Hot Time In Saigon

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Kieu Viet Lien started at less than zero. She was born in prison in 1974. Her mother had been jailed as a Viet Cong agent. They were not released until April 1975, when North Vietnamese forces overran Saigon. Lien was schooled in the city, renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victors. When she was 18 she got lucky: her application for a visa to study fashion in Australia was accepted. After three years in Melbourne, she went to Canada in 1996 for two years and then spent a year in Paris. There she fell in love with French style. "Christian Lacroix, Galliano--I have a taste for the elegant," she says, pointing to a rack of sumptuous $200 wedding dresses in the back of her shop. "I want to make Vietnamese look beautiful." But in a city where a college graduate would be happy to land a job paying $100 a month, her $12 shirts and $30 dresses are for only a small number of young people with money.

The manic pace of Saigon carries over to the streets, where swarms of motorbikes zip through intersections. Cars are too expensive, but the motorbike is at the top of everyone's must-have list. Young bloods race them after dark, and couples use them as a place of intimacy: Vietnamese don't kiss in public, but women know how to hug their boyfriends tightly from behind.

Pham Phu Xuan borrowed money to buy a motorbike the day he got his current job as production manager for J. Walter Thompson. "I was so happy. It was the first thing I did," he says about that day four years ago. There were 1,000 applicants for just five jobs, and Xuan had neither a college degree nor money to buy a suit and tie for the interview. His friends told him he was wasting his time. They didn't know him well enough.

Eighth in a family of 10, Xuan was brought up in a poor village seven hours from Saigon, and realized early that there was no future for him in the countryside. In 1985, at 16, he moved to Saigon, got a job repairing electronic equipment and taught himself English. "I knew I must be successful. I could not afford to lose." Many of the boys he left behind in his village have no jobs. Half have started using heroin, he says. Full of self-confidence, Xuan began coordinating TV and photo shoots for the agency, and after a while made some trips around Asia. He was shocked at the prosperity of Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul. "Vietnam is the slowest country in the region. We are very behind."

Xuan resolved to find a way to move to the U.S.--home to nearly a million Vietnamese. This month he married his childhood sweetheart, a girl from his village who had managed to get a highly valued exit visa in the 1980s and settled in Minnesota. She flew to Saigon for the wedding, but Xuan knows it will still take years for the U.S. consulate to process his visa request to join her. "I know it will not be easy in America. I will always miss my family here. But I need to try something bigger."

The government is ambivalent about the flood of Vietnamese who have been returning from America since Washington normalized relations with Hanoi in 1995. It welcomes their dollars, yet is wary of their politics. But if any revolution is coming from these returning Viet Kieu, as the overseas Vietnamese are called, it will probably have to do with transforming the lifestyles and expectations of younger Vietnamese.