Generational Views of Vietnam

There's a special section on Vietnam in last week's Economist, which made me think about the time I visited there in the summer of 2000. I was traveling with my mother and Vietnam was our last stop during a 3 week trip that focused on China. In China, neither of us had expectations of what we were going to see, and we were both delighted. Vietnam was another story.

Of course I know from textbooks and TV specials and a general knowledge of history about the Vietnam war, but I was too young to know the emotional, political and cultural turmoil that it engendered. My most immediate sources on Vietnam were friends who had gone backpacking there after college in the mid 1990s.

On the other hand, as we were driven from the airport in Ho Chi Minh City to our hotel, the guide casually pointed out the old American Embassy. My mother immediately recalled news footage of people clinging to that last helicopter leaving the embassy roof, knowing that anyone left behind certainly was in terrible peril of death or awful re-education. As we drove into Ho Chi Minh City, I was excited to see a new place and she felt deep shame/guilt about how the US had failed to protect the South Vietnamese who had worked with/fought with the US. Those few days in Vietnam were difficult for her in a way that surprised me. I had never heard her talk about the subject and she was not a hippy or a war protester, but clearly she had very deeply held feelings, which were so different from my own because of our different generations.