Andrew Lam

Thursday, Mar 4, 1999 8:00 PM UTC

The war at home

While Vietnamese in California battle over Ho Chi Minh's photo, and legacy, a younger generation on both sides of the Pacific manages to live in two worlds.

By Andrew Lam

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SAN FRANCISCO — Several years ago in Hanoi I watched an old woman take down a faded picture of Ho Chi Minh, leaving a conspicuous white space on her living room wall. Eventually, her teenage grandson covered it over with a poster of Pamela Anderson.

For a while now, Uncle Ho’s faded pictures have been routinely taken down in many Vietnamese households, replaced by something more au courant — a Kiss or AC/DC rock band poster, a color TV set or, better yet, a family altar with incense smoke wafting. No one comments, no one cares.

But if taking down an old icon is uneventful in Vietnam, putting it up turned out to be a much messier affair across the Pacific. In Little Saigon in Orange County, Calif., a Vietnamese immigrant named Tran Van Truong, once a refugee himself, put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store and inflamed an entire Vietnamese community. Protest raged on every day for six weeks and an enormous South Vietnamese flag — yellow with three red horizontal stripes — now flies in the parking lot across from Truong’s store.

From an outsider’s point of view, the whole episode might seem absurd. The war of attrition between two archaic icons — the poster of a long dead Communist leader and the flag of a country that no longer exists — is as jarring as, say, waiters dressing up as Mao Tse-Tung and serving nouvelle cuisine dim sum in a posh joint on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Yet ask any Vietnamese protester outside Truong’s store and he or she will recite stories of incredible suffering and unbearable loss. An uncle killed by the Viet Cong during the war; a brother lost at sea trying to flee oppression at home; a father sent to a reeducation camp; a best friend killed in the decade-long war of occupation in Cambodia; cousins suffering for years in the malaria-infected New Economic Zone.

None of these personal histories registers on the American imagination these days, let alone plays out in the American media, whose radar homes in first and foremost on the issue of free speech. Historically, it’s been a curious curse of the South Vietnamese to lack the talent to play to the American media (think of the famous black-and-white photo of Gen. Loan executing a Viet Cong soldier in front of the camera during the 1968 Tet — never mind that the same Viet Cong had killed an entire family an hour earlier, off-camera). The media portrayal of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in Little Saigon is reduced to that of a rabidly anti-communist community, once persecuted by communism, now intent on persecuting a solitary man standing up for what he believes in.

But does the American media expect the Vietnamese community not to react? Does it not remember how the Vietnam War itself nearly tore America apart in the late ’60s and ’70s? Why should America expect any less passion from those who actually endured that bloody conflict?

Besides, the Vietnamese protest is tame compared to other possibilities. Imagine what would happen to a Cuban in Miami who put up a poster of Fidel Castro!

Yet, having said all this, I must admit that I, who fled Vietnam when the
war ended at the age of 11, also have mixed feelings. Of course I believe
that Truong has every right to speak his mind. But I cannot help but
think that this man, who went out of his way to fax various Vietnamese
organizations in Little Saigon about what he was doing, is a kind of
narcissistic ass. Although he got what he wanted — the media limelight,
the underdog image — Truong remains incoherent at best and inane at
worst. On TV he lights incense and bows to the Communist flag and the Ho
Chi Minh poster, but he betrays no sense of irony over the larger picture
– that he fled to America to gain the right to free speech so that he
could eventually bow to the Communist flag of Vietnam.

For their part, the protesters are so mired in their anger and lust for
revenge that many can only view Vietnamese identities through the myopic
ideological lens of pro- or anti-communism. There’s no room for
discussion. The oppressed have become the oppressors — yielding the
moral high ground to Truong.

The truth is that many Vietnamese both in Vietnam and abroad have gone
far beyond the old “us” vs. “them” mentality. We are aware of the
injustice Vietnamese refugees suffered after the Communist victory, and
of the atrocities that followed Vietnam’s reunification. But we are also
now too individualistic and too circumspect to allow a defunct flag and
the fading photograph of a dead man to frame the complex meanings of our
lives.

