Hanoi in transition: from pre-modern to modern times.

Schutte, Heinz

Ever since Doi Moi, that is, the arrival of capitalist market forms (and the evolution of corresponding social relations), Hanoi has been undergoing the dramatic upheaval that occurred in the old cities of Europe in the 19th century as a result of industrialization and revolution. (1) What we can see before our eyes amounts to a radical change from pre-modernity to modernity, although the driving force is not industrialization but consumerism. The observer can perceive its consequences when strolling through Hanoi's streets. So let us go on a walk together through the Vietnamese capital.

I often hear it said by visitors that Hanoi is timeless and unchanging. In fact this is an illusion, the nostalgic view of outsiders who discover ways of life, forms of social interaction and modes of work that remind them of their childhood and their own society's past, forms that have disappeared in the highly industrialized, post-modern environments of Western Europe and North America. So the visitor is a la recherche du temps perdu--out to discover a pristine age that is lost forever.

I would suggest, then, that Hanoi is changing radically, and I will attempt to show that the process of transformation is not random or chaotic, as it may seem, but that it follows a logic that can be historically categorized. The posh new villa on West Lake; the decoration of facades or the careful renovation of a French villa in the inner city, the former colonial town; the 'purging' of the footpaths of family businesses and private activities in the Old Quarter of the thirty-six trade streets: each can be viewed as a document of change that can be deciphered and interpreted like a written text. (2)

This is a story of disappearance as well as of renewal. As we have become used to what disappears and, as what disappears is always conceived of as a part of ourselves, we perceive the new as alien and hostile; it is a melancholy story which looks back onto the past in the same way that we look back onto our childhood. The city is changing from a place of work and everyday social life into a centre of consumption--clean, organized, controlled. Take the traffic lights which made their appearance in Hanoi only a few years ago as a present from France on the occasion of the Francophone summit in 1997: they break up chaos and replace the permanent relations and struggle with others--the interminable negotiation of street life--and impose order, contributing to a 'disciplining of urban space'3 hitherto quite unimaginable. There are zebra crossings now too, to which, naturally, nobody pays attention, but which by their very purposeful existence establish a principle which contradicts pre-modern modes of conduct. In that wider process social groups lose significance in favour of the individual who is thrown back on his or her own resources. In Hanoi, then, right in front of our eyes a vital stage is unfolding in the process of 'civilization' (as Norbert Elias might say), which is indeed a stage in the transformation from the pre-modern to the modern age.

When, a little over a year ago in September 2003 I arrived at my modest hotel in Hang Trong Street--next to the monstrous cathedral from colonial days which, at that time, must have been experienced as a massive mark of the invader's ideological domination--I was overcome by an inexplicable sense of emptiness, of an unusual neatness and unaccustomed orderliness. Something I was at first unable to point to, but which seemed strange, even unreal with regard to my image of Hanoi, had changed. I sensed the intrusion of a new quality.

In the past, to the extent that the bubbly activities of the people had allowed it, motorcycles were parked chaotically anywhere and in all directions on the footpaths, so that everything was possible except to walk quietly through the mess. Westerners would constantly be torn between agitation and a desire for order and nostalgic admiration for this denseness of life because, while they have lost touch with such a reality, long gone from their own cities, it still haunts them as a dream-like shadow of tales from a picturebook. In those old towns and cities of pre-modern days the footpaths, if there were any, and the public space in front of buildings, were privatized in as much as they were used for the manifold activities of the neighbourhood. So I suddenly realized that the footpaths in Hang Trong Street had not only been spotlessly repaired but that the motorcycles were nicely parked along its street-side, a commanding white line now drawn down the middle of the footpath. And more surprising and shocking still compared to my ossified image of Hanoi was that the overflowing life of the people of the neighbourhood, which had previously taken place in front of houses and shops, had simply disappeared. No more old ladies selling tea with their teapots in wicker baskets and their four miniscule stools and a tray (for some time already the tiny wooden stools made in the neighbourhood had been replaced by bright plastic imported ones); no more soup vendors with their bubbly cooking pots on small coal stoves from which enticing smells used emanate; no more bicycle repairers--often war invalids living on a miserable pension too small for survival--waiting to pump up your bicycle tyres; no more women squatting in front of their doors, talking or washing their hair in metal basins; no more children playing marbles or hopscotch; and no more cardplayers or board games on the ground right next to the street. I was suddenly faced with an urban organization from a different planet from the one I remembered. In Ly Quoc Su Street I saw a man in front of his door, two red plastic stools arranged for selling tea. Hearing a police siren--the police are charged with the maintenance of the new order--he hurried inside with his meagre street vendor's equipment in less than a second, clearing the footpath for the advance of civilization. The man reminded me of a rat.

