VIETNAM

 

Entering Thailand, one is asked to declare ‘monetary instruments’ in excess of $10,000; entering Vietnam one must declare one’s T-shirts. Persons ‘having the action of tricking’ in the latter regard will, according to the customs declaration form headed with the national motto, Freedom, Independence and Happiness, be punished as prescribed by the laws of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which are no doubt of exemplary severity.

What kind of economy could be seriously imperilled by undeclared T-shirts? I arrived in Vietnam in December 1989, 13 years after the communists entered Saigon, with a friend, Ingo, who was once a refugee from East Germany when Ulbricht was in Berlin and all was right with the world. He recognised the mentality at once.

Actually, everything was changing fast in Vietnam, according to an Australian businessman we met as we waited for our luggage (the less busy the airport the longer it takes to unload). The nonsense about T-shirts was a hangover from the ancien régime, he said. Every month, no, every week there were reforms and improvements. For example, when he – the Australian businessman – left Saigon only a fortnight ago, there was no conveyor belt for luggage at the airport, a deficiency that had been rectified in his absence. It now took only an hour to retrieve luggage instead of three. There had also been no public address system when he left; now it was very much in evidence. Let there be muzak, said a commissar; and there was muzak.

It seems that progress, like freedom, is indivisible.

From the purely selfish point of view, I found the optimism of the Australian less than pleasing. It wasn’t that the commercial project upon which he was engaged struck me as strange, even bizarre (he was planning to bring a floating luxury hotel, with rooms at $200 a night, to a mooring in the Saigon River); rather, it was that I was writing a book about countries in despair, and amelioration made my task more difficult.

We drove to the centre of Saigon (no one calls it by its new name, Ho Chi Minh City). I was struck at once by the complete difference in atmosphere between Saigon on the one hand and Tirana, Pyongyang and Bucharest, which were still fresh in my memory, on the other. Not only was there little in the way of political iconography to be seen in Saigon, and that little so faded by time and climate that it had achieved the status of relic, but there was life on the streets, there were shops, little cafés, stalls, discussion groups, mechanics and – it must be said – beggars. Bicycles, motorbikes and a few cars wove their way anarchically through the tree-lined avenues (more than one Vietnamese remarked on the French legacy of trees in the cities of Vietnam), tinkling bells and honking horns. Everything was shabby and rundown, one could almost smell the mould everywhere; but the people were alive, not undead.

As soon as you take your first walk in Vietnam, you become aware of a certain crudity, not in the people around you but in yourself. I am neither fat nor unusually tall, and yet I felt my movements were awkward and lumpen compared with those of the Vietnamese, who seem to perform even the most ordinary tasks with physical grace and suppleness. This impression was powerfully reinforced on our first night in Saigon when we were directed, somewhat against my will, to a performance of ‘folk’ singing and dancing. Such performances in communist countries, which take place in the caverns of international hotels where ordinary citizens may not penetrate, are as authentically traditional as John Wayne’s films are authentically historical. So it was on this occasion, with young Vietnamese men in traditional costume playing their traditional electronic instruments, to whose sound heavily made-up peasant women danced peasant dances under coloured spotlights. With the exception of Ingo and myself, the audience was Russian, to whom such entertainments were no doubt thoroughly familiar.

When the singing and dancing were over, one of the Russians got up on stage to make a speech. No one forced him to do so; heir to seventy years of official evasions and falsehoods, he spoke fluent langue de bois, managing to disregard entirely the absence of Vietnamese in the audience as he extolled the virtues of international solidarity and friendship. His appearance among the slender Vietnamese performers, however, was nothing short of grotesque. He had wiry red hair and a putty-white face from which sweat copiously poured, despite the air conditioning; to call his features rough-hewn would be unfairly to denigrate rocks. Above all, he had that permanent shortness of breath caused by a large girth, which also caused him to waddle.

‘Too many potatoes,’ as a Vietnamese said to me later by way of explanation of the pachydermatous ungainliness of the Russian technical advisers whom he had just passed.

‘And too much vodka,’ I added laughing, though I was uncomfortably aware that in his eyes I was probably only a fraction less grotesque.

We stayed in the Palace Hotel, which had been renamed in Vietnamese the Friendship Hotel, by which name it was known to no one. It was built in the sixties, not perhaps a memorable epoch in the history of architecture, yet the hotel was not wholly without atmosphere, thanks to the history and intrigue it must have seen and to the mild decay it had undergone. From its roof on the fourteenth floor there was a splendid view of Saigon; I was surprised to see that the city did not extend beyond the far bank of the mud-brown river, not more than 400 yards away, from which green rice fields stretched to the distant horizon. In the other direction sprawled a chaos of rusting tin-roofed buildings, occasional skyscrapers, lesser edifices of darkly-stained concrete, palm trees, godowns, factories and even a church spire or two. By no stretch of the imagination could the scene have been called beautiful; but for me at least it was not without charm. By night, the dim lights of the city glimmered feebly, a testimony to the economic situation; but along the curve of the river the ships were illuminated brilliantly by their own lights, and all through the night one could hear the metallic rhythm of ships’ repairs.

We noticed a small and curious refinement in the Palace (or Friendship), Hotel that had lasted since American days: every morning, afternoon and evening without fail the rugs in the lift were changed. They were frayed and uncleaned since the ‘liberation’, but the words ‘Good Morning’, ‘Good Afternoon’ and ‘Good Evening’ were still legible on them. The latter in particular conjured in my mind images of quiet Americans, scrubbed and cleaned, leaving the hotel after a hard day’s clandestine political activity for a night on the disreputable town.

Nearby the hotel was a second-hand bookshop. It dealt in books left behind by the departing Americans, with a sideline in English grammar texts and language tapes. One of the latter was playing from a cassette recorder, turned up loud for the benefit of everyone. Two tutorial voices enunciated their words with the clipped, pedantic precision of BBC announcers three decades ago. Here was a world in which even waiters were upper class; but the message, it must be admitted, could scarcely have been more appropriate for a communist country:

 

Customer: I think I’ll have a chocolate ice cream.

Waiter: I’m sorry, sir, there’s no more chocolate.

Customer: Then I’ll have strawberry.

Waiter: I’m very sorry, sir, we haven’t got strawberry either.

Customer: Then what have you got?

Waiter: Nothing, I’m afraid, sir.

 

As for the books, they had suffered in the humid climate: their covers had curled, their pages yellowed, must had grown into their fabric so that an acrid odour rose and caught in the throat when their pages were turned. The books fell naturally into three or four categories, into which the owner or manager had surprisingly (and discriminatingly) sorted them. There were pulp paperback novels of sex and adventure with which soldiers had no doubt tried to beguile the boredom of the 99 per cent of their tour of duty that was not absolute terror. There were dozens of hardback novels about Vietnam by men who, but for their experience, would never have written, and who hoped that burning sincerity might compensate for lack of talent. There were ‘family’ books, the adornments of middle America: encyclopaedias, picture books of the wonders of the world, and a volume entitled, with unintended irony, The Legacy of the West. Finally, there were the academic theses of political science, many of them Prop. of the US Army, over which serious military advisers had pondered long and hard. Such effort so ill-rewarded! For who could read with genuine pleasure long volumes devoted to the foreign policy of Burma or the marriage customs of the hill tribes of Laos? And is there anything so stale as twenty-year-old political science?

Perhaps – my blood runs cold – reportage withers even faster. Nevertheless, I bought two books written by Americans in 1967 and 1968 when a visit to Hanoi was still something of an adventure, Harrison Salisbury’s Behind the Lines: Hanoi and Mary McCarthy’s Hanoi both of which – but especially the latter – acted as a kind of Greek chorus as I read them in…Hanoi.

The bookshop owner, seeing that I was a serious customer and not just a browser with nothing else to do, sidled up to me and offered me something which, by his manner of a Bangkok pimp on the Sukhumvit Road showing prospective customers snapshots of ‘his’ girls, should have been salacious at the very least. In fact, it was a booklet printed on pink paper entitled La Semaine à Saigon du 7 au 13.9.63.

With what strange emotion does one read of a world that existed within one’s own lifetime, and yet is now as irrecoverable as ancient Mesopotamia! Semi-philosophical, even mystical, thoughts are set in train: is not five minutes ago – no, not so much, ten seconds, even one! – as distant as a thousand or a million years?

In 1963, there was still a French influence in Saigon. ‘The barber shops, beauty parlours, dressmaking houses, with every modern comfort allow you to get the latest Paris Fashions, because nearly all hairdressers, aestheticians and dressmakers are certificated from Paris.’ But where now are the ‘smart and attractive’ shops with their ‘rutilant shop-windows…full of everywhere products’, and where is Guyonnet, the butcher for whose meat – délicieux, succulent, délectable, merveilleux – ‘even Madame de Sévigné would not find sufficient words to praise’? What has happened to the Vietnamese radio station in the French language with its seven o’clock ‘réveil musculaire’? Where is La Niche, offering soins et beauté des chiens? Should you still take Hépatic for that most vulnerable of organs, your foie?

