Travels in Vietnam

In my father's footsteps

Part Two: Journey to the Imperial City
Part Three: ‘I say the Americans really won the war’

Our introduction to Vietnam, after the initial sensation of butterfly house heat, came in the form of the truly insane taxi driver who picked us up from Hanoi airport. He was without question the absolute most reckless and dangerous driver I’d ever had the experience to travel with; playing with his phone as he sped in the hot rain, accelerating as he approached cars ahead of him, whizzing in and out of lanes without the slightest interest in indicating. As we entered what seemed like the start of downtown, we passed a distressed-looking western couple whose car had just had a smash amid the chaos of Vietnamese traffic. Our chances of dying in that 20-minute journey must have been three orders of magnitude higher than during the 13-hour flight.

I don’t like flying and, while I was relatively serene on this journey back in April last year, I barely slept except for about half an hour of that ambiguous state where one is not entirely sure. Having exhausted all remaining episodes of The Rest is History and too agitated to read, mostly I just starred at the flight map as it inched closer to Hanoi.

I had with me Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which I suppose many people read when visiting the country for the first time. It was the work which had first inspired my father’s interest in the country many decades ago, and he recalled that it ‘had delighted me when it first appeared in 1955, perhaps arousing my interest in Vietnam’.

Dad was a much braver man than I am, and among his exploits he recalled a hair-raising flight bound for Saigon alongside senior South Vietnamese ministers, dodging surface-to-air fire missiles. He followed American troops into battle, saw fresh corpses in its aftermath and never breathed a word of anguish or boasted about his exploits. It was a generational thing: part of that last cohort to rule an empire, he had been sent to boarding school at 6 and, from 10, to Canada to escape the Nazi conquest which my pessimistic grandparents saw coming. Posted to Italy for national service at 18, he had become a Cold War foreign correspondent, covering eastern Europe, Africa and central America. He saw the world, but I think he loved Vietnam most of all.

We had a map of the country in the flat when I was growing up and it loomed large in dad’s career, but he was a reticent man who didn’t open up much, especially to his children, and I never got to speak to him enough about his adventurers when he was alive. However, there is one benefit to having a writer for a father, a certain familial immortality, and also with me was a copy of dad’s memoir War and Peace in Vietnam. In truth we weren’t exactly travelling in his footsteps - dad spent most his time in the South - but I felt his vague presence with me, especially as in middle age I came to resemble him ever more.

My father was always perverse in his views and seemed to go on the opposite journey to most people. Starting the war imbued with Greene’s cynicism about the American global project, he came to feel that their war was ultimately righteous and only collapsed because of the cultural revolution erupting back home. He also admired the South Vietnamese, whom most people regarded as corrupt and incapable of fighting for themselves. Dad also often remarked that Americans were well-liked in Vietnam, and that the Vietnamese – especially the southerners – longed for capitalism. Some three decades after he last wrote about the country, both of these assertions now seem justified.

His second to last trip, in the early 1980s after the war ended, was an extremely depressing time; Vietnam’s experiment with communism was as successful as expected, and by the mid-1980s it was the poorest country in the world, or by some measures second poorest, above only Burundi.

Today its GDP per capita is around $4,900, which makes it still a poor country, but there are poor countries which look like they’re going to stay poor, and there are poor countries which are clearly heading in the right direction. Vietnam’s year-on-year growth in the 2010s averaged about 6.5 per cent, and it is trajectory is obvious just by the frenetic early-morning activity in the streets which we saw as we made our hair-raising drive into town.

We wanted to take the children on an adventurous holiday, at least once, and they had reached the right age, with the eldest (15) soon at the point where she’d want to go backpacking without parents (although I have threatened to turn up and embarrass her). I wanted to make sure that they appreciated how special this was, and gave them a very boring talk about how such a trip would have been inconceivable to me as a child, and that most of my family holidays involved taking the ferry to Ireland blah blah blah.

