Susan Schroer, "We Hope They Spend Lots of Money": The State of Tourism in Vietnam

Saturday evening, back in the hotel lobby: we have just taken cyclo rides, en masse, around the city of Hanoi.   Twenty bicycle carts in single file, carrying eighteen bleary-eyed Americans, one expat tour guide and one Vietnamese with a Palm Pilot – we must have been a sight.   Afterwards, the consensus among us seems to be that the experience was “weird.”  Something about sailing through the busy intersections, being pedaled manually through these crowded streets by an invisible driver sitting somewhere over your shoulder – yes, it definitely felt odd.   For my part, to avoid thinking too much about traffic, I had focused my attention on the shops.   Apart from being puzzled at the number of copying stores, I was surprised to see so many tourist centers.   Who runs these shops, I wondered, who patronizes them, how long have they been there and how long will they stay?   These were the questions that resurfaced for me at every point of our trip, and I’ve come to believe the answers are particularly helpful in understanding the country of Vietnam today.

Above all, travelers to Vietnam will be reminded that tourism in a communist country is run according to a central agenda.   It would be difficult to underestimate the influence of the government: in Vietnam the state still oversees all projects related to tourism, and requires that foreign investors work alongside Vietnamese partners.   Indeed, the government considers tourism such a priority that it announced a nationwide “Visit Vietnam Year” in 1990. The industry is overseen by several institutions, of which the largest is the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).   Vietnamtourism [sic], an agency responsible for research, development and promotion, is one branch of VNAT.   Other levels of the government-run industry include local travel offices, which sometimes cooperate with VNAT and sometimes work independently, and the People’s Committees, which control ownership of hotels and other related property.

Readers may be impressed by the system of carefully delegated powers and the attention to detail, but don’t be fooled: this industry is still quite young.   The tourist trade in Vietnam has grown directly out of doi moi , the economic reform project enacted in 1986 that allowed for greater autonomy.   Much of today's progress can also be traced back to the subsequent Foreign Investment Law, passed in 1988 to encourage overseas investment in hotels and transportation. By the late 1980s, Vietnam had become desperate for foreign exchange, having fallen into economic isolation after the collapse of the Soviet Union.   Slowly the government has been moving toward modernization and (to a certain extent) privatization.   Most recently, in 2000, Vietnam completed the first five-year stage of a fifteen-year plan to improve industry, technology and living standards.  

Progress has been shaky, and there seems to be some lack of consensus on successes and failures.   In 1993 the state of hotels and transportation was apparently so poor that the journal Travel Trade euphemistically considered the country “an ideal budget destination” (quoted by Annabel Biles).   Yet in the same year, Ralph Lenz wrote in Focus magazine that “so far, Vietnamese tourist policy has been aimed at the wealth package tourist, and the affordable packages have been limited to only a few sites” (2). In addition to lodging difficulties, travel itself was initially something of a hassle: at one point interior visas were required to move about within the country, and Lenz complained in 1993 that “ no one knows for sure what the present regulations are” (2).   In any case, over the last decade the situation has only improved.   Although a large percentage of visitors to Vietnam are visiting family members, the number of paying tourists continues to rise steadily – Graham Yates writes that there has been over 40 percent annual growth since 1991 (2).

Just as we Americans forget there was a Vietnam long before the U.S. Marines landed in Danang, we may also forget that foreign tourists to Vietnam are not only from the U.S. The tourism industry reaches out to all nations with money and leisure to spend, and travelers from countries such as France and Australia are also an important source of revenue.   Speaking generally, each nation has its own set of priorities and expectations.   Like Americans, the French are attracted by a certain sense of nostalgia, though of an older, classically colonial sort.   In fact, as Annabel Biles notes, marketing campaigns take advantage of these sorts of constructed memories by recycling images from the 1920s and 30s (212).   The ads have done the trick: inspired partly by these campaigns and partly by films such as Indochine , L’Amant , and The Scent of Green Papaya , French tourists began to flock to Vietnam in the mid-1990s, totaling 119,202 in 1995 alone (Biles 214).  

More than a few commentators have been troubled by the direction in which advertising campaigns are headed.   Based as it is on nostalgic images of days gone by, tourism in Vietnam can be seen as a continuation of colonialism in more than one way.   Laurel B. Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams observe that some representations still present Vietnam as “a nation of colonial pleasures, of elephant rides, 1930s Citroens, and afternoon drinks in the shade of the veranda” (136).   Such notions are not only inaccurate, but may also be damaging culturally and economically.   Financially speaking, tourism inevitably makes the host country dependent on the prosperity of other nations.   Meanwhile, Biles worries about the ethnic implications of certain tourist promotions, where "descriptions of exotic scenery and traditions merge into patronizing comments on the people themselves" (212).   Victor Alneng goes one step further, suggesting that “with the tourist trail so meticulously following the destructive trail once trampled by combat boots and Ho Chi Minh sandals, it’s worth asking – is this newly discovered country still at war?” (462).  

Part of the problem is that travelers come over already carrying expectations of what Vietnam will be.   The reality is that many of our expectations come from media representations which are sometimes less than reliable.   Victor Alneng’s interactions with backpackers taught him that “few would talk at any length about Vietnam … without talking about Vietnam War movies” (468).   Interestingly, “the second major source of information was the Lonely Planet guidebook” (469).   The emphasis on film and tourist perspectives, with little attention to political and cultural history, may begin to explain the problem.

I look back on how I conceived of Vietnam before our trip, and I think I must have expected something less familiar.   What I found has made me wonder if there can be any fundamental differences among cities worldwide. Hanoi smells… not like fish sauce, but like car exhaust.   The sandals are not made from black tire rubber, but bright yellow plastic, like the ones I wear in the shower back home.   Davies, our U.S.-born tour guide, was roughly what I’d expected: dressed for safari, eager to get us on and off the bus without incident, tending to wax rhapsodic about Southeast Asia.   But Truc, our Vietnamese guide, surprised me with his jokes and his e-books and his love for American rock.   On sightseeing days he wore a short-sleeved buttoned shirt and a ballcap, which inexplicably made me think of my grandfather at work in his garden.  

I don’t suppose I was naïve enough to expect everyone to be fresh from the paddy, but that is the stereotype that we often gravitate toward.   “Traditional ways of life, such as farming and wood gathering,” writes Graham Yates, “are perceived [by tourists] as more ‘real’ than many urban lifestyles” (2).   Of course it’s silly, as silly as East Coast natives who assume that I live on a corn farm because I grew up in southwest Ohio.   Still, these unspoken notions, what Biles calls “picturesque scenes of a timeless, ‘mysterious’ Orient,” can be dangerous if they obscure realities -- if they “dehistoricize Vietnam's turbulent past and the disturbing social conditions of its people" (208).

Perhaps the only generalization I would venture to make about the Vietnamese people is that they were happy to see us, and even happier to do business.   In June 1994, a reporter for The Economist asked a Mr. Trang Cong Cuong how he felt about seeing former GI’s returning to Vietnam.   Mr. Cuong, who runs the Da Nang Tourism company, went straight to the point: “It is a symbol of the normalisation of relations,” he said.   “We hope they will spend lots of money” (“Profit Hunters” 31).   This is, after all, the core truth of tourism: no matter how authentic or genuine the experience may be, if it can’t be sold there’s not much point.   Bizarrely, there seems to be a market for “authenticity” just as important as the market for luxury. One Australian company claims that its “Authentic Vietnam” program “does not just take you to temple after temple; we take you to our favorite special places such as a potting village outside Hanoi,” and other such village sights.   But what are we to make of the incongruity of paying for such an experience?   On our first night in Hanoi, I find myself in a stilted log cabin, watching interpretive dance on a television screen.   Two artists, a husband and wife team, are hosting our group for dinner, and outside on the patio a catering team is arranging the food and drinks.   It may be the hunger or the jet lag, but I’m having a desperately hard time understanding why we’re here.   Who are these painters, and why should they care about us, most of whom have no notion of art at all?   Then after dinner I see members of our group inside – engaged in the first of what will be a long list of complicated credit card transactions – and it all suddenly makes sense.  

