The following are extracts from the speech. It is a picture of a young schoolgirl. With a determined look on her face, she pedals furiously to school on her rusty Nam Ha bicycle in the early morning.
Her small hands squeeze the handlebar, and her right thumb readies itself to tinkle her bicycle bell. In her bicycle basket, she keeps a solitary black Bic pen and some Vietnamese schoolbooks. A few years later, this picture changes. The young girl has grown. Her hands, protected from the sun by white gloves, now grip the handles of a Honda Dream motorbike.
Her black hair and white ao dai still ripple in the breeze as she bobs and weaves through the ever-thickening city traffic. The tinkle of the bicycle bell has given way to the clank of the horn. Her determined look intensifies as she recounts the words she learned in English class that day. My picture morphs again. The schoolgirl is now a young woman. With a sleek laptop under her arm, she steps out of the Ford Focus that she and her husband bought after they married.
In a new, silk ao dai, she enters the elevator of a tall, modern building where she works as an account manager for a foreign company. On the elevator, she sends a text message, on her mobile phone, to her local clients about a conference call that she had with New York earlier that morning. As the schoolgirl traded her rusty bicycle for a Honda Dream, as she exchanged her black. Bic pen for the latest laptop, and as she moved from school-house to skyscraper, two mortal enemies were figuring out how to become friends.
Five years before the girl in the white ao dai was born, the United States and Vietnam were locked in a hideous war that left over 58, Americans and roughly a million Vietnamese dead.
