This past weekend, Vietnam marked a big anniversary: 35 years since showing the world’s greatest military superpower the door and uniting the two halves of the nation under the grand banner of communism. That last bit actually didn’t work out so well for everyone, as you may know, but that hasn’t stopped the government propaganda machine from pumping out platitudes extolling the unspeakable wonderfulness of freedom, independence and money-grubbing happiness under socialism, or the new communism, or whatever they’re calling it these days. All weekend there were the requisite dancing in the street, parades, celebratory speechifying and solemn tributes to Ho Chi Minh, who’s worshipped pretty much as a god around these parts, despite the fact that he bears what may or may not be a coincidentally uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders (who, in point of fact, also occupies a pretty high spot on the local totem pole). The celebrations fell back-to-back with Vietnam’s Labor Day holiday this year, so posters like the pair below blanketed all of Saigon for the week preceding, giving the whole city the feel of being trapped in a retrospective of 1920s Soviet Union constructivism.

These posters all sort of neglect to mention that every house, every vehicle, every thimbleful of dirt that had previously been owned by a resident of South Vietnam before 1975 was ‘reallocated’ to someone from North Vietnam immediately following the events of 35 years ago. For them, ‘independence’ tastes a lot  like a shit sandwich. You don’t hear them complaining, though – perhaps because it’s illegal to complain.

Freedom! Independence! Happiness, goddamit!

Very rough translation: "Celebrate 35 years of independence and a united country with a bucket of KFC Original Recipe®"

Here’s a little news item guaranteed to chill the hearts of all peace-loving folk.

Russia to help Vietnam Build Submarine Base

MOSCOW, March 25 (Xinhua) — The Russian Navy will help Vietnam build a submarine base, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said Thursday.

Russia and Vietnam have bright prospects of bilateral military and technical cooperation, he said. “Vietnam needs a submarine base and the Russian Navy will provide help.”

As my mother used to say to me, “You and I seem to have different understandings of the meaning of ‘need.’” From where I’m sitting, Vietnam needs a submarine base like a hyperactive 12-year-old needs a bazooka. I wouldn’t object to the idea of a submarine base per se. It’s the troublesome possibility that a submarine base might lead, like a gateway drug, to even more dangerous fixations. Like, say, submarines.

This is troubling on any number of levels. To begin with, a Vietnamese person is constitutionally incapable of doing a 100% job of almost anything. Rather, he or she does exactly the minimum work necessary to achieve whatever a task requires in a way that gives it the appearance of having been achieved. I should note that this is most definitely not a matter of laziness but of job security. When the job needs re-doing, as it inevitably will, the result is more work for the person who did a half-assed job in the first place. If this were an individual character trait, you might expect it not to work out so well for that person. As it happens, this is a universial ethic, borne of the longstanding communist imperative that every person have a job, no matter how menial, pointless, redundant, counterproductive, bureaucratic, or obsolescent. What better way to assure that everyone is ‘working’ by doing every job at one-quarter the speed, proficiency, acccuracy and thoroughness it requires?

Secondly, the technology does not exist that the Vietnamese have not found a way to misunderstand, misuse, misapply, or otherwise endanger themselves with. Whoever invented the wheel umpteen hundred thousand years ago would faint if he saw what your typical Vietnamese person does with it on a daily basis. And if he and the guy who created the cellphone could together see the way those two technologies are used in tandem, they’d claw their own eyes out.

So with all due respect, this is a society that could fuck up a bowling ball, if they could ever get around to it. And now they want a submarine?

The article goes on to note that:

“They (Vietnam) will also need rescue and auxiliary vessels,” he added.

You can say that again.

It’s been tough lately not to follow the blow-by-blow of the recent dust-up between Google and China. Tough, that is, unless you’re one of the 1.3 billion human beings living in China, where all media accounts of the embarrassing fracas, wandering as it has over the sensitive terrain of government censorship, have been censored. Meta-censorship, let’s call it. On mainland China, any and every reference to the actual reasons for Google’s departure, and the fracas itself, have been meticulously removed from the public record by the 40,000-strong legion of government censors who maintain the Great Firewall and its many filters, sieves, traps, honeypots, hack squads, and political prisons.

Here in Vietnam, where the antennae of government officials are carefully tuned to the pronouncements of their communist counterparts in China’s bureacratic hallways, it’s been some surprise that accounts of the Google-China battle have been widely available on the Internet. Vietnam shares China’s distaste for political and religious expression; the only difference is that they lack the resources of their rich northern neighbor. The spirit is strong, you might say, but the flesh is weak. Vietnam would probably love to have a Great Firewall of their very own, but at the moment this developing economy still has to rely on foreign aid (and engineering knowhow) to build roads and bridges.