This is what struck me like lightning on arriving in September 2003. I soon learned that the People's Committee had decreed that order was to be imposed in preparation for the South-East Asian Games (Seagames) to be held at the end of the year, by which time Hanoi was to be 'presentable' to the foreign visitors expected to descend upon the city. However, the regulations, it was quite obvious, were not policed everywhere in the same way. There were streets and neighbourhoods where nothing seemed to have changed, although the police patrolled regularly. The various parties must have come to an implicit arrangement: between the forces of order (not seeing anything) and the people (who had to pay). In any case, I am only indicating trends, and not totalities. Already cyclos had almost disappeared from Hanoi, and I wondered what had happened to their drivers. It was unlikely they had become taxi drivers. Where cyclos still operate they are no longer the privileged means of transport for goods and people but rather, shining brightly and immaculately polished, they serve as vehicles of nostalgia for tourists on their Indochina tour. What are also likely to disappear are the historically earlier forms of the labour market that one can still observe--men crouched on street corners with their work instruments, a saw or a shovel--offering their services for hire for a few hours or the day.

The principal target of the new regulations were the small itinerant traders who sell everything one might need from heavily loaded bicycles or who walk the streets carrying their goods in big baskets attached to shoulder poles and who call European customers, men and women alike, madame. They are the sellers of vegetables, fruit, flowers, meat, fish, porcelain, shoes, ritual objects, baskets, honeycomb and many other things, shouting their trade cries--the particular music of pre-modern urban cultures prior to the arrival of the newspaper, pamphlet or television. Recyclers, those women one could see collecting paper, plastic bottles and drink cans to sell to villages specialized in the manufacture of paper, metal or plastic, are now officially prohibited. This once useful employment not only guaranteed the women a modest income but also saved the municipality a considerable sum. Of the previously too many shoe-shiners and sellers of postcards pestering the poor foreigner, only a few remained. I was told that these youngsters had been sent back to their villages. But I wonder if they had just been dumped there to return to the city illegally, or whether structures had been put in place to accommodate them after having led the life of street children and, not infrequently, of drug addicts. The Bia Hoi outlets, once places of exuberant popular sociability, have become rare. The chess players of Hoan Kiem Lake have disappeared too, chased away into exile from a more sociable age. Their presence on the banks of the lake during the late afternoon once gave the impression that the place belonged to the people of Hanoi. The old gentlemen dressed in pyjama trousers and undershirts, who for decades had done their physical exercises on the banks of the Little Lake, had also been chased away by the police. The new regulations consider their outfit indecent. A peaceable and complex urban world which was difficult to control (and to keep clean) has now to be subjected to a new order whose sad models in the South-East Asian region are supplied by Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Hanoi's urban culture is obviously changing rapidly. This process of change is due not only to the economic and social evolution brought by Doi Moi, but also to administrative intervention inspired by a certain ideal of modernity and the modern city. This ideal is shared by both socialist and post-socialist decision makers. The state's conception of administrative order, which is the control of the anarchic masses and the spontaneous use of space, destroys vivacity and promiscuity, the narrow-mindedness of the ordinary people and the tissue of the sociability of disorder. The footpath--which in German is called Burgersteig, literally 'path of the bourgeois', in French, passerelle des bourgeois--is becoming exactly this, by which I mean a footpath that belongs to those who have the time and the means to stroll, flaner (a concept to which I shall return shortly) and to consume without being incommoded by the teeming multitude of everyday life in an Asian city that still displays many traits of pre-industrial, agricultural society. To a large extent, Hanoi's population still has a peasant, rather than a proletarian, mentality. Hanoi's popular masses are indeed 'peasants in disguise', (4) and this can be seen from the way people behave in Hanoi's traffic, or as they walk along streets and footpaths, displaying a ruthless disregard for others. Peasants everywhere and at all times have learned to survive against material and natural difficulties.

