Enterprise Returns to Former South Vietnam Capital

Almost 15 years have passed since a North Vietnamese army tank forced the gate of Saigon’s Independence Palace, signaling the defeat of South Vietnam and the unification of the two countries under communism.

Today, the sound of war still faintly reverberates throughout Saigon, now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, where the Communist victory is tainted by what is, for many, a futile quest for prosperity.

“Could it be that quite a few things here really haven’t changed all that much?” asked Peter T. White in National Geographic. “That even the massive American presence here a quarter of a century ago--fought so bitterly by so many--has left some memories that are now regarded as positive?”

White discovered that Saigon is once again a citadel of enterprise, considered by many to be the country’s secret capital, its commercial mainspring, the home of the entrepreneurial spirit that may guide the country out of its economic adversity.

“I get a whiff of that spirit in the so-called golden market, half a dozen blocks of busy shops and stalls with goods made or assembled here, or more likely smuggled in,” he wrote. “Generators and electric chain saws, TVs and VCRs. Quaker Oats. Shiny red apples--from Oregon? Yes, via Singapore.”

And the old Rex Hotel, once bachelor quarters for American officers, is now the new Rex, tastefully renovated, buzzing with purposeful activity.

“On the fifth floor, three dozen businessmen from Taiwan are lunching with Vietnamese trading persons while a trio plays the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz,” he wrote. “On the third, a hundred delegates meet for an international symposium on the health of mothers and children; half came from Western Europe and a dozen from the United States--including one from Atlanta from the Centers for Disease Control.”

In the garden of a spacious villa, White spoke with Tran Bach Dang, the wartime first secretary of the Communist Party in Saigon, who planned underground activities in the city.

Still high in the party, Dang is an adviser to the minister of the interior and a popular author of spy thrillers. He has a cordless telephone, rides in a chauffeur-driven white Mercedes-Benz and plans to start an English-language business newspaper, to be printed in Bangkok, Thailand. He remains obsessed by what happened after 1975--the victory in the war didn’t turn into peacetime economic success.

“The Americans left us a very good infrastructure of roads, bridges, a wonderful airport,” Dang told White. “Only now does Thailand have the infrastructure we had.”

But it’s all gone to pieces, Dang noted. “Our machines are rusty or gone; those with high skill in management and production have gone away,” he says. He adds that Saigon’s airport, once one of the world’s busiest, now has only one runway in operation.

Another long-term change for the worse was noted by Dr. Duong Quynh Hoa, a veteran Communist who is now in charge of a pediatric center: “You see a child, you think he’s 5 or 6, but in fact he’s 9 or 10. This is chronic malnutrition.”

From 1960 to 1975, Vietnamese children in Saigon were bigger because of the Americans, she told White.

“The Americans gave billions of dollars and the people had butter, condensed milk, all they wanted!” she said, and those who were against the American presence, as she was, must recognize that it brought some material gains.

Hoa worries that many children born now may not have normal development, mentally or physically, because of malnutrition--and that a whole generation will be affected.

“As I pass through the airport gate I wonder--how can Vietnam start to pull itself out of its political-economic quagmire?” White asks.

He seeks a clue from a remarkable group of old southerners, former colonels and generals of the People’s Army who work part-time shifts on a farm in Ho Chi Minh City’s suburban Thu Duc district. They’re raising flowers, vegetables and pigs to help impoverished People’s Army veterans.

“The old officers, caustically critical of the economic muddle, are all good Communists still, but with a touching faith in something American,” White wrote. “They envision a bright future for Vietnam--with hard work plus high technology plus American management techniques.”