Hanoi

There's no getting away from it, stuffing and waxing a dead man and putting the corpse on permanent display is rather odd. Ho Chi Minh didn't even want this. A man of simple tastes, he had requested a simple cremation. But he is far too potent a symbol in Vietnam not to have his image---or his actual self---flogged mercilessly by the regime. And even among the solid majority of Vietnamese who now appear to regard his socio-economic ideas as crackpot, Ho is still revered as the man who devoted his life to freeing the country from French and then American domination. He is their Washington, Lincoln and FDR rolled into one.

Imagine, though, visiting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and rather than finding a majestic marble Lincoln, gazing instead at the Great Emancipator's actual corpse, propped up, smiling benignly, and lit like Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. For some of us, the impulse is to snicker. Snickering is not explicitly forbidden at the Ho Mausoleum---as are wearing shorts, taking pictures and putting your hands in your pockets---but with white-uniformed armed guards all around, I would not recommend it.

Ho's glass sarcophagus rests deep inside a gargantuan stone mausoleum built between 1973 and 1975. Both it and the Ho Chi Minh Museum next door apparently were designed to inspire reverence and awe. Perhaps they do for the thousands of Vietnamese who queue up each day to file quickly past the bier; it takes about an hour to get in and out. But I was reminded of Ada Louise Huxtable's useful term "the architecture of brutality." She was referring to Mussolini's Rome and Nelson Rockefeller's Albany.) You get the feeling that the Soviet Union, Ho's chief benefactor, might have had a hand in his memorial. In fact, the corpse is shipped off to Moscow for three months each year, October through December, for refurbishing.

About the museum, suffice it to say that it views Uncle Ho, as he is often referred to, favorably. There's an enormous heroic bronze statue, a lot of official documents, and photos of Ho laughing with children. Missing are any savage LBJ caricatures or gloating displays of Jane Fonda chortling next to North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns. Such things are more likely to turn up in Hanoi, maybe because more American tourists visit there. You do come upon the front end of an Edsel crashing through a wall. This failed Ford model from the 1950s is meant to symbolize the bankruptcy of capitalism. Tell it to Toyota, everybody's favorite car here.

Completing the Ho complex are the Presidential Palace, once the chateau of the French governor general, and two small houses where Ho lived until his death in 1969. On display are his easy chair, small bed and the entrance to his bomb shelter.

If this group of monuments and buildings presents a convincing picture of what I would call the good Ho---the nationalist liberator---another Hanoi museum currently features an exhibit, remarkable for its candor, that indirectly lambastes the bad Ho, the Marxist-Leninist theoritician. It's at the Museum of Ethnology, a fascinating place with displays about the beliefs and daily lives of Vietnam's 84 highly variegated tribes and ethnic groups, but into which somebody has snuck a show called "Hanoi life under the Subsidy Economy---1975-1986."

That's the period when private property was largely abolished in Vietnam and production of food and goods was collectivized. It was nuts. Everything came to a screeching halt. People suffered terribly. Many starved---though not Party members, who had access to special food and other shops. The Ethnology Museum display and an accompanying documentary film show and tell about life then. Also, bravely, they show the willingness of writers and artists to criticize this "inefficient" system with their "controversial" plays and articles. It was this protest movement---led by writers, professionals and monks---that resulted in the economic reforms of the late 1980s that got the country functioning again. In this stunning exhibit, there is no mention of Uncle Ho.

Hanoi was founded by the Emperor Ly Thai in the year 1010, but the French built the city we see today and they did a nice job. The pleasantly congested Old Quarter, where we're staying, feels like the Paris Left bank, and the late 19th century newer sections look and feel like the Right Bank Paris of grand Beaux Arts edifices along tree-lined boulevards and avenues. Gorgeously designed and maintained parks surround the city's several lakes, making Hanoi a superb walking city (if you can figure out how to get across the street without getting creamed.)

The climate here is more Mediterranean than Parisian---cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers---so the buildings of Hanoi open up more readily to let in air and light. (It's still winter here and we haven't seen the sun since Saigon.)

Because high local property taxes are based on width of frontage, both the oldest and newest buildings are "tube" houses. These are skinny, four- and five-story brick and stucco places, often with the family business (capitalism is back) on the ground floor. With their formal balconies and elaborate perdiments and finials, they are quite handsome. And the colors are either soothing---honey, ochre, pumpkin---or sometimes delightfully jarring---chartreuse or electric blue.

The buildings in the Old Quarter are more ramshackle and the narrow streets home to a commercial life that at first glance seems chaotic. Street vendors, most of them squatting on low stools, take up much of the sidewalk space not hogged by parked motorbikes. A woman with a brazier next to our small hotel, the Hoa Linh, specializes in dried squid. The smell leaves an impression. Others are hawking fruit, vegetables, chilis, coffee and noodle soup. It's illegal to set up shop on sidewalks, so cops are either bought off or vendors get chased away and then return the next day. Space is alloted through an arcane system of seniority and who-you-know, and sometimes turf wars break out.

We learned how this works from Lynn, a Vietnamese-American dermatologist from Atlanta who spent her first twelve years in Saigon and knows the drill. It was also Lynn who confirmed our suspicion that the obnoxious loudspeaker announcements that crackle through the streets late at night and early in the morning are "propaganda." It's the regime bragging about its accomplishments and reminding people that, while life may be tough for most of them (a good salary in Hanoi is $100 a month and farmers make around $20), they are still better off than they would be under "imperialism."

While the loudspeakers make a dreadful racket, most of the din in Hanoi is from motorbike horns. Drivers roar through unregulated intersections at high speed honking, beeping, bleating and sqawking, and everybody else had just better get out of the way. This somehow works, though accidents happen. Joe saw two large farangs on top of an overturned moto and driver, everyone somehow uninjured. We met a Filipino couple who said traffic in Manila is hellish but Hanoi far worse. Joe's theory is that in a society where it's uncool to lose one's cool, and where political opinions are rarely openly expressed, people vent with their moto horns. This jibes with what the American writer Mo Tejani said in Chiang Mai about Thai drivers. Speaking of roadway behavior, Mo described Thailand as "Freud's country."