Remembering terror: a Vietnamese perspective

By Penelope Lake June 2002

I was working in Hanoi as a sub-editor on the Vietnam Economic Times magazine. The date was September 11.

That night, when I turned on CNN, a link to the world outside of Vietnam and the only source of relatively reliable news, I saw the first plane crash into the twin towers.

I wondered what the country's reaction would be. Vietnam had allied itself with other isolated states such as Iraq in the recent past, and had itself been the target of similar hostile attacks. It had survived its own "war of terror" - that which was waged by the USA during the '60s and '70s. Vietnam knew all too well what it was like to lose every semblance of normality in a matter of days. How would the Vietnamese see the event, and America's outraged and nationalistic reaction?

Sure, the footage was spectacular. Planes carving through one of the world's most powerful centers in a show not even Hollywood could top. Black clouds of smoke billowing from the top of the iconic twin towers. New Yorkers covered in dust running through the streets.

Then there were the people. The tiny figures leaping from a burning tower. The teenager laughing and making faces at the cameras. A woman diving under a car. And paper. Everywhere, pieces of paper floating down like they fell out of the sky.

It was work as usual the next day. No one mentioned it. There was no hysteria. No sadness or anxiety. Friends teaching English recounted how in every class a student would show pictures of the buildings collapsing, and everyone laughed. It was almost a joke. Older Vietnamese shook their heads in disapproval. North Vietnam seemed accustomed to such violence, and understandably so.

I remembered that foreigners enjoyed living in Vietnam so much because the media plays such a different role. "It's all good news" was the joke told about the local media. Everything ran according to the Government line. News served a purpose and the purpose was party propaganda. To add to this, everyday life is still quite traditional and more focused on the minute details of everyday life. People still live in communities, and the affairs of family, workmates and neighbors, like births, weddings, infidelity and death are more important than an event so far away in both distance and relevance.

Like most people in Vietnam, I saw S11 as a domestic affair with little relevance to the world. A poll by the Ho Chi Minh City-based marketing company Taylor-Sofres showed that about 80 per cent of people in the two major cities had heard about S11 after a month. The vast majority of Vietnamese live outside of the cities, and in the countryside S11 was either not an issue, or only mentioned in passing. The number of people concerned about issues of national safety, or falling share prices, would have been negligible.

I am now appreciating how different this response is to the mainstream Australian experience. People tell me about the hysteria that gripped the nation. How school classes stopped, and how even young children saw the violent footage repeatedly. S11 became a national obsession. People knew people working in New York. Your sister's friend's brother could have been there. Your father was planning to fly to New York the next week and had to cancel the trip. Then there was the financial stress experienced by the 50 per cent of Australian who own shares.

Then there was the anxiety that if New York was under attack, it could happen anywhere. It could happen in Australia. These are the views finally filtering through to Vietnam. Maybe they are still trying to understand what happened.

I find myself, in this sense, separate from Australian society and more aligned with the Vietnamese in that I don't consider S11 a matter of universal proportions. It certainly doesn't warrant the kind of labels we've seen thrown around, such as 'axis of evil' and 'war on terror'. And from an Australian point of view, it is no justification for broadening the powers of ASIO at the cost of civil liberties.

But then again, I would not laugh at pictures of people jumping from a building. And, judging by the somber reactions of older Vietnamese to such a random act of violence, neither would they.

<June 2002>