Oh, East is East, and West is West
And never the twain shall meet.
Till Earth and Sky stand presently
At God's great Judgment Seat.
—Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of East and West"
As we checked through customs at the Hanoi airport, the pretty uniformed girl gave me a smug smile and stamped "Surrender Monkey" on my passport.
Well, maybe not — I can't read Vietnamese; I was just thinking of John McCain, who believes we shouldn't have quit fighting the Vietnam War. The old soldier's ideas are simple, and we Americans like that: He hates war; but our wars are just, and we must fight on to "victory," no matter how many lives are destroyed. Though McCain was imprisoned here, he gives no hint that he knows Vietnamese history, how we blocked the democratic election of Ho Chi Minh and kicked off the war,
The first thing you think in Hanoi is, "How the hell can I cross the street?" Wave after wave of motorbikes, bicycles and "cyclos" (small cabs pedaled by their drivers — the descendants of the old rickshaws) roll side by side, hour after hour, with a cacophony of horns worthy of some modernist composer's arranging abilities. Far behind Bangkok in modern toys, Hanoi has few cars — only the occasional taxi and bus edging like manatees through a pool of minnows. "Just step out," new friends in our student-filled hotel told us. "Look confident, and whatever you do, DON'T STOP!" Of course we were terrified, but after a few aborted tries found ourselves able to grit our teeth and move slowly forward as the bikes whisked by on either side.
Just a few hours later, coming out of the charming Turtle Pagoda on Hoan Kiem Lake, between the French Quarter and the Old Quarter, we saw traffic slow to a standstill, as it paused to watch four athletic Vietnamese boys break-dancing on a raised outdoor stage by the lake. With funk and rap blaring out, we felt we were in Greenwich Village or Harlem 20 years ago, except without any traffic laws. Now this is the way to conquer a country and win its heart and soul.
Like Bangkok, Hanoi has embraced capitalism, although the remnants of Communist control show in the way goods are clumped together. On our street, they sold toys (Disney's big here); on the next street watches, then silk, then buttons and thread. We meandered around like millionaires — in fact, we were millionaires: the dong (yes) goes for 16,000 to a dollar, so my hundred dollars at the airport gave me 1,600,000 dong. When you buy a cup of coffee, you have to study those zeroes carefully — though I should add that we found everyone scrupulously honest, as well as friendly.
They like us. The young ones are pouring into Hanoi to make a buck, or a dong, and they look to America for guidance. (Although the streets tend to sell the same goods, every third store-keeper is an entrepreneurial travel agent: CHEAP TRIP TO HA LONG BAY is plastered everywhere.)
But they have a long way to go, and one can see much heartache, not to mention gridlock and fire, ahead. A symbolic example: We were eating on the second floor of a bistro called Café des Arts. (The French-influenced cuisine is exquisite, with inexpensive versions of Tampa's BT scattered everywhere.) Looking out the window, we saw a ganglion of wires stretching and sagging from our building across the alleyway, and so on down the street, all knotted together, more than 50 of them, swaying in the air in a hopeless tangle. American Airlines' wiring problems were child's play next to what Hanoi is going to have to deal with. We fear the whole overcrowded city could go up in flames.
Rudyard Kipling was a sly old rogue, and the truth of his lines above seems to be supported by the wars of the 21st century, pitting a fundamentalist East against the secular West. The situation is complicated by the mostly secular Europe splitting from the surprisingly religious U.S., with two fronts moving in opposite directions. One is the battle between the certainties of large abstractions: religion vs. secularism, capitalism vs. communism (which often boils down to rich vs. poor). Though the young do the dying, these abstractions are generally spearheaded by old men.
The other front is the uncertain but constant bonding between young people from different backgrounds: Palestinian and Israeli, Asian and Western, and black and white friends, intermingling and intermarrying on all levels. When my sister and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary by gathering all the children, and our children's children, for the occasion, we were astounded that in three short generations this small white Protestant American family now includes in its spreading branches African-Americans; Catholics, Jews, Muslims and atheists; in-laws from Pakistan, Iraq, China, Japan, Italy and the Philippines. None of this was planned (au contraire!); it just happened.
Barack Obama is the poster child for this kind of seismic world change. Here in Hanoi, we look at our new Vietnamese acquaintances, who are willing to forgive the sins of the past, and think of McCain vs. Obama. McCain, like John Wayne and George Bush, is a tough guy with a childish code; Obama's an adult who tries to address complicated problems in a mature manner, using complete sentences and hoping we as a country will understand. Well, we've had too many tough guys lately: Look where it's taken us. What we need is a visionary without a chip on his shoulder and with an adult brain in his head.
Peter Meinke, who is even older than John McCain, will vote for youth, if he can remember. His latest book is Unheard Music, a collection of stories.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.