The Freeman fellows met as a group our final day in Vietnam to review the SE Asia tour. We discussed what we had seen and heard over the course of a month in Asia.
It’s clear that SE Asia is experiencing a remarkable period of growth. All of the countries we visited, including Thailand, are poor by American standards, but they are growing quickly. (In SE Asia, western businessmen have discovered the Holy Grail: cheap labor, stabile governments and a market friendly business orientation. They don’t care about the human rights situation.) China, in particular, is becoming a powerhouse.
The people of SE Asia are also freer today, in relative terms, than they have been in the past. They have greater access to information, though they still lack basic freedoms, which people in the West take for granted.
Given the improved economic situation, it’s hard to be anything but optimistic about SE Asia’s future. There is still reason for some skepticism, though. The countries of mainland SE Asia have been rivals and combatants for centuries. They remain deeply suspicious of each other. SE Asia lacks strong regional organizations, such as NATO and the European Union, which bind the people of Europe.
SE Asia is unlike Europe in one other way: Europe has four major powers of roughly equal size. There is no dominant power. In SE Asia, China is vastly larger than the other countries along the Mekong — including the region’s most prosperous country, Thailand. It’s hard to predict how China will behave if and when it becomes a global superpower. (I believe that it will.) What we saw along the Mekong does not bode well for the future: China is developing the river without little regard to the interests and concerns of its smaller neighbors.
Interestingly, the two most experienced members of our group were the most skeptical of the region’s prospects. Our Thai host claimed the “privilege of old age” — pessimism. He was skeptical that China — given the size of its population — could ever achieve a standard of living comparable to what you see in the United States. He did not, however, mention a specific roadblock that might halt China’s continued growth.
Another member of our group, the chancellor of Kapiolani Community College in Hawaii, cautioned that it’s easy to misread the region’s growth. He said that foreign companies and corrupt politicians are making most of the money in SE Asia and that ordinary citizens have benefited very little from the economic boom.
I have a slightly different view. I concede that a small number of people have reaped most of the benefits from the expanding economy in these countries, but it’s also true that ordinary people have benefited as well, albeit to a lesser degree. My home visit host in Thailand told me that modern amenities — paved roads, plumbing and electricity — had come to her village only in the last twenty years. (I imagine that Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are about twenty years behind Thailand in terms of economic development.) So ordinary people are benefiting and will continue to benefit from economic growth.
(It’s worth remembering that the United States underwent a similar transformation at the start of the 20th century. In the age of robber barons, a handful of people controlled most of the country’s wealth. Ordinary citizens worked for pennies a day and endured living conditions harsher than what most people in SE Asia experience today. Eventually, the wealth trickled down. Even today, though, there’s a real gap between the haves and have-nots. As the U.S. economy has grown over the last 30 years, wealthy — skilled and educated — people have benefited more than poor and middle class people.)
I suppose it goes without saying that poor countries tend to be corrupt. They will be less corrupt as they become wealthier and better integrated into the global economy. That may be naïve, but I think it’s true.
SE Asia will continue to progress. That progress may slow. It may be interrupted by crises as yet unforeseen. (Remember the currency crisis of the late 90s?) But the region is certainly moving in the right direction.
I hope to use the Freeman experience to introduce students to a variety of issue, events, and phenomenon. I already host a regular series of seminars — we call the “teas” — for students and faculty and I will use these sessions for this purpose. Future sessions might include the golden triangle, Buddhism, the killing fields, the ruins of Angkor, the Mekong River, temple architecture and so on. I also want to introduce an international component to my mass media courses.
The Freeman fellowship was a wonderful opportunity, adventure and learning opportunity for me. For a lot of other people, it was a lot of work. The trip required an enormous amount of planning. We were blessed with a great staff, starting with RicardoTrimillos, the head of the Asians Studies department of the University of Hawaii. Trimillos didn’t come on the trip, but he helped plan it.