On the other hand, that old order was a pleasant and instinctively organized chaos where every move and action had to be negotiated. It accepted difference, and cunning and the talent for improvisation were highly valued. In such a universe, where planners and bureaucrats have little grip, everything is scarce, and goods or things are exchanged according to the principle of necessity. During the period of central planning and an accompanying culture of stagnation, the ordinary people accommodated themselves within its limits. They exchanged the little they could dispose of. As good bricoleurs they repaired what they had, and always there would be time to stop for a chat since time was not money but rather was used to maintain the social relations essential for subsistence survival.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not want to paint an idyllic picture of an often miserable past, and I am certainly not saying that the person in the street does not want to escape the old constraints. Indeed, it seems clear that overall the people have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities which are now available in an economy in full expansion. The fetters of the old system have become attenuated ever since Doi Moi. The fact that I visited Hanoi is itself due to Doi Moi. It has become the social base and stepping stone for an undreamt-of multiplication of miniscule and small private economic activities, as well as for public and infrastructure investment, knowledge of and exchange with the outside world and travel, not to mention widespread corruption.

In comparison with the pre-Doi Moi period where non-state commerce was rare and illegal and was therefore practised underground, opportunities to gain an income have multiplied, and with them the creation and expansion of needs. Pre-Doi Moi, the different forms of work were visible everywhere in the city, and this was especially so in the Old Quarter of the thirty-six streets where the same trades were handed down from generation to generation. Even if you were not busy, you looked on as others worked; people lived alongside work, chatting and helping out on occasion, just as in the cities and towns of old Europe. In this way, knowledge and the practice of a trade were transmitted in the family group. Such a way of working is typical of a form of life that does not yet distinguish between 'work' and individual or family life, where, rather, working is a way of life. This way of life only disappeared in my own lifetime in Europe, where its decline was synonymous with that of the peasantry and handicrafts--that is, with the triumph of (big) industry and the transformation of peasants and small artisans into industrial and service workers. But the towns and villages of old were always places of inbreeding and strangling social control. Thus, also, in the socialist city of Hanoi--where the streets and neighbourhoods were the sphere of predilection of snoopers and a whole army of informers who created a climate of fear and suspicion, so that social relations were often tense and false, and people would as much as possible hide from the eyes and ears of their neighbours.

This, I would like to believe, is in the past, or has at least diminished since modernity arrived with the market economy. Such a new system renders the tight control of an urban population much more difficult. As the local merges with the global, this system is likely to create an enlarged political space in which people may play out their roles as civic actors, free to some extent from the constraints of social conformity. Nevertheless, although the market economy has had such unintended consequences, first and foremost it promises unlimited access to goods, and now everybody desires and dreams of them. As a result of the structural bond between modernity and the market, which henceforth will determine citizens' existence and influence administrative decisions, the process of the disappearance of pre-free market life is irreversible. This is so because, before all else, the goods produced by that devilish machine called 'industry' need to be sold, even if industry remains marginal in Vietnam itself. New needs have to be created and consuming must be equated by the people with fulfilment and happiness. In Hang Trong and Hang Gai streets in the centre of old Hanoi you can now buy Leica cameras for $5,000. They are symbols of the new civilization, just as Mercedes cars are, or the Peugeot bicycle of the son of a trendy nouveau riche family who is too young for the latest motorcycle. This also means that the bicycle is no longer a working tool or means of transport but has become a sign of leisure and status. Real estate, of course, is also merely merchandise, to be consumed conspicuously, just as televisions, motorcycles, cars, sexy underwear, travel and fashionable clothes are.

