Two sides to every story and multiple agendas
Posted: May 25, 2012 Filed under: change, media | Tags: media, news, vietnam 2 Comments »I wanted to share a couple of recent news articles I thought were excellent in terms of giving a really balanced picture of what is happening in Vietnam.
First off this piece from (Twitter’s very own) Mike Ives. Government’s seizing land is always going to be an emotive subject but I’ve bemoaned, for some time now, a lack of explanation from the state. That’s the problem with a state controlled media, sometimes it’s easier to limit coverage than to actually explain. I can’t begin to imagine how much effort it must have taken to bring absolute balance to this piece.
Along the same lines this fantastic piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic offers an incredibly exhaustive overview of modern Vietnam and its diplomatic role in the region. Reading both pieces side by side it feels like the balancing act required to run this country is almost impossible to comprehend.
What worked best about both is that they were written with obviously an incredible amount of research and valued facts rather than just targetting the usual bogeymen. In contrast, a much briefer example perhaps, but the crow-barred in reference to communist Vietnam in this report of a horrific accident just seemed odd and it’s hard to know what it’s suggesting.
Balance doesn’t make one side right or the other side wrong. Balance doesn’t make the worst excesses forgivable. But balance does give us the chance to make our own minds up. Just as there two sides to every story, there are also various agendas.
The Trouble with Travel Writing
Posted: April 28, 2012 Filed under: Blogs and Bloggers, change, Hanoi, Reflections, travel | Tags: Hanoi, travel, travel writing, vietnam 1 Comment »
I don’t think that travel writers visiting where you live and airing an opinion is ever a particularly comfortable experience.
Now of course, it’s not a case of someone arriving followed by a wait while they return home and file copy. The writer, whether pro or wannabe, is likely to be sharing their views from the second they hit WIFI. In Vietnam there’s a lot of WIFI.
What it means is that without looking especially hard, you can come across reams and reams of live content generated about where you live. In the end very little of it impresses. Yes it can be mean-spirited to pick holes, but frequently it’s all too easy and that goes for the writers from the quality press just as as much as it does for ambitious young bloggers.
Travel bloggers dreaming of being able to fund an endless holiday, need to be read. In order to be read, even putting aside SEO-thinking, they have to be of use. So instead of actually writing about their travels they write tips for future backpackers. However with limited time in town and limited research resources they Google and cannibalise what they find.
Even their travel writing heroes are not great explorers but great blaggers. Travelling for years fuelled by travel tips churned out and ready to be recycled by the next “nomad”. Sure, it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey. But increasingly it’s length of journey that’s all important.
For the foodies it means visiting that same bun cha restaurant. While those not wanting to be quite so same same, head for the snake village. Another cliche but it’s something to share on YouTube and if it’s good enough for the telly guys… (please, don’t do it).
Meanwhile at the higher end of the market, “proper” journalists descend on Hanoi as the first stop on their tour. All good except they use the same Google as the rest of us. Worse still with flights and rooms arranged by the same PR company the writers ends up staying in the same places and churning out information from the same fact sheets. Google “Charlie Chaplin” AND “Sofitel Metropole” and you get 11,900 results.
After the Metropole there’s the three other hotels that crop up time and time again in Hoi An, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City. One charges well over $1,000 a night. Not the kind of freebie you’re going to slag off in print – then again, with the PRs having primed the resort management it’s not like they’re going to get anything but preferential treatment anyway.
And when did broadsheet travel writing becoming almost exclusively about luxury?
But perhaps the days of The Great Railway Bizarre are over anyway. It’s not just that everyone’s seen it all already on TV and YouTube but travel writing as Paul Theroux said is about “Jumping to conclusions and generalising. Inventing and recreating places from vagrant glimpses.”
In modern times I think we’re less comfortable generalising about people and we’re less comfortable reading those who still do.
That’s probably no bad thing.
I’m not sure where it goes from here though. Are travel tips and Instagrammed photos of sun sets all we have left?
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How long can Vietnam keep this up?
Posted: April 9, 2012 Filed under: change, environment, family, Hanoi, News, Reflections | Tags: development, environment, family, growth, Hanoi, pollution 2 Comments »Most of my columns for the Word Magazine can be found online – including this most recent one, a tribute to my colleagues at the British Council.
But a couple have only previously appeared in print. This is one of them…
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Judging from newsreel footage, back when “all this was bicycles”, Hanoi wasn’t just quiet it was pretty slow moving too.
Not at all surprising when you figure that heat occasionally nudges 40 degrees in the summer. Vietnam doesn’t seem like it was meant to be fast.
But scooters replaced pushbikes and now cars replace scooters. Air con means people can work faster, harder and longer.
Those cars are now blocking streets. To deal with this we’ll soon get more car parks, wider streets and fly overs. Alongside these will be trams and increased public transport. Hanoi is expanding – it needs more housing, more shops.
Hanoi is to become a city made of cities.
My Vietnamese parents in law used to live in the countryside. They now live in the city. They didn’t have to move to achieve this.
Still, for the those with a nostalgia for “their countryside” there are wildlife restaurants. While the kids increasingly pay lip service to green causes, many affluent oldies are still paying top dollar for civet and pangolin. In 2010 Vietnam’s last Javan rhino was shot. No one really believes Vietnam’s tigers and elephants can survive.
Since the end of the American war Vietnam’s population has doubled.
Over the past decade, Vietnam’s carbon dioxide emissions have grown by 136%. That’s faster than any other country on the planet. Over the same period Vietnam’s oil use grew by 82% – beaten only by increases from China and Qatar.
