Winners and losers
HANOI - The air fills with resigned grunts and a few
triumphant fists. Pushing past the mob attending the
nightly lottery draw in Hanoi, 13-year-old Pham Quang
Huy dashes outside. His customers will pay for quick
information. "Here are the results! Here are the results!"
Huy shouts, clutching the notepad where he's scribbled
the winning number for the top prize. Spotting a regular
customer, he swerves into a rowdy cafe where men
swill watery beer. Then he bolts toward a corner gas
station, collects again, and heads left, dodging traffic.
Motorcycle headlights catch his thin figure in pitiful
silhouette.
With a nightly take of 6,000 dong (40 cents), Huy
occupies the lowest rung of Vietnam's vast lottery
business--a billion-dollar world of public spectacle and
secret wealth. While the country's communist rulers rant
against gambling as a "social evil," they have promoted
the state-run lottery system to the hilt ever since Ho Chi
Minh gave it his stamp of approval in 1962. "Benefit
Both the State and Your Family," urges one billboard.
Nearly every Vietnamese province now boasts its own
lottery company, run by tight-lipped party cadres.
Directly or indirectly, such companies employ hundreds
of thousands of people nationwide.
Ticket revenues are supposed to be channelled toward
social-welfare projects like hospitals and schools. But
with auditing patchy at best (see story on page 62), no
one really knows where all the money goes: Arguably,
it's Vietnam's safest slush fund. Corrupt officials have
been known to chase down holders of winning tickets,
offering slightly more than the jackpot in exchange for
the tickets. That way, they can provide a plausible
explanation to neighbours and investigators who
wonder where they got the cash for that flashy new
motorbike. "It's the easiest way to make money," says
one Vietnamese sociologist. "Nobody asks questions."
Parallel to the provincial lotteries, Vietnamese spend
another fortune on an illegal but not-so-underground
racket that's based on the official lottery numbers. With
prizes worth up to 70 times the size of the bet, So De,
or Pick-a-Number, is certainly tempting. Better yet,
anyone can get into the business of collecting cash and
paying winners, without fear of territorial control by any
mafia. And thanks to kids like Huy, they don't have to
wait for the results to be published in the next day's
newspapers.
In a sense, Vietnam's lotteries mirror the nation's entire
economy. People play along with the official rules of the
game, but they have plenty of time to pursue
unsanctioned channels for profit: Workers at
state-owned companies quietly moonlight for private
firms; teachers slog away at state schools but make
their real money by giving private classes; investors
escape the tightly controlled, official market of just
seven stocks by trading freely in more than 90
companies on the unofficial exchange.
In a country with few legitimate avenues for a significant
return on capital, and few targets for entertainment
spending, the lotteries--legal and illegal--fill the gap with
panache. But there's a price to be paid: Precious
income frittered away, spreading corruption, and
children wandering the streets selling tickets.
Still, this is a lottery: If there are winners, there must be
losers, too.
Every gambler dreams of success, and the
63-year-old Hanoi woman is no exception. "For the
amount of money I've spent, I could have bought a
villa," she sighs. The woman (who prefers not to be
identified) started playing in 1995, drawing on a nest
egg from the late 1970s, when she peddled rare
medicines smuggled into Vietnam from Europe.
Occasionally she'll buy an official lottery ticket, but
since lottery success is usually elusive, she prefers So
De.
It's no casual pastime. Every night she stays up from 10
p.m. to 2 a.m., scrawling a strange calculus of previous
winning numbers in pyramids and diagonal lines. After a
brief sleep she'll wake up and grab a pen to write down
her dreams. One night she dreamed that her home was
flooded up to the fourth floor, which corresponded to
either "06" or "66" in her tattered book of
dream-interpretation. It turned out that 66 was on the
money, but since she only bet 1,000 dong, she didn't
win much. "It made me ill," she groans, spitting out a
juicy red wad of betel nut into a ceramic bowl.
Every day she'll play 35 combinations of two-digit
numbers. She also dispenses numbers to local officials
who believe she has good instincts. And she's skilled at
combing the elaborate poems penned by the
pseudonymous Cu Quang, a retired official and
intellectual who hides "lucky" numbers in each stanza.
On good days she'll win 100,000 dong. On bad days
she'll lose 150,000 dong. Her worst days come when
she can't play at all--like when her family dragged her
off on a 10-day tour of Thailand. "My hands were
itchy," she confesses.
Vietnam's lottery obsession can be traced back to
French colonial rulers, who introduced a regular draw
called the Indochina Lottery in 1936. They should have
known that their impoverished subjects wouldn't have
much cash to spare--the lottery folded after just two
years.
