The Yale Globalist: Vietnam

GLOBALIST The Yale

Spring 2014 / Vol. 14, Issue 4 Summer 2014 / Vol. 15, Issue 1

Vietnam UP CLOSE Writers’ Notes 22 : 1

The ratio of motorcyles to cars in Vietnam

$47 would make you a “millionaire” in Vietnam as 21,275 Vietnamese Dong (VND) exchanges to 1 Dollar (USD)

Up to

25% of Hanoi’s population

consists of unreigistered internal migrants. (see on p. 6)

“Our visit to the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park was cut short when we were chased out by a guard on motorcycle. Luckily our taxi driver had become very invested in helping us find the attacked factories and helped us evade him!”

- Rachel Brown (see on p. 8)

Creative Director Chareeni Kurukulasuriya Production & Design Editors Quyen Do Skyler Inman Associate Editors Skyler Inman, Anna Russo, Christian Soler, Isidora Stankovic, Caroline Wray

Editor-in-Chief Zoe Rubin Managing Editors Grace Brody, Jackson Busch, Jasmine Horsey, Elizabeth Villarreal Editors-at-Large Rachel Brown, John D’Amico, Adrienne Elliott, Danielle Ellison, Aaron Gertler, Eleanor Marshall, Tara Rajan, Kelly Schumann, Ashley Wu

Cover photo by Skyer Inman (TYG).

Up Close photos by Chareeni Kurukulasuriya (TYG) and graphics courtesy Creative Comomns.

Executive Director Nitika Khaitan Business Coordinators Mitchell Hightower, Vishakha Negi, Jonathan Reed Online Editors Meiryum Ali, Josh Feng, Jerelyn Luther, Akhil Sud

04 vietnam

06

Bluster Behind the Banners

BY RACHEL BROWN

Defiance and resignation in Vietnam’s response to South China Sea disputes

A Hidden Crime

09 10

BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID Vietnam’s slow reckoning with sex trafficking

Invisibles

BY ANNA RUSSO Vietnam’s unregistered populations

13

The Long Wall of Quang Nai

BY NITIKA KHAITAN

Narrative Feature: A satirical reflection on a (supposed) tourist attraction

Uncle Ho’s Family Business

14

BY SKYLER INMAN

Seeking to profit from both capitalism and communism, Vietnamese leaders send mixed messages to the country’s market-oriented youth

16

19

BY CAROLINE WRAY Vietnam’s mail-order bride industry, and the women who become the brides

Vietnam Rocks

BY ISABELLE TAFT Metal musicians fight for the right to play in an authoritarian country

21 spring 2014, issue 4

The Wife Market

Endangered is the New Black

BY JADE HARVEY

Fighting elite rhino horn consumption in Vietnam

SPECIAL FEATURE

23

27

BY CHAREENI KURUKULASURIYA Community and disability in a relocated Vietnamese leper colony

Bound to Shackles

RUSSIA RESURGENT Voices on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and its implications on US-Russian relations

BY JOSH FENG

Censorship & contemporary art in Vietnam

30

32

The Blue Houses of Da Nang

Neutrality on a Russian Frontier

BY MEGAN TOON Experiencing the conflict in Crimea from Russia’s interior

What We Needed In Hue

BY ELIZABETH VILLAREAL

Healing war wounds in New Haven’s sister city

Along the Shoreline

BY JR REED

44

Passport to Safety

37

Taste Test

BY HAYLEY BYRNES Narrative Feature: An exploration of Vietnam’s cafe culture

47

On Banh Mi & Blood Cashews

BY ANNA RUSSO & RACHEL BROWN The politics behind the bite

46

BY ANNA BARON Reflections on identity, nationality, and citizenship

Held Up

BY HANNAH SHWARZ The U.S. moratorium on Vietnamese adoptions might just be hurting the children it is supposed to help

Q&A With Thomas Graham

BY HANNAH FLAUM TYG sits down with Russia expert & Jackson Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Graham

The Promise and Perils of Da Nang’s OneTrack Economic Development Strategy

34

42

PHOTO ESSAY

One Thread at a Time

BY DIANNE LAKE Indigenous women & textile arts in Guatemala

39

06 vietnam

Bluster Behind The Banners Defiance and resignation in Vietnam’s response to South China Sea disputes

BY RACHEL BROWN

T

he streets of the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park on a Saturday morning in mid-May are eerily quiet, and only a few uniformed guards linger outside factory gates. But echoes of the protesters’ anger resound in the signs that hang outside every gate. Some banners are nothing more than simple red graffiti on white sheets proclaiming, “I love Vietnam” while others are professionally printed with messages ranging from “Japanese Companies. Long Live Vietnam!” to “We are 100% Capital from Thailand.” Flags wave from more than a dozen countries spanning the globe from Norway to Malaysia, but a Vietnamese flag always accompanies them as a symbol of solidarity. In Thuan An district, in the southern Vietnamese province of Binh Duong, factory owners desperately want to prove that they are anything but Chinese.

The perils of association with China appear in the stripped façade of the “Vision Internationsummer 2014, issue 1

al Co. Ltd” factory. Days before, protesters tore patches of golden lettering away, leaving the nonsensical jumble “VIIO NTERNATIONAL C. LD.” Unlike in the still legible English name, in the Chinese translation not a single character was spared. In place of the Chinese characters, two spray-painted signs wave and state in Vietnamese “the Paracels (Hoang Sa) and Spratlys (Truong Sa) belong to Vietnam” and “Vision supports Vietnam. Demolish China.” Ironically, the vandalized factory is actually owned by the Fu Sheng Group, the world’s largest manufacturer of golf club heads and industrial air compressors, which is based not in Mainland China but in Taiwan. The mere presence of Chinese characters on the plaque outside was enough to earn the Vietnamese protesters’ suspicion and wrath.

Across Southeast Asia, tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea such as who rightfully controls the Paracels and the Spratlys,

island groups off the east coast of Vietnam, have been mounting due to a potent combination of nationalism, a desire for economic resources, and the growing strength of the Chinese military. The scene at the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park demonstrates how simmering animosities can erupt into public expressions of frustration when China provokes smaller states.

After the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation placed a $1 billion oil rig, Haiyang Shiyou 981, off the coast of Vietnam this May, anger rose among Vietnamese citizens.

The Vietnamese government, which rarely permits expressions of dissent, even allowed the initial non-violent protests outside the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi.

The timing of China’s decision to send the oil rig out for exploration “was not totally a surprise,” said Professor Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, vice dean of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam (DAV). The deployment of the rig came

vietnam 07 shortly after President Obama visited Southeast Asia in April 2014. Both political commentators and Vietnamese students speculated that China sought to test the strength of the heightened American commitment to the region. China likely also saw an opportunity to seize a moment when Russia’s actions in Crimea had distracted the United States from Asia. Professor Nguyen added that, by observing Russia, “China can learn the lesson. They can stand the blame for a certain time.” Members of the international community may be “angry but then they forget and the new status quo has been made. And that’s it. That’s all they need.”

This “new status quo” envisioned by China does not sit easy with much of the Vietnamese population. One editorial published in the Vietnam News said that the “Vietnamese people are angry. The nation is angry. We are telling the world that we are angry. We have every right to be angry.” This anger quickly curdled from rhetoric into a more violent form as acrid smoke billowed from attacked factories.

Nearly 20,000 factory workers in the province of Binh Duong poured into the streets on May 13th and May 14th, 2014. Protesters set three factories within the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park on fire, and across the country an estimated 351 factories were vandalized or entirely destroyed. Meanwhile young Vietnamese across the country launched a digital protest as they set their Facebook profile pictures to an image of the Vietnamese flag superimposed with the phrase “protect the Paracels and Spratlys.”

Various nations fiercely contest ownership of these island groups. Skirmishes between the Vietnamese and Chinese navies occurred over

the Paracel and Spratly Islands in 1974 and 1988.

China, Taiwan, and Vietnam all claim parts of the Paracels, which lie further to the north. The constellation of claims in the Spratlys, which lie further to the south, is even more complex, with Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam all involved.

The Vietnamese government faces a difficult choice between the desire to project strength towards China to satisfy certain segments of the population, and the need to manage the critical economic and political relationship.

These conflicting claims arise largely from China’s assertion of sovereignty over a huge swath of the South China Sea, encircled on a map by the “nine-dash line.” Nations desire access to the South China Sea because of both the extensive natural resources believed to lie deep below its surface, and the trillions of dollars of trade that pass on ships above its surface.

Nearly half of the world’s merchant fleet and 20 percent of oil shipped by sea pass through the South China Sea. Claimant nations are eager to prove their rights to even the smallest features in the South China Sea in order to establish exclusive economic zones, which extend 200 nautical miles from a coastline and grant access to the

resources below. As China grows more powerful both economically and militarily, it has taken an increasingly strong position on its historical rights to these waters. Professor Nguyen said that Vietnam perceives China as desiring “to become the naval power in the world. And in order to become the naval power they need to settle something around them first.”

China’s growing naval power has exacerbated underlying tensions in the Sino-Vietnamese relationship. For 2,000 years, China has loomed over Vietnam as a powerful neighbor and sometimes colonizer. As one student at the Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City said, “when it comes to China, everything else is so small.” During the first millennia A.D., China controlled northern Vietnam and many in Vietnam argue that China still views its southern neighbor as a tributary state. The pattern of smaller Vietnam struggling against enormous China has reoccurred throughout history, appearing not just today in college students’ Facebook profile pictures, but also in cultural performances, such as the water puppet shows frequented by tourists. These often depict the story of the successful defeat of the Chinese by the Vietnamese king Le Loi in the 1400s. As historic animosities reemerge, the Vietnamese government faces a difficult choice between the desire to project strength towards China to satisfy certain segments of the population, and the need to manage the critical economic and political relationship with China. China and Vietnam are ideological siblings, as both states are led by Communist parties but have economies that operate on capitalist principles. These similarities also affect Sino-Vietnam ties. Professor

Top left: Vietnamese newspapers respond to the placement of a Chinese oil rig off the coast of Vietnam (Brown/TYG). Here: Protestors’ graffiti declares “Long Live Vietnam!” The red banners suggest the complex is actually American-owned. www.tyglobalist.org

08 vietnam

Above and here: Factories vandalized following anti-China protests in the Vietnam Singapore Industrial Park in Binh Duong, Vietnam. (Brown/TYG).

Nguyen said that the government must “think carefully about how to satisfy the demand from Vietnamese people,” while operating within the constraint of what they can do and “how to serve the best interest of the country.”

Members of the business community expressed concern that the protests were not in Vietnam’s best interest, as they might spook tourists and investors from coming to Vietnam.

Vu Tu Thanh, the managing regional director for the US-ASEAN Business Council, said that some factory workers criticized the protesters and complained that they “smashed our rice pot,” in terms of employment opportunities. Tourism from Mainland China fell by approximately 30 percent the month after the protests, although Chinese tourists in Hanoi told the Globalist that everyone had been friendly to them in their travels, and they only desired peace.

Vietnam’s economic dependence on China, the nation’s largest trading partner and source of tourists, has tempered defiant feelings among some Vietnamese, leading instead to resignation. “China is what it is, there’s only so much you can do,” Mr. Vu said. Similarly, a group of students at Vietnam National University explained that, while they were unhappy with the situation, there was little they could change. “I don’t see any other way because we are just a small state and we have [to] live with China for summer 2014, issue 1

a very long time in the future,” one student said.

Vietnam, he noted, was stuck in a “classic case of the small state-large state model” with China in a dominant position both economically and militarily. The theoretical power dynamics this student read about in his international relations textbooks were now playing out in his home country.

This sense of resignation underlies the more overt expressions of national pride. While Vietnamese citizens can express their frustrations with China rhetorically, the government has few options to fight for its claims more formally.

Unlike the Philippines, a treaty ally of the U.S., “only Vietnam stands alone without any allies, without any defense treaty,” Professor Nguyen said. “So it has become a vulnerable point and the easiest point for China to attack to gain control.” Also unlike the Philippines, Vietnam has not yet employed a legal strategy to address the South China Sea disputes through international arbitration. The adoption of such an approach by Vietnam would require careful consideration of the costs, both in legal fees and in the political capital that might be lost with China. The power imbalance between Vietnam and China might even limit the potential for the two nations to jointly develop oil and gas resources.

Researcher Nguyen Thu Phuong at Vietnam National University said that joint exploration

projects were “absolutely not a good choice to protect our sovereignty in the disputed waters” because China “would gradually swallow the joint company.”

Even the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), once considered the best hope for small and medium-sized nations to stand up to China, has limited effectiveness.

The members of ASEAN “only have the strength if we stay together,” explained Professor Nguyen of the DAV. Staying together has proven difficult, as only four out of the ten member states actually have territorial claims in the South China Sea. Many states without direct claims, such as Laos and Cambodia, rely on China heavily for investment and are reluctant to take an aggressive stance. At the 2012 ASEAN summit in Cambodia, the group’s foreign ministers could not even agree to the text of a statement on the South China Sea. That incident taught ASEAN a valuable lesson said Professor Nguyen. “This year we have a statement, a stand-alone statement on the South China Sea,” she explained. “But then the substantial issue—that different issues can easily be dived by China—is still there.”

This discord has hampered efforts to reach a Code of Conduct between ASEAN nations and China over how to manage or resolve the territorial disputes. Skepticism of the Obama Administration’s commitment to Southeast Asian nations and the “Pivot to Asia” also remains. “The countries here [are] always looking for the evidence of the actual pivot,” Professor Nguyen said. If another major power does not remain in the region for balance, the prospects for China’s regional hegemony grow ever more likely.

Limited avenues to address the disputes leave members of both the Vietnamese public and government with little choice but to express defiance while simultaneously resigning themselves to the realities of the situation.

Vietnam has strengthened its relationships with large powers such as the U.S. and Russia, from whom it purchased six submarines, but neither nation has the geographic proximity or regional economic influence of China. Despite the outpourings of nationalism at the factory protests this spring, Vietnam has little desire or recourse to “demolish China”—or even stop changes in the status quo.

Rachel Brown ‘15 is an Ethics, Politics, and Economics major in Saybrook College.

Contact her at rachel.brown@yale.edu.

vietnam 09

A Hidden Crime?

Vietnam’s slow reckoning with sex trafficking

BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

T

he Southeast Asian sex industry is now a notorious symbol of globalization, where the vectors of migration and capital come crashing into each other like two Boeings full of stereotypical red-faced sex tourists.

Still, it is the prostitutes who often travel farther.

“You don’t do sex work near your home. You go far away,” said Oanh Khuat, a Vietnamese civil society advocate who works with marginalized populations. A 2005 World Fellow, Oanh is the founder and executive director of the Center for Supporting Community Development Initiatives (SCDI), which works to advance the rights of marginalized groups like sex workers, drug users, and men who have sex with men. In her experience as a civil society activist, Oanh has found that many sex workers leave their countryside homes for cities like Hanoi in the north, or travel from Hanoi to the even more bustling Ho Chi Minh City in the south. And according to the US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report—the industry bible—Vietnam is a source rather than a receiver in the global network of trafficking; Vietnamese women can be found in brothels as close as China, or as far away as Russia or Ghana.

This global scattering of Vietnamese sex workers is what makes trafficking so hard for Vietnam to combat. Whose problem is it? In the host country, the victim of trafficking often becomes an illegal sex worker or an undocumented laborer, turning into a criminal herself. And in the source country—Vietnam—trafficking is merely conceptual. Oanh was quick to point out that most victims aren’t explicitly forced into sex work. “Kidnapping is very rare,” she said.

Instead, traffickers lure rural women with the promise of a waitressing or service job in the city or in another country. Those women owe exorbitant transportation fees to the traffickers.

And when the job never materializes, they might resort to sex work to pay up. Remember, Oanh

said, the industry has a high, stable demand and low barriers to entry—anyone can do it.

But even where trafficking takes more coercive forms, the Vietnamese government has found itself paralyzed. Take the case of one 16-year-old girl from a town on the Chinese border. She didn’t think much of it when her boyfriend invited her to go shopping in China for the day. But when her boyfriend ended up selling her to a Chinese family as a bride, the girl—who spoke no Chinese, didn’t know her location and had her papers confiscated by her captors—was stuck in place.

The man who told me her story, Vi, chose not to disclose his last name because of what happened next. After six months in China, the trafficked girl got ahold of a phone and dialed one of her former teachers. The teacher turned to Vi’s organization, the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, an NGO that, along with operating two shelters for street children in Hanoi, runs occasional vigilante rescue operations for trafficking victims. Vi’s team tracked the girl’s location through a computer IP address, and immediately spent three days combing the Chinese city for any sign of her location, using only her vague description of the world outside her window.

Eventually, Blue Dragon instructed the girl to flee her apartment and get on a bus that dropped her off at a predetermined drop-off location.

Crossing the border back into Vietnam, the rescue team faced a final obstacle: the Chinese government. Blue Dragon teams regularly detour clandestinely through the jungle to bypass Chinese police stations, which would stop them for illegally smuggling persons.

The girl’s story speaks to the ways Vietnamese NGOs must work hand-in-hand with the government, each doing the work the other cannot. Because the Vietnamese police can’t conduct raids in China, they effectively outsource border-crossing rescue missions to Blue

(Nitika Khaitan/TYG).

Dragon. And thanks to their mutual trust, the Vietnamese border police cooperates and lets the Blue Dragon team cross, even though the rescued girls do not have any papers.

