The new world
IT’S not every country where the solemn first duty of every visitor is to visit a mausoleum. But then, Vietnam is no ordinary country.
Having spent a few weeks in this beautiful, beguiling nation recently, one comes away with profound admiration for the people — but also many questions.
The mausoleum in question is of course for Ho Chi Minh. Uncle Ho, as he is affectionately referred to by the Vietnamese people, died in 1969 yet his mortal remains are kept in pristine nick.
To visit Uncle Ho, you must walk “two-by-two with no talking, hat wearing, photography nor hands in pockets”.
Such rules were enforced by the smart white-uniformed, gold braid bedecked presidential guardsmen who, with rifles ready, seemed to totally lack the quirky Vietnamese sense of humour we came to experience.
When Uncle Ho finally became president of Vietnam in 1954, true to his principles he eschewed the very impressive previous French governor’s residence for more modest digs in the extensive gardens.
Uncle Ho is still revered. Before the beginning of each National Government Assembly, all members visit him and pay their respects.
Visiting Vietnam is very much like visiting India, about which someone once wrote: “Be there a week and one can write a book, be there a month and one can write a paragraph, be there a year and one can write a sentence.”
Of course, after such a short time in a country, one risks becoming an instant expert, observing life and listening keenly to the local guides’ take on the joys and failings of a centralised government.
The daily English-language paper focuses on the joys, but such media is of course officially sanctioned.
Australia now has an intrinsic link with Vietnam, forged through the “American War”, which the locals are always at pains to name it.
On such a short visit, one can only begin to appreciate the extreme difficulty, terror and tragedy of that war for all involved or touched in some way.
Many young Australians paid a huge price in this conflict, and too many still suffer the effects.
For a decade or so after the war, everything was centralised, pooled and equally shared — everything.
But, like a scene from in Orwell’s Animal Farm, life for some was more equal than it was for others. One guide described it this way: “Communism may have been good at winning wars but not at running an economy.”
Life at that time for the average Vietnamese was extremely tough. Australia received — and welcomed — many boats of people escaping Vietnam during that time, among them Anh Do and his family.
Fast forward to 2018 and the burgeoning Vietnam tourism industry is on steroids, with visitor numbers up 23 per cent last year.
Like many other “discovered” destinations around the world, mass tourism has many positives — particularly employment for locals — but places huge burdens on infrastructure, the environment and the very nature of community.
My humble guess is that Uncle Ho did not spend years fighting imperialist forces in order to build miles of holiday resorts to satisfy legions of us Aussie, Russian, Chinese, Korean, US and European holiday-makers.
This is just one of the many anomalies one encounters the longer one stays in this captivating country.
The juxtaposition between communism and capitalism is intriguing — they do sit alongside each other — but uneasily.
Internal reforms enacted in the mid-1980s sowed the seeds of what is modern Vietnam today.
Yet, the vast majority of people we encountered were living what — on the face of it at least — was a tough life, meagre housing, with daily struggles to make even the most basic of ends meet. Subsistence really.
For an ostensibly communist government, whose focus and priority theoretically should be on supporting workers and their families, such philosophies seem largely abandoned.
While efforts to improve services are under way, the consistent message of the series of local guides we met across the country was that there is little evidence of a “social contract”.
So, I wonder what Uncle Ho would think of modern Vietnam.
At best, surprised by many aspects of Vietnamese life in its 21st century iteration; and at worst utterly dismayed by others.