It was certainly different. The sensory experience of Hanoi is quite overwhelming, in particular the insanity of the traffic, and crossing a busy street can be alarming. The children were soon in tears, made worse by my panic.

The city is shabby but colourful, overflowing with life from the bugs up. You see crowded vegetable shops at the basement of five-story grey concrete blocks with plants growing everywhere; most of the streets are a jumble of three, four and five-story shacks besides the occasional colonial era apartment blocks, with towels hung everywhere. Many of the cars, notably, are brand new.

The pavements are lined with people crouching and eating, cooking on burners, eating noodles or smoking cigarettes. Or they are selling things, either alive or dead. Within half an hour of arrival, walking past some elderly women with tanks full of both giant living and dead fish, the sight of a giant spider caused our eldest to jump and scream. Curious about what alarmed us, an old crone with a protruding tooth took a look at the spider and laughed at my daughter. After all, why would you be unsettled by this freakishly large spider? In fairness, the people here laugh when you say anything.

My wife had booked a bicycle tour of the city upon immediate arrival, which seemed like not a good idea when we got there. As our son was too small to fit on any of the bikes, he instead hung on the back of the scooter driven by our guide, whose name seemed to be Wind. I watched in trepidation as my exhausted 10-year-old clung on as we made our way through the city’s insane traffic, with the constant sound of beeping, which is here used to warn people, rather than a sign of aggression.

It was a bit like the old Richard Scarry book we used to read to the children when they were younger, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go - people driving all sorts of vehicles with improbably combinations of things on the back, whether fruit, bits of meat dragging along the ground, or huge vats of oil. Mopeds and motorbikes accounted for most of the traffic, although there were plenty of people riding bicycles, often carrying vast amounts of vegetables on the back and many wearing Nón lá, the traditional Viet hats. I didn’t realise how widespread those hats were, and half-imagined it was a historic style of clothing that had fallen out of use, so it would be like turning up in Amsterdam and finding people wearing clogs. Mopeds and motorbikes also fill all the kerbs; we were tickled to spot a child asleep on the back of a moped, but this was actually quite a common site, suggesting either a very safe society or a very relaxed approach to parenting.

Wind described a care-free and free-range childhood, roaming around and killing snakes to eat; he was regretful that the younger generations were too addicted to phones to enjoy this sort of upbringing, talking in a wistful way despite seeming to be little more than a child to me.

He was a big fan of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the North Vietnamese forces who became a god-like figure following his death before their final final victory. By the standards of communist leaders, admittedly a pretty low bar, Ho was not the worst - or at least, he died before he could do anything too bad. Whereas Mao’s regime in China obsessively destroyed remnants of the past, the Vietnamese communists had great respect for old buildings, as Wind explained. This was partly because of costs, but they also didn’t have the same destructive urge as the Maoists, or the same hatred of the past. Perhaps that was because Ho was primarily a nationalist.

Dad wrote that ‘if the Americas had spared Hanoi, so too had its Communist rulers. Far from decrying the French colonial architecture, the North Vietnamese admired and preserved it. I am told that the Hanoi newspapers often denounced Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore because he had replaced memorials of the British past with garish skyscrapers and shopping centres. Whereas Mao Zedong in China, and Kim Il Sung in North Korea had wanted to wipe out history, Ho Chi Minh and his followers treasured it. It is true that the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, with its goose-stepping sentries, brought to mind similar eyesores in Beijing, Bucharest and East Berlin, but Ho himself had not ordered this monument. Nor did he have the usual vices of a dictator, such as a morbid fear of plots against him.’

Many of the old buildings are very beautiful - while being colonised by the French has its downsides, they always have good taste in architecture - although there are the occasional bullet holes to remind visitors of both war and poverty. America’s Vietnam War is very well known, in part because of its depiction by that country’s dominant film industry, and because of the political and cultural turmoil that engulfed the US at the time; but the preceding French War was in many ways worse, and per capita the French lost far more men. They were also more brutal, as we were reminded when Wind insisted on taking us to a museum devoted to Gallic atrocities, at the spot where they interned and tortured Vietnamese opposed to their rule. They seemed quite bitter about French rule, but not about the Americans; indeed, the US is more popular in Vietnam than it is in Poland.