Relying on NGOs is convenient for Vietnam’s government, which until January 2012 had no law on the books regarding sex trafficking. Georges Blanchard, the founder of Alliance Anti Trafic, remembered the days in the late 1990s when a shelter for victims had to cloak its mission with a euphemistic name: “Training Center for Women” (it did, indeed, provide vocational training). Blanchard credits American diplomats with pressuring the Vietnamese into joining a regional taskforce on trafficking in 2004 and then, in 2012, finally signing into law an omnibus anti-trafficking bill that prohibited both sex and labor trafficking—the first ever mention of sex trafficking in Vietnamese law.

But Vu Thi Thu Phuong, the Vietnam project coordinator for the UN’s Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, Blanchard, and other Vietnamese activists remain concerned.

In Ho Chi Minh City, when the sun falls low, men have not stopped riding by on bikes, whispering, “Girls, girls,” as they pass. To the tourists of Vietnam, the cautious girls, and the NGOs that rise to action, this whispering game is far from discreet, but for the government, human trafficking remains, as Vu puts it, “a hidden crime”: a problem concealed between international borders and behind its nebulous concept.

NGOs are still filling the void of government action, as the omnibus 2012 bill reveals itself to be nearly impotent. The basic word “trafficking” had fallen through the legal cracks. The government forgot to define it.

Yuval Ben-David ’16 is a History major in Silliman College. Contact him at yuval. ben-david@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

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Invisibles

Vietnam’s Unregistered Populations

BY ANNA RUSSO

A

bout a hundred meters from the canal under the Long Bien Bridge in the Phuc Xa district of Hanoi, patches of pink, white, and blue fluttered amid the dense, reeds, so tall their green tips brushed against my sweating neck. As I moved closer, the hidden colors presented themselves: the t-shirts of a young child hung to dry under the Vietnam sun.

Below these shirts, strung outside between the corners of a carefully constructed hut and a small vegetable garden, a middle-aged couple sat enjoying their afternoon meal under the shade of an extended roof. The shirtless man stared at us as he ate his sautéed spinach; the woman squatted next to him, eating occasionally while busying herself with organizing their possessions. Both invited me in with welcoming summer 2014, issue 1

eyes as we stood at their doorstep, lacking any reservations toward an intruder from the other side of the world.

“We moved here from our village five years ago,” Nguyen* said through a translator, explaining that the prospect of a brighter future for their daughter in the city was a motivating factor when the family of three moved to Hanoi. They make their living as urban farmers, growing corn and rice in the cleared gardens outside their house to sell in the city markets.

“The prices here are much higher,” Nguyen said. “We don’t want to go back to the country.”

Here in the city, they earn at least triple what they would in the country and can send their daughter to a kindergarten of far higher quality.

Vietnam is urbanizing at a rate of 3.4% per year, according to the World Bank—markedly higher than neighboring rates of 2.5%, 2.1%, and 1.6% in Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand respectively.

This family is but one among the many responding to the allure of Vietnam’s lucrative city jobs.

However, in Vietnam, moving to a city has its costs. Under the Vietnamese system of resident registration known as ho khau, citizens are not free to move between the country’s rigidly defined districts at will. Those who wish to relocate must apply through the People’s Committees of their new district of residence to request a change. It might seem straightforward, but the process is far from simple.

This urban farming couple has been saving

vietnam 11 to change residency are often impoverished subsistence farmers from the countryside who must send a part of their earnings home as remittances. In total, the couple has saved only fifty million dong in the past five years; thirteen million is quite a large fraction of their savings.

Saving the money to pay for a residency change is made even harder when living as an illegal resident. Without access to public schools, the family pays 1.3 million dong each month to send their daughter to a private kindergarten. They bear the burden of additional fees for private medical insurance and nonsubsidized electricity, and the cost of constantly dismantling and rebuilding their home, farm, and life based on the tides of both the flooding river and the equally volatile government whim.

Lacking a Hanoi KT2, they have no legal right to buy a house in Hanoi, so the family squats amidst the reeds and overgrown cornfields of the uninhabited riverside. At least once a year, the police come and demand they move off the government-owned land—the family carefully dismantles their home, appeases the government, and rebuilds once the danger of the police returning has passed.

Several other families I approached in this migrant community in Phuc Xa, who lived in homes built isolated amidst the tall grass or in floating houses constructed directly on the canal, refused to speak to me. I was foreign; I might tell the government that they lived there.

These migrants prefer to remain invisible, hidden under the Long Bien Bridge, behind the screen of their farms’ tall corn stalks.

Flood-prone land used by migrants for urban farming in Phuc Xa (Hannah Schwarz/TYG). money ever since they moved to Hanoi five years ago, but have yet to obtain the necessary KT2 residency permit that will allow them to vote, send their daughter to public school, obtain health insurance, and buy a house. To obtain a KT2 permit, one is required to live in the city for a sufficiently lengthy period of time, secure a source of income, and pay 13 million Vietnamese dong ($614 USD)—three million to apply, and ten million to process the residency change.

“With a household registration book, your life [starts],” explained Dr. Le Bach Duong, codirector of the Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS), a Hanoi-based non-profit think tank.

13 million dong is not an insignificant figure, especially considering that those who are paying

B

efore the Doi Moi reforms of 1986, household registration and the ho khau system determined every aspect of life in Vietnam’s centrally planned economy: employment, food rations, medical care, education, housing.

The Vietnamese government used the system to control and allocate human resources. If the government determined it needed labor in a specific region, ho khau gave it the leverage to do so—if you could only receive food rations in your registered region, what choice did you have but to comply and live there?

Following the Doi Moi reforms, Vietnam transformed into a socialist-oriented market economy. Food rations and governmentdetermined employment disappeared, and the ho khau system subsequently lost both its life-or-death leverage and its power to move entire populations. But the government never abolished ho khau itself. It lingered on in Vietnamese law for decades, just like China’s

hu kou system, North Korea’s hoju scheme, and Thailand’s tabien baan, an archaic process of tying people to their land.

Recently, the Vietnamese government has repurposed ho khau to occupy a new niche: to help curb urbanization and address—or rather, willfully ignore—the problems of overcrowding, insufficient state resources, and expensive support for growing numbers of vulnerable urban populations.

R

epresentatives from all six families living in a concrete four-room house in Phuc Xa—far enough removed from the canal for permanent structures to exist—joined me in a circle on the floor of the central room, and we sat cross-legged, knees touching. Hailing from villages as far as five hundred kilometers away, none of these migrants hold permanent residency status in Hanoi. Most come to Hanoi for ten months of the year, the men working as day laborers and the women in the Long Bien markets, while they leave their children behind with grandparents and other relatives. They send remittances home while they are away and return to their villages for only the short twomonth harvest season.

They scoffed at the idea of obtaining a KT2 residency status. “It’s too expensive,” the woman sitting across from me said. “We don’t need any help from the government.” She laughed as she explained the unnecessary expense, and the others around her nodded in agreement. They prefer to simply cope with the consequences of living as illegal residents—higher costs of electricity, the risk of illness without health care, and, for those who bring their children with them to the city, extra fees for school—and sending the money that would have otherwise been spent on the KT2 application process home to their villages. “Life in the city is hard, but life in the country is harder,” another man explained.

This logic is a common theme among illegal migrants escaping from the hardships of village life. They and their and their government benefit from the current contours of internal migratory practices. The residents of Phuc Xa, even while paying for all basic social services, are better off.

And the government, who doesn’t have to bear the expense of supporting these poor migrants, while also generating revenue off the penal fees, benefits as well.

The Vietnamese government officially counts Hanoi’s population at six million.

Third party researchers like ISDS estimate a population closer to eight million people. For many of those two million unlisted residents, www.tyglobalist.org

12 vietnam

Many Vietnamese migrants live beneath Hanoi’s Long Bien Bridge (David McKelvey/Creative Commons). invisibility is convenient.

I

n 2006 the UN appealed to Vietnam to end its archaic ho khau system, on the grounds that in its current incarnation, the system amounted to a grave violation of human rights, further marginalizing already vulnerable citizens and denying them basic social services. Vietnamese scholars and civil society activists all support abolition of the system, claiming Vietnam is ignoring the citizens it most needs to help. But the Vietnamese government has adamantly maintained its position that ho khau is necessary for social stability.

Although the Globalist was unable to obtain a comment from the notoriously opaque Vietnamese government, Dr. Duong of ISDS explained that the government support for the ho khau stems from three specific ministries: the Ministry of Security, the Ministry of Planning, and the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Security claims they must know where everyone lives in order to protect the population, the Ministry of Planning maintains that the ho khau draws the line between an orderly society and one of complete chaos, and the Ministry of Finance depends upon ho khau data to determine budget allocation.

But considering the ever-increasing numbers of domestic migrants, these arguments are fatally flawed—the inaccurate ho khau data jeopardizes the very functionality of these ministries. Many Vietnamese intellectuals

summer 2014, issue 1

instead believe that ho khau is merely a tool for maintaining the government’s delicate image of control, an image it is not prepared to lose despite the inherent problems within the system.

For the Vietnamese government, ignorance is bliss for many reasons. Urbanization encompasses much more than simply the creation of a more dense population. With urbanization comes social liberalism: the anonymity of the big city attracts sex workers,

The Vietnamese government has devised a way to completely ride its cities of people who pose a social or infrastructural risk—no ho khau, no problem.

HIV patients, drug users, and the LGBT population who migrate to escape the oppressive social stigma of traditional rural society. For these at risk populations, the city is often the only place to live an open life.

Almost all of these populations lack registration. Most migrate without the means to change their residency status; for others, whose mothers did not give birth in hospitals—due to poverty, drugs, HIV, or other circumstances— they were never even registered to begin with.

The municipal government, known, ironically, as the Hanoi People’s Committee, and the rest of Vietnamese society, can simply pretend these people do not exist. The Vietnamese government has devised a way to completely rid its cities of people who pose a social or infrastructural risk—be they poor outsiders from a rural village, drug users, sex workers, or homosexuals—no ho khau, no problem.

A government policy that hinges on the philosophy that ignorance is bliss is, by its very nature, unsustainable. But for Nguyen, his wife and daughter, and the other families of Phuc Xa, a yearly police visit, restricted political rights, and elevated prices are a small price to pay for urban opportunities beyond the wildest dreams of their families in the countryside. For now, Nguyen’s invisibility may be convenient. But Vietnam’s future hinges on its ability to harness the potential of its urban centers for education, innovation, and growth. If it ignores its urban residents and allows poverty to fester, hidden among the reeds under the Long Bien Bridge, how will Vietnam as a nation move forward? In a country where management seems synonymous with willful neglect, how long can this control last? *Name has been changed to protect his identity.

Anna Russo ’17 is in Berkeley College.

Contact her at anna.russo@yale.edu.

vietnam 13

The Long Wall of Quang Ngai

BY NITIKA KHAITAN (Nitika Khaitan/TYG).

I

t’s a tiny blurb in my thick Lonely Planet, tucked away at the bottom of a page: “Built in 1819… stretching some 127 km through the hinterlands… reaching up to 4 meters in height… the wall was announced to the world in 2011.”

2011? How had no one noticed a 127 km wall for a century? Well, tourists had to be flocking there now.

“However, there are currently no organized tours to the wall and no trained guides to introduce its history. The best chance of visiting the Long Wall is to talk to experienced Easy Riders.”

A newly discovered wall in the Vietnamese hinterland, and the only way to get there is with whatever an “Easy Rider” is?

This would be the coolest story ever.

M

y fellow journalists are slightly less enthused. “You want to ride a bike when it’s 100 degrees to go see a wall?”

An “Easy Rider,” it turns out, is a freelancing guide who takes tourists around on a motorcycle.

“But it’s the most significant archaeological discovery in South-East Asia!” I retort, “According to the BBC! Plus, there’s a real story here. I emailed the journalist who wrote about the wall for CNN, and he implied that the Communist government might be repressing minorities in the region, and so they don’t encourage foreigners to visit the Wall.”

“Wait, the government doesn’t want us to go there?”

Somehow the things I say to back up my argument aren’t actually working in my favor.

“I mean, I’m sure it’ll be fine. The only other thing is…” I pause, knowing what I’m about to say might further hurt my case, “No one I’ve asked in Hanoi seems to have heard of the Wall. But” I’d quickly brush this aside, “That’s probably just the language barrier. I end the conversation, smiling confidently.

In hindsight, I should’ve known it wasn’t the language barrier.

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hankfully, all of the Easy Rider companies in Danang have heard of the Wall, and

they offer AC cars in addition to motorcycles.

One of the Easy Riders casually mentions that his parents live ten minutes from the Wall.

Oh great! The CNN journalist had been rather fatalistic about options for interviewing locals— if we found residents through official sources, they’d say what the government wanted them to, and if we tried to find them through unofficial sources, well, we’d fail because they’d be too scared to talk to foreigners.

“Can we interview your parents?”

“Yes, yes! No problem!” This Easy Rider doesn’t seem concerned about the government, or anything else for that matter. The ride is set.

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he day dawns, barely. It’s 7 AM. “We’re going to the Wall!” I cheer. My two companions, apart from our driver and guide, manage smiles. Nobody on the trip had been okay with my traveling alone, yet oddly enough, no one else seemed too excited about the Wall.

The previous night, we had been on the verge of drawing lots, when finally two friends volunteered. “It’ll be amazing,” I say, reassuringly.

They respond by falling asleep.

Six hours into what should’ve been a four-hour ride, the sign appears—green marble, ornate gold lettering spelling out “The Long Wall of Quang Ngai,” pointing off the main road down a dirt path lined by shops and houses. As our car trundles along, the houses get fewer and fewer, until we reach a dead-end, and get out.

Fields surround us, and a jungle begins right in front of us. A low wall runs somewhat arbitrarily through a field to our right.

“That’s the Long Wall?!”

It’s about knee-high.

“No, no!” the guide gestures emphatically, signaling us to follow him into the forest. We breathe a sigh of relief. This is it.

I

t takes us a while to see the stones beneath the undergrowth. “Is this 4 meters?” I ask, remembering my Lonely Planet. No one else is on the metrical system.

We’ve paused in front of one of the tallest sections of the Wall, except you wouldn’t realize there was anything beneath the overgrown

shrubs, unless you were looking for it. The Wall winds all around us, ranging from waist-high to shoulder height, its grey stones piled so loosely on top of each other that it looks like a natural rock formation. This is how no one noticed it for a century! Anyone who came here wouldn’t have been able to guess this was man-made. Only after archaeologists discovered references to the Wall in manuscripts and consciously looked for it were they able to realize it was here all along.

Finally, the original mystery that arose on the plane has been answered.It feels, all in all, rather underwhelming.

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ell, at least we still get to interview the family of the Easy Rider company’s owner about the local government’s repression of minorities. We follow our guide-cum-interpreter into his boss’ house, a short car-ride away from the jungle. They aren’t well off, but their house is made of brick, and they have a TV in the living room. Once we’re done with about a half-hour of formalities, we start asking about the government.

“We’ve heard the government doesn’t treat the people well in this area?”

The grandmother in the house, who answers most of the questions, seems bewildered.

She explains to the interpreter she likes the government, and they’ve always been nice to everyone she knows.

“But, why aren’t they developing the wall? That could bring income to the people who live here, but the government just isn’t doing anything.”

“It’s far and no one wants to come here!”

She laughs. “Why would the government want to develop it?”

I press on. “But history matters! What relationship do you think people here should have with the Wall?”

One of her sons, middle-aged, chimes in with a sheepish grin. “We just go there and get drunk from time to time.”

Nitika Khaitan ‘16 is a Humanities major in Silliman College. Contact her at nitika. khaitan@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

14 vietnam

Uncle Ho’s Family Business Seeking to profit from both capitalism and communism, Vietnamese leaders send mixed messages to the country’s market-oriented youth

BY SKYLER INMAN

Graphic by Skyler Inman

I

n August of last year, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung signed a decree that had been a long time coming: the country needed young people to study Communist thought, and it was now going to offer them money to do so. The decree established a straightforward program. Any Vietnamese university student who agreed to follow a four-year course on Marxism, Leninism, and the works of Vietnam’s revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh would receive a full scholarship. As long as the student studied communism, university costs would go from about $200 USD per year—a significant sum in Vietnam—to nothing at all.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Pham Tan Ha, director of admissions at Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences, put the

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issue in plain terms: students aren’t interested in studying the history and ideology of the Party. Instead, they prefer degrees that will give them “better chances of employment and better pay when they graduate.”

In other words, a degree in communism won’t get you a career in the free market.

But Vietnamese students are turning in hordes towards business-related careers even if they don’t have the opportunity to pursue higher education. In fact, the explosion of young applicants to business positions has many worrying that the market is bloated with workers who would rather manage than labor, even though blue-collar jobs are still largely what run Vietnam’s developing economy.

Still, this generation’s growing interest in

business has happened for more than just practical reasons and has implications beyond the workforce. Students not only consider communism to be an unmarketable course of study, they tend to be disengaged with the ideology as a whole. And since 60% of the country’s ninety million people are under the age of thirty, Vietnam’s millennials matter.

I

n a multi-story house just outside the center of Hanoi, a woman named Thanh* talks to me over lunch. Breaking the mold of most young Vietnamese professionals, Thanh did not pursue a career in business after graduating from university. Instead, she works at a local charity and is considering going back to school for social work.

vietnam 15 According to Thanh, it’s not shocking that young people have fallen out of touch with the ideology of the party.

“Most people don’t care,” she said. “We don’t see that many people who strongly believe in the government anymore.”

As a twenty-something, Thanh is a part of the only living generation of Vietnamese to have been born in a unified, independent, and post-colonial Vietnam. This generation, unlike their parents and grandparents before them, has no personal memory of the colonial roots that inspired Vietnam’s Communist revolution.

And while it seems at first that this could explain their apathy towards the government, in truth, it shouldn’t. Under communist governments, like that of the former USSR, loyalty to the Party has historically passed from generation to generation by way of visual propaganda, wellknown songs that teach communist values, and institutionalized conventions like communist youth groups.

