Pointing Out Poverty

While I was trying to search for food places at 1 AM on a Saturday night, I was invited by the gatekeepers of D11 to eat a midnight meal: instant noodles. While I had these questions in mind, they were ones to first bring up the issue of poverty and what is entailed when a person is poor in the city versus rural. As we were talking about transportation in a thành phố, one person brought up how it's incredibly expensive to buy a car in Vietnam in comparison to the US. Say a car costs $20,000 in the US, the same car would be $40,000 or more in Vietnam. Same goes with Iphones; it may cost $500 in the US, but in Vietnam it would be $1,000 or more. Then they talked about class and social inequities in Vietnam.

"In Vietnam, you either have very rich people or very poor people, there is no middle"

When this was said, the word "development," and words relating to it: globalization, neoliberalism, capitalism, free trade, free market, and so on kept on resounding in my mind. Is this a side effect to what we call progress or đổi mới?

Moreover, many of the gatekeepers told me their home is in more of the country side or less populous city areas.. thành thị. It makes me think again how the flows of capital to the city parallels the migration to the city for jobs as large corporate enterprises take over farmers' lands. Truly, cities all have a kind of parable that comes with it in order for it to legitimate itself. This legitimacy can come through a kind of romanticization as so many movies take place in the city. We did not talk about poverty so much in different areas, but we did touch upon the polarization between rural and urban. One gatekeeper mentioned how poor people in the rural areas are much poorer than the poor in the city though many poor in the city are those who came from the rural areas from the start.

After the weekend, in the beginning of the week, I started working at Bò Sữa or Boo Skateboards in Old Quarter -- www.bosua.vn. The customers we get range from foreign tourists to incredibly rich, and điệu rich people. You can tell they are incredibly rich because most, if not all of them drive Vespas and have tons of make-up on and perfume if they are girls. We rarely get "ordinary"--người bình thường-- people though we get local Vietnamese youth at times. I just thought my experience thus far working here is relevant to the discussion of poverty and wealth. It is also amazing to see this company or công ty be operated by people all under 30, especially when the owner is a little older than 30. Makes me wonder about the future of Vietnam as these Vietnamese entrepreneurs are so avant-garde or "progressive" in that regard. Of course, it all takes place in the city.

"Everything is fair when you're living in the city" - Funkadelic