Thirty years ago, Vietnam won the "American War" and set out on a path toward its miraculous rebirth. Susan Hack finds a land that has unified not only North and South, but an honored past and a rich future
In his Hanoi atelier, decorated with antique Buddhas and other family heirlooms, the Vietnamese artist Le Quang Ha shows me canvases that recently caused consternation among officials of the ruling Communist party. From a red backdrop, dogs with black eyes and oversized teeth snarl at the viewer; in another painting, a woman performs fellatio on a man with an American flag draped over his head. Artists who once served the state are now free to paint what they want in Vietnam, and much of the contemporary market consists of peaceful rural scenes and graceful girls in flowing white ao dai, subjects that had been banned as frivolous but which now appeal to artists able to explore them for the first time—and to Western buyers with a romanticized view of the country's past. Nudes were another verboten subject, and here Le Quang Ha delights in pushing the boundaries. The forty-two-year-old chain smoker is particularly proud of three panels depicting a hideously obese old man, wearing nothing but red high heels, who squats while alternately grimacing and grinning. "What's it called?" I ask, wondering if the fat-man triptych, reminiscent of Francis Bacon, is supposed to be a commentary on three pervasive themes I've repeatedly come across in Vietnamese society: communism, consumerism, and corruption. Le Quang Ha replies, "I call this piece Taking a Shit." Quite a departure from the state-sanctioned works hanging over in the National Museum of Fine Arts, boasting titles such as The Enemy Burnt Down My Village and When the Shift Is Over Let's Meet and Enter the Best Female Worker Contest.
It's been thirty years since victorious North Vietnam reunited with the defeated South. After the first, ruinous decade of farm collectives and state-controlled enterprise, the government embraced open market principles in 1986, and in the ensuing entrepreneurial whirlwind, Vietnamese art has become faddish in the way that Soviet pieces became collectable after glasnost. Private galleries abound, and artists, some of whom exhibit overseas and sell works for tens of thousands of dollars, are among Vietnam's first wave of "pink" millionaires.
The government, which once shipped its critics off to reeducation camps, still draws the line in some cases when it comes to freedom of expression. Around the time of my visit last June, officials banned stage performances by skinheads and anyone sporting "horror hair" or skimpy costumes. They also warned the judges of state television's version of American Idol to stop making sarcastic, cruel comments about budding pop stars; Simon Cowell-style nastiness, apparently, is not in line with Vietnam's "national identity." Says Le Quang Ha, whose last Hanoi exhibition was shut down by the state's Cultural Committee, "The government still thinks culture is something that can be controlled, and that art should be nice. I fight with myself not to make something beautiful, to show the truth. It gives my painting meaning, to shake people up and change their habits of viewing."
As an American who grew up seeing Vietnam portrayed as the enemy, a morass, and a moral reproach, I'm being jolted by its gritty charm, the quirks and strengths of one of the last five Communist holdouts. In the shadow of great change in China to the north, Vietnam has emerged as one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a booming travel destination. Nearly 300,000 Americans, including many veterans and the children of refugees, are coming here each year for business, relaxation, and reconciliation.
Beyond our shared history, Vietnam seduces with chic new beach resorts, fabulous colonial hotels, adventure travel (kayaking, trekking), adventure cuisine (elixir of beating cobra heart, barbecued dog)—and luxury at affordable prices. In Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City (often HCMC) and now the country's fashion and advertising capital, I bought a dress from leading couturier Minh Hanh for seventy-eight dollars. In the ancient trading town of Hoi An, a UNESCO-preserved architectural jewel, I paid fifty-four dollars to sleep in an antiques-filled suite in a converted Chinese merchant's house (indeed, the same one Michael Caine used as a dressing room while filming The Quiet American). At street markets throughout the country, a bowl of pho, the national breakfast soup, still sets you back just fifty cents. Wishing to learn more about morning glory, nuoc mam (fish sauce), and other indigenous ingredients, I splurged and signed up for a cooking class with Hanoi's most famous female chef. The fifty-dollar fee covered the lesson, a market tour, a five-course lunch at one of the city's best restaurants, and various goodies, including rice paper, dried mushrooms, and a sack of Vietnamese cooking utensils.
Such bargains can be guilt-inducing pleasures, given the gap between rich and poor (the average annual income is $483) and our legacy in Vietnam: bombs, massacres, and the defoliants dropped on the country, which now has one of the world's highest birth defect rates. Vietnamese entrepreneurs have turned what they call the American War into a niche market, leading tours of the former Demilitarized Zone between North and South, charging one dollar per bullet to fire Vietcong AK-47s outside the Cu Chi tunnel complex near HCMC, and creating "Apocalypse Now" bars decorated with kitschy army helmet lamps and bomber nose cones. Teams of disabled children hawk embroidered silk paintings at rest stops on the new highway between Hanoi and Halong Bay, where Agent Orange once rained down. But when it comes to one-on-one connections, the war generation is remarkably friendly and dignified. "There is no hate, only sadness, because we know both sides suffered," a fifty-nine-year-old former North Vietnamese Army captain told me on a hillside near the Chinese border. "What do I want from Americans? Only this." And he clasped my hand.
In the current age of terror, Vietnam, ironically, is one of the safest places a traveler can go, the safest in all of Asia, according to Hong Kong's Political and Economic Risk Consultancy. Tourism grew 27.9 percent last year, to some 2.9 million foreign arrivals, with the biggest group coming from China. December's tsunami left Vietnam unscathed, and even more visitors are expected as travelers to Asia switch itineraries to avoid Thailand and other hard-hit destinations.
Yet the country still feels deserted and unsullied compared with Thailand, which gets eleven million visitors annually. Prostitution exists, but there is a national campaign against "social evils" (a term that includes Thai-style full-body massages). The Communist party's two million-plus members are expected to provide a model of "correct behavior," though in an updated style from Ho Chi Minh, who lived simply and wore shorts and sandals to demonstrate his allegiance to farmers. "If I had a third child, I could get in trouble," a cadre from Danang explained to me in his favorite beer garden, the Weeping Pillow, "and I may not go to karaoke bars because most of them are not just for singing."
Meanwhile, developers are rushing to fill an infrastructure vacuum with luxury hotels, many on the 2,140-mile coastline. As of last June, at least seven new properties—including an ultraposh Amanresort—were rising on the beach outside Hoi An; the Six Senses spa company was completing villas with individual wine cellars at their Evason Hideaway, on an isolated bay outside Nha Trang; bulldozers were paving a 775-mile portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a tourist corridor; and contractors were converting the old Russian airfield at Cam Ranh Bay into an international airport. The pace makes one wonder how far Vietnam's soul—not to mention its natural environment—is being stretched between the yin-and-yang pull of communism and state-controlled capitalism, between traditional values and the temptations of the global market. Over a seafood lunch on the famous China Beach, I was briefed on a new Wonder Park resort with two hundred rooms and a spa with tai chi classes and cosmetic surgery. "It's for caring about your inner and outer beauty," a Western developer swooned. "You can be just as beautiful as you want."
I start my three-week trip in Hanoi, a nine-century-old city surrounded by farms on the Red River floodplain and still inundated each day with women in conical hats balancing loads of lychees and lotus blossoms. Motorbikes have replaced bicycles and rickshaws, but the capital retains antique poetic fixtures such as the Street of Silk, the Street of Combs, and the Temple of Literature. Yellow villas shaded by plane trees survive in the French colonial quarter, while on the outskirts, new millionaires' mansions blend pagoda features and mansard roofs. "The French and Vietnamese are both aesthetic people," says my guide, explaining the continued cultural fusion, the affinity for baguettes, and the recent arrival of (genuine) Louis Vuitton. So that I'm not tempted to wallow in Indochine nostalgia, he takes me to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison (near a new Hilton hotel, no less), where exhibits of American Air Force POWs are outnumbered by the tributes to its earlier inhabitants—Vietnamese political prisoners locked in tiger cages by French colonial administrators—and where another French import, the guillotine, has a prominent display.
