[news] Time Magazine: Saigon Soars

[AnHai Doan <anhai@cs.washington.edu>]

This story appeared on the cover page of the Asian edition of Time 
Magazine. A significant event. It's interesting that the author calls 
Saigon "the most stubbornly romantic city on earth". What do you think, 
Hanoians? :-)

An interesting bit of news: Duong Van Minh will return from exile in 
France to his old villa in Saigon.


 JUNE 2, 1997 VOL.149 NO.22
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ASIA

Saigon Soars
Vietnam's leaders have discovered what the Americans and French learned
before: there's no way to tame this city's free-wheeling spirit

BY TIM LARIMER/HO CHI MINH CITY
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After all the guns of war now silenced, after all the dramatic helicopter
escapes and the invasion of communist tanks and troops, after a miserable
experiment with Soviet-style economics and the mass exodus of refugees on
rickety wooden boats, after all of the tragedy and heartache any one place
could possibly endure, Saigon, the most stubbornly romantic city on earth,
has sprung back to vibrant life.

The French couldn't control the Saigonese, the Americans couldn't figure
them out and their cousins from Hanoi couldn't convert them to socialism.
The war's victors may have renamed the city after Vietnam's founding father,
but it has never sounded right. After all these years, one thing,
at least, is clear: those who come to tame this tiger of a city end up tamed
themselves. And now the tiger is roaring with energy and self-confidence, no
longer exhausted and defeated by battle fatigue but revitalized as it claws
out of a post-apocalyptic slump.

"I spent half my life trying to get away from Vietnam," says Henry Lam, who
fled the country by boat in 1979 and has returned to run a steel factory to
supply Saigon's booming construction industry. "I had really bad feelings
for the place. But then I came back, and there's something in the air here.
You just feel it. You just know this place is going to take off. It's
magical."

After all these years, Saigon still seduces--even those who should know
better.

Hop on the back of a Honda Dream scooter, the breezy mode of transit that so
perfectly fits Saigon's carefree mood of the moment. Zip past the bright
neon of the nightclubs, around the festive circle near the graceful city
hall, and navigate a thoroughfare busy with transactions of the flesh trade.
Cruise down the wide boulevard named after Le Duan, the now-deceased
Communist Party leader who would turn in his grave if he could see what's
going on. The former U.S. embassy building, with the fragile-looking
staircase that carried the last Americans to their choppers of escape in
1975, for many years was Le Duan Street's most notable landmark. No more.
The sad, decaying monument to a long-passed era is eclipsed by a gleaming
new high-rise across the street, a discotheque around the corner, trendy
boutiques a block away, a Mercedes-Benz dealer and the city's tallest
edifice, a new 39-story tower. Le Duan has become Le Chic.

The motorcyclist weaves around the pedicab driver with his load of cement,
the pretty girls in flowing tunics on bicycles, the young punk racers with
gold studs in their ear lobes and Marlboros rolled up their T-shirt sleeves,
the budding tycoons cradling mobile phones, and the black bmw with its
tinted windows. It's a breathtaking ride. The driver maneuvers hair-raising
turns that he handles with the flick of a wrist, driving the way people live
in Saigon. Moving around obstacles, never stopping for them. Perpetually
looking ahead, never in the rear-view mirror. Avoiding eye contact with
drivers who get in the way, but maintaining a steady gaze on one objective:
getting wherever you're going as fast as you can. And looking good while
getting there, never revealing a worry or breaking a sweat, no matter how
dicey the situation. It's an ingrained strategy built on the lessons
Saigonese have learned from being in the eye of a geopolitical storm over
several generations. In Hanoi, the country's capital, the pace is more
deliberate, the approach one of patience. But in Saigon, what's here today
may be gone tomorrow. It's happened before, after all. "People say we all
work hard and only care about money. Maybe it's true. But we know how fast
it can disappear," says Tran Dinh Nghiem, 28, who is a typical Saigon
worker. That means he doesn't have one job. He has six or seven. He runs a
noodle shop with his sisters, operates a small factory that packages scented
towels for restaurants, teaches the piano, plays in a band and is
negotiating a deal to import used tires from Canada.

After all these years, Saigon still draws strength from its past. It was
April 30, 1975 when the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, and
19-year-old Ho Huy was one of the foot soldiers of that final assault. He was
naive and wide-eyed when he saw the city for the first time. Huy was
dispatched to guard a South Vietnamese army captain and his family in a
wealthy enclave on the opposite side of the Saigon River. For a month, he
lived in the family's house, ate with them, and slowly, in a delicate thawing
of tensions between soldiers from enemy armies, befriended them. "My father
liked Mr. Huy. He felt sorry for him being alone," says the host's daughter,
Dinh Thu Thuy, now 29. Recalls Huy, 41: "I tried to show them they didn't
have to be afraid." It was the beginning of an unusual relationship, the kind
of link Saigonese learn to cultivate in a city of frequently shifting
alliances. 

