BY TOM PLATE (Pacific Perspectives)
POWERFUL women seem to be
appearing frequently in Asian news these days. Recent headlines
trumpeted the continued defiance of the great Burmese leader Aung San
Suu Kyi, and of course mourned the assassination of the Pakistani
heir-apparent Benazir Bhutto.
The truth, though, is there’s nothing that new about powerful women and Asia.
They
are omnipresent throughout the region, embedded even in otherwise
sexist or patriarchal cultures. Over the decades, national liberation
movements have spawned prominent female insurgent leaders. Even the
long-established political dynasties throw up their fair share of
powerful matriarchs.
And so while the US electorate goes about
deciding whether the next American president will be a woman, in a
country where no woman has even been vice-president, I was able to sit
down with a famous — indeed, in this region, legendary — Vietnamese
woman who helped spearhead her country’s reunification struggle against
both the ill-fated French and American interventions.
Madame
Nguyen Thi Binh, now in her eighties, has been aging quite gracefully,
thank you. Even today, she packs such punch and panache in her eyes and
such bouncy incandescence and voice as she recollects her involvement in
the historic Paris Peace Talks of 1972 and the ultimate US troop
withdrawal from her country, that you can’t imagine how we Americans
might ever have thought we could possibly prevail here.
Vice-president
of Vietnam for ten years from 1992, Madame Binh looks every bit the
part of the Asian women of steel and destiny. She is happy to comment,
though diplomatically, about things American, especially as they relate
to our troubled past with her own Vietnam.
“That Iraq war will go
on too long,” she says, at once tugging at her brown socks, then
sipping Vietnamese tea from a large glass. Like with Vietnam, “the US
considered itself a big power and behaved like a big power. And because
it was such a great power, it could not accept that the Vietnamese
people would actually fight against them.”
It was only “after
great losses,” as she put it, that America withdrew from Vietnam; with
Iraq she fears our big-power hubris will delay the inevitability of
withdrawal: “With Iraq, it’s different from Vietnam but the general
purpose is the same: The US wants to impose its rule and its rules on
other countries.”
This view of US hegemony through socialist eyes
that have seen much over the decades might strike Americans as far more
ideological than historical. The American intervention, after all, was
justified to prevent the spread of communism from North Vietnam to the
south and then (presumably) through all of Southeast Asia.
But,
as Madame Binh notes, the Cold War is over, and America and Vietnam have
gotten on with the job of trying to relate in a businesslike manner.
And she is not at all reluctant to admit that Vietnam has made its own
share of mistakes in its struggle to escape third-world
underdevelopment:
“Socialism does need to be democratic,” she
admitted, “and we really have not implemented it well enough. But if we
want to implement true democracy in Vietnam, we need to have much better
education for our people. You can’t have intelligent public
participation without sufficient public education.”
That, she
points out, will take lots of money — or, in the fancy phrase of our
times, economic development. To that end, Vietnam needs to make friends
with every country, make no more enemies than necessary, and be warm and
gracious to all visitors and tourists, especially those with money to
burn.
In truth, the Vietnamese can be the friendliest of hosts.
The buoyant energy of the streets is palpable; at times the place feels
like a surging South Korea a decade or so ago. To be sure, the country
must not only overcome the enormous cost of its past war-time struggles
but the continuing cost of an oft-overbearing communist bureaucracy
which is characteristically suspicious of any move it cannot control.
Madame Binh has seen it all, of course, and expects that in the course
of time Vietnam’s political culture will measure up to its
economic-development needs. It will have to or Vietnam will fail.
Such
issues rise above gender, for all the prominence of women in Asia or
elsewhere. And though her sisterhood makes her wish Hillary Clinton all
the best, it is both the values and the decisions of America’s next
president that catch her eye and roil her memory: “I am very happy for
her,” she says, rising to say good bye, “but America’s actual policies
are what is most important.” In effect, despite all the time that has
gone by, very little has changed in that regard.
