The Fall and Rise of Saigon : NOW : Commerce, Night Life Are Signs of City’s Resurrection

After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Nguyen Thanh Minh toiled for eight long years at a Communist youth magazine extolling the virtues of Motherland, Lenin and fraternal relations with Cuba.

Minh is now the managing director of a medium-sized advertising agency called Saigon-Phoung Dong. With his mobile phone and alligator Filofax in hand, Minh takes meetings with creative guys from U.S. ad giant Ogilvy & Mather and dreams up ways to put “the thrill of it all” in Vietnamese-made Pepsi-Cola.

“These days, you can do just about anything in Saigon,” Minh said in an interview.

Both Minh and his hometown, Ho Chi Minh City--which just about everybody calls Saigon again--have changed profoundly in the 20 years since Communist tanks rolled into the South Vietnamese presidential palace grounds on April 30, 1975.

Saigon is once more vibrant with commerce and pulsing to a carefree night life that was all but extinguished by the first decade of drab Communist rule. Peeling party posters are overpowered by neon signs hawking Sony, Kodak and Honda.

The Communist victors still hold an authoritarian grip on Vietnam’s political life, but the party seems increasingly marginalized, even ignored. Saigon literally hums with free-market enterprise, from Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors to the Mercedes-Benz dealership down the block. Ho Chi Minh, the revered spiritual guide of the revolution for whom the city was renamed in 1975, must be spinning in his Hanoi mausoleum.

The first decade after the fall of Saigon was an era devoted to a campaign of harsh retribution against those who had sided with the ill-fated South Vietnamese government. Thousands of former soldiers were sent to re-education camps; tens of thousands of people escaped the country by boat for the West, and many of those who stayed behind were denied an education or job.

Except for some political activists, however, the days of retribution seem to be over. More than 60,000 overseas Vietnamese visited the country last year and, more important, sent back an estimated $1 billion in investments to help finance new businesses.

Signaling that the war against these former “traitors” is finally over, Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi reassuringly promised that “Vietnamese residing abroad, regardless of their circumstances and locations, are an integral part of the nation.”

Hoang Thanh Nguyen fled Saigon by boat in 1981 and opened a Vietnamese restaurant in Sydney, Australia. Now he’s back full time in Saigon with his wife and daughter, running a thriving 109-room hotel and about to finish work on a new office complex.

“If life had been like this in the ‘80s, I wouldn’t have left,” Nguyen said. “Anybody with money can set up a business. The people are more comfortable. Business is just great.”

Tay Binh, 40, was an air force officer who spent a year at a Biloxi, Miss., Air Force training program. He still speaks English with a hint of the drawl he picked up there. After 1975, he endured five years in a re-education camp.

“Things are much better now,” said Binh, who drives one of the shiny new yellow taxis in Saigon. “My kids can go to school, and I’m allowed to work. It makes a big difference.”

Another former South Vietnamese officer who stayed on in Saigon is Tran Duc Nam, a former captain in the South Vietnamese army who went through two years of re-education, a combination of work camp drudgery and political brainwashing.

Nam now runs the Saigon Private Garment Import-Export Co., one of Vietnam’s largest exporters, with 500 employees sewing and assembling fashions bound for such destinations as Western Europe, Japan and South Korea.

“I don’t think there is any more discrimination,” Nam said. “The government just wants to get on with business.”

Although the government has allowed many Southerners like Nam to achieve material success, Nam has achieved another milestone. Late last year, he was elected to the People’s Council of Saigon, a kind of local legislature that runs municipal affairs in the city. It was a breakthrough because Nam is not only not a member of the Communist Party but served the former Saigon government as well.

Pham Chanh Truc, the chairman of the People’s Council of Saigon, insisted in an interview that the election of Nam should not be taken as a sign that the party is inching toward a pluralistic political system. But the existence of independent voices like Nam’s is sure to have a broadening effect at the local level.

“The government has lessened its control,” Truc acknowledged, woefully noting that this has led to a sharp rise in prostitution, gambling and drug use in the city, to levels approaching those found before 1975.

