15 Things about Vietnam #14 - The Chinese

The Vietnamese are deeply suspicious of the Chinese. Though no single country has influenced Vietnamese culture more than China, to suggest that the Vietnamese and the Chinese are basically similar or the same is one of the biggest faux pas you can make while in Vietnam.

To say that the Vietnamese and the Chinese have history - in the sense of having a well-known propensity to spar, scrap and generally hurt each other's feelings - would be an understatement. 

So here is the rough history. This will take about 10 hours, so if you find history a dull subject, feel free to have a break for today and come back later in the week for the last installment in this series.
  

The history lesson. So. The reason the Vietnamese and the Chinese are culturally quite close is that the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the area around Hanoi was a Chinese colony from roughly 120BC to 940AD. And because, once the Vietnamese finally kicked the Chinese out, they did something a little strange: they become more Chinese than they already were before.

The 1000 or so years that the Vietnamese spent under the Chinese thumb are what set up a solid foundation for a further 1000 years of hatred and resentment. As a Chinese colony, Vietnam paid lavish tribute to the Chinese Emperor: cartloads of silk, ivory, mother of pearl and sandalwood disappeared over Vietnam's northern border, and the wider population was forced to do strenuous amounts of unpaid labour for the general enrichment of the Middle Kingdom. Vietnamese rebellions against this state of affairs started as early as the first century AD and they are celebrated down to this day as heroic steps on the road to True Vietnamese Nationhood.

But beneath the surface - indeed on the surface a lot of the time - a huge amount of borrowing was going on; even though the Chinese ruled Vietnam ruthlessly for their own benefit, the locals didn't straightforwardly repudiate Chinese ways, they adapted to them and in many cases made them their own. Not the least of the cultural imports was Confucianism and the thing to remember about it, if you want to get your head around its influence in Asian history, is that it has gone through a series of slow transformations, starting out, in Confucius's day, as a kind of minority report on the ethics and politics of feudal China, slowly becoming a consistent body of philosophical ideas, then a blueprint to run a sophisticated feudal society, in the end becoming something close to a religion, with a lightly emphasized cult of Confucius and a heavily emphasized cult of classical Confucian texts.

Essentially it was in these last two forms that Confucianism arrived in Vietnam, along with Han Dynasty troops, who occupied the greater part of the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the Second Century BC. 

Han Emperors sent various officials, schooled in Confucian ways, to govern their fractious new dominion. Over the years, a range of Confucian institutions worked their way into the Vietnamese system. Full-blown Chinese ancestor worship became a normal part of Vietnamese life. The beautiful, elaborate regulation of works and days by customary ritual, which Confucius himself had perfected back in the Fifth Century BC, took on Vietnamese form. Plus there was the language: 70% of Vietnamese words come from Chinese and it was during Vietnam's days as a Chinese colony that the main work of linguistic assimilation took place.

A second rather large import was Buddhism, which again seems to have reached Vietnam from China, rather than its Indian heartland. After the Third Century AD, pagodas became normal features of Vietnamese villages and in them the Vietnamese gave Buddhism a warm-hearted Vietnamese twist. Monks read their scriptures in Chinese and took their general lead from the main movements in Chinese Buddhism, like Zen. The wider population accepted the Chinese forms and got on worshiping what they liked. To become truly popular in Vietnam, Buddhism adapted itself to the cults of various gods, spirits and natural powers that the Vietnamese had already been worshiping for untold ages.

 

For better and for worse, Chinese influence didn't let up though, even once the Vietnamese regained their independence in 938AD. Every couple of 100 years, new Chinese invasions were launched and promptly beaten back - at the cost of vast numbers of human lives. In the Eleventh Century, the Sung Dynasty tried its luck, in the Thirteenth Century the charge was led by the well-known right-wing dynasty of the Mongols, led by Donald Trump. However, the kernel of the grudge that the Vietnamese bear the Chinese down to today probably lies in the occupation of Vietnamese territory by Ming Dynasty troops between 1407 and 1427 - an episode that saw the wanton destruction of most of Vietnam's previous high culture, stored neatly in the Royal Citadel in Hanoi and torched by marauding Ming troops.

All the invasions did something to define Vietnam's cultural identity in anti-Chinese terms. The Vietnamese victors of battles against the Chinese formed the basic pantheon of national gods and culture heroes. At an even more basic level, the whole place turned itself into a wildly tough fighting force capable of subordinating pretty much all individual desire to the needs of collective self-defense. Historical irony no.1: The collective consciousness which the Vietnamese think of as a distinctively national trait has two historical bases, both of which are deeply related to China: a positive base in Confucian ideas about the individual's duty to family and society, and a negative base in Chinese bastardry towards its southern neighbour. Countries are made to stick together as countries in funny ways. In Vietnam it was a deep undercurrent of Chinese ideas and an overwhelming amount of Chinese nastiness that did the trick.

Probably the most counter-intuitive response to the threat of Chinese invasion was the decision on the part of Vietnam's own Lê Dynasty (1428 - 1788) to set up a thoroughly Chinese system of government and education, after the Ming ran amok in the early 1400's. Effectively, a new Chinese strand was grafted onto Vietnamese history, in the generation or two after the rout in Hanoi; from 1463 the selection process for all government jobs in Vietnam was rigorously based on knowledge of the Chinese classics, tested in national exam competitions every three years. The watchword of the great Confucian emperor, Lê Thánh Tông, was that government should be the preserve of men of noble character, not men of noble birth - well-educated men steeped in Confucian notions of ritual and responsibility and capable, if called on, to improvise a drily beautiful poem or two. (As a virtuous Confucian, women, either of noble or not so noble character, were of little interest to him.) 

The immediate effect was to raise the prestige of Chinese high culture to new heights. From the time of the Lê reforms, anyone (anyone male at least) who wanted to share in the responsibilities or profits of government also had to be a master of the Chinese language, together with the general arts of life associated with it.

In fact you could say that many of the elements that the Vietnamese think of as constituting "Vietnameseness" only came together at the time of the Lê Dynasty's turn towards China. The "traditional" Vietnamese respect for learning only became traditional under the impact of Chinese ideals of scholarship. The political cohesion of the country was solidified as a centralized bureaucracy modeled on Chinese lines came into existence. In the end, even the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the injustices of the system got a boost from - the system itself. While Chinese-style scholars who successfully landed government jobs tended to use their hard-earned privileges to grind the noses of poor rice farmers, other Confucians lived much closer to the people. There were Confucians who retired to their home villages once their work in government was done. There were Confucians who taught in their home villages all their lives after failing to get a government job in the first place. Both types of outsiders encouraged the broader masses in their struggles with royal authority in the decades and centuries that followed, as the initial Confucian idealism of Lê Thánh Tông slowly dissipated.

