Vietnam still split on cultural lines

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Northerners are rude, talk funny, are lousy drivers and have bad taste. When a Vietnamese blogger unleashed this tirade from down south recently, people 700 miles away in Hanoi responded with a flood of angry Web site postings and a few death threats text-messaged to the blogger’s cell phone.

The episode underscored a delicate truth about Vietnam: Hard feelings die hard. The United States has had 142 years to recover from the civil war. The Vietnam War’s north-south division ended just 32 years ago.

Vast cultural differences divide the former republics of North and South Vietnam. Hanoi is as far from Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, as New York City is from Atlanta. The two cities have different cuisines, different dialects and different styles of doing business.

Relations are generally civil, even friendly, but something occasionally stirs up old animosities. Nothing has stirred them like Nhu Hoa’s shot in the country’s thriving blogosphere, which she wrote after a weekend visit to Hanoi.

“I came to realize that Hanoi was not a place for Saigonese, who are food connoisseurs,” wrote Miss Hoa, a university student who complained about everything from the condensed milk northerners use in their coffee (sticky and sweet) to the speed of their Internet connections (very slow).

“I don’t like anyone who isn’t from Saigon,” Miss Hoa declared.

“I pity the parents who gave birth to this devil baby,” Hanoi resident Bui Dung shot back in a typical online riposte.

Since the war ended in 1975, legions of northerners have moved to Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s business hub and a testing ground of stereotypes.

Northerners tend to think of themselves as more cultured, and view Hanoi as Vietnam’s capital of art, literature and scholarship. Some see Ho Chi Minh City as a place of glitz and fun, but a bit shallow.

Southerners consider themselves more dynamic and tend to see Hanoi as a quaint, sleepy town. They have been more exposed to Western ways, while the north is more influenced by neighboring China and by communist central planning.

Southerners with money take their friends out to dinner; northerners tend to be thrifty and prefer to visit friends at home, said Kim Dung, a journalist who moved to Ho Chi Minh City from Hanoi 12 years ago.

Northerners generally are more concerned about status and will buy one expensive motorbike while the southerner is more likely to buy two cheap ones, she said.

Ms. Dung says she misses the village feel of Hanoi’s winding streets and street vendors balancing baskets of fruit on their shoulders.

Many northerners relish the night life and business buzz of Ho Chi Minh City, but the adjustment can be difficult.

“I felt like I was coming to a foreign country,” said Tran Thu Huong, 37, who moved here to direct an Australian educational exchange program. “People spoke Vietnamese, but I didn’t understand what they were saying.”

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