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 #10 - Vietnamese Cool

Throughout Asia, cool has minor but essential variations, as anyone knows who has been here for more than a cocktail under a palm-tree.

In China, there is off-shore cool and mainland cool, HK cool and SH cool.

There are the various versions of Indian cool, which revolve largely around themselves (Tollywood, masala movies, kurtas with tight leggings), just as there are a vast range of Japanese cools, including everything from computerized pets ("Aibo") to stylized asexual drifting ("hervibores").

The Thais, of course, do a nice little line in sexual androgyny too. Free of Christian sex-complexes and Chinese obsessions with social self-control, they manage to sneak the idea of pleasure into a fairly traditionalist culture in a fairly cool way.

While Japanese cool takes elements of the foreign and transforms them without giving the rest of the world much of a look in, Korean cool is basically export-oriented; its main products are candy-coloured t-shirts, bloodless teen comedy and I-left-my-brain-at-home girlbands:

In plenty of Asian cities, you’ll find old colonial palaces and plenty of other ageing colonial architecture, which none of the locals find especially cool. You’ll also find the remnants of much older civilizations – standing there as mute testaments to the days before human beings needed the ideas of cool and uncool to mark the difference between social up and down, in and out, beautiful and ugly.

In all of Asia, serious money has been made in recent history, sometimes in obscene quantities. And the purchasing power of those who did the making has kick-started the sorts of commercial arts, the competitive displays, the restless imitation and change that make more things seem cool or uncool in the first place.

Being cool in Asia normally involves taking a splash in global culture – hence the fascination with the standard Western accessories, tv formats and pop-music genres. Hence also the uncoolness of a lot of Asian Cool in the minds of formidably cool Westerners who, when in Asia, tend to idealize precisely what they despair of back home in the West (oversized urban jungles, poverty) or what Asians despair of in Asia (hidebound traditions, sleepy country ways).

Hence also one of the advantages of Asian Cool: because it takes its lead a lot of the time from a kind of super-culture, global culture, it mainly avoids splitting itself into a hopeless muddle of subcultures the way Western culture does. Cool is something it is almost impossible to be in the West – what is cool in one corner of the social landscape is boring, weird or incomprehensible in the next. (Who over the age of 23 is really cool anyway? etc) To be cool in Asia all you need, at least to get started, is enough money to spend at an upmarket shopping mall.

This makes it sound as though what is cool in Asia is mainly what comes from somewhere else (the fashions and accessories of the wealthy, enviable West). But that’s much truer in some places than in others.

At its worst, Asian cool is a game of catch-up with the West, played with a conformism that is pretty hard to take. At its best, cool is also what renovates homegrown Asian tradition in any way that seems attractive, interesting or fun. And what Vietnamese girls and boys find cool is no exception.

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The latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is dancing.

Do Vietnamese kids think they can dance?

Having been taught at school to hold everything in, most are not sure whether they can, but watching other people who can (or who are trying) is definitely a whole lot of fun.

The second-latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is singing. Most Vietnamese, in their upbeat moments – and all Vietnamese men in their drunken moments – think they can. They don’t need American tv formats to convince them they can. But the imported formats (and the imported speaker-systems) definitely give the whole show a huge boost.

The thing that became cool the day before yesterday is – Korean stuff. (South Korean stuff of course. There is nothing cool in the minds of young Vietnamese about fat underage dictators or armies of goose-stepping zombies.) Vietnamese girls, particularly in Hanoi, swallow Korean fashions whole. So at the moment they go for the “boyish” look (long baggy trousers and short hair):

or the "sporty" look (big glasses frames, singlet-tops, high-riding shorts and sneakers):

(The sporty look, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of interest in sport. Most Vietnamese girls would break into a sweat at the idea of breaking into a sweat.)

Korean pop music (Bigbang, Psy, Girls Generation) effortlessly conquers the hearts and minds of Vietnamese teenagers, while the Korean film industry is considered a model for the local industry. There are essentially three types of Korean film that find their way into Vietnamese cinemas: quirky comedies, quirky horror films and quirky “historical” films – the latter being thinly disguised comedies in which ancient Korean princes talk like witty Seoul teenagers.

Compare Korean historical films with the vast quantities of historical pastiche being churned out in HK and SH. In Vietnam, Chinese historical dramas are basically fodder for retirees and car-park attendants. Full of the same bitchy princesses, the same growling monarchs, and the same endless Ang-Lee-inspired effects, they have a relatively small following which doesn't let on too much about its Sinophilic habits. Such is the enmity between the two countries, no matter how rich the Chinese get, the Vietnamese are never going to accept that the Chinese are cool in any essential way.

