I HAD decided the name of this column before travelling to Vietnam, even if I did not know what I would write about. I imagined my observations would guide the material, but now that I’m back, I’m choosing to start with a photograph. I am standing outside a soon-to-open Hermès boutique a few steps away from our hotel, which deserves a column of its own given its history of serving as a bunker. In this photo, I am underneath a canopy of flags from the 50th anniversary of the country’s reunification a few days earlier. The yellow star against a red backdrop of the Vietnam flag flies alongside the yellow hammer and sickle symbol of communism, also against a red backdrop. “Hanoi, Hammer and Sickle and Hermès,” I said, chuffed at my own cleverness.

I thought it was an apt juxtaposition of the country’s new reality. Ho Chi Minh, a devout communist and founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, died in 1969, years before seeing the realisation of his dream — a unified Vietnam, free from foreign influence. I wonder what Uncle Ho, as he is affectionately called, would have thought of this sight.

I was editing a luxury magazine in Hanoi when Hermès opened its first boutique in 2008. I was not used to working in the luxury sector — the only luxury I knew in Karachi was uninterrupted power — so I felt like a fish out of water at the opening which had a red carpet.

That event received a lot of international media coverage, especially in the West where articles threw shade at the demand for luxury goods in a communist state that was meant to eschew elitism. One paper wrote the price of the smallest purse ($10,000) in a country where fighters once used old tyres as slippers for combat. There was so much glee in the Western media coverage about the boom of the luxury sector and the so-called failure of Uncle Ho’s dream of a classless society. I understand that luxury and labour-owned entities make for strange bedfellows.

Vietnam expects its tourism sector to reach $135bn by 2033.

Throughout my trip, I didn’t think so much about what Vietnam had become as much as I thought of what Pakistan hadn’t.

Hanoi felt more familiar than Ho Chi Minh City. I was able to make my way using memory in the capital but I had to rely on maps to guide me in Ho Chi Minh City. Everything I knew had moved further away or shut down because no one needs watch repairmen or cobblers or tailors downtown, for example. Hanoi’s old quarter retains its charm, and colonial-style buildings, while — according to friends — realtors want downtown space to build skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh City. I have yet to understand why skyscrapers continue to be the symbol of progress, urbanisation and advancements. They are ugly and an environmental hazard but I digress.

We were far removed from the sights and sounds of the concrete jungle in our two nights at Mui Ne beach, around 200 kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City, home to more luxury resorts than I can count on my fingers. When I was last there nearly a decade ago, a lot was geared to the budget-conscious traveller. Vietnam expects its tourism sector, which recorded $27.5 billion in 2023, to reach $135bn by 2033. This is a far cry from when I lived there and many nationalities struggled to get visas, yours truly included, and I was moving there for a job! Things changed when Vietnam made it easier for foreigners to do business; they invested in the country’s transport infrastructure to make travelling easier, and then relaxed their visa policies.

While I had plan-ned the title of this column so many years ago, along with a rough itinerary combining nostalgia and newness, I could not have anticipated how much Pakistan weighed on my mind. The war drums be­­gan to beat our first morning in Vietnam, just as workers were dismantling all the stages and paraphernalia set up to celebrate its reunification. We managed to disconnect from the news and laugh at the memes but we could not escape the thought of war.

We were, after all, in a country whose identity is still tied to America’s destruction of it, especially its use of napalm bombs to clear terrain. Vietnam claims that the massive spraying of Agent Orange continues to impact the health of now the fourth-generation.

I’m surrounded by a celebratory feeling in Pakistan, a renewed sense of pride in our ability to stand up for ourselves but I want to remind readers there are no victors in war. One visit to the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City can set everyone straight. So will listening to the mothers of the sons who died, because they chose to defend or because they happened to be there.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.

Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2025