A young Vietnamese-American friend of mine from Los Angeles whose sister
was killed by Thai pirates while escaping Vietnam recently returned to
Saigon, where he is now a thriving entrepreneur. The son of a colonel who
spent 14 years in reeducation spent his honeymoon in Vietnam, despite
his dislike of the Hanoi regime. Having lost the war, these people have
emerged as the victors of the peace. They’ve learned to remake themselves
and go on with their lives, refusing to let the politics of the homeland
dictate how they live.

Some 60 percent of Vietnam’s population today is under 30 years of age –
born long after Ho Chi Minh died. They have no personal memories of the
war nor any personal attachment with the bloated body of the long-dead
Uncle lying in the mausoleum in Hanoi. Ask them if they are working for a
communist paradise and they will probably snicker that they want what you
want — a good job, the freedom to travel, schooling for their kids. They
want a VCR, a TV, a computer with access to e-mail and the Internet. And
if possible, they want a nice car.

The irony is that with the exception of San Jose and Orange County and
perhaps Dallas, nowhere in the world would an image of Ho Chi Minh
provoke such a potent reaction — including in Vietnam.

On TV I heard a young man protesting outside Truong’s store declare to
the camera that he “would die for the South Vietnamese flag.” I winced.
The time to die bravely has passed, I wanted to tell him. Live bravely
instead. Spend that same passion to build a memorial for the dead, write
a book about your life, tell your children about your past, lobby for
Vietnamese rights in America, in Vietnam.

And watch how the old picture of the Uncle with his white beard in the
old woman’s house in Hanoi is fading with age, waiting to crumble into
dust.

Friday, Aug 8, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Newsreal: Ghosts eternal

"The Khmer Rouge is no more," said the one Western eyewitness to the show trial of its genocidal leader, Pol Pot. But if the guerrillas' threat has receded, what they did during Cambodia's "Punishment Time" may never be erased.

By Andrew Lam

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in the summer of 1992, while staying at a friend’s home outside the town of Siem Reap, I woke in the middle of the night and saw fire outside my window — to be more accurate, several balls of fire moving in a slow dance at a distance. For half a minute, I stood transfixed, watching those balls of light flutter and flirt with each other before they abruptly disappeared.

To this day I do not know what I saw, though I reasoned they were torches carried by very fast runners. When I talked about the fire to soldiers, servants, housewives and even politicians, however, many simply nodded their heads knowingly and said, “ghosts.”

“So many ghosts here, you know,” one woman remarked in a matter-of-fact way, “their souls have not gone to heaven. They are still very angry.”

It is risky for a journalist to talk about ghosts — it has taken me almost five years to tell this story. But ghosts and spirits and myths provide a crucial window to the Cambodian psyche, especially as it seeks to fathom the cause of the country’s immense suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during what one woman called “Cambodia’s Punishment Time.”

From notebooks I wrote while traveling the Cambodian countryside:

An old woman named Srong said this about the Khmer Rouge. “The old monks used to say, ‘One day there will be a war where the demons come and blood will rise to the elephant’s stomach,’ and it came true.” Srong is blind. Her face is strangely serene as she explains how she had witnessed the Khmer Rouge murdering her own children and then found she could no longer see.
A man named Hott Nguong explained it this way. “The Khmer Rouge soldiers are possessed by demons who came from hell. They have no souls. You can tell by looking in their eyes. If you are a human being, how can you torture children to death?”
Bonn Srey, a woman who cannot read or write, explains Cambodia’s tragedy by saying the country is cursed. “A long time ago, the Cambodian king was powerful and cruel to neighboring countries and those people curse Cambodia. Now Cambodia is full of demons and ghosts.”

Maybe this is just normal superstition in a country where nine out of 10 people live in the countryside, without electricity, and where seven out of 10 are essentially illiterate. Yet intellectuals are not immune. Reasay Poch, a Cambodian-American with a graduate degree in Asian Studies from Cornell, was doing research at Tuol Sleng, the infamous Khmer Rouge prison where some 20,000 people were incarcerated, tortured, then systematically killed. Poch was working on the second floor of the building, reading and photocopying written confessions left behind by Khmer Rouge victims, when he heard screaming and the sound of clanking metal. He rushed out to the balcony overlooking the torture chambers on the first floor, but saw nothing. “I had to tell myself, even if there were ghosts, they wouldn’t harm me,” he said. “After all, I am here to help tell their stories.”

The past — both the mythic and the immediate — has a strong grip on Cambodian life. One sees it in contemporary Cambodian politics. All warring factions during the early 1990s had the image of the ancient capital, Angkor Wat, imprinted on their flags. Paintings of these stone ruins hang on the walls of every government office, every restaurant and every classroom. They are a testament to an ancient empire that once stretched westward across Thailand to Burma and eastward to include much of the Mekong Delta and South Vietnam. “Bangkok” and “Saigon” are both Cambodian words.

It was an empire that understood intimately the power of war and destruction. Cambodia was once a Hindu nation that worshiped Shiva, the Destroyer God. When he danced, it is said, he set in motion both the creative and destructive forces in the world.

Those who know the story say Shiva remains a potent and angry God. One Cambodian guide at Angkor Wat explained, “We failed to worship Shiva and he punished us by sending his Monkey Army” — the Khmer Rouge. “Shiva promised to protect those who worshiped him and destroy all unbelievers. And we were punished because we failed to worship him.”

Shiva’s four faces with their eerie half smiles can be seen all over the stone ruins. Each represents a different aspect: Creation, Preservation, Incarnation, Destruction. As I write, I can still see in my mind’s eye those stone faces, smiling their mysterious smiles.

And I think of Kall Kann, a doe-eyed teenager who stared at the stone faces, trying to decipher the past: “The stone faces belong to a king, maybe a God, but it’s too long ago,” he said. “I don’t remember the name. My father knows the name for sure but, you know, my father is dead.”
Aug. 8, 1997

) Pacific News Service

rollerbladers r e s p o n d

Editor’s note:A Newsreal commentary by Scott Baldinger on “irksome” rollerbladers in Manhattan (“Rollerblader rage: They’re sleek, they’re shiny, they’re |ber-pedestrians and they must be stopped”), which ran in Wednesday’s Newsreal, did not go down well with some Salon readers who are also rollerbladers. Here are some of their responses:

Just read the “death to rollerbladers” piece. While I am the first to admit that there are many fellow rollerbladers that are disrespectful to others with whom they share public spaces and that sometimes risk their own safety and that of others, I found the above mentioned piece quite insulting.

Obviously its writer has never experienced the magic of a skate along the Charles River in Boston. I commute on my rollerblades, leaving traffic jams behind me in rush hour and leaving my car at home as well — thus in a small way not adding to the parking nightmares in this city. I yield to pedestrians, wait at crosswalks and still manage to get to work totally invigorated by an early morning skate through my beautiful city.

It is awful to think that there are people out there who enjoy seeing a skater getting hurt. Usually I only get good vibes from people I meet while on my skates. How disappointing to read an article such as “death to rollerbladers” in my favorite online magazine. To imply that all skaters are selfish, inconsiderate and foolhardy is to contribute to the creation of a new and unfair stereotype.

Paula Aguilera

I beat my old record around Mission Bay (in San Francisco) and felt so inspired by Scott Baldinger’s piece I did it without elbow pads. So all streetbladers are rude, aggressive and abusive? Gee, that’s how most people describe New Yorkers. Could it be Mr. Baldinger was engaging in a little generalization and stereotyping, hmm? I agree that some streetbladers could use a few lessons in manners, but I put that down to the average age. And after being trapped in the pedantically conformist mediocrity of San Diego, I’d cheerfully accept a few sore toes to experience some cultural diversity. Tell Scott to stop whining about trivia, focus on the big stuff and enjoy the hell out of the beauty of New York life.

Oh, and I’ll give him a blading lesson any time he wants.

Carolyn Cooper

It’s pretty obnoxious that Scott Baldinger gets revenge by enjoying seeing rollerbladers fall. Because in fact, falling is a dangerous and painful experience when skating.

I get to blade on Venice Beach every day, far from Scott Baldinger. Pedestrians are the menace here. The typical pedestrian on the bike path seems to be a cross-blend of the Beverly Hillbillies/Gomer Pyle/Mr. Heaney. They trip you, they walk suddenly and blindly in front of bikes and bladers.

I was tripped by a pedestrian a few months back. He was standing holding a child in the middle of the bike path talking to someone else. As I was passing him, he turned blindly and stuck his foot out. I had no time to avoid him or his foot. If he wasn’t holding a child I would have just hit him straight on and let him cushion the fall for me, but I didn’t think — in the split instant — the baby deserved to suffer for his lack of awareness of the world around him. So I wound up rolling over and over on the pavement. As I lay on the ground writhing in agony, his wife offered me a baby-wipe and an L.A. cop told me that skaters didn’t belong on the bike path, which is a big joke because skaters easily outnumber bikers at any time of day, every day on the bike path.

I have another scar on my legs, but I otherwise
recovered.

Blading is a nice, healthy and fun way to get around. It’s better for everyone’s health than putting another car on the streets. Here in Venice, Calif., the Wells Fargo will let you in on skates (but BofA does not), as will the Bean Queen and most other local businesses.

Re: bladers, Scott should really join ‘em instead of trying to beat ‘em, or getting some perverse and gross enjoyment out of hoping we fall. Hope to see you on blades soon!

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Thursday, Jun 26, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Killing fields linger

Salon Newsreal: Pol Pot's capture won't end the tragedy of Cambodia.

By Andrew Lam

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captured by his own crazed and disillusioned soldiers, the man responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million people seems more a frightened deer than the feared Brother Number One who would order the execution of entire families at the drop of a hat.

Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, came to power in Cambodia in 1975 and was driven out by invading Vietnamese in 1979. During his reign, he enforced a radical, agrarian-based reform that included the systematic elimination of the ruling and bourgeois classes. One in four Cambodians died.

Yet the United States, perhaps traumatized by its lost war with Vietnam and still believing in the “domino theory,” continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the country’s representative in the United Nations in the 1980s. And China, angry over losing a war with the Vietnamese in 1979, continued to arm the Khmer Rouge until the early 1990s.

Many pundits have announced that Cambodians will experience closure if Pol Pot is finally brought to justice. But while his capture certainly marks an end to the bloodiest chapter in Cambodia’s history, it won’t end the tragedy. Years of factional fighting following the Khmer Rouge reign of terror have left a nation of 6.5 million traumatized and impoverished:

Even after the most costly U.N. peacekeeping mission ever mounted, Cambodia is in desperate need of capital for rebuilding. But it lacks all the basic infrastructure — roads, an educated work force, investment law, electricity — needed to draw foreign investment or tourism.
After more than three decades of war, two of three Cambodians are female, a disastrous ratio in a country where 90 percent of the population depends on labor-intensive agriculture to survive.
Partners in the country’s coalition government, set up by the U.N.-sponsored election four years ago, continue to bicker among themselves, and some observers say this may lead the country once again into civil war.
In the meantime, government officials vie for the right to cut down Cambodia’s forests and sell them cheap to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The depletion of forest lands contributes to landslides and floods, and to the loss of topsoil.

Although the war with the Khmer Rouge may be over, Cambodia is a nation armed to the teeth. Almost every family owns a gun or a rifle for defense against demobilized soldiers who have turned to banditry.

The worst problem of all is the presence of land mines. Cambodia has more mines per square mile, and more amputees per capita, than any country in the world. Every month, on average, some 400 Cambodians are maimed or killed by mines. The task of removing the remaining mines will take half a century.

In East Asia, a region experiencing unprecedented growth, Cambodia has become a kind of embarrassment. “We don’t really include Cambodia when we talk about economic miracle and investment,” a Bangkok businessman remarks. “Cambodia depresses us. Cambodia belongs to a different Asia.”

As it is now, a tourist brave enough to visit Cambodia goes not simply to gawk at the magnificent ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, but to ogle the aftermath of a holocaust. The maimed and wounded and distraught survivors, the fields piled high with skulls, the bombed-out buildings and the Tuol Sleng museum — a high school turned prison now filled with photographs of the varieties of torture committed by the Khmer Rouge — all serve as a reminder of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.

For many in Cambodia, and elsewhere, Pol Pot is horror incarnate. And if his trial eases the Cambodian psyche, then it might be a small, good thing. But after the media limelight moves on from this wretched nation, Cambodia might once again be left to fend for itself. In the dark.
June 26, 1997

Andrew Lam is a Vietnam-born short story writer and an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. He has traveled in and written extensively about Cambodia over the last decade.

