Today's Vietnam :
What I learned about forgetting the past and
living the simple life in a land half a world away

I hear the sing-song voice of a vendor walking down the alley, and automatically I know that she’s wearing a conical hat and carrying her goods in two baskets hanging from either end of a bamboo pole balanced on her shoulder. The vendors have different chants revealing what they offer, but without looking, I have no idea. It could be fresh pineapples. It could be multi-colored plastic food containers.

The voice probably belongs to the recycling woman who passes by daily, calling (I’ve been told) for us to bring out our cardboard or plastic. She pays a small fee for it and then carries it away to a recycling center that pays her slightly more. Initially, I didn’t realize households were paid for their recyclables, so I just said thank you and smiled back at the beaming woman, glad that I was getting some of my waste hauled away and into the recycling chain.

I know about the fees now, but I don’t ask to collect from her. It’s a tiny amount, and she works hard. Besides, most transactions here involve haggling, and I haven’t learned numbers in Vietnamese. In stores, the shopkeeper and I punch in numbers on a calculator until we agree on a price for a blouse. With the fruit and vegetable vendors on the street, we hold up fingers back and forth until both of us nod and soon I’m walking back down the street with my small bags of tangerines and tomatoes.

I hear the constant honking of horns. Vietnam is densely populated, with 84 million people living in a landmass about the size of New Mexico. The cities are buzzing with motorbikes. There are hundreds of bicycles, taxis, buses, and cars, but motorbikes are the primary means of transportation for millions. A description of the things tied across the seat of motorbikes, from freshly-slaughtered pigs to mattresses and televisions, would be an article in itself.

My initial terror of trying to cross a street has now subsided to a tolerable level. You must move into the stream slowly, but keep a steady pace and the traffic parts around you, like a school of fish avoiding a wader in a lake.

In fact, motorbike drivers and bicyclists don’t look around when they pull into traffic – no need to look behind you, there’s definitely something there and if you wait for an opening you’ll never get in. Just look ahead and move forward. The main operating rule is that you must never hit anything in front of you. If you do, it’s your fault. The potential for road rage in the U.S. would be tremendous, but here it is standard driving practice and I haven’t seen any incidences of road hostility.

At times the noise of the traffic is drowned out by the blare from the massive speakers outside my house, reminding me that this is a communist country. Daily, a female voice reads out what I’ve been told are updates on construction projects in the area and the latest announcements from the party, with some approved Vietnamese music mixed in. After she finishes, the vendors’ sing-song starts up again, as does the neighbor’s stereo, playing the CD from a Disney movie.

The streets are awash in consumer goods. Every shop is filled to the ceiling with inventory, whether shoes or irons, and their displays spill out into the street. Vendors set up baskets along the curb, selling flowers, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables and freshly-slaughtered pig cut into portions right on the street. Women fan tiny coal grills cooking skewers of meat. In a country which suffered famine for decades, you can’t walk ten steps without finding something to eat now. There are also tarps spread on the ground filled with the latest DVDs, rhinestone-studded hair ties, multi-colored flip-flops and plastic toys.

Most of the businesses are private and the number of joint ventures with foreign companies is growing by the month. The school I work at is owned by a British man. It’s one more incongruity in this communist country.

I look through the writing assignments on my desk. My students are adults, mostly ranging in age from 20-50, with a few ambitious 17-year-olds mixed in. They pay a hefty fee to come to language school at night, after their work or studies, to improve their English, hoping to get into better universities, get good jobs or get promoted.

Their first assignment is to write about themselves, and all of them write about how much they love their families. Centuries of Confucianism, supported in recent decades by the Communist Party, have fostered a strongly ingrained family focus. As an outsider, this seems both admirable yet stifling. The family is happily the center of daily life, but decisions regarding career, friends, and spouses must be made, or approved, by the parents.

At the mention of Vietnam, everyone I talked to in the U.S. before I came here – and probably anyone reading this – immediately thinks of the war. But here, there is little talk of the war and I haven’t experienced a single inkling of anti-American sentiment. When it is mentioned, it’s called the American War, as they’ve had a couple other wars since then, with Cambodia in 1978 and China in 1979. Plus, they had centuries of war prior, living under Chinese domination for 1,000 years and French colonial oppression for 100. Even guidebooks will tell you that the Vietnamese don’t dwell on the past.

I had read about this, but actually experienced it when a group of students invited a fellow teacher and me out for a nice dinner. While comparing American and Vietnamese wristwatches, one fifty-something man recounted being shot in the wrist and through the shoulder when he was 17. He even showed us where the bullet had struck. We tried to say we were sorry that this had happened to him, but our hosts chimed in “never mind, it was the past, we don’t think about it.” His tale was only part of a conversation about his wristwatch.

Is there a parallel between driving without a rear-view mirror and this not looking back at the past? Perhaps. I’ve barely begun to learn about the people, the customs, the land, the climate, the religion, the censorship and the politics. But I’ve gathered enough from my daily life in Hanoi and talking to other expatriates to see that whatever you can say about Vietnam, it is changing, almost by the day and moving rapidly forward.

Colleen Kalchik, originally from Northport, has taught English in the Czech Republic for 4 years and is now teaching in Vietnam.

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