Pattie Dunn, the project coordinator for the Freeman Initiative, represented the University of Hawaii on the trip. Deeply experienced in the region, Dunn is blessed with an wonderful, outgoing personality. She made sure to include everyone in our conversations.
Aaron Sorenson, a graduate of the Asian Studies department at the University of Hawaii, joined our group at the assistant coordinator. Just 29 years old, Aaron has traveled the world and immersed himself in many cultures. He’s a kind, generous person who loves to share his knowledge and insights. He’ll be working on advanced degrees at the University of California-Berkeley.
We were blessed to have a professor from Thailand, Charnvit Kasetsiri, join us for most of the trip. He gave us insights into the local culture and answered all of our questions, even the dumb ones. (And yes, there are dumb questions. I asked a few myself.)
We couldn’t have made this trip without Ernest. He supervised the entire expedition taking care of big problems and small problems. No request was too small. He did it all.
Roger represented the travel agency which managed the Freeman trip. He worked tirelessly, day and night, to insure that the trip went smoothly He counted heads and counted bags. He arranged our meals. He handled all the details, leaving us with nothing to do but relax.
Before Roger joined us, Mr. Big represented the travel agency. A soft spoken guy, he enjoyed sharing his culture with the Freeman participants.
A local guide showed us each city. Each one was knowledgeable and friendly.
Jenny, our China guide.
Kantapong Thepsurin, our guide in Northern Thailand and Myanmar
Our guide in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Our guide in Luang Praband, Laos
Our guide in Vientiene, Laos
Our guide in Siem Reap and Angkor
Our guide in Phnom Penh and the killing fields
Our guide in Saigon
In addition to great guides, we started with a great group of participants. No complainers here. Everyone participated in our activities. Everyone enjoyed each other’s company.
Barbara Ross, my wife for a month, has a wonderful, infectious laugh. An economics professor, she’s a champion shopper, too.
Dennis Nullet is a geographer. A real gentleman. He made me think throughout the trip.
Leon Richards is an administrator and a teacher. He never missed an opportunity to interact with local people and to recruit students to Kapiolani Community College.
Jim Rush is a philosopher; a kind and deeply spiritual man.
Leah Creque-Harris teaches composition and literature. Earth mother and class act.
Cecile Yancu: animal lover, vegetarian, Canadian, photographer, and sociologist. Need I say more? A very nice person.
Anna Lee is everyone’s favorite younger sister. The girl next door. She teaches psychology. (She didn’t always sleep. This is the only photo I could find of her.
And last but not least…
Finally, SE Asia is a wonderful place to find unique arts and crafts. I brought home a few things, speak up now to claim your share.
LARGE TAPESTRY (CLAIMED BY KATHLEEN)
PINS (CLAM CLAIMED BY MOM…ONE AVAILABLE)
DRAGON STATUES (AVAILABLE)
ELEPHANT TAPESTRY (AVAILABLE)
TWO OIL PAINTINGS (CLAIMED BY MIKE)
TWO PAINTINGS MADE BY ELEPHANTS (ONE CLAIMED BY KATHLEEN, ONE AVAILABLE)
PILLOW COVERS (CLAIMED BY LORI AND KEVIN)
PUPPETS (ONE FOR MIKE, ONE AVAILABLE)
SHAWL (FOR MOM)
STONE BOXEX (ONE FOR DAD, ONE FOR MIKE)
WIND CHIMES (AVAILABLE)
TEXTILES (AVAILABLE)
I also have a bag of small gift for small children.
July 12th, 2006
We arrived in Taipei, Taiwan, the evening of July 6, 2006. The airport arranged for us to stay at a hotel that evening, since our flight to Honolulu would not depart until the following afternoon. A Vietnamese woman from Canada told me about a free half-day tour of Taipei the following morning, and five of us decided to take it. That meant getting up at six a.m. to return to the airport, but it beat sitting all morning in a hotel room.