While there’s no question of them bumping the Koreans for the top spot on the list of cool Asian nations, the Thais are definitely also getting cooler in Vietnam. It’s a little difficult to know how this happened. Plenty of middle class Vietnamese go to Thailand for holidays. To many of them the Thais seem more relaxed than the folk back home. They make better films than the Vietnamese (slightly better films). They have less hang-ups about sex. Not being a nation of ethnic purebreads, many Thais look Asian in a less hard-boiled way; Vietnamese admire them their longer noses and deeper-set eyes. And though Thai politics, like Vietnamese politics, involves some hefty prohibitions (never saying mean things about the king, etc), it lacks the heaviness of Vietnamese politics. Hey, the teams are colour-coded, just like an old-fashioned game show! Until the junta moves in . . .

For anyone in the market for darker experiences, there's no denying that Japanese manga taps authentic feelings of anxiety, plus a whole lot of raw desire, that other cool products - and the wider scene of Vietnamese culture - don't give much of a look in. Some of it crosses teenage fantasies of desirability and violence in fairly obvious ways:

Some of it muffles its anxiety in camp gesture or cheap romanticism:

But a lot of the time it speaks the boredom and pain of being young, Asian and middle class in pretty pure form.

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Korean music and Japanese manga are very cool in Asian terms. But the more time you spend in Asia, the more you realize a lot of Asians find being Asian a bit déclassé. It’s Western bodies and Western souls a lot of Vietnamese kids really want – soul referring here to two things: among 20-somethings to the possibilities of deep romantic experience, among teenagers to the upended version of the concept, with 2.5 emotions: love, hate and m’eh, all on the outside.

In Vietnam, looking too Vietnamese is definitely uncool. The aim of the Vietnamese girls who care about these things – which is a lot of Vietnamese girls – is to adapt classical Vietnamese standards to the main Western ideals of beauty and attractiveness. (This does not mean junking classical Vietnamese ideals of beauty. Some of the time it means redoubling the force of classical imperatives and prohibitions.)

Fair skin has always been considered desirable in these parts of East Asia. But with Western models to live up to, buying the expensive cosmetics and applying them daily to make yourself look as un-yellow as possible has become big business. With more Western noses on display, more Vietnamese women find they can’t live with the short, stubby arrangement they already have. The list of cool surgical adjustments has also come to include eyelid snips, boob jobs and major jaw reconstructions. Thin, longish noses and heavy breasts are about as sought after, and about as readily purchased, by Vietnamese girls as ugly, “posh” handbags and upmarket mobile phones. (Because it's a sure-fire way of looking sort-of Western, actually being Eurasian has become very, very cool.)

Then there is Western food. Vietnamese kids are taking to Burger King, KFC and McDonalds in a big way, even though, by comparison with Vietnamese street food, Western fast food is vastly expensive.

They also love going out for coffee and cakes – bad, pseudo-Western iced-coffees with turrets of whipped cream which they drink with bad, pseudo-Western cakes, mass-produced on South Korean machine lines. Thank God the homely Viet version of the coffee date is still an option for young couples. Kicking back beside a canal in a double-deckchair with your boyfriend and a delicious glass of straight Vietnamese coffee is still considered normal and can be done in a cool sort of way.

While as yet there’s nothing in Vietnam to compare to the behaviours of Western foodies, young Vietnamese with disposable income are starting to attribute significant amounts of subcultural cool to particular culinary styles or a broad range of culinary experiences. Vietnam doesn’t have the heavily-hyped restaurant openings or the competitive public assertions of culinary sophistication that middle–class bogans go in for in Western countries. But it does have restauranteurs and cooking game-shows and you can tell they’re starting to have an impact on the stock of inherited Vietnamese ideas because many Vietnamese men nowadays actually speak with pride about knowing how to cook. (Traditionally, plenty of Vietnamese men have always known how to cook - their seedy bachelor days saw to that. But of course no traditional Vietnamese guy would admit he could cook, because he wouldn’t want to have to do the cooking any longer than it took to find a wife to cook for him.)

Though middle class Vietnamese dream of going to Singapore for long-weekends, the same way middle class Americans dream of going to London and Paris, for the super-rich it's Western locations - the US, Australia, Europe - that are the really cool places to holiday and shop. Taking an interest in Western culture when holidaying in a Western locale is considered slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned. No matter how many letters to the editor get written about how shameful it is for Vietnamese to come back from the West knowing nothing more than the price of standard consumer goods, the same thing keeps on happening: fashionable

In the movie stakes, Koreans supply the spooks but Americans supply the explosions - and the repetitious fantasies of moral redemption, which Vietnamese teenagers are much less interested in than the explosions. In the music stakes, a lot of youngsters take a passing interest in Bruno Mars, Brittney Spears or Lady Gaga. Having little idea what these people are trying to assert the coolness of – and no idea what the lyrics mean – most go back to listening to Vietnamese pop music pretty quickly.

Western clothes are considered very cool. And, I have to say, they are very cool. But why?

To a Western eye, the first night nerves young Asians experience on the stage of global history, the light air of formality that informs their everyday ways, seem beautifully offset by a denim jacket or a flannelette shirt.

The general rush to borrow from the wardrobe of Western style doesn’t mean traditional Vietnamese costumes are looked down on though. No Vietnamese girl finds being a bridesmaid boring - traditional Vietnamese áo dài are the best dress-ups ever, almost as cool as mini-skirts and stilettos:

However, the ultimate fashion accessory in today’s Vietnam would have to be the tattoo.

Tattoos are probably the most controversial aspect of Vietnamese cool, especially for girls.

The first thing to remember here is that in Vietnam there is a deep-seated taboo that girls are breaking in getting a tattoo. Tats fly in the face of the traditional East Asian belief that when you die you’re supposed to deliver your body whole and unblemished to the realm of the spirits if you want your spirit to rest in peace. So for most older Vietnamese, tats are for unsavoury characters who are not interested in the fate of their souls - gangsters, hookers and the like.

From a negative point of view, tats might seem like a long-winded exercise in pissing off parents and a self-reinforcing statement of your identity as fashionable and free: if, as a progressive Vietnamese 23 year old, you went through the pain of getting the thorn-anklet (the muscly love heart, the slowly blue-ing slogan, etc), then what you say about being different from your parents must be true, right?

The debates about tattoos that take place in Vietnamese social media are not that different from the ones Westerners were having with their parents over Xmas lunch late in the past millennium. What Vietnamese girls with tats argue online in their own defense rings pretty true. In short, they say, quite believably, that they continue to love and respect mum and dad, in spite of their thorn anklet - that the thorn anklets are there to express to the world the beauty of their souls.

Vietnamese girl’s tats exist to eternalize the inspiration of a single moment, to express the poignance of the single, irrevocable decision. They are as cool as romanticism itself – the Western cult of deep individual emotion which, with a few adjustments for Vietnamese sensibility, is one of the biggest shows in town in today’s Vietnam.

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So if that’s pretty much what’s cool in today’s Vietnam, what do Vietnamese girls and boys find uncool?

This is where the broad differences between Asian cool and Western cool come out.

Tattoos aside, one of the main differences between Vietnamese cool and Western cool is that rebelling against your parents is not considered cool in Vietnam. (Vietnamese Cool, you’d have to say, is not yet Rebellious.)

As in the West, in Vietnam no one’s parents are cool. In the West, that’s basically because the engines of fashion have been turning over quite fast for decades, leaving anybody who seriously adopted cool stuff from previous decades feeling light years behind what is being adopted by the kids of today, or, at best, feeling admired by the kids of today for the 30 seconds it takes to recycle the styles of the past and then move on.

In Vietnam, the reason no one’s parents are cool is very different – because everyone over 30 was brought up during the war or during the period of post-war austerity.

In the West, no one’s parents are cool. And they’re a little difficult to love because of that. Giving them and everything they stand for a good little kick in the teeth, especially if they stand for jobs, mortgages, values-based education and nutritious food, has been considered a pathway, if not to long-term self-respect, then at least to a certain social cred, for numerous generations.

In Vietnam, though no one’s parents are cool, kids, in the main, still adore their parents. Of course, there is tension and, occasionally, tragic conflict, when parents stand on the side of convention and kids find themselves drawn to unconventional ways of life. But systematic spite, or stylized gestures of defiance, are not encouraged and not in general circulation. Young Vietnamese who seriously don’t like the deal served up to them by their parents usually fly the family nest and get on with living cooler, more open-ended lives without making a big deal about it.

Next, there is sex, drugs and rock n roll. None of these three is particularly cool.

In Vietnam, sex, you could say, is not yet cool.

True: flashing the flesh has definitely become a huge social phenomenon in Vietnamese cities, where shorts have been getting shorter, jeans tighter, necklines rakinger and shoes kinkier for the better part of the last two decades. (Good manners, on the other hand, went out of fashion in 1997.)

And true: actually being hung-up about sex is uncool. One of the more serious reasons parents are considered uncool is because of the anxiety that older Vietnamese people feel about free-form social relations between men and women – any sort of free-form public relations between men and women, not just free-form sexual relations. Traditional Vietnamese culture is considered hopelessly backward, especially by some young Vietnamese women, because of its obsession with female chastity and domesticity – the traditional insistence that the main social role of women is to be masters of “gia chính” - an interesting word which can either mean “domestic arts” or “household chores”.

But none of this means that sex itself is considered particularly sexy. Vietnamese girls do not talk to each other, let alone to boys or anyone else, about how much they’re getting. 95% of Vietnamese girls would never kiss a boy experimentally with no thought for the future, and no Vietnamese girl would loudly have sex with her boyfriend in her bedroom to teach her parents a lesson. Vietnamese teenagers are not primed to think of sex as the most meaningful experience of their lives. They do not obsessively contemplate the ritual of losing their virginity. Nor are they encouraged by Vietnamese pop culture to pretend that they know more about sex than they “ought” to.

