Rooms at the Floating Hotel on the Saigon River go for $200 a night. Small merchants do a brisk business. selling their wares at free markets and in street stalls. Whole blocks boast tinseled stores displaying TV sets. stereos. VCRs. But beggars and pickpockets also roam the streets. and malnutrition afflicts 40 percent of the nations children. many of whom wander about hawking stamps. gum. postcards. Anything they can get their hands on. And boat people still set sail for refugee camps in Hong Kong and Malaysia. fleeing not from political oppression but rather from starvation. even though Vietnam is the worlds thirdlargest producer of rice.