News, 8-10/2/00 (1)
hytran
* Enter the dragon - Around globe, preparations under way for
auspicious New Year
SJM, 4/2/00
HANOI -- Nguyen Anh Diep is a cat.
That is, she was born in the Year of the Cat, and as a true believer in
the promise and portents of the zodiac, Diep would thank her lucky
stars if she could be married this year.
``I'd also love to have a baby girl, because it's the Year of the
Dragon and that is a promise of good luck,'' says Diep, 25, a lively
college graduate who waits tables in a Hanoi cafe. ``Next year is the
Year of the Snake, and I'm so afraid of the snake -- that would mean my
daughter would have a very hard life.''
This year Vietnam celebrates Tet -- its Lunar New Year -- on Saturday.
Tet is by far the largest of Vietnam's holidays, and the Year of the
Dragon is particularly auspicious for those who trust in the 12-year
celestial cycle.
A Vietnamese century is counted as 60 years, meaning dragon years come
along only five times a century. So for 20-something women like Diep,
now is the time to tie the knot; there won't be another dragon year
until 2012.
``Everybody knows these things and how it works,'' says Bui Thanh
Huong, 26, a Hanoi newlywed who hopes to give birth to a boy. ``The
information about this is handed down from generation to generation.''
And what if a couple marries outside its celestially designated years?
``The life of the couple won't go along well,'' Huong says. ``Bad
fortune will happen.''
Dragon years are said to be especially good for new businesses, bumper
crops and baby boys. As a result, it looks like it's going to be a
rough year for family-planning officials: In recent days, clinics and
drugstores nationwide have reported record sales of herbal medicines
that claim to increase fertility and sexual potency.
People born in dragon years are said to be sincere, energetic and
lucky, virtually assured of a prosperous life.
``Oh, I believe in these things, of course,'' says Diep, who hopes to
have enough money saved so she and her boyfriend, also a waiter, can be
married soon. ``If I can't get married this year, I will wait two more
years, until the year of the horse. That would be good, too.''
The dragon is ubiquitous throughout Asia, of course, and it appears in
architecture, fashion, art, literature and mythology. In addition to
serving as the symbol of the capital Hanoi, the dragon has a particular
resonance for all of Vietnam.
``The dragon is first a symbolic representation of the country because
the Vietnamese believe they are descended from a union of a dragon and
a lady fairy,'' says Huu Ngoc, a leading historian and folklorist. ``In
Asia, only the Vietnamese claim to be descendants of the dragon.''
That notion was first recorded in writings from the 15th century, with
a reference to con Rong chau Tien -- children of the dragon and fairy.
The dragon, whose totemic symbol was a crocodile or snake, was said to
rule the coastal peoples, while the fairy, in the form of a bird,
governed the mountain tribes. Their conjugal meeting gave birth to the
Viet people, while the idea of the soaring dragon, Thang Long,
eventually came to represent Hanoi.
``This is the national master-myth,'' says historian Chu Quang Tru.
Western mythology portrays dragons as malevolent creatures that breathe
fire and barbecue hapless bystanders. They go around capturing
princesses and getting subdued by gallant knights.
``But in Vietnam the dragon is the symbol of a benevolent animal,''
says Ngoc. ``It was supposed to throw water from the clouds for rice to
grow well and to give a good harvest.''
According to a Vietnamese saying, ``When the black dragon fetches
water, it's sunshine; when the white dragon fetches water, it's rain.''
Ngoc believes that the great dragon myths and legends originated some
2,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, not in China as many historians
suggest. He said the creature's original form was probably a crocodile
or a large sea snake -- aquatic animals that were abundant in hot, wet,
rice-growing cultures like those in Southeast Asia.
``Until 200 B.C. China was above the Yellow River, and the people lived
on wheat, not rice. But Southeast Asia, just as it does now, lived on
rice.''
As the Chinese made forays south into what is now modern-day Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, Ngoc believes that a Chinese emperor ``usurped and
exploited the symbol, saying the dragon was him and he was the dragon.''
The emperor did a good marketing job, making the dragon into an
exclusive symbol of glory and power before eventually allowing the
public to use it.