The Metropole Hotel, Graham Greene's home while he wrote portions of his 1955 novel, The Quiet American, about a fatally idealistic American spy, has been restored by a French hotel chain. It still has hardwood floors, ceiling fans, and a colonial ambience—and now a new generation of agents provocateurs. On my first morning, the breakfast room is dominated by the conversation of a Texan family with six kids for whom the world is an adventure theme park. "We took the children white-water rafting last year in Fiji, and this year we wanted to try kayaking Halong Bay," I overhear Mrs. Texas tell her guide.
After breakfast, I walk to Hoan Kiem Lake, next to Hanoi's old market district, hoping for a glimpse of a giant Hoan Kiem turtle, an elusive creature with a pointed snout and a flat green shell as big as a car hood. According to local legend, the fifteenth-century king Le Loi used a magic sword to free Vietnam from Chinese occupation, and when he no longer needed it, a giant turtle rose from the lake to carry the weapon back to its divine owners. The turtle was assumed to be a myth rather than an actual species until 1968, when a 550-pound individual emerged from the water, only to be stuffed and put on display by the Communist authorities.
Instead of turtle watchers, I find hundreds of early-morning exercise enthusiasts gathered along the shore: joggers, youths playing badminton, supple old ladies practicing tai chi, and men and women performing another slow-motion martial art involving red ribbons and curved swords. Crossing a footbridge to a small island temple, I come upon the 1968 turtle, preserved under layers of shellac and in much worse condition than another national symbol, the embalmed, gray-bearded corpse of Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969 and lies in a glass coffin in a Soviet-style mausoleum across town. Nearby, under some trees, an ancient woman leads an outdoor aerobics class, wearing a sky-blue leotard and matching bandanna, a Vietnamese tribute to Hanoi Jane.
I sip buttery Vietnamese iced coffee in the Café Lam, an artists' hangout, before wading into the motorbike-choked old market. Thirty-six streets named after guilds—Bronze Street, Copper Street, and the like—are full of mom-and-pop shops: pho stands and tombstone carvers alongside storefronts selling pirated DVDs and inflatable Winnie the Poohs. Before 1986, private enterprise and many foreign imports were forbidden; now a tide of merchandise has arrived, and the rejuvenated merchants' quarter has resumed a role begun in the thirteenth century. Few Vietnamese are wealthy enough to own a car, but I divine consumer aspirations in the ghost-money shops selling paper offerings for ancestor worship. Along with traditional gifts of rice wine, tea, and lotus-seed cookies, people bring to temples paper versions of Adidas sneakers, hundred-dollar bills, motorbikes, tuxedos, cars, and even air conditioners. They ship these "goods" to family members in the hereafter by lighting joss sticks, a spiritual Federal Express.
On Hang Than Street, I meet Suzanne Lecht, an American designer who relocated here from Hong Kong after she was widowed and who subsequently founded one of the first private art galleries in Hanoi. Wearing a raw silk sheath from a local tailor, she shows me around her nineteenth-century "tube-house," explaining that businesses were once taxed according to how much street space they occupied, leading to a tradition of long, narrow architecture. Lecht felt an immediate connection with the ancient city and its war-torn history, and she has made a career out of introducing Vietnamese art to American collectors—"my tiny drop in the ocean of reconciliation." Real estate prices have skyrocketed since Lecht arrived, and families living in minuscule quarters in the market district have traded up to bigger modern houses on the outskirts, homes built on land reclaimed from rice paddies and peach blossom farms. While HCMC benefits most from new investment, artsy foreigners are following Lecht's lead to Hanoi. On Nha Trang Street, I wander around a miniature version of New York's SoHo: chic dress shops, housewares stores, and wine bars patronized by a growing colony of expats and Vietnamese yuppies.
An eclectic mix of past and present, Hanoi is both a microcosm and an anomaly, showcasing the new forces sweeping a nation where most of the population is still rural. I travel by overnight train into the northern mountains and an austere world of pine, bamboo, and rice, blanketed in mists, with distant waterfalls gleaming white against the green. In valleys outside the town of Sapa (founded as a summer retreat by French colonialists), Black Hmong, Flower Hmong, Red Dao, and other minorities live in scattered hamlets linked by streams and water buffalo paths. Named after the color or pattern of their traditional dress, the hill tribes arrived from China two centuries ago and have always resisted assimilation and intermarriage. Because French and American military spies once courted mountain people, the regime in Hanoi remains suspicious of contact between foreigners and members of the country's fifty-four ethnic minorities, and has only recently begun a program of road building and electrification to enhance tourism in such regions.
