Winning the war

Now, in a long planned trip, we were in Ho Chi Minh, once called Saigon by GI-men and the so-called "free world" just a generation back. My kids, who are much more "westernized" in orientation largely because Metro Manila is as western as western could get, found Ho Chi Minh so lacking in the same comforts that they took for granted in Hong Kong.

Did I go to these capitals so I would find a place less "progressive" than depressing Metro Manila, my daughter asked me? Was it my way of somehow asserting Philippine pride? How wrong she was.

I told her that in 1986, when I first visited Kuala Lumpur, I thought Makati to be more progressive. I was billeted in one of their best hotels, and I found it wanting. In 1999 when I next visited Malaysia’s capital, they had the Petronas twin towers, and most everything was more modern and more efficient than Manila. Only its nightlife, as my companions Mike Defensor and Ace Barbers found to their discomfort, was tawdry in comparison to ours. In 1986 also, I was in Bangkok, and although even then it throbbed with vibrancy, today’s Bangkok is much more modern and certainly a lot more affluent. The following year, on the way to Beijing, I transferred planes at Xiamen, and saw how its airport was just about similar to Tacloban’s. Well, I was back in Xiamen in 2005, and it has an airport terminal far, far better than NAIA 2 and certainly ages removed from our decrepit NAIA 1 terminal.

Urumqi, the commercial center of Xinjiang, is on its way to being much more modern than it presently is. Already there is a Sheraton and a Kempinski, and a Shangri-la is being built, among others. When the newly affluent people of Kazakhstan and Kyrghizhtan and the other "istans" start spending their money there, I have no doubt that Urumqi will be more cosmopolitan than Manila in another decade. Already, their economy is far better off. The world’s "backwaters" are leap-frogging to progress and somehow only Manila is descending to backwater status.

But Saigon is something else, and one could see that Vietnam has learned much from its colonial past and war-ravaged history to pre-determine the growth path it wants and the way of life it wants to preserve amid the prevailing "westernization" of the rest of Asia.

You’ve never seen as many motorbikes in your life running crazy in the streets of Ho Chi Minh. There are some 8 million people living in this city. There are also 4 million scooters and low-powered motorcycles in the city. There are few cars, purposely so. The Vietnamese government charges prohibitive taxes on cars for personal use, purposely so their streets don’t get clogged with traffic and their citizens don’t splurge on vehicles they have nowhere to park in. But for their main boulevards which are wider than Metro Manila’s, their side streets are the usual two-lane streets similar to ours, excepting of course Pasay, where side streets were made only for calesas. As a result, the Vietnamese buy scooters, and ride it so recklessly and wantonly in Saigon that I had the impression that human life is not valued in a country which lost four million in a war of attrition against mighty America.

"We don’t want our people buying things they could not yet well afford, and create monstrous traffic like Bangkok or Manila," said a Vietnamese acquaintance enjoying the Caravelle bar where an ubiquitous Filipino band was playing.

"And we will never tear up our old landmarks or cut our centuries-old sao trees to widen our boulevards," he swore. I could almost envision Buddhist monks burning themselves if such desecration ever happened. For the most beautiful thing about Saigon are its stately trees, be it the tall sao of the teak family that reminds me of the lauan that has virtually disappeared even from the wilderness of Mindanao, or the beautiful fruit-bearing tamarind (sampalok) one sees these days only in Sariaya and Candelaria in Quezon.

Metro Manila mayors headed by MMDA’s Bayani Fernando should visit Vietnam and learn a thing or two about preserving the past and stop their orgy of uglification. Here lamp posts are vintage European that reminds every citizen or visitor about their French colonial past which has lent a graceful sophistication to its way of life, and surely enriched the cultural heritage of a people so artistic to begin with. Coming back to Manila Sunday night, I saw this macabre sight of garish lamp posts which change from horizontal tiovivo’s in Baclaran, to diamond-shaped tastelessness in Pasay, all spaced a few meters apart (obviously to multiply the tong-pats), and then the familiar sputniks of Lito Atienza who started the craze. All these in what used to be beautiful Roxas Boulevard. Suddenly you wish you were back in Saigon.

They don’t spend as much for electric power as we do, even if the heat is just as unbearable. Except for your room, they don’t turn on the air-conditioning full blast in their hotel lobbies or restaurants, or maybe they purposely use less cooling units. Most of their popular eateries, bars and cafes are not air-conditioned. Instead they situate these on rooftops or beneath century-old trees, which could be quite refreshing. Be thankful for giant electric fans instead. Planned economy, which makes you think too of the energy-efficient scooters, and wonder how these "communists" can be so prescient, with oil prices hitting the roof and beyond.

But the more significant thing about Vietnam, which graduated from a war of liberation against the French colonials just after the Second World War, and plunged a decade after in the bloody war of attrition against the American "saviors" of democracy, ending quite recently, just a generation ago, is how it is now winning the war.

In 1999, when the Philippines could barely make the 2 million foreign visitor mark, Vietnam had a little less. Eight years later, we were boasting that we had reached the 3 million visitor mark. Vietnam received 4 million, and it’s still rising fast. Guess who their Number One visitors are? Americans, followed by the Japanese, then the Chinese, and the Australians and Britons.

I saw many American youngsters shedding a tear at the War Museum, where pictures of the atrocities in My Lai and elsewhere overwhelmed your senses amid a panoply of American war materiel. And I saw them looking chastened at the Cu Chi tunnel where the Viet-Cong outwitted their forebears with nothing more than grit, ingenuity, cunning and an indomitable spirit of fierce nationalism.

Ah, nationalism! Something you feel even among the Thais, and the Malaysians, the Chinese, certainly the Japanese, and even tiny Singapore. Which you hardly feel among us. Maybe in there lies the secret.

And guess who are Vietnam’s largest foreign investors? Why the Americans, of course. And it all began when Bill Clinton decided to open doors, followed by George Bush. They invested 15 billion dollars in the past two years. In the Philippines, their Colgate-Palmolive and their Procter and Gamble have closed down their manufacturing plants, and so will their Intel.

Vietnam keeps winning the war against America, while poor Philippines has always lost the war and the peace.