Vietnam, Now by David Lamb

Author:David Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I couldn’t figure out why the leadership was afraid of so many things: of people having access to unfiltered information, of the intents of foreign governments, of farmers tired of being ripped off by local People’s Committees, of what foreign correspondents wrote, of the Internet, democracy, religion. Vietnam was stable politically and nationalistic to the core. It had fewer dissidents in a population of 80 million than most backwoods Michigan towns had in a single block. Even the few malcontents who surfaced from time to time had no radical goals; they just wanted to help build a better country. True, the collapse of the Soviet Union had given the politburo nightmares, but Vietnam wasn’t divided by religious or ethnic gulfs as was Moscow’s former empire. And true, Suharto’s fall from power after thirty-two years in Indonesia sent a signal that no one was immune, but the former general had stolen a Rockefelleresque fortune, let his soldiers kill thousands of citizens, and presided over a patched-together country of 17,000 islands where various groups often had little in common, historically, culturally, or linguistically.

Vietnam’s government was of two minds about having people like me around. One group of old-line conservatives would have been happy to see Hanoi’s small foreign press corps—there were about twenty of us: Americans, French, British, Russian, and Cuban—pack up and leave, sparing Vietnam its nosy questions, its pursuit of issues that officials didn’t want to talk about, and its notion that communism was more a detriment than an asset to the country’s development. But however big a pain we were, most officials, I think, realized there were benefits to our presence. Foreign investors wanted access to information that wasn’t siphoned through official channels. Potential tourists wanted assurances Vietnam was stable, welcoming, and worth visiting. Overseas Vietnamese who had fled their homeland needed to know—but didn’t always accept—that the Dark Years were over and that Vietnam had made progress in human rights and economic development. And Vietnam itself liked being reminded that a few newspapers still considered the country important enough to base a correspondent there and distribute his or her articles to an international audience.

I knew the government kept track of me, though I doubted that my office was bugged or that I was followed, as some colleagues insisted. I knew that my assistant—an office manager-interpreter-translatorfacilitator-minder hired from the government—had a dual role: first to make my job easier, which he did, and second, to report every Saturday to the press department on whom I had seen during the week and what stories I was working on. It was a childish game because everything I knew and did was printed in one article or another in the Los Angeles Times, and anyone who wanted to know what I was up to could have simply read my clip file of stories in the bureau or on the Internet. But letting Western correspondents snoop around their country was a new experience for the Vietnamese, and their uneasiness was understandable, particularly given the cantankerous nature of the press as a whole.

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