I sign up for a visit to Ta Phin, a Red Dao village. Getting out of the guide's minivan, I walk along a newly paved sidewalk from the village entrance up to a stalactite-filled cave. The path seems like the yellow brick road to Oz, completely out of sync with the landscape and the local thatched-wood architecture, but it's convenient for toddlers, those who wear heels instead of hiking boots, and the friendly crowd of apple-cheeked women with shaved eyebrows and silver-tasseled red turbans who follow our group. The guide points out features of a self-sufficient eco-lifestyle: barrels where handwoven hemp soaks in indigo, and stream-powered rice threshers whose thumps echo up the hills. The scene at the end of our visit is unsettling. The smiley women become desperate, trying to sell us silver jewelry, embroidered baby caps—things that seem more like family heirlooms than one-dollar trinkets. One strokes my arm and chides in English, "You took a picture of my baby, so now you must buy from me." I get the impression that instead of harvesting rice, they're harvesting tourists, blurring the lines between bargaining and begging, hospitality and exploitation.
The next day, I travel by four-by-four to three villages beyond Sapa's tourist orbit. I have an appointment with Nguyen Thien Hung, head of the Thanh Kim Cultural Committee, who is mediating a dispute between four thousand minority people and a Dutch company building an eco-lodge on their ancestral lands. Expecting an apparatchik, I find a thoughtful landscape architect who prefers the outdoors to city life and appreciates the conundrum facing tourists and local citizens. "We need to find a better system for our people and foreigners to interact," he admits as we sit on a seat salvaged from a Russian jeep, looking out at the forested peaks where fifty years ago tigers roamed. He tells me that tourism provides income for farmers in winter, an entertaining diversion from sitting in a smoky longhouse, and a reason in the age of imports to keep on weaving and embroidering traditional dress. But trekkers who sign up for homestays wind up compromising the authentic experience. "The trekkers ask to hear traditional music, as if the villagers were performers," Hung complains. "They give children candy or a pen, and children start begging all foreigners for these things." Without a common language, the main shared activity is getting drunk on rice wine.
Travel is supposed to chip away at cultural barriers, but Hung believes that ecotourism lodges serve as a necessary quarantine for foreigners. "We can't avoid tourism, but we can try to keep our people living normal lives, raising animals and farming. Of course there should be change, and life should become more convenient. And we realize that to preserve minority culture only for tourists is a dangerous thing."
The Karst geology of Halong Bay looks like an ancient scroll painting, but the jade sea and labyrinth of three thousand limestone islands and outcrops shaped like dragons and mandarins turn out to be anything but pristine. In 1994, UNESCO declared Halong Bay a World Heritage Site, and it now draws more than three million foreign and domestic visitors annually. Chinese developers are building a massive resort on Tuan Chau Island, altering the skyline with a three-thousand-seat restaurant, a theater in the shape of the Sydney Opera House, and a planned island-to-island cable car network. Coal mines, meanwhile, have dumped more than 900 million tons of industrial waste into the bay, a thousand tourist boats discharge more than 4,400 pounds of machine oil a day, and a Japanese consortium has proposed building a mega-port just a few miles from the core of the World Heritage Site.
Hoping to see pelicans, dolphins, and a rare cave-dwelling primate, the golden-headed langur, I board a huge wooden junk decorated with carved dragons. Instead, we follow a pack of tourist boats and a trail of motor oil, plastic bags, and brown scum to a sewerless floating fishing village where some intrepid travelers are buying shellfish for supper. A few hours later, our fleet arrives at the Cave of Marvels, where groups of Asian tourists clamber amid stalactites despite signs asking them to stick to the path. The final stop is a small beach where Ho Chi Minh lunched with a Russian cosmonaut in 1962, and where the moored junks finally raise their vestigial red bat-wing sails for a photo op. The beach is filthy and crowded. The only sign of wildlife is a penguin-shaped bin into which a lone government employee is dumping trash.