There is an odd juxtaposition of sophistication and naivety in La Semaine à Saigon. Amid the advertisements for bars and nightclubs, all with their ‘charming hostesses’, ‘teen-aged lovely singers’, ‘graceful waitresses’ or ‘golden voiced songstresses’, accompanied by Poon and his orchestra, Patty Pink and his combo or l’Orchestre International sous la Direction de BOB, are interspersed jokes of such innocence that any eight-year-old would now be ashamed to tell them:

 

Two African explorers are swimming in a river. Suddenly one of them cries out:

‘Pierre, Pierre, a crocodile has just eaten one of my feet!’

‘Which one?’ asks his friend.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘All crocodiles look the same to me…

 

And 1963 was an age of innocence, too, with regard to what is now lugubriously known as the environment, which then seemed indestructible.

 

In Vietnam boundless forests there is important fauna of about 500 species…

Tigers are numerous in every region, and offer fine target.

Panthers also are abounding, there are 4 dissimilar species: the biggest one has a black flecked skin; the common panther is smaller, with more numerous black spots, the nebulous panther and the Ounce.

And the big target, dream of numerous hunters: the elephant is not scarce in Vietnam.

Several species of wild oxen are easily offered to the big game hunters: the Gaur or Indian Urus of which the track affords an unforgettable emotion…

The Bears are also found in Vietnam’s forests, there are 3 species…

At last the various kinds of deer, very numerous. Among the same game, we cannot here enumerate their numerous kinds and names: from the fair ‘Dwarf Deer’ to the full flavoured porcupine; from the peacock to the partridge, this small game will offer at every moment, various targets, either to make delicious roast, or to get a scarce specie for your hunting bag.

 

For $22, you could buy a Licence D, ‘good only for killing wild and harmfuls beasts such as tigers, leopards’.

Still, an ominous note is not altogether lacking. Above an advertisement for a hotel offering UNSURPASSED…SERVICE AND HOSPITALITY! YET, MODERATE CHARGE! appears a little notice:

 

The declaration of the State of Siege in Vietnam will inevitably bring certain technical and editorial difficulties to the production of our magazine…

We apologise in advance to our readers and advertisers.

 

So much for the world we had lost. What of the world we had won?

Out in the street, people offered us old coins and banknotes, guided tours, women, trinkets, Vietnamese dong for dollars, all with rare desperation. There were not a few beggars with their hands upstretched from the ground, and young children followed us with melodramatic expressions and gestures of hunger and misery, until they ran away laughing as they clutched the 200 dong we gave them (about 5 cents). I soon grew weary of this: either they told other children about us, or our ‘generosity’ was noticed by them. At any rate, we were rarely without a penumbra of demanding children. Ingo was more patient than I: he just accepted that one had to keep a supply of small denomination notes to pay the children. His patience was born of sympathy, for when he was a child in Weimar just after the war, he too had pestered American soldiers (before Weimar was transferred to the Russian zone) for cigarettes and chocolate which were then the true currency of Germany.

We walked towards the river, past the burnt out shell of one of Saigon’s buildings, the state import and export company. The upper floors were charred and covered in soot. I suspected that the cause of the fire was fraud about to be uncovered: I was reminded of my time in Africa in the mid-eighties when a fire in the Bank of Tanzania destroyed – not inconveniently – all records of foreign currency dealings.

As we reached the river, a short, wiry figure approached us. He wore a military-style jacket and on his crushed cap I was surprised to see a brass badge of the American eagle clutching arrows in its talons. His name was Nguyen and he spoke English with an American accent and a grammatical error every three words. He wanted us to take a ride in his cyclo, a pedicab of old French design with the pedals at the rear.

We were reluctant at first to accept. Was not the image of Europeans riding in vehicles powered by (oriental) human effort one of the icons of anti-colonialism? That one man should ride while another pulled or pushed or pedalled, especially in the broiling heat, seemed repugnant to our newly-tender occidental sensibilities. But Nguyen was insistent: there was no doubting the sincerity of his desire to convey us wherever we wanted to go. And looking around, we saw Vietnamese ride unselfconsciously in cyclos. Recalling Dr Johnson’s defence of riches – that they gave employment to the poor – we swallowed Nguyen’s pride and acceded to his pleadings.

He lost little time in letting us know what he thought of communism. It had impoverished everyone except a few top Party leaders. It was tyrannous, corrupt and unjust. No one in the South wanted it, he said.

Nguyen had been a sub-lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, three times wounded (when he discovered I was a doctor, I thought he was going to show me the scars of his wounds, but he never did). I wondered, though I did not ask, whether in those days he had been quite so opposed to corruption as he was now. After the ‘liberation’ he was sent to re-education camp for four years, where they tried ‘to clean the brains’. It hadn’t worked, not for him and not for anybody else; but outwardly he had conformed to secure his freedom.

Relative freedom, that was, for at the time no one in Vietnam had been free – the whole country was a prison camp. Nguyen found work as a teacher but when, after three years, the headmaster discovered he had been to re-education camp, he was dismissed, since when he had pedalled a cyclo. He did not own his contraption: he hired it every day from a man who owned five of them, for 2000 dong (50 cents) a day. When he was lucky, Nguyen made a profit of 15,000 dong ($3.75); when he was unlucky, nothing at all.

As we rode towards the children’s hospital, the name of whose doctor I had been given as a contact, a few people called out to us in almost insulting fashion. Nguyen said they were asking whether we were Russian, and I soon learnt to call back Anh! (English in Vietnamese). This produced a wreath of smiles and upturned thumbs – anything, so long as we were not Russian. I had encountered this reaction before, in Ethiopia for example, and I was rather saddened by it: not out of sympathy for communism, of course, but out of sympathy for individual Russians, despised as they are everywhere for their poverty and the sins of their leaders, yet who are no worse than any other people, and have strengths and virtues too.

The hospital was French colonial, a series of yellow stucco pavilions open to the breeze, set in the shade of huge, shaggy tropical trees, and surrounded by gardens. Whatever the crimes of the colonialists, they learnt to build for the climate and not to rely for comfort on the vagaries of an uncertain electricity supply. And their buildings were charming, civilised, though it undoubtedly took barbarity to build them.

Was this charm for western eyes only? Were the Vietnamese indifferent to the fact that everything constructed after the departure of the French was ugly, functional, tasteless, decaying without the bittersweetness of decay: in short, a mess? No; we never found a Vietnamese – heirs, after all, to a very refined aesthetic tradition – who did not appreciate the virtues of colonial building.

The doctor for whom I was searching was away in France at a conference and would not be back until after we left Saigon. Disappointed, we strolled round the hospital. I wanted to see inside the wards, but had not the courage of my prurience. As we were strolling, a man with a self-important manner came up to us and started to question Nguyen in a decidedly unfriendly, almost threatening way. It was clear he was some kind of security official trying to find out who we were and what we were doing, and so I assumed that expression of absent-minded and idiotic innocence that had helped me in such situations before. (A saintly determination not to understand the significance of what one is being asked will eventually exasperate any petty secret policeman beyond endurance.) The man’s questions to Nguyen were sharp; I smiled at him sweetly. Eventually, bowing, I thanked him very much, and satisfied at last that we were a visiting delegation of European subnormals he let us continue.

Outside the hospital, Nguyen complained that only people who worked for the government received free medical care; everyone else had to pay. And medicine was expensive, if it were to be had at all. Again I wondered how it had been in the old days; and whether he had complained quite so vociferously then.

I arranged to meet Nguyen again a few days later. He was always at the same place by the riverbank, he said; it was risky for him to ply his trade outside the hotels where the foreigners stayed, for the police spies were there. I suppose he knew what he was talking about; but if so, the police spies in Vietnam were not the bone-headed, pebble-suited variety that haunted Eastern European hotels, but people who knew how to melt unobtrusively into the background and quietly observe.

Nguyen was waiting for me as arranged. He promised to show me areas of Saigon no visitor would see unless in the company of a native. His companion pedicyclist was disappointed that Ingo did not come: he had been hoping for a fare, and looked so downcast I thought he was going to cry.

‘He says he not lucky today,’ said Nguyen. ‘He no have customer for four days.’

It was not just a sob story, I thought. I gave him some money, but he cheered up only a little. He had his dignity, and he wanted to earn money. But there was nothing else I could do, and so Nguyen and I went on our way.

