Day 28 - Who Won the War?

The next day we did some sight seeing around Hanoi. I first went over to a travel agent who was just down the street from our hotel to look at what was the best way to get back to Changzhou. I had originally wanted to go to Hong Kong on the way back but I was getting sort of travel fatigued so I decided to just go right home. I first thought that I'd have to take the train into China then get a flight to Shanghai, but the travel agent was able to find me a pretty good deal on a flight from Hanoi to Shanghai. The only worrying part was that I had to get a paper ticket and pay in cash. The place seemed reputable but handing over that much cash made me squirm. Ken had apparently reacted badly to something he ate in the last 24 hours and was throwing up about every 30 minuted. Considering that I would have been dragging myself to a hospital by then he was holding up pretty well. We went over to a big lake near where we were staying. I think it was the same lake the McCain crashed his plane into during the war. There was a little temple on a lake in the middle and we went over to it. The temple was fairly standard fair except that because of its central location there were easily as many tourists and people actually praying, actually there were probably more tourists.

The most interesting thing at the temple was a big, I guess you could call it a cauldron filled with what seemed like sand with as many incense sticks as people could cram into it. I guess I just don't really get the point of everyone going up and burning a ton of incense at the same time. The lake as nice and there were these really big balloons hovering over it tied to posts on the side of the lake. According to legend there are giant turtles that live in the lake and you would never believe it looking at the water, and apparently most people didn't believe it until the found a giant turtle there one day, whose body is now on display in the temple. After this Ken wasn't feeling well still so he went to a store and got some antibiotics recommended by the guide book. He felt somewhat better eventually but spent most of the afternoon in the room. Me and Dave went to some sort of temple of knowledge that was very highly recommended by the guide but seemed to lack almost any distinct characteristic, it didn't even have the body of a giant turtle, though there were some sculptures.

We passed by a KFC, not nearly a common a sight as they are in China but this was still at least the second one I'd seen. Even odder than it is to be in Hanoi not that long after the US fought a endless war there was the sight of seeing such symbols of the US. A major part of the rational for the war was that if Vietnam became Communist it would give rise to more Communism in South East Asia. And oddly enough the war itself was probably a big factor that turned Laos Communist, but the rest never really panned out. Communist countries turned out to be just as nationalistic as anyone else. The Vietnamese may not have wanted the US running things but they were never on the best terms with Cambodia or China, they fought a short war with both not long after the end of the US war there. But of all the dooms day predictions of countries turning Communist it seems Communism itself has turned Capitalist. Everywhere you turn in Vietnam there are monument to the war but who really won the war when there is a KFC in downtown Hanoi? Isn't this now famously thrown out as the signal for victory in Iraq, a McDonalds in Baghdad.

I had an argument once with a professor about the nature of the US. I claimed that the influence of US culture now rivaled that of Greek culture in Antiquity. The Greeks despite never exactly being the strongest bunch in any place but Greece had most of their culture adopted wholesale by the Romans and spread through out the world. The professor thought the comparison was ridiculous since what I was talking about was what he dubbed "low culture." We don't spread are architecture, I don't think anyone's written an Epic Poem about America, and the thing we seem to fail at the most is spreading democracy, but America culture is still everywhere. It's actually really hard to see until you're outside of the US. First and foremost are our businesses. If the US is an empire it's not a military one but an economic one. US tanks may never have gotten anywhere close to Hanoi but KFC seems to be an unstoppable force. What movies people see and talk about world wide seem to comprise 90% American movies with a sprinkling of something local. US celebrities are automatically world wide stars. I may not know who the president of Vietnam is but they all know about Obama, I even had one of my classes in China quote "Yes we can" as the punch line to a joke. America really is sort of omnipresent in the world. So I ask even if people were getting shoved off the last helicopter out of Vietnam 40 years ago who really one when KFC can set up shop in Hanoi?

Me and Dave had a bunch of time on our hands so we headed over to the infamous Hanoi Hilton, the jail in downtown Hanoi that so famously held US PoWs during the war. About half of it has been torn down and turned into a rather large hotel. You would never know the grounds of the hotel had been part of the prison since a road has been built to separate them. What was left of the prison had been converted into a museum about the prison's history mostly focusing on when it was used by the French to hold Vietnamese prisoners. There were wax figure displays of prisoners shackled in place, though oddly the wax figures sort of looked like they were having a good time to me, their expressions seemed pretty peaceful and they were mostly just talking to one another. The most interesting section of the prison though was the part about the American PoWs. It was mostly interesting in that it was essentially straight propaganda. The US prisoners during the war were torture to extract false confessions while the Vietnamese showed the world pictures that seemed to suggest that they were well treated. There is one famous picture of McCain supposedly receiving good medical attention, only he was receiving medical attention for injures suffered at the hands of the prison guards.

This propaganda was essentially the only thing on display. There was picture after picture of the "happy" prisoners playing basketball and what not. It was actually a little sickening after seeing all the information they had on US war crimes to see history just so blatantly white washed. Maybe the oddest moment was the section on anti-war protests in the US during the Vietnam war. As Dave noted what was not pictures was the Vietnamese protesting anything. They also had several displays devoted to McCain in particular. There were a number pictures of an older McCain revisiting the prison looking at pictures of his younger self. There is also what is supposedly his flight suit, which bares a plaque stating that he is running for president. I wonder how they would have reacted if he had won. Most people didn't really talk about it besides to something generically positive about Obama. One taxi driver expressed some generally negative impression of McCain. I find it hard ot imagine that people there would have embraced a US president who was partially famous for fighting a war against that country.