Hanoi: Souvenirs and Spontaneity

VIET NAM

Hanoi is a city mobilized for peace, reports TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who spent three days there while accompanying the special commission headed by United Auto Workers President Leonard Woodcock (TIME, March 28). Returning to Washington last week, Talbott wrote these impressions of the Vietnamese capital:

In Hanoi's Chi Linh Park, amidst the tamarind, rhododendron and banyan trees, there are two man-made structures. One is a bomb shelter, constructed in the mid-'60s as U.S. air strikes crept closer to the capital. The other is a round cage with a pagoda-style roof, built in the French colonial period but maintained by the Communists; it houses two large cranes, symbols in the Far East of longevity and prosperity. The bomb shelter is overgrown with weeds and largely ignored by the populace. "It is marked for demolition," explained one of our official escorts. "We have other uses for the brick and iron." The nearby bird cage, by contrast, is the center of activity in the park. On the afternoon of our arrival, a squad of preteenage girls, dressed in uniforms consisting of white blouses and black trousers and wearing the red bandannas of the Pioneer Communist Youth Organization, marched around the cage. Three off-duty soldiers in green pith helmets looked on with amusement, while two women street cleaners in conical hats and surgical masks busily swept away bread crumbs that passers-by had thrown to the birds.

Chinese-made military trucks and Soviet troop carriers clog the rickety Long Bien bridge over the Red River, hauling sand and gravel to reconstruction projects around the city. The army has been pressed into service restoring communications, repairing roads, digging irrigation canals and even harvesting rice.

A bombed-out wing of Bach Mai hospital has been left in ruins as a memorial to victims of the 1972 Christmas bombing. But there are few such deliberate reminders of the war, either in the landscape or in conversation. Posters celebrating the accuracy of rooftop antiaircraft gunners have been replaced by ones exhorting greater industrial and agricultural production. In the city's teeming central market (where dog meat is sold as a delicacy), a loudspeaker system installed ten years ago for air raid alerts and tirades against the "imperialist" enemy is now used to announce the arrival of produce from the countryside.

When one of our group asked his guide about a nondescript gray building next to a children's playground downtown, he was told only that it "belongs to the government." In fact, it is Hoa Lo prison, the notorious "Hanoi Hilton," where captured Americans were held. Today it serves as a jail for common criminals. Another visitor noticed on sale in a shop a stack of pocket-size packages of Kleenex, obviously liberated from a U.S. Army PX in the South. His escort explained, "That is merely a souvenir from Ho Chi Minh City [as Saigon has been renamed]." Our guides unabashedly confessed to listening to the Voice of America. They prefer country-and-western music and Hollywood show tunes to The Ballad of Norman Morrison, a Vietnamese song commemorating the war protester who burned himself to death on the steps of the Pentagon in November 1965.

Partisan Comrades. During a banquet in honor of the visiting Americans, Foreign Ministry Official Phung Cong Duc reminisced to Air Force Colonel William Hubbell about World War II. Due and his Communist partisan comrades had cooperated closely with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) against the Japanese and helped rescue downed American pilots. "What an irony," said Hubbell. Due merely smiled and shrugged.

One reason for the surprising friendliness toward Americans is that the Vietnamese are worried about becoming too dependent on their Communist allies, particularly China. Strolling near Chi Linh Park, one official pointedly explained that Return-of-the-Sword Lake is named after a legend about a giant turtle that emerged from the depths and gave a Vietnamese folk hero a magic golden sword with which to repel Chinese invaders. This same official complained about the regimentation of the Chinese and pointed with pride to the many colorful ao-dois (traditional flowing dresses) and the occasional young woman wearing lipstick or young man wearing bell-bottom trousers--more "souvenirs from Ho Chi Minh City."

An evening of Vietnamese music featured dances of the tribal minorities, folk songs the peasants have been singing for centuries and haunting instrumental classics played on the dan bau, a one-string violin. There was little of the tedious Red-flag-waving "revolutionary culture" with which visitors to Peking are entertained. "We believe that ideology has its place, but so does tradition and so does spontaneity," said one Vietnamese. "Unlike certain of our neighbors, we are an informal and a tolerant people." As an example of official tolerance, he pointed out that a Catholic newspaper called Righteous Path is published in Viet Nam. A European resident of Hanoi later explained, however, that the editors of the paper take pains to identify the teachings of Jesus Christ with "Marxist-Leninist values."

Until the U.S. establishes relations with Communist Viet Nam, American visitors to Hanoi will be rare, and their impressions of the capital, to say nothing of the rest of the country, will be fleeting. But the Vietnamese are already thinking--and talking--about the future. A number of our escorts confided a desire to serve in their government's first embassy in Washington, and Western diplomats based in Hanoi say that the American consulate there, closed in 1955, is being kept in good repair.

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