The Emperor and His Cell Phone
The emperor of Vietnam sought exile in France in the 1950s, and died not too long ago. He had five children (a lot for a Vietnamese family), one Beloved By All beauty queen wife, one concubine, and a few palaces.
We visited the one in Da Lat. It was a strange experience.
A man inexplicably dressed like a monkey sat on a half wall outside, half-heartedly beckoning people for photos with him; another man stood poised next to three small, very pregnant horses, ready for riding.
The parking lot was the usual circus of peddlers and buses.
Inside it was worn and tattered--not the opulence you'd expect from royalty--even expelled royalty.
And in one room sat this guy, dressed in king's clothing for the crowds, bored, answering his cell phone while tourists snapped his photo.
I wondered what the king who lost his country would have thought.
3 comments:
the imperial city was bombed to death during the war by the americans and left to rot for decades before the communists finally decided quite recently that it was a good idea to begin to restore it to use for tourism purposes (vietnam is communist in name but capitalist in every other way baby!!). the man is wearing the typical cheapass 5 dollar imitation of royal garbs and the whole setup sounds like typical cheap tourist trap. there are some pretty monuments left but vietnam is still way too poor at the moment to afford the all the restoration needed, but it's improving.
btw he didn't only have 1 concubine . his first (beloved) wife that you mention was supposed to be his one and only but he ended up marrying several other wives. but in actuality, most vietnamese emperors would have many wives and over 100 concubines each (with the resulting 100 + children). bao dai (the last emperor) was actually quite conservative/modern in that regard.
oh my..ignore my first comment. I thought you'd visited the imperial city in central vietnam but re-reading your entry it says you went to dalat. this must be bao dai's little vacation getaway, not the imperial city where the royal palace complex is (which is in hue in central vietnam) - although it seems his getaway too was evidently left to rot.
I've spent the last dozen in years in the former Soviet bloc, so I'd definitely agree with you that capitalism is alive and well in Vietnam--to an extent. But so is Communism, as the two aren't mutually exclusive, it seems. The state still squelches freedom of speech and press, and buying private property there is basically giving money to the government for the privilege of living in the house as if it were your own, because the reality is, the govt can take the house anytime it wants without compensation, and has done so.
There are other examples, such as closing all bars and clubs at midnight to "suppress evil," but the Vietnamese manage to get around that. Overall, they live with much more promise than the former Soviet bloc ever did, and, it seems (altho I can only go by what I read), than China, as well.
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