were shaped while on assignment in 1992 for an American newspaper. Back then, the government imposed a nightly 10 o’clock curfew across the capital, by which time my prison-like hostel was in lockdown mode. Desperate to make an after-hours deadline, I went over the compound’s two-meter wall one night and skulked though the shadows up Ngo Quyen Street to the Hotel Metropole. Save for a lone, squeaking cyclo pedicab, it was dead quiet.
In that pre-Internet age, the grand old colonial-era Metropole was the only place in the city—indeed in all of northern Vietnam — with an international fax machine. This was also the pre-MasterCard age in the socialist republic, so I forked over US$50 in cash to the hotel’s concierge—the going rate to transmit two handwritten pages—and thought to myself: There’s no capitalist quite like a Communist.
were shaped while on assignment in 1992 for an American newspaper. Back then, the government imposed a nightly 10 o’clock curfew across the capital, by which time my prison-like hostel was in lockdown mode. Desperate to make an after-hours deadline, I went over the compound’s two-meter wall one night and skulked though the shadows up Ngo Quyen Street to the Hotel Metropole. Save for a lone, squeaking cyclo pedicab, it was dead quiet.In that pre-Internet age, the grand old colonial-era Metropole was the only place in the city—indeed in all of northern Vietnam — with an international fax machine. This was also the pre-MasterCard age in the socialist republic, so I forked over US$50 in cash to the hotel’s concierge—the going rate to transmit two handwritten pages—and thought to myself: There’s no capitalist quite like a Communist.Download full Acticle