Who is to blame for this disappointing cruise, which I'd looked forward to as a highlight of my trip? I'd booked my two-day voyage through an American travel agent with many years' experience in Vietnam who had recommended a cruise company that had recently hosted the king of Sweden. But because none of the five Western passengers on board my junk wanted to book the entire vessel for a custom program, we were all stuck sharing a locally imposed tour. The young crew, though friendly, spoke hardly a word of French or English, and the three guides sent to accompany us from Hanoi and Saigon knew little about natural history, apart from the fact that none had seen a dolphin or a pelican in the last five years. Given that Halong Bay has more than three thousand islands, surely there are plenty of deserted beaches and opportunities to veer from the beaten path. It seems the bay is suffering from a bad case of World Heritage-itis: Measures intended to safeguard it are creating new sources of pollution and human pressure.
I roll into Hoi An, another World Heritage Site, on the back of a motorbike whose driver is simultaneously clutching my suitcase and assorted parcels. Cars are forbidden in the heart of this ancient river port, which traded silk for ceramics from medieval Cairo and sheltered Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch traders for four hundred years.
UNESCO and the Japanese government have funded the preservation of the many surviving eighteenth-century wooden merchants' houses, guild headquarters, and pagodas, in which elements of the Vietnamese Imperial City of Hué mingle with the architecture of old Kyoto. A few descendants of Chinese traders still inhabit their ancestral homes, but most either fled in 1975, after the Socialist victory, or sold out recently to businesses marketing silk lanterns, "antique" ceramics, and tailored silk suits to tourists. With their carved screens, pillars, and hidden courtyards, Hoi An houses are lovely to look at but difficult to live in, since the local Monument Conservation Center forbids modern alterations. "I get extremely sad when someone I know sells his home to a business, because in Vietnam your house is also your ancestors' temple," says Tran Thu Loi, the sixty-year-old granddaughter of a Cantonese betel nut trader, as she rolls herbs and translucent gray shrimp inside rice paper in her garden across the street from the Be Happy, Don't Worry Art Gallery. Her unmarried sister Ngo lights incense on the family altar, a found object as beautiful as any museum piece, decorated with incense holders, Buddhas, sepia photos, and old pastel portraits.
Let the past stay in the past," the Vietnamese like to tell Americans. But across Central Vietnam, I can't help noticing scars on the land. South of Danang, at the Cham ruins of My Son—Vietnam's counterpart to Angkor—Polish archaeologists are restoring eleventh-century temples amid a sea of American artillery craters. On the red-earth remnants of the U.S. airstrip at Khe Sanh, where the North Vietnamese bombarded our troops, a man tries to sell me a crushed Army Ranger badge and old dog tags listing names, ranks, religions, and blood types. In the forests of the central highlands, a joint U.S.-Vietnamese task force is still searching for the remains of the last 1,407 American MIAs. On the road back to Hué, we pass village war memorials and members of the new American Mine Assistance Group, which is clearing old ordnance from coffee farms and tapioca fields.
My local guide seems disappointed to detect no extreme emotion on my face when we stand on the bridge that spans the small brown river that separated the red-flagged North from the yellow-flagged South in the DMZ. I tell him that I once wore an MIA bracelet to honor a U.S. soldier who eventually returned home, but that I remember the war as mainly a series of newscasts. Old enough to have lived through the war himself, he takes me to a shop in Hué that sells folk music from the 1960s, and translates songs about night artillery, grieving mothers, corpses floating in the Perfume River. Hué was the scene of ferocious fighting during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
The melancholy Nguyen emperors chose Hué as their capital in the early nineteenth century because of its propitious location between two islands in the Perfume River (named for the flowers that grew along the banks), with distant mountains serving as additional screens against bad influence. Bao Dai, Vietnam's last emperor, died in French exile in 1997. A few descendants of the royal family lead ordinary lives outside the walls of the Forbidden Purple City, and on the north bank of the Perfume River I meet the granddaughter of a mandarin who married the niece of the ninth Nguyen king; she is sweeping the tomb of this princess, who died in 1952 and is buried in the family's frangipani-covered backyard.