All the stories run by Vietnamese Cosmo about the mysteries and thrills of sex seem irrelevant, a little pretentious. They are contained in a section called – in English, not Vietnamese – “Love and Lust”. If you ever get really good at Vietnamese and try reading this stuff (which I don't recommend) then you’ll quickly realize that the rather Western backstory of the love/lust distinction is lost on Vietnamese 20-somethings. Who the hell are Adam and Eve? In which James Cameron film were they the main item?

Young Vietnamese men probably consume about as much pornography as men in the rest of the world and many of them probably pick up dumb ideas about huge racks and shaking booty as a result. (Those ideas seem particularly dumb in Vietnam, given how slender Vietnamese women tend to be.) But with the majority of high-speed internet connections still found in very public places, boys still tend to get most of their kicks from online violence rather than online sexual depravity.

The sexualized antics of Vietnamese stars – everyone from Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh to Hồ Ngọc Hà – are seen by both boys and girls as entertaining, rather than impressive. The most credible of the three, Hồ Ngọc Hà (a singer, below), looks mainly like an upmarket calisthenics instructor:

Once she has stopped swiveling and thrusting on-stage, she becomes as stiff and proper as any middle-aged Vietnamese housewife. Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh, who are famous for showing off their breasts in public, have, by definition, lost the plot. Neither are even remotely cool.

Alternative sexual practices, it must be said, have quite a lot of cool potential. Vietnamese gay and lesbian folk have their own styles and their own stereotypes, which have been captured memorably in some very good Vietnamese films. (For an intro, try this one and this one). There's even a minor cult of gay love among certain straight (slightly bent) Vietnamese girls. What we are talking about are imported Japanese novels, both literary and graphic, that canvass a full range of issues, from wistful glances across flowing streams to full-blown pillow-biting of the Richard Amory variety.

While many younger Vietnamese are quite comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, but quite anxious about the possibility of actually being gay, mainstream Vietnamese culture is just anxious and in denial. Possibly the worst aspect of the situation are the insults Vietnamese movie directors deliver to the LGBT community in mainstream films on a regular basis. Every year sees the release of a couple of home-grown comedies whose main character is a cheap caricature of an ugly, not very intelligent woman - and whose plot inevitably involves him/her having to get over a crush on the straight male lead.

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Unlike in the West, drugs are unambiguously very uncool in today's Vietnam.

Very few Vietnamese kids feel the need to unwind with a spot of weed or bend their Friday nights into interesting shapes with Ecstasy. (Quite cool Vietnamese kids approve of the death penalty, which the Vietnamese government makes regular use of for drug offences.) Likewise, very few people in Vietnam fall for the bohemian argument that drugs are a laudable, really rather sexy, form of protest against bad social reality or a vehicle of personal expression or in some sense mind-expanding, “philosophical”.

Medium-ranking police officials on the other hand get interviewed on tv by breathless junior reporters whenever they conduct successful drug raids. The job of the reporters in such situations is to express a certain sort of frisky admiration; the job of the cops is to sound as if no one has ever put one past them in the history of the world. Coolness is something it is obviously pretty easy to exude when you have a 20 year-old intern getting het up about what you had for breakfast on the morning of the big bust. Plain-clothes police in Vietnam are definitely quite hip.

Again, while it is considered uncool to worry too much (eg like your parents) about female drunkenness, regularly getting drunk for Vietnamese women is definitely not cool either. Drinking expensive cocktails is for tryhards. Cavorting on table-tops for the benefit (i.e. torment) of heavily drinking men is for sluts. And drinking with the heavily drinking men, the way some Western girls do – because female equality means taking men on in the various pissing contests that their social lives revolve around, doesn’t it? – is not considered even remotely admirable or courageous. (Being a heavy drinking Vietnamese guy though is quite cool, if it shows you know how to enjoy yourself.)

As for rock n roll – well, some middle-aged Vietnamese folk have heard of The Rolling Stones and Queen, but frankly as a nation Vietnam was up to slightly different stuff during the heyday of Western pop culture - fighting major wars and picking up the pieces for example. Most of the various sub-moods that were minted by the greats of American pop and rock had lost most of their attraction before Vietnam was ready for them.

Rock n roll at its best, you might say, helped Western 20-somethings express a range of negative truths about how angry or disillusioned life made them feel in the gilded cage of Western society from the 60's onwards. It captured certain heroic sensations of quixotry, desolation. It gave voice to a bit of rogue male tenderness of heart (or at least offset the blasé cult of male toughness that a lot of other rock n roll was about). It also let loose the eloquence, intelligence and general sassiness of women who wanted to make up their own lives. 