The new year also will be auspicious for two political milestones.
Wednesday, the Communist Party of Vietnam celebrated its 70th birthday,
and the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon will be commemorated
April 30.
In another more earthly matter related to Tet, the government expects a
record number of overseas Vietnamese to be visiting during the Tet
holiday, which ends Wednesday. The consulate in San Francisco said it
has issued twice the number of visas that it granted for the holiday
period last year.
The prime minister also proclaimed that overseas Vietnamese will be
entitled to the same domestic train fares as resident Vietnamese,
instead of the double-the-fare prices that foreigners usually pay.
* Vietnam approves new road along Ho Chi Minh trail
ABC, 10/2/00 - Vietnam's prime minister has approved construction of a
second north-south road that will follow part of the route of the
legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Trail was used to move soldiers and supplies from communist North
Vietnam to US-backed South Vietnam during the Indo-China war.
The new road, to be named the Ho Chi Minh National Highway, will run
17-hundred kilometres from the capital Hanoi in the north to Ho Chi
Minh City in the south.
A Vietnamese Transport Ministry plan approved by Prime Minister, Phan
Van Khai, calls for investment of 600-million-dollars for the first
phase from Hanoi.
Construction, which will include 314 bridges, is expected to take three
years to complete.
Funding will come from both the state budget and foreign development
aid.
* Vietnam trade fraud on the rise --media
HANOI (Reuters, 10/2/00) — Vietnam uncovered 14,281 breaches of import
and other trade rules last year, an increase of 8.5 percent from 1998,
official media reported on Thursday.
The Saigon Giai Phong (Liberation Saigon) daily said violations
included use of illegal shipping documents, bribing of state firms and
false declarations of the origin of goods to avoid import duties.
Smuggling and graft have become widespread in communist Vietnam in
recent years, and foreign investors complain they are a major
impediment to doing business in the country as smuggled goods are often
cheaper than those imported legally.
The daily quoted figures from police in Ho Chi Minh City, the country's
business hub, as showing that 2,608 cases of such fraud were discovered
in the city last year, 18.2 percent of the total.
Other major smuggling routes include the Cambodian and Chinese borders.
* Kerry, McNamara give differing viewpoints at U. Nebraska forum
Daily Nebraskan, 9/2/00
(U-WIRE) LINCOLN, Neb. -- When Bob Kerrey returned from the Vietnam
War, having lost part of his right leg in combat, he bitterly resented
men like Robert McNamara who had helped lead the country to war.
On Monday, the two men shared a stage at the University of Nebraska
Lied Center for Performing Arts at the to debate the war that helped
shape both of their lives - and that has haunted the United States ever
since.
Kerrey, a retiring U.S. senator from Nebraska and a Congressional Medal
of Honor recipient, and McNamara, who served as secretary of defense
under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to
1968, participated in a four-member panel discussion sponsored by the
E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.
Although the two men disagreed about the war's lessons, Kerrey made
clear in an extraordinary exchange that he has forgiven McNamara.
Facing the former defense secretary, Kerrey described his mindset at
the time he lay in a hospital recovering from his wound.
"I harbored hatred for the men who got us into Vietnam - Johnson,
McNamara ..."
When a few members of the audience began to applaud, Kerrey admonished
them to be quiet: "I would appreciate your not applauding bad behavior
like that."
Kerrey then said he had concluded, upon reflection during the ensuing
years, that his anger was misplaced.
"There was no reason to hate these men," he said. "These men were
patriotic and tried their best to do the right thing.
"So, Mr. McNamara, for whatever it's worth, I stopped hating you long
ago."
In recent years, McNamara has sought to identify lessons from the war
in which he was intimately involved as the top U.S. military
policy-maker.
Along with two other panelists - James Blight, an international
relations professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and Robert
Brigham, a history professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. -
McNamara is the co-author of the recent book "Argument Without End: In
Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."
The book grew out of a dialogue among policy-makers and scholars from
the United States and Vietnam.
The Vietnam War claimed the lives of 58,000 U.S. soldiers and about 3.8
million Vietnamese - appalling losses that must not be repeated in the
21st century, McNamara said.
