This post was written on 12 May 2010 after 3 months in Vietnam

Interesting conversations often pop out of nowhere and end up taking all attention away from everything else. Today’s conversation started with an innocent question about what our intern does when he gets home in the evening and ended up being a conversation about what Vietnamese children learn about other forms of government policies, democracy and history and how much of it is hidden from them. Only the basics get through to the children and whether the basics in the Vietnamese books is the truth about democracy, we will never know. It could be interesting to ask someone to explain about the difference between communism and democracy and highlight the pros and cons for both just to see what the answer would be. I didn’t hear how the conversation went from spare time activities to government issues, but it definitely caught my attention.

Our dear intern told us about how his parents told him about what it was like after the war. The government ran a planned economic policy where everything was supposed to be divided evenly to everyone in the country. However, the families living far from the depots, where the food and appliances were distributed, often received rotten rice and what was supposed to be meat was pure fat. This meant that people living in the city areas started dying of famine while rice farmers were trying to keep the government from buying their rice because the price they were paying was too low. So much for equal rights and dividing evenly, huh? Imagine that the way the government dictates children’s learning, controls the internet and public opinion and lets young men pay themselves out of military service today was a huge improvement of the Vietnamese system just 25 years ago. Maybe that’s the reason why the Vietnamese people are not complaining too much about the current situation – more than half of them are probably not even aware of other types of living and take it for granted that there are no elections and no information about…. things they will never know anyway……. …….? That is an interesting thought, actually.

It is only when Vietnamese people meet people from the outside who raise questions about their beliefs and everyday lives that they may start considering whether there are other ways of doing things and whether their government is right in the things it does. So the question is, frankly, how long will the people stay quiet? How long can it actually go on? Because, as my American colleague said, as long as things work fine, their iPhones work, they can find ways to access facebook without too much trouble and corruption isn’t a big issue in their everyday lives, it is easier to just leave it be than to get up and deal with it.