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On the one hand, Hanoi is the new and modern Vietnam. The bicycles that clogged the city streets have given way to scooters,* with helmets replacing the conical straw hat, hard enough to balance on your head as it is; (in a moment of cultural (mis)appropriation, I bought one from a woman on the street and looked ridiculous). Restaurants and hotels are overstaffed with energetic young people who are helpful and easy to communicate with. The economy is bustling, with more American tourists than we’ve seen anywhere else and a mélange of European and Chinese visitors. Our second night, Don and I walked through a narrow alley to an elevator up to a fancy dinner on a balcony overlooking the lake and surrounding neighborhoods (think Central Park).

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*I can imagine getting used to the honking traffic and squatting on the city sidewalk for tasty BBQ pork and rice, with fresh basil and greens. But I’m not gonna lie. Crossing the street in Hanoi is scary. Our guide, Hoing, told us to relax and keep moving, but even so, Don and I – hands in a death grip – had to feint and dodge. I can’t imagine driving here. It’s a constant negotiation between drivers, pedestrians, and other drivers, with no eye contact that I can see. Even small roads are eight motorcycles deep, more or less divided into halves going in opposite directions. It’s no better looking out your car window, because you just know you’re going to get t-boned.

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On the other hand, Hanoi is still paying for the misdeeds of its various colonizers and occupiers. The Vietnamese language was recorded by Portugal in the 16^th century and converted phonetically into Latin letters. Prior to that, China had ruled for 1000 years, up to 1046. China’s influence persisted until the revolution in 1945, when education opened to women and the official language was no longer Mandarin. At the end of WWII, only 2% of Vietnamese were literate. Since then, Vietnam has made great strides in educating its people. The Temple of Literature, with its lush gardens and ornate Confucian temple, sits in the heart of the city. Stylae (stone tablets with the names of the top 3 scholars in each town) can be found from as early as 1435. To this day, rural families sacrifice everything to send their sons (and daughters?) to university. In contrast to the peaceful egalitarianism we saw in Luang Prabang, here we were told that the Vietnamese do not respect the “dirty” work of the farm or factory, but expect their children to land a white collar job in an air-conditioned office. The problem with this thinking is that there aren’t enough jobs. Even jobs at a mall or shop are filled by those with a college diploma.

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“Hanoi” is laughing at the funny names that are meant to attract Western tourists (we stayed at the tri-lingual La Siesta Trendy). It is the French Quarter with its tree-lined boulevards and university modelled after the Sorbonne and the noisy, clogged streets of the old town. Hanoi is also a difficult place to live and work. Corruption is rampant (with “tips” expected for many services, exorbitant taxes, and unstable currency). Yet our guide, at least, separates in her mind the present government from the Marxist heroes who toiled and suffered for freedom. As she explains: “I hear people say, Hanoi could be like Singapore or Hong Kong, but we take the good with the bad; we hold our history and we hope for better leaders. We want Vietnam to be recognized as a free market by the WTO.”

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The hardest part for me today was visiting the prison where John McCain was kept for 6 years. The prison operated as such until 1992, taking up 12,908 square meters. Making our way through the two wings that remain, we were met with walls of Communist propaganda. Only at the end did we walk through a room with exhibits regarding the enemy pilots captured during the “Anti-American War.” This place is the “Hanoi Hilton” only to us; for the Vietnamese, the prison evokes the 88-year struggle to throw off the French oppressors (who built the prison for easily convicted “criminals”). History I never knew – the 1908 “Poison Revolt,” where house servants poisoned their masters’ food, and the 66-day standoff in 1946 when the Vietnamese travelled through holes in the brick walls separating their houses in order to move the government up into the mountains – built a perspective very different from the one I brought in.

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Even our most cherished stories of American triumph over adversity are, at best, not the whole story, and at worst, morally misplaced. I know this is not a complete revelation, but to be surprised by it as I stood there made it sink in more. I didn’t know what to do with the real pain I felt considering what John McCain and those pilots must have had to endure. The NVA showed the world photos of them decorating for Christmas and playing basketball in the yard. But in the “cochot” or dungeon, prisoners for decades had lain with their legs in irons in dark, concrete cells, on slanted floors designed to make their blood flow to their brains. All I could do was shiver. The Vietnamese “said” one thing, yet the thin, scarred bodies of the pilots returning home told another story. These soldiers had been tortured as “criminals” from a country that never officially declared war. John McCain and others eventually reconciled with their captors, probably because they realized that some of our soldiers (not all) were just as guilty of war crimes, and against women, children, and the aged, both in North and South Vietnam. Don and I sat across from Senator McCain a few years ago on a commercial plane. When we stood up, he reached out his left hand to shake Don’s extended one, and I watched this slight, old man maneuver stiffly to get off the plane.

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Hoing gave us space yesterday to process all this information, and we passed a quiet afternoon both at the museum and walking to find the downed B-52 of an American pilot, part of its fuselage and landing wheels resting in a shallow lake now surrounded by apartments, not fields, and a schoolyard of happy, screaming children.