In the long term, a nice little amalgam of Chinese and native Vietnamese culture came into existence. The formal rules that regulated daily life, which Confucianism had issued by the 1000, were adapted or abandoned in line with average-everyday Vietnamese common sense. The prudery of official Confucianism was set aside in lusty village festivals (and is still there to see in the artwork on display in old-fashioned Vietnamese villages).

The patriarchal emphasis of official Confucianism was infused with some authentic, Vietnamese-style mummy worship. The cult of ancestors, which in the Chinese tradition is basically a duty on the part of male descendants to pay homage to male forefathers, in the Vietnamese tradition was renovated, with male and female ancestors honoured equally at the family's ancestral altar.

After another Chinese invasion in the Eighteenth Century, Vietnam's feudal monarchy was in fact overthrown and the country's new rulers briefly looked set to modernize the place along authentic non-Chinese lines. This time, Chinese-style conservatives won the day and Vietnam's last royal dynasty, the Nguyễn, established itself on the throne. (The reason so many Vietnamese share the family name "Nguyễn" dates from this era of Vietnamese history. The Nguyễn clan had long provided the Southern parts of Vietnam with a caste of feudal overlords. Essentially, once the overlords of the South became the new ruling clan throughout the land, they ordered masses of their new subjects to take the clan name, giving rise to a top-down naming system whose effects persist to this day.)

With the rise of the Nguyễn, the stuffy side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage asserted itself; having ascended to royal power, Vietnam's new masters styled themselves more Chinese than the Chinese themselves - which itself was a complex bad joke, given that China at the time was ruled by a non-Chinese dynasty, intent on wrapping itself in the now heavy cloak of Chinese tradition. Major historical irony number 2.

Strict adherence to traditional Chinese forms got Vietnam exactly nowhere. The Nguyễn's traditionalism, just like that of their models in Peking, left them ill-equipped, both mentally and materially, to confront the challenges posed by a new set of invaders from the outside: Westerners armed with weapons, drugs and a hard-nosed attitude to getting their own way. Here was a force that was more powerful and far more foreign - both to the Chinese and the Vietnamese - than any army that had swept across their respective northern borders down the centuries. While Western intervention in China fueled Civil Wars that were still being fought in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in the case of Vietnam the result was out and out occupation. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, French colonists had systematically performed two feats. First, they had divided Vietnam into three, ruling the South as an out-and-out colony and Central and Northern Vietnam as "allied dependencies". Secondly, they had reduced the great Chinese spectacle of the Nguyễn monarchy to a colourful sideshow, which is what it remains (with a bit of help from the tourist industry) pretty much down to today:

As far as more recent attitudes to China go, parts of Vietnam's communist establishment seem at times quite close to recognizing that the age-old Vietnamese grudge against the Chinese is hardly a simple matter. School primers still tend to present the Chinese as the eternal aggressor and communist orthodoxy tends to reinforce this with simple moral tales about the injustice of the total social-political system imported from the Middle Kingdom: Chinese influence on Vietnam tends to get lumped together in a black and white volume entitled "the evils of feudalism". Over the past 25 years, more open-minded historians have taken the liberty to fill out the story - in particular to show how local Confucians were a diverse bunch who at times played the part of country intellectuals, shaping, or even leading, the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the venal agents of feudal authority. 

In fact one of the more interesting ways Vietnam's Chinese heritage has begun to be read during the past 25 years of tentative liberalization is through a combination of Marx and Confucius.

To explain how this works would take another 10 hours, so I'll spare you the details. But the rough idea is to downplay orthodox Confucian ideas about fixed social roles and the duty of absolute obedience owed to rulers and instead take the Confucian idea of humaneness, teasing out of it an acknowledgement of the basis of political rule in the hearts and aspirations of the people.

Obviously it'd be a pretty steep task to discover in Vietnam's Chinese heritage a full-blown notion of legitimate government of the people by the people. But Vietnam's Communist masters, in their own cramped way, know they have to add some of the lessons of Confucius and Mencius to the more familiar strictures of Marx and Lenin. The task of ruling Vietnam, and of keeping themselves firmly positioned on the once plush seat of state, depends crucially on responding - not just to contradictory expectations emanating from Beijing and Washington, but to the average Vietnamese sense of what it means to live in a dynamic, but rapidly fragmenting, social world.

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Not that China and Vietnam are particularly at peace now that the positive side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage has been given some degree of official recognition. Chinese raids into Vietnamese territory started all over again in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, virtually from the time China began its current rise to global power. Nowadays, fear of further Chinese aggression is kept on permanent low heat by Vietnamese media sources ever-fond of a patriotic story. And of course it is heavily fueled by the Chinese, who are intent on projecting power in cultural, economic and military terms now that they produce half the goods, and own half the debt, of the entire world.

You might have thought the well-known war the Vietnamese fought against America between 1963 and 1975, with substantial Chinese assistance, might have helped to keep a lid on old-fashioned tensions between the two neighbours. Surely the project of building socialism together, and defending it against the aggression of American "imperialists", was enough to make the age-old enemies work together?  Unfortunately, minor differences of opinion are sometimes as good as actual wars to get people or nations at each other's throats again. And it was just such a muddle of strategic and ideological differences that again turned the Vietnamese against the Chinese in the 70's, after a mere 20 years of communist brotherhood.

Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Chairman Mao started seriously negotiating with the Americans, in a bid to win an unlikely ally in another weird, nasty ideological struggle (between Communist China and the Soviet Union). Mao in fact favoured a two-state solution to the conflict in Vietnam and if he'd had his way the North Vietnamese effort to boot out the Americans and unify the country would've been rendered entirely meaningless - Vietnam, like Korea, might have remained divided in two down to this day. Understandably, the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi were upset. 

However, relations between Beijing and Hanoi really went sour after the end of The War, once the North Vietnamese had stitched up their victory over the American-backed government of the South. In the years prior to 1975, Mao had been the main patron of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who, when they came to power, proceeded to turn the entire country into an enormous death camp and then launch raids across Cambodia's border with Southern Vietnam, killing miserable Vietnamese rice farmers by the thousand.

