Hanoi

On the first morning after we arrived in Hanoi, our professor Roy Grow gathered us together in a meeting room on the top floor of our hotel. The room had large windows, from which we could see much of the city and hear the constant sound of honking motor bikes below. In many ways Hanoi has a European feel to it, the effect of French colonization. Much of the architecture is in the French style (lots of columns and cute little balconies), and at meal time the rice and egg rolls are often accompanied by a side of pommes frites. But the French influence is just one layer covering the dense and complicated culture of Vietnam. Professor Grow waved his hand over the city as he told us that our purpose in Vietnam was to scratch beneath the surface, to look beyond the moldy concrete and and the French balconies and try to understand the more complex reality of Vietnam.

We as Americans are part of that reality. "Remember," Professor Grow said as he gestured to the city in front of us, "everything you now see was once leveled to the ground. We did that." He pointed towards the east, towards the river: "That bridge: the Americans destroyed it sixteen times." He told us that virtually everyone we come in contact with will have had someone in their family who was killed during the War. "Remember this," he said.

Roy himself was a soldier here. He says he doesn't travel to the South very often because the memories there are too vivid. But even for those who didn't go off to fight, the memory of the War will never go away. My parents grew up with the War. My father lived in Madison, Wisconsin--the heart of the "War at Home," where some of the most heated protests occurred. My mother wrote in a recent e-mail that she was embarrassed to admit that the Vietnam War was covered so often on TV that she got bored of it. For everyone in my parents' generation, memories of the War go hand in hand with memories of childhood.

But the irony is that no one in my generation remembers Vietnam. It was such a central part of the baby boomer's experience, but for me and my generation Vietnam was that war that came right near the end of the year in our American History class, right as the summer was approaching and nobody was paying any attention anymore. It was an afterthought. It was only when I was actually walking through customs to enter Vietnam that I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about this country. I found Roy as we were picking up our bags off the luggage carousel and tugged on his arm. "So, there was some kind of a North-South thing in Vietnam, right?"

Roy stared at me dumbly. I am grateful that he didn't slap me upside the head. Now that I've had a week to learn infinitely more about Vietnamese history, I'm baffled that I could have ever been unsure about such a simplistic question. But suffice it to say, to tell someone of my generation to "Remember Vietnam" is to tell us to remember something we did not experience and which is rarely talked about anymore.

Happily for America, the same phenomenon is pretty much true of Vietnamese people my age. If you walk around and ask people here, "Aren't you still angry at us for what we did to you?" most people will look at you blankly and tell you that it was in the past, and that they don't think about it much any more. Since the mid 90's Vietnam and the U.S. have had a friendly formal diplomatic relationship. Coming here as a tourist, especially with plenty of Dong to spend, I have been treated most warmly. The other day we visited Hanoi's Foreign Trade University where I made new friend named Phoung with whom I've traded e-mail addresses. In the future I expect that the relationship between our countries will only grow stronger.

In the meantime, Vietnam has some important questions it must confront for itself. For Vietnam, the War Against the American Imperialists was really just an extension of the wars against the Japanese and the French Imperialists which took up most of the 20th century. Vietnam saw itself as constantly fighting for liberation from foreign oppression. When the French had come during the 19th century they seized control of the farmland and expected the people to whom the land had once belonged to continue to work it. In the span of 30 short years the French had completely reconfigured a system of land ownership that had been in place for millennia. A hundred years later when America got involved the Vietnamese did not see it as an ideological struggle between communism and libertarianism: they saw just another big thug playing the same old colonial game. Most people worry a lot less about ideologies than they worry about whether they can depend on their right to the land on which they are going to grow their daily food.

So like I say, the American war was just an extension of the wars against foreign influence that came before. But the question that confronts Vietnam today is this: did they really win the war? Vietnam may call itself a socialist republic, but in many ways its markets are wide open. Vietnam plays an integral part in the world economy, and the nation depends on outsiders--on foreign investment and consumption--to fuel its growth. So who is to say that Vietnam is truly liberated from foreign powers? At the same time, who would dare do anything differently, especially given the phenomenal growth Vietnam has experienced in recent years? It turns out that this debate is being held continuously throughout the government apparatus and amongst the different bureaucracies. There are many important government officials with strong opinions on the issue, and they voice them loudly.

"How open should we be?" This is a debate that China is undergoing as well, which is our next stop. Tomorrow we fly to Beijing.