Taipei stands in sharp contrast to most of the other cities we visited in SE Asia. It is cleaner and much more modern. It’s more affluent and more expensive — about as expensive as the United States I would say. There are more cars on the road and fewer motorbikes. The city is veiled in smog.
Driving through the city, we noticed something very unusual. We noticed very attractive women, typically wearing mini-skirts, sitting “inside” store-front displays. The women looked like mannequins, placed in the middle of a brightly decorated display case. The “betel nut ladies” sit in these windows and wait for customers to pull up to the curbs outside. The women then run outside the store and sell “betel nut gum” to the waiting motorists. The gum is a stimulant. People use it to stay awake. It may also cause mouth cancer. Most of the people who buy the gum are men, so vendors hire attractive women to sell it.
Our local guide, Scott Kao, an older man with a sense of humor, spoke to us frankly. He had pointed things to say about the Japanese (“whale killers” who occupied Taiwan for 50 years) and the Chinese communists. He made it quite clear that Taiwan represented the true China. (“We have 35 provinces in China,” he said. “Thirty four are occupied by the communists.”)
SCOTT KAO, UNPLUGGED
We stopped at Lungshan temple in the Manka district of Taipei. “Religion,” Kao observed. “It may not be real, but people like it.” We certainly liked the temple, a Buddhist sactuary filled with Tao deities. The temple was also filled with worshippers — ordinary people, not monks — chanting and lighting incense. This was the only place in SE Asia where we saw ordinary people praying together in large numbers.
We visited the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, a giant white tower capped by an octagonal roof, in downtown Taipei. The Hall contains a number of exhibits on the life of Chiang Kai-Shek, one of history’s great losers but an impressive man nonetheless. (He ruled a united China for a short time, led the nation in its fight against the Japanese during WWII, and built Taiwan into an economic power. He did not, however, make Taiwan into a democracy. That came after Chiang Kai-Shek died in 1975, one year before his arch-rival Mao Zedong.)
CHIANG KAI SHEK MEMORIAL
STILL AT HIS DESK AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
The exhibits include Kai-Shek’s touring Cadillac with its “888” license plate. I found that interesting only because we had been told earlier that most Asians consider even numbers to be unlucky. The Vietnamese even built a ninth channel in the Mekong delta because they considered eight channels to be unlucky.
The Hall includes many photos of Chiang Kai-Shek with world leaders and his beautiful wife. She was one of the famous Soong sisters. (”One loved money, one loved power, one loved China.”) She moved to New York after Chiang Kai Shek. She died there at age 106.
We stopped at Taiwan’s war memorial and watched the changing of the guard. The young men seemed fit, well trained, and disciplined, which may not be enough should the communists ever decide to invade. (The communists seem content, for now, to win the Taiwanese over by economic means.) Taiwan has compulsory military service. Twenty three million people live on the island. One point three billion people live on the mainland.
We made one last stop before returning to the airport. Taipei 101 is among the tallest buildings in the world, too tall in fact, for me to take a full-length picture. The office tower stands more than 1,667 feet tall, like a giant bamboo tree in a field of shrubs. Wow.
July 11th, 2006
Saigon is officially named Ho Chi Minh City, after the Vietnamese military leader who defeated the French in the IndoChina War and later led the North Vietnamese against the South Vietnamese and the United States in the Vietnam War. (He died in 1969 years before that latter war ended.) Most local people still refer to the city as Saigon.
Saigon is larger and busier than the other cities we visited in SE Asia. The streets are filled with people on motorbikes. Our local guide said that 10 million people live in Saigon — an exaggeration I think — with 3.5 million motorbikes (purchased used from Korea). It’s almost impossible for a Westerner to cross the street since there are very few traffic lights and since motorists ignore the lights that do exist. (Our guides said the Saigonese are “colorblind.”)
Our guide gave us the following advice for crossing the streets:
• Just do it. Don’t wait for a break in the traffic. It will never come.
• Don’t look. If you look at the traffic, you will chicken out and never get across the street.
• Walk. Don’t run. Motorists need time to move around you, so take your time.
