Letter from Hanoi:The free market has been embraced in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in one highly visible way: the traffic.
In the centre of Hanoi, on the road to Hue, from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh City, self-regulating chaos liberates the scooters, push-bikes, vans and occasional limo that compete ceaselessly for road space. The traffic is unrelenting and at first sight chaotic. Lanes? What are lanes? Pedestrian crossings? Why? Tourists and other foreigners get a rude shock from the "white knuckle ride" travel books warn of, and they're not kidding.
To a continual chorus of get-out-of-my-way toots, vehicles (mostly Honda scooters, buy shares now) weave in and out, overtake, intersect, in a world with no apparent traffic code and only the occasional set of lights to slow the mighty stream.
All this is conducted with an impassive calm, perhaps born of the prevailing Buddhism. Road rage is not Vietnamese. The southeast Asian cultural norm of never displaying anger could be the reason.
You also know you're in this part of the world because of the fascinating array of cargoes whizzing past. There's a man on a bike with at least 60 large baskets; another with a scooter pillion passenger clutching two five-foot pot plants, one in each hand; and are those pigs alive or dead? No, heard some squealing, but perhaps the piggies are just reflecting a western response to Hanoi traffic.
The national road toll is 35 deaths a day, and the miracle is that it's not much higher. At least a requirement for all motorcyclists to wear safety helmets was imposed last month, and seems to have gained 99 per cent compliance. And a concept of modern capitalism, just-in-time management, is the philosophy of the roads. Everywhere, that mix of old and new, capitalism and Communism, is stealing over Vietnam, 30 years after the final end of the "American War".
This January sees two significant and contrasting anniversaries: one year since Vietnam joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and 40 since the famous Tet offensive, the fightback launched during the new year holiday, Tet, in 1968.
For the average Vietnamese in the street, who would be aged 26 in this young country, the former is more exciting. WTO membership is one tangible sign of Vietnam's struggle to lose the tag of "low-income developing country".
Foreign companies are setting up in Vietnam at an ever-accelerating pace, lured in part by the rock-bottom labour costs. The US and South Korea have been eager entrants. Last year foreign direct investment hit a record of some $20 billion (€13.44 billion). That's US dollars, and one of the inevitable ironies of Vietnam's recent history is that the dollar is accepted almost as freely as the indigenous currency, the dong, currently trading at 16,000 to the dollar.
But in a land where water buffalo and chickens also jostle for space on intercity highways, the past is felt in a thousand ways. One is the attitude of a people who are early risers and constantly industrious, but can't quite adapt to the human resource requirements of western firms.
The refrain at business gatherings is always the same: you can't get the staff. It's an issue of both quality and quantity, for even with an increasing number of graduates, in banking, for example, there is a projected shortfall of at least 4,000 positions that can't be filled from the graduating class of 2007. And even Vietnamese employers complain that, while the students are getting good learning from books, their savvy as to how to actually operate in a modern financial institution is very poor.
One young Vietnamese man who has spent 10 years working for HSBC told the Saigon Times magazine of his awe at the "discipline" shown by western managers.
Yet discipline is a characteristic to be expected from a race that waged successful guerrilla warfare against a superpower.
In January 1968, what came to be known as the Tet offensive took the US and South Vietnamese forces by surprise. North Vietnamese forces launched a massive and wide-ranging series of attacks before dawn on the first day of the Tet holiday, confounding assumptions that this would be a quiet time in the theatre of war.
Although Tet was not a victory for Ho Chi Minh's army, it showed the US the real mettle of the native opponent and proved to be the shape of things to come.
For the Vietnamese as a whole, the war left two million dead, with thousands of deformed babies born as a result of Agent Orange, the defoliant, and other chemicals used in warfare which also decimated forests and wildlife. Today, some remember with quiet bitterness. "That is the past. We have to keep building our country now, and if American investment helps us to do so, we will," one impeccable gentleman in his 50s, with the ubiquitous surname of Nguyen, told me.
The younger generation, post-1975, streaking to work on their scooters, are mostly more interested in upping their annual salary to levels where they can shop in the western fashion shops that are beginning to appear (Esprit and Nine West in Hanoi, for example, and some very upmarket, expensive places in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City). The average wage is some $900 a year, but even a hospital doctor can find himself on a basic salary of only $62 a month. And of late inflation has been taking even basic foodstuffs out of reach for many families.
In this strange hybrid Vietnam, they all still visit Uncle Ho, the great leader, intellectual and unifier, who died in 1969. He rests at his mausoleum in Hanoi, not in the city named after him. Paying a visit to Ho is a solemn affair. No loud talking, laughing, use of mobiles or cameras is allowed before, during or after, in the respectful line that shuffles in to see the great man, mummified in his glass case.
There's almost a personality cult of Ho in his native land. But the times are indeed a changin'. In the sedate Saigon freesheet which details, it seems, every move and word of prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung on solid subjects such as foreign investment, etc, a flick of the wrist revealed the news which really excited the editors that day, a half-page devoted to a report that "Nicole Kidman is pregnant". And Uncle Ho, mummified and permanently supine, cannot even turn in his grave.