All of these exist in Vietnam, but the problem still persists, and Thanh says it could boil down to the lack of social and financial support the government provides its citizens.

Transparency International’s Open Budget Index rates Vietnam in the lowest category of budget clarity, defined as offering “scant or no information” about its monetary allocations.

While this opaqueness raises questions about corruption—Vietnam likewise ranks 133rd in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, close to the bottom of the list of 177 countries—it is also makes it difficult to tell exactly how much the state allocates to benefits and services for the people.

According to Thanh, though, who works with some of the city’s most marginalized citizens, government benefits today often amount to “next to nothing.” As a result, many social issues fall into the hands of international NGOs and local charities, breaking the basic chain of support from communist state to communist citizen.

But the biggest issue that challenges the government’s legitimacy—education—is one that non-profits cannot directly address. Vietnamese schoolchildren still wear red neckties and learn about Uncle Ho in class, but the system itself is broken. The government only guarantees education until the sixth grade, and Thanh says that for the poorest families, the fees associated with secondary school can be prohibitively expensive.

In other words, something seems wrong when poor Vietnamese parents have to pay for their child’s red scarf. What was once an emblem of the youth’s enthusiasm for the Party is now rendered an ironic symbol of how the Party either cannot or will not serve the best

interest of the people.

Because secondary education is not guaranteed, there are not enough spots in public high schools for all Vietnamese students. This means that admissions to high school are overly competitive, and many who wish to attend secondary school must turn to private education, usually of a lesser quality. Those who can afford it sometimes send their children to English or other foreign-language ‘international’ schools in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, while other affluent families opt for boarding schools in other countries.

Dr. Quang Van, a professor of Vietnamese language and literature at Yale, says that for many Vietnamese parents, education is something they will pursue no matter the cost. “I know parents who sold their house to send their children abroad to a private boarding school,” Van said.

According to Thai Nga, a university student in Hanoi majoring in Journalism and Communication, for those students who do attend public Vietnamese high schools, the requisite courses in Ho Chi Minh Thought are “very boring” and unanimously dreaded.

Thanh agreed. “It’s all about obeying and copying what the teacher writes down. It’s not a good environment for kids to develop [to] their full potential and express their opinions.”

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he Vietnamese government knows it is at a crossroads. In 2013, just two months before Prime Minister Dung signed the decree that created the communist studies scholarship, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) began its own venture: Vietnam Silicon Valley, an initiative designed to encourage start-ups in the country.

Minh Do, a Vietnamese blogger for the online publication Tech in Asia, says that the government has both embraced the start-up movement and slowed its progress.

“MOST has been very favorable with… its Silicon Valley project,” Do said, whereas “the Ministry of IT has made things a bit worse, with… new regulations that are rather restrictive for startups and IT businesses.” Additionally, he added, the Ministry of Culture has also been “quite restrictive about content.”

It’s tempting to think the Vietnamese government is simply in the throes of growing pains, caught between an aging philosophy and an evolving economy, unsure of how to make the transition—but that isn’t it. The true root of the problem, in the end, is that the current arrangement is lucrative to those in power.

In Vietnam, the people who profit the most from the current system are those who have a hand in both the growing market and the cor-

rupt government—like Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s son in law, Henry Nguyen, who owns the rights to the country’s chain of McDonald’s eateries.

Any change to the status quo—that is, a decisive move towards one system over the other—is a threat to their livelihood, so the state continues to straddle a fine line between communism and capitalism, attempting simultaneously to encourage entrepreneurs and to revitalize support for communist doctrine so as to keep it from becoming entirely obsolete. But given the runaway popularity of business among Vietnamese youth—and their broad disinterest in studying communist doctrine—it remains unclear if the Party can recapture the youth demographic.

And, to its credit, there are signs that not all members of the Party are complacent with this state of affairs. On July 28 of this year, following a territorial dispute with China over the East Sea, sixty-one members of Vietnam’s Communist Party published an open letter calling for the development of Vietnam into “a truly democratic, law-abiding state.”

Ultimately, though, these critiques stem not from a concern for the day-to-day issues facing the Vietnamese people, but from the discontent surrounding the tension with China. In an interview with Bloomberg News this August, one of the letter’s co-authors, Chu Hao, the former Vice Minister of Science and Technology, stated that “[t]he Party needs to get rid of Marxism-Leninism and get out of China’s orbit.”

In the end, the timeline of events can be pared down to two factors: how much of a threat China poses to Vietnam, and how badly the Vietnamese leadership wants to hang on.

If the government does decide to make way for further democratization, it will surely be in response to China’s actions and not to the needs of the Vietnamese people.

As far as the younger generation is concerned, though, the future is not necessarily delineated by the ideology of the government.

Linh Nguyen, an active member of the entrepreneurial mentorship program VietYouth Entrepreneurs, told me that his dreams for the future align with those of many in his generation.

“In the next ten years, I want to have a company for myself. I think 99% of students want to have their own business,” Linh said. “But actually, I want to build a community more than a business.” *Last name omitted for privacy reasons Skyler Inman ’17 is in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at skyler.inman@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

16 vietnam

The Wife Market

BY CAROLINE WRAY

“V

ietnamese single ladies are not only pretty and nicely slim, but their faithfulness to their husbands makes them even more attractive.” So promises Rosebrides.com’s “Vietnamese Brides” webpage, a website where paying members can browse through online photos of hundreds of potential wives. “Femininity in this culture is often defined in terms of self-sacrifice, respect, [and] keeping one’s self alluring,” the site also attests. “Bad habits are unusual and unacceptable to most Vietnamese ladies.”

J&N Viet-Bride Match-making Agencies, a Singaporean company, promises that its clients will enjoy the “shortest & [most] hassle free search possible for a wife at our surprising competitive & full packages.” One such package provides a five-day, $4550 USD trip to Singapore, during which time clients pay for the opportunity to meet a “wide variety of village Vietnamese girls which are gentle, affectionate, beautiful, lovely, caring and commit-minded.”

After meeting several of these women, the client may choose one. He is assured that he will ascend to a lifetime of domestic bliss—after, of course, he receives the results of his future wife’s

summer 2014, issue 1

thorough “health examination,” and she completes a 30-day language course.

The practice of purchasing a bride across international borders dates from antiquity; today, in a globalized Asia, the custom occurs with increasing frequency. Vietnam is an especially popular “sending country,” or a nation that sources potential brides to send abroad. Most Vietnamese brides marry Taiwanese clients and move to Taiwan, but in the last five to ten years nations like South Korea and Singapore have joined Taiwan as top “receiving countries.”

But pinning down the “typical” Vietnamese mail order bride is difficult, and the global media has responded by classifying her as either an objectified victim of trafficking or as a money-seeking harlot. Her marital fate, perceived as either alarmingly successful or horrifically tragic, is equally confounding to observers.

Both the client and his bride place a tremendous amount of faith in one of countless third-party brokers such as J&N Viet-Bride.

These brokers have agents in Vietnam and in the receiving country. Agents in Vietnam recruit potential brides by visiting poor, rural villages and promising that international marriage will

provide wealth and happiness to single women and their parents. Agents in receiving countries promise beautiful, submissive wives to potential clients and their families. Often the views of one or both parties are sorely distorted, leading to grave, sometimes catastrophic, misunderstandings.

One situation to consider: a girl might be persuaded by an agent and taken to Ho Chi Minh City, where she will, like a pig at the market, be herded and lined up among dozens of others at a large “wedding auction.” Georges Blanchard, the founder of Alliance Anti-Trafic in Vietnam, has worked tirelessly to free thousands of women from coerced sex trafficking. In one covert expedition, he posed as a client seeking a potential bride: “I could have ordered them as though off of a shelf…from teenage to older, virgin or not virgin, educated or uneducated.”

An even harsher scenario: a man (who typically has paid between $7,000 USD and $10,000 USD for a package that includes his trip to Vietnam to select a bride) can select three or four women from the mass to speak with and get to know, and then examine them naked and either order or perform a “virgin check.” This in-

vietnam 17 The Vietnamese Bride Industry in Numbers

2009 2009 2004

Graphics by Ivy Sanders-Schneider

178% increase in marriages between Vietnamese women and South Korean men

Each bride costs between $7000 and $10,000 Family members of a bride line up for the betrothal ceremony, part of a traditional Vietnamese wedding (Courtesy Flickr user Benjamin Linh Vu). vasive procedure can be performed by a doctor to “prove” the girl’s virginity, or, in order to confirm her purity, the client can just have sex with her himself. If it’s unsatisfactory, he can claim that during their encounter he “discovered” she was not a virgin, and discard her.

A careless broker might then send the chosen woman abroad without proper legal documents, making her an illegal resident in her new nation. Undocumented, she is left entirely at the hands of her new husband and his family.

Even with less malicious third party brokers, the cultural differences alone can be enough to destroy a marriage. For example, a study published by the Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS) noted that the “patriarchal Taiwanese family system puts emphasis on the parent-son relationship,” meaning that sons are both more highly esteemed than daughters, and that a married woman in more indebted to her in-laws than to her own parents. In Vietnam, the opposite is often the case.

In fact, in her study “Marriage Migration Between Vietnam and Taiwan: a View from Vietnam,” Dr. Nguyen Thi Hong Xoan, a sociology professor based at Vietnam National Univer-

There are approximately 10,000 Vietnamese mail-order ...and 4,000 in Taiwan brides in South Korea...

www.tyglobalist.org

18 vietnam sity, Ho Chi Minh City, found that two-thirds of the 635 migrating brides that she surveyed listed their main reason for the marriage as “to help the family” or “to make [her] parents happy.”

They married with the expectation of providing for their families back home, a foreign concept to their Taiwanese husbands, who traditionally expect their wives to care for their husbands’ families over their natal ones.

Furthermore, most wives go abroad without knowledge of the culture or the language.

The subsequent isolation is crippling. In the worst scenarios, women face prolonged and intense mental, emotional, sexual and/or physical abuse. Without documentation, they cease to exist legally, they become nameless, and are paralyzed; it is impossible for them to either legally return to Vietnam or divorce their husband.

grating for marriage. “The women who are willing to participate in migration are those who have an adventurous mind,” he said. “They’re not purely submissive or victims.”

The smart and adventurous bride is beautiful, and many men at home would have liked to marry her. She is a participant in global hypergamy, meaning that she “simply thinks that life in other countries is superior or better than in Vietnam,” and considers her marriage an act of “social upward mobility.”

And she knows that her marriage may not be domestic bliss. “She considers it as a trial,” he explained. She has a “very clear strategy: to stay married until she receives her permanent residency, her language skills improve, her social networks are better, and she is accustomed to the culture. Then she will divorce, and become

S

o why is it that governments, academics, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) all agree: women are leaving of their own volition?

According to the United Nations (UN), 80% of single women in the Mekong Delta would prefer to marry a foreign man to a Vietnamese one.

The truth is that the cases of abuse are relatively rare. A 2001 study by Dr. Hong-zen Wang, Professor and Director of the Graduate Institute of Sociology at the National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, reported that over 90% of Vietnamese women married to Taiwanese men—many of whom were originally “mail order brides”—were satisfied with their marriages.

Most of these women are sending money home (according to Xoan’s survey, enough to raise the vast majority of their families up at least one socioeconomic group), both gaining agency and respect within their natal families and improving the lots of younger women in their villages. “[My daughters] want to marry foreign men,” one mother told ISDS. “They insist on not marrying Vietnamese men…in the past, since my family was poor, they might not have dared to be picky like that.”

“In our village there are nearly no spinsters left,” another survey participant said. “The majority of young, beautiful women have already been selected by foreign men; whereas, the rest are married to Vietnamese men.” These “beautiful women“ have become, by way of marriage, the main breadwinners in their families.

Dr. Le Bach Duong, the director of ISDS, said that there are two kinds of women immi-

summer 2014, issue 1

perts that improving education within at-risk areas, such as low-income districts in the Mekong Delta, is the best way to go forward. At the end of the day, said Blanchard, “the education of the population is the only way to solve problems in the population.”

“Education is the beginning,” said Xoan.

“You can see the difference [in international marriages] between educated and uneducated women—the educated ones understand, and they end up in much better situations.”

The UN’s focus lies in attempting to provide greater support to Women’s Unions in Vietnam, where potential migrants can access legal services, organized support networks, and help with languages and cultural divides. Xoan and Phuong each said that the funding for such programs remains insufficient.

At the same time, pointed out Phuong, education alone may not cause change: “Just because someone is aware does not mean that they change their behavior.”

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independent.” All the while, she will be either earning her own income or receiving money from her husband that she can send home to her family.

While it’s impossible to know just how successful or prevalent this plan really is, data shows that nearly 1 in 10 divorces in South Korea in 2012 were between a man and a foreign-born woman; in 2009, 33,000 men married foreign brides, which comes out to about 1 in 10 of all Korean marriages that year. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, divorce almost certainly leads the woman to lose custody over the couple’s children.

Clearly, this plan is by no means foolproof, and the women face a real risk of being sold into prostitution if their new families are unsatisfied, or if their matchmaking agency is a front for a prostitution ring. “They might end up as victims as opposed to beginning as victims,” said Vu Thi Thu Phuong of the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP).

There seems to be consensus amongst ex-

hile one generation of Vietnamese women finds a risky new voice through global hypergamy, another is lost in the Southeast Asian landscape. So how should policymakers respond; should the trend be allowed, even encouraged, to continue as many women find new opportunities? Or should it be curbed, in an effort to prevent more troubling cases of abuse and suffering?

Is the acquired agency of the majority of international brides enough to justify the acute suffering of the minority?

Many, like Duong, believe that selling oneself in an international marriage is “a real option for many poor, and even well off, people who want to improve their situation by any means.”

Others, like Blanchard, have witnessed too many tragedies. He’s tried to help repatriate women sold as wives into prostitution; he’s had to try to “prove that [these women] even existed.”

The trade continues. Sometime this week, maybe today, maybe right now, a newly wedded Vietnamese bride is boarding a plane to Taiwan or Seoul. She is waving good-bye to her family.

She might be thinking about them. She might be thinking about the stranger who is now her husband. She might be thinking about the alien place that is now her home.

She is almost certainly thinking about her future.

Caroline Wray ‘17 is in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at caroline.wray@yale.

vietnam 19

Vietnam Rocks Metal musicians fight for the right to play in an authoritarian country

BY ISABELLE TAFT (Nitika Khaitan/TYG).

I

t’s hard to be a metalhead in Vietnam.

Your parents want you to focus on your job. Your friends think Linkin’ Park is the greatest rock band on earth. Your government is afraid you’ll incite some kind of mass anti-establishment uprising. You just want to play.

Vietnam—a country once synonymous with the war-fueled soundtrack of an American generation—now has a rock scene of its own. Though that scene is still small, buffeted by the same forces that beat against would-be Metallicas all over the world, it’s vibrant and growing. While earlier generations smuggled in records from abroad, young digital natives use the Internet to sift through music spanning decades and continents, and to find each other to organize shows and start bands. Though most of the bands will not produce albums or go on tour—both activities are too expensive for all but the most popular groups in this middle-income country—they practice religiously, write their own songs, and play shows in local bars and basements. In a nation still ruled by an old Communist regime and an even older set of cultural mores, emphasizing deference to authority and commitment to providing for family, picking up a guitar is still a political act.

Most Vietnamese rock musicians, however,

aren’t engaging in conscious rebellion. They simply love music, and are willing to flout convention and parental expectations to chase a dream that spans generations and continents— the dream of making auditory art that means something. Metal fans and musicians (internationally known as the loudest and fiercest chasers of the dream) are an improbably strong and tight-knit presence in the world of Vietnamese underground rock, turning out by the hundreds for events like the annual Saigon and Hanoi Hell Fests, day-long concerts featuring metal bands from across Southeast Asia. Shows at Hanoi Rock City, the primary venue for independent rock concerts, often draw thousands.

But most of the musicians harbor no aspirations of quitting their day jobs. Kim Anh, the 22-year-old lead singer for Mozaik, a Hanoi-based gothic metal group, studies jewelry design at the Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts. All of her band-mates are dedicated students as well.

“We are all young and ambitious,” Anh said. “But with lack of money for instruments and the lack of experience and knowledge, the way to achieve something bigger than now is a long way to go.”

Anh’s curly hair is short and messy, with blunt bangs swept off to one side of her fore-

head. She wears retro eyeliner and bold red lipstick that contrast with the round youthfulness of her face, though not as much as the heavy black lipstick she sports in one of her Facebook profile pictures. She only recently told her parents she is in a band, and “they were not too hot on that.” Though music is her passion, she respects their wishes that she finish university, find a good job, and start a family. Still, Mozaik practices for two hours twice a week in a room rented from a friend, the lead vocalist of a symphonic metal group. A love for metal is about the only thing the band members have in common.

That’s true for many Vietnamese underground bands, whose members are often brought together from all kinds of careers and socioeconomic backgrounds by online forums.

On a warm Tuesday evening in Hanoi, four members of the thrash metal band Voluptuary sat outside one of the city’s many storefront cafes. Squatting on the little plastic stools that spill out onto sidewalks, the mild-mannered men— an engineer, an architect, a police officer, and a university student—waited patiently for the final member to arrive. Nguyen Doc, the singer, played with a stray kitten to pass the time.

When the secondary guitarist, a high school student and the group’s youngest member, fiwww.tyglobalist.org

20 vietnam nally pulled up on a motorbike, his goofy grin offered a wordless explanation for his tardiness.

“He’s been drinking!” Pham Binh, the group’s primary guitarist, declared triumphantly. Mild rebuke delivered, practice could begin.

