AF Reeves - @afreeves23 

Do governments always get it right? I think even the most ardent party man would acknowledge that they don’t. Is it reasonable to expect them to? In reality, I’d argue not, but treating anything less as acceptable would be a slippery slope. Do they intend to do the right thing? Do they make decisions with the best interests of the public in mind? Call me gullible if you like, but for the most part, I think they do.

One of the things that has kept me in Việt Nam this long is the feeling that things are getting better and that the powers that be want the lives of citizens to be healthier and more prosperous. Public schooling is now free from preschool through Grade 12, and every citizen is entitled to a free health check once a year. Decisions like these don’t come easily or cheaply, and those two alone would be the envy of many a living soul on this earth. Not every decision is quite so simple, though, and some come with trade-offs that are either unforeseen or at the very least unwanted.

Take motorbikes. I know pretty well this may sound like an entitled Tây who thinks his right to ride a Triumph is more important than clean air for the people who live here, and all I can do is ask you to hear me out before heading for the comments section. For now, the low emission zone covers eleven streets around Hoàn Kiếm at weekends, though the plan is for it to reach everything inside Ring Road 1 by the end of the decade. If the aim is to move towards electric vehicles, that’s fine for somebody whose bike is simple transport, where the feel of the thing falls well down the list behind getting to work on time. A Honda Wave can be swapped for an electric equivalent without much being lost, which isn’t true of a forty-year-old Minsk or my Bonneville for that matter.

I’m also far from the one with the most to lose, as the classic bike scene here is overwhelmingly Vietnamese, from the Minsk clubs to the families who’ve kept a Honda Cub running for generations. A city filled with electric vehicles could surely make room for a few of them, with a special permit for the hobbyists who live and try to breathe through the subculture of motorcycle enthusiasm. Charge us for the privilege. I’d pay.

Then there’s the recent move away from fee-based ESL programmes in public schools. The government is trying to make education more affordable and take the pressure off parents to pay exorbitant fees to keep up with the Joneses. I get it; I really do. The problem is that teachers of the calibre needed to make English a second language here demand a salary that schools are unlikely to meet on their own, now that parents aren’t paying. While things are being resolved, teachers in Hà Nội who have gone months without a salary are moving abroad to pastures new, which is a curious way of getting more English into the classroom.

The war on pavements is another. After years of back and forth, the authorities, in Hà Nội at least, seem deadly serious this time about clearing away the tables, chairs and excess of bikes that brought local life onto the street. Does it make the city more liveable and cleaner? Yes, to an extent, but at the cost of some charm, and for vendors whose only shopfront was the pavement, their living. There’s talk of businesses being able to rent the pavement to cover the cost of its maintenance. We shall see. This isn’t the first campaign of its kind, and the plastic stools have a habit of creeping back once the patrols move on.

A more novel secondary impact of legislation was recently brought to my attention. Nitrous oxide has become an all-too-popular option for late-night revellers and partygoers, and from January, selling it for recreational use is banned. The law exempts food use, but the crackdown leading up to it has made the gas far harder to import and sell legitimately, and bar owners tell me it’s now several times the price when it can be found at all. For cocktail bars and fine dining restaurants that use it in their techniques, it’s becoming unviable. A bit of a first-world problem? Maybe, but to the professionals and artisans who take such pride in their work, it’s an undeserved consequence of a problem they had no part in.

Last but not least, construction. Yes, change is needed. Old buildings will be knocked down and new ones built, and bridges are needed to ease the strain on a city with growing congestion. Does it all need to be done at once, in the manner it is? I’m no city planner, though I’ve spent enough time staring at the back of a cement mixer to have opinions, and I can’t imagine adding fifteen minutes of unpredictability to people’s commutes does much for productivity.

I’ve argued in these pages before that those of us who live and pay taxes here have every right to complain, and I still think so. Living somewhere in such a hurry to improve comes at a price, though, and it was one I signed up for when I moved here. Sometimes that price is paid by people who had nothing to do with the problem, the bartenders and the teachers, among them, and it’s fair to say so. Until somebody drafts that permit for my Bonneville, I’ll sit in the traffic, grumble a bit and give them the benefit of the doubt. Call me gullible. — VNS