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Vietnam Redux Two countries, former enemies, are learning to live with the past By Sandra A. Engel '72, '74G

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The war in Vietnam raged while I was an undergraduate. It was a time of big and small protests, a time when we read the names of American soldiers who had died in Vietnam in front of Thompson Hall at night. Eventually, after I graduated, Saigon fell in April 1975. We lost the war.

Sandra A. Engel '72, '74G

Vietnam refers to all this as "The American War," but these days the country is more American-friendly than you would think. The U.S. and Vietnam signed a Bilateral Trade Agreement in 1998. There's a Ford plant on the road to Haiphong, and blue jeans, Pepsi-Cola and Madonna are winning the culture wars. DVDs of "Forrest Gump" sell for one dollar in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). "Gone With the Wind" is available in four translations. Half the national population is under 30, and they want to practice their English. "Hello, hello. What's your name? Where you from?" children call.

After visiting Vietnam five times since 1998, I was in the Mekong Delta as a Fulbright Scholar. At Kien Giang Community College, the newest of Vietnam's nine community colleges, I talked about the American system of community colleges and learned about Vietnamese higher education. I also taught English to young teachers of other subjects. Much of my teaching contrasted cultures. Despite the changes since the collapse of the former U.S.S.R., the young teachers taught me that a Vietnamese resume includes age, and parents' names, villages and occupations. College dorm rooms are one size: eight students in each. Only in the past few years has the federal government allowed private higher education to exist. As things stand now, only 10 percent of the students who want a higher education can get one.

Towards the end of my visit, U.S. Ambassador Raymond Burghardt came to visit, and spoke to the importance of the American community college as a means of providing access to education for other than the elite. He came to reinforce my point: the model of the American community college—the access it provides and the connection to workforce development—can provide Vietnamese with ideas for educational reform and advancement.

For Vietnam, the American war is over.

Not that it has disappeared. Vietnam is a complicated place. On Liberation Day—the day Americans know as the day Saigon fell—I had breakfast with Kien Giang Community College's president, a former Viet Minh war hero. I also had a conversation with another college administrator who seemed subdued on this equivalent of the Fourth of July. He told me, yes, it was an important national holiday, but it was also the anniversary of his mother's death. On the day that victory was declared, she had been shot—and the family did not know by which side. And finally, that night, I had dinner for 30 cents at a nearby mom-and-pop concrete and galvanized tin house of the family of a man with one leg, a man who fought on the side of the Americans and spent years in a re-education camp before returning to this, his home.

As I said, a complicated place.

When war broke out with Iraq, I was at Kien Giang Community College, in Rach Gia, a city of 200,000, including only four westerners. I saw the antiwar protests in the U.S. and abroad on a state-owned television station. "Why does America fight?" I was asked again and again. "Why is the U.S. invading Iraq?" At first I said I didn't have enough information, but later, as I took a photo of Kien Giang Community College students protesting the war, I said that if I were at home, I might well be protesting, but I wasn't going to say anything against my country from 10,000 miles away from home.

Although in Vietnam the past is always present, the Vietnamese are without fail friendly and open, more curious than cautious. People who made 30 dollars a month invited me home for soup, offered me motorbike rides, and, when I said I wanted to take a photo of a water buffalo, asked in perfect English, "Do you not have water buffalo in your province?"

Granted, Vietnam still has Viet Minh war heroes, many of them now in powerful positions. One of them was one of John McCain's guards at the Hanoi Hilton—Hoa Lo, "fiery oven," prison, originally built by the French to incarcerate Vietnamese. After the war, the guard went home, got married, and named his daughter—my first friend in Vietnam—Binh.

Binh, by the way, means peace. ~

Sandra A. Engel has a B.A. and M.A. from UNH and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She received a Fulbright grant for work in Vietnam in 2003 and is currently the director of international education at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, N.Y.

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