None of these cultural gestures means that much in a Vietnamese context. Vpop – which is the overwhelming exception to the rule that Vietnamese cool comes from outside Vietnam – hardly bothers with minority emotions or negative truths. About the only sensation it is interested in is teenage love gone bad; year after year, the Vpop machine churns out the same old videos of gym-fit boy-men emoting into the stratosphere:

Oh, and quite a few of Hồ Ngọc Hà doing what the idea of love gone bad makes Hồ Ngọc Hà want to do – close her eyes, shake her glossy mane and go round and round in circles. . .

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As this list indicates, what’s cool today in Vietnam hardly invests at all in the deeper attitudinal complexes of Western cool and maybe this is what gives it its special air of groundless drifting, pure spectacle. Depending on how you look at it, you can see it as a playful, purely aesthetic phenomenon, or as a particularly self-absorbed form of consumerism. Asia, it has to be said, has known its floating worlds before, but nothing even vaguely like this.

For better or worse, one of the other main things that is not cool in Vietnam is irony. Like sex, irony, you’d have to say, is not yet cool – the Vietnamese, at this stage of developments, are not yet ready to mock their own drift into materialism, and they are still too attached to the communist idea of the nation to mock seriously at political authority. Vietnamese humour still has something gentle and positive about it - something that to Westerners feels totally before the fall. In general, if you put your tongue too far in your cheek in Vietnam nowadays, the kids will just not get it. Saying one thing and meaning another is neither cool nor uncool, it’s incomprehensible.

Last of all, there's politics. One of the complicated issues it is definitely worth pointing out about Vietnamese social life nowadays is how uncool politics has become. Yes, a lot of young Vietnamese feel an abstract admiration for the achievements of the nation under Communist leadership (mainly – winning the war). Yes, they appreciate that Uncle Hồ and General Giáp had their understated style and their robust political beliefs – and a considerable willingness to stick up for them. Maybe some younger Vietnamese have fond memories of the fun they had as kids at Party-sponsored jamborees. But all of this is coupled with a nigh-on total lack of interest in either the politics or the policy-settings of the Communist Party.

No section in a Vietnamese bookshop goes more untouched than the corner devoted to political doctrine. No subjects within the school curriculum are considered more deadly than the introduction to Marx and Lenin and the drills in Communist history which all Vietnamese kids get put through.

The standard response you’ll get from a Vietnamese 20-something, if you ask what the slogan on one of the million big red banners actually means is – Who knows? Why are they always 50-feet long? The Vietnamese Communist Party doesn’t seem to have adjusted to one of the basic conditions of urban living – that an idea or image, to be lodged in the mind of casual passers-by, has to be compact enough to be taken in with a quick sweep of the eye.

Membership of the Party is still something Vietnamese go in for in order to realize worthy social goals, not just because it’s the best way to move up in the world. But imbuing the party with any of the attributes of cool is the last thing on their minds – either on the minds of Vietnam’s leaders, or the country's politically rather mellow citizens.

There’s almost certainly a method to this. Live in Vietnam for a couple of years and you might find yourself thinking that the Vietnamese Communist Party is happy to seem as boring as possible because it doesn’t want to be subject to the iron law of cool: that what is cool one day will become uncool the next.

Vietnamese cool, like Asian cool in general, has a very definitely bearable lightness. Political ideals, let alone political realities, are by comparison unbearably heavy. Vietnamese cool floats along on the assumption that both the ideals and the realities can be safely put to one side. And in this it's pretty similar to other regional versions of Asian cool too.

15 Things about Vietnam: Part 3

North vs South

There are some small-to-medium-sized differences between Southern and Northern Vietnamese and a degree of underlying tension between them. Much of the tension arises from the War. Some Southerners believe that the Northerners have used the Northern victory in the War to enrich themselves and generally grind the noses of Southern Vietnamese; others hold that the Northerners are basically arrogant, uptight and no good at enjoying themselves. Some Northerners on the other hand suspect that Southern Vietnamese have never been fully signed up to the communist vision of the nation, or else think that Southerners ought to be more grateful for the sacrifices Northerners made in uniting the country; a small but significant number of Northerners find the free-wheeling party mentality of Southerners an offence to customary Vietnamese ways. 
  

As important as The War is though, the differences between North and South Vietnam go much further back in history. The key thing to remember here is that North Vietnam, centred on Hanoi and the Red River Delta, is the cultural and historical heartland of Vietnam. (It is also worth remembering that Central Vietnam makes up a region of its own.)

For a lot of Vietnamese history, there was no such thing as South Vietnam. Up until about 300 years ago, the lower reaches of the Mekong, which make up the core of the South, were a sparsely populated Cambodian marshland. 

