Vietnam

Oct.23

A man on board said if a small country was wise, they would pick a fight with America, start a war, surrender rather quickly, then make America rebuild their country physically and economically.  Politics and emotions aside, Vietnam would be light years ahead of today if they had followed this advice 35 years ago. We board the oldest, smelliest and poorest air conditioned tour bus yet on this trip. Not a bad bus really, just poor in comparison to all the other busses we have taken. We are docked at a huge, brand new terminal with no other traffic in the middle of nowhere called Phu My, 70 kilometers from Ho Chi Minh City. Our tour guides’ name is something unpronounceable, or Antonio, and we are now calling the city ‘Shygon’ as he pronounces it. Only the government refers to it as Ho Chi Minh. He is hard to understand but says he speaks Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and French in addition to English. I wonder if he is even harder to understand in those languages. He tells us you need to speak English to get any sort of decent job in Vietnam and you need to go to the university to get away from the difficult country life. The exams to get into the university are very difficult, but worth the effort. Everyone wants to leave the country life.

So we start the 70 kilometer ride on a highway into Saigon They tell us it will take up to 2 hours and I can’t figure out why it would take so long. But first let me tell you about my boyfriends and the bus. I have managed to collect lots of friends in the last 29 days. Married couples, older single women, Mr Ugly, my tablemates, even a single woman my age and several older man friends I refer to as my ‘boy friends’. There is ‘Mass boy friend’ who I see at mass and eat breakfast with, there is ‘Boat boy friend” who lives on a boat near Vancouver Island and I can have drinks with after my dinner seating and before his, there is ‘Oh no, it’s Pieter boy friend’ from Amsterdam  who I try to avoid because I can’t understand, and there’s ‘I’m not sure if he’s gay boy friend’ this other couple keeps putting me with, and theirs ‘Nice old guy from Ohio’ boy friend who’s just down-home Midwestern. And somehow I never really seem to cross paths with one when I’m with another, but 4 of them are on this same  tour to Vietnam and all suggest trying to get on the same bus with me. Awkward. Now I have nothing going with any of them except enjoyable company and I would like to keep it that way, so I don’t need egos getting in the way. And none of my woman friends are on this tour to save me. So I meet in the big lounge with everyone as we are required to do before every tour and talk to all of them and luckily one gets put on another bus, but three are on mine. We make the daily mad dash for the busses (these old people can move when they want the best seat on the bus, but I can do stairs faster!)and Ohio guy gets in first and pats the seat next to him and I say “Let’s see if we can all get out own seats”  and run to the back. Pieter’s already there and pats his seat so I repeat about getting our own and say a prayer the bus isn’t full. Boat guy gets on and takes the seat in front as I already filled the seat next to me with all my extra bags. Clever me. Well God is good, the bus is not full and we singles get extra seats. Whew! I manage to be with all of them throughout the day and we are all happy. Still gotta have that drink with Pieter though……

Back to the drive to Shygon.  After leaving the port we get on the highway, a loose term for the road to Shygon, as it is mostly paved, but very bumpy and incredibly slow going and clogged with traffic from cars, busses, trucks and motorbikes by the hundreds. Antonio tells us Shygon has 8 million people and 4 million motorbikes. And I think we see most of them. This so-called highway is populated on both sides by small dirty buildings with awnings made from faded fabric, tin or thatch. They are mostly open in the front with plastic resin chairs in all colors sitting on dirt ground. Many types of cafés or restaurants face the highway which is lined with a ditch on both sides filled with disgusting brown water with garbage and what-not floating in it. Little makeshift boardwalks cross the ditches to get to the highway. There are piles of garbage everywhere and chickens scratch next to oxen next to cows next to cafes next to hair solons next to the radio store next to an ox cart next to a bamboo store next to a home. All is covered in dirt and dust from the highways and ditches. The ditches look to be for a new drainage system that will be employed at some point. Children squat and play in the ditches while women walk by in high heels or traditional straw cone hats. And everywhere you see people with masks driving on the motorbikes. The masks are essential to keep from choking on the dust and fumes. The whole family rides one bike – Dad in front, baby or child in the middle and Mom in the back. I don’t know how anyone lives to old age. Our driver keeps up a constant rhythmic beeping on the horn about every 10 seconds. And open air food vendors are common too, selling all types of uncovered food right next to the ditch and filthy, grungy highway. We would be sick about 45 minutes after eating any of this food. This is our view for almost 2 hours. I find out later all of these are homes with the front converted to businesses. The rich people don’t have to have a business running out of the front of their house. It’s capitalism at work in a Communist country.