But that’s nothing compared to Vietnam’s electricity use – up a massive 227%.
Meanwhile having hauled themselves out of poverty through sheer hard work, Vietnamese ambition doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Those who had it hard don’t want their kids to suffer like they did. If that means youngsters studying seven days a week then so be it.
Kids won’t go hungry but they will face different kinds of pressures. Simply making it to University isn’t enough. It has to be a foreign University. In the right country.
Meanwhile stats show that by the time kids hit their teens their largest outgoing is paying off debt.
That is something they have to get used to. With Hanoi’s housing bubble not yet burst, real estate loans went up by almost a quarter between 2009 and 2010.
Borrow more. Buy more land. Or dollars. Or even gold.
And if you’ve spent all that money on land, you’re going to want to make the best of it. No point having a three storey house when you could have five. Knock it down, borrow more money and build it up again bigger than ever. Five stories this time. Have your builders work through the weekend to get it done as soon as possible. Make them start early and finish late.
If you find yourself richer in 10 years time, do this again.
Little wonder then that Vietnam has a dust issues – up to 20 or 30 times the recommended limit near building sites. A mere half that on busy city crossroads.
Back to the family – mum and dad both have to go out to work now in order to meet increasing financial commitments. Grandparents are needed to take kids to school.
The golden generation that won wars and survived food shortages are now needed to babysit and do school runs. Mums and dads get back late. Stuck at work then stuck in traffic.
It’s a ride, exhilarating but exhausting, and let’s not forget that these are the good times.
But surely it can’t go on like this.
***
You can download the most recent version of The Word here.
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Three blogs and a flyover
Posted: April 2, 2012 Filed under: Blogs and Bloggers, change, Reflections | Tags: blogging, blogs, change, growth 1 Comment »
Back then, back when blogging was the only social media, well give or take Friends Reunited, the social bit was the links and the comments.
To a certain extent that’s all moved to platforms like Twitter, Facebook and the rest. Most of the interaction now takes place away from the blogs themselves. Does that alter their whole point? A post was written with the comment box beneath it in mind. If the comment box is obsolete does that change the content of the blog?
But links, links are still good. Links are what makes it all go round. Links continue to power Google so we can find all this stuff.
So alongside the extensive blogroll on the right and alongside Vietnam Blogs. Here’s my three most-readable from Vietnam. Two from Hanoi and one from Ho Chi Minh City:
First off Debbie J Clare, sporadic but worth waiting for. Written beautifully.
Secondly, Antidote to Burnout, this is a long standing favourite who I hope we can persuade to blog more. The niche, architecture, specifically modern architecture, works particularly well because as expats we tend to be more impressed by tradition and history. I recall kids at KOTO telling me off for only taking pictures of things they considered old fashioned – ie bicycles, conical hats etc. That said, check out this for a little bit of Old Saigon.
Finally, aimed at the tourist, rather than the expat I do like the Travelfish Hanoi Blog. Again, like the two above it’s written with little comment, neither cooing glee nor tired cynicism. But if you’re thinking of visiting or coming to stay then it’s just about the best introduction I can imagine. Mercifully it avoids CNN GO’s increasingly irritating list format.
I particularly like Travelfish’s Hanoi People section and in particular the interview of Ian Paynton, (he of Oi Gioi Oi fame), particularly his description of last time he left the country when he “thought about Hanoi every day for two years.”
That was me once. Ian is currently working back in the UK and you’d bet on him coming back, not least because he’s become a little bit famous during his absence. No doubt he’s missing Hanoi all over again.
Before he went I had a brief online chat with him while he was chasing me for my Word column. I reminded him that leaving doesn’t mean you can’t come back. Something I am now reminding myself of as I start to cast the net wider as I look for new employment.
And the flyover, the flyover is just a flyover. Snapped on my way to my inlaws on Saturday night. In the West of the city the growth remains incredible. My current employers (I’m working my notice) just opened an English class there aiming to enrol 50 students, now they’re approaching three times that number. I read (a little too gleefully, or is just me?) reports of slowdowns yet the pace of it all seems as frantic as ever (“ These days, Hanoians do not have much to celebrate…”)
To me though, this is how it always was, only more so.
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A brain ticks in Taipiei
Posted: March 17, 2012 Filed under: change, Hanoi, Reflections, travel | Tags: taipei, taiwan, work 1 Comment »
Having just spent a week taking part in a digital training course in Taipei with an array of regional representatives, what struck me most is how we all move to different timetables and agendas.
Spend enough time in any country and you’ll soon take its norms as your own. Then step out of that context into a more international arena and you’ll start asking yourselves questions.
Maybe, as a country, Vietnam despite breakneck growth isn’t quite as advanced yet as I had perhaps come to believe. But then again, where is the UK in all of this? Am I benchmarking Vietnam harshly against Asia which, as a whole, now leaves the West for dead?
It’s the same with personal skills. I had been worried that my training session would be old hat. In the end across the week I was understandably behind in some areas and ahead in others. Gratifyingly there were areas where I was still the expert. It was especially rewarding to have a valued opinion. These are areas where I would like to spend more time.
From a digital point of view it was incredible to spend time with like minds. Now we all have to go back to our offices to and try and do as much enthusing, inspiring and negotiation before this newly topped up resolve runs dry in the face of constraints, resources and inbox servicing.
As you’ll note a week spent between a hotel room and its conference centres hasn’t done much to stop my brain ticking over. It leaves me still wondering what equation can bring together work, home, future and location and have it equal contentment.
In the absence of total contentment I’d settle for security.
