by Paul Theroux
Most of the museumgoers were Vietnamese. They and the museum attendants, seeing me, greeted me with a smile, asking where I was from.
"America."
"Welcome."
I wanted to meet someone in Hanoi who had lived through the bombing. Hanoi was a walkable city. I strolled around for a few days, in the Old Quarter and among the huddled shops and temples and through the big market. I saw the water puppets and Ho's mausoleum and the museum dedicated to Ho's life and achievements.
Rather than eating alone in a proper restaurant—a depressing activity anywhere, sitting and staring—I roamed and browsed and grazed, snacking on noodles and bowls of soup, chatting with people in fresh-beer bars and coffee shops, looking for witnesses.
Invariably, while walking, a motorcycle with a biker babe on board would pull up beside me and demand that I get on behind her.
"You come! Boom-boom!"
This even happened in the area of cloisters and villas and temples and embassies near the National Museum of Fine Arts, where I had gone one day to look at silk paintings and bronzes.
There I found the witness I had hoped to meet, a woman who had been in her early teens at the time of the Christmas bombing. She was now the mother of two girls. Wearing a tissuey silk scarf that accented her fine-boned face and luminous eyes, she was beautiful in the Vietnamese way, slightly built, a dancer's body, svelte, almost skeletal, yet looking indestructible. The delicacy of her fragile-seeming features—and this seemed true of all Vietnamese women I met—was in great contrast to her powerful spirit and her prompt and appreciative manner. This put me in mind of how thirty years of war, successfully defending their country, had given the Vietnamese unshakable faith in themselves and made them unusually resourceful and alert.
She was Vuong Hoa Binh, the daughter of the late Vuong Nhu Chiem, who had been the curator of the museum, where she worked and where I met her, purely by chance. She smiled easily, she was articulate, and she had lived in or near Hanoi throughout the war.
"What is your country?" she had asked.
I told her. She welcomed me. I said, "Was this museum damaged in the war?"
"It was bombed," she said. "The whole city was bombed, of course."
Her father, the curator at that time, had devised a plan for moving the ancient Buddhas, the stelae, the silk paintings, the porcelains, the gold work, and the scrolls to safety.
"He hid it all underground so it wouldn't be damaged by the American bombs," she said. "My father supervised the distribution and hiding of it. He put it in many different places, so even if some of it were bombed, the rest would be intact."
Mr. Vuong used the same systematic logic to disperse his family, scattering his five children to five different locations in or around Hanoi, to give the family a better chance to survive.
"If we had been in the same place, he would have lost us all, had a bomb hit us. Hanoi was bombed all the time by B-52s. Yet we all survived!"
"You knew what a B-52 bomber was?" I was impressed that a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl would recognize a specific aircraft. It was hard to imagine an American adolescent knowing such a thing, so why should she?
"Everyone knew this plane," she said. "And we were afraid, even in the bomb shelters."
"Do you remember the Christmas bombing?"
"I remember everything. I remember the day the bombs fell on Kham Thien Street," she said, drawing her silk scarf close with her slender fingers. "It was the nineteenth of December. A thousand people died there that day, and most of them were women and children. Every home was destroyed. It was very terrible to see."
"You saw it?"
"Yes. My aunt and my mother took me to see the damage," she said. "We saw many cratères—yes, craters—big holes in the road. And the dead, and the fires. I was so frightened. But my aunt and my mother said, 'We must see this. What has been done to us.' There's a monument on that street now."
"Were you living near there?"
"We were just outside Hanoi." She hesitated, then, seeming to remember, said, "We didn't have much to eat. In fact, we had very little food all through the war. We were always hungry. Even after the war was over we had so little rice. And it was stale rice—old rice."
"Because of the destruction?"
"No. Because of the American embargo, and the Chinese invasion."
We had withheld food from them. I did not say, though Mrs. Vuong surely knew, that the Chinese had invaded the northern provinces at a time when we were cozying up to them, and Americans took some pleasure in seeing the Vietnamese being thrashed in their hungry and weakened state.
"We were told that the targets were military bases."
She smiled sadly at this and said, "Everything was targeted. The whole city. Especially roads and bridges. Our bridge was bombed by the B-52s"—this was the Chuong Duong Bridge, across the Red River to Haiphong. "But we repaired it. Factories were especially targeted, no matter what they made. The bombings continued for years. Everything was bombed."
She meant not only Kham Thien Street but also the railways, the lakes, the pagodas, the mansions, the tenements and huts, the museums, the eleventh-century Van Mien Library, the eighteenth-century Catholic cathedral, the opera house, the ancient university Quoc Tu Giam with its stelae and statues and Confucian temple, the markets, and the suburbs—everything. Of the millions of tons of bombs we had dropped, many had fallen on her city. By 1968, when there were half a million American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the British historian J. M. Roberts has written, "a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than fell on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War."
Outside the museum, rain had begun to fall. Hanoi is known for its frequently dreary weather, its cloudy days and its drizzle. Raindrops pattered on the windows and ran down the panes, and the wind sucked at the glass, rattling the casements.
"My mother had a friend whose husband worked at a factory that was bombed," Mrs. Vuong said. "The woman hurried to the factory as soon as she heard the news. She saw that it was smoking—it had burned. She couldn't see anything. But she wanted to find her husband, even if he was dead. But he wasn't there. Just ruins.
"She walked through the smoke and ashes, and she saw, lying among the cinders, one finger. A human finger with a ring on it. Their wedding ring! She knew then that her husband was dead. She took the finger home and had it buried. She kept the ring. And this year she gave the ring to her son, when he got married."
"What a story," I said.
"So many stories from that time," she said. "We were poor and we had no food, but we had esprit. My brothers wanted to fight the Americans. They wanted to be in the army. Ninety-nine percent of the boys in North Vietnam wanted to be in the army. To be a soldier was the greatest thing. No one hesitated. It was their spirit."
"So your brothers were soldiers?"
"Another story," she said, smiling again. "One of my brothers went to the army recruiter. He came home crying, because he didn't have enough age or weight. He was just a small boy—too young. He kept crying, 'I want to be a soldier!' My other brother was accepted. He was so happy to be given a chance to fight."
"What did your parents think?"
"They were happy. My mother was so happy she went to a lot of trouble to find the right ingredients for spring rolls for him. It wasn't easy in Hanoi then! She had to search everywhere. We had a party. Everyone was happy, my brother most of all, celebrating that at last he was a soldier. He was about seventeen."
We were standing beside the big windows of the museum, the Buddhas and porcelains behind us, one of the more formal and completely European-looking neighborhoods of the city out the window. The rain-streaked panes gave the old French buildings across the courtyard the blur and muted color of an impressionist painting.
"It's a beautiful city," I said.
"Hanoi is losing its beauty," Mrs. Vuong said. "It was so quiet before. It was smaller. Just bicycles. No motorbikes. Now it's noisy, and the people
are not Hanoi people. They're from the countryside. They don't know the city."
She thought a moment, adding, "And we are changing. We were poor but we had spirit. I knew my father so well. I knew his life. I knew what he needed. My children don't know what we've been through. I try to tell them. It's impossible for them to understand. I can't explain it to them."
"But aren't these good times?" I was thinking of the markets that were packed with consumer goods, full of food. I was also thinking of the vitality of the country, the tremendous sense of pride, no visible poverty—nothing like the present-day wreckage of Cambodia and its demoralized people.
"Yes, there's more money, more food, but less spirit. I read books, but my two girls are always using computers. They don't read. They love American films." And with a kind of wonderment and resignation, she said, "They want to go to America."
"It's easy to get there now," I said, but I was just gabbling. I was thinking of the bombing, the hunger, the death, the severed finger with the wedding ring on it, the party for a soldier, with specially made spring rolls on platters, celebrating the departure of a teenager, off to fight Americans.
"The world is small," Mrs. Vuong was saying.
I said, "Do you hate me?" and realized as I was saying it that I was becoming tearful, which was a kind of nausea too, I suppose, absurd self-disgust, as my eyes filled.