Recent word out of Mountain View, however, may change that. News reports this morning had the company lambasting a new target for alleged cyber-espionage:

Security engineers at Google Inc. and computer security company McAfee Inc. said malicious software was used to spy on government critics in Vietnam in what analysts suspect is the second major example in recent months of an Asian country trying to quash dissent on the Internet.

A posting on Google’s online security blog Tuesday said the software has targeted “potentially tens of thousands” of people who downloaded software enabling them to type in Vietnamese, and that the software was used by unknown persons to attack blogs criticizing the government’s policies. “Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” wrote Neel Mehta, a Google engineer.”

At the moment, reports of the story are available in Vietnam on many news sites, though the BBC’s website is unavailable. It’ll be interesting to see how long those reports continue to be available here. For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see how long this particular blog remains available.

With all due respect to both living and deceased parties involved, I’m confident the only reason this beast didn’t end up as dinner for the entire village is because it was already dead and rotting.

Thousands Mourn Dead Whale in Vietnam

An enormous whale known as “Your Excellency” received last rites and was buried today at the mouth of the Cai Cung River at southern Bac Lieu province in Vietnam, according to an Associated Press report.

On Sunday, the 15-ton, 52-foot-long whale was observed floating dead 26 miles off the coast. It took several dozen fishermen on 10 boats just to bring the whale ashore.

Thousands of people were expected to attend today’s funeral. Yesterday, 10,000 mourners had already gathered to honor the whale in the southern Vietnamese village. The air was thick with incense burned during such sacred occasions.

Plans are already underway to build a temple at the site of the whale’s burial.

“Whenever whales arrive, dead or alive, local fishermen believe they bring luck and safety,” Do Tien Ha, a coast guard in the area, told AP.

Also, just so we’re clear, “last rites” are the final prayers and ministrations given to Christians by Christian clergy upon death. There’s a remote chance that one or two of this gang may have been Christain, but you can bet none of them was wearing a cassock and speaking Latin. That goes double for the whale.

I spent a significant portion of Sunday mentally salivating over the New York Times article on Saigon eateries I posted the previous day, and so that evening M. and I decided to hit one of the local spots reporter David Farley waxed enthusiastic over, Cơm Niêu Sài Gòn. The article’s account of flying clay pots and caramelized fish hatchlings sounded like a full-sensory dining experience, and it didn’t hurt that Cơm Niêu had appeared in a No Reservations episode back in 2005. If Anthony Bourdain gives it a thumbs-up, you won’t find me second-guessing the man.

Unfortunately, I forgot that Vietnamese restaurants are more attuned to the dining schedules of locals than Westerners, which means the dinner rush starts around 5pm and lasts until about 7:30pm at the latest. (After all, these people have to be up at 4:30am the day day so they can get in a good two-hour nap at lunchtime.) By the time we finally arrived at 9:30pm, chairs were being placed on their tables and floors were being mopped. A waiter enjoying a cigarette and grooming his mole hair on the street in front of the entrance harrumphed when we strolled up and gave us the shaking-hand-in-the-air sign — the universal Southeast Asian semaphore meaning “no fucking way.”

I despaired, roundly cursing fate, all the food gods and Vietnamese clocks, not having eaten since breakfast and knowing this probably meant I’d have to settle for pub food somewhere unsavory. But M. had a brainstorm: we’d check out an all-night Vietnamese-Chinese joint she knew a few blocks away called Dìn Ký Seafood Restaurant. Turns out Dìn Ký is one of those Vietnamese places with a menu the size of a capital-city phonebook; you know for a fact there’s no way they cook some of these things more often than once a year. But with M.’s guidance and a look around at what other diners were tucking into, we settled on a grab-bag of crumbled fried softshell crab, vegetable springrolls, a salad of crab-claw meat and needle mushrooms, and stuffed grilled cockles with peanuts and cilantro.

The favorite of the lot was the softshell crab: lightly breaded and perhaps a little too vigorously fried, it was served with the ubiquitous saucer of soy and sliced red chilis that accompanies nearly all southern Vietnamese dishes. The vegetable spring rolls were also fried, the diameter of a V-8 cylinder, and delicious. Crab claw meat and needle mushrooms (who knew there was such a thing?) may go together well in a salad, I don’t know; all we tasted was mayonnaise, in a sea of which both ingredients were drowning. Last on the list: a quartet of cockles, drizzled with oil, cilantro and aforementioned chopped peanuts and grilled. The result was a shellfish with the taste and consistency of galvanized rubber. Probably great for weight loss, as you’d lose 100 calories just masticating the thing. All in all, a mixed bag of results for ol’ Dìn Ký.

The best part of the meal, in fact, was in considering a few of the items we didn’t order. (See photo below.) It’s not that I have anything against ox penis or deer veins or chicken testicles or pig’s brain, necessarily. But braised? Come on. Even I’m not such a country philistine as to eat braised ox dick. At least grill that bad boy, then we can talk about dinner. I suspect Anthony Bourdain would agree.