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HANOI - The conversation in this particular Hanoi shop starts with kitchens and ends with the Vietnam War, or the American War, as the locals call it.
Nguyen Mai Huong's store is a magnet for New Zealanders in town for the Apec summit. The name of the business where she is deputy director and minor shareholder is Fisher & Paykel Ideal Kitchen.
The shop with a "please come in" sign sits in a small street between the Catholic Cathedral, a remnant of Hanoi's French colonial past, at one end and a famous pagoda, Ba Da, at the other.
The two owners are the sole distributors for the New Zealand whiteware manufacturers in north Vietnam, with a small "n". Another company has the rights for the south.
Mrs Nguyen was born in 1972. She speaks relatively good English and loves European whiteware. She lived in Germany for six years, doing not much while her husband studied physics except soak up European tastes.
Now she is back home in a job that combines her degree in economics and her acquired taste for high-class goods.
She has found that the whiteware sells better if it is displayed in a kitchen setting, so the company has enterprisingly had storage cabinets and bench units made to surround the fridges and dryers.
In the New Zealand Embassy's very helpful dos and don'ts list for visitors to Vietnam, it says, "Get over the war. The Vietnamese have."
The subject is tentatively broached.
Mrs Nguyen says she can't talk much about the war because she was only 3 years old when it ended but she does remember the tough times afterwards.
The worst time for Vietnam, at least in Hanoi, she said, was the years after the war when China and the Soviet Union reduced their previously huge support.
Economic reform, known as Doi Moi, began in 1986 and allowed private enterprise to flourish.
Seventy per cent of Vietnam's population was born after 1975.
The ironies surrounding the war may be lost on more and more people but they are still everywhere. New Zealand, which fought on the side of the United States, last week struck a deal with Vietnam to help the country in peacekeeping.
The agreement was signed by New Zealand Defence Minister (and former long-haired leftie protester) Phil Goff and Senior Lieutenant General Phung Quang Thanh, a former fighter in the North Vietnamese Army.
The Army has a museum in Hanoi, which is not given star billing in the tourist guides, and it is easy to see why. Amid the intact tanks and helicopters seized at the end of the war, the most dramatic exhibit is the crumpled wreckage of a US F111A fighter "shot down during an air raid over Hanoi by militiamen using infantry guns in Tien Chau Commune, Vinh Phuc Province, in the night of October 10, 1972".
Displayed on the twisted metal is the famous photograph of a young girl pulling a piece of the wreckage ashore with a piece of rope.
A Vietnam Foreign Ministry official was quoted as saying recently: "We struggled 1000 years against the Chinese, 100 years against the French and 20 years against the Americans. It is time to think of the future."
Mrs Nguyen is a long way from that young girl of 1972. Her energies are concentrated on the next refrigerator sale, the next strategy to boost sales and to get ahead and possibly visit New Zealand one day.
In her own home she has the fridge and dryer.
What does the future hold? That's easy. A pull-out dishwasher drawer.