"Do Americans have headstones in their gardens?" she asks me. "How does the size compare?"
In part to contain the growth of formal religions, the officially atheist Communist party tolerates the traditional balm for death—ancestor worship. More than all the war cemeteries girding Vietnam's highways, the bird feeder-sized temples outside so many houses seem especially poignant. Their very profusion in Hué and other central cities underscores claims of Agent Orange's disastrous effects. Believed to provide solace to miscarried fetuses and people who die far from home, unmourned, they also commemorate the 300,000 troops and civilians from both North and South who remain MIA, unaccounted for to this day.
Dalat, on the southern fringe of the central coffee-growing region, is Vietnam's honeymoon capital, a city of hope and romance. Lovers cuddle on motorbikes along moonlit mountain switchbacks; during the day, they flock to the Valley of Love (the "Valley of Shops," locals quip) for swan boat or pony rides in an immaculately landscaped park.
I fall in love with Dalat because it's full of mavericks: boys from the Lat tribe who reckon their age in buffalo life spans and wear homemade American-style cowboy boots, and fifty-year-old war veterans who sell motorbike tours to foreigners. My new guide is Chau "Ted" Thiet, a former South Vietnamese Army lieutenant who spent three years in a reeducation camp; he has managed to overcome the suspicion that every English speaker works for the CIA. He gives me a business card advertising himself as the "Dalat Easy Rider" and introduces me to the Moscow-educated daughter of Ho Chi Minh's successor, Dang Viet Nga, who presides over a Gaudí-esque hippie hotel. Down the street lives Thay Vien Thuc, an artist/monk who spends most of his days in a Buddhist temple, painting self-portraits and caring for his five vegetarian dogs. I find him posing for a photo with three British backpackers who read about him in Lonely Planet. "Sometimes I lock the gate and pretend I'm not here," he says with a sigh, resigned to another interruption. "The American ambassador came to see me. He signed—what was it?—guest book number thirty-five."
Ho Chi Minh City—which everyone still calls Saigon—has become the heart of Vietnam's burgeoning fashion industry and the source of its most innovative cuisine. Around the corner from my hotel is the shop of a fashion revolutionary, thirty-two-year-old Vo Viet Chung, who is trying to resuscitate the black silk worn by peasants and Viet Cong guerrillas. Inspired by old photos of his mother and grandmother, Chung located the villages in the Cu Chi district that once produced the fabric, rebuilt traditional looms, and talked to the local people to rediscover the plants used for dyes. Adding a few tricks of his own, he has produced an all-natural fabric with a high-tech feel, as light as silk but with the buttery texture of fine Italian leather.
"I don't know whether I will become a millionaire or go bankrupt, because most Vietnamese women still think black silk is for farmers, but I am devoting my life to following my way," he tells me. Cu Chi, the site of an extensive underground tunnel network used by North Vietnamese troops infiltrating Saigon, was one of the most heavily bombed regions in military history. Born in 1975, Chung is a Cu Chi war baby who escaped injury when his mother, pregnant with him, survived an artillery barrage that killed his sister. The fabric's survival is a miracle in more ways than one.
I'm staying at the Rex Hotel, the wartime U.S. Information Service and journalist hangout. The pink rooftop bar has grand views and B-52 cocktails, but it feels a little retro, so I ask this designer of the moment for some nightlife tips. He's sporting a gel-spiked coif and a cutoff T-shirt, but it turns out that hip restaurants and nightclubs are not his scene. "I spend my free time talking to friends, going to the beach, reading books, listening to music, or visiting my mother in her village," he says. Hard-line officials might shudder at his horror hair and the skimpy black silk hot pants he sends down fashion catwalks. But Uncle Ho himself would surely approve of Vo Viet Chung's priorities, his grip on Vietnam's strong roots, and the boldness of his walk into the future.
Published April 2005
Sourse: Condé Nast Traveler
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler
Concierge.com © 2008 CondéNet Inc.