Falling Off the Map (15 page)

In recent years, however, the pressure on the isolated kingdom has begun to build. The Dalai Lama describes how twenty-eight Tibetans living in Bhutan were suddenly arrested, tortured, and thrown without trial into jail. And recently, when the Dragon Ruler issued his latest edict ordering all Bhutanese citizens to wear traditional dress while in public—and, in the same breath, expelling every immigrant who had arrived since 1958—the roughly 400,000 Nepalis who represent almost a quarter of the population rose up in protest, stripping Bhutanese civilians of their clothes and calling out for democracy, until they were violently put down. Even in the course of my own stay, I could sense the first stirrings of a modernizing impulse. The new jet was one sign of this, and there was already talk of an airport terminal that would hold 160 people. One afternoon I wandered out of the Druk Hotel to watch the archers in the Sportsgrounds, and returned less than an hour later to find the nation’s first American Express stickers proudly plastered to the door. The country had even just completed its first feature-length movie, a $6,500 spectacular about a star-crossed couple: she dies, he throws himself on the funeral pyre, and both live happily ever after as an ox and a cow.

Yet what I remember best about Bhutan seems unlikely to change very soon. What I remember best is sipping chilled mango juice in the sunlit mornings and walking through blue afternoons, silent save for the snapping of prayer flags; or climbing up mountains to the whitewashed monasteries and watching
the lights come on in the valleys below. When, on my last day in Bhutan, I returned to the Thimphu library, to cancel my membership there, one of the young librarians hurried up to greet me. “Just now you go to America, sir?” Yes. “How long to America, sir?” Maybe two days. “Oh, sir! America is very far from Bhutan! Here in Bhutan, sir, we cannot imagine America!” The same, I thought, was more than true in reverse.

In Hue, the gracious, reticent capital of old Vietnam, I drifted one morning, by sampan, down to the Linh Mu pagoda, its gardens scented with orchids, frangipani, and jackfruit, and scattered with a flutter of white and crimson butterflies. Monks with girlish faces ushered me into the kitchen, where eleven-year-old novices, tassel-haired, were slicing vegetables and stoking fires. Then, over tea and green-bean cake, the head abbot, smiling-eyed, told me about how Buddhism had long been suppressed in his country, and pointed out to me the grayish Austin, sitting neatly in the temple garden, in which a monk from the pagoda had driven to Saigon to immolate himself in 1963. Later that day, I walked around the lakeside pavilions where the emperor Tu Duc had once composed poems, sipped lotus tea, and dallied with his 104 courtesans; I wandered into the shaded, pink-walled French colonial school where Ho Chi Minh, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and former Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem had all been educated (and, as ever in Hue, felt as if I were walking through an avenue of smiles); and that night, I returned to the kind of lyric pleasures I had come to expect in Vietnam—the couples gathered in cafés along the waterside, sitting on wicker chairs, their glasses balanced on stones, and watching the lights on the river while a syrupy
female singer softened the night. (Nearby, others were lined up in rows on chairs, entranced by a video advertised by hand-painted signs of an Oriental-featured Meryl Streep, with “Oscar-winner” written in Vietnamese.) In Hue, watching the famous local beauties, flowerlike in their traditional ao dais, pedaling, with queenly serenity, across the Perfume River, long hair falling to their waists and pink parasols held up against the sun, I felt that here was a scene that could move even a journalist to poetry. Just one week later, to my astonishment, I read, in Morley Safer’s
Flashbacks
, that even this most hardheaded of investigative journalists had, he confessed, written a poem in Hue—which “mercifully, [he had] both lost and forgotten.”

