Kent Wong, the director of UCLA’s labor studies center, discerns a positive spirit among Vietnam’s working class based on taking several union delegations to Vietnam. “I’ve seen poverty in many developing countries, and Vietnam is different. There are no shantytowns,” Wong says. Vietnamese unions, Wong acknowledges, are not constituted as adversarial bargaining units, but the many members he has interviewed have high morale. “Four years ago when I was there, they had a plan to organize 1 million more workers in the public sector, and they actually met the goal,” he says. Wide income disparities prevail in the private sector, but inequalities in the public sector are less pronounced. Wong, who wants to turn the AFL-CIO away from its lingering cold war (and CIA-financed) heritage of anti-Communism toward Vietnam and China, is working to build direct worker-to-worker relationships to foster labor solidarity strategies in the age of globalization.
To make sense of the contradictions between Vietnam’s grinding poverty and rising affluence, between defeating Americans in war but joining the WTO in peace, one must consider Vietnam’s history. Perhaps no country in the modern world has suffered the sorrows of war more heavily and for a longer consecutive period than Vietnam. Leaving out the century of French colonialism, the Vietnamese survived, even prevailed, during the Japanese occupation in World War II, the nine-year war against French reconquest (365,000 battle deaths), the fifteen-year war with the Americans (2.1 million battle deaths) and the ten-year war with Pol Pot’s Cambodia and China in the 1980s. Millions of Vietnamese died of famine as well, or lived with hunger and deprivation as everyday experiences. After the American war, at least 38,000 more Vietnamese were killed by unexploded bombs and landmines, and countless numbers continue to live with the deformities resulting from 20 million gallons of dioxin-laced Agent Orange and other defoliants. Their sufferings are beyond Western imagination. All this sacrifice was accepted as either a duty in the war for independence or a reality to be accepted and survived. It was accompanied by the deep personalized pain of Vietnamese killing one another, not simply the French or American invaders. At least 185,000 Saigon soldiers died, for example, dishonored as the losing side.
Here, perhaps, is the explanation for Vietnam’s two-decade quest to achieve something resembling a normal life, to avoid exclusion from the world community. This memory is why they believe normalization with the United States, accession to the WTO and a (nonpermanent) seat on the UN Security Council are strategic “victories” on a long road to recovery. It is a matter of great pride that a Vietnamese Bronze Age drum is placed at the entrance to the UN Security Council today.
“No More War was the lesson after Vietnam for our people,” said Bao Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War, a 1993 antiwar novel that ranks in my mind with the classics of Remarque, Heller, Vonnegut, Mailer, Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo among war veterans. We visited Ninh one evening at his Hanoi residence, where he and his wife received us with tea, fruits and cake. His first floor was a bright reception room with a couch, chairs and, in one corner, a motorbike. Ninh’s novel was banned at first for allegedly undermining the national consensus that the war had been patriotic, victorious and glorious. But under doi moi the book gained a huge audience in Vietnamese and other languages, and this year it is being produced as a film.
When he was 15 in Hanoi, Ninh saw his first American. It was John McCain, parachuting into Truc Bach Lake from his burning fighter-bomber after destroying a power plant. Ninh watched as McCain, drowning with two broken arms, was pulled from the lake by a local fisherman at a spot marked by a small monument today. Ninh later joined the army to fight in South Vietnam, was among the soldiers who liberated Saigon in 1975, and searched for the decomposing bodies of dead soldiers after the war. His book is more about man’s inhumanity to man than a tale of triumphant revolution. I was stunned at the jacket’s description of Ninh as one of only ten survivors of a youth brigade of 500. With a laugh, he surprised me by saying the numbers were made up by his publisher, Pantheon/Random House. “Not only governments but soldiers themselves make up war stories, too,” he laughed again, not unlike sardonic American Vietnam veterans. “I like writing. I write about what I know. I wanted to tell a soldier’s story, not a political or ideological one.”
Ninh visited the United States in 1998 with other Vietnamese writers, gaining an impression of U.S. diversity, including surprise at how many Americans were “quite fat.” That aside, even in conservative towns like Missoula, Montana, he found Vietnam memorials and town officials who were veterans like himself. Ninh came away impressed that so many Americans still “remembered, discussed and agonized over Vietnam,” and formed the opinion that this memory of Vietnam could be “a tower of strength from the past” on which to build better relations in the future.
Beneath his friendly bearing, Ninh carries the scars and guilt that only some war veterans are capable of expressing. The most painful, perhaps, is his “sorrow at having survived,” the belief that the very best of his generation died for Vietnam’s present peace:
Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad. And look who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox.
Ninh was repelled by Vietnam’s Marxist postwar policies. “In the war, I had lived like an animal. Now I couldn’t stand this [the peace]. Some Americans may sympathize with Communism but I lived under it and couldn’t stand it. Everybody was fed up with the hardship. That’s what led to the doi moi in the ’80s.” One of Bao Ninh’s sons is making millions in the global high-tech industry and travels frequently to the United States. It’s not the future he fought for at the same age, he says, but he’s proud and happy for his son. “We Vietnamese are not like North Korea or China. If Communism doesn’t work, we move on. But North Korea, for example, has a very tough time because they keep going on with Communism.”
Not many Vietnamese today think of the war with America with Bao Ninh’s profound cynicism, for that would mean questioning their country’s very identity, much like questioning the Indian wars or the Revolution for Americans. Rather, the American war is perceived as a necessity forced on Vietnam by invading powers, as has happened for more than a thousand years, beginning with the Chinese. Vietnamese take pride in having defeated so many great powers and feel deeply about their losses. There is a suppressed anger that they were willing to join the search for American MIAs while the United States and Monsanto refuse to take responsibility for Agent Orange.
