April 10 2012

Back from my trip to Viet Nam. I’ll try to get down a few things I think about the last three weeks and then, in subsequent posts, get back to threads left unsecured last month. I wish I had some already-synthesized summing up to put here but I don’t; I have observations but I am really not sure they add up to much.

Let me start by saying that the confrontation between my war-time activities and present day Vietnamese reality never materialized. That is to say, I felt no deep emotional conflict over having bombed that physically lovely country so many years ago and then returning only to snap photos and soak in the exotic. At the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City I was repelled by the evidence of all of our destructive history there, but the difference between what I felt there from what I have felt at moments over the past 45 years was one of degree, not of kind. Sometime later I want to try to talk about the “American war” as the Vietnamese call it, but not now. I will only say that the Vietnamese seem an extraordinarily resilient people and their narrative of that war characterizes it as but one episode in a long, long war of national liberation beginning in the 19^th century.

Generally, Viet Nam is a young country demographically. Most people are younger than 40 and the rest seem to be old. I’m not sure, though, that the last part of that observation is accurate. At first glance, people on the street seem either young and handsome/lovely or old and worn; where, one wonders, is everyone over 30 and younger than 65? I’m not sure but there are a couple of possibilities, each premised on the assumption that they are present but obscured.

One, which accounts for some of the phenomenon, presented itself just a few days before we left for home. We were “trekking” near Viet Nam’s border with China, in the northwest of the country, near a town called Sapa, and were joined from time to time by Hmong women going to or from market, fields, or bamboo stands. Often they wanted to sell us something but in every case they would casually fall into step along side us and walk along for a mile or so before veering off in one direction or another. My wife chatted with one woman who had some English (most Hmong women [we saw few Hmong men and they never spoke] knew the phrases “Where are you from?” and “Will you buy something from me?”) and said later to our trek guide that Hmong life must be very hard. “Why,” he asked, “do you say that?” Her response was that in conversation she discovered that the woman she had assumed to be in her seventies, as is my wife, was really only fifty. What other than a hard life could age one so? The trek guide’s answer was one word, “opium.” Many Hmong women smoke opium their entire lives and one consequence is the haggard, worn look. Opium production is illegal in Viet Nam but little energy is spent enforcing those laws against local grower/users. This is the case even in the region just to the west of Sapa where Viet Nam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos come together in the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s two major sources of illicit opium, the other being the “Golden Crescent” with Afghanistan at its center.

The other possibility is the one put forward by my wife: life in Viet Nam is harsh. I think this is particularly true in the major cities. Actually, life among the Hmong and the other ethnic minorities of the northwest seems hard but not harsh. Life in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, however, looks harsh to me. Those two cities remind me of New York City in the 70s and early 80s and of Managua, Nicaragua, in the mid-80s. Life there seems to be lived in the streets, endlessly engaged in curb-side capitalism; on corners and sidewalks men make keys, repair shoes, cut hair, practice every variant of bricolage. My favorite was the man who sat on a small stool on a corner of a busy intersection with a tank of compressed air and a hose, waiting for the moto (motorbike, of which there are seemingly five times as many than autos) with a flat tire to struggle up to him. Both times I saw him, on successive days, he had no business but he was stoically (?) waiting for fortune while entertaining his young grandson (?). Interestingly enough, given the rarity of cars on side streets in Hanoi, there were a number of tire repair store fronts where punctures and the like could be fixed on the sidewalk. Folks reading this in Brooklyn will remember 4^th Avenue in the late 70s and the “Flats Fixed” storefronts along that big street between Atlantic Avenue and Sunset Park. Just like that! Men sell services on the street in Hanoi and HCMC; women sell goods. Because the sidewalks are filled with men at their tinkers’ trades and with hundreds of small “pop-ups” for eating, seated on low plastic stools at low plastic tables while the food simmers over charcoal fires in ingenious small burners, women walk in the streets carrying baskets full of pineapples, onions, dried fish, bread, pastries, flowers, mushrooms, herbs, caps, scarves, t-shirts, flags…I can’t do justice to the number of women or the variety (and redundancy) of their goods. The only men I ever saw selling a “thing” as contrasted to a “service” were selling books, carried in the crook of an arm in a small pasteboard box.

I don’t know how this life feels; it looks harsh because it seems the effort to make it work is unremitting. At the Women’s Museum in Hanoi we saw a short film in which women street vendors described their lives: isolation from families, incredibly long hours, poor health, little profit. None of these women, and none of the men at curbside, was young. About half-way through the trip a text came to mind that made it all a bit more familiar to me. In 1941, in an essay on comic postcards, George Orwell noted that in the Britain of such postcards the population was either quite young or quite old. This was not, he argued, just license on the part of such postcard auteurs as Donald McGill, but rather a reflection of a desperate reality of English life. In the England of the 20s and the 30s, Orwell said, there was no such thing as adulthood. There was youth and then there was old age; life in England erased anything like the possibility that the impulse to love and procreate would lead to domestic adulthood, family, hearth, comfort. Reaching one’s majority meant the onset of toil and deprivation in a heartless industrial landscape where youth served until suddenly overtaken by age. That is how urban Viet Nam looks; there are many many beautiful young women and energetic young men and there are many many haggard, thin, worn elders. There are very few men and women of simple mature adulthood.

Oh, and there are many many young children, all astonishingly lovely. They will soon be joined by a considerable number of younger siblings if the presence of pregnant women on every block is any indication. Just why there are so many pregnant young women in Viet Nam at this moment is a matter for next time.