Like many northern cadres, Huy was sent to the Soviet Union to study, and
later to Prague to manage a tractor factory. When he returned to Vietnam in
1985, he took one look at Hanoi and at his hometown in northern Thanh Hoa
Province, and headed south. "I could do something with my own ideas here,"
he thought. "Perestroika was coming." The economic reform program the
Vietnamese called doi moi was still in its infancy, so Huy went to work for
a government tourism company, managing its fleet of cars.

Things hadn't gone well for Thuy's family. Her father, the former South
Vietnamese captain, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for anti-government
activities. Before the man died five years ago, Huy made him a promise: if
the former North Vietnamese soldier ever could, he would take care of the
southern family who befriended him. In 1993, with market reforms picking up
steam, Huy started his own taxi company, Mai Linh, with $30,000 and two
cars. Among the first people he hired were Thuy and her brother.

The conversion from comrade to capitalist didn't take long. "I quit the
Communists a long time ago," Huy says, though to hedge his bets, he keeps on
his desk a picture of party leader Do Muoi. Success didn't take long either.
Huy's venture now employs 1,000 workers and last year earned $3.5 million
from its fleet of 35 taxis and six Mercedes-Benz limousines, a travel
agency, a car repair shop and a newspaper distributor.

Northerners have been sent down from Hanoi over the years to rein in the
footloose Saigonese. But more than two decades after Saigon's fall, the
obvious question is, Who changed whom? Says Truong Tan Sang, the city's
personable and pragmatic 49-year-old Communist Party chief: "The people of
this city are very dynamic. The leadership has learned from them." A
historian, who asks not to be named, is more direct: "The leaders put in
charge of Saigon, they all are changed by Saigon. They all become
reformers." And listen to Pham Ngoc Suong, 62, a Communist Party stalwart
who in 1975 was put in charge of the city's shoe factories: "We don't care
what you call it, communism or capitalism. Whatever works. The old system
didn't bring us benefits, so we change."

Five years ago, Suong lobbied the government to let one of her factories,
which had been set up to pay off debts to the U.S.S.R., join an experiment
in privatization. Now called Hiep-An Joint Stock Co., it is 30% owned by the
state, 35% by employees who were given loans to buy shares and 35% by
private investors. Suong quickly switched production from shoes to slippers
and luggage and built a second factory. Her products are good enough to
export to Europe and the U.S., by way of South Korea.

But Vietnam's reforms are far from complete. Despite Suong's success and
similar gains by other private and semi-private enterprises, the government
has been painfully slow in dismantling lumbering state companies, including
708 of them in Ho Chi Minh City. "It is not much of an exaggeration to
characterize the present financial situation of the state-owned sector as a
time bomb," Swedish economist Ari Kokko writes in a new study. Just 12
enterprises have been partially privatized, and most of the rest are
debt-ridden and unproductive. Vietnamese economist Le Dang Doanh reports
that as much as one- third of state firms' equipment is useless.

While solidly credentialed communists like Suong are converts to reform, the
national leadership apparently isn't sold. "We have to admit the process is
slow," says economist Ton Si Kinh. Last year's Party Congress, a planning
affair held every five years, offered little hope for more rapid change. The
leaders asserted the state sector will remain dominant.

That's not a popular sentiment in Ho Chi Minh City, the country's economic
engine, where growth was 15% last year--well above the otherwise impressive
9% rate for the country as a whole. The city accounts for one-third of
Vietnam's industrial output, contributes a hefty share of tax revenues, is
home to one-third of the country's foreign investment and boasts household
incomes triple the national average.

The acting mayor, Vo Viet Thanh, acknowledges that the shift toward
capitalism has created its own set of problems. "Of course during the
process of developing a market economy there will be some hitches in certain
fields," he told an audience commemorating Saigon's "liberation day," April
30. "When people are enjoying rice they might choke. When eating fish, they
might swallow a bone. Should rice and fish be given up because of that?"

The question is how strict a diet the leadership will impose, for
capitalist-style excesses are dampening Saigon's glee like the frequent
mid-afternoon tropical rains. Many of the go-getters who had been paraded as
examples of Saigon's new business elite have apparently gone out of control.
Several are in jail, or in some cases, headed to the firing squad on fraud
and corruption charges. "They went from Rolls-Royces to a prison cell in a
few short years," says a prominent businessman. "Everybody is really nervous
right now. We all look around and wonder who will be next."

The public's appetite for sacrificial lambs compounds the insecurity. At a
recent trial of a high-profile company director, about 2,000 people waited
outside the courthouse. "He lost $50,000 in one card game and we make $50 a
month! He should die!" said one worker. The wish came true: the director was
sentenced to be shot.

After all these years, Saigon still confounds expectations. Just as Saigon
has recaptured the entrepreneurial and energetic pace of its Vietnam War
days, it has accepted back into the fold some of those who fled the country
after the communist takeover in 1975. In fact, the last president of South
Vietnam--Gen. Duong Van Minh served in the post for all of 42 hours before
Saigon collapsed--has reportedly asked to return from exile in France. A
government spokesman in Ho Chi Minh City confirmed the request and said
Vietnam would allow the ex-general to return. Workers have been sprucing up
his old home, a tree-shaded villa that his former chauffeur keeps watch
over. Outside the villa, painted on a concrete gatepost, remains one of the
signs of the old regime: the faded flag, yellow with red stripes, of South
Vietnam.

"They called us tu san mai ban--capitalists who sell their souls to
foreigners--and they treated us so poorly that what could we do but leave?"
asks one Vietnamese American who fled in the 1980s and returned last year to
run a small business. "It is so strange now to see how things have turned
around, because now they want me here. They want my money."

It's not an entirely cozy reunion, however, because this man in his 30s
refused, like many returning exiles, to allow his name to be used in print.
A woman who returned from the U.S. to teach school says immigration
officials asked her a battery of questions about her father, her escape from
Vietnam and her activities overseas. "I feel like they are watching me," she
complains.

Henry Lam was among the wealthy tu san mai ban. Most of his family's money
and property was confiscated after the Communists came to power; Lam was the
first family member to escape, but everyone else left later. Now he lives in
a modern villa built on land owned by Vietnam's military. He is general
director of the Australian-Vietnamese joint venture that owns the steel
factory he runs. "If you build a bridge, you need a lot of steel. You build
a dam, you build a new town, you build a house, you build a hotel, you need
steel," says Lam.

The steel girders of the new high-rises overshadow another side of Saigon
life. All the glamour and sheen of this bustling city can easily obscure the
fact that it is still filled with urban slums. Electricity in some
neighborhoods is cut every day, like clockwork, for several hours. More than
a quarter of the residents don't have running water. More than 100 of the
bridges in the city could collapse if they aren't repaired soon, according
to an official report. Two already have fallen. But the city has just
$250,000 to handle repairs. At least 1 million of the city's ballooning
population--now estimated at 5.5 million--are migrants from the countryside,
many of them living in Saigon illegally.

Ask Nguyen Hoang Kiet about Saigon's new prosperity and you'll get a shrug.
Is he wealthier? "I just try to get enough for food every day," he says.
Kiet, 29, is a bottom-feeder in Saigon's food chain. He scavenges the river
bed like a prospector panning for gold, and all he comes up with are worms.
A year ago, he packed up his wife and two sons onto an 8-m wooden boat and
snaked along the inlets of the Mekong Delta from Ben Tre to Saigon. Rural
areas like his have for the most part missed out on Saigon's economic boom,
and incomes are only a fifth as high as in the city.

In search of a better life, Kiet moored his family's boat in Saigon's Nhieu
Loc Canal. Cutting through the heart of the city, the fetid waters are not
an inviting place to set up a home. Human waste is dumped into the canal,
whose waters are an opaque black, covered in spots with an oily film and
polluted with garbage. Shanty- towns line the banks, their houses of bamboo
supported by stilts. Dozens of boats bob near Kiet's family. The boys, ages
8 and 5, don't go to school and rarely even step foot off the boat. Kiet
buys water for washing and drinking from residents on shore. He owns a
battery-powered black-and-white TV. When he arrived, people gave him a piece
of advice: there's money in worms. Twice a day, when the river tides
subside, he motors out on a smaller boat to the Saigon River. Neon-lit
billboards advertising Compaq, Canon and Tuborg illuminate Kiet's sturdy
body as he wades through waist-deep water, feels through the muck and scoops
up sludge with squirming red worms. As the water lightly laps against him, a
speedboat from a new deluxe apartment complex roars by, carrying well-heeled
residents home from work. They're the kind of people who will buy Kiet's
worms for their aquarium fish. On a good day, he sells enough to make $4. He
watches the sleek boat skim the river's surface. "I see those people and I
think, how do they get so much money and I am so poor?"

The city is trying to do something with desperately poor people like Kiet.
The shantytowns along the canal are being knocked down to make way for
apartment buildings and a park. It's a huge relocation project that if
completed will change the face of Saigon. Plans call for moving more than
700,000 residents from Nhieu Loc and other inner-city slums into new
satellite towns. Some resist moving, despite the squalid conditions. It
reminds them of the disastrous forced relocation of thousands of southerners
into what were called new economic zones in the late 1970s.

