Young Blood Pumps Life Into Vietnam

Vietnam is a country run by the old but shaped by the young. The old are a product of war and communism, the young of peace and economic opportunity. The former fear change, the latter demand it.

However the battle for the soul of Vietnam sorts itself out, the reality is that a whopping 80% of Vietnam’s 77 million people are younger than 40. Their generation is the first in many lifetimes to come of age in peace, and their dreams are challenging the validity of slogans from the past and are heading Vietnam on a course unimaginable a decade ago.

If the new generation has a face, it might well be that of Pham Ba Hung, a 24-year-old photographer with talent, a healthy free-lance income and little knowledge of the long, painful war against the United States that ended when he was a baby.

Hung, who studied Russian for eight years, now speaks perfect English and grumbles about the old bureaucrats who are perplexed by his efforts to digitize the government’s photo archives. “We’ve got the pictures in boxes,” Hung says they say. “Why isn’t that enough?” Privately, Hung complains that they’re too proud to admit they don’t know anything.

In Hanoi, Hung cruises the streets on his Honda motor scooter, a Nikon camera around his neck, a cellular phone on his belt. At home, his parents still set a place at the dinner table every night for Hung’s uncle, a North Vietnamese soldier listed as missing in action for the last 30 years.

“Things are getting better and better every day,” Hung says. “I have opportunities, and I have enough freedom. I understand what I can do and can’t do. Power is slowly changing hands because my generation understands things the old people don’t. We know about technology. We’re more open. We’re not scared of change.”

Although economists are concerned about Vietnam’s immediate future, and the Communist government in Hanoi is criticized for being more interested in protecting vested interests and privilege than in pursuing political and economic reform, Hung’s general contentment is widely shared. It stands in sharp contrast to the gloom prevailing elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

A poll of Vietnamese in five cities, commissioned by the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, found that 81% of respondents believed that their living standards will improve in the year ahead. Nearly half said they are better off today than a year ago. Six in 10 thought the economy is healthy. The younger Vietnamese were the most confident.

Part of their optimism is easily explained: Life was so terrible for so long in Vietnam--war, near-famine, utter poverty, an authoritarian government that crushed the entrepreneurial spirit--that by comparison these truly are good times, as the country edges toward a free-market economy. This is Vietnam’s peace dividend.

On the shores of Hanoi’s West Lake, a dozen Vietnamese and Westerners gathered over cocktails the other evening at the villa of an American businessman. The lights of Hanoi stretched out in front of them. Pham Xuan Bac, 38, an investment consultant who spent eight years in Moscow, said that much has changed but that economic reform still isn’t coming fast enough.

“Ten years ago, I couldn’t have been here, talking to you,” Bac said. “Contact with foreigners was forbidden. To tell you the truth, even when I was in Moscow, I didn’t think communism would work. I went to Western Europe and saw the difference. What more did you have to know?”

To many young Vietnamese--though by no means all--the Communist Party is irrelevant. It is obsessed with control, answers to no one and is out of step with its people, they say. Its older-generation leaders were more comfortable with the discipline and shared hardship of the war years than they are with the choices and uncertainties of today’s more open Vietnam.

Then why did Tran Le Tien, 39, join the Communist Party in 1997?

Because, he says, communism is synonymous with nationalism, and the party is the conscience of the nation. Besides, no one in Vietnam, be it an artist or a banker, gets to the top without being a Communist, or at least without strong connections to the party.

“Granted, most of the young generation wants to get out of the party,” says Tien, a successful TV cameraman who is studying at night for his master’s degree in economics. “But it would be tragic if they did and also tragic if the old think the young come to the party to embrace ideology. The party knows it has to reform and has to provide economic development to make itself suitable to today’s generation.”

Tien says he didn’t become one of the 2 million members of the Communist Party to wave hammer-and-sickle flags. Rather, he sees his generation as the vehicle to change the party, moving it toward free enterprise and more democracy. “This will evolve; I am sure of it,” he says.

The USIA poll showed that the Vietnamese, influenced by the young’s more liberal attitudes, have no desire to revert to the isolation of the 1970s and ‘80s. The Dark Years, as they are known here, were the result of disastrous, repressive policies, which the government has been trying to undo for the last decade by moving toward a free-market economy.

“I think the young today love their country no less, but they love it in different ways than my generation,” says Nguyen Tran Bat, 55, a former North Vietnamese soldier who heads a firm helping foreign businesses in Vietnam.

“We wanted peace, unity, security. This generation wants Vietnam to be [soccer] champion of South Asia. It wants its singers to perform like Michael Jackson. It’s materialistic. It complains about the pace of change. But I think it’s the young’s responsibility to complain.

“The reasons my generation gives for wanting back the beautiful past are not persuasive to the young. The young has its own values and principles, and whatever you think of them, those values are going to be the values of this nation in 10 years.”

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When the 170 aging members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee met in Hanoi last month to chart a course through Asia’s treacherous economic currents, they couldn’t come up with much except to call on Ho Chi Minh, who has been dead for 29 years, and “traditional Vietnamese values” for guidance. It was a call to the past, not the future.

The members of Vietnam’s postwar generation are not revolutionaries in the cause of either communism or democracy. Most are curiously apolitical. But what they have come to expect as a birthright is opportunity. If they live in Vietnam’s central cities, like Danang, they probably want to move north to Hanoi to find that opportunity. If they live in Hanoi, they want to go to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). And if they live in Ho Chi Minh City, they want to go to California.

“Oh, my, yes, I’d like to go to the United States,” Ho Chi Minh City resident Ton Phuong Dung, 35, says. “I know it’s not paradise, but here you can only go so far unless you know people at the top. For a hard-working, ordinary woman like me, I think the opportunities would be much better” in the U.S.

But Dung says “life is very livable” in Vietnam now. With $1,000 saved over two years and a $2,000 loan from her brother, who is an electrical engineer in San Jose, she recently opened a marketplace stand selling toiletries and sundries. If she manages her business well, she says, a $500 profit for the year would not be unreasonable. In case things turn sour, she is taking English and computer classes at night.

Vietnam’s postwar generation seems so industrious and capable, so thirsty for knowledge, that one wonders why the government still wants such firm control over what its people think, learn and say.

The answer, political analysts say, is that the more the party reforms, the less power it has. Its own survival is bound up in having created a society in which there is no open debate, authority is respected without question, and university students are expected to accept what their instructors say.

At Vanglang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Le Nguyen Hung, 26, stunned his architectural students when he told them at the first meeting of the semester:

“In this class, I want you to learn to think for yourselves. I want you to examine the actions of others and make your own decisions. Don’t just listen to me and believe what I say. Challenge me. Decide if what I say is honest, if it makes sense.”

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Such advice is almost revolutionary in Vietnam, but Hung, an artist, architect and composer, says he believes that the Vietnamese must break away from their government-encouraged, think-alike mind-set if they are to realize their real potential.

“If you are a nonconformist, if you’re different, it is very hard to survive in this society,” he says. “You are cut away. In a job, if you have ideas, if you talk about different things than your colleagues, they say you are hard to get along with. To survive, you must conform, and that stifles creativity and keeps us from advancing.”

Hung considers this “a time of waiting,” as the government and Communist Party decide how far down the road of reform they are willing to venture. But he adds: “I’m very proud of my generation. I don’t think it’s immodest to say that if the government creates the right conditions, we can accomplish so much for Vietnam.”