The origins of this decades-long conflict date back to the Japanese conquest of south-east Asia, which forever destroyed the myth of white invincibility. Although the French and Americans were the chief western participants, the small British role in the conflict is less well known.

While the Japanese had occupied Vietnam in 1940, they had allowed the Vichyites to rule the colony until March 1945 when, seeing their short-lived empire collapsing, they had rounded up all the Europeans. In August the British arrived and suppressed the communists who had been fighting the Japanese, and then – strangely – released and armed the Japanese prisoners in their possession. The Cold War was starting here even while the hot War was still ongoing.

The Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, defended Saigon Town Hall and called for insurrection against the British, and there followed bloody fighting between Vietnamese and Indian Army troops.

On 21 September, the British released about 1,400 French troops, mostly legionaries, who went on a massacre of locals. The communists ordered a general strike for the 24th, and that’s when the war essentially started. In neighbouring Laos, one of the other two French colonies – Cambodia, the third, was to have the unluckiest history – the French and Americans even briefly fought each other. My father recalled that his old friend Peter Kemp, a journalist and adventurer who had the accolade of being one of just 12 British men who joined the Spanish Civil War to fight for Franco, witnessed fighting there between the French and the American OSS, who were then backing the communist Vietnamese against the Europeans.

In March 1945 the Japanese had appealed to racial fellow-feeling with a favourite metaphor: ‘Take an egg, there is a white and a yellow part. The yellow is better, nobody doubts that. If you mix them together the yellow will come out on top. Nobody doubts that.’ Yet Asian fellow feeling was never much of a draw; the Japanese were notably cruel in their rule, and the Chinese… well, the Vietnamese have some history. Dad also recalled that the sight of half-starved Dutch and Australian prisoners being marched through Saigon attracted pity rather than hatred from locals, who lived in a tolerant and commercial city that had always been an entrepôt filled with many nations.

The Vietnamese communists were also highly motivated by anti-Chinese sentiment, the ‘bourgeoisie’ they railed against often being interchangeable with the country’s wealthy Chinese merchant elite (just as it was to Russia’s German minority to the Bolsheviks). This they felt more keenly than any hostility towards the Europeans, who they understood – correctly – to be on the way out.

Ho even wanted the French to come back in 1946 to kick out the Chinese, and told a dissenting comrade: ‘You fools. Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came here they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.’

China’s cultural dominance is clear everywhere. After half an hour of Hanoi traffic, which after a while began to make a certain sense, we reached the Temple of Literature, or Van Mieu – Quoc Tu Giam. This dated back to the 11^th century, when the Viet kingdom first flourished, heavily influenced by its giant, overbearing neighbour.

It was here that young Vietnamese would, for centuries, compete in exams, in three stages - first locally, then regionally, and then the finalists proving their intellectual mettle before the king. Within this quintessentially east Asian palace complex are shrines to the country’s more recent kings, most of whom were essentially puppets who notionally reigned under French rule until 1945. Everywhere are statues of turtles and dragons, which are considered lucky, and besides each royal shrine ornate wardrobes garnished with flowers and other offerings (including energy drinks). Almost every building contains these shrines, usually with the smiling figure of Buddha surrounded by gifts of tea, coffee, fruit, fake dollars and Coca-Cola - symbolising prosperity.

Like China, this is a culture which has valued hard work for a long time, and it shows. In recent years the economy has boomed, and Wind reflected that ‘I cannot recognise Vietnam from 20 years ago’. The palace grounds were full of groups of schoolchildren in white shirts and red sashes being taken around to see how their forefathers competed in an exam-based culture. By the time that all these children are my age, Vietnam will be enjoying the fruits of that Confucian work ethic.