1.
The divided nation has been unified for 34 years, but travelers are still asked whether they’re headed to North or South Vietnam. I say I’m headed to Hanoi since us Americans still don’t like flying young men into Saigon. I got good mileage out of that joke.

2.
But here’s the thing: these Asian tigers change so quickly as to make our mental impressions irrelevant. Vietnam has, like China, implemented a market economy, but I figured the country was still Red Brigades and Slogans with perhaps a textile export factory thrown in for spice, like chillies in the stock of a bowl of pho.

I flew in from Luang Prabang, that old French base in the North of Laos, on Vietnam Air, and indeed saw slogans as I walked through the Hanoi airport terminal. The surprise was that the terminal was modern and the slogans were for HSBC, Your Local Bank.

Hanoi itself is perfectly pleasant, with leafy boulevards, temple-strewn lakes, and many French restaurants serving proper coffee and crème caramel. The largest lake – West – features an Intercontinental and a Sheraton, as well as stores selling Scandinavian design, imported wines and giant flat-screen televisions.

Indeed, the development is so striking that I began to hunt for any reflection whatsoever that Vietnam was run by a Communist Party, descendants of Uncle Ho and his toppling Dominoes, which threatened to spread its Black Heart across Asia and then the World in the manner of an ideological oil spill. Vietnam the King Cong wasn’t solely a mental fiction of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon; her human rights record during the war (the massacre at Hue, for instance) and after (the infamous ‘boat people’) is appalling, and both the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge were originally branches of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Certainly memory of the war and the Red Menace exists for tourists, who tromp daily up to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. But what evidence can be found beyond the tourist sites? I saw only two, and the first is a stretch: a hammer and sickle graced the main gate of, incongruously, the Hanoi Stock Exchange.

The second was a faded old poster on a side street south of the Old City. A black bomber, labeled “B52” and “USA” on the two wings, soars over a white, pinnacled, Soviet-style building capped with the Vietnam flag. The plane is aflame, its cockpit lit with a red toupee. The contrails of the Vietnam missile, however, soar past the plane itself, ending at a gold missile fired far into a cerulean sky. I like to think this is a metaphor for Vietnam’s recent history – the war and the darkest days of communism lie below, while prosperity in the future means moving past both.

3.
But if Vietnam has changed greatly over thirty years, what must be said of China? I studied and worked in China in 2005, only four years ago. As the Chinese economy continues to hum, however, the percentage increase in the average Chinese worker’s income from 2005 to 2009 is greater than than of an average American from 1965 to today. I returned to Beijing to see what had changed.

Little differences were apparent even before I reached Beijing. Yuan and Jiao bills had largely been replaced with coins, Cokes were sold in cans rather than in glass bottles, and smoke-filled, rickety buses were now leather-seat, bottled-water affairs. Pirated everything was tougher to find as more Chinese demanded the genuine article. Trains are quicker, prices are higher, buildings are larger, cities are busier.

But a voyage to my old neighborhood, just south of the zoo and west of the communist-era Moscow Restaurant and Soviet Exhibition Center, made the scale of changes clear.

4.
The University I studied at was previously flanked by two tiny convenience stores, or xiaomaibu: little sales offices. The one to the right was manned by a portly, twenty-something hunched over a Playstation controller, a stack of one-dollar bootleg games stacked on the black machine. He was known for collecting rare Western compact discs; a slice of British punk, classic rock, or underground hip-hop could be parlayed into free snacks. I don’t know how he fared in the MP3 Era, but his former storefront now sells ladies’ garments.

The other xiaomaibu, my regular, – overseas, one has more ‘regulars’ than at home, the fruit boy, the laundry wallah, the tailor, et cetera – was run by a woman recently emigrated from a rural province to the southwest. She had two young kids, for which schooling was always a problem. In China, the identity card system, or hukou, limits urbanization by refusing city services to those with a rural hukou. A place at school, therefore, is a matter of personal connections or bribes.

Her store wasn’t more than ten square feet, with snacks piled floor to ceiling, and a solitary freezer to the left. Every Friday morning, she knew to empty the waters and green teas and lychee mixes from the freezer, to be replaced with a case of Tsingtao tallboys, the lot of which would in due turn be purchased by one of the neighborhood Americans that afternoon for the grand price of twenty-five cents per bottle. Her store has now merged with the neighboring shack to become a computer training center; rumor was that her daughter had gotten pregnant, but otherwise nothing was known about what happened.

Up the alley toward the bus station, at one point, was an enormous, chaotic wholesale clothing market. Chinese knockoffs of every brand you could imagine were available for next to nothing – D&G T-shirts for a buck, spring leather jackets for five – and the World’s Busiest McDonald’s served as the edifice capstone. Chinese love McDonald’s Ice Cream, you see. I had my regular girl at McD’s as well – if I showed up in my suit fresh from the embassy when she was working, the nuggets, fries, Fanta and two packets of ketchup would be prepared even before I arrived at the counter. Chinese McDonald’s pays twice the hourly wage of a standard neighborhood restaurant, so the staff was always a cheery group.

The McDonald’s has now moved across the square – the old Soviet square where elderly Chinese would dance the waltz on weekend evenings – and the wholesale market is nothing but an empty lot. The small vendors have all been moved inside a gleaming, soulless skyscraper next door, a glass canyon.

My regular restaurant a block away served the Central Asian Moslem cuisine of Xinjiang’s Uighurs. The Uighurs serve for Han Chinese the role of Indians in America, and the restaurant went all out with stuffed animal heads mounted above, a giant shisha against the bar, and pictures of smiling ethnic minorities on the walls. A circle of naan from the brick oven or a lamb kebab could be had for twelve cents a pop, and dapanji, literally a Big Plate of Chicken, was a dollar. The storefront has now been replaced by a branch of the rapidly growing dumpling chain Qing Feng Steamed Stuffed Bun Shop: their translation, not mine.

The old DVD shop? Now socks and underwear. The hairdresser, who included two shampoos and a shoulder massage with each cut, and who was rumored to provide further, more illicit, benefits for the right price, is now a spare parts dealer. The only recognizable store from 2005 on the whole block was Dead Fish, our play on words of the restaurant’s Chinese name.

5.
The rapid growth, and resultant change, in East Asia over the past thirty years is completely anomalous in world history. This form of progress has unquestionably improved the lives of untold numbers of people. But something goes missing when the good of the past disappears so quickly, or when the bad of the past is ignored so totally. Is it not everyone’s experience that the old things are the best?