One of its former prisoners of war may be a vote and an oath's distance from becoming president of the United States, but most citizens of this city, with one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, are too busy, frankly, to really care.

Outside the ochre walls of Hoa Lo prison in the whirling dervish that is central Hanoi, a battalion of motorbike drivers waits for customers. Peasant women walk by carrying long poles that creak and sigh from the punishingly heavy twin baskets of souvenirs and mangos and roses. Mercedes-Benzes drive past, delivering tourists and businesspeople to several luxury hotels nearby.

In the 1990s, a high-rise and residential complex was built on the site where the city's infamous prison stood for decades. To make way for progress and, symbolically as well as literally, to put the past behind, the cell where a Navy pilot named John McCain was beaten and held in solitary confinement was bulldozed.

A small salute to his ordeal remains in a corner of the museum the Vietnamese created out of the original Hoa Lo. There, McCain's flight jacket, helmet and boots have been enshrined as artifacts, evidence that the most famous American held captive here not only survived, but returned with good will.

The prison that loomed so large to McCain and his fellow POWs - the hellhole they dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton" - has a different significance for the Vietnamese. The Hoa Lo museum spends most of its energy recalling the torture and abuse Vietnamese dissidents suffered here for decades at the hands of the French, beginning in the 1800s. And among the few Vietnamese tourists who visited one afternoon last week, none professed any interest in - or knowledge of - the Republican senator from Arizona.

"McCain?" said a man entering the museum with his wife and two children, when a translator asked him if he recognized the name. He shook his head no, then hurried off into the exhibit on the French occupation. Those rooms contain a guillotine and photos of the severed heads of resistance fighters who were put into stocks and then beheaded after an attempted plot to poison their French captors in 1908. In one, there are life-size bronze statues of Vietnamese prisoners in agony, their ankles locked to the long wooden platform that served as their collective bed.

McCain has returned eight times to Vietnam and in 2000 came back to Hoa Lo to tour what remained of the bleak structure, a place he spent part of his 51/2 years - including two in solitary confinement - as a POW.

He says he's at peace with the past, and now, he's focused on the future.

Apparently, so are most Vietnamese.

"McCain? Is he the one who makes french fries?" asked Trang Phung, a 20-year-old student from the International University. She was thinking of the Canadian frozen-food company of the same name.

"I don't know about him," she said, when her professor explained the misunderstanding. "How old is he? Seventy-one! And right now he wants to be president? Wow! He's ambitious!"

Her French professor, Andre Kronenberger, said he believed the Vietnamese are more interested in the history of China and other near neighbors.

Government officials certainly must be paying attention. But the rest of the city is focused on the present. People are far more interested in trying to make a living and move ahead than in contemplating the change in fortune of some enemy pilot who crashed into Truc Bach Lake 41 years ago.

Today, the lake is this city's equivalent of LOVE Park, the preferred spot for couples who want to canoodle on a warm evening. Swarms of commuters buzz past on motorbikes. Wrinkled women in conical hats hawk rambutan, a spiky, sweet and subtle fruit.

A monument on the path around the lake, near where McCain landed when he parachuted from his jet, has old splotches here and there of red paint.

Almost any local coffee shop or noodle-soup stand draws more people than the crowd at the prison last Wednesday.

The tour begins at a model of the original buildings, with tiny plastic trees and lit windows, that sits under a Plexiglas case. You move on to displays of old prison uniforms, chopsticks, and tin cooking pots.

Throughout, the political slant is striking, observed Paula Purdy, who visited last week with her sons, Geoff, 20, and Alex, 14. The family, originally from Maine, lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where Purdy's husband works for Chevron.

"It's interesting the way it's presented," she said, standing before an exhibit touting how humane the Vietnamese were as captors.

In contrast to the French, "we treated the Americans with dignity. We let them celebrate holidays," said Nguyen Tien Dat, who runs a small tour operation. (McCain tells of giving the finger to the propagandists who were trying to photograph prisoners having a staged Christmas celebration.)

Like about 60 percent of Vietnamese citizens, Dat was born after the American war's end and holds no grudge against Americans. His mother was a soldier, he said. "And in my family, many people were in the military. Two died. And in my village, too many people died."

But as people in Hanoi repeatedly explain, the United States was only one of the many successive invaders the Vietnamese have fought over thousands of years.

"Maybe because McCain was here, he will care about what happens in Vietnam," Dat reasoned. "Maybe he will take care of the victims of Agent Orange."

On the way out, visitors pass through the almost hallucinatory gift shop, which sells bronze crucifixes, carved Buddhas, landscapes in embroidered silk, laminated Indochinese paper currency from the 1940s, copies of The Killing Fields, Papillon, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as well as a large framed print of the Mona Lisa.

The cashier, who is in his late 50s, said he was on the prison staff in 1973.

But he, like so many others here, didn't recall an American pilot named John McCain.

INSIDE

Obama, in Wayne, focuses on economy. A10.

Currents

How do you peg Obama, racially? D1.

Relief

at the end

of primary season. D1.