We followed a road by the river, pausing to look at people who lived under a concrete bridge. Squalid shacks overhung the creeks leading to the Saigon River, the kind of sight that would give you typhoid, if bacilli could enter through the eyes on wings of light. Nguyen said that everything was worse, poorer, dirtier than before – before always meaning before ‘liberation’.

Still, these visions of Saigon did not depress me as the frigid, sterile concrete grandeur of Pyongyang had depressed me. ‘You won’t see signs of poverty in Pyongyang like in other Asian cities,’ a sympathiser with North Korea had told me proudly before I went. He did not mention that I would see no signs of life either; whereas in Saigon, for all its squalor, there was activity, movement, laughter, argument.

The Vietnamese government had changed its policy since the Sixth Party Congress in 1987. Whether from conviction or under Soviet pressure to reform, the Politburo had decided to free the economy a little. The land was returned to the peasants on long leasehold and they were allowed to sell their produce to whomever they pleased at whatever price they could get, after a certain delivery quota to the government. At the same time, smuggling across the Thai and Chinese borders was ignored if not encouraged by the government, and the smuggled consumer goods were traded in markets by private traders. Small-scale private enterprise was now permitted, with family businesses allowed to employ up to ten people. The economic effects of this relaxation were immediate and dramatic. Rice, which until then had been rationed and in such short supply that people had trekked into Thailand in search of it, was now plentiful. Vietnam had become almost overnight one of the largest exporters of rice in the world. The peasants were prepared to work and produce, because there was some chance now of due reward.

But the effects of the reforms were not only economic. As Marx, who did not underestimate the influence of economic organisation on human affairs, might have expected, the economic changes in Vietnam had brought in their wake great social changes, apparent immediately to anyone who had travelled to unregenerate socialist lands. The people were recalled to life. Pace intellectual snobs, the market is not just a soulless economic mechanism; it is a spiritual phenomenon as well, without which there can be no personal freedom, at least in modern societies.

The very success of the reforms, however, posed a serious problem for the Vietnamese government: for the success of the reforms was a complete refutation of everything the government had said and done for the last forty years. Yet the government was also tied to the doctrines of apostolic succession and Caesaropapal infallibility. It was omniscient or it was nothing.

I picked up a little volume of the recent speeches of Nguyen Van Linh, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (ie the Pope). It was called Vietnam: Urgent Problems. Following the title page was a photograph of the General Secretary: I knew at once I was not in for an exciting read. The first paragraph was unencouraging:

 

After several days of diligent and active work with a high sense of responsibility to the Party and people, today the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam has come to fruition.

 

Although the book was only 147 pages long, I could not help but recall Lord Macaulay’s review of a two volume biography of Lord Burghley:

 

Compared with the labour of reading these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, the labour of children in the mines, the labour of slaves on the plantation, is but a pleasant recreation.

 

Nevertheless, I read on. It was my duty: I had to know what the official mind was thinking.

Couched in the stiffest of stiff langue de bois, the General Secretary does most of his thinking and writing on autopilot, as befits a man who became a communist at the age of fourteen, sixty years ago, and has remained one ever since. In a talk at ‘an informal meeting with artists and cultural activists’, entitled ‘Art and Cultural Workers Should Contribute to the Party’s Renovation Work’, the General Secretary said ‘I am not a specialist in literature and the arts… But as a lover of literature and the arts, I fully agree with the idea that fighters on the cultural and art front need not only sharp knives to remove the bad… You are engineers of the soul. You must contribute to building the new-type man.’ Not exactly original: there’s nothing there with which Stalin or Mao or Enver Hoxha or Ceausescu or Kim Il Sung might disagree.

Yet from time to time the faint glimmer of an idea emerges, reluctantly, from the General Secretary’s pages. One has the feeling of a man wrestling with uncomfortable facts, a man whose powers of expression are stunted and arthritic, and whose ideas rattle around like a dried pea in a small bottle. He acknowledges the ‘big and instant impact’ on the supply of rice effected by the removal of restrictions on private trade, but is unable to draw the obvious general conclusion from this salutary experience. He excoriates what he calls ‘bureaucratic centralism’, yet defends to the death ‘democratic centralism’, describing Party and national unanimity as ‘the apple of our eye’. But it is in his closing speech ‘Delivered at the 2nd Plenum of the Party Central Committee’ that the General Secretary reveals his originality and genius. There he says:

 

…the State’s selling of agricultural tools to and buying of paddy from peasants [must be] according to the principle of mutual agreement and price parity…

 

In other words, peasants must be paid: a lesson he had learnt after fifty years of political experience. That something so obvious should have taken half a century to learn is, after all, a form of originality.

‘He’s a good guy,’ said Nguyen the cyclo driver, referring to Nguyen the General Secretary. He meant, of course, good by comparison with the others in the Politburo. Before he came to power, it was dangerous for a Vietnamese to talk to a foreigner, even for a minute, even to an East German. To do so was to risk arrest and interrogation. His fellow cyclo drivers had often been apprehended and questioned about their foreign fares by the police. The advent of Nguyen had led to an immediate easing in the all-pervasive atmosphere of terror. None of this, however, prevented him from telling a political joke against the General Secretary.

‘Nguyen and his deputy are flying from Hanoi to Saigon. Nguyen says, “Do you realise that if I threw a 5000 dong note out of the window, I’d make someone happy?” His deputy says, “But if I threw five 1000 dong notes out, I’d make five people happy.” “So what?” says the pilot. “If I threw you both out, I’d make 65 million people happy.” ’

On the way to where Nguyen lived, we stopped at a little tea shop, where he came to console himself when there were no fares to be had. There he drank a livid red liquid poured over dirty crushed ice while I, usually immune to concerns over the amoeboid dangers of unboiled water, providently chose tea, which arrived lukewarm with a sugary sludge, in a glass of quite spectacular uncleanliness.

Nguyen lived down a teeming alleyway, no wider than an arm-span. I should not have ventured down it without him, uncertain as to what my reception as a foreigner might be. I needn’t have worried, however: I was received like a returning hero. Children rushed out of cramped front rooms that opened on to the alleyway to shout and laugh and hold my hand. Unlike the children who hung about the hotels, they wanted nothing from me; and the adults bade me welcome with their greetings.

Nguyen lived in a lean-to with walls made of planks and a corrugated tin roof, a single room with a concrete floor, bereft of any furniture except two shelves on which he had stored empty soft drink cans and cigarette packets, the latter stacked like books. They were the only decorations he could afford. There was a large jar of water and a wooden box that contained the clothes he did not stand up in.

‘I own nothing,’ Nguyen said, prodding his two spare shirts and a pair of trousers. ‘Nothing.’

It was true. Until recently, Nguyen had lived here with his wife, but she left him because they argued about the long hours he worked. He went out at six in the morning and returned at eleven at night; she assumed another woman was involved, and never realised that pedalling a cyclo was not an easy way to make a living. Arguments had led to fights – physical, not metaphorical. Nguyen had hit her. One day she left taking their son with her, returning to her village 250 miles away. Nguyen missed his son but could not afford the fare to see him.

‘When you have money, a woman can love you,’ he said. ‘When you no have money, she cannot love you.’

He showed me a few pictures of the old days when he was a lieutenant earning $100 a month. He and his wife smiled into the camera, knowing nothing of the trials to come.

When it was hot, Nguyen could not sleep in the stuffy lean-to. Then he went out into the street to sleep. When it rained, the roof leaked, so sleep was impossible then too. All the while he told me this I wondered about sanitary facilities, but did not ask. I could imagine them vividly enough.

Across the alleyway lived his mother and several brothers and sisters. They shared two rooms, one of which opened onto the alley. This room had a large picture of the Virgin and child: Nguyen and his family were Catholics. One of his younger brothers joined us there for tea. He was learning English, Nguyen said, but was too shy to speak it. English was the language of freedom and emigration to the United States and everyone in Vietnam was learning it, to judge from the manuals on sale everywhere. Nguyen’s brother showed me his: slightly tattered, it contained as reading practice a story about three children who, during the Russian Revolution, heard that Lenin was going hungry and gave him their lunchtime portion of bread which, despite his own need, he distributed to other children. There was also a story set in an American maternity hospital, in which a nurse, emerging from the delivery room, asked a group of waiting fathers-to-be, ‘Comrades, which of you is Mr White?’

Nguyen’s brother then showed me a book in Vietnamese that I had seen in many shop windows and on stalls, and which he was reading with great care. It was a translation of Mark H. McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, and it was the most popular book in Southern Vietnam. (I wondered whether Mr McCormack received his royalties in dong.) One of the things which presumably even this book didn’t teach you was how to obtain a motorbike in Vietnam. Nguyen’s brother was quite frank and unashamed about this: he worked for a government organisation where he was so obstructive that people eventually bribed him to do what he was supposed to do anyway.

‘Government people get 20 litres of gas a month free,’ said Nguyen, taking me for a spin on his brother’s Honda. I had the impression that Nguyen was not altogether glad of his brother’s good fortune.

Before we left, Nguyen’s brother asked me how many teeth I had. The usual number, I replied, and asked why he wanted to know. Because, he said, he had heard that to meet someone with 36 or 40 teeth was lucky (and obviously a foreigner was more likely to be deformed). Luck in his case, as in so many others, meant emigration to the United States: alas, my dentition could not help him achieve his ambition.

In the afternoon, Nguyen and I went to a football match between a visiting team from the Philippines (representing the San Miguel brewery, whose pennants fluttered around the stadium) and a local team. Before the match begun, Nguyen read the newspaper, a single sheet folded into four and printed as though it were a clandestine publication emanating from a distant cave during a civil war and smuggled at great danger into the city. Strange, then, to read in it of the knighthood of Rex Harrison. Next to this item was a blurred, inky photograph of a woman: Mary McCarthy. She had just died, and though there was an obituary of 500 words or more, her book Hanoi was not mentioned. Perhaps even the Vietnamese government found it embarrassing now.

Even Nguyen had heard of our British football hooligans.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘our hooligans are the best hooligans in the world.’

The match was not a very serious one. A couple of the Filipinos were overweight and their team played without a great deal of passion. They lost 3-0, but did not seem put out by it. This, I thought, was sport as it ought to be: mildly diverting but nothing to riot about.

I was predisposed in favour of the young Filipinos. I had seen them earlier in the week at Saigon’s War Museum. There they had clambered laughing over the detritus of war, the tanks and artillery nothing more to them than suitable backgrounds for snapshots to show families back home. Of the tragedy implied by these artifacts they seemed to know nothing, despite the violence of their own land: an ignorance which I hoped would never be enlightened by their personal experience.

Within a week, a violent, though unsuccessful, coup had broken out in Manila.

The war is everywhere in Vietnam, inescapable, not in what you see but in your thoughts. A visitor to the country who knew nothing of its recent history would not conclude it had emerged only a few years ago from four decades of international and civil war. The only obvious evidence is the presence in every town of a War Museum, with mangled helicopters, jets, tanks and howitzers exhibited outside. And – to adapt slightly Spiro T. Agnew’s dictum about American slums – once you have seen one Vietnamese war museum, you have seen them all.

Triumphalist propaganda is now rare in Vietnam, at least by comparison with other communist states. I wondered why, and several possible explanations came to mind. First that the Vietnamese are naturally a modest people. Second that such propaganda would inflame a population tired of war and exasperated by the impoverishing economic mismanagement that followed it. (However, sensitivity of this kind is not usually characteristic of communist parties in power.) Third that triumphalist propaganda is paraded in inverse proportion to genuine triumph. The military victory of the Vietnamese was real enough for it not to require absurd embellishment. Whatever the reason, there is little outward gloating or self-glorification in Vietnam, and this is very pleasing.

Of course, the War Museums have their propaganda purpose and children in large groups are dutifully taken round them by teachers. As in most communist propaganda museums, however, I never saw anyone visit them apart from foreigners and children; as institutions, they were as dormant or extinct as churches in England.

They were not without interest, though. When one glimpses the power and sophistication of the weaponry the Americans deployed (a different type of bomb for every military eventuality), one wonders how they could possibly have failed to achieve their end. There were bombs that fragmented over huge distances, killing every living being in their path; bombs that set fire to the uninflammable; bombs weighing four tons that shook the ground as in an earthquake to destroy all subterranean installations; and bombs that defoliated whole forests. The weight, the mass of these things seemed disproportionate to the fragility of what was being attacked, a sledgehammer to crack a nut, an elephant to crush a flea. But the nut remained uncracked, the flea uncrushed.

In the Saigon museum there are terrible pictures. One of them shows a soldier, a presumed American, holding up the head of a decapitated Vietcong guerrilla with a long tatter of skin hanging where the neck should be. According to a guidebook to Vietnam that we bought in England, the American is laughing, though the photograph is indistinct and his laughter could just as well be a grimace of disgust or horror. Another photograph shows an American soldier with a large knife about to cut out the liver of a prisoner: that, at any rate, is the guidebook’s interpretation, which presumes the soldier is American, his victim is alive and that the knife wielded is about to cut out the liver.

I resisted the guidebook’s interpretation. Though I knew that all nations are capable of bestiality, I was reluctant to admit that people so culturally akin to me could behave in this way, at least as a matter of policy: for if they could, perhaps I could, too. And even if these photographs showed what they purported to show, how representative were they of American behaviour? It does not take a war, after all, to uncover instances of bestial behaviour among half a million men. And by what right, I continued, did the followers of General Giap, who once said ‘Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die on this earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little’ – by what right did the adherents of such a philosophy display photographs whose meaning derived solely from the preciousness of individual human life?

Still I trembled to look at them.

We went afterwards to visit the tunnels of Cu Chi, about forty miles from Saigon. This system of underground chambers and connecting passages, over 150 miles long, served as the headquarters of the Vietcong. The forested area in which it was constructed was completely defoliated during the war, but now, fifteen years later, scrubby trees had reappeared. A former colonel in the Vietcong gave us a brief lecture on the tunnels – how they had been hand-dug by peasants, their arrangement in three levels, the efforts of the Americans to destroy them – and then another officer took over to show us into the tunnels themselves.

We walked for a while in the scrub. Then the officer challenged us to find a nearby entrance to the tunnels. We looked around, tried a few tussocks unsuccessfully, and then gave up. Triumphantly, the officer showed us a trap door by our very feet, so well camouflaged that even after he had pointed it out we had difficulty in seeing it. He took us to underground kitchens with smokeless ovens, their exhaust vents so long that smoke was dissipated along them, imperceptible even to infra-red sensors; he took us to underground conference chambers where commanders had planned offensives and dormitories where the guerrillas slept, each with escape hatches to deeper, safer levels of the tunnels. He showed us booby traps for intruders into the tunnels, disguised pits furnished with pungi sticks, sharpened stakes on which they impaled themselves; he described how the guerrillas had dressed in American clothes and washed with American soap to confuse the alsatian dogs sent to track them down; he described the ways in which the guerrillas had combated the gas and water that the Americans pumped into the tunnels. And then he took us into the tunnels themselves, first assuring himself that we wanted to go and were not cardiac invalids.

They were not more than three and a half or four feet high, so that I moved along them by a method halfway between a crawl and a stoop. Although we were only in the upper level, the heat was stifling; every few yards I sank to my knees for rest. The tunnels were pitch dark, of course, and our torch beam revealed bats flying swiftly and silently towards us, so that it seemed a collision was inevitable. But the bats swerved, with miraculous infallibility, and at the last moment turned without losing speed in the direction from which they had come. After a few of the most strenuous minutes of my life – I am sure I should exaggerate if I were to estimate how many – we emerged into the bright sunlight which scorched my eyes, only a hundred yards or so from where we had entered the tunnels. 150 miles! My knees were weak, I poured sweat like a wrung sponge.

We bought drinks for the colonel and his junior – Coca-Cola smuggled from Singapore (the Americans maintain a complete embargo that forbids foreign subsidiaries of US companies to trade with Vietnam). They, like many others, had spent years in the tunnels. I duly expressed wonderment, and said that I could never, under any conceivable circumstances, emulate them.

‘You could,’ said the colonel, ‘if your country were in danger.’

No, I could not. I could envisage myself fighting in the streets against a foreign invader, so enraged for a time that I was indifferent to danger and my own death. I could be part of a canaille, I could throw bricks in a riot, I could hunt for a victim with a lynch mob: but I could not live in those tunnels for years on end, a soldier-termite, taking orders unquestioningly for the achievement of far-distant ends.

I was awe-struck. Awe, however, does not necessarily imply approval or agreement. One can admire the Pyramids without subscribing to the religious beliefs of the Pharaohs. It was self-evident that terror exercised by the Vietcong over the peasantry could not alone explain the construction of this eighth wonder of the world, or that anything other than unshakeable conviction could explain the resilience of the guerrillas who lived in the tunnels for years; but the tunnels struck me nevertheless as a monument to unreason, or at least to delusion, to the capacity of false (or at the very least dubious) ideas to take hold of human minds and exact savage sacrifices. Insincerity in human affairs is always a vice, but sincerity is not always a virtue.

A question – perhaps the question – went through my mind like a refrain, as a snatch of tune that, though unloved, will not go away: was it worth it? Later, in Hanoi, I received an unequivocal answer.

There we met Binh, a chemical engineer. He was in his late thirties, and had spent ten years in the North Vietnamese army, some of them guarding American prisoners of war in bamboo prisons in the jungle. He spoke without bitterness of those years; neither, of course, was he nostalgic. He talked of the Americans with a faint twinkle of amusement in his eye. He did not hate or despise them, he was far too intelligent for that; he thought of them rather as people who, in Vietnam, had been out of their natural element and therefore had floundered.

They had not been good soldiers, for obvious reasons. Most of them were conscripts, anxious only to survive their year in Vietnam and return home safely. When they went on patrol in the jungle, they sprayed their gunfire indiscriminately to exhaust their ammunition as quickly as possible, returning afterwards to base. The guerrillas, by contrast, had only a few bullets each, and they never fired without careful aim. The Americans were loaded down with equipment and supplies, reducing their manoeuvrability. The Vietnamese, other than their weapons, carried only a handful of rice. And it seemed that the Americans, used to a high standard of living, could not live without certain comforts and even luxuries. Binh had seen helicopters hovering over platoons of American soldiers, spraying them with water for showers. The Vietnamese, a fastidious people about personal cleanliness, had made do with whatever they could find in the jungle. The hard life they had endured since birth made them tough and adaptable. A life of abundance does not make good soldiers.

I asked why the Vietnamese – why he – had fought so hard and so long?

‘We believed,’ replied Binh.

For years the Vietnamese were told by their leaders that they had only to defeat their enemies, both external and internal, to become free and prosperous. They believed what they were told because they had no knowledge from any other source. They knew nothing of the true history of the Soviet Union; they knew nothing of life in western countries. And the bombs seemed to confirm what the leaders said.

Well, belief was a thing of the past. Fifteen years later, they were not free and they were not prosperous, despite two further wars. The people of Vietnam had drawn their own conclusions.

As we spoke, we walked together through the huge and echoingly empty Revolutionary Museum. We paused for a time at an enlarged copy of a document in French: the respectful submission of Ho Chi Minh to the Versailles peace conference in 1919. It asked for untrammelled freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom to travel and the same protection under the law for Vietnamese as for French citizens. These requests were, of course, arrogantly turned down, or worse still, ignored: had they been acceded to with a good grace, the history of the world might have been different. I translated Ho Chi Minh’s requests for Binh – knowledge of French is dying out now in Vietnam – and then I asked him how many of these desiderata had been achieved in the intervening seventy years. He laughed, this time with a certain bitterness.

Binh had once been sent to Belgium for three months on a training course. It was not only techniques in chemistry he learnt there: he also learnt what it was to be free.

‘They tell us you are oppressed,’ he said. ‘But we see that you are the only free people in the world, the only people who go where they like and do what they like. So only the oppressed are free!’

Unlike many intellectuals in the west, Binh had no doubts about the reality of our freedom. He would have found the mental contortions of philosophers and others to prove that in reality the citizens of liberal democracies were no freer than those of communist dictatorships bizarre, and quite possibly obscene. Of the existence of intellectual fashions – ideas worn and then discarded like clothes – he probably knew nothing.

‘Do you think, then,’ I asked sotto voce, as if about to utter a blasphemy in the inner sanctum of a religious cult, ‘that Ho Chi Minh deceived you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do many Vietnamese think this?’

‘Yes.’

Coming from a man who was not an unthinking opponent of Ho Chi Minh’s cause, but rather from one who had devoted ten years of his life to fighting for it, these conclusions were not without a certain impact. They had been bought, so to speak, exceedingly dear.

On the Sunday after our arrival, local government elections were held throughout Vietnam. A few red banners were slung across the streets in Saigon, one or two vans were fitted up with loudspeakers and went round the city pretending to electioneer, and posters appeared with pictures of the candidates. Since they were all chosen by the Party and two thirds of them were certain to be ‘elected’, excitement on the day was at less than fever pitch. The polling stations were in public buildings, turned for the occasion into secular shrines, draped in red, with large plaster busts of Ho Chi Minh presiding over this farcical simulacrum of democracy. Not only was there no choice of candidates, but the electorate had no choice as to whether to exercise its lack of choice: voting, if that is the word, was compulsory.

Nothing could better have illustrated the pathological dishonesty of communists. While they decried the illusory nature of bourgeois democracy, they copied its forms (down to the secret ballot) but deprived them of all content, at the same time claiming to have created a more perfect, ‘truer’ democracy. And yet they knew all along that democracy and communism are quite incompatible. When Harrison Salisbury went to Hanoi in 1966, the North Vietnamese convinced him that their aim was not the forcible reunification of the country under communist dictatorship. When Salisbury had suggested such a thing to the then Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, he ‘displayed one of the few signs of anger which marked his lengthy discussion’, and he said that no one in the North had this ‘stupid, criminal idea’ in mind. And Le Duan, then First Secretary of the North Vietnamese Communist Party, made a speech to army cadets (but almost certainly for Salisbury’s willing consumption) in which he said that when the war ended there would be ‘Socialism in the North, democracy in the South’.

Democracy and socialism – opposites, not synonyms.

The elections in Saigon were a sublime irrelevance. Not a single person gave them a moment’s thought, and as soon as they were over all trace of them disappeared from the streets, the red drapes and busts of Ho put away until the next electoral charade, intellectually and emotionally as satisfying and authentic as Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess in the gardens of Versailles. Life after the elections did not return to normal for the simple reason that it had never been disturbed by them.

Saigon’s Chinatown, where perhaps half a million people lived, was indistinguishable from any bustling, if poor, South East Asian city with a large Chinese community. The old covered market, built by a rich Chinese merchant during the colonial era, was once more the focus of life. The triumphant communists, with their mandarin disdain of trade, had pulled down the statue of the merchant that once adorned the centre of the market, and reduced the market itself to secondary importance by the simple expedient of encouraging shortages and introducing rationing; but the belated recognition that there might, after all, be something to be said for the virtues of free exchange had returned the market to ‘normal’ – at least for the time being. This qualification is necessary because the Secretary General of the Party has emphasised that under socialism, the object of trade is not profit: rather, its purpose is to facilitate the construction of ‘large-scale socialist industry’ at some time in the future. As an example of what he meant, he cited Lenin’s New Economic Policy: a historical example that might not bring much comfort to the market traders, if they stopped to think about it.

Not that they appeared to be sparing much thought for the morrow: sufficient unto the day were the profits thereof. A happy buzz of bargaining, gossip and laughter rose ceaselessly up to the roof. In the market was displayed a variety of produce bewildering to people unschooled in Chinese cookery and medicine; our fascination with what for them were everyday things greatly amused the stallholders. Butchers sold every last part of the carcasses of beasts: was goat’s trachea a delicacy, a sovereign remedy, a love potion, or merely the meat of the poor? There were pyramids of spices and vats of sticky preserves; there were little restaurants where people concentrated with seemingly fierce intensity upon consuming their noodle soup, their chorus of slurps a sharp reminder of the cultural relativity of table manners. And then there were stalls with imported toiletries: Thai forgeries, or imitations, of famous brands, such as Colligate, Cammay and Luxx.

Not a hundred yards from the market we visited a Chinese temple, on a street filled with a seemingly random ferment of rickshaws and carts, bicycles and pedicabs. The temple was an island of calm where all agitation ceased in the tapering smoke of incense. From time to time, when someone offered up some money, the gong was struck, and a soothing basso profundo growl moved slowly and with dignity through the red-columned halls of the temple. Old ladies in black pyjamas came to make their obeisances to their ancestors and to the goddess of the sea, whose temple it was: she was the deity worshipped by the Saigon Chinese, for she had protected their ancestors on their journey four centuries before when they migrated from south China to Vietnam. This was a religion whose entrails I could never enter: syncretic, with a shifting doctrine, half-philosophy, half-superstition, a way of life more than a dogma. Shut out from its meaning, I could only observe a few of its externals.

The temple guardian asked us to sign the visitors’ book and append our comments. What a rich source such books will one day provide for future historians with an interest in social psychology! One wonders what will they make, for example, of the American visitor who said of the temple that it was very beautiful, and wished that Americans had something to be as proud of (as if Manhattan, San Francisco, Harvard, the Library of Congress, the Constitution, were nothing). Will they understand the complex dynamics of guilt and ignorance that underlie this remark? And what will they make of the Frenchman who wrote that the temple was very pleasant to visit, but it was a shame about the conditions in which its turtle (symbolic of long life) was kept, adding a sketch of a turtle enclosed by prison bars? Will they regard this as an instance of terminal hypersensibility, complicated by fulminating moral absolutism? I should have liked to gather further philosophical gems from the visitors’ book, but the guardian grew impatient: he wanted me to write something, not read what others had written.

As an author, I decided on succinctness. ‘Very nice’, I wrote.

The market and the temple reminded us that not everything in life is political. But it was not possible to escape politics for long: we were taken by a guide to see the presidential palace of what is invariably known as ‘the former regime’.

It stands empty in a large park in the centre of the city, a decaying and charmless monument to the modernity of the sixties, when it was built to replace its French predecessor, destroyed by fire. Large without grandeur, its concrete, glass, stone and steel structure is entirely angular, as though curves imply weakness. Its architect – a Vietnamese, the guide told us, though whether with pride or shame I couldn’t quite tell – had obviously been concerned only that his palace should be considered utterly up to date, forgetting as all avant-gardists do that modernity without beauty is the most ephemeral and worthless of all virtues. The furnishings of the palace were more or less intact, though a little musty, untouched since the day the North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the park and the last president of South Vietnam, General Duong Van Minh, surrendered. The gates themselves were not directly in front of the main entrance to the palace but slightly to the side, such an arrangement (according to Chinese superstition) impeding the entry of evil spirits. Also impeding the entry of these spirits – though not the tanks – was a small pond, whose stagnant waters were now fishless. The furniture in the palace was largely of Scandinavian inspiration, the decorations Chinese. This extreme uncertainty of taste seemed to symbolise other, more serious uncertainties: but of course, I was touring the palace with the benefit of hindsight.

We peered in at the cabinet room. To judge from the number of seats, South Vietnam was never short of ministers. The cabinet table, said the guide, was the one that General Maxwell Taylor, the American ambassador, used to pound with his fist in his frustration with America’s ‘puppets’. The room was now unused, silent; I imagined the general, furious, imbued with a sense of historical destiny and of his own place in it, raging intemperately, going red in the face, and I reflected on the folly of passion. No, henceforth I should always have the transitoriness of all sublunary things firmly and equably in sight, and never again lose my temper – at least, not until the next time.

We passed from the ‘public’ areas of the palace – the reception and banqueting halls, ministerial committee rooms, and so forth – to the private apartments of the presidential family. Considering their reputation for unbridled corruption, the presidents of South Vietnam lived, at least in the palace itself, on a scale that was modest enough. Built around a small open courtyard covered with grenade-proof netting, their bed and dining rooms were no larger than those of an ordinarily prosperous European family. The private apartments did, it is true, contain a discotheque and games room in the very worst taste of the time, which no doubt indicates the presidents were frivolous vulgarians; but the architecture was not that of megalomania, only of profound mediocrity. The staircases, for example, would not have been out of place in a provincial office of the Department of Health and Social Security.

We had the opportunity to compare these living quarters with those of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, preserved as a national shrine. There can be no doubt, at least in the negative sense, about Ho’s motives in struggling for power for so many years: he did not wish to dwell in marble halls. He refused, for example, to move into the old Governor-General’s palace when the French departed for good and all. Rather, he had a wooden pavilion of great simplicity and no great size built in the grounds, overlooking an ornamental lake whose enormous goldfish he used to feed. This pavilion, built on two floors, is elegant, the wood very fine; the upper floor has Ho’s two private rooms, a little study with simple but refined wooden furniture and a bookcase with volumes of Lenin and a photograph of the master, and a bedroom with mosquito screens and net. Downstairs is the room in which Ho used to receive the other leaders, the books, all political, in English, French and Russian (he spoke Chinese fluently too), that he was reading at his death still piled reverently on the table before his seat.

What does one make of the difference between the way Ho Chi Minh and the presidents of South Vietnam lived? At every point of comparison, of course, Ho emerges immeasurably the superior. Intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced, incorruptible, a brilliant linguist: he was, indeed, everything a philosopher-king should be. By contrast, the presidents of South Vietnam were shabby place-seekers, nepotistic, cowardly, avaricious and unprincipled.

Yet when it came to votes with the feet, who received more of them? Who created a country from which scores, or hundreds, of thousands have fled in boats, on rafts, on anything that will float for a time, through shark and pirate infested waters, in desperate search of somewhere better?

For all Ho’s virtues and talents, his personal honesty, bravery and devotion, one feels a shudder as one inspects his little house. There is something not quite human about it: in a country where family life is so important, there is not the faintest indication of an emotional tie to another human being. I prefer my saints to live in caves and not to try to impose their standards on the world: for single-mindedness is a cold virtue. Chernyshevsky, Lenin’s hero, wrote (approvingly) that ‘A man with an ardent love of goodness cannot but be a sombre monster.’

Ho was not always thus, far from it: he went through a dandy stage in Paris in the twenties. He even danced and went to the opera. It might therefore be said by way of extenuation that he eventually reacted against the intransigent arrogance of the French colonialism that so cruelly humiliated his ancient, proud and civilized people. But this is at best an explanation, and a partial one at that, not an exculpation. After all, he had observed at first hand the unprecedented tyranny of Stalinism: if he mistook it for freedom he was foolish, if he admired it he was evil. People who love freedom do not drink at the fount of despotism to become despots themselves.

If I had seen the discotheque in the ‘Puppet Presidential Palace’ after rather than before I visited Ho Chi Minh’s house, perhaps I should have thought of it not as a tasteless excrescence but as a welcome sign of human frailty: the very quality that explains why votes with the feet favour the frail.

To escape politics once more we took a boat with a dragon prow on the tea brown Mekong and visited an island in the river. It was ten kilometres long and I should have said it was a paradise had I not heard a mother shrilly scolding her fourteen-year-old son for spending the whole day in a tea-house with a pool table instead of studying hard at school and getting a good job with the government. The island was irrigated throughout by beautifully cut canals crossed by bridges of bamboo, and everywhere there were exotic fruit trees (exotic, that is, to us), coconut palms, bamboo groves, hibiscus hedges and flower gardens.

Five thousand people lived on the island; they owned their land, they fished, and many of their homes were two centuries old, displaying a refinement of taste I might have called aristocratic had not the people been peasants and fishermen. The houses were open to the breeze; their roofs were tiled and their eaves curved gently upwards in the Chinese fashion. There was little in the way of outer walls and so the rooms were almost open spaces. Each house had a shrine to the ancestors and the magnificent old wooden pillars and rafters of the house had gilded Chinese characters carved into them. It was tempting to imagine the island as an undisturbed remnant of some golden age, a pre-communist, pre-colonial Vietnam that might one day revive. Like all visions of a perfect past, mine was a chimera: the island had been bombed and shelled in the war, having been a suspected guerrilla stronghold. But all that seemed long ago and supremely irrelevant now.

In Hue, the old imperial capital four hundred miles north of Saigon, we again escaped into a vision of the past. What remains of Hue is for the most part not very ancient, but it tells of a high culture that has now been liquidated. Its last adept was the emperor Bao Dai, deposed by Ho in 1945, but still living (in Paris). Bao Dai was an intelligent man, but – having been reduced all his life to an ornament of someone else’s power – not a serious one: and nothing could better have illustrated the refined frivolity of his court than a palace game in which he became expert. The game entailed bouncing a stick on its end on the ground and getting it to enter a vase with a tiny aperture standing at some distance. This was not conspicuous consumption: it was conspicuous uselessness, the end product of a futile feudalism. Bao Dai was the last scion of a lineage of scholar-emperors who fought vainly to preserve their independence and the Confucian heritage of Vietnam. When he left Vietnam and took initial refuge in Hong Kong, he went to the movies every afternoon: his favourite actress was Jeanette MacDonald.

If Vietnam had had a different history, Hue would now be full of tourists. As it was, the hotel was empty – one walked through it as though one had come to the wrong place – and the fact that another hotel was under construction next door, in preparation for a hoped-for influx of foreigners, seemed as much a work of faith as any medieval cathedral, though of somewhat lesser aesthetic appeal. On the back of my bedroom door were fire instructions, information about laundry services and checkout times, in English, French and Russian. The Russian notice had been almost entirely scratched off. By whom, I wondered? By French or American visitors, humiliated by this evidence of the extension of Soviet power and influence, made possible by their own military defeats? Or by Vietnamese staff of the hotel, angered by the poverty and meanness of the new colonists, who spent what little money they had buying up electronic goods in Vietnamese markets for sale at huge profit at home?

Alas, war and economic devastation can bring certain small advantages to travellers who visit monuments. They are not overrun by vulgar tourists (so unlike themselves), who crave drinks and other refreshments at every step, who want souvenirs of what they scarcely bestow a glance upon, and who take snapshots of Bill with his arms around Buddha. And so we were able to contemplate the tombs of the emperors – Bao Dai’s ancestors – in a tranquillity that mere peace could never have brought.

