Hot Time In Saigon

The air is crackling with electricity this Tuesday in Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City, but the locals have reverted to the old name). Monsoon clouds are moving in from the west. People are hurrying along sidewalks, newspaper vendors are getting out plastic sheeting, cyclo drivers are making for shelter.

On Nguyen Trai Street, Kieu Viet Lien has brought her new moped indoors. The 25-year-old designer is kneeling on the floor of her shop surrounded by paper patterns and pieces of green silk, preparing for a fashion competition. From his office in an advertising agency across town, Pham Phu Xuan, 31, can see the storm approaching too. He is on the phone setting up a TV shoot for a shampoo commercial. Hong Nhung, 30, one of Vietnam's most popular singers, is working out in her gym in the Saigon Center. Drops of rain are starting to splash on the windows--and she has to get to a rehearsal later for a concert she is giving over the weekend. Only Nguyen Quang Huy is oblivious to the coming deluge. The 21-year-old bar owner and music promoter is shut in a soundproof recording studio in his home, coaching a new band.

Lien, Xuan, Nhung and Huy have never met, but they are from the same generation--those for whom the war never happened. Children of one of the starkest generation gaps in the world, they have no interest in hearing about the hardships their parents endured in a war that ended a quarter-century ago. All four are Vietnamese but have ambivalent feelings about Vietnam, a country no longer communist but not yet democratic or free.

Through them and others like them, Vietnam is remaking itself. As the aged cadres in Hanoi debate whether private enterprise is a good thing, young entrepreneurs in Saigon have already decided. Youthful rebelliousness in Vietnam, once channeled collectively into war, now expresses itself on an individual level, as a fierce will to get ahead. They have not lost the tenacity and endurance of their parents. But learning from the West, this is a generation no longer afraid to say "me."

Theirs is a world of cell phones, mopeds, long days at work and long evenings in coffee shops. All four have complicated, busy lives, careers they forged on their own and ambitions to take them to the top. They have grown up to be self-reliant in uncertain times, with little guidance from their elders. Sex before marriage--"eating rice before the bell," as it is sometimes called--is the norm. All have acquaintances who do drugs, a haven for those who don't know where else to go.

They are determined to get on with their lives, to make up for lost time since the communists took over and dumped Vietnam at the bottom of Asia's economic league. Vietnam's per capita gross national product is a paltry $350 a year, according to the World Bank, compared with $510 for sub-Saharan Africa. In February, Le Kha Phieu, the 68-year-old Communist Party chief who runs the country, lashed out at "imperialist forces [who] have expanded the world market everywhere for maximum profit." Such rhetoric flies over the heads of the younger generation. Its members are reading from a different script, a script they had to write themselves.