Many of the functions that have to be carried out for the survival of the community are disappearing from the field of vision. Painstaking and dirty work which offends the consumer out on a shopping spree--everything that is smelly, or the sounds of the pre-modern age--are being chased from view and ear-shot. By decree of the People's Committee and the decisions of the newly emerging class of entrepreneurs, they are being hidden and concentrated behind the walls of specialized buildings far away from residential areas and centres of consumption in the outer suburbs, underground, or in what used to be rural areas. In Paris, one of the last examples of this evolution took place in the early 1970s with the destruction of the vast, noisy, rat-infested area of the wholesalers' market with its fine art-nouveau pavilions, Les Halles, which had attracted poverty, vice and an exuberant night life, and which was re-established far away from the city. In its place a Pharaonic shopping complex many floors deep, including the city's major subway and regional train junctions, was constructed, the whole conceived of as a 20th-century consumer's paradise, immensely ugly and diabolically functional. For some years now, however, it has been the meeting place of post-modern society's outcasts. A marginalized group of people no longer attracted by status-conferring consumption, or simply unable to consume, they use this complex, its endless corridors, passage-ways and hidden corners, for their own purposes--drug trafficking and all kinds of illicit activity which frighten the contemporary consumer away.

In Hanoi, the transition of the city to its new primary function as place of consumption, then, has begun. The market economy, a high growth rate and an astronomical increase in disposable income, (5) which will explode earlier social relationships, demand their place. Neighbourhood communities, whose members once knew and competed with each other, did business and exchanged the stories which gave sense to their worlds, are being torn apart. Work space and living space are being dissociated, and there are distinct functional areas emerging: industrial zones and business centres here, residential areas elsewhere. People are thereby being dispersed and thus individualized so as to be reintegrated as individuals who offer and sell their specific qualifications into specialized organizational structures: markets, shopping towns, factories, offices, government agencies and so on. And it is these structures which, from afar and invisibly, according to bureaucratic and economic principles, will henceforth control their lives. Previously the people had more or less determined and controlled their own life and working conditions, escaping state authority and unknown and unknowable profit and power interests. Ever since we, in the West, lost control of the organization of our own time, as well as our work instruments, including land, we too lost our independence.

Similarly, street trading and small-scale production in family workshops opening onto the street (economie des ruelles), which took place simultaneously with the sharing of lived experience--people talking to each other, often simply exchanging popular wisdoms or comments on everyday events--is being taken out of the hands of small traders and artisans and transferred to municipal markets, supermarkets and factories. What is typical of neighbourhoods where working and living space is one, namely the link between exchange of goods and sharing of (recounted) experiences, is being lost. Such universal, pre-modern social cohesion, that specific way of life, only persists as long as it is transmitted through the stories and in the joint memory that constitute a small community of neighbours. It is typical of 'the village' anywhere and can only blossom through permanent social contact and exchange. We can detect in this transitional period, where the social elements of the village are being replaced by relations typical of the modern city, an attempt to domesticate memory and social space so far uncontrolled due to collective resistance. It is true that stories can have a counter-hegemonic intent (against history decreed by the state and reinforced through state-controlled ritual (6)), but such stories may become 'codified and rigid unless they are permanently "recharged" by new experiences and interpretations', (7) that is, by a constant reworking of what one knows and thinks through lived joint experience. The communal process and neighbourly cohesion come to an end with the individualization of its actors. The city's true actors are no longer its ordinary people but rather bureaucrats and planners. Citizens are replaced by customers, while the poor and the weak come to be thought of as unseemly and are banished from view.

The official pretext, then, for the measures introduced in Hanoi in 2003 was to improve and to 'sanitize' Hanoi for the arrival of foreign visitors attending the Seagames. The People's Committee had decided to create a network of markets where all the small trades would eventually, over several years, be concentrated in a clean and orderly fashion. The functional space of the market, however, can never replace the life of a neighbourhood and, apart from its social-communicative aspect, a market cannot possibly accommodate those who are not professional traders. That is, it cannot accommodate those for whom the footpath is the contact point between an often overcrowded and sinister interior and an exterior free space full of the colours, sights, smells and sounds of the incessant activity that offers people a modest income.