The tombs are in a vast area of forested hills reserved for them. One of the most beautiful is that of Tu Duc, the last truly independent emperor, who opposed the French but in the end surrendered to them. At a time when his position looked hopeless, he published a poignant cri de coeur:

 

Never has an era seen such sadness, never a year more anguish. Above me, I fear the edicts of heaven. Below, the tribulations of the people trouble my days and nights. Deep in my heart I tremble and blush, finding neither words nor actions to help my subjects…

 

Later, during a respite in the French advance, he put to death thousands of Vietnamese Catholics because they had helped or favoured the French. By those who supported colonialism he was portrayed as a bloodthirsty monster; by others, as an essentially gentle man brought to this pass by the terrible logic of his situation. Perhaps there are historical analogies here.

Yet if the tomb of Tu Duc is anything to go by, he was a gentle, not a vicious, man. He spent many days there before he died in 1858, fishing from the small pavilion beside the lotus pond that confers such transcendent calm upon the scene. Apparently sterile, he frolicked there with his concubines, who made him jasmine tea using only the dew that formed on lotus leaves, infusing it overnight in their blossoms. As for the tomb itself, through a deserted courtyard with frangipani trees and stone elephants, it does not contain the emperor’s body, which is buried in an unknown place somewhere in the surrounding hills to prevent robbery and desecration of the imperial finery.

If one can compare their lives, why not the tombs of Tu Duc and Ho Chi Minh? There is, of course, a slight unfairness here: Tu Duc endorsed his own tomb, while Ho Chi Minh expressly forbad any memorialisation of himself. In his will, in which he anticipated joining ‘Karl Marx, Lenin and other revolutionary elders’ (where, one is tempted to ask?), he requested that ‘my remains be incinerated… Not only is [cremation] good for the living from the point of view of hygiene, it also saves land. When we have a plentiful supply of electricity, “electric cremation” will be even better.’

Who now can say that communism, unlike religion, offers no consolation for the fact of death? Who is so philistine that the prospect of a hygienic electric cremation, power cuts permitting, will not compensate for an eternity of non-being?

Anyway, Uncle Ho did not get what he said he wanted. Instead, Mavsolexport, the giant Soviet mausoleum construction, maintenance and export company, which specialises in granite review stands, the embalming of national heroes and goose-step training, was called in. The company constructed a masterpiece of the genre, turning a little bit of Hanoi into Red Square. Inside the tomb lie the waxen remains of Ho. Unfortunately, we could not see them because the tomb was closed for two months’ annual maintenance. Even when it is not under repair, however, the tomb of the great egalitarian is not easy for ordinary Vietnamese to penetrate; harder, in fact, than the tomb of the feudal Tu Duc, for no fewer than four separate permissions, each available only from a different office, are required.

One of history’s small ironies, perhaps. But my sympathy for Ho is somewhat limited: for I have never wholly believed disavowals by dictators of the personality cults of which they were the object.

By common consent, the most beautiful of the emperors’ tombs in Hue is that of Minh Mang, in whose reign the first American set foot in Vietnam, in 1820. The tomb was on the other bank of the Perfumed River, which we crossed in a boat hired at a small and grindingly poor riverside market where, a trifle optimistically, we were offered pieces of freshly slaughtered pig for sale.

The tomb was exquisite. It was in just that state of decay that induces reflection on the transitoriness of earthly existence, without at all obscuring the original design. The first buildings of the tomb to which we came were undistinguished, simple outhouses with crumbling plasterwork, in whose shelter a poor family lived, its firewood stacked against a wall. We wondered whether the beauty of the tomb had not perhaps been exaggerated, but we were soon to be convinced that no words existed with which to do it. For in the centre of a square lotus pond, reached by four stone pathways, was a decorated wooden pavilion in the most perfect of perfect taste. Around the pavilion were formal gardens, and the whole tomb complex was in the shadow of hills covered in pine forest, so that the refined and artificial was united seamlessly with the wild and natural.

We climbed to the upper floor of the pavilion. There was silence, except for the birds and the occasional echoing howl of what I took to be a monkey: of our fellow man there was no sign. At once an almost mystical tranquillity enveloped us: silence was the only way of expressing it.

All too soon, we had to leave, but the moments of peace I shall always be able to recall.

Alas, it is the fate of intellectuals to leave no experience, however ravishing, to remain in the memory untainted by theorising. I soon began to muse on my own sensibility: on how different my experience of the tomb of Minh Mang might have been had other people – as I imagined them, eating ice cream, dropping litter and uttering loud inanities – been present there. In my innermost heart, then, was I a believer in an aristocracy of feeling, and not a democrat at all? No: in the last analysis, I attached no great significance to my own exquisite emotions. I was merely glad to have had the occasion to experience them.

We left the tombs of Hue by car. We took with us a peasant and her young son who had never been in a car before. They sat in the front seat, transfixed by the novelty, the comfort, the speed. Their emotions were too deep for speech.

Everyone remarks upon the French character of Hanoi. The leafy avenues, the colonial architecture, the opera house – all survived the war intact. During his visit to Hanoi in 1967, Harrison Salisbury was told that the government expected the city to be utterly destroyed by bombing: a prospect they took with what he called ‘aplomb’ since Hanoi was considered by them an ugly old city that symbolised the French occupation. After the war, they were going to build a new capital of their own, an example, perhaps, of what the Reverend Dr William Sloan Coffin, another American visitor to North Vietnam, called ‘passion rekindled by…bomb damage’.

Hanoi is not an ugly city, quite the contrary, as every citizen I asked now agreed; and I was far from alone in supposing that a capital built by the present government to replace it was unlikely to be an improvement.

We stayed at the Thong Nhat (Reunification) Hotel, once the Metropole. The first person I saw in the lobby was obviously a journalist, though I am not sure how I knew it even before she imperiously demanded a line to London to report the explosions she heard the night before in Phnom Penh. The somewhat glutinous response of the hotel staff further fanned the flame of her self-importance.

The Thong Nhat is large, old and run down. Well-fed rats circumambulate the vast dining room from time to time with the impunity of household pets; one hesitates before turning on a light or a ceiling fan because of the possibility of electric shocks from the switch; and a Belgian worker for Médecins sans frontières told me that the two light bulbs in his room had exploded. As for the staff, they have that special reluctance to oblige, that stony-faced obstructiveness that one learns to love so in communist countries. It was the first and last time we encountered it in Vietnam.

We were told that a French company was soon to renovate the hotel, to bring it up to ‘international standards’. For my part, I very much regretted it. I am a connoisseur of seediness, and I particularly liked the enormous baths, big enough to swim in, with their enamel coating furred by skin-scraping deposits from the unsoftened water, and the huge Hungarian boilers that produced seismic rumbling sounds, whistles and occasional spurts of cold water, unpredictably emitting gushes of boiling liquid the colour of rust every forty-eight or seventy-two hours. How dull and predictable by comparison good plumbing will be!

And what of the mattresses, unchanged since colonial times, with their deep concavity, so that one either rolls helplessly towards the centre of the bed or clings to the edge as in a shipwreck? What will there be to say about mattresses that merely allow one a good night’s sleep?

The first time we left the hotel, a Vietnamese aged about sixty, dressed in a lumpy suit and an unfashionable broad tie, bowed us through the door before him.

‘Everything,’ he said in excellent English, ‘must be for foreign visitors first.’

He was polite, but his words made me shiver: they had the unpleasant timbre of langue de bois. ‘After you’ would have sufficed; I thought his manner bore the same relationship to friendliness as pornography does to love. Perhaps what the southerners had told us with a shudder about northerners was true after all: they’re communists up there.

Out in the street, what the southerners said of their northern compatriots seemed at first to be true. The people who streamed past us, both on foot and on bicycles, were silent and unsmiling. Their expressions seemed grim and their clothes were drab. Many of the men wore olive-coloured topees, as though in some deadly serious satire on colonial manners. Or perhaps they had taken to heart Albert Schweitzer’s warnings about the deadly effects on the brain of a single beam of tropical light falling, even for a fraction of an instant, directly on to the scalp (though Schweitzer referred only to the brains of whites). There were more men in military uniform than elsewhere in Vietnam, and even civilian clothes, especially for men, tended to the military colours of khaki and camouflage green. We passed a state department store, recognisable as such at once by its shoddy goods stacked in dusty chaos, the immobility of the store assistants, the shuffling gait of the customers and the byzantine method of payment.

I gazed with special attention at the complexions of the people in Hanoi. This was because Mary McCarthy had written in 1968 of her visit to a school:

 

The boys were good-looking, some beautiful even, with lustrous hair, shining eyes, soft clear skin – no acne in North Vietnam.