In the meantime, the Vietnamese were doing their fair share of shooting and smiting. In the South of Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese origin were on the receiving end of a not very bright idea: to liberate the accumulated capital of the Chinese business community in South Vietnam - straight into the coffers of the new Communist government. Large numbers of the Chinese population of Saigon (soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City) were sent back to China and many of the rest fled the country. Ethnic Chinese Vietnamese made up a large percentage of the boat people who were soon fleeing South Vietnam in droves. Those who remained were often forcibly resettled in the Southern countryside. Many ethnic Chinese had been small traders in and around Saigon's Chinatown (Chợ Lớn) for generations. With little or no skills growing subsistence crops in wild jungle places, many came close to starvation in the years immediately following the war.

The new Communist government's decision to expropriate the riches of Chinese Vietnamese after 1975 might have been a social disaster. What the new government did to stop the raids across the Cambodian border was an unprecedented good; it marched the Vietnamese army straight into Phnom Penh and kicked out the Khmer Rouge, who by 1978 had managed to slaughter 2 million Cambodians in the name of their special Chinese version of communism. However, the episode was a disaster for Chinese-Vietnamese relations. By 1979, China's Deng Xiaoping had decided that the Vietnamese needed to be "taught a lesson" for kicking out China's mob in Phnom Penh. So a six-week war was launched, Chinese troops occupied several towns on the Vietnamese side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border, only to be beaten back by battle-hardened troops, fresh from fighting the Americans, the Cambodians and just about everyone else.

The Chinese claimed the mess as a strategic victory. The Vietnamese noted with some pride that this time the invaders from the north hadn't made it more than 50km into Vietnamese territory. Neither side pointed very frankly to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese killed in Deng's extravagant pedagogical set-piece.

That brings us almost to the present day, when numerous minor and medium-sized grievances still simmer away.

The dispute that gets the most coverage is over a series of tiny islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by both countries. For China the dispute seems to be partly about mineral riches, partly about geopolitical strategy: a third of the world's shipping passes between Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines on its way to ports in Northern Asia and having military control of sea-routes is definitely on the map of China's path to global power. For the Vietnamese, the dispute is mainly about national pride. Naturally enough, they consider it highly provocative when the Chinese build military bases on what are in essence fortified sand banks.

 
And they find it downright offensive that China claims sovereignty over the sea pretty much right up to the Vietnamese coastline, as the notorious Chinese 9-dash map of the region makes plain:  

Even mentioning the "South China Sea" in Vietnam could land you in a bit of trouble. Many Vietnamese won't know what you're talking about and some of the ones who do will be riled by the word "China" in the English designator for the relevant body of water. Calling it the "South China Sea" in some sense gives credibility to Chinese claims. In Vietnam it's called the"Biển Đông" (East Sea) - presumably because it is to the east of the impish, dragon-shaped nation whose belly sticks out into the deep aquamarine in a way richly suggestive of property rights.  

If Vietnamese suspicions about Chinese geopolitical strategy are well-founded, then the suspicion that the Chinese are intentionally setting out to poison Vietnamese kiddies seems slightly overblown. There can be no doubt that a certain quantity of deadly Chinese chemicals ends up in Vietnamese food, and in some of the other products flowing across the Vietnamese-Chinese border in great profusion. But Vietnamese patriots have blown this up into a systematic plan to kill, or at least seriously enervate, the Vietnamese body-politic; the reality, I suspect, is that the dangerous chemicals moving southwards over the border into Vietnam are in equally wide circulation in China.

True, Chinese factories might be producing coffee-substitutes laced with lead and other toxins and trucking them across the border into Vietnam. But greed alone is what prompts Vietnamese coffee vendors to buy the stuff and sell it on the street. One plastic tank apparently makes 400 cups of a saleable, coffee-related product. And creates dozens of new cases of cancer. Yum.

A little less nutty, but still in the realm of uncontrolled suspicion, is the idea that crafty Chinese farming conglomerates are deliberately driving honest Vietnamese primary producers out of business. Again, there's a kernel of truth to this. Yes, large, credit-rich Chinese farms do produce large, cheap, chemically enhanced fruit and vegetables which flood the Vietnamese market, making it harder and harder for small-scale Vietnamese growers to get by. And, yes, there do seem to be Chinese business operatives at work in various upcountry places in Vietnam, buying up supplies of subsistence products and selling them back to locals at an extravagant mark-up in what is essentially an elaborate con. However, the grim reality of what is going on most of the time is probably not that of systematic Chinese evil-doing, but the simple fact of hard-nosed economic competition across borders. And here's the thing. Economic competition across borders is something that China and Vietnam have both signed up to in a very big way in recent decades.

If dodgy chemicals and toxic economic competition are controversial enough, then there's the whole issue of the Mekong, which is the life-blood of the economy, indeed the life-blood of society itself, in the south of Vietnam. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the Mekong has its source - do you know where? In Laos and Cambodia (firm Chinese allies) and in China's ("China's"?) Tibetan highlands. And what have Chinese investment banks been encouraging the Laotians and Cambodians to do with merry abandon in the upper reaches of the Mekong in recent times? Exactly what the Chinese have been doing to most of China's rivers: damming them as fast as they can to supply the region's growing power needs, and in the process reducing water flows to Vietnam's "rice-basket" in the Southern lowlands.

Though tensions have been managed diplomatically so far, the long-term potential for conflict over the issue is palpable. The Vietnamese already have a sense that the Chinese have their hands around the nation's proverbial jugular. The fact that the Chinese and their allies have control over half the country's water supply is only bound to inflame it. In the long-term, reduced water-flow has the potential to turn the Lower Mekong, home to 20 million people and the source of 90% of Vietnam's rice, into little more than a searing, salt-logged plain.

No doubt about it, the uncontrolled suspicion and awkward messages directed at the Chinese from the Vietnamese lowlands look set to keep on coming:

 
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If the similarities and common interests between Vietnam and China are masked by historical aggression and modern-day suspicion, what can we say does genuinely distinguish the Vietnamese and the Chinese?

The first thing the Vietnamese themselves would point to if you asked them this question would be the last thing to strike a Western visitor to Vietnam: the Vietnamese and the Chinese, according to the Vietnamese at least, look quite different.