Because Saigon is so much richer than the surrounding countryside, Truc said, the population has swollen from 3 million at the end of the war to nearly 5 million today. Officially, 300,000 people are unemployed, but unofficial estimates suggest the number is much higher.

Despite the recent sense of relaxation, no one denies that the government retains a stranglehold on political matters. Two Vietnamese-born Americans, Nguyen Tan Tri and Tran Quang Liem, were arrested in 1993 for trying to organize a democracy conference and have yet to face a trial. A Vietnamese who waved a South Vietnamese flag at a marathon road race in 1992 was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “rebellion,” while a Buddhist monk got three years for handing out documents that the government considered hostile.

An unexpected source of political opposition is the Assn. of Former War Combatants, a group of aging veterans of the Viet Cong, as the Communist guerrillas in the South were known, which has been critical of the government’s wholesale movement toward capitalism. The group’s leader, Nguyen Ho, is under house arrest after publishing a critique of government policy.

Another critic is Duong Quynh Hoa, who was the Viet Cong minister of health and lived in the jungle for seven years. In frustration, she resigned from the Communist Party and her government post immediately after the war ended.

“To me, it is a very uncomfortable situation to come back to capitalism, to the old ways,” the French-trained physician said. “To me, the object now seems to be to have more and more money. But I don’t think (that in the present situation) the people have the right to a better education, to better health and the right to say the truth. That is what we fought the revolution for.”

One Vietnamese intellectual said he believed the party was facing a watershed year, because a party plenum will have to choose replacements for the aging leadership from a younger generation of Communists who lack the credentials of war veterans.

While the economy has increased more than 8% a year for the past several years, few talented administrators are being drawn to the party these days because of the competition offered by relatively high salaries available in the private sector. That has left the government in the hands of officials who have few administrative qualifications other than party membership.

“The leadership desperately needs to get competent technocrats into the government,” said one Western-trained economist. “The man in charge of the banking sector is a complete idiot. But they can’t fire him because he’s in the party. That has to change.”

The government has ruled out the kind of massive privatization carried out in Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended. A recent report noted that state enterprises actually increased their share of Vietnam’s gross domestic product from 36% to 42% in the past four years.

One paradox that many foreigners feel in Saigon is that few Vietnamese appear to feel comfortable talking about the war in the way that Americans do.

There are now only about 300 Americans living in the city, mainly as representatives of companies that have set up since President Clinton lifted an economic embargo against Vietnam in February, 1994. The only fighting these days involving Americans is the struggle between Pepsi and Coke for market share in the South.

“Vietnamese almost never talk about the war,” said John Mims, who heads Pepsi’s operations in Saigon. “When they do, they want to know why Americans are so obsessed with the war. The year 1975 is just a point of reference.”

Nonetheless, Saigon’s streets seem filled these days with American tourists, many of them balding and slightly potbellied, showing their wives and children with great nostalgia the place where they lost their youth.

An enterprising group of former Viet Cong have established a travel company called Ben Tre Tourist, catering especially to American veterans. For $1,400, the company will escort American veterans to sites of famous battles, accompanied by Viet Cong who were fighting on the other side.

A company catalogue offers this description of a typical day on tour: “Visit Notre Dame Cathedral, a secret VC ammo dump in the heart of the city and the site where a Buddhist monk immolated himself in protest of the war. A free evening in the bustling city.”

“Most veterans come here feeling that Vietnamese have a bad impression of Americans,” said Col. Le Lo, a former Viet Cong commander who heads the company. “But after a few days, most Americans realize that they were wrong, that actually we’re very friendly people.”

When Vietnam celebrated the 10th anniversary of the end of the war in 1985, it was a major event, with a triumphant military parade and the nation’s leaders addressing huge crowds in front of the captured presidential palace, which is now a museum. But this year, the celebrations are to be intentionally low key.

“We’re too busy making money,” smiled Saigon council chairman Truc.

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Vietnam Now

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is one of the world’s few remaining Communist governments. Population--72.3 million

Currency--The dong. One U.S. dollar is worth about 11,075 dong.

Principal exports--Oil, gas, rubber, rice, coal, coffee, minerals, ores and seafood

Primary customers--Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan

Per capita gross domestic product--$230*

* 1992 estimate Source: Facts on File