Prior to the pandemic, the Arlington Chamber of Commerce each year sponsored an autumnal journey to the People’s Republic of China for its members and guests.
With China still somewhat off-limits to outsiders, the business organization pivoted, and this past November a total of 65 participants embarked on a 10-day tour of Vietnam.
The journey was not just a chance to visit a series of sites, but to interact with the public, as well.
“The people are very, very dedicated to staying independent,” said Linda Chandler, one of those who embarked on the journey.
Chandler had participated in an earlier Chamber trip to China, and said the Vietnam experience provided greater opportunity to interact with local citizens.
“Despite being communist, it’s a very open society,” she said of Vietnam, while during a pre-COVID China trip, “we did not have interaction with anybody that was just hanging around.”
Chandler is president of the Kiwanis Club of Arlington. She and Pat Keough recently presented a photographic retrospective of the trip to members of the sibling Kiwanis Club of South Arlington.
“I was a little anxious” about the reception the group might receive, Keough said, particularly in the northern part of the country that from 1954-75 had been on the other side of the American-backed south in a bloody civil war.
But, both participants said, there was little lingering resentment found as the group traversed the country from north to south.
Keough, too, was struck by how the Vietnamese proved adept at maintaining their own version of ideology while being flexible enough to encourage opportunities for interactions and economic-development opportunities with the West.
“Ho Chi Minh had a different vision of communism than Russia or China,” he said.
The Chamber group toured Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Danang, Hoi and Ho Chi Minh City (until 1975 known as Saigon). Highlights included visits to Buddhist temples and a Roman Catholic cathedral; an overnight cruise on the South China Sea; and surveying the Mekong Delta.
There also was a journey to the notorious prisoner-of-war facility that became known with grim humor by American forces as the Hanoi Hilton – which decades before it detained U.S. military personnel in the 1960s-70s had been used by the French to intern Vietnamese anti-colonial activists.
As the trip progressed southward, “we really got an idea of hot and hotter,” said Chandler. By the time the contingent reached Ho Chi Minh City just 10 degrees above the equator, the temperature hit 104 to 108 degrees and was accompanied by high levels of humidity.
A number of the tour participants were Vietnamese natives, including sisters who had never been back since departing decades before. “We had lots of fun seeing their delight at visiting the country they were born in,” Chandler said.
Arlington Chamber of Commerce president Kate Bates said the trip was one of the largest of its kind organized by the business group.
“We are thrilled that our participants had the chance to explore remarkable sites and engage in a myriad of unforgettable experiences,” she told the GazetteLeader. ”The feedback from the travelers was overwhelmingly positive, and we’re excited to announce another trip to Asia for 2024 soon.”
In its lengthy existence, the long, narrow enclave of Vietnam was occupied successively (if never truly successfully) by China, France, Japan and then France again until its military defeat there in 1954. Four years after the Vietnam War effectively concluded with the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnam and its neighbor to the north, China, embarked on more than a decade’s worth of military skirmishes, and today maintain an uneasy relationship.
Chandler said that, looking back on the journey and face-to-face interactions, she believed the nearly 100 million Vietnamese seem focused on making the most of their future, rather than looking back.
“The people . . . really want their country to survive,” she said.
