Liz and Jim Patton

The City.  Officially Ho Chi Minh City, but still Saigon to those from the South, this does not have the look of a dour Communist  metropolis. Stores are open and full and restaurants are crowded. The people, while not really friendly, are talkative and energetic, dressed in trendy city styles. And moving constantly.

Ho Chi Minh City has 8 million residents who ride 3 million motorscooters. They flow constantly through the streets, resembling nothing more than a one-dimensional swarm of bees that maneuvers instinctively around pedestrians, cars and trucks. They generally ride one or two to a cycle, but often carry a couple of children in addition. There are as many women riders as men: the women cover their faces with masks and their hands and arms with long gloves to protect themselves from the sun. The riders wear helmets now too, because of a recent law, but these seem insubstantial, as much use as a Yarmulke might be in an accident.

We arrived with Ginny and Maynard Switzer on Sunday night, just escaping a  winter snowstorm to come to this city sitting in the humid mid-nineties. HCMC is an interesting mix of the influences of its past. Chinatown is very large, and the home the Cha Lon Wholesale Market, a huge, tight packed mix of ………everything: spices, butchers, plastic ware, women’s shoes, barrettes, vegetables, dried bird’s nest, laid out in a dizzying lack of order or sense. Other areas of the city are very European with broad avenues and sculptured parks,  but much of it is narrow and windy. There are several memorials to the wars – referred to as the French War and the American War.

And religions. Vietnam is at the convergence of many religions. Most people consider themselves to be Buddhist, yet Confucianism shapes family and civic values, and Taoism the understanding of the cosmos. Fully ten percent of the people are Catholic, and that number is growing since the suppression of the religion by communism has ended. A fascinating religion, Cao Dai, created by the Vietnamese, has grown out of this convergence. In 1925, Ngo Van Chieu received a vision that told him to create a religion that was the culmination of two earlier alliances of God and mankind – those brought about first by Moses and then by Jesus Christ. We visited a pagoda of this religion, At the entrance was a painting of the meeting of Ngo Van Chieu with Sun Yat Sen and Victor Hugo, entitled “The Three Saints.” There are 2-3 million people who espouse this mix of Eastern and Western philosophies. Amazing.

There are a few vestiges of the communist government – a press that publishes 600 newspapers and magazines yet is completely run by the government, TV and radio whose content is broad but whose real news is controlled by the government. But with the fall of communism in Europe in the late 80’s, and the loss of financial support from Russia, Vietnam has experimented with a much broader economy. Doi Moi beginning in  1986 permitted private ownership of businesses. 1995 saw recognition of the Vietnamese government by the US. Vietnam joined the WTO in 2007 and is now a member of ASEAN.

Just over forty years ago the US was at war with this country, a war that was so devastating that it fractured the structure and values of the US, killed 58 thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and left millions wounded and displaced. Now relations seem to be coming to a full normal, as if nothing had ever happened. Except for all those dead boys.