Central Vietnam is not altogether different. Until the 15^thCentury most of it was an eccentric Indian-Malay kingdom called Champa, with a culture and a mentality all of its own. To get a rough idea, go and check out the huge stone penis statues and the ecstatic dancers, complete with square unVietnamese jaws and full unVietnamese breasts, on display in the museum in Đà Nẵng:

 
In short, what passes for the Vietnamese "national character" was formed over several thousand years under the conditions of village life in the North. A Northern Vietnamese village was a fiercely independent, fiercely parochial little locale that was self-supporting to a large degree. Its inhabitants didn’t take kindly to visitors and they weren’t inclined to take orders from high-up places hundreds of miles away.

The centerpiece of village life was a communal hall that doubled as a cultural centre and a place to worship the founding fathers of the village.

 

After the communal hall there were two other strategically important centres of village life. The first was the village river-landing, where women gathered to talk among themselves – after Vietnamese Confucians decided that they weren't going to give women a say in the communal hall any more. The second was the village banyan tree, where various spirits were supposed to lurk, where men and women on their way back from the rice fields took a breather and where most exchanges with the outside world took place:

Surrounding the village was a solid wall of bamboo that was tough to burn down or tunnel under. For villagers, it was something that was difficult to see out of or in through, both mentally and physically.

If you’re trying to imagine what I'm talking about in the comfort of your living room, think of a kind of commune crossed with an old boys’ club. Or, if you can get hold of it on Amazon, read the relevant chapters of Hữu Ngọc's book, Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, which explores all these issues in a sophisticated tourist-friendly way.

If you don’t like the whiff of patriarchal penis power that hangs over the traditional Vietnamese village, recall that the distinctive Vietnamese mode of existence that started up there had its strong points: a fierce sense of independence, a far-reaching ability to look after its own needs and some basic features of democracy (families represented in the communal hall regardless of wealth or social standing).

If you’re tempted, on the other hand, to think of village life as a pure, beautiful expression of community spirit that is sadly missing from the modern Western world, then keep reminding yourself what the fierce independence of Northern Vietnamese villages also brought with it: an informal village pecking order, a deep-seated fear of the foreign and the new, a stubborn self-satisfaction with local customs and traditions, as well as a kind of Vietnamese version of what Australians call tall poppy syndrome – the urge to “scratch everyone down to the same level” (thói cào bằng).

Now it was this kind of village mentality that changed when the Northern Vietnamese took over what is now Central and South Vietnam. And how the mentality changed tells you quite a lot about why the Southerners are, on average, a bit more easy-going, and a bit less ceremonious, than Northerners.

Southern Vietnamese villages didn't turn out to be as inward-looking as the villages of the north. Walls of bamboo existed down South, but they tended to be ornamental – they didn’t radically separate the inside from the outside. Part of all this came down to simple geography. The South of Vietnam is criss-crossed by waterways – swamps that eventually got drained or turned into canals - and it was along these that life proceeded to move rather freely.

Just as importantly though, the South of Vietnam was first settled by the Vietnamese at a time in history when business was becoming a much bigger factor in the life of South-East Asia and doing business doesn’t just mean wheeling and dealing with people from distant places, it means talking to them about stuff other than wheels and deals.

The fact that Southern Vietnam depended for its economic survival on trade meant that Southern Vietnamese were much less suspicious of outsiders than their Northern cousins who got by essentially by growing rice for themselves. Because the society created by trade in the South was more liquid in every sense of the word, the Southerners tended to be less attached to village hierarchies, and in general less moved by the idea that the present has to answer to the past.

Southern Vietnam was a kind of nation within a nation – a nation of settlers – and the Southern mentality reflects this down to today. However, settling the South didn’t mean giving up entirely on being Vietnamese. The new inhabitants of the Mekong Delta in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries set up new cults to new ancestors (the founders of new places, the victors of new battles), as well as taking with them some of the older gods of the North. But as geographical and spiritual wanderers, they were disinclined to take the rituals of village life as strictly as their Northern cousins. Hence the Northern Vietnamese complaint, voiced down to the present day, that Southerners don't take the rites of Vietnameseness seriously enough, or celebrate them in a slightly obscene spirit of irony.

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Operating across history on the mentality of Vietnamese from the different regions is the weather.

Northern Vietnam has to cope with monsoons and floods, while Central Vietnam suffers monsoons and floods and droughts. Scraping together a living has always been a tiring and dicey business for the Northern and Central Vietnamese.

Contrast this with the situation in the Mekong Delta, where the Southern Vietnamese confidently expect helpful weather and bumper crops, year in year out. The Southerners, for as long as the South has been the South, have had to do less hard labour and put aside less of what they produced – far less – than Vietnamese from the other two regions.

The result is a kind of hedonism. The Southern imperative to live for the day is summed up neatly in the phrase “Làm bao nhiêu ăn bấy nhiêu” – to eat and drink as much as you make – and in a kind of complacency, which traditionally says: “If that’s as far as I got, then why think of going further?”

Weather-wise, Hanoi is truly beautiful in the autumn – and infernal at the start of summer when a hot, dry wind blows down from somewhere in the Laotian mountains adjacent to Hell.

