Pride and Prejudice in Ho Chi Minh

For my tenth birthday I was given a book of short stories by Jeffrey Archer, someone I’ve always thought – despite being a fabulous scoundrel – one of the most gifted natural storytellers of all. I remember a lot of this great book, but my favourite story was the one about an insurance claims assessor, who lives a life of metronomic regularity. Every day is exactly the same as the one before and the one after, including his arrival at the train station every day to catch the 5:52pm home from work, but not after buying ten Benson & Hedges and a copy of the Standard, which he would place on the little ledge next to his seat on the way home, happily reading and smoking for the 38 minute journey.

One particular day, however, his routine is disrupted by some event at work, and a chain reaction of events leads him – instead of placing his newspaper and cigarettes as usual on top of his briefcase – to put them inside. Finding himself sitting in a different train from his normal one and surrounded by unfamiliar commuters, a leather-clad, pierced young skinhead reaches over to him with a glare of defiance, and steals a cigarette from the pack sitting atop the man’s briefcase on the ledge. Fearful and speechless at the breach of protocol, our protagonist grabs the newspaper. But the young punk glares again, reaches forward to do the same, a tussle ensues and the paper is torn in two. The insurance man smokes a cigarette from his pack but to his astonishment the skinhead grabs another, the insurance man takes another and for half and hour they glare at each other, both smoking the B&Hs as quickly as possible and clinging to the scraps of newspaper they’re left holding. Eventually, the insurance man reaches his stop and opens his briefcase, only to find inside a pristine copy of the Standard and an unopened pack of Benson & Hedges.


I hope the joke of that story survived its summary, because among the various bewildering experiences of Vietnam, one stands out. I needed to hail – as is perfectly the norm – a young man on a motorbike to take me across town. He was about twenty, short, very slight and bespectacled and wearing a shirt of typically catastrophic blue. We agreed a price, and before getting on the back, I turned away to put my iPod in my bag and check it was all securely fastened. This was a lesson I learnt in Cambodia when half my belongings narrowly missed being crushed under a brakeless lorry.

Turning back to the young driver on the bike, I saw an overweight German man – who could easily get a full-time job as a professional caricature – climbing onto the back of my young driver’s bike, and strapping on a helmet. Politely, I tapped his corpulent shoulder and I told him I was here first. No I wasn’t, he replied in accented English. This was now a problem. Not because there aren’t enough motorbike drivers around (there are plenty), but because firstly, you should always stand your ground, and secondly, if you give a German an inch he’ll take it as an invitation to invade a neighbouring country. And Cambodia has really been through enough already with the French.

So in what I imagined was a display of phlegmatic resoluteness, I pushed up to him, put my finger in his fat little face and told him to get the fuck off my motorcycle.

The man – and I should add that although fat enough to topple a ferry, he was more security guard than daytime television guest, and could’ve killed me with a single bear-hug – peered at me with the bewildered indifference with which a rhino might regard a wristwatch. His response was that which Germans often give when approached in the wild. He spoke in German – and I’m pretty sure in the cretinous, self-satisfied idiolect they use in Bavaria.

He disembarked from the bike – to the evident relief of the driver who was mentally calculating how much a set of new shock absorbers would cost – and a crowd of curious Vietnamese surrounded us. They’re all curious, and all of the time. But when there’s actually something more interesting than a dying dog to watch, they really, really gather fast.

Now he’s shouting and me and I’m yelling back, because I’ve absolutely had it to bits. You get screwed in India, you get screwed in Thailand. You get screwed in Nepal – but you forgive it because everything’s so pretty. Getting screwed by the locals is an inevitable part of travel, but I’ll take getting sodomised and beaten in a Vietnamese prison before I get screwed by a fat, lugubrious German.

As the yelling about who had the motorcycle first gets more and more heated, a uniformed policeman as thin as a chopstick and about as tall comes and breaks it up. A scuffle ensues, a fracas, a melee even. And then I see him. Sitting on a virtually identical Honda motorcycle parked directly in front of the bike with the bellowing Jerry is my driver. He’s watching me in the way a woodland critter must regard a bird of prey, having seen me approach the bike directly behind his to attack a total stranger for no imaginable reason. He presumably thinks me a certifiable lunatic, and upon catching my eye as I stare, dumbstruck and mortified with embarrassment, he frantically turns the key and speeds off. The German – still shaking with indignation – climbs back onto his bike and leaves. And the throngs of spectators who were pleased just to see a white guy lose his marbles, mill away and back to their lives. There are no more guys on bikes anywhere to be found.