It takes quite a lot of practice to get the hang of it. As Americans, we are taught from a young age to look both ways and to wait for a break in the traffic before crossing a street. If you see a motorcycle bearing down on you, you sprint across the street. But that’s not the way it works in Saigon.
The first time I tried to cross the street, I used a street vendor pushing a cart as cover. The second time, on a corner near the Central Market, I hesitated and a tourist cop — a man paid to help Westerners across the street — came to my rescue. The third time, I was on my own. There were no tourist cops and no vendors in sight. I stepped into the traffic and walked slowly across the street. I looked straight ahead trying not to use my peripheral vision. I walked slowly, calmly, and confidently. The motorcyclists maneuvered around me.
I would like to report that it always works out this way, but our local guide told us that 55 people die each week in Saigon in traffic accidents. I found that figure amazing but unsurprising. Everyone does his or her own thing on the streets and hardly anyone wears a helmet. Why? Our guide suggested these reasons:
• The helmets are hot.
• They restrict your vision.
• They’re unattractive.
• TIM (This is Vietnam): The quality of the helmets is so poor, bikers are better off without them.
Coincidentally, casket makers enjoy a thriving business, building new caskets right on the sidewalk.
COFFIN MAKER
HEARSE
While in Saigon, we stayed at the Windsor Plaza Hotel, a fine if unspectacular hotel, on An Duong Vuong Street, near Chinatown (home to 800,000 ethnic Chinese.) The Windsor serves a mostly Asian clientele despite its English surname. (In the aftermath of the communist victory in Vietnam, many businesses adopted suitably proletarian names at the behest of the government. They are now reverting to their pre-regime change names.)
The Windsor is adjacent to a shopping center. It has a small business center which offers high speed Internet access for $8 an hour. (I paid $1 for two and a half hours at an Internet café outside the hotel.) There are conference rooms on the third floor and a health club on the 8th floor. The health club is open 24 hours a day and has 62 massage rooms. A 90-minute massage costs $11. (Or you can go outside the hotel and get a less expensive massage from a less qualified masseuse.)
The hotel also has a pool on the 24th floor, which offers a great view of the city, filtered through smog-covered glasses. You need to carry your room key at all time. You cannot use the “up” elevator without inserting your key into a slot built into the wall of the elevator.
Saigon boasts a number of interesting buildings. The French left behind Notre Dame cathedral and the Vietnamese communists — to their credit — have left it alone. (About six percent of the Vietnamese are Catholic.) A few months ago, someone saw the Virgin Mary statue “cry,” and pilgrims began to visit her statue in droves. The Bishop came out, said it was untrue, and asked the people to go home.
NOTRE DAME
OUR LADY
The French also built the main post office, which is impressive and charming at the same time. The post office has two old men on staff who serve as translators for people who either cannot write or who wish to write a letter in a language other than Vietnamese. The “keepers of secrets” are known for their discretion. (Incidentally, the Vietnamese use a Roman alphabet, just as we do, thanks to Portuguese missionaries.)
POST OFFICE
POST OFFICE INTERIOR, HO CHI MINH IN THE BACKGROUND
THE KEEPER OF SECRETS
THE FREEMAN GROUP
We visited the “reunification palace” where, in another day, the president of South Vietnam lived and worked. The president’s office, living quarters, and reception rooms have been preserved. So too has the basement bunker which served as the president’s war room. The building is still used on special occasions for receptions. Two Soviet tanks can be found just outside the front gate. In 1975, on the last day of freedom for the South Vietnamese, these tanks knocked down the palace gate and rolled onto the palace grounds.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the United State government tore down the American embassy. It built an expensive bug-free consulate on the same site. The U.S.-Vietnam relationship is evolving. The Vietnamese government is avidly pursing American investment, as a counterweight to China’s growing power.
(Vietnam’s relationship with China is complicated. They are ideological allies but historic enemies. Vietnam and China fought against each other in wars both before and after the Vietnam War. The two countries have important economic ties — which grow stronger every year — which the Vietnamese view as a mixed blessing.)
