Good Morning, Vietnam : It’s a New Day for an old foe: In Saigon, Foreign Investors Huddle Over Deals; in Hanoi, Young Couples Negotiate the Lambada

SAIGON. THE CONTINENTAL. I draw back the curtains, throw open the shutters and step onto the balcony, into the sensory shock of glaring sun and humid air. This is one of those long-anticipated, peak moments in travel that invariably reduce me to giggles, when I pinch myself, metaphorically, and say aloud, “Hey, babe, you’re here !”

Map in hand, I look down at the square. Its name is Lam Son, for the village where Le Loi, the 15th-Century Vietnamese patriot, was born. Across the way is the Caravelle, where I’m fairly certain Eric Sevareid did his nightly stand-uppers on the roof in 1967, silver hair beneath the low Saigon sky. Strange, the first memory to surface: a visiting commentator choosing a flattering backdrop for a television war. The building straight ahead with the wide stone steps must be the old French opera house; it housed the National Assembly during the Saigon regime. And that narrow street, why it has to be Dong Khoi, known to American GIs as bawdy Tu Do, home of raunchy massage parlors and dives where B-girls sipped the fake champagne called Saigon tea. To the French and to Graham Greene and his readers, Dong Khoi had been the Rue Catinat, street of fine jewelry shops, choice gossip, wild rumors. If I follow Dong Khoi to the river, as Greene and his fictional journalist, Fowler, walked the Rue Catinat, I will reach the Majestic, where the price of a drink still includes the best view of Saigon’s port.

Some cities intimidate by the memories of others who captured the sights and smells with such breathtaking skill that you think, What’s left except to retrace their footsteps? Stand on their rooftop. Drink at the bar they made famous. Pull off a romantic assignation in a sweltering room in a seamy quarter. Wander dark streets in the dead of night miming the gesture for dreamy narcotic pleasure.

I was afraid I was going to fail in Saigon, a rank pretender stumbling in the path of “The Quiet American . “ An aging female grown altogether too cautious and weary for the reckless adventures of Marguerite Duras. A passing observer too late by a generation for the brotherhood of foreign correspondents who flocked here and nested, for too many seasons, on the awninged terrace they christened the Continental Shelf.

But fail in Saigon? That is a joke. Who didn’t fail in Saigon? The French? The Americans? The Southern Republic, after declaring it the national capital in 1956? Those politically correct, economically disastrous warriors from the North who rolled in amid cheers and cries of liberation in 1975? Even the name they bestowed on their glittering trophy, Ho Chi Minh City, failed to stick.

Naturally I am staying at the Continental. I’m a sucker for tradition. From the moment it opened its Belle Epoque doors, the grand hotel won a reputation for soothing the scalawag international crowd with cool aperitifs and fine cuisine. When Andre Malraux, chastened by his detention in Phnom Penh for hauling off a cache of Khmer statues, arrived in 1925 to start a newspaper that railed against colonial excess, where else would he and his wife Clara rent a room? L’Indochine, his reformist paper, lasted one season, but it wasn’t a total loss. The hotel’s management gave Malraux meals on the house when he could not pay his bills.

What have I done to deserve Suite 115? My carpeted, two-room extravagance has a giant bed, huge armoires, welcoming bowls of fruit and flowers, a tea set on a carved table, eight lamps, a big tiled bathroom, a minifridge and bar stocked with the usuals, plus (oh joy!) imported Swiss chocolates, a working TV, VCR and a complimentary copy of Vietnam Investment Review. From the number of vases filled with fresh flowers, I gather that the front desk received word that an American journalist had checked in.

THE TRUTH WAS, I’D CHECKED OUT OF VIETNAM emotionally a long time ago. I had ceased to follow its fortunes some time after the 1968 Tet Offensive, had renewed my interest during the 1973 Paris peace talks, then dropped it again until those awesome shots of the last American helicopters leaving Saigon. We need our defense mechanisms, and mine had been to disengage from the horror by skipping the news stories, by turning the page.

From 1965 to 1968 I hadn’t a choice. I was a network newswriter for the American Broadcasting Company, a minor cog in the apparatus that brought the televised war into our nation’s living rooms. In those years I handled a Vietnam story every day--screening film, editing sequences, writing intros in New York for our Saigon correspondents. My job was to carve out a minute and 30 seconds for the 11 p.m. feed to our affiliated stations from outtakes that hadn’t made the prime-time news. I slogged through routine search-and-destroy operations and inconclusive firefights, pieced together murky footage of falling black bombs, raging smoke and fire, whirring medevac Hueys, wounded GIs on stretchers, captured Viet Cong in black pajamas, burning monks, screaming children fleeing across fields, women keening their dead. I cut airable snippets from hollow assurances by Lyndon Johnson and Gen. William Westmoreland about the light at the end of the tunnel.

I disliked my job and I hated the war. So I quit in the strange, strange year of ‘68, an epochal time when a vast, ugly boil burst on the American body politic. Vietnam receded from my frontal lobes--but it did not go away. Twenty years ago, Vietnam had been the battleground of sharp ideological conflicts. Those conflicts have lost most of their currency in the new world order, but the reunified Vietnam remains frozen in time in the American perception, its power to reactivate old traumas and suspicions unfaded. Now I was ready to see the country in peacetime, its problems and progress as it tentatively embraced its future in a market economy. I began plotting my route.

Photographer Maggie Steber was shooting a story in Oklahoma when we spoke by phone and introduced ourselves. She sounded game and adventurous, a thorough professional. Traveling light with good walking shoes was the way to go, we agreed, with antimalarial tablets, rain gear, sunscreen and something warm, a sleeveless down vest or a sweater, for Hanoi.

Our status as journalists looking into tourism and travel put us in a peculiar limbo. We needed to cover a lot of ground efficiently, and we shared a strong aversion to the packaged, conducted tour. But under Vietnam’s rules, we required a “sponsor” to secure our travel documents.

There was, it turned out, a solution. Foreign investors were flocking to Vietnam to investigate its offshore oil fields. The government had set up an agency to cosset the business people with translators and sightseeing junkets. The tail had begun to wag the dog, and the oil-services agency was accepting clients whose reasons for poking about fell short of a stake in Vietnam crude. Through an American travel company in San Francisco, we applied for tourist visas and submitted our proposed itinerary to the oil-services outfit. It came back approved: a private, customized trip for two from Hanoi to Saigon and the Mekong Delta.

We were embarking on the trip of a lifetime, a journey that would take us full circle, forward to once-forbidden places and back into memory. “And hey,” Maggie joked, “we might even knock off a few pounds.”

MAGGIE AND I HEAD DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE EX-Shelf, remodeled to fit the changing times as Chez Guido, an enclosed, air-conditioned Italian restaurant presided over by a voluble, pony-tailed entrepreneur from Venice named Guido Cora, who recommends the baked green lasagna and cappuccino from his espresso machine.

The lasagna is excellent, the cappuccino is strong, the clientele is business executives and tourists. From the shape of the room, its chandeliers and pilasters, I try to imagine how it looked at the turn of the century, when the men dressed like planters and women wore hats and were corseted under their high-necked white gowns.

Guido came to the restaurant business in Saigon via a pizzeria in Zurich. He married a Vietnamese woman, a circumstance that eased the way for his joint venture, a 60-40 split favoring the government, when such things became possible in the late 1980s under doi moi , Vietnam’s new policy of economic freedom.

Our host for the luncheon is Thomas Weigelt, vice director of the oil exploration services and tour company in charge of our in-country arrangements. Thomas hails from the former German Democratic Republic, a.k.a. East Germany, and met his Vietnamese wife in Moscow, when both were on scholarships to study Soviet literature and economics.

His Saigon in-laws had welcomed the Communist regime in 1975. They voluntarily turned over their spacious villa to the state in the rush of enthusiasm to abolish private property, reducing their living quarters to one floor while several families of strangers moved in upstairs. Thomas’ in-laws are now trying to get rid of the interlopers and reassert their ownership rights through a legal system that is struggling, as they are, to adjust to the changing times. They feel it isn’t fair that they should be penalized for having tried to be good Communists in the previous decade while families that hadn’t altered their bourgeois ways were now positioned to make a fortune.

Impressed by the success of Chez Guido, Thomas wonders if a German rathskeller featuring beer and knockwurst in his in-laws’ villa might go over big in the new Saigon.

Only when we finish the meal and Thomas sends us on our way with a warning to watch our purses--a needless suggestion to New York women--do I realize that we had spent most of the lunch talking about money.

Ho, ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh! Welcome to Saigon.

Saigon is not beautiful. It lacks the cool green parks and gem-like lakes of Hanoi, its harbor is not one of those knockout, natural curves like Hong Kong’s or Sydney’s. The imperial lines of boulevards laid out by the French are obscured by a hodgepodge of latter-day constructions marked for the wrecker’s ball, but gussied up for the present with Christmas-tree lights, neon marquees, billboards that trumpet Sanyo, Panasonic, Sharp. In the last few years the population has swollen to more than 4 million, matching its wartime bloat, most of the new arrivals from Vietnam’s populous northern provinces who migrated southward looking for work.

There is a natural progression in the late 20th-Century development of Southeast Asian cities. First there are bicycles, next come the motor scooters. The third stage of development--ah, the longed-for apex of civilization, material wealth, and modern, industrial progress--is the automobile.

If Hanoi is awakening to Stage Two, exchanging bicycles for scooters as the preferred means of transportation, Saigon is gaining on Stage Three, the private car. For now, whole families chug by on sputtering motorbikes--mom, pop and the kids balanced like circus performers--while sport-shirted young men and long-gloved young ladies, a la mode in dark glasses, zoom solo on heavy-duty Hondas. Dark elbow-length gloves are dernier cri for the fashion-conscious female motorcyclist, taking over where the parasol left off. High school girls, wearing the white ao dai , the traditional long tunic worn over flowing trousers, pedal in flotillas of conventional bicycles when classes let out, while grade-schoolers of both sexes zip by in white shirts and red ties. Only naive tourists, their faces frozen in startled grins, allow themselves to be transported in the old-fashioned, man-powered three-wheeled cyclo through the lurching, snarled traffic.

The desire of the Saigonese to be part of the passing parade, or to relax in a bit of shade with a tall glass of something or other and watch the parade pass by, is matched by a mercantile lust that 15 years of a hard socialist line couldn’t extinguish. In Hanoi, it is said, you feel like a guest. In Saigon, I feel like a prospect. Small boys are the worst offenders when it comes to hawking, unresponsive to the strictures of no, No, NO! It is impossible to walk two steps from the hotel without someone wanting to sell me a souvenir--tintype postcards, poorly reproduced, of old Saigon; a Miss Saigon T-shirt; a Good Morning, Vietnam T-shirt; an End the Embargo Now T-shirt; a small furry animal with big button eyes and no discernible tail that I believe is a pygmy slow loris.

Whatever it is, I’ve never seen the likes of it before. The appealing little creature climbing over the shoulder of a street hawker on Dong Khoi is snapped up in a twinkle by a resident Japanese businessman. He has never seen anything like it before either. The purchaser is given a wicker cage and a banana for his new pet. Transaction concluded, the hawker pulls two additional loris from her basket, one each for Maggie and me. We respectfully decline.

Nycticebus pygmaeus , the pygmy slow loris, is a nocturnal primate only seven inches in length whose distribution is restricted to the rapidly depleting forests of Vietnam and Laos. To the consternation of wildlife protectionists, the exotic animal trade (for eating and pet-keeping) flourishes openly in Saigon. Macaques, gibbons and loris are the backbone of the market. The loris is very cute. By now the Japanese businessman must be aware that it marks its range with urine.

VIETNAM IS NO EXCEPTION TO THE RULE THAT within one nation, geography and climate can present certain objective conditions that inspire differing attitudes, temperaments, tastes in food, points of view. Hanoi has four seasons that include a cold winter. Saigon, some 700 miles south, is hot and rainy or hot and dry. The historic character-building lesson of the North, necessitating eternal vigilance and collective struggle, was the fight to tame the Red River and a perpetual cycle of floods and drought. In the less populous, more recently settled South, the mighty but gentler Mekong offered up its alluvial riches with less effort and tribulation.

Nothing in human temperament is graven in stone, but the Northerners, as the French colonialists found them, seemed more industrious, intellectual and poetic, while the Southerners tended to be more relaxed, individualistic, open to strangers and temporal pleasures. The conquerors achieved their goals first in the South, where they met the least resistance. “Cochin China” was made an outright French colony in 1867. “Annam” and “Tonkin” were declared protectorates 17 bitter years later. It was probably not happenstance that when things appeared to settle down, the French put their one university in Hanoi, their best museum in the central region, and their opium refinery in Saigon.

(Fowler, the world-weary journalist of “The Quiet American,” smoked a few pipes before retiring for the night, and his creator, Graham Greene, had waxed romantic about Saigon dreaming in the pages of “Ways of Escape,” his second volume of autobiography. Greene had been very specific about how to cop in Saigon. In his day there was a code understood by every cyclo driver. You put your thumb in your mouth and made a gesture “rather like a long nose” and you’d be whisked to a fumerie in the Chinese quarter of Cholon. When I’d demonstrated the thumb-in-the-mouth and long nose routine for a friend in my living room, he’d burst into laughter. “You try that in Saigon,” he warned, “and they’ll take you to a dentist.” So I didn’t. I was on a natural high in the city anyway.)

Southerners today have a reputation for being seekers of wealth and profligate spenders compared to their Northern counterparts; after all, they cut their teeth on the seductive temptations of Western consumer culture. The per capita income in Saigon and the fertile Mekong Delta is twice the national average. Although the region accounts for only one-quarter of the country’s population, it produces half of Vietnam’s rice, most of its seafood exports and all of its exported oil. Doi moi ‘s innovations were tried out first in Saigon and the delta provinces before they became law in the North.

The swift and clumsy imposition of Northern-style socialism had sent shock waves through the middle-class intellectuals in the Provisional Revolutionary Government who had worked underground in the belly of the beast during the war. Believing they had been squeezed like a lemon by Northern ideologues who never intended to share the power, or give them a voice, in the postwar period, many stalwarts quietly retired from politics or went into exile.

Now the government is reinventing the wheel. The zigzag shift to a market economy is being presided over by Premier Vo Van Kiet, an old Viet Minh warrior who remained in the South during the war, living in safe houses and traveling in secret as the Communist Party secretary for Saigon and environs. (The radical Southerner has impeccable revolutionary credentials; his wife and children were killed by a B-52 attack when they were visiting him in a forest hide-out.) Under Kiet, Vietnam is overhauling its state banking system, lawmakers are struggling to master the international language of commercial regulatory codes and foreign investors willing to enter into joint ventures with the government, for up to 90% of the profits, are being wooed. Following the pattern that leaders of developing countries seem to prefer when they get on the market-economy track, democratic reforms like free speech and religious freedom lag behind.

After the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, Asian business interests rushed in to replace Eastern European countries as Vietnam’s major trading partners. Ideological barriers seemed to disappear overnight as entrepreneurs from Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia arrived at the door of the former pariah in the quest for profit, drawn by an educated, relatively skilled labor force used to low wages. The outsiders were encouraged by a liberal investment policy that, on paper, was the most generous in Asia. Patiently, they worked their way through the labyrinthine government ministries in Hanoi for the official approvals while they settled in Saigon to do business.

In an interesting twist of fate, the rush to invest was pioneered by overseas Chinese, many of them longtime Vietnamese residents before their forced departure a decade earlier as boat people at the height of the antagonism with China. Uniquely versed in conducting business within a mobile, loosely structured mode, the new entrepreneurs set up a clutch of garment, shoe and small-appliance factories, often with hand-me-down machinery from Vietnam’s prosperous Asian neighbors. France and Australia were the first non-Asian countries to step in, followed by Germany and the Scandinavian countries. In recent years, the United States trade embargo has become a unilateral action, a source of some merriment to investors from other countries and a policy the Clinton Administration has under close review.

One of my fellow guests at the Continental is an exuberant man from Royal Dutch Shell. The Dutch and British cartel had won a major lease for oil exploration rights off the coast of Vung Tau, southeast of Saigon, along with some British, French, Japanese and Malaysian competitors. “Tell your countrymen the major blocks have already been allocated,” the Shell man gleefully teases. “The bets have been laid.” He presents me with two baseball caps embossed with the Shell logo. Oh well. I pass them on to the pleasant hall porter who takes care of the laundry.

Most mornings at the breakfast garden I check in with a team of three Canadian businessmen who have begun to test the joint-venture waters. “Vietnam is the rising star of Southeast Asia, the best example of positive change,” says one. “These are people who understand prosperity. They have some prior knowledge of it.” The Canadians are eyeing a piece of property across the Saigon River, close to the port, where they hope to build a plant for the manufacture of tractor-trailers. At odd hours I’d catch a glimpse of them wearily conducting their negotiations with their Vietnamese counterparts at an ornate table in the hotel’s lobby. Their tractor-trailer proposal was moving more slowly than they desired.

Another guest, a crisply dressed woman breakfasting alone, welcomed my company. Dao Huynh is, she says in perfect English, a Viet Kieu--a returned Vietnamese, and an executive with the international French banking house Credit Lyonnais.

“Yes,” she laughs, tapping her Mont Blanc pen, “I was one of those young girls of Saigon in miniskirts on the back of a motorbike during the war. Our family left in 1975. We certainly were not boat people. I didn’t become a serious person until I studied finance in Chicago. You’re not writing this down, are you?”

I confess that I am, a terrible habit, and ask for her impressions of her native city.

“I would say Saigon is nearly 90% back to what it was before ’75. Of course, they try to buy you back emotionally,” she frowns, “but the reality is these people need me.”

I suggest that the Canadian businessmen sipping coffee across from us might also benefit from her expertise.

“Yes, everything here takes double or triple the time,” she says quietly. “People are cautious, keenly aware of their missed opportunities. But there’s a certain inevitability to history, isn’t there?”

HANOI. THE METROPOLE. LE DUCK Kha is the full name of our guide, but we are to call him Mr. Kha. I don’t know why he prefers the distancing honorific of “Mister,” except for reasons of pride, since he calls us Maggie and Susan. He’s a few years younger than I am, but in the days that we spend together he remains Mr. Kha, and takes on a “Mr. Kha” personality when I begin to write about him. Mr. Kha wears glasses, which is rare for a Vietnamese. Not that their eyesight is better than ours, as a nation, but because eyeglasses cost three weeks’ wages for the average worker.

Mr. Kha bears up under us beautifully. Well, we have to put up with him, too. As he gets to know us better, he insists on telling dumb sex jokes that make him giggle, like the one about the Japanese man and the beautiful prostitute . . . “Banzai.” “Bonsai.” The laughter serves a useful, diplomatic purpose. We are unusually insistent, assertive American women.

“The program starts tomorrow morning,” Mr. Kha announces in the lobby of the Metropole, after watching us change money and seeing that we are properly checked in.

I had pulled one string, and one string only, for Vietnam, and that was to get myself into the Metropole. Hanoi’s legendary hostelry, the creation of the same Blouet family that ran the George V in Paris, opened its doors in 1911 but fell on hard times after the French abruptly departed in 1954, in the wake of their stunning defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Operated as the state-owned Thong Nhat (the name pointedly meant reunification), the hotel had a resident population of rats that soon outnumbered the tourists.

A few years ago Pullman-Sofitel, the French hotel conglomerate, settled with the Blouet heirs and, in March, 1992, reopened the famous landmark under a joint venture with Hanoi’s tourist authority. Working from old pictures, Pullman-Sofitel lovingly restored the green-shuttered, white colonial facade, put down new Vietnamese marble in the lobby and refurbished the gutted interior, retaining only the fine atrium stairwell and the hardwood floors.

The infamous rats are gone, and with them, according to some misty-eyed traditionalists, a lot of the old charm (they miss the old-fashioned ceiling fans, not the invasive rodents). Already there is a three-month waiting list for coveted reservations at the chic, 90-room wonder that proclaims ooo-la-la , the French are back!

In late afternoon, I slip some dollars and a wad of Vietnamese dong into my wallet and set off to explore the winding streets of the old quarter. A few years ago, the sight of a Westerner in Hanoi brought cries of “Lien Xo” (Russian) from small children, or sometimes--my, did she make an impression--”Jane Fonda!” No longer. Concerned pedestrians gather to examine my map. A smartly dressed woman draws up on her bicycle to help with her limited English. With everyone’s goodwill, I am sent on my way. What’s the attitude toward Americans in Hanoi? Friendly. Very friendly.

Nothing makes me happier than an outdoor market where I can browse quietly, pretending to be invisible, lured farther and farther by strange, wondrous foodstuffs and bright-colored wares. Although I bargain wherever I can, mostly with street hawkers and cyclo drivers, I never shake the feeling that good-natured interplay is mildly inappropriate for a middle-class American relatively flush with dollars. Furthermore, my bargaining works only with the poorer strata of the population unfamiliar with free-spending Westerners and international exchange rates.

I can’t knock anything off one of my transactions, so I stand by the stall and watch the brisk business in socks and underpants until I determine that the fair local price for two pairs of cotton briefs, one blue, one olive drab, truly is 80 cents. An excellent purchase teeming with social significance. The stitched-in labels read “USA,” and in smaller letters, “Made in V.N.”

