At the ornate 19th-century opera house here, Vietnam's opera and ballet orchestra presented a ground-breaking evening of all-American music.
It was the first time the young musicians, dressed in elegant black, had tackled American compositions. Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Rodgers and Hammerstein and John Philip Sousa -- the harsh and the harmonious -- were all on a recent Lunar New Year program. Under the guidance of a US conductor, Steven Kruse, from the University of Toledo in Ohio, the cultural fusion of old enemies seemed complete.
But enduring political differences intruded.
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The security police wanted to ban the narration of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which was to accompany Copland's "Lincoln Portrait." At the last moment, the impasse was resolved, and Scott Bellard, the political counselor at the US Embassy here, stood at the front of the stage and read the words of freedom to Copland's soaring music.
The little diplomatic tussle was a reminder that Vietnam remains one of the world's last redoubts of communism, a distinction that it shares with its far more powerful neighbor, and erstwhile enemy, China.
But as China forges ahead with its transition to a market economy, Vietnam remains far more wary, still caught in its Marxist-Leninist straitjacket and not sure it wants to wriggle out.
Like the Chinese government, Vietnam's leaders have no patience for political dissent, and they continue to arrest people for expressing criticisms in e-mail messages.
On the economic front the Vietnamese leaders have moved toward market reform, though grudgingly and primarily for reasons of self-preservation rather than principle, Vietnamese and Western analysts say. Vietnam did sign a trade agreement with the US that in the past two years has propelled exports, especially of garments and shoes, but it remains one of the few Asian countries outside the WTO.
But Vietnamese leaders know, analysts say, that they must create many more jobs to maintain political stability among a population of 80 million, overwhelmingly young people.
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai announced in a New Year message that he wanted a "resolute commitment to the abolition of state subsidies." The enterprise law, which allows private investment, must be "strictly enforced," he said. He even made a step toward lifting the veil of corruption that has engulfed the Communist Party and turned off foreign investors. Officials, he said, should declare their assets.
But such declarations fall far short of the spirited directives of the Chinese leaders former premier Zhu Rongji (
"Fear of the future and lack of confidence holds them back," said Thomas Vallely, the director of the Vietnam program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, during a recent visit here.
"Vietnam can become a modern economy, because they have the money and the knowledge. Even given the failed education system, they could get outsourcing business like India has, but they have to allow it," he said.
The daily lives of Vietnamese people do not always square with the ideology the government professes. During the Lunar New Year festivities, for example, Vietnamese flocked to Buddhist temples and shrines, and attendance at temples is not limited to the holiday season, Vietnamese worshipers said.
Many of the people at the temples were well-dressed women, often businesswomen who run manufacturing businesses and retail shops. They carried sheaves of bank notes in their hands. As they stood before Buddhist statues and altars laden with offerings -- gladioli, packets of food, bowls of fresh fruit -- they clasped their hands in prayer, the bank notes peeping out at the tops of their fingers.
Afterward, the worshipers stuffed the wads of notes into a collection box.
For the most part, the prayers were devoted to materialistic dreams rather than spiritual transcendence.
Worship at Buddhist temples has been encouraged by the government since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a traumatic event that deprived Vietnam of one of its sturdiest friends. By allowing an ancient and revered tradition to blossom again, the government hoped to build "a sense of community" among the population, a kind of communal solidarity that would be nonthreatening to the leadership, a Western diplomat said.
A major test for Vietnam is its plan to join the WTO, a goal it has set for 2005.
When the deputy prime minister, Vu Khoan, visited Washington in December he told Secretary of State Colin Powell that Vietnam was steadfast in wanting to join the organization, a move that would hasten US investment and would signal a real opening of the economy. Khoan's pledge was intended, a Vietnamese official said, to reach out to the US.
More than 50 years ago, when Ho Chi Minh announced a Declaration of Independence for Vietnam -- a move designed to discourage the French from reclaiming its colony after World War II -- he, too, tried to impress the Americans.
He read a short statement to an emotional crowd in Hanoi, not far from the opera house, quoting liberally from the Declaration of Independence, with sentiments about personal freedom not so different from those in the Gettysburg Address, which the Hanoi thought police had tried to stifle.
On that earlier occasion, the US failed to respond, and sided with the returning French.
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