Wandering the Old Quarter of Hanoi to find the Temple of Literature, I was lost amidst river-food vendors hawking energetically and aggressively all manner of creatures in brightly colored, plastic basins. I watched as tiny, black crabs climbed on each other and escaped into the muddy street, while river shrimps with long, red antennae darted back and forth in their watery confines, and silvery fish gracefully flapped their tails back and forth in their curved basins as if performing a yin-yang dance.
The air was burdened with humidity, tropical sun and the pungent fragrance of the open-air market. I found a time-weathered, yellow-ocher portal whose front no vendor occupied, and upon entry, the serenity of an ancient Buddhist pagoda was so still and undisturbed that I could sit down in the shade of a Banyan tree and escape the world outside.
I thought about my father, who grew up in a province not far from there in the 1930s, and wondered if he ever stopped here to find refuge from the conflicts, starting with the Chinese, interposed by the French and terminating with the Vietnam War. My grandfather left Hanoi in the 1950s with my father when the communists took his rice land. My father emigrated from Saigon with me in the late 1970s when the recently victorious communists took my family’s silk shop.
I wondered if my father, who passed away last year, would understand my return to Hanoi this spring at Vietnam National University under the Fulbright Program to educate a new generation of Vietnamese, whose memory of the war is as faint as the protruding, rusted tail of a submerged bomber in a lake now covered by white water lilies and their wide, verdant leaves.
Built in 1070, the Temple of Literature housed the first university (Quoc Tu Giam or “school for the sons of the nation”) in Vietnam. The temple not only symbolizes the esteem in which Vietnamese hold education, but also illustrates its democratization, welcoming not only sons of royalty and mandarins, but also any other educationally qualified candidates to obtain a cu nhan (bachelor’s degree) or even a tien si (doctor laureate), leaving names chiseled in massive stone tablets set upon equally massive, stone-tortoise relics. Today, Vietnam National University is located not too far away.
Unlike the temple, with its classical-style architecture and precincts of courtyards separated by columned red gates, great halls and sanctuaries of carp-filled pools, the university appears to have been designed by a committee of dispirited Soviet minimalists. I lectured on U.S. patent and software law two days a week to 50 people, including senior law students, government officials from various intellectual property offices, and experienced private practitioners. The remaining time I spent researching, preparing for the next week’s lessons, and traveling around Hanoi.
I presented my lessons in English because Vietnam lacks sufficient vocabulary in intellectual property. For example, a trade secret is translated as “thuong mai, bi quyet,” which literally means a recipe of commerce. As another example, software is translated as “phan mem,” which literally means that which is soft. As a third example, the obviousness standard of patent law is translated into “khong co hien nhien,” which means not natural.
Although I had to correct the translation a few times, I was inspired by the facility of my Vietnamese translators, who correctly transcribed the difficulty of legal and technical idioms into vernacular Vietnamese that was easy to understand. When I spoke Vietnamese, the audience exclaimed that I have an entrepreneurial Saigonese accent. Because I grew up listening to my father, their imperial Hanoian accent poses no linguistic barrier to me.
One afternoon, before my lecture, students took me out to lunch at an open-air stall on campus. Simple wooden chairs and tables sat in a clearing shaded by an overgrown, leafy garden. As we finished bowls of soup laced with long rice noodles, shredded white chicken and slivers of “dangerous” red peppers, someone asked why any government should grant exclusive intellectual property rights to an innovation when the marginal cost of reusing such an intangible asset is zero.
It was a penetrating, but revealing, question. In a country that still experiences a high rate of piracy, I needed to explain why people would have no incentive to innovate if others could simply copy without authorization and compensation.
Later, I looked out my hotel window as a finch landed on my windowsill and picked at a bug. Beyond is the Opera House built by the French in 1902. Its majestic, white Ionic pilasters soar from the grand public staircase to the third floor interposed by white balustrade balconies framing ornate archways. Colonial yellow paint graces an exterior whose apex is crowned with a cupola so distinguishable that the Opera House can be readily identified as a site of Hanoi, while below a maiden hidden under a traditional farm-field conical hat walks by, elegantly balancing poles on her shoulders tethering heavy baskets of fruits and vegetables.
I shut down my laptop and walked down to the hotel lobby to greet my tour guide, who was preparing to take me to the province where my grandfather and ancestors were born. As we drove through the countryside, rice fields spread like a continuous sheet of green velvet as the wind fluttered through the stalks.
Interrupting the rice fields were factories with signs in Korean. The tour guide told me that the highway we were on was built by Australians and the bridge across the Red River was financed by the Japanese. All herald foreign investment in an economy that has grown 8 percent annually, one of the fastest in the world.
Next year, Hanoi will celebrate its founding 1,000 years ago, although the Viets occupied the area long before that. Its original name was Thang Long or “dragon ascending.”
In this context, the communist regime still seems young. The decision in 1986 to jettison Marxist economics for private entrepreneurship has breathed life again into a country that belongs to the mystical world of classic East Asia. The students in my class no longer starved for nutritional sustenance, but instead hungered for knowledge of the modern world.
There are older Vietnamese Americans who continue to experience pangs of resentment over their bitterness from losing everything in the Vietnam War. The new generations do not share these painful memories.
Before I boarded my plane back to Seattle, I stopped by the Empty Wall Gallery to purchase an impressionistic painting of a Buddhist pagoda with crumbling walls and weathered red portals. In the artwork, a giant Banyan tree protrudes beyond the terra cotta roof of the pagoda and weeping vines hang down from muscular branches. Near the image of the pagoda is a dented pole at the top of which is a propaganda speaker in a dilapidated state.
The painting reminded me of my time walking around the Old Quarter when suddenly a broadcast of communist propaganda crackled down from a speaker to the hustle and bustle of capitalistic commerce on a narrow street. An old woman stopped and looked at the speaker, and then told me, as her bright, black eyes glistened with memories long past, that no one has paid any attention to the propaganda for many years now and she wished that they would shut the thing off.
She then smiled at me with her blackened teeth and lips reddened from a chew of betel leaves and mineral lime, and disappeared into the frenzy of the crowd.
Peter Chu is a member of Christensen O’Connor Johnson Kindness PLLC in Seattle, and can be reached at peter.chu@cojk.com.
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