Even before we crossed the border into Vietnam, we were hearing the rumors. “Vietnamese people are cold and unfriendly.” “You’ll get so frustrated by people asking you to buy things and asking for money.” “China is a warm welcome after a month in Vietnam.” “We got lied to so much by Vietnamese people- you can’t trust any of them.” We even have had one guy loudly proclaim, in front of three English speaking Vietnamese, that he thought “all Vietnamese people are (expletive deleted) holes!” There are quite a few reasons why we think our experiences in Vietnam have been so different than the ones we’ve heard about from these other travelers. A lot of it has to do with an inherent lack of friendliness on the part of these fellow trekkers. They see the Vietnamese as nothing more than service-providers, not human beings with lives, ambitions and perfectly legit motivations for their actions and attitudes. Thankfully, it takes little more than a smile and some friendly words to break the ice and peer into the world of a Vietnamese citizen. Recently, we’ve had the opportunity to have extended conversations with two incredibly fascinating men who’ve embraced us with warmth and openness and regaled us with stories from their lives in pre-war, war, and post-war Vietnam.
We left off our last post in Hue, a central city with a rich imperial history, and the site of some of the most vicious fighting of the war. Our fifth day in town, sufficiently recovered from the heat exhaustion, we set off to explore its famous citadel. Before we knew it we’d been swept up into the waiting cyclo of a man named- fittingly enough- Hue. He wore us down with persistent urgings to just take an hour’s tour, showing us a small notebook with the comments of past customers, telling us that he had been born and raised here and knew the city inside and out. Finally, he told us the price. For an hour of carting us around the city by pedal power alone, in the mid-day heat, he charged the equivalent of three dollars. We agreed.
The citadel is an ancient town within a town, encircled by a bullet-scarred wall with a 10 kilometer perimeter. In the first hour, Mr. Hue took us through its narrow alleys and the shadowed shores of its small lakes. We passed a school, and he told us about his two children, both in high school, and the costs of education in Vietnam (where school is not free). He was overjoyed to speak of his family. “I am very, very lucky with my family now,” he declared. “Before, not so much.” Hue was born in 1966, two years before the battle for Hue city during the 1968 Tet Offensive. His father, along with 3000 others, died fighting for the South Vietnamese forces. His mother raised him alone, but died of a heart failure when he was still a teenager. His attitude about his father was philosophical: “If he hadn’t died fighting, I might not be in Vietnam today. I might be in America.” After American troops withdrew from Vietnam, as South Vietnam fell, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country, fearing possible retribution and a communist future. Unlike many, Hue was glad of his fate. Despite the costs of education and the desperately hard work, he loves his city and is happy to be there.
Peddling the stiff rickshaw in the hot, midday sun, Hue took us further into the heart of the mighty citadel. Incredibly old, dilapidated houses contrasted sharply with the grand, imperial structures of Vietnam’s bygone era while the typical array of panting dogs, frantic chickens, and meandering water buffalo met us at every corner. Hue stopped the rickshaw along a silent lake densely covered by lotus flowers, pointing out the bright pink bulbs with a wide grin. “Everyone in Vietnam comes to Hue to buy lotus tea,” he explained. “It’s the only place in Vietnam where you can get it, and Vietnamese people give it out as gifts to their closest friends and relatives.” We were intrigued. We’d seen lotus flowers throughout Vietnam, and couldn’t figure out why Hue held such an esteemed status. Hue was more enthusiastic than intrigued, clearly proud of his home city’s geographical uniqueness.
Back on the rickshaw, Hue pointed out another of Hue’s (the city) famous floral arrangements. Throughout the city, beautiful bouquets of red flowers hang from trees along the streets. “They are called ‘vacation’ flowers,” he said to us as we commented on their elegance. “They only bloom in June, July, and August- the months when students are on vacation.” This brought the conversation back to a favored topic of discussion- Hue’s family. In Vietnam, parents must pay for their children’s schooling. There is no such thing as free public education. This can be quite a problem in a nation where so many are so impoverished. Hue, having been orphaned at an early age, hadn’t had the opportunity to complete his schooling and attain a well paying job. His status as the son of a former South Vietnamese soldier probably didn’t help him out much in a country where formal reconciliation has been incredibly slow in coming. Thus, Hue had to perform one of the most physically demanding, low paying, and unpredictable jobs available- cyclo driver.
Like most in Vietnam, cyclo drivers start their day incredibly early, usually before 7 a.m. Also like most in Vietnam, their days don’t end until well after 9 or 10 p.m. The plight of the cyclo driver is exacerbated by the style of employment, however. Hue was little more than 140 pounds, and we were asking him to peddle us (combined well over 320 pounds) on a gearless, rickety old contraption during the hottest hours of the day. We learned from Hue that these sacrifices seem rather small when compared to the rewards of providing his children with an education. “Before, I used to peddle sacks of rice back and forth- usually 600 kilos a load, all across town. I used to make four or five trips a day so that my family could have money.” Hearing things like this makes you understand why Vietnamese vendors and drivers approach you with such desperation at times. Imagine if your life and the lives of your children depended on the revenues you made from tourists. Mind you, not lives in the sense of “Can I afford a new ipod for my kid or those new rims for his truck?” but lives in the sense of “Will I be able to afford to send my daughter to fourth grade next year or even be able to give her a bowl of rice for breakfast tomorrow?”
Hue dropped us off at the old imperial city, a walled compound inside the citadel. We agreed to meet him after taking a look, and strolled through its ornate, brightly painted gates. Inside, the sprawling grounds rivaled the Forbidden City of Beijing. Renovated temples and terraces were flanked by smaller compounds devoted to mandarins- the suite of advisors every emperor required. Most of the buildings were built during the early 1800s, under the Nguyen dynasty. After a bit of wandering, we climbed to the top of the main gate, admired the views, and waved to Hue and his friends who were waiting in the shade of some nearby “vacation trees.”
Instead of the initial hour we’d planned on, we spent three doubled up on the bright velour cyclo seat. Hue took us to several more pagodas, including a district where nearly every other building was a Chinese temple. We were most interested in the backstreets he took us down, where old women sitting outside cleaning fish or plucking chickens would grin toothlessly at us, and small children would stare and then shout “hello!” to our backs. Later, back in our hotel, we got online and did some further research on the city’s wartime history. We stumbled across a few sites with photo galleries taken by U.S. Marines and reporters as they retook the city in 1968. Aside from the tanks and helmeted soldiers crawling through the back alleys, the scenes in the photos looked exactly the same as the ones we observed that day. It was eerie to see them and think that we had just ridden up the same streets where the fighting took place. How many of the people who smiled and waved at us that day had been impacted by the war? How many had lost children, husbands, wives, parents or friends?
A few days later we climbed off a morning bus to Dong Ha near the DMZ and into the tiny office of two South Vietnamese veterans who helped answer these questions firsthand.
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