Vietnam: struggling to win the peace

Chung claimed that incentives introduced for workers by the government at the end of last year were causing an ''economic boom.'' If a worker produced more, he got paid more, said Chung. He said that he accepts the revolution in Vietnam because, in his view, it has produced a more egalitarian society.But what is surprising about Ho Chi Minh City is not so much what has changed as what has remained the same. Impressive numbers of people still go to the churches and pagodas, for example. At the same time, however, religious leaders are under pressure to conform to the new system.''The churches are even fuller than before ,'' said a Vietnamese Roman Catholic. ''But most of the seminaries are closed. . . . 200 to 300 priests are in jail. . . . The communists divide the priests and push forward the ones they consider progressive.''The old Saigon rumor mill - rumors passed by word of mouth - still functions. Known to some as ''Radio Catinat,'' it was named after the main downtown street called Catinat during the French period. (The street later became Freedom Street under the American-supported regimes and General Uprising Street under the Communists. A joke has it that General Uprising killed Freedom.)Radio Catinat occasionally tells the truth, but most of the time, as it did during the war, it spreads the preposterous sort of rumors that everyone wants to believe.An example of the latest from Radio Catinat came from a woman who said she had tried unsuccessfully to escape by boat from Vietnam. She said that friends had told her three empty boats had been found recently off the coast of Kien Giang Province in the Mekong Delta. The boats, she said, were believed to have brought into Vietnam soldiers from the old regime under the command of former Premier and Vice-President Nguyen Cao Ky. I told her that was unlikely. Ky is running a liquor store on the West Coast of the United States.''But many people want to believe it's true,'' she said.Escaping from Vietnam by boat was proving to be an increasingly dangerous and expensive proposition, the woman said.She, and others , said that the cost of bribing the appropriate officials and arranging for the boat and trip came to about $1,000 per person these days. Even after all payments were made, much could go wrong. One could be arrested, as she was. Those who made it to sea often encountered pirates.So some of Saigon's middle class live in limbo. Wanting to escape but unable to do anything about it, they wait for something to happen.Sunday night in Ho Chi Minh City is an occasion. Courting couples gather by the hundreds up and down Nguyen Hue Boulevard and around the fountain on Le Loi Boulevard. Young men and women cruise on the edges of the crowd, discreetly, and not so discreetly, looking one another over. The more daring among the young men weave dashing patterns on their Japanese-made motorbikes, abruptly accelerating, then just as abruptly stopping. The sight of a young woman from another era - she is wearing a miniskirt, something not seen here very often these days - reminds you that this is Saigon, not Hanoi.A surprising number of youths once known in Saigon as ''cowboys'' are still here, wearing their hair long and showing off their motorbikes. Their ways are frozen in time. Some persist, for example, in wearing bell-bottom trousers, as though styles had not changed since 1969.No one knows exactly how these youths get their money. Some live perhaps off the black market and from parcels sent by Vietnamese refugees who fled to the United States or elsewhere. According to one estimate, as many as 200,000 of the city's people depend almost entirely on such parcels. At any rate, the youths in the coffee shops have enough to pay for their coffee and drinks. Indeed, some drink far too much.''They steal and they sell,'' said one Saigonese. ''They steal and they sell so that they can get drunk and not have to think.''Some Saigonese insist that corruption is even more widespread now than it was during the war years. If all the stories one hears are to be believed, the system, in the southern part of the country at least, cannot function without bribes.But even with bribes, it is said that it takes as much as a year to get some items through the port at Ho Chi Minh City.Duong Quynh Hoa, a round-faced, vivacious, French-speaking pediatrician, is one of those who continue to accept the system but who also criticize it.In her view, the ''comrades from the north'' have been too theoretical in their approach to the economy. They lacked a knowledge of what makes economies function and thought it enough to try to motivate people, she said.''We've hit bottom economically,'' Mrs. Hoa said. The problem, as she sees it, is still one of reconciling the Communist-led revolutionaries with those who were not on the side of the revolution. Or, as she puts it, ''The difficulty now is to bring together those who made the revolution and those who didn't.''''Motivation came easier during the war,'' she said. ''It was easier to win the war than to win the peace.''

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