Letter from Vietnam

By Trinh Quang Do, MBA '92

December 1997. I have been working in Vietnam since March 1995 for Procter & Gamble. As I reflect on my years in Vietnam, I find an interesting analogy. More than 30 years ago, American warriors came to Vietnam and found it to be a quagmire. In the end, the guerrilla tactics of the Vietnamese wore out America's will to fight the war. In the 1990s, a different type of American warrior, the corporate warrior, came to Vietnam. Today the guerrilla tactics of Vietnamese government officials and business managers are wearing thin the patience and will of American companies. Perhaps the next generation of American managers would do well to study the history of Vietnam, its war, and its people.
      Developing and airing advertising for P&G brands has been one of my key responsibilities. Typically, before producing a commercial, we send the storyboards to the Vietnam Ministry of Culture and Information and the heads of the key TV stations for approval. Theoretically, these censorship sessions iron out all issues. In practice, a well-conceived marketing plan can fall apart at any point in and even after this process.
      In mid-1995 we produced a commercial for Doll, a detergent, that featured three generations of a Vietnamese family--grandmother, mother, and a young daughter--washing clothes in a backyard. The storyboard showed the little girl blowing soap bubbles. We got approval from all the relevant authorities, and the commercial aired for two months without any incidents. Then Haiphong TV suddenly decided to stop airing the ad. The station had received a letter from a retired Communist Party cadre complaining that the commercial contained elements unacceptable to Vietnamese culture. The cadre contended that the little girl was blowing bubbles at her grandmother's face (not true) and thus encouraged children to be disrespectful of their elders. And we thought we had to deal only with paid censors!
      In December 1996 we produced a commercial for Tide. We selected a minor TV broadcaster as the main actor. When we learned of an unwritten rule that people who work for government-owned media properties (all TV stations are government owned) cannot engage in commercial activities, we received written assurances from the broadcaster and his supervisor that the broadcaster could star in the commercial and that this would not violate the station's or Vietnam's regulations. When the commercial was finished, the station's vice-director viewed it for final approval. He exploded when he saw the broadcaster. Not only did he not allow us to air the copy on his station, he also threatened to sue us if we ran it on any other station. We ended up having to reshoot the entire commercial using a different actor. Months later, we learned that the broadcaster and his supervisor hadn't shared their earnings with the vice-director. Net, we ended up losing hundreds of thousands of dollars just because one government bureaucrat did not get his bribe.
      Corruption is a part of life in Vietnam. I believe it is driven both by the culture and by the miserably low official wages of government civil servants (the average salary for a Vietnamese policeman is about VND 700,000, or $60, a month). Despite the government's cosmetic anticorruption campaigns, many civil serv-ants still use their positions to extort money from anyone who comes their way. For example, I have the use of a company-rented car and driver. The car is owned by my driver. One night the headlights began to flicker. At each of four checkpoints, a policeman flagged my driver down and threatened to impound his car. This would have been a catastrophe for my driver. Not only would he not be able to earn his living for days, perhaps weeks, but he might also lose valuable parts while the car was in police custody. My driver had to cough up a bribe for each policeman.
      Vietnam today remains very much a police state, with a huge security apparatus. With the influx of foreign investment and business in the past few years, the police and secret agents have adopted more subtlety. While they still closely monitor the activities of "suspicious" foreigners as well as overseas Vietnamese here, they avoid causing trouble for these people--until the right moment. Thus, many expatriates living in Vietnam develop a false perception that Vietnam today is an open country. They couldn't be more wrong!
      For our three years in Vietnam, we tried to keep a very low profile. Concluding that we were basically harmless people because of our boring and predictable schedules, the police left us alone except for a few times in the first year when the local police came to my house at night to ask for donations. However, a recent incident serves as an ugly reminder that whatever we do, the security agents are watching.
