This is a mental disorder which manifests as a morbid and delusional pre- occupation with a person whom they "love", and whose behaviour to them is always interpreted as love. It may not seem very much for the responsibility you are required to undertake, but people are willing to work for that, and I'm one of them. Air companies pay according to the number of people their aircraft carry. Our planes are only 66-seaters, with a flight crew of only two, but jet pilots, who will be flying, say, 200 people at a time, get about pounds 38,000 as a starting salary, going up to pounds 50,000. At the Fourth of July every one of the celebrants had their own story of corruption - the routine bribes and backhanders, the labyrinthine layers of bureaucracy.

"We pre-censor rather than post- censor," said the Australian publisher of Vietnam's leading English language business journal, and even this does not always work. Since Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994, 2,500 Americans have found their way to Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now officially called. "In memory of that day in Philadelphia in 1726, and that small group of people who dedicated themselves to free trade, free religion and representative government."Politics or not, these are still qualities noticeably lacking in Vietnamese society. About this, as about much else, Vietnam's Americans have to be careful. The Communist Party, without whose approval no organisation can officially exist, has yet to give its final seal of approval to the Chamber - members cautiously refer to it as "AmCham proposed" "We're like the Hell's Angels," Mr Scown explained. "When we first started out we weren't allowed to meet, but we just stuck at it, pleaded a lot, and eventually the licences came through for this event." Licences are required for music, food, and dancing, and Michael had to give a personal undertaking that the festivities would contain no political content."So I want it to be on the record that this is not a speech, but a toast," he cautioned the crowd later in the evening.

But 21 years after the communist victory, when helicopters carried the last of the expats from the roof of the US Embassy, here they were again. There were rock'n'roll bands, a tug-of-war, and the Dunk Tub into which luminaries of the local US-Vietnamese community could be plunged with a well-aimed rubber ball. Up on the stage, Uncle Sam silenced the band, and reeled off the list of sponsors: IBM, Chrysler, Jeep, Citibank, Mobil Oil, United Airlines, with special thanks to Baskin Robbins ice cream and Coke, "our beverage supplier". "You really never been to a Fourth of July party before?" I was asked by Linda, whose husband works for a management consultancy.

"We better get a beer and a burger down you, right now." Beverage in hand, I waited by the Dunk Tub for Michael Scown, attorney- at-law, and president of the American Chamber of Commerce of Vietnam. Historical ironies don't come much sharper than this: a celebration of US bounty and democracy in Saigon, the city whose very name epitomises modern America's greatest humiliation. Welcome to American Independence Day, in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Secondly, the weather was tropically humid (instead of the traditional sharply creased trousers, Uncle Sam wore a pair of dinky starred-and-striped shorts) And thirdly, this was not the United States at all.