Of course, you'd expect the Vietnamese to claim that Vietnamese women are more distinctive (more beautiful) than Chinese women. What they'd also tell you is that Chinese eyes are smaller and narrower, Chinese faces flatter and rounder and Chinese general features somehow not as fine - all of which does make it roughly possible for Vietnamese to tell Vietnamese and Chinese faces apart at least some of the time. (Chinese lips are supposedly not as full as Vietnamese lips and, as the local proverb goes, "thin lips tell lies".)

Is it true that the Vietnamese think a bit differently to the Chinese? It would be silly to take Vietnamese self-stylization at face value, though it's true that clichés about national character do have real world effects - normal people adjust the way they think and behave to fit in with fixed ideas about the way members of their own clan normally think and behave, and how they're different from their neighbours. It's a kind of trick of psychological perspective. And one that certainly seems to be in play a fair bit on the south side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border.

The Vietnamese, across the board, think of themselves as pluckier and tougher than the Chinese - something they put down, in large part, to having been invaded by their northern neighbours so many times down the centuries.

The further south you go in Vietnam, the more you'll hear it claimed that the Vietnamese are better at enjoying themselves than the Chinese. Vietnamese, it is true, are willing to credit the Chinese with having a more ancient or refined culture than their own. The downside is that the Chinese are supposed to be more boring and staid; where a "typical" Vietnamese will speak his heart or throw a spontaneous party, a "typical" Chinese will (in the Vietnamese mind) stand on ceremony.

In my experience, Vietnamese, across the board, are in fact more accommodating towards foreigners, a little more eager to please; they're interested in what the rest of the world thinks of Vietnam, where the Chinese are indifferent, or maybe just too busy to care. Turn up in Vietnam speaking half-decent Vietnamese and people will really make a fuss of you; even if you can just pronounce half a dozen simple phrases, you'll make quite a few locals deliriously happy. In China, try the same party trick and you will be greeted, at best, with a certain wry smile.

In business and politics, the Chinese are supposed to be coldly calculating, in both the short and the very, very long term. The Vietnamese (again on their own account) could never be like that; like Australians, they're attached to the sorts of ideas of informal mateship that do the rounds of little nations which think of themselves as made up mainly of good, little people. A typical Vietnamese, on this picture, could never play his cards close to his chest or pretend that nothing is happening for years on end, the way Chinese businessmen and government officials do: striking up friendships and making the general warmth of Vietnamese existence flow out in all directions are much too important for that.

Or such roughly are the fixed ideas the Vietnamese have about the Chinese. The key point being that there is no corresponding set of fixed ideas about the Vietnamese entertained by anyone in China. The Chinese of course have their stereotypes and clichés, their historical and cultural sore points, and their blind spots, about other nations and the wider world. But one of the benefits of being the most populous nation on earth with a 5000 year history is that you are spared little-nation anxieties about the really big nations in your neighbourhood of the world. This brings us to inter-cultural irony number 3. The Chinese just don't pay the Vietnamese as much attention as the Vietnamese pay them.

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Your lesson for today: when in Vietnam, whatever you do, don't tell Vietnamese people that, as far as you can see, they're basically Chinese with a twist.

Remember that nowadays being a normal, patriotic Vietnamese person, who's proud of his country's culture and its successes fighting painful defensive wars, means being a little bit anti-Chinese.

If it's the younger generation of Vietnamese you're mixing with, note that being young and hip in today's Vietnam means idolizing Korean boybands, imitating Korean hairdos, reading Japanese manga and infusing your life with a bit of pop cultural edginess from a range of Asian and Western sources.

Vietnamese teenagers might spend days (or years) playing Chinese martial arts games on their computers and quite a few Vietnamese oldies are addicted to the historical soap operas that are churned out by studios in Shanghai and Hong Kong by the bucketful. However neither the games nor the soaps have any noticeable effect on wider culture or mentality. While masses of Vietnamese learn Korean or head to Japan for work, and eventually make it back to Vietnam with a range of Korean or Japanese ideas in their heads, the number who orient themselves towards China is vanishingly small: a minority in the military-political establishment, plus the realists in the economics and business fraternity, who know well enough where most Vietnamese supply chains start out from.  

Ask a bunch of Vietnamese teenagers what their nation's primary cultural symbols are and they'll probably tell you something about the lotus. Ask them what the lotus stands for and they won't mention the Buddhist idea of tranquil beauty, they'll tell you about Vietnam Airlines.

Try digging a little deeper - and the brighter ones will tell you that red is the traditional Vietnamese colour of marriage, bamboo the traditional Vietnamese symbol of unity and the dragon the traditional symbol of Vietnamese power and prosperity.

 

Now ask them where these key cultural signifiers come from and their eyes will widen and one or two of the boys will let out a confused roar: China! At which point some of them will start booing and some of the others start muttering in an undertone.

Optimistic inhabitants of a globalized culture world that they are, young Vietnamese might say they'd be happy to see all the old Chinese stuff that belongs to Vietnam's past disappear into the dustbin of history.  

But the ones doing the muttering perhaps see it differently. They know, or rather they feel in their bones, that by pulling up the roots of Vietnam's Chinese culture, they'd in a sense be abolishing Vietnam itself.

Irony no. 4, the biggest of them all, one that applies equally to history and culture and individual psychology: there's nothing more awkward than the effort to escape something that has always been a part of yourself, and often one of the deepest parts, the way China is part of Vietnam.

15 Things about Vietnam #13: Bureaucracy

Vietnamese police enforce the law in slightly . . . irregular ways. Vietnamese bureaucrats, though sometimes nice, have never heard of customer service.

Vietnamese police are widely regarded by foreigners living in Vietnam as a source of annoyance and there's no doubt some of them like to make special trouble for expats, though that of course doesn't stop them being good blokes once they've hung up their jungle green uniforms and brushed off their red epaulettes.

If you stay for a while in Vietnam, the two classic situations you will find yourself getting into with Vietnamese police are as follows:

Situation (a) A Vietnamese traffic cop pulls you over for a minor traffic violation - possibly one which all the Vietnamese driving down the same street are also flagrantly committing. The cop then rubs his thumb against his index and middle fingers or says the word "money" straight up. When you ask him how much he wants, he names a sum that in Western terms is a trifle, but in Vietnamese terms is excessive. The cash you hand over disappears straight into his shirt pocket, after which he waves you on in a testy manner.