The city and everything that organized and regulated its communal existence was probably totally visible when the French first began to sanitize the old merchant quarter. This first step in the process of modernization began soon after the transformation of Paris--at that time still largely mediaeval--into an industrial and (more or less) post-revolutionary city by Louis Napoleon and his prefect Haussmann. In Hanoi this process got underway in the 1880s. By then the transformation of the city--both the merchant town, the popular quarters, dilapidated, always in a state of movement and flux, and the Citadel, the seat of power, formal and timeless--had begun in line with the needs of the colonial power and its imperial vision. The French introduced the straight line--orderly, straight-forward, excluding the past, oriented towards a splendid future--their new boulevards and monumental perspectives expressing power and control, ruthlessly cutting through age-old streets, communities and sensibilities just as they had in Paris. During the 1940s, in the period of the Japanese occupation and collaboration, and then as a consequence of war from 1946 to 1954, that process slowed down. Even the architectural transformation of the city after Dien Bien Phu into a socialist capital according to Soviet and Chinese models was comparatively modest. Due to war and poverty, Hanoi had escaped transformation into a 'modern' city. But this has changed profoundly since the introduction of market principles. With the new energies economic reform has released, in particular the degree of economic freedom, the funds now accessible to the Vietnamese government go by far beyond anything available in the past.

Whether dirty work and the smell, colours and noises of active human life will disappear entirely, whether this process will triumph over the whole city, is quite another question. The outcome depends on many, mainly economic factors, such as the growth rate. In fact, each new historical period still contains within it the preceding one. However, for those overseeing and administering the desired changes the point now is to eliminate as quickly as possible those elements that resist or do not obey the market rules of the post-industrial age. What can be taken for granted is that a decisive step has been taken towards the bourgeoisification and reorganization of the city as a centre of consumption of the new Vietnamese middle class and, of course, of tourists and foreign residents. A large proportion of independent small 'entrepreneurs', such as artisans and craftsmen, will surely disappear and a new dependent middle class, which organizes, supervises and regulates, will replace it.8 On the other hand, quite a few members of the state bureaucracy from peasant backgrounds are now becoming entrepreneurs, using their influence in the state apparatus to further their advancement under new conditions. The polyglot offspring of the pre-revolutionary elite, too, conscious of the world beyond Vietnam, are leaving their modest jobs in the bureaucracy and, taking revenge for the humiliation suffered by their parents, are linking up with relatives in Europe, Australia or North America to embrace the opportunities of an expanding market so as to restore the fame and wealth of their families. Frequently they work for foreign companies, institutes and NGOs, in this way mediating between Vietnam and the rest of the world.

So, the attitudes expressed in the anarchic road traffic of Hanoi's still largely peasant population will, with the increasing use of motor vehicles, ultimately destroy the social tissue of narrow alleys, streets and neighbourhoods.9 Soon, maybe, the rudiments of this passing world will be visible only to a social species new to Hanoi, one not stressed and pressed like the consumer, namely the flaneur, the person out for a walk, not consuming, not bothered by the dictate 'time is money'. In fact the flaneur, essentially a parasite, does not hail progress but rather looks to the past. Flaneurs will recognize each other and they will detect the last remaining traces of yesterday's urban social life. The decoration of a facade is a book from which they will read the history of the city. Seeking to understand the past, to grasp what has been lost, the flaneur is a melancholy species, an onlooker for whom the life of the city is a spectacle and the city dwellers actors who play out the drama of the joys and suffering of everyday life. The flaneur is not involved. Remaining unattached, a lonely wolf, an ambivalent actor in the modern age with a sharpened sense of the past from which he is a survivor, the flaneur perceives the changes which constitute the present. Here is a paradox: the creation of a social category only in modernity, dedicated to seeking out the past from which he has emerged. In Hanoi the flaneur may very well emerge from a culture of coffee houses and galleries where artists, writers and others not working in acceptably organized ways linger about, smoking, drinking, discussing endlessly and aimlessly, reading alone in a corner or to each other. Suspiciously watched over by the guardians of petty socialist respectability, these places are the watering holes of those who waste their time, oblivious to social conventions, successfully eluding involvement in socialist progress and demonstrating by their very existence what any hegemonic regime detests and fears most: independence, individuality and difference.

Despite all that I have said, I must insist on the obvious: that even now, walking through Hanoi, and especially at night when the murderous traffic and the day's agitation die down, you can still feel you are walking through a fairy tale, where elderly ladies bring out plastic basins to take a foot bath, where people take their evening snacks on the footpaths and everybody enjoys the fresher air. But here and there, instead of chatting, people have their TV sets out on the footpath watching a show, spellbound, and even the children are transfixed--a new form of Gleichschaltung is on the horizon.

