In Vietnam, a culture of "snatching and grabbing" is giving way to a new civility. But there is reason to wonder whether this will last any longer than any other transformation in this most changeable of countries. PNS Associate Editor Andrew Lam just returned from an extended trip through Thailand, Vietnam and Burma.

HO CHI MINH CITY --  It seems a completely ordinary thing to do -- standing in line at the airport waiting to buy a ticket.

But this is Tan Son Nhat airport in Vietnam, and that gives standing in line an odd significance. Not quite three years ago, I had to fight through a pushing and shoving crowd to get to the same ticket counter.

This time, no one in the line of well-dressed passengers -- some chatting animatedly on their cell phones -- pushes or shoves.

Thanh Nguyen, 22 and a university student, who stands in line behind me, comments on this change. "We used to rush forward without any sense of order because we didn't know if there would be anything left for us at the counter if we were the last to get there," he explains. "Now, we know we can still get tickets if we wait in line. These days if you rush forward, you will be seen as uncivilized and everybody in Vietnam wants to be civilized."

Civility, or at least good behavior, has made a comeback in Vietnam. When the Vietnam war ended and the communist North triumphed over the U.S. backed South, civility was one of many victims. Replacing the country's ruling class was an army of peasants indoctrinated with the bolshevik idea that anything "bourgeois" and "capitalistic" was decadent and therefore must be distrusted and discarded, if not destroyed. Somewhere along the line, good manners disappeared. After all, polite behavior when there isn't enough food to eat would be foolhardy -- the only option was be rude and survive.

Indeed, the war and its aftermath turned the Vietnamese into a people who lived, as Mai Pham, 42 -- standing in front of me in the line -- puts it, "song chup duc" -- by snatching and grabbing. "Since we were starving we didn't care how we behaved."

The daughter of a rich rice merchant, she admitted to being a snob until her family lost everything. "At first I couldn't squat on the street to eat because I wasn't raised that way, but table manners aren't important when there's no table or chairs."

But that is all history. "Now," Mai boasts, "we live even more luxuriously than we did before." She owns a furniture store and counts a dozen newly-built hotels among its clients. In fact, she is here to buy tickets for a vacation for her family of five in Thailand -- she flashes her passport with the pride of a kid showing a straight "A" report card.

"You don't know how long I waited to get this thing," she says wistfully.

"How long?" I ask.

"Twenty-three years."

Here is what it is -- while the communist party still runs the country, it has dramatically loosened its grip on the economic and cultural spheres, holding steadfastly instead only to political power.

And it was, after all, no small act of trust in its people that the Hanoi regime, newly reformed with younger, more worldly and practical technocrats, recently decided to lift the exit visa requirement, allowing Vietnamese to travel freely abroad for the first time in more than two decades, and to rewrite the constitution to allow the practice of "private capitalism."

What forced its hands was the ending of the Cold War and the opening up of Vietnam to the outside world. And in recent years, with the return of tens of thousands Vietnamese from Europe and the United States and with the influx of foreigners investing and working in Vietnam, the transformation of the country has accelerated to the point where regular Vietnamese wear Giorgio Armani suits and drive Mercedes Benzes and BMWs on the streets of Saigon and Hanoi without being seen as conspicuous.

What is conspicuous is a new middle class with cosmopolitan yearnings. It did not take long, for instance, for previously indoctrinated peasants to turn their newly inherited villas into chic restaurants, hotels and karaoke bars to compete with the rest of the populace. In a sense, the rural-based revolution was subsequently swallowed up by city life.

Ask any Vietnamese in Saigon old enough to remember the war's aftermath and he'll tell you the story of a rural takeover -- "The rural won over the city," as one man wryly puts it. And he'll tell you, too, of how the Vietcong came in and ordered people to break down the sidewalks on tree-lined boulevards to grow yams, burned books and music tapes of all kinds, shut down elegant restaurants, nightclubs, tailor shops, art galleries, and so on. The ongoing joke that lasted into the late 1980s was how one Vietnamese communist general and his family, having emerged from the jungle, decided to raise catfish in a toilet of a newly abandoned French villa only to lose them all in an accidental flush.

Phuong Anh, an elegant, fashion-conscious Vietnamese-American, owns the Q Bar, a favorite watering hole for expats and well to do Vietnamese -- a place to see and be seen. He attributes the country's civility to privatization. "Vietnamese are naturally polite. So government-owned hotel workers suddenly behaved amiably when private-owned hotels opened up -- the same for restaurants. I mean if you have money why pay to be treated rudely at government institutions when you can, for the same money, be treated with politeness and respect at private ones?"

Is this new civility a sign of some deeper shift in values, a return to traditional Confucian values or just a desire to be seen as being in sync with the rest of the world? Will Mai be kinder, gentler than her earlier two incarnations? Will all this gentility simply go by the wayside once again when, as Phuong Ang predicts, Vietnam's economy falters?

It is not clear. But one thing is -- the image of Vietnam the revolution gave the world as a black pajamaed peasant in a conical hat is gone forever, replaced by karaoke bars, aerobics, Hong Kong TV soaps, and women shopping in the market in colorful leotards.

In a country where change is the one constant, at least for the moment it is comforting to know that a visitor can leave his place in a ticket line and get it back again.