I end up walking.

Vietnam is such a weird and perplexing place. Back home, it’s easy to forget that it was a country long before it was a war. Yet the war is how we see this country. We measure its progress against how much was lost during twenty years of conflict. We see, to this day, a communist government running a capitalist country – a government which exists because of the failure of the mostly American foreign forces to triumph in a war against a dedicated and hidden enemy which could stomach greater casualties and knew what they were fighting for. If only that were a lesson which’d been heeded in the last few years. Long before Vietnam meant bodybags and napalm and cold war proxies thrashing it out, it was a country of proud and dignified people. Proud to have worn the scars of battle against various enemies at different times, a centuries-old abnegation of foreign domination which gives the visitor a sense of the people’s national self-assuredness; something you don’t feel in other Asian countries. The Lonely Planet (as always) puts it well:

“The Chinese have been the traditional threat and the proximity of this northern giant has cast a long shadow over Vietnam and its people. They respect but fear China, and in the context of 2000 years of history, the French and the Americans are but a niggling annoyance that were duly dispatched”.

But it’s a country of stunning paradox, too. The Vietnamese have embraced capitalism and then run with it – creating a monster of mercantile, consumerist strength which belies its communist underpinnings. The significant Vietnamese migrant communities in the US, Canada and Australia – communities which left during and after the war in the 1970s to start a new life – have one striking thing in common. They have an extraordinary work ethic, a predisposition and facility for business and commerce which has been the envy of many other migrant communities. The Vietnamese diaspora was a sad part of modern Vietnamese history but has given a great deal to the receiving countries.

Like much of Asia, cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with comparatively low life expectancy and an explosive birth rate, it’s a young and jaw-droppingly dynamic place. For every elderly Vietnamese wearing the distinctive, conical rice paddy hat and traditional garb, you see twenty young men and women porting what they believe to be the latest western fashions, carrying mobiles and MP3 players and swapping thousands of counterfeit DVDs. Ho Chi Minh City – which the locals persist in calling Saigon – thrums with commerce. Everywhere you look is the sensory overload of sights, sound and smells which characterises the Asian megacities in general. But Saigon has something else, something hard to identity and even harder to describe. The closest I can get it is to invoke a well-trodden and rather tired cliché. It’s a city which feels alive. It pulsates and undulates with the round-the-clock tramplings of five million inhabitants, three million motorcycles (the most in the world) and a culture of street commerce and an otherwordly chaos that tantalises and frustrates. Only thirty-three years since images of American troops and diplomats being saved from the advancing Vietnamese troops, hoisted from the roof of the embassy, brought humiliation into the living rooms of America, Saigon has been reborn. It represents everything, absolutely everything which means this century will be the Asian century.

The people are warm and engaging, but commerce underpins everything. A fruit vendor tells you about her children in the staccato, pronoun-free delivery which characterises Vietnamese English. Any reciprocated interest elicits a machine-gun burst of further minutiae about her family and an invitation to meet them. Then a rather aggressive request to buy a metric ton of papaya. Then indignation at your polite protest that a cubic metre of tropical fruit might be an unwanted burden to a backpacker.

A conversation struck up with an old man on a park bench continues for ten minutes or so. You admire his facility with English and his knowledge of the city, his stories of being a private in the South Vietnamese army, until he tells you he’s a freelance tour guide – and promptly pulls out a tattered and garish business card. A few years ago, an American politician, in a dumbass pique of Francophobe populism, announced that, “The French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur!” I don’t know whether the Vietnamese got theirs from the French while this was Indochina, or whether it’s culturally innate. I’m just saying: the Vietnamese are admired for the same reason that the Jews have been historically distrusted. They have commerce in their blood.

I told the man on the bench I don’t need a tour guide. Which wasn’t really true, I just don’t like to be observed having things pointed out to me while I almost get run over by five hundred motorbikes. I told him – as I have done countless times on this voyage – that I’d be delighted to retain his services for a couple of hours, if he’d tell me real things about the people and the place.

The man happily slurped the revolting coffee I’d bought him (important digression: don’t drink coffee in Vietnam. They serve it with the viscosity of honey, the smell of sewage, the taste of tarmacadam and the texture of soil). Vietnam, he told me – and South Vietnam in particular – has changed beyond recognition the past thirty years. The gap in understanding between the elderly Vietnamese and the westernised youth creates a disconnect which in other places might manifest as mutual hostility (I’m paraphrasing). Yet the young and the old, despite how different their lives and exposure to the West are, share a deep and passionate love for their country, a tolerance of their single-party government and a fierce determination that Vietnam should prosper.

