\n<\/p>\n
On April 30, 1975, Vu Dang Toan commanded the first tank to smash through the main gate of Saigon\u2019s Independence Palace<\/a>. After seeing so many die \u2014 after grinding away his youth battling the Americans and the forces of South Vietnam \u2014 he was there, alive and surprised, for the war\u2019s weary end.<\/p>\n It was a full surrender. At the United States Embassy nearby, helicopters had already carried away the last Americans as the South\u2019s fighters disappeared, ditching their uniforms and boots in the streets.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m proud,\u201d Mr. Toan said, \u201cthat as a soldier, I completed the mission.\u201d<\/p>\n Fifty years later, he was a long way from that moment, sitting in his comfortable home north of Hanoi, encircled by rice fields, not far from factories pumping out Apple Watches.<\/p>\n Photos on the wall showed his tank on the palace lawn. Wearing his military uniform, he sipped tea in a dark wood chair beside his grandson Dang Hoang Anh, 14, a bright-eyed soccer fan wearing a school uniform in Chelsea blue<\/a>.<\/p>\n The boy pictured his life in different terms.<\/p>\n His goal? \u201cTo study in Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n His mission? \u201cTo make money.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandparents\u2019 generation, they had to go to war and people died,\u201d Hoang Anh said. \u201cNow we don\u2019t worry about that. We worry about school and jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Vietnam War was many things: a nationalist uprising against colonization, a killing machine that took the lives of at least one million Vietnamese<\/a> and 58,000 American servicemen, and a civil war in Asia that tore America apart. But it was also a bloody conflict over economic systems and cultures \u2014 the North\u2019s revolutionary socialism versus the South\u2019s freewheeling market scramble.<\/p>\n A half-century later, ideology is mostly dead and pragmatism is thriving. Vietnam has moved in a single lifetime from war to peace, rural to increasingly urban, poor to roughly middle-class, and explicitly Communist to a complex hybrid of free markets and state control.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Major multinationals (Nike, Samsung, Apple and others) have made Vietnam an export hub. The country, which liberalized its economy in the late 1980s, has been pushing toward higher-tech manufacturing and income levels closer to those of richer nations in Asia.<\/p>\n But the Vietnam model \u2014 mixing youthful workers, massive factories, flexible diplomacy and open markets for its exports \u2014 now faces a more hostile world.<\/p>\n The U.S.-China trade war is injecting uncertainty into a system that has hugely benefited Vietnam, freezing investment and slashing projections of economic growth. And the disruption comes at a terrible time \u2014 in the last decade of Vietnam\u2019s \u201cdemographic dividend,\u201d before the population rapidly ages.<\/p>\n And yet, for a resilient nation that is more windshield than rearview mirror, hope is always just up the road. Vietnam regularly tops rankings<\/a> of the most optimistic countries, and according to many Vietnamese, it\u2019s for good reason.<\/p>\n As recently as the 1990s, most were poor. Now less than 4 percent<\/a> of the population lives below what the World Bank considers the national poverty line, earning less than $3.65 a day. Per capita annual income has jumped more than sixfold, to roughly $4,500<\/a>, since 2000 \u2014 and everyone who can seems eager to join the world\u2019s social media stream, whether it\u2019s with fashion, food or hip-hop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nothing defines Vietnam more right now than the desire to be seen anew, to have Vietnam and its people recognized for their strengths. That urge has produced a potent and paternalistic nationalism. Factional struggles in the ruling elite sometimes open space for targeted critiques (of corruption, for example). But mild questioning of the system in art, books, religion and online still draws police repression.<\/p>\n Ambition is the focal point, for the government, too. Communist Party leaders recently launched a bold plan to consolidate provinces, merge ministries and cut the public work force by a third.<\/p>\n The goal is to move fast, and that drive for achievement is especially visible in classrooms.<\/p>\n At the Tan Phu Secondary School in Ho Chi Minh City, a private school that is part of a for-profit network emphasizing global citizenship<\/a>, the physics club is especially popular.<\/p>\n The school day runs from 7:20 a.m. to 4:50 p.m. The stairs display quotes in English like \u201cleadership is a choice not a position.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A decade ago, Tan Phu was one of just a few private schools in the district. Now there are 58. And all over Vietnam, bright high schoolers are pushing for, and expecting, upward mobility.<\/p>\n The students at Tan Phu are mostly the offspring of shop owners, office workers or factory managers. Ask these teenagers what they want, and nearly all will say studying abroad. Many pull it off.<\/p>\n In 2000, Vietnam sent around 1,300 students<\/a> to further their education in the United States; last year, American universities welcomed 22,000<\/a>. Another 37,000 or so studied in Australia<\/a>. <\/p>\n Why is an international education so important in Vietnam?<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just \u201cto make money.\u201d In interviews with parents and teachers, something deeper emerged \u2014 the lingering impact of war and the struggles that followed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The decade after 1975 was a desperate time of food shortages and suspicion. Soviet-style planning paralyzed the economy, while the North\u2019s leaders sent hundreds of thousands from the South to re-education camps<\/a>, blacklisting them from government jobs and banning their children from universities. More than a million Vietnamese fled on boats<\/a> in the 1970s and early \u201980s.<\/p>\n For those who recall that era, the opportunities of the present feel profound \u2014 and they must be seized, as if they offer a way to paint over one Vietnam with another. The postwar generations have something to prove: that their homeland is much more than war and refugees.<\/p>\n \u201cVietnam can get along with all the other developed nations,\u201d said Le Tra My, 39, Tan Phu\u2019s vice principal and a mother of three. \u201cWe want to show them the capabilities of the Vietnamese people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Vietnam\u2019s big cities, smog has reached crisis levels. Many days this year, Hanoi has topped the rankings of the world\u2019s most polluted cities, and Ho Chi Minh City has not been far behind.<\/p>\n Call it the cough of Vietnam\u2019s boundless growth. Coal generates more than half<\/a> of the country\u2019s electricity during peak demand. When farmers were given more freedom to grow for the market, they produced wild abundance with copious quantities of fertilizer and pesticides.<\/p>\n Especially for the Mekong, all of this has combined with climate change to threaten one of the planet\u2019s most productive regions for food and fishing.<\/p>\n Le Hoang Phuc, 25, grew up on a family farm deep in the south. It had been abandoned during the war when Saigon\u2019s leaders relocated rural residents into so-called strategic hamlets. When Mr. Phuc moved back as a boy, he could cup his hands in the shimmering water of nearby streams and watch fish squirm through his fingertips.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cToday we have more trash than fish,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Sitting near hives of bees making honey on a recent afternoon, he told us that his legs burned from chemicals when he stood in the dirtiest canals. <\/p>\n In TikTok and YouTube videos<\/a>, Mr. Phuc has been filming himself explaining the value of cleaner alternatives \u2014 like the organic farming that his family has now adopted.<\/p>\n They are doing their small part to keep the area healthy, while acknowledging it\u2019s not enough. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He said the Mekong now needed stricter laws, and garbage trucks for rural areas. Even more important, he added, Vietnamese society needed to reclaim a community mind-set.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople want to clean up their own houses,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t care much about common spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Weekend retreats at the Giac Ngo Pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City are a bustling affair, now regularly attended by scores of young professionals, who chant together under the gaze of golden Buddhas.<\/p>\n They come for meditation, songs (some with electric guitars) and messages warning against consumerism.<\/p>\n \u201cFor many lifetimes, we have forgotten our true nature,\u201d a monk told the group on a recent Sunday. \u201cWe are entangled in the world of delusion, intoxicated by greed and anger.\u201d<\/p>\n The event was live-streamed on Facebook<\/a> for those who couldn\u2019t make it in person.<\/p>\n Catholic seminaries and convents across Vietnam have also expanded in recent years, producing a bumper crop of young priests and nuns. <\/p>\n As young men and women embrace faith \u2014 along with folk songs, traditional dress and ancient tea ceremonies \u2014 some experts see it as a movement back to forms of Vietnamese identity that preceded Marxism and war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cVietnamese culture is like an underground stream,\u201d said Nguyen Duc Loc, an anthropologist who studies social change. \u201cIt\u2019s hidden from the surface, yet always present, quietly nurturing everything around it.\u201d<\/p>\n The government has mostly accepted the traditionalist revival.<\/p>\n The AO Show at the Opera House in Ho Chi Minh City, featuring modern dances with bamboo and folk songs, has become a hit for both tourists and local school groups. The performers see themselves as active participants in protecting Vietnam from foreign forces.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important thing for me as a young person is to preserve the culture of Vietnamese people \u2014 beyond wars,\u201d said Doan Khanh, 34, an AO Show dancer. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But expression in Vietnam has limits. This is still a one-party state where dissent can lead to prison.<\/p>\n Vietnam is not China, with its censored internet and sophisticated systems of heavy policing. It does have red lines that are real and sometimes hard to see, especially for cultural creators, nonprofits and the faithful outside institutional hierarchies.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very challenging \u2014 yet inspiring and dynamic \u2014 environment,\u201d said Quynh Pham, who fled Vietnam as a child and returned 28 years ago to research the contemporary arts scene.<\/p>\n In 2003, she co-founded Galerie Quynh, a contemporary art gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, which recently hosted a show of new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, a Vietnamese American artist. In a sign of past becoming present, and of what is allowed, the show included large mobiles reminiscent of childhood toys, with dragonflies made from old artillery shells, resting in perfect equilibrium.<\/p>\n That kind of balance \u2014 between openness and control \u2014 is proving hard for Vietnam to find.<\/p>\n In 2022, an art exhibition meant to commemorate Vietnam\u2019s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu was shut down by officials<\/a> \u2014 apparently because a painting included images of a tattered flag and bony soldiers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even a devout Buddhist who went viral for his asceticism and long barefoot walks around the country was detained last June and forced to end his pilgrimage<\/a> in Vietnam.<\/p>\n Because he had gained followers online and off, independent of the state-sponsored Buddhist system, he was treated as a threat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n My Dien is a hurried cluster that has grown up ad hoc, with buildings of varying sizes rising like reeds from a fertile swamp.<\/p>\n More than a decade into the town\u2019s existence, the energy of neon mingles with the early decay of rushed construction.<\/p>\n Vietnam is young \u2014 with an average age of around 32 \u2014 but getting older as birthrates decline. Companies are having to venture further afield to find workers, which drives up costs in a time of intense international competition, and may hinder Vietnam\u2019s future growth.<\/p>\n