You have a really weird way of phrasing things. "Things really sucked after the war. They don't suck like that now, decades later. The average Vietnamese doesn't like how things are now".

It's hardly surprising that the communist government went crazy-anti-capitalism after having half the country turned to mush by the Americans, but things are getting better. After the war, the communists didn't even allow privately-owned shops, and the economy was awful. They started reversing that and the economy started recovering.

But just because somewhere else is doing better doesn't mean that a place hasn't improved significantly in recent years. That's a boom.