Overall, though, the new Vietnamese petit bourgeoisie and middle class are increasingly evident in the heart of the capital, and some parts of Hanoi are just huge building sites. For some years now, the small one- or two-storey houses typical of pre-modern Hanoi have been under reconstruction. Many have been transformed, in no time, into high-rise apartments, concrete testimony of the existence of a stratum of aspiring businessmen. In the Old Quarter of the thirty-six trade streets, for example, you might observe how, one morning before daybreak, a group of workers will start, from the roof downwards, to demolish a group of tube-houses, carefully cleaning and preserving bricks and other recyclable building materials. In the morning begins the construction of a single building in concrete or bricks, five floors high and often only four or five metres wide, but sixty or eighty metres deep. They replace a whole neighbourhood compound of small homes, inner courtyards and artisans' workshops which once opened onto the street. A few weeks later, into what was once the workshop will come the incomparably bigger and better equipped consumer outlet with neon lights and deafening music, a fashion shop for the new golden youth of Hanoi perhaps, or a motorcycle showroom.

Yet not only the sounds, smells and filth, the overflowing vulgar and naive life of the neighbourhood, will be evacuated from the sight of modern Hanoi. For the past few years now a parallel movement has been observed that consists of the nouveau riche moving away from the old parts of the city where life is overflowing, where the air stagnates and the chaos and noise of the frenetic traffic become unbearable, to live in the new quarters outside the city proper. New residential areas have become fashionable and here everything is transformed: the life of the countryside is rapidly pushed back so that the middle class can enjoy fresh and unpolluted air. With the arrival of the car they can live at a distance while working in the city centre during the day.10

Let me now say a few words on Doi Moi building construction as an example of the emergence of new classes of social actors and their consumption patterns. Firstly, there are the constructions of the nouveau riche around West Lake. The owners may live here themselves or rent out their new villas to foreigners. The owners may be former peasants from the area who have sold a plot of land to finance construction. Or they may be former contract workers who once worked in the old socialist countries and who have returned with their savings--in the form of three bicycles or two motorcycles--which they subsequently exchanged for land and which has increased in value enormously. Then there are the stilt-houses bought from the Tay or the Muong peoples that have been reassembled in Hanoi. Here we need to distinguish between two categories of owner, namely the petty bourgeoisie and artists. Finally, as well as the sometimes highly individualized constructions of the nouveau riche, over the past four or five years a number of remarkable buildings have been constructed in the centre of the city. Many of these new buildings make use of forms that pre-date Vietnam's socialist architecture, the new department store on the corner of Trang Tien and Hang Bai streets being a fine example. Socialist architecture was intended to break with everything that had gone before; to eradicate the signs of Vietnam's feudal and colonial past. This period now seems to be over, and I am under the impression that there is a new acceptance of Vietnam's bedevilled past as part of the country's history. Today, the new buildings evoke Sino-Vietnamese and French colonial histories, and this has the effect of new buildings being integrated into the existing urban ensemble much more harmoniously than was the case with socialist construction. The desire to eradicate the past and to express a messianic and revolutionary image of society has given way to the careful renovation of colonial buildings, such as the magnificent new Goethe Institute.

In an attempt to recuperate French colonization for the Vietnamese patriotic communist project and, by the same token, to differentiate Vietnam culturally from the eternal enemy to the North, the writer, musician and high-ranking cultural official Nguyen Dinh Thi told me in October 2002: 'The diversity which manifests itself at present in architecture is due to French influence and experience. This is not found in China'. As a matter of fact, reality is more complex. What we can see at present in Vietnam, and especially in Hanoi, among the new class who have managed to enrich themselves or been able to assemble sufficient funds to build, cannot come as a surprise in a society that has only recently emerged from decades of war, generalized poverty, collectivization and political oppression and in which, at long last, the pursuit of personal interest has been rendered possible. The social and cultural consequences are revolutionary.