My elderly vet said he’s as happy as anyone could expect to be. He remembers well the misery of the 60s and 70s. Lending weight to the lesson which many have learnt from the Iraq debacle, he spoke with clarity of the humiliation brought upon a people when foreign troops with space-age toys come parachuting in and wantonly go house-to-house. This, of course, is a guy who fought with the Americans, as part of the poorly-trained, indisciplined and ragtag South Vietnamese army. But anyone, he said, who sees their country invaded – even if the invaders are fighting on the same side as you – suffers the marked indignity of occupation. He couldn’t wait for the Americans to leave in ’75, even though it meant the communists had triumphed. And, he impassively observed, they’re still in power a generation later.

I met a schoolgirl in a black and white pressed uniform. She’d stopped off for a drink, halfway through her two-hour commute home from school by scooter. Five days a week, she sits on her girly-pink Honda for four hours in pea-soup pollution and end-of-history traffic, most of that time at a standstill. The two other days of the week she does the same thing to get to work, most of the money from which supports her family.

I said hi. She giggled like, well, exactly like you’d imagine a Vietnamese schoolgirl to giggle. We got chatting and I learnt – aside from her commuting schedule – that she has five siblings, was born in a village outside Saigon, and – like so many in this city and every other Asian metropolis – her family moved here for a better life. Her mother is a tailor who works seven days a week. She (my giggling friend, that is) has an iPod (fake), a DVD player (fake), some Bose headphones (fake) and a shiny new 3G phone (real). Turns out mobile phones are the only consumer gadget which the Vietnamese are yet to bother counterfeiting.

But they counterfeit – as do the Cambodians, and the Thais – with breathtaking ease, speed and imagination. In Thailand, I needed new headphones. Armed with the long-gotten wisdom that headphones are one of the few things you should never skimp on, I circled the islands for days in search of a single, solitary pair of Sony, Sennheiser, Samsung headphones – any would do. I probably found five thousand pairs scattered across forty electronics shops. And not a single pair, not one, was genuine! I know this because firstly, the text on the packaging would invariably have some ridiculous syntax. And secondly, when I would demand of the shop proprietor that I wanted the real thing and was willing to pay ten times more for it (the fakes were a couple of dollars), he or she would always give the same apologetic shrug, insist that it’s not possible to buy real headphones anywhere in Thailand, but “is ok, copies also good! Same, same! But different!” As if it’s like going into a chemist and buying generic ibuprofen rather than Nurofen. Rather than what it actually is, which is an illegal breach of Sony or Toshiba’s intellectual property – not to mention a besmirching of their reputation for quality every time anyone buys this otherwise cosmetically identical product and blames the company for its shoddiness. Which, I imagine, happens about a gazillion times a day.

My search for headphones is a rather dull tale (I ended up being forced to buy some “Sony” in-ear buds, and they naturally stopped working within six hours), but worth telling to illustrate a broader point. In a part of the world that is so bustling, so imaginative, so entrepreneurial and which boasts so much human capital, it’s completely impossible to buy a standard, genuine consumer product that you could find within five minutes in any European or North American city. Counterfeiting is well known to be rife in Asia – the Chinese are in a constant and circular battle with the Americans over a failure to crack down on DVD piracy – but you really have to go into a DVD or electronics shop to appreciate the scale of the problem. Hundreds of thousands of fake DVDs line the walls, sending not a single penny back to the producers, the actors or the film companies. But at least the product they’re selling doesn’t diminish the reputation of the studio. Electronics are a different matter. I can’t tell you the number of gadgets you can buy which are perfectly recognisable as having been made by the premium Japanese brands, only to shake them and hear them rattle like a box of smarties. Not everyone, I think, immediately recognises crap when they see it.

Some of it is very funny. Here are some photos of DVD covers at a typical Vietnamese shop; two of my favourites are “Overwhelming USA Action Movie”, which, it transpires, is a collection of Willis, Van Damme and Seagal blockbusters; and my personal favourite, “Robert De Niro: Gangster. Black helped eldest brother to come, the fire exploded a condition imminent!” Which, after ten minutes of brow-furrowed inspection, I still could not for the life of me decipher.

