Hot Time In Saigon

By Terry McCarthy/Ho Chi Minh City

The air is crackling with electricity this Tuesday in Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City, but the locals have reverted to the old name). Monsoon clouds are moving in from the west. People are hurrying along sidewalks, newspaper vendors are getting out plastic sheeting, cyclo drivers are making for shelter.

On Nguyen Trai Street, Kieu Viet Lien has brought her new moped indoors. The 25-year-old designer is kneeling on the floor of her shop surrounded by paper patterns and pieces of green silk, preparing for a fashion competition. From his office in an advertising agency across town, Pham Phu Xuan, 31, can see the storm approaching too. He is on the phone setting up a TV shoot for a shampoo commercial. Hong Nhung, 30, one of Vietnam's most popular singers, is working out in her gym in the Saigon Center. Drops of rain are starting to splash on the windows--and she has to get to a rehearsal later for a concert she is giving over the weekend. Only Nguyen Quang Huy is oblivious to the coming deluge. The 21-year-old bar owner and music promoter is shut in a soundproof recording studio in his home, coaching a new band.

Lien, Xuan, Nhung and Huy have never met, but they are from the same generation--those for whom the war never happened. Children of one of the starkest generation gaps in the world, they have no interest in hearing about the hardships their parents endured in a war that ended a quarter-century ago. All four are Vietnamese but have ambivalent feelings about Vietnam, a country no longer communist but not yet democratic or free.

Through them and others like them, Vietnam is remaking itself. As the aged cadres in Hanoi debate whether private enterprise is a good thing, young entrepreneurs in Saigon have already decided. Youthful rebelliousness in Vietnam, once channeled collectively into war, now expresses itself on an individual level, as a fierce will to get ahead. They have not lost the tenacity and endurance of their parents. But learning from the West, this is a generation no longer afraid to say "me."

Theirs is a world of cell phones, mopeds, long days at work and long evenings in coffee shops. All four have complicated, busy lives, careers they forged on their own and ambitions to take them to the top. They have grown up to be self-reliant in uncertain times, with little guidance from their elders. Sex before marriage--"eating rice before the bell," as it is sometimes called--is the norm. All have acquaintances who do drugs, a haven for those who don't know where else to go.

They are determined to get on with their lives, to make up for lost time since the communists took over and dumped Vietnam at the bottom of Asia's economic league. Vietnam's per capita gross national product is a paltry $350 a year, according to the World Bank, compared with $510 for sub-Saharan Africa. In February, Le Kha Phieu, the 68-year-old Communist Party chief who runs the country, lashed out at "imperialist forces [who] have expanded the world market everywhere for maximum profit." Such rhetoric flies over the heads of the younger generation. Its members are reading from a different script, a script they had to write themselves.

Kieu Viet Lien started at less than zero. She was born in prison in 1974. Her mother had been jailed as a Viet Cong agent. They were not released until April 1975, when North Vietnamese forces overran Saigon. Lien was schooled in the city, renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victors. When she was 18 she got lucky: her application for a visa to study fashion in Australia was accepted. After three years in Melbourne, she went to Canada in 1996 for two years and then spent a year in Paris. There she fell in love with French style. "Christian Lacroix, Galliano--I have a taste for the elegant," she says, pointing to a rack of sumptuous $200 wedding dresses in the back of her shop. "I want to make Vietnamese look beautiful." But in a city where a college graduate would be happy to land a job paying $100 a month, her $12 shirts and $30 dresses are for only a small number of young people with money.

The manic pace of Saigon carries over to the streets, where swarms of motorbikes zip through intersections. Cars are too expensive, but the motorbike is at the top of everyone's must-have list. Young bloods race them after dark, and couples use them as a place of intimacy: Vietnamese don't kiss in public, but women know how to hug their boyfriends tightly from behind.

Pham Phu Xuan borrowed money to buy a motorbike the day he got his current job as production manager for J. Walter Thompson. "I was so happy. It was the first thing I did," he says about that day four years ago. There were 1,000 applicants for just five jobs, and Xuan had neither a college degree nor money to buy a suit and tie for the interview. His friends told him he was wasting his time. They didn't know him well enough.

Eighth in a family of 10, Xuan was brought up in a poor village seven hours from Saigon, and realized early that there was no future for him in the countryside. In 1985, at 16, he moved to Saigon, got a job repairing electronic equipment and taught himself English. "I knew I must be successful. I could not afford to lose." Many of the boys he left behind in his village have no jobs. Half have started using heroin, he says. Full of self-confidence, Xuan began coordinating TV and photo shoots for the agency, and after a while made some trips around Asia. He was shocked at the prosperity of Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul. "Vietnam is the slowest country in the region. We are very behind."

Xuan resolved to find a way to move to the U.S.--home to nearly a million Vietnamese. This month he married his childhood sweetheart, a girl from his village who had managed to get a highly valued exit visa in the 1980s and settled in Minnesota. She flew to Saigon for the wedding, but Xuan knows it will still take years for the U.S. consulate to process his visa request to join her. "I know it will not be easy in America. I will always miss my family here. But I need to try something bigger."

The government is ambivalent about the flood of Vietnamese who have been returning from America since Washington normalized relations with Hanoi in 1995. It welcomes their dollars, yet is wary of their politics. But if any revolution is coming from these returning Viet Kieu, as the overseas Vietnamese are called, it will probably have to do with transforming the lifestyles and expectations of younger Vietnamese.

Nguyen Quang Huy sees a lot of Viet Kieu in his bar, the Hot Club. "The younger ones we can get on with," he says. "It is the older ones who are difficult sometimes, with their memories of before." He is leaning against the counter, drinking a Corona and watching one of the bands he is promoting. They begin with a love song. Huy frowns. "Now that could be a problem for us if the police come in." The song is by a Vietnamese band in the U.S. "Not allowed here." More than anything, Huy wants to make money. Fast. "Business is good. Artists paint so many pictures. Why? To make money. Singers write songs--to make money. With money you can live." Huy wanted to study in the U.S. but couldn't get a visa. He says it doesn't matter much. "I can get what I need from the Internet." The bar is doing so well that he plans to open a second one. He's hoping to begin shooting music videos of his best acts. "You know the real problem with Vietnamese bands?" says Huy. "They don't smile. When an American band is onstage, everyone is smiling." Sure enough, the guitar, bass and keyboard players look as if they are waiting for a bus. Huy drains his Corona. "I have to teach them that."

It is a whole new world. Vietnam's younger generation has escaped from under the very eyes of the government, which didn't even see them going. The party's authority no longer crosses the generation gap, and a huge empty space has opened up in society for youngsters to prosper--or self-destruct. A 15-min. cell-phone call in Saigon costs the same as a single hit of heroin in one of the city's public parks.

The rain held off over the weekend. Lien and her fiance went out for dinner with some friends to a restaurant where the waitresses sing as they deliver the food. Xuan ducked work in order to spend time with his soon-to-be wife--his first holiday since 1996. Nhung was onstage in the Long Phung Culture Center, singing the songs of Trinh Cong Son to a rapt audience. And Huy was back in the Hot Club, coaxing another new act, looking for that smile.