A Pinched and Hermetic Land

By KURT ANDERSEN

In Viet Nam, the sacrifice and sadness seem always to come wholesale. During the ten years of war with the U.S., 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed. In the decade since the Communists took over, another million have fled the country, sneaking through the bush to Thailand via Laos and Kampuchea, or huddling in boats headed into the treacherous South China Sea. Viet Nam is now quiet and bucolic, the battlefields lush once again. But it is also an anxious, impoverished country, more than a little grim: the terrible random death of war has been replaced by the mean certainties of a police-state peace. Life may be better for most Vietnamese, but life is not good.

Viet Nam is one of the poorest countries in the world. As a Vietnamese economist explains, the decade of the 1960s was "a fabulous time for development in the Third World. Here, it was the worst time of the war." Energy is scarce. The country's infrastructure is decrepit. Ten years of inflexible Communist dogma have only hobbled the economy further. Four out of five workers farm, but the ancient techniques are pathetically underproductive. By 1979, famine was a possibility, as disastrous typhoons and war with China hit simultaneously. The country now depends on Moscow for $2 billion a year, an amount equal to more than 20% of Viet Nam's gross national product.

The crisis has forced a measure of reform. A limited free-market system is now in place, permitting farmers and fishermen to sell off surplus food for profit. As a result, one industrious vegetable grower in the North earns five times as much as her office-worker son in Hanoi. In 1983 Viet Nam managed to feed itself for the first time in years. Though owning pigs is illegal in Hanoi, many of the capital's residents raise swine with loving care; a single butchered porker can bring in as much as a well-paid salaried worker earns in a year.

For most people, life's basic necessities are satisfied, but anything more--a cup of mocha in a cafe, a second pair of shoes--is a luxury. The per capita income is about $125, less than a fifth of that in neighboring Thailand. Government workers earn monthly salaries of between 200 and 500 dong--worth no more than $55 even at the official exchange rate. Housing is free for civil servants: Nguyen Than Tan, 24, a Foreign Ministry employee, shares a 10-ft. by 12-ft. dormitory room with three other men. Food is subsidized, but rations are meager. Officially, low-level bureaucrats are allowed each day about a pound of rice, an ounce of meat, a few vegetables, a bit of milk, coffee and a couple of cigarettes. In the private street stalls, groceries are abundant but very expensive. There, rice might cost 150 times as much as in the state-run shops.

Ho Chi Minh City in 1985 is physically little different from Saigon in 1975, just as Hanoi is much as the French left it in 1954. Both cities are full of pastel stucco and the decaying architectural flourishes of colonial temps perdu. In Hanoi, which shows surprisingly few signs of the U.S. bombing, water buffalo pull carts down boulevards lined with tamarind trees. There are few automobiles; as elsewhere in Asia, the bicycle is ubiquitous.

The two halves of Viet Nam were officially merged in 1976, but the differences remain striking. In general, life in the North seems more pinched, commodities less abundant. Ho's tomb, a sort of brutalist recasting of the Lincoln Memorial in concrete, seems the emblematic postwar construction project. There is, meanwhile, a casual, envious resentment of the mellower South.

In Ho Chi Minh City, the authorities have eliminated most of the druggy, decadent excesses, yet the city is still frenetically commercial. At the Cafe Givral, the Rick's Bar of wartime Saigon, a superb French-bread sandwich and cool citron presse are still available. Money changers, prostitutes and all kinds of small-time wheeler-dealers flourish, albeit rather more discreetly than ten years ago. North and South, Coca-Cola is for sale, but the black market stalls of Ho Chi Minh City are packed with foreign goods: Spam and Tang, Zest and Lux, A&W root beer and Del Monte prunes, Remy Martin cognac, Wilson tennis racquets and balls, Japanese TVs and calculators. Vietnamese are allowed to receive up to four packages each year from friends or kin abroad. Some families subsist exclusively from the sale of such foreign goods.

"One country, two systems," is the rueful, sloganized explanation for the North-South differences. Yet some of the cultural Westernism has filtered north. Cassette tapes of U.S. pop music are played all over. Most striking still, the rare U.S. visitor is everywhere treated with respect and, frequently, spontaneous displays of affection.

Many former Saigonites have been forcibly turned into farmers. In the new economic zone near Ho Chi Minh City, some 1,700 people, mostly urban exiles, have built the Nhi Xuan (Two Springs) communal fruit farm. "They were unruly when they came here," says Farm Official Nguyen Duy Tong. "We educate them. We teach them to realize the tasks they must do. We can do that. It is the character of our society."

Ordinarily, every young man must spend at least three years in the military. The army, 1.2 million strong, is the world's fourth largest (after the Soviet Union, China and the U.S.). Some 160,000 Vietnamese troops occupy Kampuchea. Nguyen Ba Mai is a deserter from the occupation force, who is now living in Thailand. "In Viet Nam," he says, "whenever you talk, you have to beware of spies."

Civil liberties are meager. The "re-education camps" hold some 10,000 prisoners. Says a Vietnamese scholar familiar with postwar Hanoi: "What surprised me was how the society in the North was so isolated from the rest of the world, even from the East bloc countries. It was like Russian society in the '30s." It is still hermetic: during 1983, Viet Nam admitted exactly 252 tourists.

More than half a million people have applied to leave the country legally, but under the Orderly Departure Program, only about 300 emigrants a week make it out. Many are the bastard children of G.I.s. Says Refugee Tran Thi My Chau, 17: "Everybody called me con lai (half-breed)."

Antigovernment resistance is negligible. Viet Nam is peaceful now. But it is not serene. The war, admits a Vietnamese scholar, "has been very costly in terms of social control, even political oppression." But? "But these are the costs that we have to pay. We had to build a nation." After ten years, that building is still an unattractive structure, unfinished and rickety.

With reporting by James Willwerth/Hanoi