Word: viets
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...forced a measure of reform. A limited free-market system is now in place, permitting farmers and fishermen to sell off surplus food for profit. As a result, one industrious vegetable grower in the North earns five times as much as her office-worker son in Hanoi. In 1983 Viet Nam managed to feed itself for the first time in years. Though owning pigs is illegal in Hanoi, many of the capital's residents raise swine with loving care; a single butchered porker can bring in as much as a well-paid salaried worker earns in a year...
...halves of Viet Nam were officially merged in 1976, but the differences remain striking. In general, life in the North seems more pinched, commodities less abundant. Ho's tomb, a sort of brutalist recasting of the Lincoln Memorial in concrete, seems the emblematic postwar construction project. There is, meanwhile, a casual, envious resentment of the mellower South...
...least three years in the military. The army, 1.2 million strong, is the world's fourth largest (after the Soviet Union, China and the U.S.). Some 160,000 Vietnamese troops occupy Kampuchea. Nguyen Ba Mai is a deserter from the occupation force, who is now living in Thailand. "In Viet Nam," he says, "whenever you talk, you have to beware of spies...
...prisoners. Says a Vietnamese scholar familiar with postwar Hanoi: "What surprised me was how the society in the North was so isolated from the rest of the world, even from the East bloc countries. It was like Russian society in the '30s." It is still hermetic: during 1983, Viet Nam admitted exactly 252 tourists...
Antigovernment resistance is negligible. Viet Nam is peaceful now. But it is not serene. The war, admits a Vietnamese scholar, "has been very costly in terms of social control, even political oppression." But? "But these are the costs that we have to pay. We had to build a nation." After ten years, that building is still an unattractive structure, unfinished and rickety...