Their rehearsal studio is owned by a fixture of the Hanoi rock scene: a drummer named Mr. Tan who plays in an oldies cover group called the White Eagle Band, an oldies band around since the 1980s and the city’s self-proclaimed oldest rock band. They perform American and British rock songs, but never anything later than 1979.

Never punk or disco. Certainly never metal.

“Everything, in my opinion,” White Eagles Band singer Kao Vam said, “Happened 50, 60 years ago.”

Mr. Tan clearly knows better: his rehearsal studio hosts many of Hanoi’s underground metal bands. Mr. Tan, who speaks no English, provides equipment most of the bands couldn’t afford to purchase. He also likes to offer advice and drumming pointers to the younger musicians.

“He likes us to call him dad,” said Quang Nguyen, the bassist for Morning Waits, rolling his eyes.

Mr. Tan is the rare musician whose job aligns with his passion for music; he works as a drum teacher. The men of Voluptuary are all committed to their day jobs and speak openly about their band being a hobby, not a potential career option. But practice is still treated like serious business. Quay, the band’s new drummer, is struggling with the skill level required for Voluptuary’s music. The quick, intricate guitar riffs that characterize thrash metal are notoriously difficult for drummers to keep up with, and every minute or so, Quay stops drumming and swings his arms over his face in frustration. His bandmates stop, offer a few words of advice, and begin again, shredding guitars or clenching a microphone with hands that minutes earlier gently petted a kitten.

With time, some groups are able to find opportunities to transform their passion for music into more than a hardcore hobby. The members of SagoMetal, a Ho Chi Minh City group, grew up listening to Bon Jovi and Guns ‘n’ Roses on cassette tapes illegally imported from China. They have been playing together since 1991, and in March, they reached the pinnacle of their decades-long career when they opened for Paul Di’Anno of Iron Maiden, who played at the Hard Rock Café Saigon on his “Beast in the Far East” tour.

Di’Anno is notable among international metal acts for making it to Vietnam at all. Most artists are deterred by the small size of the scene, which usually can’t fill a large venue at ticket prices high enough to entice a big-name group. It doesn’t help that the Vietnamese govsummer 2014, issue 1

ernment insists on vetting lyrics. Bob Dylan, famous for his antiauthoritarian lyrics that fueled anti-war protests in the 1960s, played his first Vietnam show in Ho Chi Minh City in April 2011. Before he arrived, he had to submit 100 of his songs for review by the government.

None were refused, but the requirement is one more reason for touring acts to forego Vietnam.

Big-name artists aren’t the only musicians affected by the government’s hostility towards rock music. According to Quang Van Sot, the guitarist for Morning Waits, officials try to deter local groups from playing small shows. If police find a flyer for a rock concert, they sometimes show up at the venue, intimidating bands and would-be attendees. At one show Van Sot at-

“Instead of ‘concert,’ we’ll write ‘music meeting’ on our flyers.

Rock bands are like rebels. And [the police] don’t like that.” tended, police confiscated a band’s merchandise because they didn’t have a license to sell their t-shirts and posters. The potential for trouble with the authorities has led to creative solutions.

“Instead of ‘concert,’ we’ll write ‘music meeting’ on our flyers,” Van Sot said. “Rock bands are like rebels. And they don’t like that.”

But for all its problems, the government is presiding over a period of unprecedented stability and economic prosperity in Vietnam.

An increasingly aggressive China is pushing the country closer towards the United States.

American policymakers are more focused on building partnerships in the region than on condemning censorship and repression, but the American government seems to recognize the power of rock music to nudge Vietnam towards greater freedom and openness—or at least simply greater cultural affinity for the U.S. The US Embassy is one of the primary sponsors of the ASEAN Pride, a free annual concert in Hanoi that features rock, metal, and hip-hop bands from all over the country and continent. The event is held at The American Club, a U.S. government-owned space where the Vietnamese government won’t come knocking. It’s a strange quirk of history: America, condemned by hundreds, probably thousands,

of rock songs for the violence it committed inVietnam, is using music laden with that same anti-establishment ethos to make Vietnamese youth more pro-American. Has the Man coopted rock or has rock won over the Man? To music fans who love ASEAN Pride and bands who get exposure and experience by playing the concert, the answer seems unimportant.

The frontwoman of Go Lim, Nga Nhi, sporting a buzz cut and baggy denim shorts, jumped up and down, thrashed around the stage and screamed into the microphone during a set that mesmerized the audience, a mix of expats and natives at Go Lim’s performance at the 2012 CAMA Festival, ASEAN Pride’s predecessor. Go Lim, an all-female group that sounds a little like Bikini Kill if Kathleen Hanna had a higher-pitched voice and even more volume and energy, became one of Vietnam’s most talked-about underground rock acts. The group, whose name translated to Ironwood, seemed poised to become the leaders of Vietnam’s underground music scene, and maybe even tour internationally on the strength of their expat following. But in October 2012, Nhi passed away from a chronic illness she’d been battling for years, disappearing from the public eye.

“They were fucking cool,” said Seb Bo, a drummer and native of Bristol who moved to Hanoi from England two years ago to find work as an English teacher. They were also, according to Bo, among the most political bands in Vietnam, eschewing love songs in favor of more absurdist fare, like a song about being a hungry cat. Few bands on the scene now can match their energy, originality, and magnetic pull. But with so many young musicians dedicating all their free time to learning technical skills and listening to every metal and post-punk album they can find online, it seems only a matter of time before the next Nga Nhi comes along.

Kim Anh of Mozaik might be a contender.

She shares Nga Nhi’s irreverence, holding a red bra on her head like a helmet and grinning in one of her Facebook profile pictures. She also shares her dedication to music, dreaming of touring internationally with Mozaik and pressuring her band-mates to commit more time and energy to their music. For now, the band practices twice a week in borrowed rehearsal space. For now, that is enough.

“Ten years ago, I’d be married right now,” said the 22-year-old singer. “It’s becoming more easier for us to follow our dreams, follow our passions. And so I’m sitting here with my band.”

Isabelle Taft ’17 is a History major in Silliman College. Contact her at isabelle.taft@yale. edu.

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Endangered is the New Black Fighting Elite Rhino Horn Consumption in Vietnam

BY JADE HARVEY A 19th Century Illustration of Javan Rhino Hunting (Courtesy of Public Commons)

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here is a new special ingredient fizzing in the wine glasses of the status-conscious Vietnamese elite. It is said to dull hangovers, increase male sexual performance, and even cure cancer. It is part of a high-demand trend driving not only the libidos of certain wealthy young Vietnamese, but also the extinction of some of the world’s most spectacular animals. It is rhinoceros horn powder—and according to one Vietnamese news site, with wine, it is “the drink of millionaires.”

Rhino horn powder, tiger bone paste, dried pangolin scales—the list of currently sought-after illegal animal products goes on and on. In recent years, unprecedented increases in disposable income have spurred the development of a modern luxury goods market in Vietnam.

Along with the new demand for designer labels and foreign cars has come a sudden resurgence of interest in the most status-conscious black market products today, which come not from Parisian runways or German factories, but from the jungles of Southeast Asia and plateaus of South Africa. For a select and powerful group of emerging urban business elite, endangered animal products are the new black.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a leading conservation group, Vietnam ranks as the worst country in the world

for wildlife crime, due to the government’s poor compliance and enforcement of anti-trafficking standards. When it comes to categorizing wildlife crime, nations are divided into source, transit and consumer countries; Vietnam—with its natural eco-diversity, expansive border, and history of wildlife product use in traditional medicine—is all three. But what suddenly landed Vietnam the number one spot on WWF’s grim list has little to do with a lingering national interest in traditional medicine or geographical predispositions, but rather with an increase in demand for luxury animal products among newly rich consumers, from local celebrities to government officials.

In 2010, poachers killed the last native Vietnamese Javan rhinoceros. In order to continue meeting national demand for rhino horns, Vietnamese traders turned to South Africa, home of the white rhino. TRAFFIC, an international anti-wildlife crime organization with offices in Hanoi, describes this newly formed South African-Vietnam trade nexus as a “deadly combination of institutional lapses, corrupt wildlife industry professionals and Asian crime syndicates.” The number of white rhinos killed worldwide has spiked from 13 in 2007 to 532 in 2012 — a 5000% increase. In the first four months of 2014 alone, about two rhinos were killed every day.

Although rhino horn consumers are a minority in Vietnam, the recent demand, driven chiefly by the 65% of the population under the age of 30, is high enough to have made local and international wildlife NGOs uneasy. Exotic animal consumption was once linked to traditional medicine, but in modern Vietnam, “face consumption”—the extravagant usage of rare and expensive products to display social status and wealth—drives this demand. On the streets of Vietnam, rhino horn can fetch up to 65,000 USD per kilogram, a price tag higher than the US street value of cocaine. Surveys from TRAFFIC identify young middle-class mothers purchasing on behalf of their families and middle-aged urban businessmen as the main users of rhino horn products. Consumers no longer necessarily believe that rhino horn or tiger bone products are the best cures for illnesses. Rather, the allure of gifting a friend “$5,000 Aspirin” fuels the market, Dr. Naomi Doak of TRAFFIC Vietnam explained.

When wildlife conservation groups in Vietnam air advertisements featuring orphaned rhinos and baby polar bears, viewer response surveys indicate that audiences respond with apathy rather than guilt. According to Dr. Doak, Vietnamese consumers often note neither the majesty of the animal nor the www.tyglobalist.org

22 vietnam need to protect it but instead “see a powerful, strong animal that can defeat all others, that has a really big horn on it, and think ‘Oh, that’s probably worth a lot of money.’”

Dr. Doak explained that illegal animal consumption has nothing to do with the rhino or the tiger itself, but rather with their symbolism: “A consumer believes, right or wrong, that by physically eating, consuming, or owning a part of that animal, they take on the qualities of that animal.”

Rhino horn marketing glorifies the masculine tenacity of the rhino to convince male consumers of its male-enhancing abilities and highlights the endurance of the animal to convince cancer patients of its ability to cure illnesses.

In truth, effective advertising for anti-poaching groups proves consistently difficult. By posting pictures of animals, Doak explained, NGOs run the risk of “just creating an advertisement for rhino horn product because it’s simply reinforcing the values that the consumer sees when they look at the animal.”

Other organizations such as Education for Nature Vietnam (ENV), a Vietnamese-run conservation NGO, have pursued a more controversial route by showing graphic ads depicting poaching violence. In 2013, ENV, along with WildAid and the African Wildlife Foundation, released a viewer-discretion advised PSA titled “The Sickening Truth.” The 40-second ad juxtaposed images of a dehorned rhino bleeding profusely in an open plain against shots of rhi-

Campaign Against the Use of Rhino Horn (Courtesty of Traffic Vietnam) summer 2014, issue 1

no horn being ground in a bowl for medicine.

Though received poorly by television stations, the ads caused a direct increase in wildlife crime reports to the organization’s wildlife crime report hotline. ENV’s latest campaign takes yet another route by showing a Vietnamese businessman “losing face” at a company meeting after his employers and partners awkwardly refuse his gift of tiger bone paste.

The goal of these ads is to discredit endangered animal product advertisements—a task that has proven to be particularly difficult in recent years as smugglers now use the Internet to push their products. WWF has found Vietnamese online ads persuading consumers that rhino horn “is like a luxury car” and extolling rhino horn’s benefits as an aphrodisiac and hangover cure.

Illegal Internet ads, though, are not the only area where government regulation proves inadequate. Weak enforcement of trafficking prohibitions makes wildlife smuggling profitable and low-risk. The punishment for heroin smuggling in Vietnam is the death sentence, while the maximum time for rhino horn smuggling is only seven years—a conviction that has only been enforced on one occasion to date. NGOs are pushing to expand the maximum sentence of endangered animal product smuggling to 25 years in hopes of upping the risks of network involvement.

Even if the laws change, overcoming the “it’s not my problem” mentality may be the most daunting challenge in the fight to increase con-

servation. To be sure, the lack of ample security for protected areas, rising demand, and power of Vietnamese criminal syndicates complicate the mission of Vietnamese wildlife advocates.

But the emotional disconnect between many adults and the animals they are killing further makes meaningful progress even more difficult. “We can explain why the world needs rhinos,” Dr. Doak lamented, “But we can’t explain why he [the consumer] needs rhinos.”

While rhino horn consumers are a minority, the prevailing tradition of disregarding the importance of wildlife protection still threatens the future of endangered species in the country.

ENV established Vietnam’s first wildlife crime email and phone hotline to empower Vietnamese citizens to report the illegal sale or trade of endangered animal products themselves.

ENV Chief Technical Advisor Doug Hendrie describes the hotline and report system as a way to encourage the public to take initiative and to push Vietnamese officials to do their jobs, rather than rely entirely on NGO intervention.

As much as international NGOs have contributed to fighting wildlife crime in Vietnam, the real solution must come from the Vietnamese public itself. In March 2014, the Vietnam Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wildlife Fauna and Flora (CITES) Management Authority of the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development hosted a roundtable meeting on transnational wildlife crime. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung also issued a directive to prioritize enforcement by all ministries, and to combat poaching and trafficking across the country.

Since then, though, the government has yet to take any concrete action. Without government backing and support from citizens, anti-wildlife crime legislation will never become a national priority on its own. When it comes down to it, Hendrie explained, “wildlife crime is a Vietnamese problem that needs a Vietnamese solution.”

But anti-trafficking activists see small glimmers of hope. Hendrie cites the steady growth of young anti-wildlife crime volunteers, explaining that “in one day, Vietnam looks like hell, but in ten years, it looks pretty good.” In a country where many people still feel unaffected by wildlife crime, the upcoming generation of young, politically active Vietnamese will play a critical role in establishing wildlife protection as a national priority. Although Vietnam has lost the fight to save its last native rhino, the race to protect the country’s thousands of other endangered species from luxury consumption has only just begun.

Jade Harvey ’17 is in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at jade.harvey@yale.edu.

The Blue Houses of Da Nang

BY CHAREENI KURUKULASURIYA

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e pass rows and rows of identical blue-concrete buildings; the tin sheets that jut out from each roof cast a shadow on the cracked pavement below.

Finally, the motorcycle we are trailing in our car comes to a halt and the female rider disembarks, brushing off the dust from her scrubs before entering the medical dispensary building. I search the tops of each building for the numbers painted above the doors, the only thing distinguishing each block from the next. From here, the marble mountains aren’t even visible on the skyline, a reminder of how removed I am from the Vegas-esque strip of casinos and luxury beach resorts of Da Nang proper. The only thing these two city neighborhoods seem to have in common is the sand under my feet. The translator joins me on the doorstep of building F-03, and I check the list of names and birthdates on the sheet in my hand. After so many dead ends, I am finally about to meet the residents of the leprosy community, formerly of Hoa Van village, now of Group 14, Hoa Hiep Ward, Da Nang.

Trinh Thi Phuong stands in the doorway of her home in the block housing of Group 14, Da Nang. (Kurukulasuriya/TYG).

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eprosy is an outdated disease in many parts of the West. Less than 150 new cases of leprosy occur each year in the United States, and these patients are primarily those who have returned from foreign countries where the disease is endemic: countries like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Its prevalence in Southeast Asia poses a major concern for countries like Indonesia, where as many as 19,000 new cases occur each year, or Myanmar, where disease-burdened populations are neglected due to ineffective state treatment programs and lack of follow up care. In Vietnam, though, more sinister public health threats exist: upwards of 100,000 new cases of tuberculosis are reported each year, and a sudden measles outbreak that hit the country in early 2014 caused more than 130 fatalities.

Diseases like these receive far greater attention from the regional World Health Organization (WHO) office than the 250 or so new cases of leprosy that crop up each year in the Central Highlands, where the disease is endemic.

No longer considered a public health threat, leprosy received scant attention from media organizations until 2013, when authorities forced an isolated leprosy community in the village of Hoa Van to relocate to the outskirts of Da Nang. During the 1950s and 60s, people with leprosy were unable to stay in their home villages because of their stigma of their illness and the potential for transmission. Many then traveled to Hoa Van, located on an isolated peninsula in the Central Highlands, where they made their living as farmers and fisherman. Recognizing the villagers’ unmet need for medical attention and the growing population of uncured leprosy patients, an American missionary doctor Gordon Smith established a leprosarium in Hoa Van in 1968. When the Vietnam War ended seven years later, his establishment became a government-controlled hospital.

Even the cured villagers of Hoa Van remained in isolation after the war. “With the post-1975 changes in administration, there was a lot of migration, and so even patients who were cured were unable to find familiar faces upon returning to their family’s villages,” explained Jan Robijn, the Vietnam representative for Netherlands Leprosy Relief (NLR), a Dutch non-governmental organization. People with cured leprosy preferred to stay in villages like Hoa Van, where they still felt a sense of communal belonging. Following the country’s reunification, the government made greater attempts to implement reverse integration in communities like Hoa Van, giving families incentives to move to such colonies and providing those villages with proper rights and a civil structure.

The village of Hoa Van no longer exists. In

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2013, the People’s Committee of Da Nang requested that Hoa Van’s 70 residents, only half of whom had suffered from leprosy, relocate their homes to the Group 14 housing. The BBC article I read covering the story described with little detail the rude eviction of the residents from their homes and their struggles to manage with the compensatory money and block housing provided by the Vietnamese government. Intrigued, I hoped to find where the residents had been transplanted and hear more of their story.

Was the uprooting as tumultuous the reports implied, or was there an unspoken side to the story?

“The thing about Vietnam is that individualism is very different than it is in the West. It’s about putting the group first before oneself, and in Vietnam, everything is the government.”