"No, I don't hate you," Mrs. Vuong said, but that made me feel worse.
She was looking serene, as she had when I first saw her, the small slight figure in the museum, like a dancer. But now she was a little distracted, probably thinking of her daughters in front of computers.
"That was a different time."
***
PASSING THE OPERA HOUSE the night before I left Hanoi, I saw people gathering on the steps for a performance, a play advertised as Huyen Thoai Cuoc Song (Myth of the Living), by the Vietnamese playwright Le Quy Duong.
Finding the ticket office closed, I walked around outside and looked for an explanation. The only English-speaker was a tall, smiling young man in a suit and tie. He had the look of someone who had a ticket. He was beaming from the top of the long flight of steps in front of the floodlit opera house.
"How do I get a ticket to this play?" I asked.
"You can't," he said. "It's by invitation only."
"What a shame. Is it a musical?"
"Some music. Some film. Mixed media."
"In Vietnamese?"
"No. Body language," he said.
"I'd like to see it," I said. "Who is Le Quy Duong?"
"I am Le Quy Duong," he said.
"So why not invite me to your play?" I said. "I'm a writer too."
He looked amused at my presumption and gave me an envelope with an invitation inside.
His play was, as he said, mixed media, full of gongs and drums, with dazzling lights, mime, masks, and floating smoke. The opera house was full. I sat back and tried to divine the creation myth amid the swordplay, the prancing skeletons, and the love story. The thing had gusto and was so full of life, so plumped with startling events and sonorous music, that it didn't need explanation.
Afterwards, as I was walking to the lobby, a man said, "Can you be interviewed?"
"You know who I am?"
"You are the man who..." He faltered, then said, "Le Quy Duong says you speak English."
"That's me. I speak English."
I praised the play and then headed into the street, and not twenty yards from the opera house a motorcycle skidded to a halt next to me. The beauty on board revved her engine, hitched herself forward to make room for me, and said, "You want boom-boom?"
I thanked her and kept walking.
***
It had been my dream in 1973 to go north on the train and onward to China. But the upheavals! The Vietnam War was only one. In China, the Cultural Revolution had convulsed every part of the country. Travel to these places was impossible. So I had flown from Saigon to Tokyo, where I resumed my Railway Bazaar.
But countries open and close. Time passed. The Vietnam War ended. And soon after Mao died, in 1976, the Cultural Revolution was over. China opened to curious travelers around 1980, the year I sailed down the Yangtze. The U.S. trade embargo, lifted in 1994, was the beginning of Vietnam's economic progress. All the borders were open now.
I got a China visa. I bought a ticket on the overnight train to Lao Cai, the northernmost station on the line from Hanoi, on the Chinese border. This was a simple trip. I left Hanoi at around ten on another night train. Besides the Vietnamese, there were a few backpackers and tourists headed to Sapa, a resort town in the hills above Lao Cai, where tribal people lived—Black Hmong and Red Zao and Tay people.
In a noodle shop in Lao Cai the next morning, eating my usual breakfast—a pile of fried rice with an egg on top—a passing motorcyclist asked me if I wanted a ride to the border. I said yes, he put my bag on his lap, and he rode me through town to a building and an archway on the bank of the Red River. I walked through, got my passport stamped, and kept walking through another archway, into China.
The frenzy of China was immediate, even in the early morning, in the border town of Hekou. All the trade was going south, over the bridge; the streets were thick with trucks. From Hekou I could still see smoke rising from Vietnamese bungalows. Lao Cai was a country town of friendly folk; Hekou was a modernized town of go-getters.
I boarded a bus for Kunming. The trip took all day, winding amid the jungles of Yunnan Province, where I saw that an eight-lane highway was being built through the villages of the Miao people, in their pink hats and pink aprons, and other tribal people with colorful epaulettes. The superhighway under construction was raised on cement pillars that marched across valleys and rubber plantations and bamboo groves. Chinese engineers had gouged a great furrow amid the jungles of southern Yunnan, leaving another blight on the landscape, displacing people, putting up signs, bulldozing virgin forest. Troops had marched through here to go to war with the Vietnamese less than thirty years ago, but in a way this bulldozing, because it would last forever, was worse than war.
