A nice conversation of a scorching day

11 August, 2014

Today’s weather is so stifling, I had a good day, though. 3pm, after a long struggle, I finally made up my mind to go to the center just to receive the mock test’s results; by the way, it’s not too bad but frankly speaking, I don’t believe it. On my way home, I decided to stop for a while, walking around Hoan Kiem Lake for the purpose of getting some foreigner to talk with. After some  time, I saw a guy sitting alone on a bench and I, a timid girl, took all courage to start the conversation. Fortunately, he is a friendly person and we quickly got a little bit mutual undersstanding. He is a French, at the age of 30, exactly 10 years older than me but still looks so young and handsome as well. We talked excitingly about miscellaneous things, say, school, tourist attractions in Vietnam,  marriage and especially a lot on politics. Well, he seems to be so in favor of  capitalism and at the same time, criticized communism for poverty and corruption. He took interesting examples of the North Korea, the country isolating itself from the rest of the world and Mao Zedong with the wrong economic policies causing thousands of deaths  from starvation to prove the stupidty of communism. Then he astonished me by asking that whether Vietnam followed capitalism. It turns out that plenty of Europeans think of  communism as a society in which peasants are forced into agricultural co-operatives, working together and then distributing products equally regarless of contribution. Well, it’s true whereas this is the story of the past. This guy felt kind of stunned when I said that Vietnam’s political regime has remained Socialism under the Communist Party as he saw things here far different from his imagination of a communist society and considered Vienam much more like capitalistic other than socialistic. This is because he noticed private businesses are prevalent and citizens can easily have access to the Internet unlike the case of the North Korea where people can only see state TV channels and be prevented from using the Internet. Actually, there were hardly disputes between us for I’m in favor of  neiher of them and just curious about foreigners’ pesppectives of my country. Eventualy, we guessed that perhaps a combination of both would be better. Oooops, shame on me but I forgot to ask his name….