From backpacker to businessperson, a Penn alumna witnesses Vietnam’s economic and social transformation.
By Felicity Wood C’92
LIFE IS ALWAYS right next to you in Vietnam, eyeball to eyeball. Not counting possibly being conceived there — my father, who was with the U.S. Foreign Service, and my mother, an anesthesiologist in a Vietnamese hospital, were married in Saigon in 1969; I was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970 — I first arrived in the country as a curious backpacker in 1989. Having garnered only the odd paragraph of information from international newspapers, I found myself feeling as though I were standing on a makeshift bamboo structure bridging the chasm created by the Cold War.
From 1975 until the late-1980s, Vietnam was barred to all but a few “socially enlightened” Westerners. The reintroduction of a market system, doi moi, had occurred only in 1986. This meant that on Pasteur Street in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) where I stayed, people working from rickety wooden carts could earn some money repairing watches. The city was in terrible shape; streets and buildings in disrepair. This was not because of the war — after all, Saigon had been the capital of the side with air power — but from the neglect and pov-erty of the years after 1975.
There were so few Americans in the country in 1989 that when Vietnamese found out my nationality, they brought gifts, along with fond, sad memories of the Americans they had “worked for.” Former secretaries and maids stopped me in the market to give me baskets and ask if I knew Lieutenant So-and-So. On a visit to a Vietnamese house on the outskirts of the city, I was so mobbed I had to sneak out the back door. A friendly crowd filled the entire front street, even the roof over the house.
There were no cars and almost no motorcycles operating in 1989. Gasoline was too expensive — and, anyway, if you had money you couldn’t show it. Even eating an egg with your soup was considered ostentatious and would be reported to authorities. At night, the streets were so quiet the spokes of bicycles sounded like wind rushing through the wings of a flock of birds. With few electric lights burning, the stars were bright overhead.
In September 1989, I began my freshman year at Penn, settling on urban studies as a major. Though there were no formal courses on Vietnam, West Philadelphia provided the opportunity to research the experiences of refugees from Indochina, who had settled in the community. I often felt sad for these people, knowing the ideal image of America they had received from the movies. After a tough passage, they had landed in a place that didn’t look so different from the decrepit streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Combining my main interest in Indochina with the environment these people now inhabited gave me what I believe was the next best thing to a dedicated Vietnam education. At Penn, I decided to study Mandarin Chinese with Eugene Liu. There seemed no chance of finding work in Vietnam upon graduation, but this way I would at least be able to work relatively near the country.
WHEN I NEXT RETURNED to Vietnam, living in Hanoi for a semester in 1991, the frigidity of the Cold War still lingered. Any Vietnamese who tried to visit our guest-house was severely questioned by the police posted at the entrance, and travel continued to be restricted. There was still no U.S. embassy. Inflation was at 67.1 percent. There was little food; we often found ground up newspaper baked in with our bread. The Temple of Literature, since then completely restored, was a shambles. The roof had fallen down, and a picture of Ho Chi Minh rested at an angle on the floor. However, in Ho Chi Minh City the watch-repair people on Pasteur Street were joined by establishments renting videos. Bicycles still dominated the streets, but now big white United Nations vehicles managed to cause minor blockages at intersections. The number of motorcyles grew monthly.
Russians were by far the most dominant foreign presence in the country, numbering in the thousands — though they were very unpopular. A Russian friend never admitted he was from the Soviet Union; he said he was Polish. At the time, there were approximately 50 Americans in Hanoi — aid workers, journalists, lawyers, a couple of English teachers — most working for organizations of other countries. Today, there are about 500 Americans in Hanoi, many of them to make money. More than half the foreign non-governmental development agencies in Vietnam now are American, according to the U.S.-Indochina Reconciliation Project.
I returned to the U.S. to finish my degree at Penn. At the graduation ceremony in 1993, where Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke, I was proud to receive the national award from the Phi Delta International Honor Society for promoting cultural relations between Vietnam and the United States. Soon after the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam was lifted in February 1994, the American Chamber of Commerce in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was founded. In the absence of an embassy, this group of pioneer resident American businesspeople answered the questions of visitors and newcomers and met monthly to discuss challenges in Vietnam’s business environment — such as an undeveloped legal system and the lack of U.S. governmental support. In February 1995, I returned to become the chamber’s first executive director in Ho Chi Minh City, which had become a boomtown. Former president George Bush during his visit likened the city to Odessa, Texas in the 1950s. New office buildings, hotels, and restaurants displayed tremendous use of resources. Vietnamese friends complained that schools were being knocked down for the overbuilding of offices and hotels.
In some respects the mainstays of Vietnamese life remained the same — street cafes, delicious local food establishments located far down alleyways. During the Season of Tet, the lunar new year, families still gathered to gamble over cards. But mobile phones had sprouted among the foreign and local community alike; Vietnamese had new jade buddhas on gold necklaces, where they had worn none before; and on Pasteur Street, the watch-repair and video-rental industries were now over-shadowed by a massive trade in color television sets (and, more recently, by construction of one of the first and tallest international standard office high rises in the city). Vietnamese friends — who, though exceptionally talented and bright, had been unemployed for three years — were now able to find work with foreign firms. Wealthy Vietnamese families paid Americans up to $20 an hour for English tutoring and began to send their children to the United States for college. The money was coming out from under the mattresses — and out of foreign investors’ pockets.
SUCH PROSPERITY IS limited to cities and parts of the Mekong Delta, however. Over Tet last February, I visited the Valley of Dien Bien Phu, on the Laos border. The French were defeated here in 1954 by Vietnamese communist forces. Bicycling the 500 km road back to Hanoi, I marvelled at the will of people who carried cannon over the passes. Those we met along the way confirmed the vitality it took to win that and other wars.
As with the rest of Vietnam, the trip from Dien Bien Phu was a journey through the decades. Vietnam has preserved strata of time in its current existence. About 40 km north of Dien Bien Phu, we stayed at the home of two Communist Party officials. He runs the People’s Committee of the small town. Water is drawn from the 30-ft well behind their house, which doubles as the People’s Committee Building, while chickens, ducks, and grandchildren run around. He and his wife looked 20 years younger than their ages of 58 and 50, and their morning calisthenics demonstrated the flexibility of their muscles. She invited me to marry her son, a 26-year-old doctor in Dien Bien Phu, but I declined, as he might not have been as enthusiastic as his mother. We gave the couple a Yankees pin and $2 when we left, and received an exuberant kiss on the ear.
Because of the Cold War, Vietnam is a place of ironies and contrasts. City residents with new disposable income coexist with isolated mountain people, some of whom do not believe Americans are “allowed” here yet. The pace of development from when I first arrived in 1989 is astounding, though Americans are still handicapped in participating by the Jackson-Vanick amendment, which impedes U.S. exports to Vietnam. Until the United States engages fully with Vietnam, we are only hindering our own development. I hope to see more American embrace the opportunities of this country of steep mountains and strong spirits.
Felicity Wood, C’92, is living in Hanoi and currently works for a Vietnamese advertising company whose main clients include Motorola, Citibank, and Microsoft. She serves on the board of governors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam.