HANOI
Wednesday, March 22
Parents and Friends of Beijing Seminar Students:
I am writing this letter at a delightful outdoor café near Hanoi’s famed Opera House. The students—all healthy, energetic, and enthusiastic—are off in two separate directions on adventures in rural parts of Vietnam. I stayed in Hanoi to work out a glitch in our air connections to Beijing on Saturday.
We have all been together for only five days, but we already are functioning like a group that has been together for weeks. This is a terrific group of young people and they have been working well together as we begin our time in SE Asia. More importantly, they are a warm, friendly and considerate lot, and there is little question that individually and collectively they will “wear well.”
Everyone arrived in Bangkok as scheduled. The three “old folks” on the Seminar—my wife Mary-Lewis, Professor Penny Prime, and I—had arrived several days earlier from Beijing where we were checking details of the program (that is, making certain we really did have dorm rooms for everyone, that buses would arrive to pick us up, that scheduled meetings would occur, etc.). Then the three of us flew to Bangkok to do much the same thing before the students arrived.
The three of us had met student groups before and we expected this one to be little different than the others—tired from 26 hours of air travel, stiff from sitting in cramped seats, a little goofy from the jet lag (there is about a 12 hour time difference between the United States and SE Asia). But this group was indeed different. From the time we met the students at their gate, and piled onto our bus to drive to our small hotel in the old palace district section of Bangkok, we noticed that the group seemed unusually good humored, energetic and awake. They were tired, of course. But that did not affect the way they worked together to get luggage loaded, to watch out for one another, and to take in the newness of the place. Almost immediately after hotel check-in (well after midnight) the group was out exploring the neighborhood, walking through the food night markets, and getting the lay of the land.
The pace didn’t slow down for the next two days we were in Bangkok. On the group’s first day in Bangkok, we got the students out of bed around 7 a.m. (wanting them to get their jet-lagged bodies adapted to the new time zone as quickly as possible) and set off to see the city. Of course we toured many of Bangkok’s great sites—the spectacular Palace compound, several beautiful Wats (temples), the Parliament and Ministry buildings, and the area around the democracy monument.
But our real purpose in Thailand was to begin to build the foundation for a comparative understanding of economic development and political change. The subject of our seminar is Chinese political and economic development, and Penny and I want this group to see this development in its Asia-wide context. Thailand, with its spectacular growth in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, followed by its equally deep “crash” in 1996-7, provides a classic example of one such kind of development. We wanted our group to get a preliminary sense of how rapid development and the consequent crash affected life in Thailand. And later we will try to compare the Chinese patterns of development with those we have seen in Thailand and Vietnam.
Prof. Penny Prime guided us through this first part of our trip. Penny is a prominent economist who has lived in China off and on for the past 25 years. She is a specialist in Chinese regional development, financial planning and factory organization and she has published widely on these subjects. She first lived in China in 1976 with her family (of which I will write more later) and has spent an enormous amount of time in Asia. Penny taught in our Economics Department at Carleton and our two families have been together on every one of these seminars. Along with her husband, John Garver (an equally prominent specialist on Chinese foreign policy) and two children, Penny now lives and teaches in Atlanta. We join forces to teach this seminar.
So, under Penny’s direction we went to department stores and looked at consumer goods. We floated through Bangkok’s canals and looked at the juxtaposition of poverty and wealth. And, of course, we ate some wonderful Thai food—as a group in restaurants and individually in the small little shops that dot the area.
One of the highlights of the time in Bangkok was our visit to the “Jim Thompson House,” that classic piece of Thai architecture put together by the fabled American silk merchant. I had known Jim (in the most peripheral manner) during the early 1960’s, and the students listened with great good humor and tolerance as I described his early days in the OSS, his continuing relationship with the American intelligence community, and his disappearance and murder in 1967. The visit to the house and the topics it paved the way for, for me, evoked memories of earlier days.
As short as it was, the nearly three-day period in Bangkok amply demonstrated both the sheer exuberance of this group of young people and how wonderfully well they function as a group. Our Bangkok hotel had a small pool and after our day’s excursions we all gathered to relax and swim. Even there, beside the pool, it wasn’t all laughing and splashing, since we also got the quiet enjoyment of Jason playing his guitar and Pryor his violin.
We left Bangkok early Monday morning. I think that we were both sad to leave such a fascinating city, and also a little apprehensive about moving on to Vietnam. Even for this younger generation, the war still shapes our feelings about this part of the world and we were all a bit anxious about what our reception would be like as we landed in a city that was just celebrating the 25th anniversary of the end of the war.
An added concern—a major one—was that one of our students had a visa problem. His visa was valid beginning on March 21, not March 20, our arrival date. We had worked out a series of strategies and contingency plans if the student was not allowed to board the airline in Bangkok, or stopped by Vietnam officials as we went through customs in Hanoi. But the officials on both ends were fine and we moved through all of the steps with no hitches.
We drove around some of the old parts of the city on our way to the hotel. As my wife, Mary Lewis, wrote in her journal, “It has a kind of decayed charm and beauty—lovely bones even if a facelift would help. There are a number of lakes, parks, and trees. And many of the beautiful old French houses and architecture are much in evidence—albeit frayed around the edges.”
Our hotel—the Dan Chu—was built by a French company in the 1920’s, and it still retains a sort of funky colonial atmosphere. The rooms (there are about 40 of them) open up on to corridors which, in turn, open to a central courtyard. The ceilings are extremely high (they look about 12 feet to me) the doors and woodwork are very 1920’s. The impression is of a sort of classic but slightly run down building of another era (sort of like living in the hotel in the movie Casablanca.) While it could stand a lot of work, there is a sweetness to the place that still appreciates and is trying to preserve its bygone charm.
Equally important, the hotel is spectacularly well located. We are in the old French Quarter and, for those of you with maps, about a block from the wonderful old Opera House on one side and a block and a half from Hoan Kiem lake on the other. Everything is within easy walking distance.
Here, as in Bangkok, the group was off and running as soon as we had checked into our rooms. They quickly discovered that much remains from the French period in this city. The tree-lined streets are filled with small bistros and classic cafes, and there are still groups of old French-speaking Vietnamese intellectuals in berets and tweed jackets.
Most of us were quickly enchanted with the city—perhaps no one more so than Mary-Lewis. A quest for a new strap for her camera led us that first afternoon (and from here it is Mary Lewis’s words) “into a small little photo shop with a rather elderly proprietor. I wasn’t sure he would speak English but thought he might be old enough to speak French. We spoke a little of both while he looked around for a cord. Soon two other older men came in, one to pick up some photos which he took out to show the other. They, too, became involved in my quest and when that shop didn’t have a suitable cord they directed me to another shop on another street. But first I had a chance to see the photos of the second man’s granddaughter, now living in Paris. All three men looked very well-educated. Somehow that particular conversation--in the Vietnamese the three elderly men used with each other and the English and French they used with me—seemed to represent a confluence of places and times past and present, France, the United States, and Vietnam. We were all there in that little shop.”
But we did a lot more besides wander and explore during our first days here. Our first morning began with a visit to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum (pronounced “mawZOHlium” by our very nice guide). The square on which the mausoleum stands is the place from which Ho Chi Minh originally declared Vietnam’s independence from the French in 1945.
There is a strict protocol to such visits; people are lined up in columns, with two abreast, and they file by in strictly enforced silence. Four honor guards marked the head and the foot of “Uncle Ho’s” tomb which lies in a darkened room illuminated only by the light in the tomb itself. Dress codes require skirts that cover women’s knees or long pants for either men or women—no sleeveless blouses.
As we looked at Ho Chi Minh lying in state, it was hard to overemphasize how much he had altered history—not only that of Vietnam but also that of France and the United States.
Time kept re-reeling backward and forward for those of us who had lived through the tumult of the ‘60’s as we tried to imagine our past selves projecting ourselves forward into a future that included a visit to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb—in the middle of Hanoi with 36 students. It would have seemed unimaginable—and at times here, it still does!
That afternoon, at the American embassy, we met with Dennis Harter, the Deputy Chief of Mission, and heard his insights about Vietnam and the region. We met, as well, with a career foreign service officer who told us that their press office has more requests for interviews than those of all the other embassies combined. She said the interest stems from the American’s ongoing fascination with Vietnam as well as the colorful personality and fascinating life story of former POW, now ambassador, Pete Peterson.
From the embassy, we went to the War Museum. There we looked at the Vietnamese depiction of their struggle with the French and, later, the Americans. There was room after room of pictures and displays, going from the 1920’s up through the 1970’s. I had been in the army in this part of the world in the 1960’s, and the group was especially sensitive as I re-visited some painful old memories.
Now the students are off on adventures in the rural parts of North Vietnam. Half of the group (along with Mary Lewis, my assistant Josh Startup, and a Viet guide) traveled 120 kilometers to the coast to stay overnight at the spectacularly beautiful Halong Bay. (Pick up the French movie “Indochine”—the second half of the movie was filmed in the Halong Bay area.) The group will stay overnight in the Halong area and make two extended trips out into the bay.
The other half of the group (along with Penny and a Viet guide) journeyed about 130 kilometers to the Southwest to trek in the rural minority areas. They also will spend the night away from Hanoi, but in much less comfortable accommodations. They are eating in villages, sleeping in a communal room in a stilt house, and taking a small boat up a river to other areas.
So….I am sitting in the middle of Hanoi, pondering the adventures of the first Carleton student group to visit Vietnam. As I sit at this small café, I am thinking about just how far from the United States we are, both geographically and culturally, and thinking how well launched this group of students is in setting out to meet the adventure of the trip.
(The following written later on Thursday, after the students returned to Hanoi):
A few hours ago the students all returned from their tips—full of tales of the bay and the rural countryside. We went to dinner and I heard their stories of sleeping on the bamboo floors, of the long trips into the Bay and the excursions into some of the grand caves. They looked wonderful and I believe that many saw things they had only imagined back in the States.
We leave for Beijing on Saturday. I will write again in a week or so.
Roy
p.s. On our web site there are some pictures taken during the last several days. Some of the pictures are from my camera, others from the digital cameras of a couple of other students—especially Leah Epstein. It is a bit difficult to edit digital photos in a hotel room in Hanoi, even more difficult to transmit them back to the USA. And most difficult of all is getting the group together for some of our group photos—they are always on the move and there is always one or two people missing from each shot. Perhaps I have reduced the quality a bit too much in the hopes of simply getting a few photos of the group to you. I will take more photos in the days to come, try my best to get everyone in the pictures.
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Last updated March 24, 2000 by Tricia Peterson