Duong Van Em watched in the searing heat as workers demolished the concrete
walls of the 20-sq-m house that he shared with his mother, two brothers,
sister-in-law and nephew. In exchange for leaving, he was given $5,000 to
buy a new house in Hoc Mon, an outlying neighborhood being transformed from
paddy field to suburb. "We don't want to move, but we have no choice. If we
protest, this government will push us away," says a neighbor, 66-year-old Le
Van Hung.

After all these years, Saigon still stirs dark passions. In the dimly lit
lounge of a hotel near Tan Son Nhat Airport, a young female singer, dressed
in a leopard-print mini-dress with a plunging neckline, belts out a love
song to a thumping disco beat. Off to one side of the dance floor, two dozen
young women sit, staring ahead with placid expressions. A mama-san
approaches a black sofa with four South Korean businessmen. They chat for a
few minutes. They order a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch. Then she calls
over four of the women. One of the men asks for a younger girl, so the
mama-san motions for a replacement. The women slide onto the couch and ease
into the men's laps. Their hands disappear under the table. The joint is
packed, night after night, with out-of-town businessmen, tourists and a few
local high-rollers. The mama-san laughs: "It is like the old days in
Saigon."

The government, with its frequent sweeps to eliminate social vices, likes to
think otherwise. But the improved economy has boosted the personal
entertainment sector, as well. The police regularly make a show of rounding
up prostitutes, usually near holidays. But they don't actually arrest many
women, because the authorities announce ahead of time where they will be
inspecting. "They don't have anywhere to put them all, so they play this
little game, alerting the criminals ahead of time so they disappear on their
own and make the police look good," says a health worker. The hookers, then,
knowing that the holidays are a busy time, abandon the street walking and
take to the backs of motorcycles, prowling for clients. Two young women stop
a man in front of Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet's house. The armed guard just
watches and smiles. On a nearby thoroughfare, prostitutes wait curbside
across the street from the Ho Chi Minh City aids committee. A taxicab pulls
up. Two women jump in the back seat. The driver leaves the engine running.
Five minutes later, the women emerge counting their dong notes. Two
policemen drive by on their motorcycles. The women glance at the cops and
then saunter over to a man at a tea stand. "Boom boom very nice," one of
them says.

At the upscale bar near the airport, the business is only slightly more
subtle, as customers leave with hostesses in tow. "I don't like this work,"
concedes one of the girls, a 24-year-old who calls herself Lien. "The men
are boring." But if she likes a man, she'll go back to his hotel and spend
the night with him for $100. Lien has made the rounds as hostess at many
nightclubs where sexual liaisons are arranged like business deals. "I could
have a job working in an office as a secretary," Lien says. "But the pay is
not so good." It's not so bad, either, by Vietnamese standards. She could
earn $300 a month, quadruple the official median income in Ho Chi Minh City.
But life as a high-class prostitute earns her five times that, at least, and
has enabled her to buy a house, a motorcycle and a color TV. After an hour
of talk, Lien starts to get restless. She checks her watch. Time is money,
after all, and in Saigon, that's what it's all about. "Economic reform means
good business for me," says Lien.

That doesn't sound good to conservatives in Hanoi, who blame economic reform
for reported increases in drug use, crime and, of course, prostitution. Yet
the country's leaders must at some level realize, whether they admit it or
not, that Saigon's economy will keep surging only if the government
continues to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of the people. That energy
is evident in every corner throughout the city's maze of small alleys. In
nearly every tiny house, the front room has been made into a small
enterprise zone, sewing machines purring in one, young men making plaster
casts of the Virgin Mary in another, three men taking apart a motorcycle
engine in the next, a middle-aged woman stirring a pot of noodle soup across
the way.

But the stronger Saigon's economic muscle becomes, the harder it is to
harness. Already, the city's leaders are in a debate with Hanoi over control
of tax revenues. Ho Chi Minh City wants more discretion over how to spend
the money, since it is contributing nearly a third of the country's budget.
It wants more say in foreign investment projects, which are focused in
Saigon but which the central government supervises. The city cannot approve,
on its own, land-use permits for any project using more than one hectare.
"It's not that the central government's policies are detrimental," says Ton
Si Kinh, the economist. "It's just that they don't encourage our full
potential. Of course we want more autonomy."

And what Saigon wants, it usually gets--sooner or later, in one way or
another. In the end, Hanoi may not be any more successful in subduing
Saigon's spirit than the French or Americans were. The city remains as
seductive and confounding as ever, and just as untamed.

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