When the weather began to turn chill a number of months ago, I found myself in need of some flannel shirts (hey, that’s almost 19th-century prose, save for the part about the shirts). As I usually do, I checked at Costco first. They had the usual brand names, plus Kirkland, plus something else.
The something else turned out to be the best flannel shirts I’ve ever owned. They were incredibly soft, made with quality buttons that actually buttoned all the way down to the bottom of the shirt. There’s even a spare button sewn carefully inside in case you lose one. Best of all, the shirts were cut long enough so that when tucked in they didn’t pull out every time I needed to reach up for something. And of course, they were cheap. I immediately went back to try and buy some more, only to find that they were sold out of most sizes. I was fortunate enough to find a few more online. When I went back a day later to buy two more, they were also sold out on line.
It was only later that I happened to check the label and see that they were made in Vietnam.
I remember the Vietnam war clearly. I was at UCLA for the first part of it. When I finished grad school I enlisted in the active Army Reserve and spent six years therein, initially with a radio unit and then creating recruitment materials. Never made it to ‘Nam, so I don’t count myself a veteran. I’m not here to argue the merits or lack thereof of said conflict. I’ll just mention that between three and four million Vietnamese, soldiers and civilians, North and South, died.
It made me think once again how quickly relationships change between nations.
Deadly enemies for years. Use of poisoned booby-traps. Use of air-sprayed chemicals. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting.
Did any of those hands that held rifles and RPGs and machine guns make the shirt I’m currently wearing?
I doubt it. Such survivors would be old, as old as I am. But their children, and their grandchildren, would not be. Did any of them working in garment factories in Hanoi make the shirts I bought? You know that the garment industry in Vietnam has grown into one of the largest, most efficient in the world? There are more than 6,000 textile facilities in the city of Nam Dinh alone.
The label on the shirts I got from Costco says “Freedom Foundry.” I don’t know if that’s a bit of sarcasm on the part of the manufacturer, an attempt to simulate an American origin for their product, or just a name they thought would help sell the shirts. The symbol is a bear, which is not an attempt to be American, because there are ursines (black bear and sun bear) in Vietnam. An unexpected mammalian commonality we share with them.
My mother lived through the Great Depression and then WWII. Her whole long life she would never buy a German-made product. I understood her feelings and made no attempt to explain that Germans my age had grown up after the war and had no part it in (my books sell very well in German, I’ve driven across much of the western half, and even been a GoH at a convention in Dusseldorf). To her it was reality. To me it was and remains, albeit painful at times, history.
Today consumers buy a plethora of goods from Germany as well as Japan. Interestingly, no one ever mentions there being a historical boycott of goods from Italy, even though Italy fought with Germany and Japan in WWII. I imagine this is because no one takes Italy’s wartime efforts seriously. As Winston Churchill put it, “Italians lose football matches are if they were wars, and lose wars as if they were football matches.”
Is that how the Vietnamese see us? Is that how we see them? Or is it that, just that as it always has, sooner or later commerce trumps hate, and history? My shirt reminded me once more how rapidly these things shift. I wear clothing made in the land of a very recent ‘enemy.’ I am willing to bet whoever made it watches American films and listens to American popular music. If they have access to a good store in a mall or secondhand clothing shop, perhaps they even wear a shirt emblazoned with the logo of an American sports team. You might be shocked at how many tee-shirts and sweatshirts I’ve seen overseas that broadly proclaim not just ‘Chicago Bulls’ or ‘New York Giants,’ but ‘FBI–Chicago Division’ or ‘Property of CIA.’
Culture and commerce travel where politics cannot. We’ve fought a war in Vietnam. So has China. In 1969, while we were occupied in Vietnam, China fought a seven-month military conflict with Russia. Currently we support Vietnamese claims against China in an ongoing dispute over control of offshore waters (there is oil off the coast of Vietnam, surprise!). But we readily buy goods from both.
Maybe it’s long past time we stopped looking for enemies and focused on looking for discounts.
Prescott resident Alan Dean Foster is the author of 130 books. Follow him at AlanDeanFoster. com.