I

wait in the sparsely furnished living room. Its walls are the same blue as the pattern of the shiny linoleum on the floor and the exteriors of all the line houses in the project. Trinh Khen rolls himself out on a makeshift wheelchair, a wooden board attached to a set of wheels. His grandchildren help him settle into place when he is unable to position himself with his own hands. Khen bears the hallmark pale skin patches of one who has suffered through the disease, the permanently curled fingers and missing toes indicating the severity of the nerve damage in his extremities.

A common misconception is that leprosy causes the limbs of a patient to fall off. In reality, it is the strain of bacillus bacteria Mycobacterium leprae that infects the skin and damages the nerves, resulting in loss of sensation and muscle paralysis as the disease progresses untreated. It is the lack of sensation that leads to greater risk of injury, often without the patient’s awareness that the limb has been damaged. Lack of care for such injuries can then lead to secondary infections of the open wounds, where gangrene will ultimately kill the tissue and typically require amputation.

Typically, the progression of a patient’s lep-

rosy to such a degree of disability is avoidable.

“Once a patient is diagnosed with leprosy, a few months of multi-drug treatment therapy (MDT) is all it takes to cure the disease,” said Dr. Cornelia Hennig, a medical officer at the WHO’s regional office in Vietnam. By enforcing strict registration policies, the Vietnamese government has greatly improved disease detection in recent years. Families are increasingly aware of the free health insurance, welfare, and disability benefits to which they are often entitled.

Yet, diagnosing leprosy was not always such a straightforward task. A staggering 14,000 people suffer some form of disability caused by leprosy in Vietnam. Many of these patients are elderly (the average age in Hoa Van is about 65) and unable to work either because of their condition or their age. “I lived with the disease for three years before I decide to move to the Hoa Van village to seek treatment,” explained Trinh Thi Phuong, a resident of Group 14.

“The first treatment course I took was a local antibiotic, but I found out I was allergic to it and couldn’t be cured with it.” Only seven years later was Phuong able to get access to a newer Japanese medicine that cured her after two years of treatment. Unfortunately, her disease had progressed too far during the interim between her treatments. Doctors were force to amputate her right leg, where a wound had festered unnoticed. Like the other names on my list, she was fortunate enough to receive a prosthetic limb with the help of NLR.

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he People’s Committee of Da Nang visited the Hoa Van community early in 2012, prior to the move, to explain to the benefits of relocation to village’s residents. City officials offered compensation in the form of a large sum payment and free block housing. They stressed that better education and job opportunities within the city that would become available to the residents’ children. “It feels okay that I had to come here because my grandchildren can have a better life and schooling here near the city,” said Khen. “I can be happy about my life.”

Tran Day and his wife met in Hoa Van, after both left their home villages having contracted leprosy. In Hoa Van, they relied on farming, raising livestock, and fishing. “Since then, we were able to care of each other,” Day said. “Life was comfortable.” But in the city, neither has found a job. Instead, they must manage on the government’s $40 USD monthly disability checks Before, Hoa Van residents could only reach the markets and hospitals of Da Nang by boat, a long and strenuous trip around the peninsula to the city, or by making the dangerous trek down the railroad tracks of the Hoa Van pass.

vietnam 25

Clockwise form Top Left: [1] Trinh Khen and his grandchildren in their living room.

[2] Patients and doctors waiting at the regional hospital in Da Nang.

[3] Trinh Thi Phuong sits on the cot in her one-room house in Group 14.

[4] Tran Day shows the prosthetic he received from NLR after his left leg was amputated after an injury went unnoticed for too long.

[5] Le Van Ngo feels a part of in the disabled community residing at Grou p14 though his amputation was not leprosy-related.

26 vietnam

Tran Day and his wife, who both suffered from leprosy, met in the Hoa Van village and made a living as farmers before moving to Da Nang. (Kurukulasuriya/TYG).

There was no space between the tunnel walls and the sides of a passing train. To misjudge the length of the trip could be fatal.

According to Dr. Nguyen Pham Van Thanh of the Lien Chieu district hospital, the government has provided provided Group 14 residents with a small treatment dispensary on-site, as well as attendants to provide daily help. “All their medical fees are taken care of,” he said. Day and his wife admit that life is better in Group 14, where they are close to the hospital and doctors come by each month to administer any necessary medical treatment.

But Tran Day questions whether the government’s motives in forcibly relocating Hoa Van were truly altruistic. Officials stressed to Day and his wife their concerns for the villagers’ safety during the October/November typhoons. “It’s true that we would have a rough season some years, being so isolated and on the coast,” he noted, “but I also knew that the People’s Committee wanted to give the land for tourism use, too.” Supposedly, a French developer approached the Da Nang municipal government, expressing interest in that area of land, though plans to build any type of resort there remain unconfirmed. “The thing about Vietnam is that individualism is very different than it is in the West,” noted Robijn of NLR. “It’s about putting the group first before oneself, and in Vietnam, everything is the government. The residents, they are the government, and so the government has every right to move them off that land in their minds.”

Trinh Khen’s comments echoed Robijn’s assessment. “I knew that the government was summer 2014, issue 1

planning tourism development in that area,” he explained. “I understand that it’s what was good for the government, and I’m not angry.”

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he primary issue that the people of the Hoa Van community now face is adjusting to an urban lifestyle, not gaining access to healthcare. “Life here has a much higher cost of living that we were used to in the village,” explained Phuong. “It’s tough to have enough wood for cooking and pay for water and food with just $40 USD each month.”

Some families, like the Days, have children who are able to assist with managing the home and providing an income to supplement the disability and welfare checks the family otherwise receives. “A very close friend of ours from Hoa Van, who didn’t have the disease, knew how much we wanted children but couldn’t,” Tran Day told me, as many leprosy patients face problems with fertility depending on the disease progression. “We adopted their daughter, and she thinks of us as her own parents now.”

Though the Day family is glad to reap the benefits of living nearer to the city, not all the residents have embraced their new home so quickly.

“People from the city are very different than in the village. In Hoa Van, people wouldn’t take your roof when it was blown off in a typhoon; here the city people will steal anything if you can’t protect your house,” said Phuong, still angry about the theft of her family’s motorcycle last month.

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he last name on my list is Le Van Ngo. When I approach his doorstep and explain my purpose, he is the only person not to

welcome me into his home. He seems nervous and hesitant to answer my questions about his history of leprosy and life at Hoa Van. I show him my list from NLR, which shows that he did receive a prosthetic leg from them.

“I am not a patient here because I never had leprosy,” Ngo says. “I lost my leg during the war and was treated for it, but I moved here with the Hoa Van residents because we have a shared way of life.” Ngo sees no social stigma associated with having leprosy, and he feels at home among people who were once ostracized from their own homes. His words are a sign that it is not the location of the houses but the shared community of the former residents of Hoa Van that will help them to adjust to their situation together.

The community is not one of disease but a place where everyone has learned to live full lives with their disability. “We will all miss the Hoa Van village and the life we had there, but I still feel happy to start a new life here with everyone.”

As I drive back to the city center, and the elaborate bridges and buildings come into view, I can’t help but think that the people of Group 14 are only in isolation for now. Given Da Nang’s rapid urbanization rate, it may not be long before the project housing of Group 14 is truly integrated into the city, and the people of Hoa Van into its many communities.

Chareeni Kurukulasuriya ’16 is a Molecular, Cellular, & Developmental Biology major in Morse College. Contact her at chareeni.kurukulasuriya@yale.edu.

BOUND TO

SHACKLES

BY JOSH FENG

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rusty old metal chair stood in front of an analog TV, perched below a single hanging lamp. A small swarm of mosquitos surrounded the light, trapped by the curtains drawn on the sides of this makeshift theatre. On the humming screen looped a video of a man facing the ocean. The rhythmic sound of waves crashing onto shore overpowered the buzzing sound otherwise filling the room. And in this fashion, the display went on.

The artist of this installation is part of the Nha San Arts Collective, a group which aims to support Vietnamese experimental artistic expression. Another member of the collective, Thanh Nguyen, described the video as “colliding with what is happening right now between Vietnam and China.” According to Thanh, throughout the displays at Hanoi’s Nha San Gallery, artists tread the line of “traditional art,” challenging notions of what is accepted or rejected not only by Vietnamese authorities, but Vietnamese society as a whole.

But pushing these boundaries comes with costs. A few years ago, Zone 9, a space similar to the Nha San gallery, was an emerging hub of grassroots culture in Hanoi, an old pharmaceutical factory turned indie art center. In 2013, Vietnamese authorities closed Zone 9 down.

According to the government, their decision was due to “safety violations,” but others speculated about political motivations.

The true reason may simply be financial: an expiring three-year contract signed by Zone 9 entrepreneurs gave leeway for OceanBank (a private Vietnamese bank that possessed the underlying right to develop on the property) to shut down the zone before its investment was threatened by the unexpected success of Zone 9’s businesses. Yet the question begs to be asked: why hasn’t another hub for independent art emerged following the Zone 9 incident?

Tadioto was a bar and art space formerly located in Zone 9 that has since relocated to another area of Hanoi. Nyugen Qui Duc,

owner of Tadioto, stressed that the Vietnamese contemporary art scene is multi-faceted.

“Censorship is much more complex than most people think,” he explained, challenging the black and white paradigm of independent dissenting artists confronting strict government controls. “You know, the culture police will come into my galleries, they will know that’s the painting that has to do with the Party or the Communist Party or whatever,” he said.

“As long as I can give them an explanation that they can walk away going, ‘OK I’ve done my job, I’ve gone over there, I’ve talked to the guy, he explained it this way,’ you can get way with some of it.”

Having debunked the myth of monolithic government censorship, Nguyen offered several other explanations for the extent of self-censorship among Vietnamese artists.

“Censorship is not just dictated by the government,” he said. “[It] is also a function of money and capitalism, just like anywhere else.” The process of self-censorship, he said, is no different from that of artists in France, the U.K., or the U.S. “A gallery will say, ‘We support this kind of work,’ so the artist ends up doing that kind of work.”

Nguyen also highlighted the shift between socialist-era government censorship and modern market censorship. “Before in Vietnam, you had to be mindful where the permission comes from,” he said. “Now in Vietnam you have to be mindful where the money comes from.” A complex network of social, economic and cultural forces—not simply the government’s iron-fisted clampdown on dissidents —drives individual and market censorship of contemporary art.

In his April New York Times op-ed, “The New Censors of Hanoi“, Nguyen referenced the about-face of Dang Xuan Hoa. A 1990s artist who “defied the Communists’ insistence on rosy depictions of society,” Hoa now investigates exhibitions and performances as an

(Feng/TYG).

28 vietnam officer of the Artists’ Union, a state vetting organization. “You don’t know what his incentive or motivation was. You don’t know what the story is,” Nguyen reflected. “I mean you can point out that, you know, he was a poor artist and to make money, he sold paintings and now he plays tennis and drives a BMW.” Nguyen questioned just what Hoa had compromised. “What’s so bad about that in the end?” He asked. “[Hoa] is accepting more of the government minds? Nobody knows, and I couldn’t say it very clearly.”

The line between whom or what is censoring and who is being censored is a thin one to draw. Though the West often answers this question by immediately faulting governments for their censorship of artists, what is occurring in Vietnam is far more subtle and nuanced.

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take inspiration from the Muong cultural tradition, particularly its exquisite fabric patterns.

Nguyen Anh Tuan said that locals welcomed the gallery, viewing it as an opportunity for employment and exploration into art forms other than traditional folk fabric art. The village’s shaman even holds Muong religious ceremonies in the gallery from time to time.

However as a project led by Vietnamese intellectuals funded by Western European groups, Muong Studio walks a thin line between including rural Vietnamese in what is usually the territory of cosmopolitan elites and perpetuating imperialist tropes. And though the space was created as one of the first museums

lassically trained” at Vietnamese schools founded by French colonists, Tran Luong is an internationally acclaimed artist, who has shown his work at the Guggenheim Museum. With fewer financial constraints and the ability to show artwork abroad, artists who are a part of Vietnam’s intellectual circles have relatively more freedom than their less cosmopolitan peers to create art that represents their own opinions.

(Kurukulasuriya/TYG).

Some argue this is truer to the purpose of art, untainted by external influ- of contemporary art in Vietnam, its location two ences. On the other hand, others argue that art- hours from Hanoi seems counterintuitive to this ists like Luong could be swayed by outside fac- purpose. This physical distance may alienate tors —that even the notion of “contemporary art” many poor and working class Vietnamese, who is a Western import. Since most funding sourc- don’t have the time and money to travel to the es for “independent” Vietnamese art comes from gallery.

At times, a lack of dialogue can distance conWestern countries, perhaps donors insert their own visions into the art as well. This patronage temporary artists from the general Vietnamese calls into question the very “Vietnamese” identity public. Tran Luong pointed out that public misconception of contemporary art is one of of the art.

In 2011, Luong and more than 20 other art- the largest hurdles artists must face—a majority ists founded Muong Studio, a collaborative of the public is still trying to understand exactspace in the mountains of Vietnam’s northwest- ly what contemporary art is. “In Vietnam, they ern Hoa Binh province. They urged local and [the Vietnamese public] don’t quite understand foreign artists to take up residency and create my artistic standard,” he said. Luong and his pieces on-site, using Vietnamese materials and internationally inclined peers have tried to go surroundings as inspiration. But the studio’s through indirect routes to increase education of presence has raised further questions about the contemporary art in Hanoi, but the government foreign-local dichotomy in contemporary art has not been supportive of their efforts. “We and challenges of attempting to bridge the gap. tried to apply one time to create a small, private Studio director Nguyen Anh Tuan ex- [arts] school but we never got permission,” he plained to the Globalist that the local Muong explained, “So we have to be sneaky to learn people, one of more than 50 ethnic minorities in how to make it.”

Sometimes pushback from the public is Vietnam, often help out in the gallery, and artists summer 2014, issue 1

more direct. Thanh Nguyen, member of the Nha San Collective, echoed Luong’s sentiment: “Contemporary art is simply not understood by a lot of people.” He offered examples of challenges the collective has faced, referencing a shutdown in 2010 due to depictions of nudity in one of the pieces on display. Thanh notices that performance art and pieces involving nudity are often more prone to public criticism, as this break from traditionalism seems threatening. Such “public censorship” continues to drive how censorship in Vietnam takes shape.

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small but growing collection of grassroots contemporary art galleries and art collectives in Vietnam aims to bridge the gap between artists and the public. Manzi, a restaurant in Hanoi serves as a hybrid space, combining visual arts, literature, film, and music exhibitions into the café. Manzi owner Tram Vu aims to make Manzi into a place open to the general public to enjoy art and talk with artists. She said that “in Vietnam, people don’t have the habit to come to galleries or museums. And there’s not many galleries and museums at all to see. There’s no art education in schools, like in the States or other places in the world.”

Vu hopes that that the hybrid space Manzi occupies will help draw more people in to learn about contemporary art and supplement the lack of arts education in Vietnam.

However, Manzi continues to be subject to frequent surveillance by Vietnamese authorities. “The cultural police come all the time,” Vu told the Globalist. “Whenever we have events.” Yet she also pointed out that the “cultural police” doesn’t care much about the sometimes-controversial nature of the work since the café creates profit and brings in business.

“Every time we do [an art show] here, we don’t call it an exhibition. We call it a display,” she explained. “If someone comes and asks ‘what happened?’ we just say, ‘Because Manzi is a bar/café, we just do it for decoration.’” Infusing the café and art gallery into one allows Manzi to effectively subvert political authority and censorship. Manzi shows that the “iron fist” of Vietnamese communism softens up quite a bit when some money is placed in it.

The Nha San Arts Collective also aims to work under the radar of Vietnamese authorities, but this tactic comes with its own sets of

vietnam 29 advantages and disadvantages. Thanh Nguyen says that Nha San and other experimental contemporary art groups simply don’t have enough impact to really sway the Vietnamese people, so their work doesn’t garner the attention of government officials. They simply don’t view the collective as a destabilizing threat. On the one hand this “invisibility” gives Nha San and other groups greater autonomy, but it also means that their efforts are not reaching a broad audience.

In addition to grappling with the challenge of attracting public interest while avoiding the attention of government censors, artists and groups like Nha San must navigate the market’s prevailing currents. Thanh Nguyen emphasized that “contemporary art is simply not funded by the government.” While some artists are able to secure funding from abroad (Thanh mentioned the Danish Cultural Development and Exchange Fund, the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands, and the Goethe Institute), most continue to struggle financially to sustain their practices.

Artists themselves also need to make money as well, and often must work within existing political and economic structures to do so. As Nguyen Qui Duc explained, many artists are creating “dissent art” because there is a demand for it. After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, people looked to China, Vietnam and Cuba for dissent writers, the same goes for visual arts. To make a living, artists sometimes cater to this fascination with Vietnamese communism. This trend is also intrinsically tied to domestic Vietnamese policies, as the lack of government support for independent creativity leaves artists with no other choice but to “cater” to foreign demand.

China’s contemporary art scene offers clear parallels to Vietnam’s own. The rapid growth of Beijing’s Zone 798, another indie art space housed within abandoned factories, may prove telling. At first, Zone 798 thrived. Artists flocked to the area due to its low real estate prices and to work with the creative community centered there. However Zone 798 quickly became hyper-commercialized, a hub for tourists more than artists. Artists’ freedom of expression became increasingly bound to the limitations inherent in marketization. Whether or not this will be the fate contemporary art in Vietnam is unclear. One thing is clear: like in Vietnam, the Chinese government didn’t even need to directly censor radical artists; the market did it for them.

Josh Feng ’17 is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at josh.feng@ yale.edu.