(b) Knowing that foreigners in Vietnam are supposed to stay in places that have an official permit, you go down to the local police station with a Vietnamese friend to get yourself put on the local register of foreigners resident in Vietnam. Your friend explains the situation to the local police chief, exuding a sort of matey integrity as he does so. The local police chief looks you and your friend up and down in a very testy manner, hints that something irregular is afoot and in general sounds as if he's ready to have you driven to the Cambodian border and thrown out the back of the vehicle. (In the meantime, you stare at the red communistic banners on the walls, trying to ignore the greasies you're being given by the plainclothes officers sitting around, mainly without clothes, watching tv.) Your friend continues to exude matey integrity. Gradually the tone of the conversation between your friend and the local police chief softens. Forms get handed over and filled out. And an envelope containing an agreed-upon sum passes from your friend into the possession of the local police chief. Everyone pats each other on the back and - off you go.

Obviously we are talking about low-level graft here - something that in Vietnam is, if not rampant, then at least widespread.

Today's entry will give you some basic strategies for dealing with low-level graft in Vietnam.

But, before that, there's the question - why does low-level graft exist in the first place? Foreigners who come from places where governments have taken the issue of graft firmly in hand over the past 20 - 30 years tend to be horrified when they encounter situations like (a) and (b) in Vietnam and some of them jump to the conclusion that graft and the various behaviours associated with it exist because it is somehow ingrained in the Vietnamese (or some sort of general "Asian") psyche. Others will tell you with admirable self-assurance that it has its roots in Vietnam's political system. 

In this writer's view, both explanations are wide of the mark. There is no such thing as "the" Asian psyche. And though the Vietnamese political system plays a part in facilitating graft, it is not the main reason graft exists in the first place.

The most tangible reason graft is a problem in Vietnam (and in plenty of countries with more liberal political systems too) is that Vietnam is still a relatively poor country and because police and state officials are paid a pittance. A simple example: the salary of a low- to mid-ranking member of the police is approximately one third of what is needed to live a modest life in a Vietnamese city. The remaining two-thirds comes from various irregular sources. Graft is expected and, in a lot of cases, quite necessary for survival.

A job in the Vietnamese police is what is technically known as a sinecure. It is not something Vietnamese folk do for the regular wage, but for the unofficial licence it gives them to make money from kickbacks, special fees and paid-for favours. Like most sinecures in other parts of the world, a police sinecure in Vietnam has to be paid for too; it is part of a wider system of sinecures. Thus, to land a moderately lucrative job in the police, prospective recruits have to pay a plum sum amounting to several years' wages to a police official higher up the chain of command. Inevitably, a lot of a junior officer's "extra earnings" over the first few years of service involve recouping the fee he paid for the job in the first place.   

What is sad and annoying for all involved is that a similar system of sinecure-mongering operates within most parts of the Vietnamese government, not just within the police. Throughout Vietnamese society, low salaries call forth a need for extra earnings and a need for extra earnings leads to the extraction of special fees for various para-legal and extra-legal favours.

No doubt everyone involved in the arrangement feels like a victim being sorely pressed by economic necessity.

And no doubt the traffic cops and petty government officials who cause foreigners a hard time are small cogs in the overall machine.

So, as irritated as you might be when 500,000 đồng ($25) of your money disappears into the pockets of the Vietnamese traffic cops of this world, try at least to be angry in a sociologically informed way.

Recall for one that things are much, much better than they were in the quite recent past. 15 years ago there were many parts of Vietnam where Westerners couldn't travel outside of big cities without having their papers checked and their wallets emptied every 10km by local border guards. Nowadays, by contrast, foreigners can go a-lurking pretty much anywhere they want (except in the vicinity of Vietnamese military bases). And they tend to do this rather liberally.

Recall also that ordinary Vietnamese have it much worse than you. Yes, you have to pay steeper "traffic fines" than the locals. And, yes, there are residency permits and visa checks which give a range of officials plenty of scope to extract special fees. On the other hand, you don't have to live your whole life in the grip of the system, like normal Vietnamese people. Before you get hot under the collar about graft in Vietnam, recall what living within the system means for normal Vietnamese. At the most basic level, it means possibly not having access to the law unless you can give Vietnamese police an inducement to investigate a crime that has been committed against you.

But I said at the start of this series that I wasn't going to say anything that might endanger my Vietnamese visa, so maybe let's move on. . .

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As a Westerner in Vietnam, how to deal with Vietnamese police and Vietnamese bureaucrats, if they demand a kickback? Or just if they are being rude and unhelpful, as some of them are in their own special Vietnamese way.

It is always an option to refuse to pay all kickbacks and I am guessing that some of you will be tempted to stand on principle in this way. This is a course of action I would sternly recommend against for two reasons: firstly, because the man (it's almost invariably a man) demanding the kickback probably has ways of causing you bureaucratic pain which you haven't even thought of; secondly, because corrupt cops and officials in Vietnam almost never act completely outside the scope of the law. What they do instead is this. They present you with the fact that you have broken some bylaw (driving your bike in the car lane, residing at your friend's place even though he doesn't have a special permit, etc), then they offer to fix the situation - for a certain consideration.

The idea of refusing to pay kickbacks is fine in theory, and you definitely shouldn't rush to pay them if you're being asked for a sum in the millions. But recall two things. The first is that you don't know Vietnamese law back the front. (If you want to know more, this piece is a good place to start.) The second is that the man in the green safari suit probably has the law at least half on his side . . .

A much more realistic option when confronted with a situation requiring payment of a kickback is to accept the necessity of kickbacks and work out ways of paying them quickly and effectively.

The key to this strategy is to gather the right people around you; it is Vietnamese friends who will need to instruct you on the essentials - how to pay the kickback, who you need to pay it to, how much is an appropriate sum. The main thing to note here is that there are culturally appropriate and culturally inappropriate ways of paying the kickback. Whether or not you offer to buy the local police chief coffee using the right pronoun, or bring some flowers into the office for his wife - with a little red envelope containing cash fitted into the back of the bouquet - could make or break the deal. The secret is to make the kickback look like a gift you're giving in return for his help and generosity. (And that, in 53% of the guy's mind, is truly what the kickback is.)

In dealing day to day with Vietnamese officials, whose repetitive, low-paid jobs often turn them into fantastically crabbed creatures, your general principle should be to cop the sourness sweet. Raising your voice in English or invoking the high-minded ways of Ho Chi Minh (often inscribed in huge letters on the wall behind the official's desk) will get you exactly nowhere. Play by the rules of higher Vietnamese authority when dealing with the rude or self-important use of petty Vietnamese authority: act as if nothing is happening. In simpler terms, if you're going anywhere near the waiting room of official power in Vietnam, try to avoid looking impatient and frustrated. Bring your MP3 or a book to read.

