A tale of two Vietnamese cities

By Dewi Anggraeni

HANOI (JP): "You'll like Hanoi," said my friend over the phone from the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. "It is very safe, and charming in a quaint way." Being a full blooded Australian, his criteria for "quaint" were not necessarily the same as mine. I already had in store a number of images, collected throughout two decades of my life in Jakarta. I had images of dilapidated and renovated colonial buildings, of boulevards inherited from the Dutch, of women wearing national dresses pushing bicycles, of improvised markets along the footpaths."

No, to me, Hanoi was nostalgic rather than quaint. The ambience of the city, despite the drive of the open market economy, was still heavily conformist. The presence of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's late revolutionary leader, was ubiquitous.

International tourists, I noticed, were brought to prescribed places, where the memory of Uncle Ho lived on.

One of the "must visits" was Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where the tourists came face to face, in a manner of speaking, with the deceased leader. Nothing less than Ho Chi Minh's admirably preserved body, so the guides said, lay in state in a glass casket, on a marble platform, in a massive equally marbled room kept some five degrees below the natural temperature outside. To maintain the solemnity of the place, uniformed guards would first rally the visitors outside, then march us quietly into the room to view the body for several seconds, then march us out again.

After this visit, the rest came naturally. Across the road was the late leader's old home surrounded by a large, beautifully kept garden, and the pond where he had, in his day, called his gold fish by clapping his hands. His pictures, statues and words on plaques adorned the rooms inside the war museum, women's museum, history museum and other government buildings.

Images of muscularly well-endowed workers and farmers with bright and cheerful faces were reminiscent of Indonesian cities of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

While more recent Korean and Japanese cars occasionally drive through the streets, pushbikes and motorbikes dominated the traffic. Russian cars and trucks still outnumbered other motorized vehicles.

Despite the climate of patriotism and conformism that pervade the city, Hanoi is not devoid of the unique charms of older tradition and culture. One of the best and rare examples of traditional Vietnamese, in what it represents and in physical architecture, is the Temple of Literature. Founded in 1070 by Emperor Ly Thanh Tong, who dedicated it to Confucius, it also became Vietnam's first university, established in 1076 to educate the sons of mandarins.

The French era, too, still has its soul lingering in the city. Apart from the shady boulevards, the Municipal Theater, built in 1911 as a 900-seat opera house, is a grand piece of European architecture. The theater dominates Trang Tien Street, a trendy street well-known for its small art galleries nestled cozily among bookshops and boutiques.

With the impression of regimentation and patriotism still heavy on my mood, arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, positively tossed me.

Instead of solemnity and conformism, Ho Chi Minh City is saturated with vibrancy and individualism. I was also struck by the number of women wearing modern, Western-style clothes in the streets. I found it hard to imagine this place once conforming to Socialism. It must have been a great relief for the citizens when the government finally decided to come out of isolation and embrace a market economy to keep up with the regional growth.

The cosmopolitanism of Ho Chi Minh City permeates every corner, every section of the city. Imported goods are much more available and cheaper than they are in Hanoi. The owner and assistants at the lacquerware shop round the corner do not only speak English, but also display body language that they are used to dealing with foreign customers. The manager of the silk garments shop further up the road speaks French and English with ease. The small art gallery in one of the international class hotels specializes in contemporary arts of the region, as distinct from traditional, and sometimes contemporary, arts of Vietnam, dominant in Hanoi. Even the street stallkeepers do not appear to be awed or mesmerized by foreigners. State enterprises compete unobtrusively with private companies.

"We have noticed remarkably rapid growth," said an Indonesian consular official, who had arrived eighteen months previously. "Back then I could hardly find taxis anywhere. There were only a handful of cars on the roads."

Finding a taxi was no longer a problem, and while pushbikes and motorbikes were still the main means of transport for the population, the number, and the variety, of makes of cars on the road reflected the growing affluence of the city.

I noted with interest, that the nightclub we visited, or "dancing halls" as these places are called here, was owned and run by the local government. Our Indonesian hosts, fluent in Vietnamese, explained that the good-looking young women sitting and hanging around at the back were "dancing girls". Patrons of the dancing hall, who came without their own partners, would be able to hire these girls to keep them company for the evening. They would dance and chat -- obviously if they had a common language -- with these men, but they were not available for taking home. "These girls are all officially registered, with ID numbers," our hosts stressed. I guess it means that the authorities would be able to trace any of the girls reported missing. In principle at least, in this field, Ho Chi Minh City has found the best of both worlds, or is it a compromise between Socialism and the practice of an open market economy?

Different as they are, as far as overseas visitors and expatriates are concerned, both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have one glaring thing in common: They have two prices for everything, one for locals and another (higher, it goes without saying) for foreigners.