A few days later, I was inside the busiest and brashest circus I had ever seen. Saigon could be called Scooter City, the home of the Motorcycle Revolution, a 350 cc Beijing. For every weekend night, all the golden youth of town dress up in their Sunday best, get onto their bikes, and start racing and roaring around the central streets, swerving in and out of packs, speeding along in swarms, girls in cocktail dresses, boys in white shirts and ties, whole families on a single scooter, teenagers in denim skirts, even demure old gray-haired couples, all of them roaring around and around and around, past high-rise murals that say
TO KEEP MONEY IN THE BANK IS PATRIOTIC
, past packs of others lined up along the sidewalks, the whole group of them enacting a kind of crazy, revved-up
thé dansant
on wheels. The feverish carnival atmosphere was like nothing I had ever known before: in Italian towns, teenagers famously promenade around the main plaza in the evenings, exchanging glances and flirtations, but here the whole ritual was speeded up, intensified, and played out at top volume, half of Saigon caught up in this surging mass, trading smiles as they went, catching the eyes of strangers, or simply exulting in a literal version of their brand-new motto of
song voi
, or “living fast.” It seemed an almost
perfect metaphor for the sudden explosion of energy and excitement in Saigon, as sharp as if a rubber band, stretched out for fifteen years, had suddenly snapped back, and with a vengeance. And as the night wore on, the feverish sense of abandon grew ever more surreal: somehow, in Saigon, it is always nine-thirty at night in some flashy, shady dive, and a chanteuse in a sequined microskirt is belting out “I’m on top of the world, looking down on creation …” to the accompaniment of violins and cellos played by girls in shocking-pink miniskirts.

Vietnam, to me, seemed two distinct, almost contradictory countries: Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and the rest. And each, in a sense, is a refutation of the other. In part, of course, this reflects nothing more than the universal disjunction between big city and unspoiled countryside, equally apparent around New York, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok. In part, it reflects merely the geography of a country that was divided in half two decades ago, and two centuries: Hanoi is as far north of Ho Chi Minh City as Boston is of Charleston, and the character, the pace, even the climate of the quiet, unshowy, northern capital bear little relation to the helter-skelter, anything-goes vitality of the south (in ten days in the north, I never saw the sun; in ten days in the south, I almost got charbroiled). Even now, as South Vietnam completes what some are calling a “reverse reunification,” the two aspects of the country are as different as past and future, silence and frenzy, maiden aunt and bargirl—as different, ultimately, as Beijing and Hong Kong. Ask someone in Hanoi if she’s ever been to Saigon, and shell say, “No, I’ve never been outside Vietnam.” Her cousin in the south will say the opposite. Saigon and Vietnam are as different, almost literally, as night and day.

Yet both places are distinctly new to foreign eyes, and both paces—that of an aging bicycle and that of a juiced-up Honda—have their own exhilarations. It is hard, in fact, not to grow
woozily romantic when enumerating the holiday seductions of the place: there are the mist-wreathed rain forests of the west and north, where you can find fifty-three distinct minority tribes—each with its own colorful costume, customs, and tongue—hunting, still, with bows and arrows and, if asked how old they are, answering “ten or fifteen water buffalos’ lives.” There are the atmospheric old French villas and hotels, peeling behind coconut palms and green gates, made more nostalgic now by decay and lined up along avenues of tamarind. There are the exquisite temples and remains of the fourteenth-century Cham civilization, as “brilliant and neurotic,” in Norman Lewis’s well-chosen words, as those of the Khmer in Cambodia next door. There are the illuminated lanterns and oil-lit lamps along the crooked streets at night, which take you back to the Indochina of your dreams (or of Tintin books), and there are the urbane pleasures of white-linen restaurants serving mandarin juice and coq au vin while serenading you with piano-and-violin duets. There are 1,400 miles of coastline studded with pure-white deserted beaches, and there are prices that are extravagantly low (136 huge reproductions of masterpieces from the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg can be had for one dollar, and a tube of lipstick for ten cents). Most of all, though, there are the exceptionally attractive, cultured, and hospitable people, still so unused to foreigners that they light up at the sight, yet self-possessed, too, and full of the quick intelligence for which they have long been famous. “The Vietnamese are the last natural human people in the world,” a well-traveled Korean businessman told me, a little hyperbolically, perhaps, over drinks in Hanoi, in between discussing the relative merits of Highway 5 and the 101 freeway in California.

Yet the real attraction of Vietnam today is something deeper. When we choose a place to visit, the way a country carries itself and markets itself—the way it knows itself, really—is
everything. We flee certain resorts not just because they are touristed but more because they have begun to see themselves through tourists’ eyes, to amend themselves to tourists’ needs, to carry themselves in capital letters: because, in short, they have simplified themselves into their sense of what a foreigner wants. Thus even a country as irresistible and various as Thailand is beginning to feel used up, exhausted and eroded by the six million visitors who pass through each year, and losing a little of its soul with each transaction. Thailand—like Cancún, or the Lake District, or many of the lovely places of the world—seems to have mastered the art of selling itself while giving almost nothing of itself away.

