Vietnam Has Lost Its Heart and Soul

The Vietnamese immigrants newly arrived in this country describe a very different Vietnam than the one I remember. In the old Saigon zoo, the monkeys are now so thin that some of them sit between the bars of their cages. The tigers and lions are fed with sewer rats; once in a while, they are fed a stray dog. The parrots talk less, the bears lie in their pits.

Vietnam, in a way, has come to resemble its zoo. Stripped of its prowess and mysticism, it is reduced to a pitiful existence.

Vietnam is fast becoming the poorest country in the world. Much of the fertile land is now left uncultivated because of the government’s immovable bureaucracy. Many of the Communist Party members, are becoming dissidents and critics of the government they helped to set up.

In the meantime an entire generation, and, perhaps, the next, is trifled with, its education neglected. The overlooked children think they are adults. Forced to become workers in home-converted-factories, forced to become coolies or street vendors, they are redefining the realm of adulthood. At the age of 15, some are already married and have children. “One lives for the day, the hour,” they tell me. No one bothers to save money when inflation climbs at the ridiculous rate of 2,000% a year. A shirt costing 600 dong one day could cost 1,800 dong the next.

Changed, too, is the Vietnamese spirituality. The government’s anti-superstition doctrine disallows it. Monks are arrested, priests are jailed, geomancers and fortune tellers sent to the re-education camps. If ceremonies and the souls’ rites are not practiced, what then is left? Where could one go in today’s Vietnam to have one’s future told? From whom could one learn the best day for marriage or the decent day for burial?

The new profession in Vietnam is grave-robbing, for a good coffin can be washed and resold. Prostitution is on the rise. Corruption, bred by cynicism, is rampant at every level of government. Gold has replaced any ideology or philosophy.

But poverty is nothing new. Hasn’t the world always been a suffering sea? I think of India, of the Sudan, of Ethiopia, of Afghanistan, and so many other countries. But what is robbed in Vietnam is beyond physical accounting. Taken away from my native country is its culture, the Vietnamese essence and memory.

Not long ago a tiger escaped from the newly named Ho Chi Minh City zoo. It was caught easily as it wandered absent-mindedly. The cat’s ancient ferocity was gone, its mandibles weakened from the lack of chewing.

I am reminded of a celebrated Vietnamese poem written in the 17th Century. In the voice of a caged tiger, the poet asks: “Alas, where goes the glorious time?” I also remember a better zoo when I was a child living in Saigon--a zoo with roaring tigers and lions, with swinging monkeys and dancing peacocks.

I do not know where the glorious time goes. But if what I learn from my countrymen is even half true, now is a time to worry and weep.