But above all, before you go anywhere near the waiting room of official power, get organized. Knowing that some Vietnamese authorities will apply the letter of the law so they can squeeze an extra quid out of you, give them as few opportunities as possible to do so by having your papers in order when you arrive. If you want to work in Vietnam, make sure you bring all your paperwork with you from home: copies of your qualifications certified by the institution that issued them, a police check, plus all the details of the places you've lived and worked in the past. Have the same first name, middle name and surname on all those docs, or else the extra-testy guy from the Ministry of Labour will make you go and get a sworn affadavit at the consulate of your home country.

If you want to drive a motorbike in Vietnam, then get an international drivers licence and don't go for a whizz in the car lane just because various Vietnamese revheads are doing it. If you're still worried about being booked by Vietnamese traffic cops, then remember the following:

(a) Don't carry too much cash on you. Vietnamese traffic cops have a habit of demanding all the money they can see you have in your possession.

(b) Pretend you don't understand what they're saying, whatever language they start speaking to you in. If it's Vietnamese, then I'm guessing you won't need to do much pretending. If it's English. . . well, though Vietnamese cops know the word "money", let's just say the expression "There is a fictive problem with your indicator. If you pay me 1 million đồng I will choose not to impound your bike for 10 days" is several grammatical bridges too far for most of them. If you're feeling game, try out a bit of your high school French. That'll make them want to get you off their hands in no time.

(c) Negotiate the fine. Unless you are standing in the road with a big wad of cash in your hand, bargaining a traffic cop down to a "fair" amount ought to be possible. The standard sum they are willing to let normal Vietnamese go for (depending on how flashy their bikes are) is 150,000 đồng ($8). For foreigners - it's at least double. If the sum they demand is in the millions, they obviously take you for a noob. Which is insulting. Fight for your right to bribe them reasonably!

(d) Don't be scared, start crying or threaten to call the consulate. Unless you've done something really stupid or dangerous - and it'd be a serious challenge to do stuff that is more stupid and dangerous than what some Vietnamese boys do on the roads - the man in the bone uniform is not going to impound your bike. His aim, in this situation, is actually quite similar to yours: to get away as quickly as possible - with as much of your money as possible. Just like you, he's not going to want to waste his time writing an official report, transporting your bike to the station, etc.

(e) Don't ask for the ticket. Once the kickback has been paid, consider the whole episode closed. And lastly,

(f) Boys, if a traffic cop tries to hit on your Vietnamese girlfriend, then - put up with it. Vietnamese traffic cops are notorious for using their powers to obtain the phone numbers of pretty girls and some pretty girls are known to give in to their demands. Put it this way, if your girl genuinely likes you, she won't respond to the attentions of a goatish looking individual in a bone-coloured uniform wearing an egg-shaped helmet.

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In case I'm making it sound as if Vietnamese officialdom is peopled solely by rude, hopelessly embittered individuals working at or beyond the margins of the law, let me add that in my dealings with officialdom over the years, I've come across many, many Vietnamese people who are friendly and consummately polite.

For every Vietnamese official who just grunts when you ask "How many weeks till I can come and collect the paperwork?", there will be several who'll tell you regretfully that the process takes three weeks and then ask what country you're from with unfeigned curiosity.

For every minor functionary who won't grant your simple request on the grounds that he "has to act exactly in accordance with the guidelines" (làm đúng theo quy định), there will be several willing to find another guideline that fits your case or point you towards a loophole in the guidelines.

For every Dickens character who orders you around in a bilious tone, there will be a few - in my case they're always middle aged women or gay men - who smile shyly or start batting their eyelids at you.

For every starched apparatchik whose aim is to turn your life into a nightmare worthy of Kafka, there will be several who know how to open out a distance between impersonal laws and spontaneous human relationships and fill the gap with a melancholy cheerfulness that is distinctively Vietnamese - and distinctively their own.

Once you've experienced all the ups and downs of this treatment for a couple of months - which, by the way, is how long it normally takes to organize a proper Vietnamese work permit - try paying a visit to the consulate of your home country and make a quick comparison between the attitude to customer service within Western and Vietnamese bureaucracies.

If my experiences in the American, British and Australian consulates here are anything to go on, what you'll find is that everything is subtly the same, yet entirely different.

Western bureaucrats have less ways of rhetorically beating round the bush than Vietnamese bureaucrats.

In Western bureaucracy, there are certainly fewer shades of human sadness in play.

No doubt, Western bureaucrats are more consistent, more organized and more predictable in their dealings with the public than their underpaid Vietnamese colleagues.

And the point on which they're most predictable of all is in demanding large sums of money from you straight up.

The stamp of approval you need to get out of the Vietnamese Department of Foreign Affairs might take two weeks and a fair bit of running round. The sum you'll end up forking out will be $10, $20 if there's a kickback involved.  

The stamp you need from the British embassy will take you three-quarters of an hour, but it'll cost you $150, payable by credit card only.

Faced with a choice between Vietnamese graft and Western scams, the former beats the latter hands down in a certain sense . . .

15 Things about Vietnam #12 - Ancestor Worship

On a certain day of the year, the day her mother died 35 years ago, Mrs Như places a tray of flowers and a cup of plain water on the ancestral altar in the family home in central Hanoi, then lays out a modest meal on a collapsible table below. With her hands clasped to her chest, she bows three times to the image of her mother that sits atop the altar, separated from the equal and opposite image of her father by a bowl of fruit and an incense holder. 

On the day his villa in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City is finished, Mr Dũng does something similar: on the family altar in the expansive new guestroom, he sets a representative sample of the meal his wife has just cooked. There's enough food to serve an army, a lavish selection of fruit, red and white wine as well as two neat pyramids of Heineken and Coke. Mr Dũng bows to the images of his father and grandparents, then he waits for his 50 guests to arrive.

Nobody knows exactly when or where ancestor worship started in these parts of South East Asia, but one thing's for sure: it started way back in the deep, dark past, and it continues right up to today.

Historians argue whether the Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors before the Chinese invaded North Vietnam in 179BC and imposed their own forms of the practice - themselves fixed by Confucius many centuries earlier.

Whether or not there were once distinctively Vietnamese ways of paying one's respects to forefathers and foremothers, the ways the Vietnamese ended up with were essentially Chinese. Ancestor worship is probably the most definitive mark of Chinese cultural influence on Vietnam and it's interesting to note that neighbouring peoples like the Thais and Cambodians don't go in for it.

