The Distant Theater of Print and Celluloid

My first awareness of Vietnam was formed through the medium of paper and ink, long before I ever set foot upon its soil. By the time I entered university, the military phase of the Vietnam War had already drawn to a close, yet its reverberations remained palpable throughout Japanese intellectual life. Bookstores and university libraries held an extensive array of volumes dedicated to the conflict, reflecting a society still wrestling with its proximity to the catastrophe. Among the most prominent of these works was The Village in the War (Senjo no Mura) by Katsuichi Honda, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. Honda reported directly from the ground, describing the brutal daily reality endured by ordinary peasants under the weight of sustained aerial bombardment. His prose was detailed, matter-of-fact, and devoid of romantic sentiment. Reading his accounts produced a sobering realization of how modern technological warfare fell upon agrarian communities that possessed little defense against high-altitude ordnance.

In those years, Japanese intellectual circles were animated by a widespread sympathy toward the struggle for national reunification, largely centered on support for North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front. Citizen organizations like Beheiren, the Citizens’ League for Peace in Vietnam, mobilized students, writers, and labor union members in vocal opposition to foreign intervention. This domestic debate carried direct personal weight because Japan was structurally entangled in the campaign. The airbases and naval facilities in Okinawa served as logistical staging areas and launch pads for American bombers bound for the Indochinese peninsula. The war was never an abstraction taking place on a detached continent; it was a crisis whose logistical machinery operated directly within the geography of postwar Japan, generating persistent ethical disputes regarding national complicity.

Beyond journalistic reportage, contemporary Japanese literature engaged with the psychological residue of the battlefield. The novelist Takeshi Kaiko traveled to the combat zones of South Vietnam as a special correspondent, surviving an ambush near the Cambodian border in which the majority of the South Vietnamese infantry unit he accompanied was killed. Out of that survival came his celebrated works of fiction, including Into a Black Sun (Kagayakeru Yami) and Darkness in Summer (Natsu no Yami). Kaiko possessed an undeniable command of sensory description, capturing the oppressive humidity of Saigon, the pungent smell of fish sauce, and the dread that permeated jungle patrols. At the same time, his writing carried an unmistakable strain of self-conscious dandyism. It recalled the posture of Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War or European battlefields, where an author turns mortal danger into an arena for testing his own masculine stoicism. While the storytelling was compelling, that performative heroism produced a slight distance in me. The author’s internal drama occasionally overshadowed the real, ongoing tragedy of the people whose country served as his backdrop.

During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, cinema largely supplanted literature as the primary vehicle for collective memory. A wave of Hollywood productions arrived in Japanese theaters, capturing the profound trauma that the war had inflicted upon American society. Films such as Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now examined the madness, disillusionment, and moral collapse experienced by young conscripts. Yet these cinematic visions suffered from an inherent limitation. Whether portrayed as an adrenaline-fueled action vehicle or an existential nightmare, the actual people of Vietnam were rarely granted interior lives. Vietnamese combatants were frequently presented as shadowy figures moving through tall grass, silent snipers, or faceless casualties, serving as little more than instruments designed to illustrate the moral agony of American soldiers. Looking back on those films, it is easy to understand why Vietnamese viewers might harbor mixed feelings toward an industry that transformed their national trauma into an exclusive study of foreign guilt.

Encounters along the Riverbanks of Bataan

Concrete engagement with actual Vietnamese people arrived years later, under circumstances far removed from academic reading rooms or darkened movie theaters. During a period of fieldwork in the Philippines, an unexpected opportunity led me to visit the Bataan province on the island of Luzon. Situated along the coast near the municipality of Morong, the Philippine Refugee Processing Center was established through a cooperative agreement between the Philippine government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, with financial assistance from the United States and other Western nations. The facility operated as a transit station for Indochinese refugees, predominantly those who had fled Vietnam by sea following the reunification of the country under the communist government in Hanoi.