The heat of Ho Chi Minh City is most bearable from November to February. Day to day, the city is at its best in the early morning and at night – before the heat starts setting off bombs behind your eyes (around 9am) and after the squalls of motorbikes have dried up (around 9pm).

As traditional guidebooks will tell you, Ho Chi Minh City has two seasons (wet and dry), while Hanoi has the standard four. This accounts largely for the different dress-sense, and also partly for the different sense of life, in the two places.

The shabby-chic outfits worn by the motorbike taxi-drivers of Hanoi are obviously what's most appropriate for autumn and winter in the North.

The uniform of the Ho Chi Minh City Hondaman, which he puts on to ferry Westerners to the airport, is t-shirt and board-shorts, worn with heavy gold jewelry if he thinks you want a driver who’s really got class:

 

In the women's department, the light, cotton leisureware (đồ bộ) worn in public and private by most women in South Vietnam is again what’s best suited to the all-year-round heat. (But is that a valid excuse?)
 

 

If Southern leisureware seems a bit dumpy, then watch out for the heavy northern version of the same costume, which looks like a full-on pair of pyjamas:

Weather also has some cultural side-effects. The entire language of older Vietnamese culture, plus the rhythm of Vietnamese festive days, is geared to the changing of the seasons – as they unfold in the North. How do you have a Mid Autumn Moon Festival (Tết Trung Thu) without an autumn, or a Vietnamese New Year – Tết, which celebrates the beginning of the end of winter – when it’s already balmy and 33 degrees? Like Australians or South Americans celebrating Christmas, the Southern Vietnamese in a sense celebrate Vietnamese New Year in metaphor only. Dressed in their finest cotton leisureware, they’re probably glad to be 1200km away from the chilly New Year gatherings in Hanoi, which are telecast right across the country and involve ancient revolutionary comrades celebrating the end of winter – wearing grey sackcloth from the 1945 – 1975 period.

And of course there’s the rain.

The heavy rain of the South is traditionally compared by the Vietnamese with the moods of Southern Vietnamese girls. When they’re miffed with their boyfriends they can become wildly sour and scornful – for about 20 minutes, after which the sun comes out again. By comparison, the bad moods of Hanoi girls, like the rain of Hanoi, last for days. So if, as a single Western male, you want to try living in the Vietnamese cultural heartland, then pack a heavy raincoat and try to build up some emotional stamina.

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By Western standards, doing business anywhere in Vietnam depends a lot on political connections and favours from well-placed friends. However in the North things get political even faster than in other places. If a Vietnamese from out of town presents a Hanoian with a business plan, the gist of his response will be – present your family’s revolutionary credentials and genealogical tree and I'll have a think about it. If a different guy – one who already has the right credentials – presents the same Hanoian with a business plan, the first question will be “How much can we get out of the local People’s Committee for this little number?”

In Ho Chi Minh City they are more pragmatic. The Southern attitude to business plans is basically “bring it over for a squizz and we’ll see if we can’t get rich together.” Business is the dream of half the folk of Ho Chi Minh City, and almost all the Vietnamese who migrate there. In Ho Chi Minh City, if you are in your 20’s and don’t have a plan to start your own business, you are obviously suffering from some sort of moral paralysis. Conversations between dynamic young people trying to make their way in the world often have a slightly fraught “here’s the deal” tone to them; down south, the Marxist word for worker (“công nhân”) gets out-mentioned by the word for company (“công ty”) by a ratio of roughly 100/1.

This doesn’t mean that Southerners are more preoccupied with money or the stuff money can buy. When it comes to things like money, Northerners have a regular cult of keeping up appearances. For instance, Northern men who have next to no money will spend what little they have on hotted-up bikes, wafer-thin phones and denim shirts which for some reason they always tuck into their pants. If they invite you out to dinner though, watch out – it’ll probably be your shout. 

Southern Vietnamese men with sizeable fortunes, by contrast, will keep on driving beaten up Hondas from the mid-90’s and are happy to buy chunky $75 Nokias. Whether a Southern Vietnamese guy is rich or not, if you ask him for a loan, he’ll ask you how much you need. Depending on the situation, he’ll put his hand in his pocket, drive you to an ATM or go borrow some money to lend to you from a more solvent mate.

Northern Vietnamese bogans tend to flash their accessories like weapons. While the bogans of South Vietnam are more laid-back – give them the option and they'll come to the wedding wearing the casuals they were wearing on the farm in the morning morning:

Manners and formalities, as this suggests, are worried over more in the North than in the South, but what’s expected among family and friends differs widely from what’s expected when dealing with strangers. Northerners are more elaborately deferential towards older people, more conscientious in observing feast days and more lavish in displays of conformity around bosses. There's no denying they have a more polished sense of politeness towards guests they invite into their homes. But they can be grossly offensive to tourists and to their fellow citizens in the course of daily life. If you say thank you (“Cảm ơn”) to a Hanoi shopkeeper, she will probably think you’re trying to put one over her. And she won’t hesitate to utter obscenities if you walk out of her shop without buying anything.