      In September, my aunt visited us in Ho Chi Minh City for a week. She has lived in France for more than 30 years and is a radio journalist with connections to Vietnamese artists and intellectuals all over the world. From the moment I picked her up at Tan Son Nhat airport, we were followed. The first night, Interior Ministry agents accompanied by local ward policemen went to my driver's house at midnight to interrogate him. On the last day, an agent came to my house with an official summons requesting my aunt to meet with the Interior Ministry officials. The officials made no secret that they had a thick dossier on my aunt and knew of all her movements. We breathed a sigh of relief when the meeting ended amicably. However, at midnight, four policemen returned to our house demanding to see our papers. After 30 minutes of questioning, the officers took away my entry/exit paper on the grounds that I had not reregistered with the local police after I got my visa ex-tended. They later returned the paper (without which I cannot leave Vietnam) but not before forcing me to write a statement acknowledging that I had violated Vietnam's laws and fining me $100. The event left a bitter taste. Having lived in America for so long, I had come to take respect for individuals and human rights for granted.
      I had hoped to have the satisfaction of seeing Vietnam's economy growing steadily and be able to say that what I've done has contributed to that growth. Unfortunately, as I am about to leave, the country is now heading toward a recession, a consequence of the cumulative impacts of the many poor choices and policies pursued by the government. But Vietnam did provide us with many opportunities to make a small difference in people's lives.
      In our second year here, working with a local group, we practically adopted a rural village in Ho Nai, about 40 kilometers northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, which suffered heavy, bloody fighting during the war. There are a large number of orphans here who are cared for by Buddhist nuns. With the local charity group, we raised more than $2,000 to build a school in the village. We called this Lop Hoc Tinh Thuong (or Classroom of Love). The school doubles as a home for the orphans. We and our other expatriate friends also provide monthly funds to pay for the teacher's salary and lunch for the kids.
      In June, with a $2,000 grant from Kien Pham, MBA '85, and the Vietnam Forum Foundation in Houston, we built a second school in Song Buong, a village even more remote than the first. The Song Buong school serves more than 60 children who couldn't go to school before. Kien gave the children four college scholarships, on the condition that they study enough to make it to university. Yes, this is a Vietnamese version of the "I Have a Dream" program, albeit on a much smaller scale.
      Our final project is a bridge in Song Buong village. Currently, an old, rickety bridge is the only way in and out of the village. The crossing is particularly dangerous in the rainy season, when the river water rises to the level of the bridge. A new bridge would cost about $8,000. To date, I have gotten only $1,000, all of which is my own money. While our friends in Vietnam are enthusiastic about helping to build schools, they are much more cautious about infrastructural projects that could involve the local government officials, something that most foreigners in Vietnam avoid. In addition to these projects, both my wife, My Linh, and I have had several opportunities to develop and train promising Vietnamese in business--I at P&G and My Linh as a training consultant for a local human resources company.
      Working in Vietnam also allowed me to meet with relatives I had never seen before. On one of my business trips to Hanoi, I took a day off to visit my family's ancestral village in North Vietnam. From this tiny village my father and his brothers made their escape south in 1954 when Vietnam was about to be divided. My relatives took me to visit our ancestors' graves and shared stories of their lives. In this short time, I was able to see for myself the unbelievable poverty and hardship that they have lived with. They have few opportunities for education beyond the village gate and fewer opportunities to eke out a living. As I left the village, one thought stuck in my mind: "What would my life be like if my father had never escaped from here?"
      Returning to my ancestral village marked the full circle of my journey of the past 20 years. In 1978 I had repeated my father's journey, escaping from an environment of despair and darkness to find hope, freedom, and opportunity in a faraway land. I came back to reconnect with relatives and friends left behind. I made the voyage to the village of my ancestors to pay homage to their spirits and to the spirit of my father. I have done what I could to help the people with whom I came in contact. I have come full circle, fulfilling much of my personal vision and unloading much of the psychological burden I have carried with me for the past 20 years. I am now ready to face the future with a clear, light heart.

Photograph By Mark Gervase

The next generation of American managers would do well to study the history of Vietnam, its war, and its people.