) Pacific News Service

Hong Kong Diary

BY SIMON WINCHESTER

JUNE 24, SIX DAYS TO HANDOVER:

last night Hong Kong was looking brighter, far brighter than usual. The tiny territory can always be seen from afar when you are flying in, whether you are droning across the blackness of China or the blackness of the western Pacific — it appears as a brilliant orange glow on the horizon a couple of hundred miles ahead, an illuminated statement of its own success. But last night its brightness seemed to have been compounded a hundred-fold: As the plane turned and banked into its familiar-yet-always-alarming landing turn at Kai Tak airport, it positively sparkled and glistened, with a superabundance of light. It looked almost as though the place was on fire.

It is all to do with the handover, of course, now less than a week away. It turns out that every office building worth its patriotic salt, and every blank wall without a cigarette hoarding, has now been festooned with decorative trails of neon that have been shaped into the chosen emblems of what, come next Tuesday, will be Chinese sovereign territory once again.

But the unintended symbolism of it all has caused some puzzled amusement. The two devices that have been chosen to depict the glorious moment of the handover are a five-petaled flower known as Blake’s bauhinia and an overly cheerful looking sea creature known as a Chinese white dolphin. Biologists have pointed out — and hence the amusement — that the particular bauhinia is actually a rare hybrid, and one that is rare for the simple reason that it is terminally sterile; and the white dolphin is of a species that is currently being killed at such a ferocious rate by Chinese fishermen that it will be extinct in five years.

Why the new regime has chosen its symbols so maladroitly is anyone’s guess. But it is giving the departing Britons opportunities for sardonic commentary on how they expect the territory to flourish — or not — once the Communists get their hands on it. A sterile weed and a dying fish, they chortle, with fine inaccuracy: What can that possibly mean?

The royal yacht, the Britannia, is now lying in the harbor, waiting to take the best and brightest of those Britons away, just after midnight strikes at the end of next Monday. She came in yesterday, and there was not a dry eye among those who saw her. She is such a lovely craft — her rake perfect, her midnight-blue hull impeccable, her sailors all at attention in their tropical whites — and she came in behind scores of fireboats spraying cannonades of foam.

Prince Charles flies in on Saturday to preside over the Monday ceremonial; some unkind sorts say that Camilla, his consort, is already secreted away in Britannia’s bilges, and will be on hand to comfort him once the handover is done, and he and the colonial governor sail away for the Philippines and a few days of tropical rest.

There are other important ships around too. HMS Chatham, an anti-submarine destroyer bristling with missiles and guns, has fetched up to provide a floating headquarters for the British forces during their last week in command. And another big supply ship, the Sir Percivale, is busily loading all the ammunition that the British kept in the colony’s rocky bunkers until the very end, just in case. Both vessels will be sailing out, beyond the territorial boundary line, by the time the Chinese midnight sounds. There will be just a few British soldiers left on the Tuesday morning, tidying up, switching off the lights, rolling up the bunting. They have been given formal permission to stay until 3:30 a.m. — without their guns, though — because of the press of work, but once their jet has roared off into the night, the British colonial presence will formally, and absolutely, be over.

The Chinese army is already here, in small numbers. There are about 100 soldiers, all unarmed and in civilian clothes. But at 9 on the evening before the handover 500 more will be coming across the frontier — a major concession by the outgoing British that was announced yesterday. And they will be in uniforms, and they will have their weapons. It will be a chilling moment, something to cause a shiver in anyone with any recollections of the Tiananmen Square tragedy of eight years ago.

The contrast of all the sounds to be heard that night seems to carry a symbolism all of its own: the tramp of boots and the rumble of heavy armor coming in, the soft sigh of the boats and the whispering roar of the planes going out. The tough men and the tough times are coming, the sounds seem to say; the gentler days are now over.

The lights that we see today, and the curious flower and dolphin patterns they have been made into, may have an amusing symbolic meaning. But the sounds that we will surely hear a week from now seem to speak of an altogether graver affair. People may not be laughing so much one week from now, sardonically or otherwise.