This revolution knocks on the head all the values that three generations of Vietnamese considered immutable. It demands the creation of the fundamentals of a market economy, including the accumulation of capital, the mobilization of human energies and the creation of civic values that emphasize individual responsibility. Such an historic development implies the transfer of decision making and funding, as well as the conception and realization of projects, from the state to the private sector--an arrangement that did not exist before and has had to be created from scratch. The monopoly of the state will gradually diminish in favour of a multitude of individual actors. It should by now be obvious that this change leads to a 'marketization ... in [the] urban social structure of city dwellers'. (11) It has been estimated that in the old 'system of subsidies' which preceded Doi Moi, up to eighty per cent of Hanoi's population worked in the state sector and lived in state-owned housing. (Most of these apartments have by now been sold to their occupants.) We should remember that during the period of the prohibition of private trade, Hanoi was quiet, grey, drab. The poet Hoang Cam has told me that in 1960 he rode his bicycle through the city for a whole day in a vain attempt to find eggs or a chicken for his mother who was dangerously ill and needed nutritous food (she died a few days later). During those long years of constant hunger, he opened, in 1979, what he calls a cabaret, which means that he sold rice alcohol in his miserable dwelling in Ly Quoc Su street to people sitting on his bed. He was under Berufsverbot, that is, under prohibition to exercise his profession as a poet and did not see any other way of feeding his numerous family. From time to time he was therefore called to the police station just around the corner from his house where he would be threatened with imprisonment if he did not stop his illicit business. In fact it stayed open until 1982 when he was arrested for other reasons and imprisoned in the ex-colonial Maison Centrale which had in the meantime become useful for gaoling critics of the new regime.

Hanoiens have frequently spoken to me about the difficulties in the past of finding the bare minimum of food, about the octopus-like bureaucracy and the kafkaesque queues forming in front of state shops as early as 4 am. People were always hungry, their energy and time spent not on work but on finding food--a vicious circle, of course, which inevitably led to Doi Moi. In 1992, however, already forty-seven per cent of Hanoi households depended on the market economy. (12) And by now it is quite evident that a new, mainly commercial and administrative bourgeoisie is evolving. Simultaneously, a significant sector of the population remains impoverished. Indeed, social inequalities have increased dramatically, which only goes to show that the more personal liberty there is, the greater the inequalities become. As the nouveau riche build their dream houses, the 'nouveau pauvre' no longer expect to find adequate housing. A recent study by the National Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities has concluded that 'the market economy in housing serves mainly the well-off, while a large part of the poor fail to find adequate shelter'. (13)

So, after decades of central planning and almost total conformity imposed by the socialist model, economic renovation since 1986 has permitted personal enrichment and conspicuous consumption, but also the display of difference and individuality, feeble signs of the evolution of a civil society, with all its contradictions and perversities. For the moment, this is happening largely in the realm of consumption with the acquisition of real estate and housing construction. Frequently this consumption is luxury consumption, though of course 'luxury' is historically and culturally relative.

This turn towards luxury is visible in the West Lake villas along Nghi Tam road, beginning at Yen Phu. The most spectacular buildings are on Tay Ho peninsula (Quan Tay Ho) in Nghi Tam, Xuan Dieu, Dang Thai Mai, Tay Ho and To Ngoc Van streets, and in the lanes around these major axes. The poets, scholars and painters whose names have been used by the authorities to designate the streets of this part of Hanoi probably would not have appreciated the un-revolutionary spirit which animates the suburb and which hardly does justice to their memory. Rather these streets bear witness to a new social and economic system which has turned its back on the revolution and on socialism: arches, pillars, bay windows and cosy, overhanging roofs abound, pretending to a romantic tradition that appears to deny all that Vietnamese socialism attempted to build. When I first visited these streets on the back of a xe om (14) coming from a neighbourhood in the centre of Hanoi, I thought I was in Disneyland. Here you can discover all styles, the most unbridled syncretisms--a Swiss chalet, a northern European brick facade, Parisian domes, traditional Chinese pagodas. Potemkhin-like facades are also highly appreciated, their Greek columns lifting buildings towards the sky. There is even a small Christian chapel in an alley off Avenue To Ngoc Van.

