Small Pleasures on the Road to Reconciliation

Two weddings and a funeral show how much relations between the United States and Vietnam have improved.

A couple months ago, a young Vietnamese American friend tied the knot with his long-time Korean American girlfriend. The bride’s side of the family attended in full force, with her parents coming from South Korea.

The groom, however, was quite lonely; his side was represented by distant cousins from the Midwest. In the Vietnamese American community, where families are often dispersed by war, fate and sometimes choices, such lopsided events are more the norm than the exception.

I chuckled with delight, therefore, when at the moment when family members were introduced, the enterprising groom rigged up a slide show about his recent visit with his family in a village in the Mekong Delta. He lingered over the photo of his father until the phone worked and we realized that, by advance arrangement, his father had traveled to a post office in a nearby district and at the appointed time connected with his son by phone.

More than just technology triumphed that night. I thought back to just a little over a decade ago when even family letters to Vietnam were opened and censored by the government.

The second wedding took place in May in Hanoi. The groom was a former U.S. pilot on a mission to bomb North Vietnam. He was shot down, captured and incarcerated for 6 1/2 years. Now at 62, he is the U.S. ambassador to the country he once fought. The bride’s saga was perhaps less traumatic but no less impressive. Born in Vietnam and raised in Australia, now 41, multilingual and multicultural, she serves as Australia’s senior trade commissioner to Hanoi.

It was the wedding of the decade, if not of the century, in Vietnam. On the surface, power meets glamour; deep down it was as meaningful a union as the second most celebrated marriage in Vietnamese history: the strategic marriage between Huyen Tran, a Vietnamese princess, and Che Man, the ruler of the powerful Champa Empire in 1306.

Even by Hollywood standards, it would be hard to script a more symbolic union that reflects both the postwar reconciliation between the two countries and the dawning of the global village.

The recent funeral involved a Vietnamese American living in the Bay Area with parents still in Vietnam. He came alone as a refugee in the late 1970s, settled in the Silicon Valley and started his own family. He has supported his family in Vietnam with money and care packages, sponsored a few of his siblings and their families and had even gone back for visits with his aging parents.

His mother has been in failing health for some time but the news of her death in Saigon still came as a shock. Five years ago, it would have been out of the question for him to attend the funeral in time; but now, with help from the Vietnamese consulate general in San Francisco, it was possible.

From the day it opened its door in November 1997, this consulate has been the target of demonstrations by a segment of the Vietnamese community that will never accept a communist regime as the legitimate government. Yet this consulate issues on the average 2,000 visas to Vietnam a month.

Armed with his American passport and a faxed copy of the death certificate, the man and his wife were back in Saigon within 48 hours from the time he got the news. In one small corner of his heart, this man will be at peace for the rest of his life because he was able to pay final respects.

Is this the ideal normalized relation between two countries? Absolutely not. Does this mean that not only peace and independence but also democracy and prosperity have come to Vietnam? Far from it.

The road is still long and hard. But once in a while, like rest stops along an arduous trek, it is both refreshing and encouraging to count the small victories along the way.