On my walk through Hoan Kiem Park I began to people watch. I noticed that many people were exercising. This does not seem out of place on the surface. It is a public park, people work out there. But then I began to watch them closer. Their exercising practices seemed incredibly peculiar. I would not expect to see these types of stretches or routines to be done in front of anyone. People seemed to either be completely oblivious of the surroundings, or else they did not care in the slightest.
I watched this man for several minutes go through a number of different stretches. He seemed completely comfortable to be doing these stretches in front of me and the whole world to see. This pattern has been noticed before by westerners. For Andrew Wells he noticed the practices that older people were participating in the parks in Vietnam and questioned why they were so comfortable presenting themselves. He stumbled on a surprisingly rich subject that holds deep implications of freedom of expression and an individual’s ownership of the government in Vietnam.
Wells began to look into how people were using the park and found that these exercise practices to be a common thread through many parks. So people were using public space consistently and were happy to do pretty much anything within this area. Having this be the case in a communist regime seems wholly out of place. It seems that these individuals have found a way to combat government control by simply doing what they want in public. It seems to be small at first, not really challenging anything in the government. But any sort of freedom of expression holds a symbolic power that individuals do in fact have an ability to express themselves how they please. The government does not have complete control.
Where these expressions are taking place are also significant. People seemed to have made the parks a battleground for freedom expression. Why would they have decided that this was the place to hold their ground. This seems to be based in a sense of ownership of the parks. The parks are in fact a place for the people. Or so says the government. This is what makes their defense so intriguing. The people of Vietnam have found a way to use the government’s position against itself. If they are able to maintain this sense of ownership of the parks then they are showing that the average member of the society do have some power of the government. There is a more to the power dynamic between the government and individual than is often is ascribed to it in Vietnam. The individual expression in the parks show how true this actually is.