Despite the carnage, he said, each side achieved its primary
objectives. Vietnam was reunited and gained its independence, and the
United States prevented further communist expansion in Asia.
"Ironically, each of us achieved our geopolitical objectives," he said.
"This led me to a hypothesis: Each of us could have avoided the war or
terminated it earlier without changing the geopolitical outcome."
McNamara now believes both the United States and North Vietnam, plagued
by mutual misunderstanding, missed several opportunities to avoid or
shorten a tragic war.
For example, he writes in the book, both sides missed chances to create
a neutral coalition government in South Vietnam or to reach a peace
agreement in the mid- to late-1960s rather than escalating the war.
"Our mutual ignorance was mind-boggling," he said. "That was the origin
of the conflict. We didn't understand each other."
While seeking to prevent the fall of Asian "dominoes" to communism,
McNamara said, the United States failed to understand that Ho Chi Minh
and his North Vietnamese regime were nationalists first, communists
second.
But North Vietnam mistakenly viewed the United States as a new
colonialist power seeking domination in Indochina and missed its own
chances to avert a catastrophic war, he said.
The United States should learn several lessons from the Vietnam War,
McNamara said.
Leaders should use high-level contacts to communicate their views more
clearly to adversaries, recognize that certain problems cannot be
solved by military force and "never use our economic, political or
military power unilaterally," he said.
"I hope what we learn will permit us to have more caution as we enter
the 21st century, so we can make it less tragic," he said.
While Kerrey applauded McNamara's efforts, he disagreed with many of
the former defense secretary's conclusions.
"Simply put, our objectives were in such contradiction with those of
North Vietnam that it is highly unlikely either side could have
achieved its objectives without loss of life," he said.
Had the United States sought merely a geopolitical outcome - preventing
the fall of South Vietnam to communism - it could have achieved that
objective through a neutral coalition government, Kerrey said.
But, he said, those who conclude that the war was "wrong, terribly
wrong" ignore that the United States was fighting for something that
went beyond its own self-interest: freedom for the people of South
Vietnam and surrounding countries in Asia.
The U.S. effort in Vietnam helped countries like Thailand and the
Philippines resist communism, Kerrey said.
In contrast, he said, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 left the
Vietnamese people under a dictatorship that has denied them basic
rights, such as freedom of speech and of the press.
"It's easy to look at 58,000 names on a wall and conclude the war was
not worth the loss," he said. "It's not easy to quantify the fight for
freedom."
Kerrey said the United States should not conclude, based on its
experiences in Vietnam, that it should never fight for the freedom of
people who live under dictatorships - as in Iraq or Yugoslavia.
Only by continuing to provide world leadership - unilaterally if
necessary - can the United States encourage the spread of political
freedom and democracy, which are essential to humanity's well-being,
Kerrey said.
"Thirty years ago, I was not sure of the worth of my effort in
Vietnam," he said. "But in the 30 years since, I have seen that one of
the most noble characteristics of the American people is the desire to
spread the promise of freedom and democracy throughout the world.
"The lesson I take from Vietnam is that the fight for freedom, though
it often has terrible costs, is the highest value of all."
* Books of the times : 'Memories of a Pure Spring': After the War Is
Won, Another Struggle Begins
MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING
By Duong Thu Huong. Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong.
340 pages. Hyperion. $23.95.
NYT, 9/2/00 - Duong Thu Huong, who lives in Hanoi and whose most recent
books have been banned in her own country, came to the attention of
readers in the West with her book "Novel Without a Name." It was a
striking and affecting work, but it was most notable in the United
States for its political message. It powerfully evoked a deep
disillusionment in North Vietnam, which it depicted as a militarily
victorious but spiritually wounded civilization ruled over by a
self-satisfied, cliche-spouting Marxist bureaucracy.
Huong's accomplished new novel, "Memories of a Pure Spring," takes
place in the years immediately after the great victory and is a
continuing evocation of a kind of postwar despair among those morally
conscious enough to experience it. But it would be a mistake to see
Huong's most recent book, translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy
Duong, as aiming mainly to make a political statement. One reads it
certainly for its politics, but even more for the depth and complexity
of its characters who strive to define themselves in a world that still
puts everything and everybody in one or another category of ideology
and national aspiration.