Contrast this with the situation in the South, where the receptionist at your hotel will greet you with a cute little nod, will be moved (or ring her friends and start OMG’ing) if you successfully say one sentence in Vietnamese and where the shopgirls will ask you in a hot, soppy tone to drop by again, whether or not you make a purchase.

In Hanoi, if you take too long over your food in a café then you will get the hairy eyeball. In the South you can literally order one coffee and stay the whole day.

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Most visible in dress-sense, most palpable in the weather, the difference between North and South is at its most audible in the different regional accents. If you end up trying to learn Vietnamese, which as a culturally sophisticated expat you should, then being able to comprehend the Vietnamese spoken in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi is as basic to the task as being able to understand both Brits and Americans is to the task of learning English. 

After 6 months of hard work you should get the hang of it. The Northern Vietnamese accent has lots of sharp consonants and guttural rasps, but they're pronounced in relatively soft, suave tone. Southern Vietnamese speech is higher on decibels but sounds less like the speaker is getting ready to clear his throat.

Among Vietnamese, Northerners are renowned for being eloquent, wordy and difficult to understand, Southerners for being blunt, a bit screechy and hard to misunderstand.

Adding to the pain of regional accents, there are also the differences between regional vocabularies. Vietnamese from the three different regions have different words for many different things, including family relationships, the intimate parts of the human anatomy and the things that people do with them.

As in most countries around the world, they also have a nice little palate of psycho-issues relating to language and accent.

The standard Southern Vietnamese accent sounds to the trained North Vietnamese ear like a careless blend of slurs and screeches, roughly, I guess, the way broad Australian English sounds to educated British and American ears. Only where Australians turn vowels into diphthongs, the Southern Vietnamese turn consonants into vowels and yowls. In the South of Vietnam, they don’t speak “Vietnamese” (tiếng Việt), they speak “tiếng Yiệt”, “Yietnamese”. And they don’t eat “roast duck” (“vịt nướng”) they eat "roast" yuck (“yịt nướng”).

Northern Vietnamese is classical Vietnamese, proper Vietnamese. Like High German, it’s the language of high culture and officialdom. Like American English, it’s also the language of pop culture.

Southern Vietnamese accept that all this is true by the way.

But that doesn’t remotely make them want to change their way of speaking or learn the “proper” Northern Vietnamese way of pronouncing consonants. That is because, in the mind of many Southerners, with the Southern attitude to consonant formation comes certain powers of straight-talking which a Northerner can never possess, no matter how clearly or eloquently he speaks Vietnamese.

In the minds of Southern Vietnamese, the linguistic prowess of the Northerners is the sign of a mildly deceptive attitude to life. The North, from the point of view of Ho Chi Minh City, is most of the way to China. That is, most of the way to the home of boring, staid, double-talking, imperialistic viciousness.

From the point of view of Southern Vietnamese, the best thing that can be said about Northerners is that they stick to their guns. And turn up on time more often than they do themselves. Sometimes.

But the Southerner attributes to himself a warmth of character which is a whole lot better than that – a power of direct, sincere speech that makes his inability to speak “proper” Vietnamese just another upside-down sign of a virtue.

(The trump card in the whole pack by the way is the accent of South-Western Vietnamese girls, which is praised as silky sweet throughout Vietnam. The singsong powers of girls from the provinces around HCMC are said to make Northern Vietnamese men go to water.)

Of course, as a foreigner, you don’t have to buy into the various value judgments relating to regional linguistic usage.

But you should spare a thought in all this for the Central Vietnamese.

Southern Vietnamese people can understand and sometimes do a pretty good impersonation of a “proper” Northern accent.

A few Northerners fence off the Southern accent with their prejudices, but most just accept it for what it is. And a certain percentage of Northern men dream permanently of having a girl from near the Cambodian border pour warm treacle in their ears.

In the meantime, no one “gets” the Central Vietnamese.

To anyone from the North or the South, a strong Central Vietnamese accent is literally impossible to understand. If a Southerner heads too far north on a holiday, or a northerner too far south, then he will start to flounder. If either of them goes to Huế, the old royal capital right in the middle of Central Vietnam, he will flounder completely.

The Cosmo Kramer theory of Italian culture – that Italian life is like an opera in which everyone sings instead of speaking – has a direct analogue in the minds of Southern and Northern Vietnamese. The speech-patterns of Vietnamese from Huế are like music to the ear; but only real buffs have any idea what Huế people are actually going on about. . .

Vietnamese stage comedies produced in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, especially if they’re set in the past, often have a character from Huế who’s basically there to do a funny accent: to sound vastly poetic or vastly poofy – ultra-sophisticated, but totally incomprehensible.