A musical refrain blared from a loudspeaker as this weekend began — “Hanoi, Hanoi, Hanoi” — and on the sidewalk below, Nguyen Thi Thuy was selling red heart-shaped decals printed with the gold star of Vietnam’s flag.
Red flags with their single gold stars filled the streets, and banners celebrating the city’s 1,000 years of history were trumped by others that declared, “The Vietnamese Communist Party will live forever!”
For some people here, weary of propaganda and cynical about the country’s leaders, the gaudy and expensive celebrations were an occasion for discontent.
“I keep asking myself, a thousand years of what?” said the writer Vo Thi Hao in a widely quoted essay. “The whole country is flooded with flags, but people remain poor, and corruption is widespread along with many other social evils.”
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