The long-term irony being that, at least as far as ancestor worship goes, the Vietnamese have turned out to be more Chinese than the Chinese. Over the past 50 years, the cult of ancestors has fallen into disuse in most of China, while in Vietnam it remains the most popular religious observance of them all. Since the 1990's it's actually seen a major revival.

As the activities of Mr Ngọc and Mr Dũng attest, the cult is and always has been celebrated in the home. There's no better indication of its homeliness than the Vietnamese name for it; while "ancestor worship" sounds like a slightly chilly business, the Vietnamese name suggests otherwise: "đạo ông bà" means literally "the belief in grandpa and grandma".

So central is the belief in grandpa and grandma to the Vietnamese view of life that all the main Vietnamese religions have had to adapt to it in one way or another.

The belief in grandpa and grandma has been comfortably integrated into Vietnamese Buddhism, along with all sorts of other fairly wild Vietnamese cults. Although the main hall of a typical Vietnamese pagoda is devoted to the worship of a shiny white Buddha the size of a small truck, out the back of the pagoda you'll find the "reverse hall", housing shrines to the pagoda's spiritual forebears (monks and nuns who found Enlightenment, or enlightened others, in the pagoda's general vicinity). Further out the back or in a separate out-house, you'll find boards or miniature shrines covered in photos of earnest Vietnamese faces, normally shot against a monochrome blue background; pious Vietnamese Buddhists worship their ancestors as close as they can to the chubby stone Buddha figure in the main hall.

In recent decades, Vietnamese Catholics have also started to practice a little low-level ancestor worship too. These days, altars in Christian homes are allowed to house photos of grandpa and grandma, as long as Jesus, Mary and Joseph occupy the prime positions on the wall up above. In fact it was attachment to ancestor worship that limited the spread of Christianity in Vietnam in the first place. Since the Sixteenth Century, when it was brought to South East Asia by European missionaries, Catholicism tried to oppose ancestor worship, which went against the Christian demand to worship God rather than ordinary people. Potential converts were forced to choose between grandpa and grandma and the God who died on the Cross. So ingrained were the habits of ancestor worship that only a small minority took up the Cross and followed the French Jesuits into the cultural wilderness.

And then there's the Communist connection.

Once you get here, it will become obvious pretty quickly that Vietnamese Communism doesn't follow the strict Marxist line about religion being the opium of the people. As an organization which rules in the name of the people, the local Communist Party is happy to go along with the nation's most popular religion, especially given its homely, apolitical nature.

In fact, you could say that belief in grandpa and grandma has found its way into Vietnamese communism. Having a credibly progressive history whose moving spirits people can get in touch with is something that the Party has successfully cultivated for many generations. The Party's founding father, Hồ Chí Minh, is worshiped to this day as a kind of super-ancestor of the entire nation; ordinary Vietnamese place his photo next to the photos of their literal progenitors on the family altar, or just above them on an "upper altar" of its own:

Belief in grandpa and grandma is a light, warm-hearted affair. So while the cult of Hồ Chí Minh might at first glance have some similarities to the cults of personality instituted by demonic nasties like Mao and Stalin, it passes over into an attitude of general fondness. Uncle Hồ died in 1969, six years before North Vietnam won The War. Patriotic Vietnamese still want to keep Uncle Hồ aware that they finished the job, while others invoke his blessing for more recent plans and schemes, in the same way they do in a family context in the guest room of the family home.

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Birthdays are relatively new to Vietnam - a commercial Western import dating back to the early 90's. The really important days are death days (Vietnamese "đám giỗ), which memorialize the occasion on which one of the family's main ancestors turned up his or her toes.

The idea may seem slightly morbid, but the way it is put into practice isn't. A đám giỗ is a pretty relaxed affair. Before the event gets into full swing, a real, fully cooked meal is offered to the relevant ancestral spirit. A few stories about grandpa/grandma are told, then everyone hops into the meal that was originally placed on the ancestral altar. Mrs Như and Mr Dũng in the two scenes at the top of this essay were preparing for their respective đám giỗ.

Đám giỗ make for great get-togethers. Friends and friends of friends are welcome to tag along; the Vietnamese truly understand that the best type of party is a well-organized, regularly repeating event with a solemn core that takes up about 10% of party-time.

Now if the two most basic questions relevant to the cult of ancestors are "who are your ancestors?" and "when are their đám giỗ?", then the next basic question is "Where did your ancestors come from?"

Here we come to the all-important Vietnamese notion of "quê" or "quê hương" (homeland). For Vietnamese, your homeland, you see, is where your ancestors' graves lie:

 
No matter how far the graves of their ancestors are from their current place of residence, many Vietnamese make a yearly pilgrimage to the spot – to pay their respects, to tidy headstones and to . . . burn assorted paperwork. The simple belief, of vast antiquity, is that ancestral spirits have need of worldly possessions in the afterlife. Nowadays such things are conveyed to them by incinerating paper images. (The preferred currency in the Vietnamese nether regions is the American dollar not the Vietnamese dong, so don't be fooled if you see greenbacks drifting down the street after a đám giỗ.) 

When Vietnamese visit the graves of departed ancestors in their ancestral homelands, the first thing they do is light incense. This creates initial lines of communication between this world and the next. Then up go the paper clothes and play-money. As in the case of đám giỗ, once everyone’s said what needs to be said, the festivities begin: the men go on a spree, the women go on a spending frenzy at the local market.

Pious Vietnamese invoke their ancestors on all of life's important occasions, and on plenty of minor ones as well. They get married in sight of the relevant ancestral images. They also pay their respects before the family altar when babies are born or journeys undertaken - even when kids get decent grades in exams. The good, the bad and the indifferent are to be communicated to grandpa and grandma, because grandpa and grandma don't just share in the family's ongoing successes, they also bring luck and support - some vague degree of aerie benevolence - when times are tough. At the most basic level, grandpa and grandma apparently just want to keep up with family news.

Unburied ancestors are a problem for real followers of the cult of grandpa and grandma because their spirits are thought to wander the earth in a distressed state that is also liable to cause distress in living, breathing human beings. Hence the efforts many older folk have been making in recent years to track down the war dead and return them to their rightful places - in the rice-fields on the margins of their home villages.