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Tuesday, Feb 11, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

Juggernaut in the East

Forget America -- the real middle-class society is Asia.

By Andrew Lam

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if we now live in a world where ideological struggles have given way to the global marketplace, then Asia is unquestionably the force to be reckoned with. The largest middle-class population in the world, after all, now resides in Asia. The implications for the West are staggering, to say the least.

Economists predict that by 2010, affluent Asians will number between 800 million and 1 billion. “The biggest market for almost everything is in Asia — not just cars, but high-tech products, entertainment goods, basic infrastructure — you name it!” marvels an American businessman. “The idea that China will soon be the richest country in the world and still has only about 10 million cars makes my eyes pop out.”

But these entrepreneurial dreams will fail unless the West realizes that Asians aren’t just greedy for Western products. Modernization no longer implies Westernization: Asians are now inclined to think they are following “the Asian way.” The only problem is, no one is quite sure what “the Asian way” means.

“Traditional ethnic cultures are being revived with new elements of universality,” observes Masakzu Yamazaki, who studies cross-cultural influences at East Asia University in Tokyo. Korean agrarian folk music is influenced by jazz; Balinese dance, influenced by German art forms, in turn is influencing the Japanese modern dance troupe Sankaijuku.

Yamazaki sees a new Pacific International style emerging that draws on both Asian and Western cultures but with an emphasis on the East.

As affluent Asians acquire an increasingly sophisticated sense of self, they look for reflections of themselves as the main players in the global narrative. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the silver screen. Though moviegoers in the West are only beginning to discover Jackie Chan, the martial arts expert and Hong Kong movie star, for Asians he has long since replaced James Bond as the icon of global macho, whether fighting neo-Nazis in the Sahara desert or escaping Incas in Peru.

“Hong Kong has its own dream factory, the third largest in the world, and its own megastars, and more and more it’s incorporating other Asian stars into its movies to represent the entire Asian region,” notes Wayne Chang, whose family owns a movie theater in Hong Kong. The recently released Hong Kong film “Beyond Hypothermia” uses Korean, Japanese and Cambodian actors speaking at least five different languages (English included) in a highly stylized dance of bullets and tears that hypnotizes Asians all over the continent.

In the fashion world Asian designers like Rei Kawaibo, Hanei Mori and Joyce Ma are scoring with East-West hybrid designs. In the arts, although Western media headline Asian billionaires buying up Western art treasures, the real story is that Asian nouveaux riches prefer Asian to European arts. The new high-tech museum in Shanghai was funded mostly by overseas Chinese who also bought art objects to donate to the museum.

In Malaysia, prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is introducing the “Multimedia Super Corridor,” a 15-mile-wide by 50-mile-long corridor that connects Kuala Lumpur’s airport to the world’s tallest building. With the help of Silicon Valley executives, he aims to usher in Malaysia’s own version of the Information Age.

But despite occasional anti-Western chauvinism, there is little danger the new “Asian identity” will turn exclusionist. English remains the preferred language of commerce, and Western democracy and freedom of expression are the explicit goals of many Asians. A typical middle-class urban Asian speaks two or three languages, and feels at home in two or three different countries.

But he also retains the core values of his or her own culture. The Western journalist who reports on how a Thai youth wears his Yankee baseball cap turned backwards needs to be aware that deep down, as a recent survey of Hong Kong young people found, his family comes first, followed by education, caring for older relatives and saving for the future.

In a sense, to become relevant to the East, Westerners will have to grow more humble, just as once the East humbled itself to learn from the West. Certainly, the Westerner traveling to Asia with open eyes will discover an old continent being reborn into the New World.

Where Social Security is private

Look south for ways to save your retirement money.

BY JOHN BORLAND

president Clinton stayed far away from it in his State of the Union speech. His budget has nothing to say on the matter. Nor do Republicans. But you’re going to be hearing a lot about saving Social Security in the next year or two. Which means you’re going to hear a lot about Chile.

Chile, the sliver of a South American country, jumped ahead of the rest of the world 15 years ago when it privatized its state-run social security system, requiring most of its workers to invest their retirement savings in one of several tightly regulated private pension funds.

