When I was in Hanoi in 2010, in the central districts as unrural as you can get in Vietnam, skinned dog carcasses were hanging at a number of markets. If westernization has had an impact, it must be more recent than that. I’m curious to go back and see for myself.
Are you suggesting that all non-Western countries civilians are living in fear for their life? This is a new level of ignorance. Even if you just meant Vietnam, believe or not, a lot of things have changed in the last few decades.
I've discussed this subject with Vietnamese, in Vietnamese, all over the country, including Hanoi. Anti-communist sentiment runs strong everywhere. People are smart enough to understand how much the communists have held back the development of their country.
As an American-born Vietnamese person, I'll provide context for other Western readers:
There is no real US substitute I can think of for experiencing living in Vietnam.
I grew up in NoVA, and would go on month-long summer trips to Vietnam with my family to visit relatives. My asian friends from China, India, and the Philippines would go on similar trips with their families too, so we would share stories and commiserate with each other. We joked with the Korean kids how they had it easy, and would tell the White kids how it's like the opposite of 'vacation'.
Living outside Hanoi with my relatives and seeing day-to-day life in Vietnam made me thankful for my Western lifestyle. I was used to the typical US suburban cushiness, and this was like bootcamp: no A/C, no American toilets (only squat ones), less reliable internet, widely varying food standards (having diarrhea in Florida-like weather is awful), and commonplace dirtiness and pollution (imagine NYC before the EPA but more widespread).
Even for me, there would be moments of culture shock seeing street food vendors selling field rats or shop owners dumping loose garbage into alleys. Things you would be shocked to see happen in the US without immediate reprimand and regulation are "just a part of life" in Vietnam. There is a huge cultural disconnect to hurdle between practices that are acceptable in Vietnam vs. the US.
Finally, there is the topic of education. For those asians who came from rural lifestyles not very long ago, education was not widely accessible or particularly advanced (e.g. college-level subject study), thus, many people did not grow up receiving the same learnings. This is where folk beliefs come in and fill the void (i.e. the "old wives tale" equivalent). It's information based on tertiary cause-effect understanding, or explanation derived from non-scientific study. For example, a handful of my older relatives believe that rains causes lice (as in lice spontaneously generate from rain), therefore, keeping your head dry in the rain prevents lice. This is something that could be easily discredited if there was effort put into convincing them otherwise or letting them discover it's not true.
It's really an incredible shame that ignorance, unawareness, and fallaciousness have lead to such a tragedy of animals and environments being destroyed. Vietnam needs more figures to go out into the public and address ass-backwards thinking like drinking bile or eating horns will cure ailments. It's certainly as dumb or dumber than anti-vax stories. Modern medicine is already a solution to many of these "folk cures", with greater efficacy and less harm, yet it's ignored in favor of some random concoction because that's the "traditional way". It makes as much sense as hanging herbs in my doorway to ward off the flu over getting a flu shot.
>>>> My guess is it will take another generation for people there to appreciate how blessed they are to live in such surroundings but by then it will unfortunately be too late.
This in the parent comment is strange. It wasn't too late everywhere else, and it obviously won't be too late in Vietnam either. A clean environment is a luxury you can afford when you're rich. Poor places are dirty, but it's not like they can't be cleaned.
I've spent the last six years in Vietnam and the progress the country has made in that time is evident everywhere. There's been a lot of reckless development and many people have been left behind but there's no doubt there's also a growing middle and upper class. Corruption is endemic and is certainly one of the reasons Vietnam is no South Korea but it's also not the worst-run country in the region.
You know things are changing when more and more American Vietnamese are coming back to start businesses here.
I work for a Japanese automation company and we’ve been getting a huge surge in projects in Vietnam. Some things here are definitely exaggerated.
Birth rates in Vietnam are already below the replacement rate and dropping.
Poverty is a colossal problem. People get paid a couple hundred bucks a month at major internationals. Cost of living is massively lower, but downtown apartments for average people (and not mansions for foreigners making average foreign wages) aren’t in a great state. Rather dilapidated, in fact. Streets are sometimes torn up and left wide open while construction is going on, turning on high energy electronics might trigger a localized blackout (had this happen with an AC at a restaurant near Hanoi), and outside urban cores, you’ll see many homes with 4 plain concrete walls and makeshift doors and ceilings. Dirt floors aren’t surprising. Roadside restaurants and cafes are just tents and shops are shoddily built shacks.
That said, Vietnam is full of great people who are hopeful about their future. Progress is evident, but the poverty there is very real and the improvements aren’t equally distributed.
It's funny the way things have gone. Vietnam is supposed to be a communist country. The Vietnamese people are some of the greediest nationalities I have ever come across and the government officials and politicians are the greediest.
Culturally Vietnam is tending quite pro-west, and yes its govt is single party communist, but nowhere near the levels of authoritarian hell of the CCCP.
I've travelled to Vietnam a lot over the past couple years for work and my SO's family, and there is a lot of rot in the VN economy that has finally caught up to it.
Most of the growth could be attributed to Korean, Japanese, and Chinese conglomerates spending a LOT of money moving factories from China to VN in the 2014-22 period after China started trade wars with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US.
While this lead to massive capital expenditures, the average Vietnamese person's life didn't change too drastically, as most of the investments were located in Hanoi (Chinese) or HCMC (Korean+Japanese) and only captured by the capital owning class. While there are more FMCGs and brands now, almost everything has a luxury tax on it or is imported from the US, Thailand, or South Korea, and even Temu quality clothes cost as much as they would in the US, and furthermore - rent is insanely high in HCMC and Hanoi, so 50-60% of your income is spent on rent alone.
Furthermore, party apparatchiks decided to maximize the graft they could partake in by investing heavily in boondoggle hotel and apartment projects (similar to the Ghost cities you see in China and India).
When the COVID pandemic happened, the gravy train ended.
Vietnam followed a zero-covid policy that caused migrant workers to return to their hometowns, and there was a massive corruption scandal around COVID testing infrastructure and repatriating Vietnamese migrant workers from abroad.
This was also around the time an internal conflict began brewing between the Northern VCP (supported by the VinGroup billionaire who is also from Vietnamese Military royalty), Southern VCP (supported by this billionaire), the Army (they own Vietnam's largest telco and most of the PSUs), and the Ministry of Public Security (they have the dirt on everybody and are the actual enforcers in Vietnam).
Basically, and the MPS backed the Northern faction won this round, and the Army stayed out of this fight in order to keep making money.
That said, all this upper level turmoil (under the guise of a corruption purge) dented investor confidence recently, along with some very prominent infrastructure collapses like the power outages and the internet slowdowns.
For example, this past Tet people didn't spend as much on fireworks or red money compared to the 2023 Tet, real estate projects have started slowing down, and it's not uncommon to see abandoned construction projects once you leave HCMC or Hanoi.
If you're part of the expat Bui Vien/D1/Thao Dien scene you wouldn't notice this kind of stuff (they're too busy huffing balloons/nitrous despite it being banned in VN leaving surgeons to physically restrain patients), but once you go to "real" Saigon (eg. D10, D8) let alone outside of HCMC/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat these issues become very prominent.
reply