Kunming, a small habitable city I had once visited and written about, was now an ugly sprawl of Chinese-cheesy buildings and four million people. I succeeded in getting to Kunming by land—from Singapore, two thousand miles. Grown rich on its tobacco crop and manufacturing, Kunming had an enormous Louis Vuitton store and a Maserati dealership and a traffic problem and persistent prostitutes. The Chinese word for hooker is gai, chicken.
"Are you a gai because you like men?"
"No. I don't like men. I like money."
China exists in its present form because the Chinese want money. Once, America was like that. Maybe this accounted for my desire to leave. Not revulsion, but the tedium and growing irritation of listening to people express their wish for money, that they'd do anything to make it. Who wants to hear people boasting about their greed and their promiscuity? I left for Japan, reveling in the thought that I was done with China—its factory-blighted landscape, its unbreathable air, its un-budging commissars, and its honking born-again capitalists. Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant's greedy dream of development. I was happy to leave.
TOKYO ANDAGURAUNDO
THE GRAY SPRAWL of Tokyo was an intimidating version of the future, not yours and mine, but our children's. Glittering concrete slabs dwarfed crowds of purposeful people beetling back and forth, arms close to their sides, as though they'd all gotten the same memo: Walk fast and look worried. People become littler as they become alike. Bright lights but no warmth, very tidy, more a machine than a city. I wanted to flee to the countryside. Was there any countryside left in Japan?
From my broom closet of a hotel room I saw the domed forehead of Ueno Station. At this massive junction of shiny bundled railway lines I could board a train for anywhere in Japan, including the northern island of Hokkaido. In front of my hotel was a pond in a park, with two shrines on causeways, and some surrounding t
rees; at the back of my hotel, just past the rear entrance, was a red-light district, a floating world of nightclubs and massage parlors. Bland formality on one side, frivolity on the other, each side offering ways of overcoming loneliness in a city whose true population was more than twenty million.
I hate big cities, probably for the same reasons many city people hate wilderness (which I love), because I find them vertiginous, threatening, monochromatic, isolating, exhausting, germ-laden, bristling with busy shadows and ambiguous odors. And the mobs, and all the shared space. Cities look like monstrous cemeteries to me, the buildings like brooding tombstones. I feel lonely and lost in the lit-up necropolis, nauseated by traffic fumes, disgusted by food smells, puzzled by the faces and the banal frenzy.
When city-slicker utopians praise their cities I want to laugh. They whoop about museums and dinner parties, the manic diversions, the zoos, the energy of the streets, and how they can buy a pizza at three in the morning. I love to hear them competing: My big city is better than your big city! They never mention the awful crowds, the foul air, the rackety noise, the marks of weakness, marks of woe, or how a big city is never dark and never silent. And they roost like tiny featherless birds in the confinement of their high apartments, always peering down at the pavement, able to get around only by riding in the smelly back seat of a slow taxi driven by a cranky cabbie.
Tokyo was like that, a twinkling wonderland of dignified vulgarity that defeated my imagination. At Shinobazu Pond, in front of my hotel, token wildlife, eider ducks and pochards, nosed about the reeds, leafless willow trees drooped at the bank, people strolled from shrine to shrine in Ueno Park and ate ice cream, or else looked preoccupied in ways I found daunting. Out back, narrow lanes of bars, beer joints, noodle shops, massage parlors, love hotels, tattooed mobsters, streetwalkers, and clubs catering to every fetish. At some clubs waitresses were dressed as schoolgirls, at others French maids or nurses or terrifying bitches in black lipstick carrying whips. Sweet-faced girls in sailor suits were also popular as sex workers. Many establishments called themselves lingerie bars, the female staff in undies, and one was actually named Undies Bar. After dark, women loitered in alleys, hoping to be hired for about $37 to sit next to a man in a bar while he got drunk and fondled her. "And if she likes you," a man at my hotel assured me, "she'll fondle you, too."