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It was with some relief that I traveled on to Vietnam. No train connects the two countries, so I got there by taxi, then hitched a lift in a car carrying jackfruit to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon. I stopped along the way at a Cao Dai chapel, where a line of women in baggy white robes were congregating. I was greeted by an elderly man who sat me down for tea and litchis, then told me in French about this indigenous religion with several million Vietnamese adherents. Their teachings are drawn from Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, he said, but also bear traces of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The list of Cao Dai saints is equally eclectic, including Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Vietnamese poet Trang Trinh. This freedom to practice a faith once banned by the communists was an encouraging sign that the government has somewhat eased its restrictions on daily life.
Nothing could have prepared me for Saigon's explosive entrepreneurial forces. As in Cambodia, the rural areas that once were home to more than four-fifths of Vietnam's population can no longer support the offspring of a generation of baby boomers. Every day hundreds of young people flock to the cities in the hope of landing jobs in factories. Even in the bars and restaurants, the cacophonous riot of deals being brokered, jobs being sought and rumors of work being bandied around assails the senses.
One aspiring entrepreneur I encountered was a former locomotive driver, Anh, who had joined the Vietnamese railway by mistake, taking the entry exam for engine drivers only so that his best friend could copy his answers: "He must have copied them poorly, because he failed and I got the job." Anh quit and eventually set up a ceramics business that now employs more than 50 people. "When I come home in the middle of the night from the factory, my wife complains that I am too tired," he says. Plainly, amassing wealth can be as confining as it is liberating.
There are four trains a day linking Saigon with Hanoi and they are all called the Reunification Express. The history of the railroad is utterly schizophrenic. The French, Japanese and Americans who used the railway also bombed it—no one country or warring faction has had a monopoly on sabotaging the line.
After the North Vietnamese victory, spare parts to keep the American locomotives running had to be brought clandestinely from Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. The driver of the diesel-electric was full of praise for his charge: "It has been running since 1963. It's the best. You drive it like a cowboy. Unlike the Russian and Bulgarian ones, you can drive it roughshod and it responds and you can keep cobbling it together." Inside the carriages, passengers sat, squatted or slept on the seats and between them. But the steel shutters on the windows remained closed, apparently to protect us from the rock-throwing youths whose mothers worked the paddy fields.
I stopped twice en route to Hanoi. At Nha Trang I found fishermen doing their best to keep up with their city brethren. Tu Huang lives on the island of Tri-Nguyen in a four-story house fit for a viceroy, with balconies, verandas and chrome balustrades, the wedding-cake structure topped with a satellite dish. He needs all his 10 children: eight daughters who repair his fishing nets and two sons who help on his boat. He doesn't believe reports that the seas are being depleted: "There have always been fish and there will always be fish."
Fortunes come rarely to farmers, but in the industrious south the story on land is similar to that at sea. At Cam Ranh Bay, once home to the Russian Pacific fleet, there are few roads, but buffalo tracks lead you to mansions that would not be out of place in America. There is a rumor that the U.S. Navy will return; here, no one is upset. "The Russians didn't spend any money," says my host, a mango-and-shrimp dealer. "When the Americans were here, they spent a lot; they're welcome to come back." His father's generation remembers the fearsome U.S. bombings, but ideology is irrelevant now.
In the morning, I would arrive in Hanoi after three weeks of hard travel. The passenger on the opposite bench of my train compartment was full of the vitality and sweetness I had come to associate with the people I had met. As she sang "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away" in Vietnamese, I fell asleep. When I woke up in Hanoi, she was gone.
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