The two main characters are Suong, a famous singer in an unnamed
provincial city in central Vietnam, and Hung, her husband and one of
the country's best-known composers. They have known each other since
Hung discovered Suong in a humble village. They became lovers and were
married even as they led a Vietnamese cultural troupe that performed in
the midst of some of the heaviest bombing of the war. As this novel
opens, however, we meet Suong, not experiencing the pleasures of
revolutionary heroism but recovering in a provincial hospital after a
failed suicide attempt.
As Huong tells her story, using shifting time periods and shifting
points of view, the relationship of Suong and Hung emerges with
richness and depth, and so does the reason for Suong's drastic action.
Suong and Hung are bound together by hoops of steel, but the end of the
war has also brought a reversal in what might be seen as a shift in the
personal balance of power.
Like Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," "Memories of a Pure Spring" is
a story of crisscrossing fortunes. During the war years the older and
more worldly Hung served as Suong's lover and guide. But when the war
is over, he is set adrift with devastating consequences for both of
them.
Part of Hung's disorientation is political. A cultural functionary who
has had it in for Hung for years succeeds in having him removed as head
of the cultural troupe. This demonstrates the pettiness of arbitrary
political power and the absence of redress in Vietnam, but Huong is
more interested in its spiritual effects.
Hung is a complex and memorable figure, one who is already troubled by
the pettiness and meanness of postwar revolutionary life. Early on we
see his reaction when a Communist cultural commissar drives by in an
American-made jeep, a kind of war trophy in Vietnam, and a prestigious
one. For Hung, though, the jeep and the commissar's proud possession of
it symbolize what is going wrong.
"The patriotic feeling that had filled his heart all those years, all
the sacrifice -- none of this had prepared him to imagine that the
glory of their sacred resistance would take such a shameless form," she
writes of Hung. "What did he want? He didn't know. Something was
missing. The jeep was already far down the road. In the billowing cloud
of dust and light, the dreams that he had cherished all those years
fell apart, like so many planks of wood, adrift, bobbing on the waves."
Huong takes us on an emotionally intense and exceedingly intelligent
journey through the thicket of Hung and Suong's lives, both political
and personal. She brings us to the heart of a political re-education
camp as well as into a den of artistic alienation. Hung falls in with a
group of artists who, like himself, have no place in victorious
Vietnam. They moan to each other of the brittleness of Vietnamese
culture, its backwardness.
"Our country is a stagnant pond lagging behind other civilizations,"
Hung is told by a younger man whose goal is to flee Vietnam by boat.
"The works you wrote during the war are like fragments of epics, but
watered down -- a little local color, a bit of bamboo, a backdrop of
tropical forests."
As Hung collapses morally and physically, Suong strives valiantly to
hold together her disintegrating world, and she has some help. Here and
there in this bleak landscape is a bit of light, most important an
official who works behind the scenes to reverse the wrong done to Hung.
But the power of disintegration is impressively strong in Huong's
world, which is, as we learn from a biographical sketch appended to the
novel, a fictional transfiguration of her own experience.
She, too, was the head of an artistic troupe during the war, but
afterward, she fell afoul of the authorities, spending seven months in
prison in 1991. Her new book, a kind of Vietnamese "Farewell to Arms,"
is a powerful testament to a continued spirit of moral resistance in
Vietnam, lonelier than the resistance to the United States that forms
the country's great epic and therefore all the braver.
* Vietnam Movie Biz Fights at Home
HANOI, Vietnam (AP, 9/2/00) -- Shot in southern Vietnam, the critically
acclaimed ``Three Seasons'' won top prizes at the Sundance Film
Festival. Add to that the string of awards that Vietnamese filmmakers
have racked up at film festivals worldwide, and the country's profile
has rarely been higher.
So award-winning documentary director Le Manh Thich seems a little
pained to explain why these aren't the best of times for Vietnamese
cinema.
``I can say that the quality and substance of the films are better than
ever, but it's difficult to be a filmmaker these days,'' Thich says.
``I make movies that few people see.''
Despite the outside acclaim, Vietnam's movie industry is fighting on
its home turf against the pervasive presence of imported videos and
television.
``It's ironic that many Vietnamese movies have won awards
internationally, but our industry in Vietnam is struggling,'' says
director Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat, head of the Vietnam Feature Film
Company, the country's leading production company.
Lines are rare outside the country's handful of antiquated cinemas (the
first to offer Dolby sound opened last year). Even the more popular
films usually play to half-empty theaters.
Meanwhile, video stores renting or selling pirated tapes or CDs have
mushroomed, despite a copyright-protection agreement with the United
States. Television, now accessible to most people in one of the world's
poorest countries, has become the standard source of entertainment.
Domestic film output has dropped by as much as 80 percent from the
industry's heyday in the early 1980s, when Vietnam was routinely
producing 70-80 documentary films and 15-20 feature films a year.
During those peak days of central-government support, Ngat recalls,
Vietnam's leaders even built film studios on a 17,000-acre site at Co
Loa, just outside Hanoi.
``In those days, the country was poor, but we invested in films,'' she
said. ``Vietnamese leaders were so romantic, they imagined building a
Hollywood in Co Loa. They built three-story blocks so that actors could
have a place to live during filming. There's still the remnants
there.''
During much of that period, Vietnam was in political isolation from the
rest of the world, so filmmakers had an almost captive audience. But in
1986, the country embarked on market reforms and began opening its
doors to the world.
Foreign films flooded in from Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and the
United States, and cheap videocassette recorders made watching movies
at home possible.
The homegrown film industries of other countries are suffering similar
problems. The added challenge in Vietnam, though, is that movie-making
remains a largely government-funded affair, with tight controls over
artistic endeavors.
Thich's recent documentary of a 30th reunion of Vietnamese women
guerillas and their former American enemies won high praise at the
Asian Pacific Film Festival but has yet to be shown here.
``Though there have been more liberal policies on censorship, still
there are some problems. They would ban my film for not cutting out one
sentence. It's not right,'' Thich said.
Budget problems have reduced the annual allocation to under $500,000
for an entire film studio, enough for maybe two or three movies a year.
Slower-paced and generally contemplative, Vietnam's movies tend to deal
with themes of peasant life, revolutionary fervor and the country's
postwar struggles.
Burdened with outdated production technology and fairly rigid creative
control, filmmakers cannot launch a truly competitive fight against
Hong Kong's kung fu epics and South Korea's soap operas.
``Local audiences themselves have also turned their back on Vietnamese
films, much less trying to sell (Vietnamese films) abroad,'' said Le
Van Su, director of the Vietnam Films Import-Export and Distribution
Co. (Fafilm).
During one low period, Thich said, his documentary studio had to rent
out space to commercial businesses to stay afloat.
The hard times come as Vietnam's filmmakers are making a name for
themselves at festivals in Australia, China, Italy and the United
States.
Stirring particular interest has been ``Three Seasons,'' by
Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui. Featuring mainly Vietnamese
actors, as well as executive producer Harvey Keitel, the story of four
people's struggles in chaotic postwar Vietnam swept three top prizes at
Sundance late last month: the Grand Jury Prize in dramatic competition,
an award selected by audience balloting and the cinematography award.
``Of course, it makes me very sad to see the current situation,'' said
director Ngat. ``We have good actors but we don't have enough work.
They have to rotate. If they make a film one year, they don't make one
the next year.''
The exception has been Ly Huynh, Vietnam's equivalent of Hong Kong
action director John Woo. Huynh, who lives in Ho Chi Minh City, spent
the better part of 20 years acting before taking up directing a decade
ago.
Considered the most successful Vietnamese director and producer in
recent times, he was the first filmmaker in Vietnam to take advantage
of a government policy several years ago that allowed some private
funding to finance films.
He is still the only filmmaker to make a profit investing his own
money, and is keenly aware of his colleagues' difficulties. But
predictions of the demise of Vietnamese movies are premature, Huynh
says.
``People still like seeing films on the big screen. If you make a good
movie, people will come to see it,'' he said. ``We need to be patient.
Movies will be popular again.''
hyt...@my-deja.com
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