Remnants of the Muong lifestyle, like this shrine room on the upper floor of this building are interspered throughout the compound of Muong Studioreminding artists of the roots of the site. (Khaitan/TYG).

Studio director Nguyen Anh Tuan stands in front of an avant-garde installation involving chemically treated Vietnamese army jackets suspended from the rafters of a Muong house at the studio. (Khaitan/TYG)

An abstract art installation at the Muong Studio involving shadows constructed from rubber that cast shadows of their own. (Khaitan/TYG). www.tyglobalist.org

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WHAT WE NEEDED IN HUE Healing war wounds in New Haven’s sister city

BY ELIZABETH VILLARREAL (Photos courtesy of Howard Chernikoff ).

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espite its current role as New Haven’s “Sister City,” Hue, Vietnam first came to the attention of the city’s public under the darkest of circumstances. The “Imperial City,” with its ancient citadel and grand pagodas, was in 1968 a battlefield, site to one of the bloodiest and longest conflicts of the Vietnam War. The story for the Battle of Hue started like many others. In the early hours of January 31, 1968, Hue fell to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces along with more than a hundred other towns and cities in what would come to be known as the Tet Offensive. Unlike many of those other cities, however, which were quickly reclaimed by American and South Vietnamese troops, the Battle of Hue dragged on for over a month, fought house by house as the city turned to rubble. By the end of the war there would be almost nothing left.

Major George R. Christmas, Company Commander in Hue, described the American strategy at the time: “Just as a rat must be drawn from his burrow to be eradicated, an enemy soldier, burrowed in a building, must also be pulled from his hiding place to be eliminated.

Normally, he will not come out without a fight.

The attacker must go in and dig him out.” Major Christmas would win a Navy Cross for “exsummer 2014, issue 1

traordinary heroism” during the Battle of Hue.

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oward Chernikoff a sailor of the USS Reclaimer, wouldn’t arrive in Hue until September of the next year. From his vantage point on the ship deck his disillusionment with the mission grew as the war progressed. He had enlisted as a junior in high school because he wanted to avoid the draft and hoped to be based close to home in New London, Connecticut.

Despite promises to the contrary, he was stationed in Pearl Harbor and then sent off on a ship to Vietnam. “You do things for your country that you don’t want to do,” he said.

Eventually Chernikoff’s work with VVAW petered off, but he continued trying to wrestle with his wartime experience. “That’s how I put a lot of stuff behind me, but I wouldn’t do it again. I’ve learned to do things in ways that are more practical, more effective,” he explained.

After the war Chernikoff went to college to major in political science with a minor in South East Asian Studies and then got a job at the Connecticut Department of Labor as a Veterans Employment Representative. Now retired, in his free time, Chernikoff attends lectures on South East Asia at a local university and teaches himself Vietnamese. He’s proud of his status as a veteran and still walks around with his be-

longings in a patch-covered bag, his “flag bag” as he calls it, with the Vietnamese flag sown onto it. It saddens him that children can no longer identify the flag when he points it out to them. “Children are going to grow up to be the future leaders, but they’re just not taught this stuff,” he said. “They cover the whole war, in what—one or two pages of a lesson plan?”

In 1987 he made his first trip back to Vietnam as a civilian and has been back seven more times since. “I don’t care for their government, but I don’t care much for ours either,” he said. Many of his fellow veterans have done the same—visiting old battle sites, “adopting” Vietnamese families, and taking part in volunteer projects like building schools. It was through a network of other veterans that he first heard about the New Haven Sister City project.

“Sister Cities are formal relationships between people in two different international cities, sanctioned by their respective governments.

The idea was first developed by the Eisenhower administration as a peace initiative. War, or so the thinking went, would be impossible if the citizens of different countries understood each other better. Empathy would prevent hate.

In the early 1990s, certain members of the New Haven community began to push for a Sister City relationship with a place in Vietnam.

vietnam 31 “The Prime Minister of Vietnam gives foreign relationships with cities in Japan, South Korea, affairs direction, and he said he wanted Vietnam France, and Hawaii. “Honolulu got USAID to be a friend to every city, especially American funding for Hue—you can tell your city hall cities, so we went forward with it,” explained about that,” said Nhien. Others in Hue, includPhan Van Hai, current vice director of the Hue ing the former mayor Le Van Anh, envision a City Center for International Cooperation more mutually beneficial relationship. “In the (HueFO). “The year 1968 was a big loss for the past, Vietnam was a very poor country, and we received a lot of humanitaricity,” he said. “We wanted to an assistance, but in the last heal.” five years especially we’ve Hue city officials had He still walks developed to a point where other reasons to establish the relationship can really ties to the United States. around with his benefit both sides,” he said.

They were looking for belongings in a humanitarian assistance projects and hoped New nh remembers one mopatch-covered bag, Haven might consider fundment from his trip to his “flag bag” as ing them. Nguyen Nhien, New Haven in 1995: “When former director of HueFO, in the city, there he calls it, with the Iwasarrived remembers a visit he took to a nice meeting with Vietnamese flag the U.S.: “I went to America local people. An old lady and saw the development came up to me and gave me sewn onto it. It with my own eyes. We have a portrait and statue of Ho saddens him that a lot to learn from each othChi Minh. She said her huser. If I can be from the war band had made them while children can no generation and still support he was stationed in Vietlonger identify the nam in 1967, and when he cooperation, so can everyone else.” For a while, the she promised him she flag when he points died New Haven side of the partwould find a way to return it out to them. nership did assist the Vietit to Vietnam where he felt namese monetarily. One it belonged.” Anh put it in a year the group sent over museum so that other peocomputers, another they ple could reflect on the “love sent over medical supplies. and consideration” that is possible between the But unlike in Hue where the city’s govern- two peoples, despite the conflict that nearly dement was fully invested in the success of the Sis- stroyed his city. ter City project, the New Haven side was run Although he wishes the relationship were still by a non-profit with no more active, Chernikoff municipal funds. When thinks the feelings Anh the mayor of Hue the described are still there, U.S., New Haven’s mayeven among U.S. veteror welcomed him with a ans. In that sense he feels pizza party in City Hall. the Sister City project When the New Haven accomplished its goals. delegation visited Hue “We did what our govon the mayor’s behalf, ernments told us to do,” they were given a full he said. “When I visit welcome ceremony. Due Vietnam and meet veterlargely to the disorganians there, we don’t talk zation on the U.S. side, about the war. We talk the relationship has fallabout family. I didn’t like en into neglect. Accordshooting at people, but ing to Nhien, HueFO you do what you have to received “no response do. Harboring resentfrom New Haven when ment only causes ulcers, they were invited to the annual Hue cultural and I have no intention of getting ulcers.” festival” in 2012.

Other cities, including ones in the U.S., Elizabeth Villareal ‘16 is a History major in did end up establishing more long-term partSilliman College. Contact her at elizabeth. nerships with Hue. Hue now has sister city villareal@yale.edu.

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The members of the group were varied—one was a Vietnamese-American medical student, several were veterans like Chernikoff, and others activists—but they all believed the time was right to start healing the relationship between the people of the two countries, even if the governments weren’t ready. After a period of lobbying, in 1994—a full year before the U.S. reestablished formal diplomatic ties to Vietnam—New Haven, Connecticut and Hue, Vietnam became the first Sister City pair between the two countries.

For both the mayors of the respective cities and the people that pushed for the change, the decision was far from politically easy. The memory of the war still loomed large over the project.

Chernikoff remembers some of his fellow veterans confronting him and asking him questions like, “How could you do that?” They argued that the time for reconciliation wasn’t right until at a bare minimum all of the prisoners of war and soldiers deemed missing in action were accounted for, but Chernikoff thought differently. “I’d learned to put the war behind me; some others couldn’t,” he said.

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n Hue, popular opinion was also divided on the issue, but strong support from Vietnamese policymakers helped drive the plan forward.

www.tyglobalist.org

32 vietnam

W

hen visitors travel down the city of Da Nang’s newly-paved, fourlane boulevard, Vo Nguyen Gian Drive, some say they feel as though they are moving between two disparate nations. On the left side of the road, one can see a string of exclusive five-star resorts and million dollar villas aligning a pristine coastline. Seated on the southerly curve of a vast bay, Da Nang offers a breathtaking vista that would satisfy tourists with even the most discriminating taste. But, twenty-foot walls separate the Hyatt Regency, Fusion Maia Resort, and other luxurious destinations from an entirely different urban scene.

On the right side of Vo Nguyen Gian Drive, tin-shacks and odd patches of vegetation dot the predominantly empty land plots. Central Vietnam’s most recognizable city has used its underdeveloped shoreline to carve out a permanent place on the world tourism map, but Da Nang’s economic development journey has not come without severe bumps along the road.

Throughout the Vietnam War, both the South Vietnamese and United States air forces used Da Nang as a major military base. This base was thought to be one of the busiest in the world at the time, conducting more traffic operations daily than any other airport. By the early 1980s, the U.S.’s wartime assistance in the prior decade had helped Da Nang greatly expand its harbor facilities, turning the city into one of Vietnam’s most modern and largest ports. And despite the significant toll that the Vietnam War did have on the region, the costs of wartime devastation would ultimately pale in comparison to the effects of postwar reconstruction. In the 1980s, globalization and neoliberalism swept the developing world, reaching Vietnam and Da Nang in the 1990s.

During a time when television started to enter the homes of millions and the modern Internet first broke ground, Da Nang’s provincial government began to eagerly pursue foreign direct investment (FDI) and spearhead infrastructural developments. As of mid-2011, 214 FDI projects, with an estimated net value of $3.5 billion, have set up shop in Da Nang.

These projects have helped transform Da Nang from a city known for its hostility to foreigners into a popular vacation destination for foreign celebrities and high-level executives alike.

(Nitika Khaitan/TYG).

“As the central city of Vietnam, Da Nang has limitless land resources,” said Hoi Mai, a leading representative for Da Nang’s Institute for Socio-Economic Development (ISED), a government agency dedicated to building economically lucrative projects across the city. “The build-up of more and more of these hotels is very positive for economic growth.” Indeed, Da Nang’s boasts a staggering annual city GDP growth rate of 13% and, as of 2013, a 4.45% unemployment rate— lower than all other major cities in the country.

But, as anticipated, the redevelopment of the areas along Da Nang’s sought-after shoreline, across the river from the city center, has also led to the demolition of entire blocks and communities to create space for new roads, hotels, and luxury villas. The groomed resorts have privatized several miles of the city’s most desired beaches—an unpopular change in the eyes of many citizens. City officials hope these hotels will bring publicity, foreigners, global companies, jobs, and, ultimately, sustained economic growth, yet they also admit that the tourism industry’s rise has hurt income inequality citywide.

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ourists can certainly drive the Da Nang’s economy for now, but it remains to be seen whether the city can continue to prosper if it relies so heavily on this one economic arena.

Soon, there won’t be more space to build resorts along the coast, and the industry could lose its momentum. As Da Nang’s city planners seek out opportunities for economic diversification, might they also focus on promoting much-needed inclusive growth? In other words, can the city foster economic development in a way that fosters equality and focuses on the needs of those residents currently living in tin shacks, closing — not widening — the income gap.

The empty land between the city center and the resorts has already been sold to investors and could be used for housing for city residents, according to Dr. Ho Ky Minh, director of Da Nang’s Institute for Social-Economic Development (ISED), a government agency dedicated to building economically lucrative projects across the city. He also believes that service and logistic sectors could overtake tourism, adding that Da Nang plans to create an Information Technology (IT) Park to attract investors in this arena and champion the city as the center

of Vietnam’s burgeoning IT sector. In addition to IT, Minh said Da Nang’s two largest export industries, fishing and clothing, could make significant strides if the U.S. can effectively negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a trade agreement being worked out between 11 countries throughout the Asia-Pacific Region, including Vietnam, that focuses on opening up these countries to new markets worldwide.

“If the TPP were passed, we could see Da Nang becoming a center for processing and exporting seafood,” said Hoi Mai, a leading representative for ISED. “This could give us access to some of the fastest growing markets in the world.”

Even if Da Nang developers chose to pursue these strategies to confront the city’s pronounced lack of economic diversification, they will still need to address a myriad of related concerns, from faulty municipal infrastructure to widely reported discrimination in hiring decisions.

Many Da Nang residents told the Globalist that, even though tourism has offered more job opportunities, those closest to government officials typically have better access to jobs, creating additional ripples within the city’s social fabric. Furthermore, the assumption that tourism would bring more foreigners who would spend more money on poverty tours has not seemed to hold true.

The luxury hotels and $2 million villas have also provoked a citywide identity crisis. Just a few tin shacks, some one-story stone buildings, dilapidated storefronts, and a few fields of weeds remain as remnants of Da Nang’s old fishing communities. A mile of empty land plots divides the city into a metropolis of fivestar resorts and a prototypical Vietnamese city center boasting fruit vendors and banh mi stands. The newly-paved, four-lane avenue and painted brick wall further separate the luxurious hotels from the rest of the city.

To address these concerns, Hoi Mai and other members of Da Nang’s ISED believe that city planners must prioritize urbanization projects. City officials hope that these projects will integrate the city’s population, spark growth across income levels, and mitigate the current levels of inequality. The long avenue of resorts, flying the flags of many developed nations, remains undoubtedly the face of Da Nang’s services-oriented development strategy, which has

vietnam 33

catapulted the city’s GDP in the last decade. But, while recognizing that the city will continue to follow this internationally focused strategy, government officials have simultaneously devoted significant resources towards improving Da Nang’s technical infrastructure. This includes improving access to basic services like electricity, water, and public transportation. According to Mai, the government has begun to draft plans for a Bus-Rapid Transit (BRT) system and a wastewater treatment plan. Mai and her colleagues added that an urban underground rail could also be in the cards — plans that ostensibly would improve Da Nang citizens’ lives but could be five or more years from completion.

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hile many Da Nang citizens have expressed concern over the burgeoning tourism sector and its rippling effects throughout society, Lien Le, a current Los Angeles resident who left Da Nang 15 years ago, has been steadfast in her positive feelings towards the one-track economic development strategy. Le loved the city when she grew up there, but says

the hotels “have helped the city so much.”

“It’s brought an unprecedented amount of revenue to the city,” Le said.

“Most people could not even tell you what region of the world Da Nang was before 2000. That’s completely changed now.”

Located in the heart of a central Vietnam region ripe with economic potential, Da Nang is positioned to be a critical transit and transport hub, a gateway to the sea and the Central Highland provinces, and the banking and industrial center of Vietnam.

Hoi Mai went so far as to call Da Nang the next Seoul [South Korea] in terms of economic progress. “We are striving to become Seoul economically, and Portland [Oregon] socially,” Minh agreed. But, Portland’s urban center does not pose a juxtaposition of vast beach resorts and corrugated tin shack towns. If Da Nang wants to attain anything

Along the Shoreline

The Promise and Perils of Da Nang’s One-Track Economic Development Strategy

BY JR REED

close to Portland’s s o c i a l progress, however, much work still needs to be done. The manicured oceanside resorts lining Vo Nguyen Gian Drive stand as visual testaments to Da Nang’s economic potential — a potential comparable to that of Seoul. But their corrugated counterparts on the interior suggest that addressing the city’s social divides will amount to a far more daunting challenge.

J.R. Reed ‘16 is an Economics and Political Science double major in Silliman College. Contact him at jonathan.t.reed@ yale.edu.

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Held Up The U.S. moratorium on Vietnamese adoptions might just be the children it is meant to protect

BY HANNAH SHWARZ

An orphanage in Hoi An, Vietnam. (Photo courtesy: Flickr user Satbir Singh).

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im Nguyen and Don Pham are stuck.

Thousands of miles away from the United States, and they’re still bound by the country’s laws. Yes, they do have to file taxes in both countries, but that’s not what’s bothering them. They want to adopt a Vietnamese child, but the United States says they’re not allowed. As we share brunch in a sweltering Vietnamese restaurant, they explain.

Though Pham and Nguyen are husband and wife, the law treats them differently. Only Nguyen is legally allowed to adopt a child in Vietnam because, unlike Pham, she holds Vietnamese citizenship — Nguyen also holds citizenship from Canada and the U.S.; Pham is only an American citizen. Nguyen and Pham both grew up and attended college in the U.S, and moved to Vietnam a few years ago. But because of U.S. laws, Pham, as solely an American citizen, would not be able to join the adoption.

If Nguyen were to adopt, her child would not legally be Pham’s.

Also frustrating is the fact that, had they adopted a child before 2006, they would not be facing this dilemma. Nor would hundreds of other couples — couples who desperately want to become parents, and who, until recently, were planning on turning to Vietnam to fulfill their dreams.

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rom late 2007 to early 2008, the U.S. State Department uncovered evidence that some

summer 2014, issue 1

Vietnamese adoption agencies had placed children — whose parents had not voluntarily relinquished custody — in foreign homes. Some child launderers convinced mothers who were financially desperate to exchange their children for money. Others simply kidnapped the children.

On September 1, 2008, the State Department responded by placing a moratorium on all U.S. adoptions from Vietnam. U.S. officials would go on to disrupt multiple adoptions initiated, but not completed, before September, which meant that some parents would likely never be able to bring home the children they had spent the last months and years preparing to adopt.

The situation was heated and messy already, but then in February of 2011, Michael Michalak, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, stepped down for reasons unrelated to the moratorium. President Obama nominated then deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Shear, who supported the moratorium, a stance that would complicate his confirmation. Parents in the midst of adopting Vietnamese children — parents whose adoptions were being held up and would likely be disrupted by the moratorium — decided to do everything they could to keep Shear out of the position. They wrote to their senators and asked them not to allow his confirmation to come to a vote.