Antonio tells us he was born 2 years after the war ended. He lost six relatives in the war. He doesn’t ask if any of us lost relatives in the war. Vietnamese people are a happy people he tells us and want to forget the war and all the bad stuff. Only governments want war, not people. Too true. He has been brought up under Communism and their version of the world. Until 10 years ago his diet consisted of 50% rice and 50% yam tapioca. In the last 10 years they have become more prosperous and he can now eat vegetables and meat. He doesn’t say it is because of a more open economy, but he does later say that Vietnam is not really Communist anymore because you can open a store, be a vendor, earn your own money now. It is interesting to hear what he has been taught in school, what he is supposed to say, and what is obviously happening in his life. Many buildings are being constructed as we near the city, but almost no one is working on them. Very strange. The few beautiful buildings we see are left over from the French colonization. A few striking modern buildings are scattered about, but lots of ugly older buildings from Communist days and ugly 20^th century architecture. It is very hot and humid and our first stop, the History Museum has no air conditioning. It’s another museum with the obligatory statue of Ho Chi Minh. Our next stop is a lacquer factory where the workers don’t have air conditioning either, but the show room does. I buy. Then we go to the Reunification or Independence Palace formerly the Presidential Palace and it is here we were warned the trip might be didfficukt as we get the story of the war from the Communist perspective. It also does not have air conditioning and we are all just wilted and dripping by now.  This was the nerve center of the war for South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese tanks that crashed through the gates in 1975 to signal the end of the war are displayed on the lawn and all the explanations are about the great re-unification of Vietnam under Communism.  We see the communications center in the bunker and photos of the president they immediately shot, all the army commanders also immediately killed, and always the hammer and cycle. It was disturbing because it stirred up bad memories of all those years, all those dead, and I still can’t stand the Communists! What can I say? Truthfully, inside of me is an old, deep anger and sadness at a Godless, repressive, authoritarian government that leaps out whenever I see that emblem or hear its’ mindless propaganda. I surprise myself to feel this so deeply – to feel it in Tian’anmen Square, to feel it here in Vietnam. Who cares how the war got started, who fought it, who won it --- the Communist kept these people eating rice and tapioca for 25 years after the war. They should have called it The Jane Fonda Diet. Just about any free western country could have fixed that sooner.

But on the tit for tat scale we also learned that as a French colony the rice paddies were turned into rubber plantations for European rubber manufacture and as such there wasn’t enough rice to feed the Vietnamese. More people starved from that rice shortage than were killed in all the years of the war. We never really learn, do we?

As for the bathrooms, several men along the highway didn’t seem to need them. They just popped off their bikes, turned their backs and did their business against a wall or fence. How sanitary! Whereas the bathroom we stopped at was very clean. How did we know? The smiling lady lead us in, the men on one side of the wall with the urinals and the women on the other side of the wall with stalls and everything dripping wet: the ceiling the walls, the stalls, the toilets, the sinks , the floors, all because she had very proudly just hosed down the whole room. Quite a solution. And yes, I still manage to forget about my sunglasses hanging on my shirt and have dropped them several more time in bathrooms, but these have all been western style toilets luckily and I have bought 3 more pairs just in case.

Today Vietnam is the second largest producer of rice in the world and second largest exporter of coffee. I didn’t even know they grew coffee. They had small vendors at every stop and I bought cheap souvenirs from Vietnam that were probably actually made in Vietnam, as opposed to China. And the people are happy, and happy to have a chance to move ahead no matter what you call their type of government or politics. And I can say this: look out America, Europe, world - we are being left in the dust by these emerging nations. What is happening in China and Vietnam is beyond belief. We sit in America and argue for years about a highway, a port, a new energy plant. The lawyers, insurance, environmental agencies, civic groups, etc, weigh in on the issue. Nothing gets done. Meanwhile I have sailed into huge, new, modern ports, near cities of the future built now by people who are excited and optimistic and hugely rich compared to their parents. Because their government said we are going to do this and it got done.  And some people figured out how to sell something cheaper than they could buy or make it and the government lets them without a whole bunch of regulations! Those food stands certainly weren’t regulated on the road to Shygon!  If I throw away everything I think I know, all the terms I’ve learned and used in my life and right here, I would say capitalism is alive and well in China and Vietnam, and socialism is alive and well in America. We are just one big snarled up, greedy, political, bureaucracy that is slowly selling out personal responsibility for let-the-government-take-care-of-it mentality; which is called Socialism, responsible for a total lack of creative invention as evidenced by all the great productivity and innovations coming from say, France and Italy. There really is only one solution to this, and history will back me up here, a benevolent dictatorship lead by me. Elections are right around the corner: Peggy for Empress.

One last item: on the ride into Shygon I saw the first statue of Our Lady I have seen since I left the USA. It was large and high on a two story building displayed much the way the statutes of Buddha are displayed and it brought tears to my eyes. I have been church starved since I left home, for even though we have a priest and we have a mass on board, it is in a theater. I miss the quiet beauty of a church and the inspiration an image brings to the soul. So it was with joy and homecoming I beheld the image of Christ’s mother on a building in Vietnam. Some things are the same the world over.