President Clinton may not find the Vietnam he expects during his visit. The population is young and looks to the U.S. in many ways, not as an enemy but as an ideal. PNS editor Andrew Lam, born and raised in Vietnam, is a San Francisco-based journalist and short story writer.

Last June in an "Internet Cafe" in Ho Chi Minh City I overheard two teenage girls arguing over whether the year's best movie was "Boys Don't Cry" or "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Then the subject moved to music, and one asked rather wistfully, "Do you think the Backstreet Boys will ever come to Vietnam?"

Probably not. President Clinton, the first incumbent U.S. President to visit a unified Vietnam in peacetime, will discover it is a long way from the Vietnam shown in Hollywood movies.

America's economic power, its global culture, and its technology have irrevocably changed the landscape of Vietnam. "Boys Don't Cry," for instance, is sold as pirated video tapes on the streets for a couple of dollars, long before the legal version comes out in the U.S.

Indeed, while Vietnam remains for Americans a scar or a metaphor for disaster, America for the Vietnamese is the symbol of freedom and happiness. An entire new generation dreams of a new beginning with America.

Since the war ended 25 years ago, Vietnam has become a country of restless young. Its population has more than doubled, from 35 to 78 million, and the majority have no memory of the war.

They want Levi's jeans, cellular phones, "Dream II" motorcycles, Calvin Klein baseball caps, pagers, glamour. They have replaced the faded photos of Ho Chi Minh on their parents' walls with posters of Baywatch starlets and the Backstreet Boys.

At night they slip a video from Hollywood or Hong Kong into the VCR and marvel at the beauty and elegant possibilities that exist in the outside world.

So much has changed so quickly that Vietnam is a country full of young people in an identity crisis -- the reason, I suspect, why "Boys Don't Cry" is so popular here. Duong Thu Huong, acclaimed author of "Paradise of the Blind," and one of the most outspoken critics of the Hanoi regime, has said, "Vietnamese youths are no longer idealistic. Today they are revolting as if to avenge the prior generation for their deceptions."

Though Vietnam is still under one-party rule and claims to be communist, the state has, since the late 1980s, eased its grip on the economy and cultural life. It even rewrote its constitution to allow "individuals to practice private capitalism" and subsequently opened its doors to the world.

Gone are the days when citizens were required to discuss Marxist-Leninist doctrines at weekly neighborhood sessions. Gone too are the ho khau -- permits needed to buy rice from the state-run stores or to move from one city to another.

The result is a generation of young people who "di quay," or go wilding. Chanh Nguyen, a poet and businessman is in his late thirties, says, "The young are apolitical and materialistic. They grow up in a society where things are changing so quickly and so dramatically. Worst, there's no rules of law. All they see is everyone else struggling to make money. Materialism is really the only ideology that makes any sense to them."

Indeed, many of today's youths think the Party is a dinosaur.

Repeatedly, I heard young people say that the only time they felt proud of being Vietnamese was when Vietnam beat Thailand at soccer last year. Trang Huynh said that he "waved the flag for the first time in a long time. But only because of the soccer team, not because of the stupid government." Nga Le said, "I have never seen so many people so happy at one time. We have so little to be proud of."

They want jobs, many say, preferably with a foreign company. Girls dress up in red ao dai dresses to vend foreign cigarettes and beers, and boys in white shirts and ties bow to potential customers as they sell high-tech goods from Sanyo and Sony. Anything from overseas is perceived as better, a step up the material ladder.

Two distinct and contradicting realities exist side by side in Vietnam. Red banners hanging between tamarind trees along boulevards glorify the war against the foreign imperial powers and idolize Ho Chi Minh, not far from glaring billboards for Coca Cola and Tiger Beer and Toyota. Noisy public speakers on telephone poles mouthing communist propaganda are being drowned out by stereos that play the likes of the Backstreet Boys and Whitney Houston at high volume.

The hands down winner between these two narratives is the seductive and enticing vision from the colorful billboards, foreign films, and western pop singers.

Yet something is amiss in a country built by a collective nationalistic fervor. Vietnam is wholly unprepared for the forces of change, especially when those forces threaten to melt borders and challenge old ideologies and national identities altogether.

Indeed, Vietnam's account of itself has gone from pride to ignominy -- from a country that defeated American capitalists and imperialists to the poor, confused subservient man lurking at the edge of the global village, waiting to make Nike shoes for a couple of dollars a day.

Professor Franz Schurmann, of UC Berkeley, makes a great distinction between America and the United States. "The United States is a sovereign with its self interest and its political system," he says, "but America as an idea of individual freedom and happiness is powerful and has no border."