Clearly, the influence of French colonialism dominates in what seem to have been long repressed fantasies. In architecture 'everything which is French is fashionable', I have often been told, and I am under the impression that the French colonial shadow is synonymous with what is considered solid and durable. Surely a return to colonial (and pre-colonial) models in architecture implies an acceptance of the past as part of the country's cultural heritage. But if the roots of the French fashion in architecture are grounded in the past, it equally has a foundation in the present: the appreciation of Hanoi's colonial patrimony by foreigners. In the eyes of the new Vietnamese middle classes who are keen to be recognized by their foreign friends and business partners, this recognition confirms solidity and beauty. (15) The visitor cannot escape the impression that the new middle class is creating a clean new world that rejects the recent political and economic past and the social misery of its environment. High walls, wrought-iron gates, decorative palm trees symmetrically arranged in front of houses (resembling the poplars of southern France) reinforce the impression of a rupture with recent history. They also constitute a barrier against the potential menace of the rural peasantry and the poor masses in the big city. Together these attitudes combine a fear of 'the dangerous classes' and the collective memory of the misery and the difficulties of peasant life. So, not only does this grouping finally prove to the former colonial masters that they have made it to a level they must surely admire, they can also demonstrate to everybody that they have been as successful, and even more successful, than others. The construction of these villas is both publicity directed to the world around and a realization in concrete that one's dreams have come true. Confirming what is beautiful and worthy of the family, they are monuments that will glorify it across the generations. At the same time, the proprietors of these new neighbourhoods consider themselves the avant-garde of a prosperous, 'developed' and a more just future in a sanitized and civilized environment.

(1.) This article is a revised version of a talk given at the Goethe Institute in Hanoi on 18 October 2004.

(2.) See also my 'l'irruption de l'economie de marche et la domestication de la ville du petit peuple', in Passions Viet-Nam, no. 21, 2005.

(3.) C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004, p. 196.

(4.) Bayly, p. 172.

(5.) See M. Cohen, 'New Taste for the Good Life', Far Eastern Economic Review, 28 October 2004, pp. 44-6.

(6.) This, by the way, is also true of dance.

(7.) See Hue-Tam Ho Tai, 'Monumental Ambiguity: The State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh', in: K. W. Taylor and J. K. Whitmore (eds), Essays into Vietnamese Pasts, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 287.

(8.) Alongside such developments, habits, customs and behaviour change. To give just one small example: there are now several eateries in town where mainly office workers and employees--keen to distinguish themselves as urbanites and thus confirm their status--have lunch and where, instead of chopsticks, spoons and forks are used. Under each table is a basket for remains which are no longer thrown or spat on the floor. When I was a child, all tramway carriages had big signs indicating that it was forbidden to spit on the floor. In that case it was a matter of civilizing the proletariat which had only recently come out of the peasantry.

(9.) I should stress that the process of the 'peasantization' of Hanoi had begun with the return of the victorious troops after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and with the consequent occupation of governmental and administrative positions by people of agrarian origin who had fought colonialism and who had risen through the Party.

(10.) Yet there is equally a tendency for urban families to buy up rooms and units in the house in which they live and run a shop so as to enlarge their commerce and live in more space, thus reducing the population density of the old city. I am grateful to Natasha Kraevskaia who talked to me about this evolution.

(11.) Trinh Duy Lan and Nguyen Quang Vinh, Socio-Economic Impacts of 'Doi Mo' on Urban Housing in Vietnam, Hanoi, Social Sciences Publishing House, 2001, p. 22.

(12.) Trinh Duy Lan and Nguyen Quang Vinh, pp. 22-3, see also pp. 82-83. Arecent study shows that even during the period of centralized planning and before 1979 there were private economic activities in the merchant quarter of the thirty-six streets, while private economic activity in the French colonial sector of Hanoi only set in after Doi Moi: M. Waibel, Stadtentwicklung von Hanoi, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang Verlag, 2002, pp. 245-6.

(13.) Trin Duy Luan and Nguyen Quang Vinh, p. 234. It is interesting to note that security measures on the part of house-owners have reached a level close to hysterical obsession.

(14.) A motorcycle taxi.

(15.) Typically, the nouveau riche copy--the villa, the painting--since, consciously or unconsciously, they take an idol as their model, and it must be said that such a guiding spirit often gives them the formidable strength necessary to realize what is new and culturally unforeseen. Only the future generation(s) will, through status, wealth and education, have won sufficient self-confidence to develop an aesthetic individuality.