Ultimately, three senators, all Democrats who usually supported Obama’s policy agenda, listened to the pleas and held up the confirmation for three months. It may have been a victory, but it was short-lived.

Now, six years after the moratorium was first implemented and three years after the hold-up of Shear’s confirmation, the policy still stands.

Based on data from 2006 to 2009, during which a final 2,200 American adoptions from Vietnam occurred, the moratorium thus far has meant roughly another 2,200 children who potentially would have been adopted but were not.

Pham doesn’t hesitate to give me his thoughts about Shear or about the moratorium.

He said he has gone to the Ambassador multiple times to explain his own situation and urge him to take action. But nothing has changed for Nguyen and Pham, because nothing has changed with the moratorium.

“I could be the test case,” Pham joked about a hypothetical legal case. But then, he points out, a whole slew of issues, mostly unrelated to the important legal one, would come up. Where would the case be adjudicated? And what about the legal fees? “I don’t want to be [the test case].”

The moratorium’s personal impact frustrates Nguyen and Pham, but so too does the logic behind it.

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hile the very nature of child laundering makes it difficult to track, even the most

vietnam 35

A young boy eating lunch at the Khai Tri Orphanage (Courtesy Flickr user Dirk Tussing).

liberal estimates of how many Vietnamese children have been trafficked pale in comparison to the number of children who might have been adopted during the course of the moratorium.

And even if the number of children who have been trafficked is somewhat higher than most estimates, “is it enough to shut down international adoptions?” Pham asked me rhetorically.

“No.” “That’s a kid’s childhood,” Nguyen chimed in. “Once they’re past the age of five, the chances of their being adopted significantly decrease.”

Pham and Nguyen’s comments point to a fundamental tension in foreign policy decision-making those who disproportionately suffer the consequences are rarely those who have made the decisions. When the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Iran in reaction to the nation’s alleged nuclear weapons program, it affected millions of poor Iranians. When the U.S. slapped similar sanctions on Uganda this year for the country’s severe anti-gay laws, few protested, even though it is one of the world’s poorest nations. There is a similar layer of irony to the moratorium put on Vietnam — it is meant to help the very children it may be hurting.

Although the U.S. has yet to lift its ban, Vietnam has implemented a slew of new adoption and child protection policies in the last few years. In 2011, the government ratified the Hague Adoption Convention, establishing stricter international standards for inter-country

adoptions. Since then, it has increased centralization of its adoption services; made it illegal for adoption agencies to pay Social Protection Centers (SPCs), which house orphans; and, in coordination with USAID, piloted a program to increase the number of special needs children who are adopted. So why hasn’t the U.S. lifted its moratorium?

Those who disproportionately suffer the consequences are rarely those who have made the decisions.

According to Vijaya Raman and Nguyen Ha, legal specialists in the Child Protection Unit of UNICEF Vietnam, who emphasized that they could not comment on the rationale of any nation’s policy decisions, the U.S. may simply want to ensure that, in the slow-moving policy world, the laws are doing what they are supposed to do. Six other nations are still waiting before they lift their moratoria, Raman noted, and they want to know that they are on sure policy footing before doing so. “Three years in

the policy world is a fairly short period of time,” he said. “I suspect [the U.S. not lifting its ban] is about making sure the [Vietnamese] system is strong enough to cope” — to actually successfully implement all these changes.

And though Vietnam has made significant progress in a very short time, he said, five years after the policies were first implemented, it has become evident that gaps remain. There are, for instance, stories that in order to circumvent the new laws banning monetary payments to social protection centers (SPCs), government-run, centralized agencies that take care of particularly vulnerable populations, like orphans, the elderly, and the disabled, adoption agencies have begun in-kind payments instead, Ha said. And although those are only anecdotes, Raman said it is suspicious that certain adoption agencies have much higher rates of picking up children from SPCs than others do.

Still, the types of abuse that inspired the moratorium have significantly decreased. Before adoption reform legislation, adoption agencies often paid SPCs large sums for the most desirable children. The practice in itself was disgusting, but it also had other negative consequences. With multiple adoption agencies vying for kids, prices went up. It was Adam Smith’s invisible hand working its power on human infants. Second, only the most desirable children—that is, healthy, beautiful children without disabilities—made the cut. Agencies www.tyglobalist.org

36 vietnam ily in England, her adoption was never spoken about in a positive way. She was never called by her name, only “devil’s child.” They hit her, but never their other children, also adopted, because “they conformed to Christianity,” she said.

Most parents who adopt have no understanding of where their child is coming from, she said. They don’t understand the food, the culture, or the history. And, oftentimes, their adopted child enters the home speaking a language that they do not. She gave an example: when Angelina Jolie adopted her son Pax from Vietnam, he left speaking Vietnamese. When she took him back recently to see his father, he had forgotten it — he was no longer able to communicate with his biological father.

A Lockheed C-5 Galaxy was one of many aircrafts involved in Operation Babylift. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). were unwilling to pay for children they did not think their customers would want, so those with disabilities, including Vietnam’s many victims of Agent Orange, were rarely given a chance.

In order to combat the problem, the Vietnamese government has coordinated with the U.S. to exclusively allow adoptions of children with disabilities, starting in September 2014.

Because Vietnam previously lacked a centralized adoption system, they have made one data system to track all orphans and adoptees, which includes information about the provinces they came from and the countries into which they have been placed. And, in an effort to humanize a difficult to navigate and often bureaucratic system, they are now creating a cadre of social workers who can guide women through the difficult decision of keeping or putting a child up for adoption.

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he nation’s adoption system may be improving, adding safeguards to prevent trafficking and exploitation, but questions remain about the children who are left behind — in orphanages, often for years on end. According to Phillippa*, who runs a small, family-oriented orphanage in Vietnam, the nation’s orphanage system is particularly bad.

When she first brought children to her orphanage in December 2010, they gulped down food — in their old orphanages, food was taken away from them if they didn’t finish it quickly enough. They tucked their legs up under their chairs, their calves glued to the bottom of the seats: before, feet on the floor meant legs smacked by a large wooden stick. It took Phillippa months to get them out of the habits.

Her philosophy about what orphanages should be stands in stark contrast to what they are. She thinks they should be modeled summer 2014, issue 1

after home environments: small, with everyone sitting down for a family dinner every night.

She is fiercely protective of her children — she wouldn’t let me visit her orphanage — so much so that she did all the work, cooking, cleaning, and scrubbing, the first year because she didn’t want anyone who she hadn’t comprehensively screened working with her kids. Now, she has a couple of helpers in the house, but until you’ve gone through a background check and been cross-referenced, “there is no guarantee that you’ll see my kids,” she said.

Phillippa’s reasons for founding an orphanage harken back to Pham and Nguyen’s discussion about inter-country adoption. The entire debate around the U.S. moratorium rests on the assumption that legal inter-country adoption (no money on the table, children whose parents have truly given them up or have passed away) is a net positive. But not everyone, Phillippa included, believes that. Out-of-country adoptions are, on balance, worse for children than most other situations, she told me.

She speaks from personal experience. Phillippa is half Vietnamese, half African-American. Her biological father was likely a G.I. in Vietnam; in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a good number of mixed-race babies were born from Vietnamese mothers. In 1972, she was flown out of her home country with the help of the British Embassy. Phillippa described the undertaking as a precursor to “Operation Babylift,” a joint mission between the U.K., the U.S., France, and Canada that, from April 3 - 26, 1975, flew 3,300 Vietnamese children from Vietnam to one of the four Western countries.

The whole system was like a lottery, Phillippa explained. You either got a great family, or you didn’t. “My lottery ticket was the bogus ticket,” she said. Sent to an extremely religious fam-

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doption advocates expected that the U.S. would lift its moratorium in 2012, the year it was set to expire. But instead, on February 1, 2012, the Department issued a notice stating that it would be keeping the moratorium in place even as the Hague Convention went into effect in Vietnam.

“Despite Vietnam’s initiatives to strengthen its child welfare system and ensure the integrity of its domestic and international adoption process, it does not yet have a fully Hague consistent process in place,” the Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs declared. “[I]mportant steps must still take place before inter-country adoptions between the United States and Vietnam resume.” The notice did not specify what exact steps Vietnam would be expected to take.

Though the moratorium still stands, the State Department’s decision to allow American citizens to begin adopting special needs children may change that. The success of the pilot program will indicate whether the government should move forward and allow all adoptions, Viajaya Raman explained. The program also serves another purpose: refocusing on what matters most — the children.

“In the past, the scale has been a bit off-kilter,” Raman said. “All of the reforms are about returning to a place where the best interest of the child takes precedent.” But to prospective parents like Nguyen and Pham, that means more than the State Department pressuring Vietnam to improve its laws — it requires lifting the moratorium itself. For now, they wait. * Name has been changed to protect the source’s identity.

Hannah Schwarz ’16 is a Political Science major in Silliman College. Contact her at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu.

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n a street corner in Hanoi is a café that people call Cong. The door into Cong is dark under the shade of a ripped awning. Both are the same shade of military green.

On the door is a square plank spray-painted red with a yellow star. Cong means communism.

Inside, the ceiling is domed. It curves in the same way as the inside of a bunker. The walls are a white brick. On the wall opposite the front door is a large poster of three children, each in a soldier’s uniform. The three stand in a neat line and smile. They salute the Communist sickle, which, in the painting’s scale, is larger than all of them. The poster is lit by a single bulb on a thin wire. There is hardly enough light from the street to keep the rest of the room out of the dark.

Hanoi is a city with six and a half million people, two hundred and nineteen intersections, half a dozen cars, a hellacious infinity of motorbikes, a handful of sidewalks, a curb that is no more than a bump in the road, and hardly any traffic lights.

When you first walk in, Cong is quiet compared to the rest of the city, but it seems to get louder, the longer you stay. Everyone tries to talk over the music and over all the other people who are trying to talk over the music. People smoke.

I was there to try a cup of coffee. You probably have never had a cup of coffee from Vietnam.

This is odd, because Vietnam is second only to

Taste Test An exploration of Vietnam’s cafe culture

BY HAYLEY BYRNES

www.tyglobalist.org

(Nitika Khaitan/TYG).

38 vietnam Brazil as the largest exporter of coffee beans in the world. If you have had a cup of coffee from Vietnam, you likely had it while sitting Indian-style on the crusty comforter of a motel whose rooms smelled just a little too strongly of ammonium. Otherwise put, that night you’d like to forget.

The reason for this is simple. Farmers in South America and the world over grow Arabica, the type of bean often called “high-quality,” while the Vietnamese grow Robusta, used in instant coffee and the like. Robusta is said to be more caffeinated and more bitter. When I first tried it, I had precisely the opposite impression. It looks darker, nearly velvet-black, and swallows more like an oily chocolate than a woody French Roast. Often, a clunk of condensed milk cuts the velvet to a starchy shade of brown. Spilled over ice, the drink is sugary, strange, and a distinct Asian splendor.

There is some anxiety to my calling it “coffee” at all. I imagine the label comes from indisputable biological fact rather than any similarity in taste. My barista at Cong Caphe, a woman named Chu Thanh Ha, sold its bitterness with a bitter smile. She called the coffee strong, not bitter, and not just strong, but stronger: perhaps even the strongest, she said, with a strength that cannot be found even from the Italians’ espresso.

She talked about the café the way some talk about a scrimmage. She said Cong takes care to sell the best quality beans, and that for this reason, the café appealed to serious coffee drinkers. She called these people the “very strict” ones, and said that often meant artists and only the foreigners who want a traditional cup of “real” Vietnamese coffee.

Cong was one infinitesimal slice of the city’s offerings, the breadth of which is a testament to the outer limits of whimsy. Variations spun like pinwheels: there were chains,

(Photo courtesy Flickr user Ben K Adams). summer 2014, issue 1

some American, some home grown, several tour guide joints that slapped raw egg on iced coffee in a fit of regional specialty, expat cafés, cat cafés, dating cafés, Twitter cafés, cafés without names and only an awning or a street corner and a smoke-circle of old men and clinking cups. An infinite series of firsts.

My favorite café is on a fourth-floor rooftop, over and above dishwashers and mattresses, wrestling children, broken bottles, bathrooms without toilet paper and a smelly sink. It was the only one I went to more than once when I was in the city.

S

aigon was different. There were proper lawns, pearled women, boulevards, potted palms, and a relative, if never absolute, sense of order. The air was softer.

On my first day there, I got lost. Walking to a Starbucks, the country’s first, not three blocks from the hotel, I pitched a hairpin turn and ended up a block off, then two. I was a mile out when I found a second Starbucks (Saigon has several) and ducked inside, the topaz afternoons from the week prior having given way to a punctual three o’clock thunder.

A woman greeted me with a corporate smile and introduced herself as Lucy, the manager.

Lucy the manager started to talk about how much she loves the company and how she hopes to keep working there for years to come. I began to regret telling her that I was American: she would not stop smiling about the whole business.

I asked Lucy if she found it strange to look out at the country’s communist flag, which hung limp in the plaza’s center. If it ever felt odd to work for a paragon, if ever there was one, of Western capitalism in a communist country. She stared, unblinking.

“That is just our flag,” she said.

I try to figure it out, this confusion. Lucy had

worked at coffee shops all her life. She had started at a café like Cong, small and fiercely domestic, but applied to Starbucks when news spread that American companies gave reliable health coverage. Her old boss refused to offer Lucy anything, and this, along with the hazy labor violations to which she alluded in passing, was enough.

When I asked another barista at a different Starbucks, the one I had planned to find all along, he said nearly the same. Once again there was a flag just outside the window, and once again I pointed and asked him what he thought about it. I couldn’t think of a more foolish question, he seemed to say. In fact, he nodded and said, “Yes, that is our flag.”

It was just as well. When you travel, you ask the same question, again and again, when you confront the very-first of a thing: what is that? To me, the traveler, it is a flag of Vietnam hung outside is an emblem is a symbol is a tattered break for revolution is a paragon is a—well, is a flag, hanging limp.

M

y first Friday night in Hanoi, I found myself in a crowded bar with a bunch of expats. Four balding Vietnamese men stood on a stage and played American rock. They rarely spoke in English, slurring the words into hums. I couldn’t recognize a single song.

No sooner had I settled to sip my drink than I realized that this—the cool menthol, fleshy limbs, bobbing out-of-tune guitars, the baby plopped on a motorbike outside—was absurd.

None of it made any sense. No one seemed to notice when I folded my arms and lay my head on a cool patch of the table’s wood. My eyes shut to the red light as it warmed my cheeks.

Hayley Byrnes ‘16 is an English major in Silliman College. You can reach her at hayley. byrnes@yale.edu.

(Photo courtesy Flickr user Ben K Adams).

vietnam 39

One Thread at a Time Indigenous Women & Textile Arts in Guatemala A PHOTO ESSAY BY DIANNE LAKE

B

ackstrap weaving is a beautiful and meticulous art form that has its roots in ancient civilizations around the world.

This weaving method is used to produce both simple and complex textiles often decorated with intricate patterns, and indigenous peoples in various countries continue to weave using this technique today.

Guatemalan women of all ages wear huipiles, a traditional garment worn by indigenous women throughout Central America.

Each huipil is handmade with detailed embroidery. In Mayan culture these specific styles and designs identify the community to which the wearer belongs.

For many women in Guatemala, weaving is a way of life and an integral part of the cultural and socioeconomic makeup of their families and communities.

After the Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, women quickly became the support systems of their families and

villages. The Association of Women for Artisan Development in Backstrap Loom Weaving, or Trama Textiles, arose in order to provide women with an opportunity to earn an income.

Female weavers now play a significant role national workforce as a whole.

Today, Trama Textiles is flourishing.

The collective works directly with 17 weaving cooperatives, representing 400 women from five regions in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Trama aims to create work for fair wages for the women of Guatemala, support their families and communities, and most importantly preserve and develop cultural traditions through the maintenance of textile arts and histories.

The women that contribute to Trama weave in a variety of styles, celebrating the unique Mayan traditions of all their different villages.

Trama Textiles’ president, Amparo de Leon de Rubio has been backstrap weaving since she was young. Although she initially began weaving for economic reasons, she has

fallen in love with the art. Everyday Amparo works alongside students, usually people who have never woven before, and guides them as they meticulously weave for the first time. Her patience and care extend to all of the students and volunteers at Trama.

For many weavers, the feeling of accomplishment and pride in their art fuels them through the long hours. Whereas textiles and clothing are one of Guatemala’s largest industries, the majority of textiles exported are for American and Asian consumers, making it difficult for indigenous weavers creating traditional fabrics to expand their markets. Guatemalan weavers can struggle to feel economically secure in an area of work that so easily fluctuates, but organizations like Trama are slowly carving out new spaces for indigenous art and culture to thrive.

Dianne Lake ‘16 is in Ezra Stiles College.

Contact her at dianne.lake@yale.edu.

40 photo essay

ABOVE, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT La Escuela de Tejer - The Weaving School; Colors in the Wind - Guatemalan textiles are some of the most beautiful in the world and are well known for the rich colors of their naturally dyed thread; Different Communities, Different Styles - An exhibit in Trama Textiles showcases the different styles of different Mayan communities.

BELOW Time and Patience - A weaving student is working on a fully embroidered huipil. She has been working on this piece for the past two years.

summer 2014, issue 1

photo essay 41

ABOVE Ampar Counting Threads -Trama Textiles’ president, Amparo de Leon de Rubio, meticulously sets up a loom by counting and grouping threads.