Many American companies are now pursing a “China plus one” policy — investing in Vietnam to hedge against problems, which could develop in China. Vietnam reportedly has even lower labor costs than China.
Vietnamese Americans — including former high- ranking officials of the South Vietnamese government — are now investing in Vietnam. Bill Gates came here recently on a trade mission.
The presence of U.S. sailors in Saigon is only the most dramatic sign of improved U.S.-Vietnamese ties. Two American destroyers arrived in Saigon the day before my tour group arrived. The next morning, an English language newspaper reported that the United States is negotiating to lease Vietnam’s largest naval base at Cam Ranh Bay, a hard to fathom development should it occur.
In any event, the people of Vietnam seemed quite happy to see Americans back in their country. I didn’t detect any hostility.
A POLITICAL WORD
I have, for the most part, avoided politics in this travel blog. However, Saigon is the last stop on our tour and I am going to relax that standard for a moment.
As you may suspect, I have never accepted the now-conventional wisdom that the Vietnam War was “wrong” or “evil,” though I would concede “tragic” and “unsuccessful.” It’s tragic that we failed to accomplish in South Vietnam what we accomplished in South Korea. The people of Vietnam — to say nothing of the Cambodians — have suffered a great deal under communist rule.
I’ve never been able to understand why so many Americans who supported our involvement in Korea opposed our involvement in Vietnam. Some anti-war activists complained that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and lacked popular support. (In other words, it was typical of most SE Asian countries then and now.) Granted, South Vietnam was an imperfect democracy, but it was certainly a sovereign country.
One of our Thai hosts suggested that the two wars were different because North Korea “invaded” South Korea in such a clear manner that the United Nations became involved. The North Vietnamese were cleverer and the United Nations never condemned them for their aggression against the South Vietnamese. (That’s par for the course. The UN also looked the other way when the Soviets invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Or when the United States invaded Iraq. The only reason the UN acted differently during the Korean War was because the Chinese did not have — do not have — a seat on the UN Security Council.)
In any event, the battlefield represented just the first stage of the Vietnam War. The real war will take much longer and in the long run, the United States has powerful advantages: an efficient economic system, a flexible political system, and a powerful popular culture. The Vietnamese have already dropped their moribund economic ideology and must now defend their political system from an army of guerillas: moviemakers, web designers, business people, tourists, ex-patriots and the like. Each soldier in this guerilla army is planting seeds of unrest. The army is decentralized. Each cell is independent of the other. Most soldiers in the army don’t even realize that they are in it. Consequently, they will be difficult to defeat.
I spoke to a number of Vietnamese privately. They said that the people of Vietnam are not happy with the communist political system; they are resigned to it. People are pleased that the communists have dropped Marxist economic policies, though. Farmers in particular detested the not-for-profit policies the communists introduced in the 70s. They were deeply skeptical when the communists reversed course. Today, most farms in Vietnam are privately owned. In any event, as the Vietnamese people become more prosperous, better educated, and better informed about the world around them, they will demand more freedom.
The communists stayed in power in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe for about fifty years. The Chinese and the Vietnamese, who have reformed their economies, will last longer. But not forever.
A THEORY ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR
I asked a man in Saigon why the South Vietnamese lost the war. “Because America stopped supporting us,” he said. I asked why the United States did that. “Because Nixon opened the door to China.” He said the United States’ primary interest in Vietnam was to use it as a back door into China. Once the Chinese opened the front door, Vietnam became much less important.
It’s an interesting theory. It’s a fact that the United States pulled its troops out of Vietnam within a year of President Nixon’s trip to China. Is that just a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Access to China may have played a role in the United States’ withdrawal, but domestic political pressure and a deteriorating military situation also played a role.
July 11th, 2006
We celebrated the Fourth of July with an all day excursion in Vietnam in search of the South China Sea. We had traveled more than 1600 miles along the Mekong, on the Mekong, and high above the Mekong for nearly a month. We had explored the people, cultures, and issues, which touch the river. It was time to bring our expedition to its logical conclusion.