These refugees, commonly referred to as the boat people, had survived hazardous maritime crossings marked by piracy, overcrowding, and starvation in order to reach asylum across Southeast Asia. The camp in Bataan was not intended for permanent settlement. Instead, it served as an educational waystation designed to prepare families for integration into third countries, primarily the United States, Canada, and Australia. To facilitate this transition, the administration employed Filipino instructors who were fluent in English to deliver intensive language instruction and cultural orientation. These teachers taught practical conversational skills, introduced the civic institutions of Western democracies, and offered guidance on the social customs of the societies that had agreed to grant them permanent citizenship.

I had the privilege of staying at the camp for several days, observing the daily routines of the instructors and their students. One afternoon, I accompanied a Filipino English teacher and a group of young Vietnamese refugees on an informal excursion into the forested hills surrounding the facility. We hiked toward a mountain river, carrying simple provisions for a picnic by the water. Sitting on the smooth stones beside the current, the young men and women began to converse and sing together. At the time, I was roughly the same age as these youths, which created an immediate sense of shared generational presence despite our divergent paths.

When they sang, the melodies possessed an unexpected, lyrical cadence that lingered in the cool air above the river. The songs were imbued with a distinct melancholy, featuring musical intervals and vocal inflections that immediately brought to mind French chansons. That moment prompted a sudden recollection of Vietnam’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial history, during which French cultural institutions, architecture, and musical tastes were woven into urban life, particularly in cities like Saigon and Hanoi. Hearing those young voices rise above the rushing water, singing songs of longing while suspended between an abandoned homeland and an uncertain future across the Pacific, transformed what had previously been a series of historical dates into a vivid, human memory.

Diaspora and the Calligraphy of Peace

The generational trajectory of those who passed through Bataan, Palawan, and other Southeast Asian camps constitutes one of the most remarkable chapters of the late twentieth century. Having arrived in North America with few material resources and little command of the local language, refugee families dedicated their energies toward educating their children. A prominent public illustration of this resilience is seen in the life of Priscilla Chan, the pediatrician and philanthropist who co-founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative alongside her husband, Mark Zuckerberg. Her parents were ethnic Chinese refugees who fled postwar Vietnam aboard wooden vessels, working long shifts in restaurants and service industries upon their arrival in Massachusetts to support their family. Their daughter subsequently graduated from Harvard University and completed her medical residency at the University of California, San Francisco. That path, while exceptionally visible due to her prominence, mirrors the quiet academic and professional achievements of thousands of second-generation Vietnamese Americans who built productive lives out of displacement.

Concurrently with this demographic resettlement, Vietnamese spiritual philosophy began to exert a profound influence on global culture through the writings of the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I first encountered his thought through his English-language volume, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. His writing was striking for its total absence of esoteric jargon. Rather than presenting Buddhism as a complex metaphysical system, he articulated the core principle of mindfulness, known in traditional Pali as sati, as an immediate practice anchored in breathing, walking, and washroom chores. Before mindfulness was co-opted as an enterprise productivity tool or an instrument of commercial wellness, Thich Nhat Hanh presented it as an ethical foundation for nonviolent social action and individual composure.

Beyond his written texts, Thich Nhat Hanh developed a distinctive visual practice that linked Eastern meditative disciplines with Western linguistic forms. He created contemplative calligraphy using traditional ink and animal-hair brushes, but rather than rendering classical Chinese ideograms, he brushed phrases in the Latin alphabet. Using both English and Vietnamese, which adopted the Latin-based quoc ngu script in the seventeenth century, he drew rounded, balanced letters that occupied the space of hanging scrolls. Phrases like “Breathe, you are alive” or “Present moment, wonderful moment” were rendered with steady, deliberate strokes, turning the European alphabet into a vehicle for quiet contemplation. The practice demonstrated that spiritual discipline did not depend on archaic linguistic forms, but could inhabit the everyday phonetic symbols of the contemporary world.

The monk’s life reflected the broader tragedy of his country. Because he refused to align himself with either the American-backed government in Saigon or the communist leadership in Hanoi, advocating instead for an immediate cessation of hostilities, he was cast into exile in 1966. For decades, he lived primarily at Plum Village, his monastic community in southern France, barred from returning to his homeland. It was only in his later years, following the economic liberalization initiated by the Doi Moi reforms, that the Vietnamese government permitted him to return for visits. In the final stage of his life, having survived a severe stroke, he chose to return permanently to Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, the monastery where he had taken his vows as a novice in 1942. He passed away there in January 2022 at the age of ninety-five, completing an arc that had carried him from wartime destruction to global prominence, and finally back to the soil from which his vocation had first arisen.

The Electric Metropolis and Leapfrog Progress

When I finally traveled to Vietnam in person, the immediate impression of its streets dismantled any lingering remnants of the country I had formed through wartime literature and mid-century cinema. Arriving in modern urban centers, the most striking feature of the urban landscape is the sheer dominance of electric mobility. Moving through the traffic, one is immediately surrounded by large fleets of electric vehicles painted in a distinctive cyan hue, bearing the brand mark of GSM, an operating arm of VinFast. While international observers often associate the expansion of electric vehicles with companies like Tesla or Chinese manufacturers like BYD, the domestic market in Vietnam has been claimed by a home-grown conglomerate.

VinFast, a subsidiary of Vingroup, has undertaken an ambitious program of vertical integration, constructing not only passenger sedans and sport utility vehicles but also widespread charging infrastructure, urban service centers, and commercial taxi operations. The cyan-colored taxis are ubiquitous across major cities, providing quiet, exhaust-free transport through neighborhoods once notorious for two-stroke scooter emissions. The physical presence of BYD is notably muted on these streets, largely because Vingroup secured prime urban footholds, government policy alignments, and broad consumer acceptance early in the transition. For a nation that was struggling with acute fuel shortages and wartime devastation just four decades ago, emerging as a leading adopter of electric fleet vehicles within Southeast Asia represents an extraordinary industrial realignment.

This rapid modernization is equally apparent in small, interpersonal exchanges. When riding in an electric taxi, it is common to observe drivers navigating language barriers not through formal English education, but by using handheld smartphones. Drivers comfortably open artificial intelligence translation applications, speak into their microphones with natural cadence, and offer their screens to foreign passengers to clarify destinations, payment preferences, or traffic conditions. There is no hesitation or sense of technological intimidation. The digital tool is treated as a natural extension of practical labor, allowing individuals to conduct cross-cultural commerce with complete equanimity.

This widespread technological fluency rests on a substantial domestic corporate foundation. Enterprise groups such as FPT Corporation have transformed the nation’s technical capabilities. Originally founded by Vietnamese scientists in the late 1980s, FPT has grown from a software outsourcing firm into a global information technology enterprise that commands tens of thousands of software engineers, cloud architects, and systems specialists. The company has aggressively expanded into enterprise software, digital infrastructure, and international partnerships with global semiconductor leaders such as Nvidia, aiming to secure high-value manufacturing and design capabilities. The educational system’s historic focus on rigorous mathematics, combined with a youthful demographic eager to master digital tools, has positioned the country not merely as an assembly hub for foreign electronics, but as an active participant in regional software architecture and computational engineering.

The Mountain Market and the Disparities of Velocity

Traveling north into the high valleys of Sa Pa, near the border with China, provides a different lens through which to observe the interaction between ancient traditions and modern tools. The highlands are home to various ethnic minority communities, including the Hmong, Dao, and Tay, whose terraced rice fields sculpt the contours of the Hoang Lien Son range. In the town centers and village markets, elderly women dressed in traditional indigo-dyed garments and embroidered collars display handcrafted textiles, woven hemp bags, and silver jewelry for visitors.

Even in these highland valleys, modern connectivity is woven into the fabric of daily life. Between customer transactions, it is ordinary to see an elderly merchant resting beside her wares, smartphone in hand, chatting with family members via video call or checking a mobile banking balance. The society has largely bypassed the intermediate stages of technological adoption that characterized Western industrialization, such as copper landline telephones, desktop personal computers, and physical checkbooks. Instead, communities have moved directly into high-speed cellular networks, QR-code payment protocols, and handheld computational devices.

This technological adoption occurs alongside an accelerating tourist economy. Sa Pa now attracts a dense stream of international travelers from across Europe, North America, and neighboring Southeast Asian nations such as the Philippines. Modern mountain railways, luxury hotels, and guided trekking itineraries have transformed an isolated highland settlement into a vibrant international destination. The material benefits of this influx are visible in the ongoing construction of guesthouses, restaurants, and transport facilities that provide income for families who historically relied solely on subsistence farming.

Yet this rapid economic expansion inevitably produces social friction. The shift toward a market-oriented economy under Doi Moi pulled millions of citizens out of absolute poverty, but it also dissolved the broad equality of condition that characterized the early postwar socialist era. Income disparities between the urban middle class in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and the rural populations in highland districts have widened considerably. The pressure to participate in cash economies has disrupted traditional agrarian rhythms, occasionally reducing cultural heritage to a commercial spectacle for foreign visitors.

Furthermore, domestic economic growth has not yet expanded quickly enough to provide high-paying employment for all segments of the population. This imbalance is demonstrated by the large numbers of young Vietnamese who continue to travel abroad as contract workers and technical trainees, particularly to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These workers endure difficult physical labor, cultural isolation, and financial obligations to recruitment agencies in order to send remittances back to their home provinces. The presence of these workers abroad serves as an enduring reminder that the impressive velocity of national economic indicators has not yet resolved the underlying challenge of uneven domestic opportunity.

The Arc of a Single Lifetime

Walking through the historical quarters and observing the young people who carry this society forward leaves a profound impression. The guides who accompany visitors through cultural landmarks, many of them young university graduates in their twenties, possess a notable cheerfulness, directness, and intellectual poise. They speak foreign languages with enthusiasm, display a thorough command of regional history, and look toward their professional careers with unburdened ambition. In their demeanor, there is no lingering trace of the ideological bitterness, victimhood, or suspicion that might have been expected from a society subjected to catastrophic external aggression during the preceding century.

That openness is striking when one considers the sheer concentration of historical trauma the nation endured across the span of modern history. Vietnam experienced decades of harsh French colonial rule, followed by the Japanese occupation during the Pacific War, the prolonged Indochina War against French forces, and the destruction of the American War. Even after the fall of Saigon in 1975, peace remained elusive. The country was immediately drawn into military engagements with the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and a subsequent border conflict with China in 1979, alongside severe international economic embargoes that contributed to widespread rationing, famine, and the desperate flight of the boat people.

The fact that this entire cycle of warfare, economic ruin, institutional renewal, and technological leapfrogging occurred within the span of four or five decades is astonishing. A person who was a student when Saigon fell has lived long enough to witness the same nation become a peaceful destination for international travel, an exporter of advanced electronics, and a pioneer in electric public transit. Such an arc of renewal usually requires centuries of gradual historical evolution, yet here it was compressed into the boundaries of a single adult lifetime.

Looking back on the decades that began with Katsuichi Honda’s sober reporting and Takeshi Kaiko’s literary dispatches, moving through the melancholic melodies sung by young refugees along the river in Bataan, and arriving at the electric vehicles and software corridors of modern Hanoi, the transformation feels complete. History is rarely a static verdict sealed within old books or recorded on celluloid. It is an evolving current sustained by ordinary human beings who choose to move past catastrophe, adapt their tools to the demands of their era, and build their lives toward the future.

Image: A photo captured by the author