BELOW, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT The San Francisco El Alto Market - This vibrant textile market fills the entire urban area of San Francisco El Alto; The Huipil - Mayan women young and old wear huipils; The Finishing Touches - Oralia finishes up a scarf by tying knots on the ends in order to keep it neat and protect it from unraveling. This is the moment when hours of labor finally culminate into a piece of work that the weaver can be proud of.

www.tyglobalist.org

42 vietnam

RUSSIA RESURGENT Students’ and faculty’s voices on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and its implications for U.S.-Russian relations.

vietnam 43

I

t was six o’clock in the morning, and the first rays of sunlight were slowly dispersing across six students huddled around a battered, paint-stained radio. A brief crackle of static sliced through the room.

“We were all nervous: was this going to be the moment President Putin declared Russia was at war?” Fran Palmer, one of the students, vividly recalled.

The day before, President Putin had pledged to employ military force against Ukraine if President Viktor Yanukovych did not withdraw Ukrainian troops from the Crimea by six o’ clock the following morning. Though Fran had woken early with her housemates to hear the consequences of the President’s threat, nothing happened. “The president continued to deny Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine, and the Russian people continued with their day-to-day lives,” she said.

When Russia first came into conflict with Ukraine in February 2014, Fran was six months into a yearlong study abroad program in St Petersburg. That month, soldiers in unmarked uniforms took control of the Crimea. Western analysts referred to the unidentified men as Russian Special Forces; President Putin, eager to keep Russian military involvement clandestine, remained silent.

In late 2013, the Kremlin had warned President Yanukovych that a free trade agreement with the European

Union would void the bilateral treaty delineating the border between their two countries, implying the possibility of hostility if the agreement passed.

Thomas Graham, a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and an advisor to the U.S. National Security Council, the State Department, and senior officials of the Kremlin, believes he has not met a Russian in the Kremlin “who does not deeply believe that the Crimea is sacred Russian territory and rightfully belongs inside the Russian Federation.” Pro-Russian ac-

tivists in Ukraine reinforced the Kremlin’s sanction and prematurely ousted Yanukovych from government, causing the country to descend into civil anarchy. It was not until a number of months later that Putin revised his defense and alleged Russia’s involvement was to provide security for ethnic Russians living in Crimea.

The Kremlin’s denial extended to the media.

“Local news bulletins rarely had reports on the conflict,” Fran said. When the conflict was covered in the news, local issues such as city crime and economic analyses conveniently obscured it. In order to keep up to date on the latest developments, Fran had to read Western media, such as the BBC. Pravda, a Russian media outlet, provided the most frequent coverage of the conflict, but the articles were only ever a synopsis—never extensive and never on the front page.

Fran discussed her observations with the professor of her mass media class, but the teacher immediately accused the Western media of over-emphasizing Russian involvement “She claimed the West was blowing the conflict out of proportion, and that Russia had only two objectives in relation to Ukraine: one, defend the humanitarian rights of Ethnic Russians living in Crimea; and two, preserve Russia’s international trade assets.” It seemed that as long as the

fraught situation did not affect citizens’ personal well being, the people of St Petersburg saw no reason to intervene.

The Russian students in Fran’s classes were similarly unprepared to discuss the conflict. On the morning President Putin was to enforce his threat of military intervention in Ukraine—the morning Fran and other international students sat around the radio, consumed by the day’s political resolutions—their Russian house-

mates slept soundly. Eight months later, with the United States and the United Kingdom threatening to intervene, it is likely that locals have begun to rethink their initial complacency.

Graham, who has spent thirty years trying to build constructive relations between the United States and Russia as a government official, was shocked by how “quickly and totally bilateral contacts were severed at the beginning of the crisis.” He found it “deeply disturbing that the demonization of Putin, itself a poor foundation for policy, has slowly transformed into the demonization of Russia as a whole.”

Fran grew increasingly conscious of her Western identity, but the escalation of the conflict incited the same indifference in her friends as it did in the tightly monitored media. Part of this may be because many Russians consider Ukraine an historical part of Russian territory and, therefore, the conflict to some extent natural.

To Fran, the silence manifested itself as a lack of interest. Even as international furor erupted over Russia’s actions, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine had little impact on her experience in St Petersburg. It simply was not a prevalent topic on Russia’s radar of social interaction. * Author’s note: Francesca Palmer, BA (Hons) Russian Studies at the University of Manchester, studied at the Benedict

School in St Petersburg from September of 2013 to June of 2014 Megan Toon ’16 is a Classics major in Trumbull College. She can be reached at megan. toon@yale.edu.

Neutrality on a Russian Frontier

BY MEGAN TOON

44 vietnam

Q&A with Thomas Graham

A noted Russia expert, Thomas Graham is a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia on the National Security Staff (NSC) from 2004 to 2007, as well as Director for Russian Affairs from 2002 to 2004. From 2001 until 2002, he was the Associate Director of the Policy Planning Staff.

BY HANNAH FLAUM TYG: Are there common misconceptions or misunderstandings about the state of the relationship between the US and Russia?

The fundamental problem is that there is a lack of expertise in the US about Russia, and you see that within the broader public as well.

During the Cold War, the US spent a lot of money in building up expertise about the Soviet Union both within many universities and with federal money. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union a generation ago, federal funding and interest in the academic … and think-tank world[s] shifted to understanding issues that would have a greater impact on national security. China, the broader Middle East, terrorism - all of those things have sucked up a lot of resources. Absolutely less went into the study of Russia and the former Soviet space, and that lack of expertise is reflective in some of the trouble we have in understanding what Russia is doing, why it approaches Ukraine in the way it does, why it has certain attitudes toward the US, and so forth.

TYG: Is it a mistake that funding has shifted toward China and the Middle East? Will funding move back toward studying Russia?

There will a bit more focus on Russia now because it has become a problem, but how much more is an open question because that depends on judgments of what you think R u s

summer 2014, issue 1

sia’s future is and how important it will be going forward. The money on China will remain there because the widespread perception is that China is going to be a rising power well into the 21st century. There is [also] a tremendous amount of interest now in the Middle East and the Arab World as the region is going through a historic transformation; there is the battle between traditionalism and modernism, Shias and Sunnis, and borders made during the colonial period that did not conform to the actual breakdown of political communities are under threat. There are big questions about where Russia will be as a country in generating power, projecting power, and impacting global affairs.

The only thing that can be said with confidence is that the territory is important because of the resources located there. It occupies the heart of Eurasia and borders all the important parts of the world and has vast natural resources that will be critical to economic growth. There will be a lot of attention focused on Russia’s ability to modernize, diversify its economy, and build an effective political organization that can mobilize the resources of Eurasia for national purposes.

TYG: Do you see being able to harness its resources effectively as the biggest challenge Russia faces in its future?

Well, it needs to harness [its resources] and it needs to build a competitive economy.

They need to have world-class education [and] health systems, and they need to reform the economy. There has to be some reform in the political system that will encourage the type of entrepreneurial skills, the flexibility, [and] the creativity that a country needs to be competitive economically in the 21st century.

TYG: Do you think that is something that they are capable of achieving in the near future?

In the near future, as in the next few years, no, but societies do change … They have developed a large number of programs that are designed to achieve these goals, but there is always the political issue of how you actually get that done given the distribution of power in any society as complex as Russia. You know how difficult it is to get anything done in the US … because of the nature of our system, the multiplicity of interest groups, and how Washington works. In Russia, the problem is that you have a very small elite and power and wealth are much more concentrated. [It] is that small group of individuals who will have to make sacrifices for the rest of the population to benefit.

TYG: Do you think that Europe should take the lead on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and what role, if any, should the US play?

The US needs to play a role … For the past 60 or 70 years, there has been a division of labor of sorts between the US and its European allies when dealing with the Soviet Union and Russia in which the US deals with broader strategic questions and Europe focuses on the narrower, trade issues. Ukraine, in many ways, is both a strategic question and a trade question. Secondly, the US has a set of interests in the outcome of the Ukraine crisis that do not necessarily overlap with European interests, so it is a mistake to delegate responsibility to resolving the crisis to Europe, and the US should be part of this mix in a significant way. The third point is that Russians believe the US is the driving force behind the authorities in Kiev and that we are calling a lot of the shots and setting policies. However, I do not believe that is true, but you have to deal with perceptions and, based on the conversations I have had and what I have read, Russians genuinely do believe this. If the Russians believe the US is a major factor in this, there must be a US-Russian conversation to ultimately resolve this crisis.

TYG: How do you see an effective communication between the US and Russia arising and being maintained?

Well, there used to be one. One of the things that is striking about the past six months is how rapidly the official contacts broke down. The Secretary of State talks with the Russian Foreign Minister and the presidents talk to one another from time to time, but you can’t manage a relationship unless there is a dense set of communica

vietnam 45 tions going on at other levels of the government.

TYG: Is this a perpetual problem that will always face the US and Russia or will it be overcome?

These things can always be overcome. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a period of intense contact and communication, but each side came to the relationship with radically different expectations, which is one of the reasons we have such disappointment with the overall relationship now. We are not condemned to having bad relations, but it will … always be a difficult relationship because of the two countries’ different traditions, political systems, and values. However, that does not preclude cooperation in areas that will advance the interests of both countries and it does not condemn us to strategic competition.

Pro-Ukrainian media have referred to the balaclava-clad unmarked soldiers carrying Russian mlitary equipment who spread throughout Crimea and Eastern Ukraine last spring as “little green men.” (The Speaker/Courtesy of Creative Commons).

TYG: If you were to give any advice to the current administration on dealing with Russia today and going forward, what would it be?

We’ve reached a different point; this isn’t 2000, and the first decade of the 21st century was a difficult one for the US. We are in a much weaker position now than we were 15 years ago. Russia still faces tremendous problems, but they went through a remarkable period of economic growth in the first decade of this century, so they are in a different place … There is no single overarching principle for our foreign policy and the problem we have in dealing with Russia is that we cannot make Russians the central threat anymore. We don’t have a relationship that is almost totally adversarial, as it was during the Cold War, and there are areas where we have overlapping interests and where we are going to have to cooperate with the Russians to solve problems.

If I were to give a bit of advice to the administration, it would be to open up the channels of communication with the Russians again, because you need to talk about ISIS, Ukraine, China, the Arctic, climate change, energy and so forth. But we also have to rethink what Russia is, what types of challenges and opportunities it presents to the US, and how we want to manage this relationship going forward. It is not so much a challenge solely for the Obama administration as it is for the American political establishment and its foreign policy community to begin the long and difficult process of rethinking America’s role in the world, specifically our relationship with Russia, and coming up with a set of policies that the next president can pursue with Russia to have a better chance of advancing our interest and moving away from dangerous confrontation.

Photographs at Kyiv’s Maidan square memorializing civilians kiled during the anti-Russian, pro-EU Euromaidan protests in February 2014 (George Layne/Courtesty of Creative Commons.)

Presidentents Obama and Putin meet atthe G20 Summit in Presidentents Obamainand Putin meet atthe G20 Summit of in Los Cabos, Mexico June 2010.

(Peter Souza/Courtey Los Cabos, Mexico in June 2010. (Peter Souza/Courtey of Creative Commons).

Creative Commons). www.tyglobalist.org

46 vietnam

A Passport to Safety

BY ANNA BARON

T

his past June in New York, I was asked on an application form if I would relinquish my Russian passport for a U.S. federal internship. Until this point, I had never really considered what the passport did for me. A quick Google search explains that a passport states a person’s identity, declares them a citizen, and allows them to travel under its protection. Synonyms: path, way, route.

I conjecture what the Russian definition for “passport” could be: a demand for a specific identity for its holder, a document certifying a citizen as one whose rights could be ignored, a restriction on the right to travel. Synonyms: borders, boundaries, detours. The Russian route is that of a land grab and a war started against a neighbor who used to be a cousin, but is now deemed a troublesome burden.

I think of my cousins, who moved from Russia to Ukraine after my great aunt Lyooda married a Ukrainian. Lyooda raised her children according to the Russian cultural traditions, singing them Russian songs, cooking them Russian food, and telling them Russian tales. There was never a conflict between their Russian cultural heritage and their Ukrainian geographical home. “That is, until Putin decided to start this war,” my cousin Alosha remarks. “He created tensions where there were none, dividing the people and inciting violence.”

Now, Alosha lives day-to-day in fear of the military draft, terrified of fighting a war he nev-

er wanted. “I just want to be there to raise my seven-year-old daughter in peace. I’ve never held a gun. What if I go there and die? What will it all be for?” Despite his terror of the draft, and despite his Russian cultural heritage, he vocalizes a firm defense of Ukraine’s right to exist. He does not feel that the violence Russia is inflicting can ever be justified, and would fight on the side of Ukraine if forced to do so. But mostly, he wants to go to work, pick his daughter up from school, take her on vacation to Crimea like he used to, and know that those things won’t be stolen from him at any given moment. He has never held a Russian passport, and certainly doesn’t wish to do so now. He doesn’t agree with the borders, the boundaries, and the detours such a passport implies. These days, he holds his Ukrainian passport a little tighter.

Alosha knows that a Russian passport compels its holders to sit safely behind tanks aimed at the rebels, and speak safely with all the self-assured certainty that the media’s regurgitated words provide. My parents’ old childhood friends sit at their computers in Russia and continuously re-post statuses proclaiming that the United States took the Malaysian plane that had allegedly disappeared in March, stuffing it with old corpses, all to embarrass Russia.

And despite all the Russian passport-holders who mechanically copy and paste such fictions, the government pays bloggers to comment and post such disinformation— just to be safe.

Today, I could be safely sitting in a kitchen in Moscow, and diligently, faithfully praising Putin with the variety of laudatory phrases taught to me in my textbooks, classrooms, and newspapers. I could be providing proof that America shot down MH17 back in July just to put blame on my beloved country.

Instead, I sit safely in my kitchen in New York. I don’t worry about military drafts or Russian troops showing up at my doorstep. I don’t worry that at any moment I could be asked to fight for a war I never wanted, or forced to give up a passport in exchange for one I don’t believe in. My eye falls on the bald eagle adorning the navy-colored booklet next to me, illuminating the words “United States of America”. It whispers of rights that it seeks to protect. In return for these rights, it asks me to hold up the added weight of its pages and the associated values inscribed within its sheets. The application form before me inquires: will I give up my physical tie to Russia? I look down at the Soviet red booklet emblazoned with the two-headed eagle. Before this passport can whisper anything to me, I put it aside and feel it begin to release its hold.

I pick up a pen and sign on the line.

Anna Baron ‘16 is a Political Science major in Branford College. Contact her at anna. baron@yale.edu.

A Russian visa (Courtesy Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski).

vietnam 47

I

(Images Courtesty Creative Commons)

On Bánh Mì & Blood Cashews H

uman Rights Watch calls them “blood cashews,” because the Vietnamese cashew processing industry raises so many ethical qualms. The world’s largest exporter of cashews, Vietnam exported approximately 261 thousand tons of cashews worth $1.7 billion in 2013. And the U.S. is the largest purchaser of Vietnamese cashews, buying nearly 35 percent of exports. But, many American cashew consumers do not realize that some of Vietnam’s cashews are processed in forced labor camps, which are euphemistically known as “centers for social education and labor” or “centers for post rehabilitation management.”

In Vietnam, government-run centers for the rehabilitation of drug users often require the inmates to engage in manual labor. An estimated 123 detention camps operated in Vietnam as of 201 and housed 40,000 inmates, although not all camps were involved in cashew processing.

In certain labor camps, however, detainees must work for eight hours a day, six days a week, manually processing cashews often at shelling the nuts at a rate of one cashew every six seconds.

Those involved earn well below the minimum wage and are exposed to numerous health hazards. Processing cashews by hand, which

involves removing the shells from the cashew kernels, releases poisonous substances that can cause allergies, rashes, and respiratory damage.

One detainee, Cua Lo, who spent two years in labor camps, reported to Human Rights Watch that “I would sometimes inhale the dust from the skins and that would make me cough. If the fluid from the hard outer husk got on your hands it made a burn.” However, processing cashews by hand in the labor camps is far cheaper than using expensive machinery to remove the shells. Thus some companies are believed to have their cashew processing done in the camps.

Even Vietnam’s largest cashew processor, Long Song J.S.C., is believed to be implicated.

While relatively little media coverage focuses on the issue of cashew processing specifically, the overall labor conditions in Vietnam’s detention facilities has been raised in discussions over Vietnam’s participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed free trade agreement. Perhaps, one day it will eventually be possible to enjoy cashews without a side of guilt.

Rachel Brown ‘15 is an Ethics, Politics, and Economics major in Saybtook College. Contact her at rachel.brown@yale.edu.

view all things fusion with a certain level of foodie disdain. Call me a purist, an old fashioned restaurateur, a rejecter of globalization, but Italian food and sushi were never meant to be served on the same table.

Banh Mi is the sole exception. It is the perfect sandwich, full of French and Vietnamese flavors that blend as perfectly as the architecture on the colorful streets of Hanoi.

Banh Mi stalls are on almost every street corner in Vietnam, identifiable immediately by the overflowing baskets of crispy baguettes that hang off the sides of the portable kitchen. When a customer approaches the stall in search of the perfect lunch, dinner, or mid-afternoon snack, the Banh Mi master immediately cracks an egg on the skillet, the hissing of the frying egg mixing with the infinitely satisfying crack of baguette as she cuts open a Vietnamese baguette - less chewy, more crumbly than the French variety – perfect for these sandwiches. The egg goes on one half of the bread, with some pickled vegetables and the distinctly Vietnamese sauces and spices on top. Then the choices begin: påté?

Pork? Chicken? Just an egg and vegetable classic? The whole shebang? Your choice, and you can’t go wrong. Just take a bite of your perfect sandwich, egg yolk mixing with pickled tang and creamy pâté, and for just that single second, you might forget the evils of imperialism.

Anna Russo ‘17 is in Berkeley College.

Contact her at anna.russo@yale.edu.