When military records fail to show up useful information about the location of war dead, there are always the services of the specialists: traditional Vietnamese fortune tellers (thầy bói) have been doing a roaring trade since the problem of remembering The War started to be framed in traditional terms. Though they are treated as figures of fun by more educated folk, ordinary Vietnamese treat thầy bói as guides to a wide range of irregular spiritual beliefs. Their gifts don't just include communicating with the spirits of lost relatives, but assessing the likely success of human relationships and investment portfolios, as well as the feng shui (Vietnamese "phong thuỷ") of new homes.

Whether Mr Dũng consulted a thầy bói before he laid the foundations of his bright new palazzo is something I'll have to ask him. Blocks in new Vietnamese suburbs are usually subdivided in rigorous rectilinear patterns, leaving little scope for individuals to accommodate the underlying spiritual lay of the land.

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It would be wrong to think of ancestor worship as a set of beliefs that mainly shapes Vietnamese attitudes to the past. Future generations are just as vital a concern - and it shows in the approach that Vietnamese take to having children. Vietnamese 20-somethings who are in any way wary about getting married are intensively worried over by their families. Newlyweds who choose to pause for a year or two before popping out heirs to the ancestral line can expect to get a lot of unsolicited advice from concerned mothers.  

The issue of heirs is the gut reason why older generations of Vietnamese have conservative views about homosexuality and career women: in short because not having children is considered poor form vis-à-vis one's ancestors. Ancestors, as we've seen, require the ongoing deference and care of the living if they're to lead half-way contented lives in the afterworld. So if your kids don't have kids, then you might be condemned to wander after death like a famished ghost for many eternities. (No suckling pig for you at Tết.) As we've also seen, ancestors bring luck and give a certain metaphysical backing to the lives of the living. If you don't produce heirs, then to a certain sort of Vietnamese mind you are depriving yourself of one of the most substantial bases of support that life in this difficult world affords.

Young Vietnamese women face up to these issues in their most brutal form. If they're approaching the end of their third decade in this difficult world and not in a position to pop out heirs (within the socially acceptable confines of marriage, of course), then they tend to get into a serious tailspin. For Vietnamese women especially, not having a family is actually one of the greatest sins in this life. Unlike in the West, it is not something a woman can treat as a normal event (or a hidden blessing): the straightforward result of being born bug-eyed or having one great love that didn't work out. In Vietnam, not having kids is an existential condition, not a social condition, and definitely not one valid life-choice among many.

Strong-minded Vietnamese views about ancestors and heirs combine with narrow-minded Vietnamese views about female beauty to make many girls feel very uneasy in their own skin. Vietnamese family convention says a good woman ought to have popped out two heirs by 30. Vietnamese aesthetic convention says that a woman's beauty goes into steep and irrevocable decline from about the age of 27. Result? In the vital years between 25 and 30 many Vietnamese women lose the plot a bit. To Westerners the whole thing seems cruel and unnecessary, especially given how radiantly beautiful Vietnamese women remain well into later life.

Young Vietnamese men have it a little easier. The cult of grandpa and grandma leads some Vietnamese mothers to worry obsessively that their sons might be gay, and to give them the wind-up if they show signs of drawing out their bachelor days.

However a solid majority of Vietnamese men still believe, just as fully as their sisters, in doing the right thing by grandpa and grandma. One thing which makes them vastly different from Western men in their 20's and 30's is this: a certain percentage of Vietnamese men start getting just as clucky as their female contemporaries. In some cases, even cluckier.

Over the past decade, Vietnamese men have been experimenting, within the expanded limits of an increasingly affluent society, with various new social roles and sexual identities. The Vietnamese idea of masculinity has been influenced by all those grass-eating Japanese girly men who drift through their 20's working part-time jobs, living at home, spending their disposal income on clothes and hairspray and ignoring any signals they're getting from straight girls trying desperately to do what their parents and grandparents want them to do.

But for the solid majority who don't go herbivorous, producing heirs to the ancestral line is still pretty important.

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By Western standards, the cult of ancestors has something childish and superstitious about it, as do the not unrelated beliefs the Vietnamese still hold about ghosts and devils and omens. However there is far from being a single Vietnamese view about how to celebrate the cult and what its deeper meaning is.

Educated Vietnamese who lived through The War and have digested its meaning in secular terms, tend to be agnostic about the world of ancestral spirits. This doesn't make them any less attached to old memories or to family histories though. The meaning of ancestor worship for them comes to lie in its evocation of its own past meaningfulness - a shift in perspective which I guess goes to show that   attachment to the the very idea of religion can be just as powerful as conventional belief. Less educated older folk, on the other hand, take the cult of ancestors with full literalness; you might almost say it is out of deference to them that the cult continues in its full-blown form, even though Vietnam has become a radically modern, secular society over the past 100 years. Ancestor worship is the older generation's way of answering the claims of the past on the present - immense and painful as they are for many who lived through the period 1945 - 1975.

Younger generations have shifted sideways in a different direction. They are much less likely than their parents to care for the specific rituals of ancestor worship; most of them probably regard the way their elders duck and bob before the family altar as a quaint habit. Yet something of the habit still finds its way into their bones. That's because it's caught up with the Vietnamese belief in giving parents and grandparents their due. Even among the generations who have no direct experience of the War, you can still feel the main force of Vietnamese family ethics. At its heart is a sense of gratitude to parents and grandparents for their efforts in raising you - an obligation that extends beyond the grave.

Younger generations of Vietnamese don't take traditional beliefs about ancestral spirits wholly literally. But then they don't take them wholly metaphorically either. They believe in these things in the same way they believe in the miraculous history of Vietnamese communism: in the mode of unbelief. For many Vietnamese, both young and old, what ancestor worship boils down to is an order-giving ritual, an orientation-giving practice - something that is caught up in an unspecifiable way in Vietnamese beliefs about the importance and goodness of the family: a specific set of rituals that catches up the old-style believer, a general thought-pattern that hooks in the new-style agnostic and in both cases let's questions about its actual basis in fact take care of themselves.   

As one Vietnamese writer has pointed out, the persistence of ancestor worship in an increasingly disenchanted age can be put down to the fact that it speaks to something absolutely instinctive - as of course can the persistence of most forms of religious belief throughout the world.

The beautiful but childish idea behind ancestor worship is and has always been that when we think of the dead in a sense they live again.

In Vietnam, they arise from their slumbers in the rice fields and crowd round the family altar, eager to share in family festivity. And maybe, just maybe, in today's day and age, to metaphorically polish off the beer and Coke stacked up in front of their gently glowering images. . .