The experiment has been enormously successful, say its boosters. The country’s stock market has skyrocketed, and many blue-collar workers have millions of pesos (thousands of dollars) more in their personal accounts than the old system would have paid. In a mildly surreal version of hardball marketing, the giant pension funds now send platoons of smiling sales representatives — many of them attractive young women — to woo potential investors in factory cafeterias and office hallways.

Proponents of privatizing the United States’ badly fraying Social Security system point to this apparent success story with an impatient mix of respect and envy. Without reform, most financial analysts agree, the current American system will be bankrupt by 2029, when baby boomer retirement withdrawals will have far exceeded the amount of money being paid in by their offspring. To some, Chile and the high returns earned by its market-invested private pensions mark a way out of this demographic bind.

“The United States is really lagging behind,” says Naomi Lopez, an analyst at the conservative Cato Institute, which has taken the lead in pressing for a Chilean-style system in this country. “If people in a nation like Chile can handle this system, the people of the U.S. can.”

But is Chile, a country of 15 million with a $98 billion economy, really a good model for the United States, which encompasses roughly 264 million people and boasts a $6.8 trillion GDP?

Differences between the two countries go well beyond problems of scale. When Chile began its experiment with privatization, it was governed by a brutal military dictatorship that — whatever its economic success stories — had no qualms about “disappearing” its more outspoken critics. It also sold off state-owned companies and assets accrued by earlier, more socialist-minded governments, providing a massive one-time infusion of funds for a new system. America has no such cash equivalent.

But what really blocks a successful transplant to U.S. soil are the dates on American birth certificates. “In 1980 Chile was demographically very young,” notes World Bank senior economist Louise Fox, who spends much of her time advising other nations on how to import the Chilean model. She points out that in 1990, fewer than 10 percent of Chileans were over 60 years old. The same age group in the United States made up 16.7 percent of the population, a figure that promises to shoot upwards as baby boomers hit retirement age. “(Chile’s) transition debt was very small,” Fox says. “We’ve just got too much of a debt already.”

The debate in this country is focusing on recommendations released last December by the 13-member presidential Advisory Council on Social Security, a body so torn between different fix-it philosophies that it finally released three different reform plans — all of them a far cry from what Fox calls the “full Chile.”

The first plan would keep the current system structurally unchanged, tinkering with the levels of monthly checks and the retirement age, and allowing the government to invest its surplus funds in the stock market. Plan two would have taxpayers pay a small portion of their total Social Security tax into an individual account, which could be in equities, though still managed by the government.

Only the third alternative provides any real red meat for privatization advocates. Under this plan, close to half of a worker’s Social Security payroll tax would go into a private retirement account, managed by the individual worker. The other half would go toward supporting retirees that had paid into the old system, and would in the long term provide a basic level of benefits for everybody. The transition costs would be financed by nearly $2 trillion in bonds over the next 72 years, to be paid off by a payroll tax hike of about 1-and-a-half percent.

This third plan met with stony skepticism from many Democrats. “I think it’s a non-starter,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” Republicans focused on erasing the federal deficit also cast a worried eye on the plan’s short-term budget implications.

But whatever the initial resistance, the Chilean idea isn’t going away. Other countries, including Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Argentina, are allowing their citizens to put some of their social security funds in some form of private account. More are moving in this direction every year. “Absolutely all industrial countries … are facing the same problems,” Fox says. “Pay-as-you-go systems are too expensive.”

It might not be tomorrow that a smiling representative of Prudential Retirement knocks on your door, offers you a wall calendar and launches into an explanation of why your current pension fund manager is wasting your retirement taxes. But it might be sooner than you think.
Feb. 11, 1997

John Borland is an editor at California Journal, a monthly magazine that covers California politics and policy.

Q U O T E O F T H E D A Y

Taking the mommy track
I don’t want to send a message to the world that says, ‘Don’t hire a mom.’ But at a certain point you make the personal decisions. It all came to a point where I made the decision that this is not what I wanted to do with my life right now.
–Heidi Roizen, who resigned Monday as head of software developer relations for Apple Computer. (From “Apple to Take Big Write-Off On Acquisition: Deal for Next Revalued; A Top Executive Quits,” in Tuesday’s New York Times.)