None of this is true—yet—of Vietnam, which still has the bashful charm of a naturally alluring girl stepping out into bright sunlight after years of dark seclusion. Protected, ironically, by its years of hardship and cut off from modernity by more than a decade of Communist rule, Vietnam is still, more than most places, new to the world. It does not know what to make of us, nor we of it. Its pleasures feel unrehearsed, and surprise is still a growth industry.

That is one reason, of course, why everyone seems to be converging on it—Bangkok-based stockbrokers, Japanese businessmen, budget travelers from Europe—all eager to grab a piece of the hidden treasure before it splinters or corrodes. Vietnam has very much the feel of the coming thing, the next “little dragon,” tomorrow’s hot destination: a perfect locale, indeed, for the kinder, greener, post-cold war nineties. And it is already beginning to become a crossroads of the fashionable: in my hotel in Hanoi, an assistant producer from Paradis Films was bargaining over a suite for Mme. Deneuve (acting in one of the three feature-length French motion pictures being shot in the country at the time); when I went to the Cao Dai church in Tay Ninh, the name above mine in the visitors’ book was that
of Gough Whitlam, former prime minister of Australia. And one night in Saigon, walking through a street so crowded one could hardly move, I bumped, quite literally, into two colleagues from New York.

All this is also the reason why Vietnam is changing before one’s very eyes—and anyone who saw Bangkok or Beijing five years ago and revisits them today knows that these Eastern cities can take off with the urgency of a Chinese firecracker. Ever since the government in Hanoi decided to open up the country to free trade and private enterprise in 1987, the famous energy and enterprise of the Vietnamese have been transforming the country overnight (three years ago, by all accounts, there was scarcely a motorbike in Saigon). And already, compromise is beginning to appear and some of the village innocence to fade. Already, you can feel that shy glances and modest giggles may soon be a thing of the past; already, four-color brochures, and even AIDS, may be just around the corner. Vietnam is developing at the speed of a Polaroid. At present, the country is held back mostly by Washington’s sixteen-year-old trade embargo, which makes it difficult for Hanoi to receive IMF and World Bank loans, severely limits its trade opportunities, and leaves the hardworking Vietnamese literally all dressed up with no place to go (save round and round the center of Saigon). But as soon as the conditions change, the country is ready to take off, and already the sense of boomtown electricity is almost palpable: as if much of the country were letting out its breath, in a great gust of exhalation, after years of holding it in.

For the moment, though, the country’s facilities are still, thankfully, uncertain. Some hotels in Vietnam offer elevators, some have watercoolers, some have girls who slip into your room the minute you return from dinner. Some have Viettronics shortwave radios in each room, some high-tech phones so complex
they cannot reach even the front desk, some caged monkeys inexplicably in their gardens. In one deluxe hotel I stayed in, keys were scattered across the reception desk so that any guest could effectively take the key to any room (communal property indeed!). In another, ubiquitous signs warned:
PETS
,
FIRE ARMS
,
EXPLOSIVES
,
INFLAMABLES
,
AND STINKING THINGS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN THE HOTEL
. In another, I went into my room one day to find a chambermaid cadging a free shower. Vietnam is still the kind of place where you look out of your hotel window to see not two, not three, but nine cows grazing on the lawn.

Vietnam is also the kind of place where restaurants offer armadillo, and cobras that are slaughtered at your table; artichoke tea, gecko-steeped liqueurs, and—the specialty of Dalat—coffee made from beans vomited up by a weasel. It is a place where beer costs more than wine, and a Coke sets you back more than an entire meal. When once I ordered filet mignon and french fries, my waiter graciously apologized for being slow—but french fries, he explained, were very hard to cook.

Vietnam is also a place where traveling by car means bumping along Highway 1, through a confusion of bicycles shrouded in brushes and brooms, buses piled high with tail-wagging dogs, and horse-drawn carts, at speeds no faster than 10 mph, over “elephant holes” that put out the backs of any foreigners who are not banging their heads against the roof, and where, after nightfall, the only lights one sees are reflections in the eyes of passing water buffalos. The alternative—taking the local airline—may not be any happier. On the flight I took, all the seats on the back two rows were different colors, the portholes were guarded by flimsy curtains, and the back third of this former Soviet military plane was an empty space with trays of meatballs stacked on the floor (and later handed out by a phlegmatic
teenage boy). The whole place had the air of a hospital waiting room in the clouds.