My travelling companion, a most unquiet American, was beginning to feel picked
on.
You would think that she had become accustomed to it by now, having weathered
the anti-Yank onslaught of taxi drivers, shopkeepers, anyone really in
Europe who on hearing her accent would launch into a diatribe about those
arrogant, swaggering, ignorant folks across the pond who had the most stupid
president in history and had landed us in all this unwanted aggro.
But in Vietnam, it was a whole new level of awkwardness for, perhaps, the
obvious reasons, and all the more disorientating because of the friendliness
of the people.
The different perspective on recent history makes an immediate impression from
the moment that you hear what we have always known as the Vietnam War
referred to as the American War.
Wandering around the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, a popular setting for wedding
photos (six different couples when we were there), the museum’s guide points
to a photograph of a local hero.
It was the first stop of our trip and we hadn’t yet adjusted our mindset, so
we asked what act of heroism the man had carried out to receive this
commendation and were told, with an earnestly helpful expression, that he
had come very close to succeeding in blowing up Robert McNamara, the former
US Secretary of Defence and architect of the Vietnam (or American) War. The
young woman nodded her head and smiled and we smiled and nodded back.
Since the early Nineties when Vietnam first opened up to tourism, the
promotional emphasis has been on Vietnam as a country, not a war. And, boy,
from what we went on to see, what a country it is.
I was particularly struck, further on in our trip, when we escaped from the
already slightly tarnished strip of Nha Trang’s extended beaches in south
central Vietnam, by the beautiful drama of the sweeping cliff-drive views –
an implausibly stunning amalgam of Byron Bay, Big Sur and the Côte d’Azur.
Hotels and restaurants have been privatised and various international
companies are now marketing Vietnam as an exclusive holiday destination. The
problem is that the staff simply don’t have the necessary language skills
yet to be able to provide the seamless service they would like. But they are
so very willing and sweet and anxious to please that even I, with my
princessy tendencies, felt rather ashamed of my spoilt Western ways.
The smiling warmth of the people makes Vietnam an extremely appealing place to
visit and is all the more striking because of all the horrors its people
have had to endure – from the Chinese, the Japanese, the French and, of
course, the Americans.
I re-read Graham Greene’s story of The Times correspondent’s betrayal of a
quiet American agent provocateur and re-read the story of his Fifties
Vietnam war (the French War?) in my hotel room, the palm trees waving in the
tropical downpour, down the road from where he wrote his book in the
Continental in what was called rue Catinat.
I was struck again by the power of his recoil from the repugnance of war – the
description of the canal stuffed with bodies over which their boat got stuck
into the human clay. The horrid sight of a mother and her boy: “He was about
six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony
knees drawn up.… He was wearing a holy medal around his neck, and I said to
myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his
body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’”
Dalat during French colonial times had more telephone line than anywhere else in Vietnam, it was known as the city of gossip. Vietnamese maids and staff chattering about their French masters and what (or who) they were into now. I can't think of anything more eccentric and exciting to board a boat in Europe to escape a world war, and ending up drinking wine and playing tennis in a hill station in Indochina. The privilege of empire!
Jon Hoff, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam