Word: minh
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...trade sprouts inexorably in new areas. In Ho Chi Minh City, by one report, the number of prostitutes has recently increased from 10,000 to 50,000. Morocco has become a Mecca for Saudi sex tourists. The next tier of prosperous Asian countries is following in Japan's footsteps, with South Korea and Taiwan developing their own sex-tour operations. And last year, attesting to the growth of market economics, more than 240,000 people engaging in prostitution were arrested in China. Sex tourism takes on ever more ingenious guises as well. To Bombay, a center for inexpensive medical treatment...
...offensive in Saigon altered U.S. public opinion about what was at stake in the war as much as any other event did. A quarter-century later, the victim's widow Nguyen Thi Lop, 60, lives in a decrepit house on the outskirts of what is now called Ho Chi Minh City. For a decade after the war, she and her three children were homeless. The Vietnamese government provided shelter only after a Japanese TV crew found her living in a field. Yet she exhibits no rancor: "I am proud of the death of my husband. It was a signal...
...other hand, four successive U.S. Presidents have sought to punish Vietnam through an economic embargo and diplomatic isolation. It is impossible to determine whether the Vietnamese economy was damaged more by those policies or by the misguided efforts of Ho Chi Minh's heirs to impose a Soviet-style system on the unified country. But the combination proved devastating. By 1985, 10 years after "liberation," Vietnam was on its knees and heavily dependent on aid from its chief ally, the Soviet Union...
...embargo. But in November Tokyo announced the resumption of foreign aid to Vietnam. That was the sign for major Japanese firms, which had been operating through foreign subsidiaries for several years, to enter the Vietnamese market with a splash. Already there is a gleaming Toyota showroom in Ho Chi Minh City. Says Tran Bach Dang, one of the top three commanders of the Tet offensive: "I could almost understand the embargo before, but now it makes no sense. Does America want Japan to take over this whole region...
Rapid economic growth and opening its markets to the outside world have taken a sad but predictable toll on the country's traditional values. Police estimate there are 50,000 prostitutes in Ho Chi Minh City, more than in 1975. Drug addiction is a growing problem. That in turn is boosting petty crime. Dozens of pickpockets, beggars and touts prey on unsuspecting foreigners in the square in front of city hall, within the gaze of an avuncular statue of Ho Chi Minh. Says a local official: "This is the price we must pay in order to leave our impoverished state...