War initially spoiled plans to reopen an official lottery,
but in the 1960s, monthly draws began to be held in
Hanoi for selected development projects. Meanwhile, a
form of So De had begun flourishing among the
southern ethnic-Chinese community in the 1950s, and it
quickly spread to the north. Today, the northern
province of Bac Can remains the only one out of 61
provinces that doesn't have its own lottery company.
(The locals are just too poor, officials explain.)
State officials are keen to stress the benign side of the
lottery: "I don't see the lottery as gambling. It's a form
of entertainment," says Nguyen Tien Cuong, deputy
manager of the lottery management division at the
Finance Ministry. They are also working to attract more
players: As well as the traditional paper tickets, the
state has introduced scratch-to-win tickets in each
province, as well as an on-line version in Hanoi.
Lottery revenues vary sharply, as northerners tend to
be a bit more thrifty and risk-averse than their southern
brethren. A total of 80% of lottery revenues nationwide
come from the 20 provinces and cities in the south. The
biggest lottery--generating 14% of national
revenues--takes place twice a week in Ho Chi Minh
City.
As Vietnam's lottery hub, the southern city attracts
swarms of ticket-sellers from outlying provinces. Some
are recruited from their villages and squeezed into fetid
boarding houses. Others come spontaneously, turning
to ticket sales in the absence of other jobs.
A complex network of sales agents services this
sprawling city of 5.2 million. At the top, the Ho Chi
Minh City Lottery Co. prints the tickets and hands them
to a wholesale distributor, which coordinates one layer
of retailers, which in turn relay the tickets to other
sellers--each getting a slice of the total 13%
commission allotted by the state. Most striking,
hundreds of children ply the streets and play on pity to
sell tickets. Unlike shoe-shining, a trade monopolized
by boys, tickets are sold by girls too.
Indeed, some local social workers have encouraged the
children to enter the trade rather than stealing or
begging. "If you prevent them from selling tickets,
maybe they would sell other things, even their own
bodies," explains Nguyen Thi Kim Anh, who runs a
local drop-in centre for such children. Still, she says,
they remain vulnerable, especially as the children are
responsible for handing out smaller prizes of 100,000
dong or less. "There are very many cases where
children are robbed of lottery tickets," she says, or
where children are duped into accepting fake winning
tickets.
State officials insist that most of the children use the
extra money for school fees. They cast them as
beneficiaries of the system, along with the disabled
people recruited as sales agents. But interviews suggest
that many of the children are not attending school,
pressured instead to earn up to 400,000 dong monthly
for their families by selling tickets.
Eleven-year-old To Thi Thuong says she sells 150
tickets a day, only returning home at 10 p.m. Her
mother sells newspapers. Together they send money
back to Thanh Hoa province to support seven younger
children. Her father repairs motorcycles at home, but
that's not enough to feed the family.
While Thuong dropped out in fifth grade, her
16-year-old cousin Le Thi Lien never attended school.
"All I know is the numbers," Lien says shyly. Asked
about her future, she responds with an empty stare.
The kids perk up as the 4:30 p.m. draw approaches,
leaping around in search of last-minute ticket-buyers.
Then the show begins. As entertainment, the draw in
Ho Chi Minh City is a highly stylized production, with a
hint of kabuki theatre.
Five young women dressed in red and gold ao dai--the
national costume of a long silky tunic over loose flowing
trousers--stride lock-step onto a brightly-lit stage. Their
white-gloved hands daintily pluck small tiles from a row
of five round globes. In unison, the women swivel to
face the audience, holding the small tile in one hand and
a larger, more visible tile in the other, arching their
wrists precisely at waist level. Amid the audience's
gasps, their powdered faces remain impassive. They
repeat the pantomime 18 times before the globes are
gently returned to their red velvet-lined cases.
Meanwhile, the crowd outside surges forward to
glimpse the winning numbers posted on a board. One
winner with a fistful of tickets is Minh, a 30-year-old
worker at a state petroleum company. The day's
pay-off: 240,000 dong, not much compared to the 1.2
million dong he bagged yesterday. He says he's been
playing the lottery for 20 years, and will keep going as
long as he can afford it. On a monthly salary of 1 million
dong, he spends nearly a third on lottery tickets. Does
his wife complain? "I'm still single. I'm free," he gloats.
The draws in Hanoi tend to be more drab affairs.
Women in dull grey pants suits spin rickety green cages,
displaying the winning numbers in a lopsided line. In the
audience, barefoot young men chain-smoke and glance
at the numbers they've written on their palms. Among
them, 13-year-old Huy waits for a final burst of
applause--then hurtles out of the door as fast as his
scuffed plastic sandals will take him.
By Margot Cohen - The Far Eastern Economic Review - November 1st, 2001.
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