Vietnam

Just back from Vietnam, wanted to get some thoughts down. Overall, an amazing trip–a bit of adventure, a bit of relaxation, and a lot of food. (You can skip ahead to [our travel photos](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600757880288/)–and [my pictures of strange things](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600763136587/)–if you like).

We flew into Hanoi with little more planned than our first night’s hotel. This was partially because we were too busy to plan before we left, but also an experiment to see how flexibility (even just a week’s worth) could change a trip. Our first day we stumbled into a travel agency (mostly because it looked air-conditioned) to check on plane tickets within Vietnam, realized that almost all the ones we needed were booked, and planned the rest of the trip sitting there with the agent. This turned out well, as she knew Vietnam better than most anyone in the U.S., and picked us some nice stuff to do. Lesson learned–you can easily travel to Vietnam with just a plane ticket there, but you’d better get your act together quickly once you arrive.

Another lesson: Vietnam in July is *hot*. Chalk this one up to our casual trip planning too, but we went at about the hottest time of the year. Hanoi varies from around 55 degrees in the winter to 95 in the summer; Ho Chi Minh City from 78 to 85; we went in the summer. It doesn’t seem to bother the locals, and you do eventually get used to it, but you are always sweating, and as a traveler, always looking for places with air conditioning. Most of the sights we saw in Hanoi were the ones that lay on the shortest route from one air-conditioned cafe to another. Fortunately all the food in Vietnam is inexpensive and good, because we spent a lot of time in restaurants hiding from the sun. Most shops don’t run A/C; those that do got most of our business. Hotels sometimes charge two rates–one for a room with A/C, one for a room without. We didn’t experiment with the latter.

We eventually learned to deal with the incredibly busy and chaotic traffic in the major cities. Especially in Hanoi, the streets are filled with thousands of “motos”, mopeds driven in every direction and every way, usually carrying at least two people each–although we saw up to four, and heard stories of five. This chaos actually works, in a strange way. Each driver is constantly aware of everyone around him, and intersections are managed with a thousand tiny adjustments and collective decisions: who goes first, which side will I pass on, is my direction flowing or stopping. It’s like a really elegant dance once you get used to it, aided by the constant use of the horn.

The horn in Vietnam plays the role that calling out “on your left” or “inside” does in a bike race, letting people know where you are and what you plan to do. Honking strategies vary by driver but use frequency, burst length, and timing to convey with one sound what you’d think would take hundreds. _Lonely Planet_ recommends that Americans not rent cars in Vietnam; I’d concur with that. Driving there is different enough that our skills in cruise control and high-speed freeway driving would get us in trouble fast.

One hand always on the horn:

In Hanoi (and most other cities we visited) you immediately notice the ubiquitous vendors on every street. Every inch of streetfront is covered with shops; every square inch of sidewalk is covered with vendors. This is the city, of course–there are many people outside the city who aren’t entrepreneurs or salespeople. But most inside the city seem to be. Certainly no one is ever just sitting around idly.

Everyone on the street is constantly selling. They might be cooking dinner for themselves and their family, but they have a bucket of fruit, a blanket covered in purses, bottles of water for sale to anyone who might pass by. You see themes in these sellers (those three types are very common), so much so that you wonder if they work off a franchise model, where everyone gets the same products and they go off to compete with each other. They almost never have anything to distinguish themselves from the others selling the same thing–signage and marketing for these sellers consists of writing (or shouting) the types of products you sell, not branding yourself. Where do they all find buyers? Is it really just whoever happens to be in the right place at the right time? Many of these people migrated here from the countryside hoping for a better life. Is this it?

Hanoi is especially interesting, as there are entire streets devoted to a single type of product–padlock streets, sunglasses streets, tin box streets. You walk through the neighborhoods and pass dozens of storefronts that look almost exactly the same; like aisles in a supermarket. I’ve read that the same thing happens with entire towns in China–padlock towns, sunglasses towns, tin box towns.

Stuffed animal street:

The near-universal entrepreneurship and rampant copying were the two things that fascinated me most about Viet business. Millions of people start their own businesses, but many of them copy others exactly. Maybe this is because of a lack of “regular” (aka Western-style industrial) jobs, where people often go to work without thinking explicitly about what to do…but it can’t be entirely. After you see a line of 40 lock shops in a row, you really wonder what these people were thinking when they each started their business next to others that looked the same. In the old empire capital of Hue, there are even three restaurants touting deaf staff, recommendations from “Lonely Planet” and “Lovely Planet” guidebooks, and near-identical names. Who copies a restaurant run by deaf people, hoping to steal some of their market share?

Maybe it’s just my outsider perspective on another work culture. I’d love to hear a native Viet person opine on Western work culture–we’ve got serious issues too.