If I’d had a spray can and a spare empty wall, here’s the graffiti I would have scrawled: “France loves Vietnam, but Vietnam loves the USA.” I suppose it’s the nature of love, at least among nations, to go unrequited.

THE BUILDING IS MONSTROUSLY large and modern, a white concrete edifice with a huge front ramp and colonnade resembling smokestacks from a power plant somewhere in the Urals. On my map it’s identified as the Vietnam-Soviet Union Friendship Cultural Palace. I should have guessed. We duck into a side entrance and dart down a long, empty hall. At the end is a makeshift refreshment stand serving soft drinks, a card table with a money box and a roll of tickets and three teen-agers collecting an admittance fee.

Inside a bare rectangular room lined with folding chairs, 20 young couples are twirling around a dance floor . . . doing the tango. No strobe lights and only the most rudimentary of sound systems, a reel-to-reel squawk box, but I am definitely in a Hanoi disco.

Cued by the taped music, the dancers change partners, segueing effortlessly into a polka, a waltz, the lambada. I focus on one simpatico team, a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who nimbly range over the dance floor strutting and dipping through intricate turns. I am struck by their studious aplomb, their utter seriousness of purpose. Maybe not Fred and Ginger. Closer to Vernon and Irene Castle, for there is something even more dated about these ever-so-modern youth of Hanoi in the short, flaring dresses and freshly pressed shirts, even when they break unexpectedly into the twist.

“What’s going on?” I ask a companion when she returns out of breath from a spirited polka.

“Very authentic. No Westerners come here. The kids took over the friendship club after the Russians departed. They learned the steps from a Czech diplomat who taught ballroom dancing in Prague.”

“Oh,” I say. “ Oh !”

Soon I am on my feet, joining a circle that is twisting chastely, ever so correctly, in the dim light. Shyly I fling an arm. My shoulder-strap bag swings to a rhythm of its own. Well, I think, I am neither the first nor the last conspicuous American in Vietnam.

The music breaks off at 10 p.m. Hanoi is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of town. Back at the hotel, faint tinkling sounds of laughter from a private party in the garden waft up to my room. A male voice is crooning “ Bes-ameeeee, besame mucho “ as I drift off to sleep.

THE YELLOW, HIGH-walled Hanoi Hilton, which I crane my neck to look at on several drive-bys, is about to be torn down. Giving mute testimony to its past and present use as a prison, the rooftop is pocked with jagged glass and electrified barbed wire; the few windows are heavily barred. After rumors swept the city like a seasonal monsoon, the local press confirmed that Singapore interests have signed a deal to construct Hanoi’s first modern office building on the block-long site, that no doubt will be given an innocuous name.

News of the joint venture has not been received with warmth in all quarters. The French had used the Hoa Lo stockade ( hoa lo means oven) to imprison Vietnamese revolutionaries during the colonial wars. It was a desecration, some argued with emotion, to replace the proud historic site with a glass-and-steel monument to capitalist enterprise. Others, attempting to grapple with thorny new environmental issues, raised the question of zoning laws, or rather the lack of them. At 20 stories, the new tower would dominate the horizon in a city where six stories is high.

On one of our drive-bys, Mr. Kha allows that he’s familiar with the inside of the Hanoi Hilton. While a student, he says, he was encouraged to practice his English with those American POWs who welcomed the harmless diversion. Wistfully, he mentions a particular captain, with whom he believes he achieved a friendship. “But when I tried a few years ago to send my regards through a returning veteran,” Mr. Kha says sadly, “I received word that the captain wishes to forget his time in our city.”

“Well, Mr. Kha,” I say after a pause, “I can certainly see it from his point of view.”

I didn’t want to leave Hanoi. I had caught it at a perfect moment, as it was awakening to change, deter- minedly optimistic, thrilled to see a friendly American face. The dispirited loss of political innocence apparent in some quarters was more than made up for by an overall and unquenchable national pride, evident in the parks and streets and market arcades, an indomitable belief that to be a citizen in the proud capital city of the independent Socialist Republic of Vietnam was to be at the center of the universe.

Naive, oh my yes, but a tiny nation that had fought off the military intentions of two big Western powers was entitled to a grand, if mistaken, belief in its infallible powers, as long as it didn’t become a terminal condition. There was no way I could say, like Lincoln Steffens, that I saw the future and it works, for the future as anticipated by Hanoi’s leaders hadn’t worked. A tougher revolution lay ahead.