First Person: October 25, 1995


Elton Kash's Car and Ho Chi Minh's Museum

East and West collide in Marxist Vietnam
BY PETE HESSLER '92
WHEN WE arrived in Hanoi, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum was closed. It was early November, a bad time to be in Hanoi if you wanted to visit the mausoleum; every year during the winter, the embalmed body is sent back to Russia for servicing. If Ted, my traveling partner, and I had known about that in advance, we might have rescheduled accordingly. From Moscow in August, we had traveled more than 7,000 miles through Russia and China, and along the way we had seen both Lenin and Mao. It seemed a shame to come that far and miss Ho, just because of his yearly 60-day chemical bath, but there wasn't anything we could do about it. On a long trip like this, you become philosophical about missed opportunities.
We had entered Vietnam from China, crossing the Red River at Lao Cai in the northwestern corner of the country. It was a newly opened border, and there was a certain freshness about the guards; shyly they asked us for dollar bribes, and when we refused they smiled and waved us on, as if relieved that the ordeal was over. When they inspected our passports it was with curiosity rather than vigilance. It wouldn't last, we knew, because tourists were beginning to flood into Vietnam, but it would take time before the route through Lao Cai became well traveled.
On a map it's less than 200 miles from Lao Cai to Hanoi, but trains in Vietnam have nothing to do with maps, and the journey took 11 hours. In its way the trip was relaxing: there were long stops at every station, vendors sold everything you could want-apples, oranges, baguettes, hot tea-and the train was uncrowded. Sitting across from us, a man in his 50s waited a full hour before he introduced himself. He was studying English, he explained, and then he asked us the same questions that every student of English in Vietnam would ask: where we were from and how old we were and whether we were married and how much money we made. Our answers were mostly perplexing. We were unmarried and we made no money, and we were too old to be going on like this.
After that, the man's English was at the end of its tether-he had only been studying for a short time, he said-and he thanked us and showed us his language workbook.
The book had been published in 1978, and it consisted of simple profiles accompanied by cartoons. The 13th lesson read: "Look at this man. He's Elton Kash. He's a pop star. He's very rich and famous. Look at his house. It's large and expensive, and there's a swimming pool in the garden. There are 10 bedrooms in the house. Elton's car is American. It's a 1978 Lincoln Continental. It's fast and comfortable. In his car there's a radio, a stereo cassette-player, a cocktail cabinet, a cigar lighter, and electric windows. But Elton isn't happy . . . he'd like a Rolls Royce."
Outside, the scenery slipped past, even-paced: a water buffalo knee-deep in mud, a telephone pole planted in the middle of a rice paddy, a village where the terraced fields curved in front of the huts like the rows of an enormous theater. Along the way, many of the houses were grass-roofed with walls of woven reeds, but every now and then there would be a white cement building with a date painted proudly above the door-1992, 1991, 1990. The oldest one I saw was 1979. The land flattened out as we cruised southeast. At night, when we passed over a river on the outskirts of Hanoi, I saw a man in the black water with a flashlight, gigging for frogs as we roared overhead.

THE DAY AFTER WE REALIZED THAT THE MAUSOLEUM IN HANOI was closed, we went to the Ho Chi Minh Museum instead, as a sort of substitute. It had been built by the Soviets in 1990, the centenary of Ho's birth, and it was an impressive building: enormous and freshly painted, with a hammer-and-sickle relief on the front façade. The museum provided us with an English-speaking guide, and he smiled and shook our hands.
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"America."
"Ah," he said. "America is a very strong country."
It was the sort of remark that would have been difficult to respond to anywhere; in the magnificent entrance hall to the Ho Chi Minh Museum it was crippling. "Uh," I said, "I guess."
He was a young man who had spent four years in Russia, studying at Moscow University. His Russian was better than his English, he said, but his English was good; he spoke softly and avoided the mechanical recitation of a tour guide. While we walked through the museum, he talked about some of the places he'd seen in Eastern Europe: Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Mongolia (in the perspective of the Vietnamese, Eastern Europe apparently stretches far). "Now I would like to see some capitalist countries," he said. You might not have to go very far, I thought to myself, but I didn't say anything. In a strange way I felt like I was in a church.
The ground floor of the museum was full of economic information on Vietnam: graphs and charts, exports and imports, and trade statistics. The U.S. was the 20th-ranked foreign investor, just behind Hungary; Taiwan and Hong Kong were the top two. It was a chart that would change quickly. The U.S. trade embargo was a thing of the past, repealed earlier in the year (1994), and everywhere you went in Vietnam you caught sight of America. Prices were quoted in dollars, Pepsi signs were ubiquitous, and overpriced Pringle's potato chips were a status symbol. In Hanoi the clothing stores sold "Rambo" jeans and "Harvard" jeans and imitation Levi's that substituted the word "Money" for "Levi's." "This is a pair of Money," the label read. "Money Original 501 Jeans."
Upstairs, the museum focused on Ho. The guide explained the symbolic decorations: the silver bars on the ceiling stand for the heavens; those two houses-the shack and the villa-represent the gulf between the Vietnamese and their colonial oppressors; the stone here is from the cave where Ho hid out during his rise to power.
But what really got my attention was a room that symbolized the division between East and West. For the East, the curators had hung an enormous portrait of the Kremlin and other striking buildings from the former Soviet Bloc. The West was represented by the front end of a 1958 Ford Edsel, painted eggshell white; the car was crashing through the wall at a crazy, cockeyed angle. Standing in front of it, I could almost hear Elton Kash laughing.

Pete Hessler '92, a former On the Campus columnist, is a freelance writer living in Columbia, Missouri.

paw@princeton.edu