One thing that came out of all this competition is incredibly low prices. Specifically, labor is astoundingly cheap. Materials still come at a small discount, so plastics and wood can be bargains. But the real deals come in service. Taxi rides in most towns were around $1.50; $3 will get a driver to wait for you half an hour. Our day-long boat trip, staffed by a husband-wife couple, was $25. We had clothes made in Hoi An; the family tailor worked all day and overnight to make us clothes that were 1/3 the price they’d cost here. Our driver from Hue to Hoi An got the wrong instructions and rose at 5:30am to drive and pick us up by 8; we didn’t meet him until 10 (the time we had scheduled); he said “no problem.”

The cheap labor put me in a moral bind–I’m used to being able to buy my way out of the guilt for taking someone’s time; even normal prices for labor in the U.S. will make me feel ok about consuming their day. But in Vietnam I was so clearly underpaying for what I received that I tried to make up for it in other ways–by showing up exactly on time to avoid wasting their time (well, except for that one driver), by tipping well (and against custom) for all service–even that which, as in most restaurants, was not great (perhaps a vestige of the non-tipping culture?).

Another thing that all this entrepreneurship makes you wonder is what impact Communism really has here. It doesn’t seem to be the restriction on free enterprise that we saw in Russia. Specifically, it makes you wonder what we were so worried about in the 60s and 70s. However, the government made many economic policy changes in the mid-1980s, called _Doi moi_ (renovation), so what I saw had gotten better since then. [Wikipedia explains](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_moi):

> Although not simultaneously accompanied by an articulated policy of increased social or political liberty (such as political _glasnost_ accompanied economic _perestroika_ in the Soviet Union), the Communist government has nonetheless tacitly permitted many personal freedoms much greater than in the past (apart from taboo issues such as criticism of the Communist regime) since the beginning of the _Đổi mới_ era.

It is a different culture, though. Traveling in Vietnam made me realize what a strong cult of the individual we have in the U.S. Everything here is focused on individual success, and we value individual persons and lives incredibly highly. The Viet people seem to be much more collective in their mindset; family, city, and especially national concerns are valued more highly than any one person’s. For example, the Viet people worship their ancestors, to the extent of having them buried in rice fields where they work and building temples to them in their backyards. There is a tiny emerging pop star space in their culture, but it hasn’t nearly permeated Vietnam as much as it has the U.S. I couldn’t figure out if the Communist government had created this culture or been created by it. The dominance of Buddhism, and its emphasis on transcendence and denying individual reality, may be fundamental.

I was struck by two things about the war. First, how welcoming the Viet people were to Americans. I was amazed they’d even let me in the country after seeing my U.S. passport. This might also be due to their Buddhist culture, or possibly the great scramble to rebuild afterward kept them too busy to hold a grudge. Either way, we were welcomed wherever we went, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.

Second, how much was destroyed. In Vietnam, a country with truly ancient beginnings, you’d expect to see incredibly-old things. The oldest thing we saw was from the early 1800s, although it looked older than the Roman ruins. Everything there has been destroyed, and often rebuilt only to be destroyed in the next war. Between the old wars with the Chinese, occupation by Japan during WWII, conflict with the French, the American War (as they refer to it), and the other [Indochina Wars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_Wars), most of the really ancient things seem to have been destroyed (in My Son, near Hoi An, there are ruins from the 4th century, though we didn’t see those). The American War did the bulk of the damage, though, with bombs and land mines that still threaten today. We went to the Citadel in Hue, which was crumbling and being rebuilt, and two days later looked at pictures from the war of American troops shooting rockets at the walls of this historic city. Truly nothing was spared in the fighting.

At the Citadel in Hue:

One lesson I learned from the combination of the war history and the collective culture–don’t attack a Buddhist country. Individuals there will not hesitate to sacrifice themselves for a cause that benefits their people as a whole.

I read _The Shadow of the Sun_ while traveling. It’s a collection of stories about Africa from a pioneering Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Many themes from Vietnam echoed with the ones in the book–the exploitation of colonialism, universal entrepreneurship, the searing heat of the noontime sun, people leaving the countryside for cities in search of a better life, the demand for better infrastructure (physical, business, political). When we got back, we watched the movie _Indochine_, about Vietnam in the early 1900s, and saw these themes repeated. Some of them occur in American history as well; is Vietnam just moving through these on its way to the same destination?

I hope not. There’s something special about Vietnam. My memory of its feel is already slipping away, on my second day back in the U.S., but I at least still remember that it is different. I spent a lot of time there thinking about fun ways to blend the cultures in my own life. Imagine a world where you could attend a meeting via satellite videoconference from a boat floating in Halong Bay, then finish the meeting, close your laptop and dive into the South China Sea before a snack of fresh [lychee](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lychee) and [dragon fruit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitaya). Now that’s a cubicle I could get used to…

And now you’ve read about the trip (every word, right?) Ok, then run along and check out [our travel photos](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600757880288/) and [my pictures of strange things](http://flickr.com/photos/bobman/sets/72157600763136587/), if you like.