For the past week I have been distracted. On Thursday and Friday I attended the US-Vietnam Conference on Higher Education Partnerships in Vietnam. The conference, jointly sponsored by the US Embassy and the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training, was held at the five-star Sheraton Hotel in the heart of Saigon. Over 400 representatives from universities, non-profits and businesses in the US, Vietnam, and other countries enjoyed two days of exchanging business cards, nibbling hors d’ouvres, and debating how to best fix the education system of Vietnam. I had the privilege of meeting the US Ambassador to Vietnam, the founder of a revolutionary private university set to launch next year, and the heads of several multi-million dollar corporations doing business in Vietnam.
While listening to the intricacies of Vietnamese monetary policy with respect to donations from foreign individuals and corporations, my eyes fell to the desk and instead of the half-scribbled-upon notepad in front of me I saw only the pale green tips of rice stalks glistening in the early morning sunlight. Beyond the field of spring rice plants a stretch of rounded mountains cast a dark shadow over the bustle of early morning activity in the one-road town.
Five days ago I spent the evening sitting in a folding chair on a dusty island in the middle of a small pond overlooking the main road in town. The full moon rose slowly over the mountains and lit the faces of my new friends smiling and teasing each other as we sipped warm coffee laden with sweetened condensed milk.
Five days ago I spent the day speaking with a woman who makes decorative coasters, bowls, and plates out of bamboo cut into thin strips and curled into tight coils before being sanded, stained, and dried in the sun. She smiled to reveal two missing teeth on the right side of her mouth as she told me about her family and how the two dollars per day she makes from the handicraft workshop gives her the extra money she needs to ensure that her children stay in school and her livestock are adequately cared for. On the way back to the project office I spoke with one of my new friends about his reasons for choosing to work for a small community development organization in the middle of nowhere, and his answer articulated the feeling I have not been able to shake from my mind and my soul.
Tonight I arrived in Bangkok: tired, hungry and overwhelmed by the immense disparity of what I have seen this week. As the cab sped down the superhighway between Bangkok’s International Airport and the city center, the image of pale green rice stalks etched in my brain bled into the dark shadows of forty-story buildings. I thought of the one-lane half-paved road from Lac Tanh town to Vietnam’s own “superhighway.”
Driving under an overpass I noticed a stand of ramshackle shanties with corrugated iron roofs and tarps for walls. An old man with no shoes limped along the side of the highway in the darkness. I turned my head 45 degrees and saw a skyscraper with rows of blue-tinted oval windows lining the highest stories and wondered briefly what Vietnam is doing to itself. Doi moi. The WTO. KFC. Saigon South.
For a brief moment I thought of my new friends at the handicraft factory and office in Lac Tanh town and wanted to flee back to the countryside with a warning of the impending difficulty that economic development will undoubtedly bring to the poorest regions of Vietnam. A moment later I had to laugh at myself for thinking that 1) I could actually shelter an entire community from the massive hands of globalization and 2) It was my place to do so.
What would my new friends in Lac Tanh think of these paved six-lane overpasses and semi-truck-sized billboard advertisements?
For a moment my mind flashed into the future and imagined that I was an old woman returning to Vietnam for a workshop, conference, or something of the like, my taxi speeding down a superhighway bound for Ho Chi Minh City. Newly built skyscrapers tower on the horizon and an old hunched-over woman with betel nut juice seeping from the corner of her mouth limps barefoot toward her corrugated-iron house under an overpass. The lights of the city cast a warm orange glow into the sky and mix with the vision of pale-green rice stalks still etched in my mind.
