, may even tell you that the divisions between North Vietnam and South Vietnam are deeper, the wounds more profound, than those that exist between Vietnam and France, between even Vietnam and the United States. There are many reasons for this beyond the war. Due in part to the south's historically heavier French presence, the scholar Neil L. lamieson writes, “Southern villages have always been more open, less corporate, more tolerant of individual initiative and cultural heterodoxy”—a land of easygoing Buddhism. Others are blunter: life for those in the sterner, more Confucian north, whether because of its climate, its generally poor soil, or its closeness to China, has been much harder, historically speaking, than life for those in the south. People who lead hard, mentally blunting lives are typically more vulnerable to—and tolerant of—the devices of dictatorship. Prior to 1945, however, Communist insurgency was a far more powerful force in the southern part of Vietnam, particularly among Trotskyist Communists, most of whom would ultimately be killed by the Viet Minh. In the north of Vietnam the French were far more repressive when faced with political agitation, and the north's peasants were too poor to put much faith in Marxist abstractions. The south's major social problem was landlordism, making it a fecund breeding ground for revolutionaries.
Of course, what eventually became South Vietnam had not been in any sense free; it had been run by a series of nasty and horrendously corrupt regimes. But was it a literal dictatorship? One barometer of dictatorship is freedom of the press, freedom of information. In North Vietnam there existed one official newspaper, Nhan Dan (The People), which was (and today is) the Party paper; one television station, which was the Party television station; and one radio station, which was the Party radio station. In South Vietnam more than twenty-seven popular, inconsistently censored newspapers competed for large weekly readerships, and its three television and twenty radio stations “were free,” in Richard Nixon's admittedly qualified words, “to express dissenting opinion within certain bounds.” The one untrammeled dictator South Vietnam was unlucky enough to have, Ngo Dinh Diem, wound up shot to death in the back of a truck.