The American expat community in Hanoi, a floating population of several hundred, includes artists, writers, businesspeople, war veterans, anthropologists, retirees and healthcare providers. A lanky, sandy-haired Georgian named Chuck Searcy runs a project to defuse landmines, bombs and mortars, mostly in the old DMZ and in Quang Tri province. "A lot still remains to be cleared out," he said. "We dropped the daisy cutters and carpet-bombed from the China Sea to the Laotian border, essentially cutting the country in two with a swath of destruction. It's still not safe to go to a lot of places along that line." In 1967-68 he served in Vietnam in military intelligence (not an oxymoron in Searcy's case), and he has most recently worked as Vietnam representative for a company called Asian Landmine Solutions. Only Vietnamese are permitted to do the actual defusing, but Searcy's group is involved in finding the ordnance and cleaning up afterward.

One of the most prominent Americans in Vietnam is Lady Borton, the country representative for the American Friends Service Committee as well as an author. Originally from Ohio, she has lived in Vietnam most of the time since 1969. She rides around Hanoi on a bicycle, her graying hair flying, like the traffic itself, in all directions at once. She has investigated the long-term consequences of Agent Orange and landmines, and her current project is in rural development. "What really bled Vietnam white," she told me, "was not the war itself but the economic embargo by the United States, which kept the country under siege for twenty more years until normal diplomatic relations were established."

Lady Borton, who speaks Vietnamese, finds the atmosphere far more hospitable now than in the early years of independence. After the American war ended in 1975, the Vietnamese fought the Cambodian Khmer Rouge to the west and were attacked in the north by the Chinese. "Before about 1988," Borton said, "I couldn't really talk freely to people here, nor they to me. After the siege mentality finally faded in the early 1990s, everything opened up. People talked and people built." Borton added that Hanoi is virtually a new city compared with even a decade ago. This is a little less true of Ho Chi Minh City, still called Saigon by most of the people I spoke to, because it wasn't bombed during the war, yet it, too, has had a building boom. "The geopolitical tragedy of Vietnam," Borton said, "is that it is caught between two huge forces, China and the United States. If forced to choose, the Vietnamese would choose America, no question about that."

Whenever I have visited a Communist country, either self-proclaimed or one we call Communist--the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua--I have found myself deep in yes-but territory. I'm constitutionally sympathetic with the socialist ideal; yes, but I live in the most capitalist country in the world and enjoy its advantages. In each of the above countries, a revolution triumphed; yes, but the people have not enjoyed freedom of expression or action. The state is stultifying and totalitarian, the very opposite of the socialist ideal it proclaims; yes, but literacy, medical care, general social equality and economic possibility are now extended to a much larger proportion of the population than before. In Vietnam, the yes-buts spin into cognitive dissonance. The Vietnamese won liberation but their government's early attitude toward civil liberties would have pleased only a John Ashcroft. In their fight against the United States, the Vietnamese Communists lost virtually every pitched battle. Yes, but they won the war. Yes, but they lost the revolution, or to be more precise, the revolution shriveled into dictatorship, corruption, state monopolies, and has now devolved into the very force they fought against, market capitalism itself. Yes, but the Vietnamese are increasingly prosperous and, more to my own point, increasingly free.

Gerry Herman, an expat so outspoken he can become the verbal equivalent of a Roman candle, advised me to "stay away" from freedom issues regarding Vietnam. "Their poverty and political paranoia are the direct result of our ruthless and abusive treatment," he said. "They've felt they get so much shit from the outside they don't want to get it from the inside as well." He urged me to remember Singapore, an American ally often held up as a shining example of economic progress, whose social policies are far more repressive than Vietnam's. "As the threat from abroad has receded, so has government pressure," Herman said. "Freedom is really here now in a practical sense. Ten years ago you had to get permission to comb your hair. Today books and movies are flowing in from around the world. Every month Vietnam is freer."

When I questioned the journalist Tran Viet Hung, who writes for the Vietnamese newspaper Bao Thanh Nien, about what he could and could not publish, he was both direct and somewhat ambivalent. "There is no censoring agency in Vietnam," he wrote in an e-mail. On the other hand, he continued, "Editors-in-chief and reporters are responsible to the law for the contents they publish. They could be blamed, disciplined or even sued if the information is proved false." In other words, a writer can write what he wants, but he doesn't have the right to be wrong, as wrong is officially defined. I asked Hung if a Vietnamese publication could call for the resignation of a government official, or could disagree with a major foreign policy initiative. In both cases the answer is no. In addition, Hung said, government approval is needed for plays to be performed and movies to be shown. Permission is also necessary in order to hold a public meeting. In practice, these strictures are often ignored--public meetings occur daily that have not been procedurally sanctioned--but they still remain official policy. A one-party government can always reverse a thaw.

It is certainly no problem for foreigners to go anywhere in Hanoi as long as they remember that traffic lights, as Alicia observed, are treated only as suggestions. These days Vietnamese are so busy you find people doing calisthenics around Hanoi's lakes by 4:30 am, at work by 5, and the work--construction, repairing, making things, carrying goods on shoulder poles, shopkeeping--continues until after 10 pm. On a Sunday stroll, I saw families taking a few hours off crowded around small tables eating eight- and ten-course dinners on open porches. Dishes looked and smelled as delicious as they were, to my eyes, unidentifiable. A friendly grandmother offered me tastes from an array of small platters while I, Westernly wary of germs, gestured to indicate I was full and tried to be polite as I backed away. No one seemed to mind my wandering into their street-level homes to ask directions when I found myself utterly lost on the narrow streets of the old quarter.

Ironies abound. In a city where B-52s wreaked havoc a generation ago, several Hanoi restaurants offer the drink "B-52 Bomber," which one menu promises will "explode in your mouth" (they wish?), while a few blocks away the emasculated remains of a plane shot down during the Nixon-Kissinger Christmas bombing of 1972 protrudes from a tiny lake near a sign praising the air defense regiment for shooting down the "US Imperialist B-52." One day at the US Embassy, we sat in a waiting room with a dozen Vietnamese men, all dressed in suits and ties, who were watching an embassy TV tuned to HBO, showing a Vietnam War movie. A lot of combat, the Americans valiant, the Vietnamese shifty, diabolical. As we sat there embarrassed, the Vietnamese men looked at the screen, occasionally shrugged, exchanged a few words with each other, chuckled. Were they saying, "Yeah, fine, but we won," or were they horrified, amused, or simply didn't care? An American told us they were most likely at the embassy trying to get visas to come to the United States.

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