 

Alas, acne had returned to North Vietnam, possibly with the economic reforms: not in epidemic proportions, but still it was there, as were the red teeth of betel-chewing, also absent during Miss McCarthy’s visit.

These observations of hers were not subsequently a source of great pride to Miss McCarthy. Indeed, in the blurb of her novel Cannibals and Missionaries she is described as the author of seventeen books, and Hanoi is not listed among them – a slight revision of history of her very own. But her book was nevertheless representative of an entire, if small, genre: the miracles of Ho as related by Susan Sontag, assorted clergymen, academics and journalists.

We found a small miracle of our own in Hanoi, though it was not such as to excite the admiration of intellectuals or men of God, quite the reverse. After forty years of virtuous austerity, when the communists took over effective power from the Japanese and the French were unable to re-establish their authority, the inhabitants of Hanoi were discovering pleasure! Our initial impressions notwithstanding, the effects of the economic reforms had reached even here. A large part of the city was given over to an outdoor market, which had sprung up immediately permission was granted, and at night the stalls in street after street were lit with powerful single light bulbs, creating a dazzling and beautiful effect in a city not otherwise notable for the brightness of its illuminations. Crowds strolled in these streets, admiring what a few months before had been denounced, rejected, scorned, vilified (but not by them). Restaurants had started up, and pavement cafés; there were ice cream stalls and, most surprising of all, dance halls with popular music and coloured lights. Lovers walked arm in arm, their thoughts manifestly not on building socialism, which even Mary McCarthy admits is ‘a sometimes zestless affair’. In one of the parks, a party of pleasantly drunk young Vietnamese invited me for a drink and insisted on giving me a cigarette, though I do not smoke. Hanoi proved there is life after death.

How Mary McCarthy and her ilk would have hated it, how their lips would have curled! It was not happiness they were seeking in Hanoi but redemption from sin. No medieval monk ever outdid Miss McCarthy in the luxuriance of his penitential reflections, or in the theological subtlety of his special pleading. As I re-read Hanoi in my room in the Thong Nhat, in which incidentally there were no longer any ‘sheets of toilet paper laid out on a box in a fan pattern’ as in Miss McCarthy’s day, I found myself in a strange emotional limbo between rage and laughter, the nearest I have come to what psychiatrists call a mixed affective state.

Followed absolutely everywhere by ‘comrades of the Peace Committee’, and even to the lavatory by a ‘young woman interpreter’ who carried a tin helmet for her protection against sudden air-raids, and who, after she had finished in the lavatory, ‘softly led [her] back’, Mary McCarthy concluded only that everyone in North Vietnam was most solicitous of her welfare. That a none-too-subtle form of surveillance and control was being exerted did not for a single moment occur to her. If she had been followed to the lavatory in Pinochet’s Chile, I imagine she might have written something different.

Nothing troubled her about North Vietnam, however, armour-plated as she was against the urgings of common sense. Remarking on the formulaic dullness and repetitiousness of the news media, she regretted the western writer’s ‘convention of freshness’, capitalist society having made ‘originality…a sort of fringe benefit’. As for ‘the license to criticize’, it ‘was just another capitalist luxury, a waste product of the system…access to information that does not lead to action may actually be unhealthy…for a body politic.’ And visiting American pilots shot down over Vietnam she commented, ‘If these men have been robotized…it had been an insensible process starting in grade school and finished off by the army.’ (I wondered what the man I met in Saigon’s main post office, who had just been released after thirteen years in a re-education camp, would have made of her opinion.) In any case, brain-washing was not really nasty because, unlike in the Free World, where ‘to judge by its artifacts, nobody is free to make a decision to be different from what he is’, in the un-Free World, ‘the opposite is assumed’ and they, the North Vietnamese, ‘accept change axiomatically as a revolutionary possibility in human conduct – which Western liberals do not’ – the explanation of why such liberals are ‘tolerant of difference’ while the North Vietnamese are not.

But the crucial passage in Hanoi is that in which Miss McCarthy recounts her interview with the Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong. The question that preoccupied her was that of the type of society Vietnam would become after the war was over. She was worried lest ‘the enemy, capitalism, repulsed by air and foiled by land in the sister South, should creep in the back way…’

Pham Van Dong was her man all right. He spoke of material scarcity in Vietnam ‘as a piece of good luck’. But what really endeared him to the visiting American, who was brought up in a rich Chicago family and had never quite got round to renouncing worldly wealth, was that ‘he spoke of our automobile-TV culture as of something distastefully gross and heavy… With a full-lipped contempt…he rejected the notion of a socialist consumer society.’ To him (as to all the Vietnamese Miss McCarthy met) American life appeared ‘not just grotesque, but backward, primitive, pitiably undeveloped, probably because of its quality of infantile dependency.’

The Prime Minister’s rejection of a consumer society – on whose behalf and by what right he was rejecting it she did not think to enquire – gave rise to the following reflection:

 

In Vietnam I perceived – what doubtless I should have known before – that the fear of decentralisation and local autonomy evinced by communist leaders is not necessarily an abject solicitude for their own continuance in power; it is also a fear of human nature as found in their countrymen, on the assumption that modern man is ‘naturally’ a capitalist accumulator, already spotted with that first sin in his mother’s womb and ceaselessly beset by marketing temptations: if you let workers run factories, they will soon be manufacturing Cadillacs because ‘the consumer wants them’.

 

There we have it, the fons et origo of the appeal to intellectuals of socialism: snobbery. Left to themselves, people invariably display bad taste (a crime for which Lukacs, the Hungarian Marxist luminary who was also a murderer, thought they should be punished). Therefore, they must not be left to themselves. Philosopher kings – the Pham Van Dongs and Mary McCarthys – must teach the people what they ‘really’ want, and to reject what they merely think they want because they have been corrupted, deformed and alienated by advertising and other capitalist techniques. The ideal of socialists is thus not a society of perfect justice: it is a society where people do not put plaster ducks on their walls.

But bad taste was returning to Hanoi and the people loved it.

After I left Vietnam, I encountered some of the boat people in camps and prisons in Hong Kong and Bangkok. They were, of course, adamantly opposed to returning to their homeland. In Hong Kong they lived in crowded camps, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, a whole family living in a space the size of a large tea chest. If anything, conditions in Thailand were worse. Yet many of the people would rather have stayed in such conditions for years than again face life in Vietnam.

How would apologists explain this desperate exodus from a country whose government they so recently applauded? The first wave of boat people might plausibly be represented as the flight of ‘collaborators’ with the old regime. Indeed, in Bangkok I had a long talk with a man who had worked in the American and Filipino embassies, who had tried to escape five times before succeeding, who had been denied all work since ‘liberation’ and who had been confined to his home district of the city, having to report to his local committee three times a week. He was definitely a man of the old type.

But the 50,000 refugees (or economic migrants) in Hong Kong were almost all from the North, where they had known nothing but communism. They left from Haiphong harbour, under the noses of the officials whom they had bribed with their life savings. I saw the boats myself when I visited Haiphong (where Panamanian and other ships were being loaded with scrap metal, including bomb casings, from the war – it is an ill wind that blows no scrap metal merchant any good). The cost of a passage to Hong Kong per refugee was one or two ounces of gold, though sometimes the bribed officials arrested the refugees after taking their gold and put them in prison, from which they had to bribe their way out. And then they had to start again, saving gold for their passages out… The British government was trying to bribe Vietnam into taking the refugees back from Hong Kong – paying the equivalent of an ounce or two of gold per refugee. Misery and despair had thus been turned into lucratively traded commodities, as Marx would no doubt have expressed it.

Miss McCarthy almost lost her faith in Vietnam. ‘I’ve several times contemplated writing a real letter to Pham Van Dong (I get a Christmas card from him every year) asking him can’t you stop this, how is it possible for men like you to permit what’s going on?’

It never occurred to her, of course, that her original judgment of him was grotesquely wrong (‘magnetic allure…fiery, but also melancholy…emotional, impressionable…at the same time highly intellectual’). Or that the ideas she espoused inevitably had unpleasant consequences. No, somewhere there was a purer, better form of socialism, ‘with a human face’, living under which ‘would require quite an adjustment, but it would be so exciting that I hope one would be willing to sacrifice the comforts of life that one has become extremely used to.’

In the meantime, the Vietnamese would have to content themselves with such reforms as were granted. As Nguyen Van Linh put it (his style refreshingly free from the artificial need for originality):

 

After this plenum, the Party Secretariat and the Standing Committee of the Council of Ministers must quickly organise the implementation of the plenum’s resolution. In the spirit of concentrated guidance as in a military campaign we should closely follow the evolution and detect in time any deviation and mistakes, take necessary complementary measures, and review their implementation in each step…