Liberation!
Today was Liberation Day in Vietnam, a celebration of the victory of Communist forces over the south Vietnamese and the end of Vietnam War. It’s a public holiday, and the city is covered in lights and red flags — not to mention the gaggles of teenage couples hanging out under bridges and speeding around the city on their motorbikes. I had almost forgotten that Vietnam is still a socialist republic.
It’s easy to forget because the city is rapidly undergoing an economic transformation. The harbour in front of our window is being redeveloped with a Dubai-esque man-made island, with plans for glitzy high-rises to cover the beachfront. The centre of the city has several construction zones with billboards in front advertising the imminent appearance of modern skyscrapers that call to mind the daring architecutre of new Beijing. While these changes and ambitions are nothing short of impressive, they are just outer symbols of other, more enduring social changes. These are being planned by the group of Malaysians, Indonesians and Vietnamese in their 20s living in our building.
Our friends are here on 3-month contracts working on the software design for another mobile phone network in Vietnam. There are already more than half a dozen networks, and apparently there is still a market for more. Getting connected with a phone here is quick and cheap. We bought a sim card the night we arrived here, almost as an afterthought as we passed a tiny store where a family was watching TV together — their home opening up onto the street. The sim card cost 3 dollars and came with 60 minutes of free credit. When I was in Canada last month I tried to by a sim for my UK phone and the cheapest available was $35, and I had to go to three stores in Ottawa’s main shopping mall before I could even have the opportunity to buy one. And it didn’t even come with any credit. Needless to say, I didn’t fork out for mobile access and just stuck to my old-school hotel room phone.
Our friends downstairs are working using a fast wireless internet connection, which is freely available to the tenants of this building. In Oxford, accessing the area wireless network in our neighbourhood cost £20 a month (each) — and that was relatively cheap. Here, there is wireless everywhere. There was a free network instantly available at the tiny Da Nang airport, and everywhere you go there is an open network.
Oh, did I mention that our friends are from three different Southeast Asian countries? They are a team of 6 or 7, and they never work with the same people twice. Most of them are working on a 3 month contract away from home, and they got their jobs through an web database of technicians. Some will stay on after 3 months and others will move onto the next job, closer to their families.
Although Liberation Day is a commemoration of a communist past and present, it seems to me that Vietnam’s future lies in these remarkable trends of mobility and connectivity.
Fantastic!