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Seven thirty-five, Thursday morning in Hoi An -- past time for my appointment with the tailor.   In the lobby, a receptionist approaches and advises me that I have a visitor waiting at the front gate.   The gate, of course -- why had I thought she could just come waltzing in, delivery tucked under one arm? At the gate she is hard to miss, grinning and waving a blue plastic bag.   Waiting nearby on a motorcycle, ready for speedy departure, are a man about her age and a small girl.   A family weekend outing, I think, but then remember that I’m the one on vacation here.   In Hoi An reality this is Thursday, a business day, and the trio is probably waiting for me to pay so that they can open up shop.   Soon, as though it weren’t strange enough to be outside trying on a winter coat on this sunny Vietnam morning, we also begin to attract the attention of hotel guests. A Frenchman walks by whistling Zebda.   Songs by the Arab minority in Toulouse, France, surfacing here in a Vietnam fishing village... I’m so distracted by the oddness of the situation that the loose stitching on the pockets escapes my notice, and they’ll have torn apart by the time I get to the States.   I can’t quite believe in this girl, roughly my age, whom I met just ten hours ago, who must have spent most of her time since then either asleep or stitching clothes for me.   Who seems to have a family and a full-time job, while I haven’t got much beyond 120-odd credit hours and a new coat.   But what can be done?   If she spoke enough English for me to comment on the situation, would she think it odd too?   Even if she did, would she mind?   Questions without answers.   I pay for the coat and go back inside.

This wasn’t the only morning when I felt as though something wouldn’t quite click.   Take, for example, our visit to Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum.   There can be few more sobering experiences than seeing a national hero up close and in person, embalmed.   But, in Biles’s words, " the political significance of this site is quickly lost in the ensuing advice to 'go and wander through the antique shops, the streets lined with colonial villas, the markets and along the dikes of the Red River'" (213).   Perhaps this disparity is what travel is about: we want to explore other places, but not enough to actually pick up our lives and move.   So in Europe we see museums and cathedrals, drink coffee on the terrace, shop wherever Visa is accepted, and go home shaking our heads about the snobs who can’t understand our French.   In Vietnam we tour the temples and war memorials, buy clothes because they’re cheap and colorful, try the food (or at least those parts of it that we recognize), and go back to the hotel wondering about these people who seem so happy and yet so inscrutable.   Tourism, it seems to me, is the cultural equivalent of window-shopping: we’re free to try on other lifestyles for size, but under no obligation to buy.   Although the facilitation of travel allows us to understand others more intimately, there’s something strange in the fact that it’s so easy to escape once the trip is over – the cultural gap gets narrower and wider all at once.

And as the tourist trade expands, things could get even stranger in Vietnam.   According to one article, some of the recent growth is thanks to the golf industry.   Golf has not been the most populist of sports, especially in light of recent controversy.   And if the thought of this waspish game on the grass of Southeast Asia is not enough, Graham Yates points out that at the newly built course in Da Lat, one round costs US$100 – about one third of the country’s average per capita income.

These sorts of contradictions are perhaps unavoidable in a world where travel gets easier every day.   Alneng’s article uses the bestseller The Beach to show how “tourism, once a novelty, has undergone normalization in Western society.   This process has raised tourism … to the status of an unofficial civil right” (463).    We feel entitled to travel, and entitled to have certain experiences in the places we travel to, with the result that even relatively exotic vacations start to resemble one another.   Shortly before submitting the final revision of this paper, I came across an article by Richard Busch in a 1996 issue of National Geographic Traveler .   Reading about his experiences was like hearing from the nineteenth member of our capstone course.   He shared thoughts about the Temple of Literature, Water Puppet Show, and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi.    He raved about the glitz of Hue, and reacted to the Cu Chi tunnels and China Beach – the same sights we had seen, in the same order we had seen them, only seven years earlier.    I wondered if he, too, had watched Davies flirt with the waitresses at Le Tonkin and played dominos with Truc.   

The more mobile we become, the less we are forced to adapt to other people and ways of life, and the less we realize what a miracle it is that the international dateline is just around the corner.   Consider this: as a student at Miami, I live on campus without a car.   This unbelievable capstone, which started with a shuttle at Millett Hall and ended three plane rides later, made it easier for me to get to Hanoi than it would have been to get to Hamilton, Ohio.   Under circumstances like these it’s hard to appreciate the full import of travel: though I enjoyed every moment of the trip, I often found myself wondering what on earth I was doing there.   And yet the one thing I think our trip taught me is that I need to keep traveling more: to see more, to take advantage of my freedom to pick up and go -- because it’s not everyone’s civil right.

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Late April, by myself in the computer lab: almost time to wrap the project up, and still more questions than conclusions.   For kicks, I resort the bibliography according to date of publication.   A professor once told me about two critics who explicated a novel by stringing together the first sentences of each chapter.   Now I’m going to make some similarly superficial conclusions about my own inexhaustive research.   Some highlights:

• Years with several citations include 1993, 1994, 1996.   These articles are curious, exploratory, rarely longer than a page, appearing in mainstream press like The Economist and The New York Times .  
• 1997 and 1998, years of the Asian financial crisis, boast only one article apiece.
• The key words in early titles are either retrospective – “returning,”“resurrecting” – or economic – “profit,” “demand.”   The middle of the list seems to have something to sell – “Saigon Serenade.”  “Romancing Vietnam.”  “Americans Welcome.”  The last articles are either confusing or confused.   Peter Burns writes about something called “Interconnections, Planning and the Local-Global Nexus.”  Victor Alneng is somewhat more direct with his question: “What the Fuck is a Vietnam?”
• The earliest entry is a one-page spread in Newsweek about returning veterans.   The most recent is a thirty-page essay on “popcolonization” in Critique of Anthropology .

These may be the only possible kinds of conclusions, for the future of tourism in Vietnam is not clear on all fronts.   It’s also not certain whether the industry will be as profitable as hoped: of the revenues from foreign tourists, Lenz notes that “over half may go to airlines and tourist agents in the country of origin” (2). To what extent can the country preserve its culture and still manage to turn it into something marketable?   To what extent does the tourist trade threaten to transform Vietnam into just another exotic vacation spot, with the same straw hats being sold from Hanoi to Saigon?  

Certain aspects of the trip make me think that, at least for the time being, there is something unique about being in Vietnam.   Even the souvenir stands, ubiquitous as they are in all major cities, are in some ways distinct here.   To me, the children hawking books show a remarkable respect, if not for copyright laws, then for literacy and education.   (Now we know what all those copy shops are for.)   Yes, we were surprised by the enthusiasm for cell phones and fried chicken.   But never have I seen so many happy-looking billboards celebrating a political party and a leader dead nearly forty years.   On another positive note, there have been continuing efforts to protect the national identity.   Biles explains that in response to increased tourism in the early 1990s, eventually the government felt the need to call attention to “the 'social evils' seen to be associated with foreign visitors, notably drugs, prostitution, and AIDS” (227).   AIDS posters went up, many of them featuring the same smiling four-person family as the signs for the Communist Party, and the posters can still be seen on sidewalks and highways today. Morality and politics aside, there seems to be something positive in the nation asserting its identity in opposition to visitors from the West.  

Our group agreed that we saw a relentless optimism in Vietnam, both in official representations and in personal contact.   Newspapers seem unaffected by bad news, running stories about the conflict in Iraq next to stories about ethnic festivals and preparations for the Southeast Asian Games.   Lenz pointed out in 1993 that interactions between residents and tourists could be shaky, since “restrictions on contact with foreigners have only recently been removed” (2).   But ten years later, I have trouble imagining a Vietnam where a tourist could walk down the street without being asked “Hellohowareyou?”  

According to Ralph Lenz, the growth of tourism in a less developed nation is often a discrete sequence of events: first comes a group of rich tourists interested in the area, followed by the building of middle-class hotels, followed in turn by the arrival of “middle class mass tourists” (2). Ten years after Lenz charted out these steps, it seems clear that the process is well underway, if not complete. Most writers and observers have come to a similar conclusion: Vietnam will continue to develop in the name of tourism and prosperity, whatever the cost.   Biles writes of the different interpretations of this “progress":

        Whereas the non-Vietnamese tour operator Intrepid warns its adventurers traveler market that "as

        Vietnam races to embrace economic development and Western ways much of the charm and              character that now exists may be lost," the Vietnam Airlines in-flight magazine features articles

        on modernization, development, and investment and resource base opportunities (225).  

There is at least one thing we can say with confidence: if modernization means opening its borders to tourism, then Vietnam makes no apologies about doing just that.  

Works Consulted

Aikman, David.   “Saigon Serenade”.   American Spectator 30.6 (June 1997): 62-3.

Alneng, Victor.   “What the Fuck is a Vietnam? Touristic Phantasms and the

Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War)”.   Critique of Anthropology 22.4 (Dec 2002): 461-90.

Biles, Annabel, Kate Lloyd, and William S. Logan.   “Romancing Vietnam: The

Formation and Function of Tourist Images of Vietnam.”   Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in Southeast Asia .   Jill Forshee, Christina Fink, and Sandra Cate, eds.   Berkeley: International and Area Studies, 1999.

Blaine, Thomas W., Golan Mohammed, Fred Ruppel, and Turgut Var.   "US

Demand for Vietnam Tourism."   Annals of Tourism Research 22.4 (1994): 934-6.

Burns, Peter.   “Interconnections, Planning and the Local-Global Nexus: A Case

from Vietnam.”   Interconnected Worlds: Tourism in Southeast Asia .  

Peggy Teo, T.C. Chang, and K.C. Ho, eds.   New York: Pergamon, 2001.

Busch, Richard.   “The New Vietnam.”   National Geographic Traveler 13.3

(May/June 1996): 66-75.

Kennedy, Laurel B., and Mary Rose Williams.   “The Past Without the Pain: The

Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam’s Tourist Industry.”   The Country of

Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam .   Hue-Tam Ho Tai,

ed.   Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Lenz, Ralph.   “On Resurrecting Tourism in Vietnam”.   Focus 43.3 (1993): 1-6.

McDowell, Edwin.   “Big-time Tourism Courts Vietnam.”    New York Times 26 May

1994.

Moreau, Ron.   “Returning Vets: A Profit on the Past”.   Newsweek 121.15 (12

April 1993): 38.

Miller, Lisa.   “Good Night, Vietnam.”   Wall Street Journal 21 June 1996, eastern

ed.

Mydans, Seth.   “Visit the Vietcong’s World: Americans Welcome.”   New York

Times 7 July 1999.

---.   “Wanted in Vietnam: Tourists Who Spend.”   New York Times 16 August

1996.

Naisbitt, John.   Global Paradox: The Bigger the World Economy, the More

Powerful Its Smaller Players .   New York: William Morrow and Company,

1994.

“The profit hunters”.   The Economist 331.7867 (11 June 1994): 31-2.

Shenon, Philip.   “A Trickle, Not a Rush, to Vietnam.”   New York Times 27 Aug.

2000.

---.   “Bargain Prices Prevail at Vietnam’s New Hotels.”   New York Times 5 July

1998.

---.   “Vietnam Strains to Meet the Demands of Tourism.”   New York Times 11

Dec. 1994.

Texier, Catherine.   “Grand Survivors of a Colonial Era.”   New York Times 9 Sept.

2001.

“Travel Incentives for Vietnamese Diaspora.”   New York Times 11 Feb. 2000.

Walters, Ian.   “Where the Action Was: Tourism and War Memorabilia from

Vietnam.”   Converging Interests: Traders, Travelers, and Tourists in

Southeast Asia .   Jill Forshee, Christina Fink, and Sandra Cate, eds.  

Berkeley: International and Area Studies, 1999.

Yates, Graham.   “Tourism Development in Vietnam”.   Geodate 13.2 (May 2000):

5-8.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Urry, J.   The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies .  

London: Sage, 1990.

Wintle, Justin.   Romancing Vietnam: Inside the Boat Country .   Harmondsworth,

UK: Viking, 1991.

Relevant Websites

Vietnam National Administration of Tourism ( www.vietnamtourism.com ).

Vietnam Online ( www.govietnam.com ).

Vietnam Adventures ( www.vietnamadventures.com ).

Vietnam Tourism – Hanoi ( www.vn-tourism.com ).

GoCVietnam ( www.gocvietnam.com ).

The Greater Mekong Subregion ( http://www.visit-mekong.com/vietnam ).