So some of it is amusing, but some really is not. And having been brought up to respect quality when I see it, I find my skin crawling by the churned-out crapness of so much in this part of the world. If some kid with a DVD burner wants to sell identical copies of movies at a discount, that is – although rightfully illegal – a real service which is being provided, and which is being provided to poor people who otherwise could not see the films at all. For people with very little to look forward to at the end of a 15-hour day in a factory, if watching a pirated American film gives some bit of pleasure, then who am I or anyone else to begrudge that? Especially so when the prevalence of Anglophone movies helps improve English and increase social mobility in an increasingly Anglophone world.

But as much as I can accept that, I’m repulsed by the mass-produced mediocrity of so much of the total shit which is for sale in south-east Asia. While the Japanese innovate and design and invest in products which make many of our lives both easier and more fun – while constantly having to stave off recession and lay off the poor salaryman who’s toiled almost to death for his company – the south Asians copy the product and sell it for practically nothing, reciprocating nada to the company which designed and built it.

Japan is rich and Vietnam is (at least for now) poor. So there’s maybe some fairness in what amounts to a downward redistribution of wealth. But taking from the lucky and giving to the unlucky (something I’ve always been for) is not the same as stealing, or taking something which is good and turning it into something which is bad. And as myopic and ethnocentric as I know this comment is, I really wish the south Asians would have a little more pride. Pride in not just stealing the innovations of others and making them worse. Pride in not celebrating the bottom-line production of rubbish. And have some pride in trying to create an economy which, while booming, innovates and generates revenue which can be plugged back into helping the poor climb out of their poverty.

And, I feel, it’s the very same lack of pride which brings me back to the giggling schoolgirl – who by now was turning pink and displaying the unmistakable signs of having a crush (I’ve come to recognise it well, it’s hard work being a man of the world, you know). Between trembling giggle-fits, she asked me whether I have a girlfriend, what I think of Vietnamese girls, would I ever marry one, etcetera. And - also mindful of whether I was being watched by a jealous, crowbar wielding ex-boyfriend – I projected what I imagined to be a boyish insouciance in changing the subject. But then came the heartbreaker – and it transported me suddenly a couple of months back to India and Shahrukh Kahn (the Bollywood star) advertising “Fair & Handsome”, the skin-lightening cream which all young Indians are so desperate to use, in order to look more beautiful. More European.

“I’m so ugly”, she murmured, with the unmistakable but exquisite glimpse of honesty you occasionally stumble across. Suddenly the constant thrum of the traffic left my mind, and I even forgot the imaginary ex-boyfriend and the fact my dairy drink tasted like blended Chihuahua. All I was left with was a moment of perfect candour with a total stranger in a totally strange place. “We are all so ugly compared to you”, she remarked, with genuine sadness. I clarified that she meant white people, and not me in particular, and she went on. “White girls are so beautiful, they have those round blue eyes, and they all have blonde hair and long legs…(I wish, I restrained myself from interrupting) … I want to have my eyes done and my nose too, but it’s very expensive, and it would never look real. I will always be ugly like all the Vietnamese”.

I gave her a few useless platitudes like how she was very beautiful and should be happy with who she is, and took my leave to contemplate this seismically sad divulgence. What upset me was not hearing the fears and insecurities of adolescence – I remember them all too well myself. It’s the fact that I know, I just now know for sure, that hers is the mainstream view across this continent. There is a macro-cultural inferiority complex going on which is everywhere you look. You see it in the mannequins in the shop windows across Asia – ALL of which are Caucasian. You see it in the billboards for lingerie, razors or suits. You see it in the obsessive face-whitening in India, the eye surgery in the Far East, and the fact that probably eight in ten Singaporean, Malaysian, Korean or Thai boys I’ve ever met dye their hair blonde or red. You see it in the desperately imitative fashions, the reactive gestures, the Asian ghetto patois that inculcates all of their tongues. You see it in the way as a white guy you’re treated with reverence while a black tourist receives disdain. And you sure as hell see it when a young girl of preternatural loveliness loathes the way her race looks.

Of course, young girls in the West hate their appearance too, but it’s different. Jealousy of one’s peers at a time of insecurity and hormones is the most normal thing in the world. An old and proud culture being subsumed by another, not by outside imposition but voluntarily welcomed, sought out, encouraged, is really sad indeed. Where is the pride in permitting to economy to be run by flogging fake junk? Where is the pride in the governments of this gigantic continent not asking advertisers to curb the cultural envy, not telling their people that they should be proud and happy to be who they are? It is sad, and so is an economy which employs its people to, if they’re not making the junk which we so needlessly consume back home, creates the social conditions for embarrassingly phoney copies of exotic things from other places. And I’m not even talking about the damn headphones.