Ho Chi Minh City: Capitalism Meets Communism

The formerly-named city of Saigon is a sprawling mass of two- and three-story buildings jammed one against the other, stretching from the Mekong Delta in the south to the Cambodian border in the north. As the southern river-striding metropolis of this 1600 km long country that lies alongside the China Sea, HCMC as it is known is an epicenter of the post-1986 Vietnam, when the single-party Communist state agreed to embark on the economic experiment known locally as doi moi.


In many respects, HCMC resembles a very young Bangkok, lacking only the omnipresent skyscapers and a mass transportation system. For transportation, the 8.3 million residents of HCMC rely on 4 million scooters -- making for a continuous din of high-pitched horn beeps, brake squeals, and lawnmower engine-like rev-ups and rev-downs.

When crossing these streets, one simply steps out slowly, and walks deliberately, without hesitation, and trusts the scooters to part, Red Sea-like, and permit the pedestrian to cross safely. It takes some getting used to.

The scooters are everywhere, and, without exaggeration, traffic laws all boil down to this: drive slow enough to react to anything, but fast enough to not lose balance. Traffic lights are virtually non-existent, and each intersection, viewed from above, would resemble two streams of motorized dots crossing each other at right angles, continuously, and without discernible pause. Bikes think nothing of driving against traffic, and onto sidewalks, and alongside speeding buses and taxis, which themselves navigate through, against, and across the waves of bikes without hesitation.

The Year of the Cat, in neon.

We arrived in Vietnam a few days ago, having timed our visit to coincide with Tet, the lunar new year, and Vietnam's Christmas-Thanksggiving-and-New Year rolled up into one massive celebration. We are staying in the Chinatown district of HCMC, about 5 km from the old center of Saigon, and the preparations here border on the the maniacal. Stores, houses, and hotels are dressing themselves up with red wall coverings and gold lettering, along with with blooming plants and trees of all varieties. Like Bangkok, HCMC relies on river commerce, and we chanced upon the barges that move the Tet-celebrating trees and flowers up from the Mekong Delta.

Vietnam is also a country that has taken care not to forget the wars with France and the United States that spanned the 1950s-1970s. We visited three museums: the HCMC City Museum, which is housed in the building that served as the war-deposed/killed President of then-South Vietnam; the now-named Reunification Building, which served as the Presidential Palace until its gates were broken down by North Vietnamese tanks on April 30, 1975, and the War Remnants Museum, which houses both materials and often gruesome photographs of the war's impact on the citizens and countryside of Vietnam.

Celebrating the tanks entering the grounds of the Presidential Palace in April 1975

In the former Presidential Palace, we were struck by the side door in the President's private office that led directly down five flights to a bomb cellar -- possibly used when the palace was bombed by a renegade and now-venerated South Vietnamese pilot who bombed the palace on April 8, 1975 -- a full three weeks before the city actually fell.

Note the Chevrolet SUV in the back -- no hard feelings!

It's clear that the winners get to write the history, and that certain features of the war and its aftermath are conspicuously missing, but it's also clear, even if in retrospect, that this was a war that neither France nor the US could have ever won ... unless one considers the current economic state of Vietnam, and one realizes that while a one-party state, with limited freedom of expression, no real voting, etc., the economy of Vietnam resembles that of any free country in the world. Later, we will visit Ha Noi, the capital of Vietnam and, then, the center of the North's ultimately successful effort to conquer/unify the South with the North.

Clearly, capitalist opulence CAN co-exist with the red-banners of communism