Chic shops a window on growing wealth gap in Vietnam
Nguyen Van Sang has come for his first wander around Vincom City Towers, Hanoi's newest chic shopping and office complex.
Mr Sang strolls around the five brightly lit floors of the mall, checking out the jewellery, designer clothes and foreign cuisine. But he isn't about to buy anything.
'It's too expensive for me,' says Mr Sang, a garment designer. 'Doing business has been difficult lately.'
He is not alone. Vietnam's rapid economic development, which dominated the country's current affairs this year, is on wide display, but for many like Mr Sang, their part in the boom has been limited to window-shopping. A few kilometres from the Vincom complex is the Long Bien Market, one of the capital's dozens of traditional outdoor markets that continue to be the real commercial hub for most Vietnamese, where shoppers navigate around mud puddles to tiny stalls in ramshackle buildings.
One such stall is owned by Pham Thi Dau. The 60-year-old woman sells tea, cigarettes and sweets at a stand the size of a small dinner table. Recently, she says, she has had fewer customers.
'Everything is more expensive these days, so I have to sell things at higher prices,' Ms Dau says. 'So I get fewer customers.' So who, in Ms Dau's opinion, is benefiting from the country's 7.5 per cent GDP growth?
'Smugglers,' she says. 'And people who already have a lot of money and a good education.'
Around the corner, one of Hanoi's thousands of self-appointed motorbike taxi drivers says the new prosperity is killing his business. More people can afford cheap Chinese-made motorbikes, he says, and the city's bus service has been dramatically improved in the past few years.
'I'm just about dying of hunger,' he says.
Meantime, the steady rise in consumer prices this year, largely fuelled by oil costs, has been among the most common complaints, especially for the hordes of state employees still waiting to receive a 30 per cent wage rise that was supposed to have taken effect in October.
Foreign economists say shrinking the development divide between urban and rural areas may be Vietnam's largest single challenge. Most rural communities remain almost completely dependent on agriculture.
Nevertheless, most analysts say the communist country's ongoing shift to a market economy is going about as well as can be expected. For all those who are feeling left out, there are others who say their quality of life is steadily improving.
A recent survey found that Vietnamese are far more optimistic about their future than other Asians.
Nguyen Loi, a gymnastics coach in Ho Chi Minh City, is one of those benefiting from the boom. Mr Loi moonlights as a personal trainer for the growing numbers with time and money to spend on things like fitness programmes.
'My life is better than ever before,' he says.