The Mekong River separates into nine channels, forming a number of large islands, before emptying into the South China Sea about 37 miles south of Saigon. (The River comes by eight of its channels naturally. However, many Vietnamese believe that even numbers are unlucky, so they built a ninth channel. The Mekong is known as the “nine dragons river” in Vietnam.) There are many villages along these channels. We planned to visit a village close to the sea and then take a boat ride. Our local guide told us that it would take much of the day to reach the village and he suggested an alternative.
ONE OF THE NINE DRAGONS
We drove out of Saigon and into the country. We drove two hours along the National Highway before stopping in the city of My Tho. We boarded a ferry and crossed one of the Mekong channels to the island of Ben Tre, the Coconut Province. Ben Tre is a quiet place chiefly known, unsurprisingly, for the many coconut trees that grow there. Islanders drink coconut water, eat coconut candy, carve coconut wood, and use coconut leaves to make thatched roofs for their porches.
MAKING COCONUT CANDY
Coconut Province is a quiet place that has recently enjoyed some economic growth. The fishing is good. The soil is good. The planting is good. Private ownership of land is good, too. (Like the Soviets and Chinese before them, the Vietnamese communists eliminated private farms upon coming to power and replaced them with large, state-run “collective” farms. The results were predictably disastrous. Eventually, they saw the light and abandoned this policy.)
Vietnam today is the second largest exporter of rice in the world, behind Thailand.
We ate a delicious fish lunch at a restaurant just off the beaten path and then boarded a fleet of wooden canoes for a canal ride.
LUNCH
The canoes transported us to a bygone time — and then to a waiting ferry. There’s something special about traveling under your own power — or someone else’s, in this case — in the fullness of nature and the absence of machinery. I felt like Lewis and Clark exploring a vast, unknown territory. Priceless.
We boarded our ferry back to the village of My Tho, passing a strange little island along the way. The island is now abandoned. The people have gone and all that remains is an odd collection of buildings and structures reminiscent of an old amusement park. Our local guide said that the island was once home to the Coconut Cult. The founder of this peculiar cult believed that coconuts were the source of all goodness. He ate nothing but coconuts and urged his followers to do the same. He made the island a shrine of sorts and then died young. The government closed off his property.
CULT ISLAND
We got off the ferry, boarded our bus, and drove to the village of Binh Dai — on the edge of the South China Sea — to board a boat and head to sea. We stopped at a government office and asked permission to proceed to Binh Dai’s boat dock, which was located on government property. We waited and waited. And then waited some more. In the meantime, one of my colleagues passed a shell necklace from Hawaii to a child standing outside the bus. He gave away another necklace and a group of children quickly gathered beside the bus, climbing onto a chain link fence, asking us to pass them more presents from the window.
I got off the bus and passed out my three remaining baseball hats.
A crowd began to form.
Two of my other colleagues got off the bus and began passing out pens. The crowd grew larger. Soon, we had an audience of several dozen villagers.
They seemed fascinated by us. Our Vietnamese guide said that this was probably the first time that the villagers had seen non-Asians. A local government functionary asked us to stay on the bus. He was worried about crowd control.
We waited for about a half hour. In the end, we were turned away. The official said that it was impossible to get all the necessary clearances on short notice. So our guide’s alternative destination turned out to be a bust. We drove to the village of Rach Mieu on Coconut Island and right onto another ferry, which we took back to My Tho. We pulled to the side of the road for a moment so that our guide, Nguyen Thai Dy, could get off the bus and see his nine-month-old daughter, Miracle. Dy was thrilled to see his little girl and to show her off to his clients.
PROUD PAPA
We never made it to the South China Sea, though we made a few new friends. That’s OK.
THE MONKEY
THE ARTIST
THE WOMAN WITH THE COME HITHER STARE
THE SHIPMATES