The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  In the last light of day, the children wanted Great Uncle to entertain them with ghostly stories. In their eyes, the old man had proven the existence of ghosts when he had convinced a boy’s spirit to come down from a jackfruit tree and return to the boy’s body. Children loved to climb these trees. The boy found unconscious under one in Tung’s garden was assumed to have reached for a ripened fruit—which, individually, could weigh as much as thirty pounds—and fallen. The boy lay in a worsening fever for three days and nights before Great Uncle’s incantations worked.

  “When I was a young boy, I’d heard that ghosts frequented the village by the bamboo forest, near the main road, but I didn’t believe it,” went one of the old man’s stories. “One day at dusk, I rode my bicycle there. Suddenly, pedaling became more and more difficult. It was as if I were double-riding somebody. I dared not look behind. When my feet could not turn the pedals any more, I threw my bicycle down and ran.” By now, the children would be whimpering. “I ran until I could run no more. I looked back to see a face without a body, of a woman with flowing hair.” The whimpering would turn to screams, amid cries for another story.

  Nu arrived home as early as dusk. If business at the shop had been hectic late into the afternoon, by the time she rolled down the bamboo blind and anchored it across the entrance, overturned the stools and swept under the tables, it would be dark. A measure of her fatigue was how she arrived: if by pedicab, she was left to nap for twenty minutes; if by foot, she delved energetically into outside chores. Each late afternoon, the pigs had to be watered and fed their third meal of the day (if Tung was readying them for market, they were fed a fourth at midnight). Their pens had to be hosed out and their next day’s slop prepared by boiling the scraps delivered from the noodle shop, together with paddy (unthreshed rice) and the heads, bones and entrails of oxen bought from a nearby factory.

  After dinner, the children did their homework. Then most of them settled in with the neighbors and relatives who had come to watch television. The eldest, Loan, went out evenings to visit friends. Nu sat down to tally the day’s receipts from the shop, and to settle accounts with her direct suppliers of rice, salt, rendered pork fat and pork meat. They made daily deliveries to the shop and came by the house each evening to collect payment. Later, Grandmother Tao arrived to help Nu grind rice into liquid and make the next day’s banh trang. One woman would pour the liquid onto a sizzling pan, puffing it into a crepe. The other would take the crepes and hang them on a bamboo rack; the humidity of the night air would prevent them from drying hard. A couple of hours later, the two women would bag them for the shop. Grandmother Tao left for her own bed and Nu turned to ironing or laundry that was piled up, or housecleaning she wanted to get to. Sometimes she opted to defer sleep until the next evening, if, by then, it was already nearly time for the next day to begin.

  IN THE IDYLL OF HER EARLY CHILDHOOD, Phuc believed her sole obligations were to enjoy herself and, like “a princess in the big house,” to receive playmates. She lived up to her name, ever happy. Adults commented on her smile; in a country where smiles are brilliant, hers dazzled.

  Though she did not know it, the war was steadily, ominously insinuating itself into her daily life. Even in the calm of Grandfather Kiem’s pomelo grove, the noise of war from twenty miles away, on the South Vietnam-Cambodia border, would echo across the skies. The boo-oom of the bombs dropped from American B-52s, flying at an altitude of six miles, would be followed by a sudden, violent quiver of leaves of the trees in the grove. Phuc and her playmates would unconsciously turn their heads, no more startled, however, than if a bird’s pecking had dropped a ripe guava to the ground.

  The children’s first sense of an enemy came through encounters with the unknown. Once, at Grandmother Tao’s call to come for their daily treat, the line of children making for her door ended in a near pileup as the first of them came to a sudden halt. The children looked one to the other, taking in the meaning of a footprint in the dirt made by a sandal cut from a used tire. “Viet Cong came last night!” one whispered. Someone shrugged, and the lot of them ran inside, saying nothing more.

  While the enemy was invisible, government soldiers were not. The sight of them, handsome in their uniforms, was woven like a shiny thread into the fabric of Phuc’s childhood. Her first memory of soldiers was of a handful who once shared the family’s home for several nights. Her brothers enjoyed a game of soccer with them, while she herself was enthralled by their demonstration of how they ironed their uniforms and folded them with crisp creases. There had been four family members who worked for the military: Auntie Anh’s husband worked in one of the Hau Nghia provincial offices, where all senior administrative positions came under military authority; and Auntie Tiem’s husband and their two sons were government soldiers. Early on in the war, the eldest son was killed in combat. What Phuc remembered most of the funeral was the yellow-and-red silk flag of South Vietnam draping the casket, and the smart-looking soldiers that turned out in deference to Auntie Tiem’s husband, who bore the rank of captain.

  After the Tet Offensive, the Saigon regime sought to supplement the country’s defenses. Along with lowering the age of “voluntary” service to eighteen (Americans had been sending eighteen-year-old recruits into battle for the past three years), it organized a countrywide program of recruitment and training of local self-defense forces. These forces, established at the provincial and district level, were called “regional” and “popular” forces. Often they were the ones that Saigon sent to the front lines instead of the regular national army. Foreign war correspondents in Saigon dubbed the self-defense forces “Ruff Puffs,” a reference to how poorly trained and equipped they were compared to the regular army.

  The new district military outpost in Trang Bang was located just east of the bridge over the stream on Route 1. Locals referred to it as the “American office,” though at any given time the sole American there would have been either the military or civilian adviser, who might have been attached to one or more offices in the field. From time to time, South Vietnamese soldiers were in barracks there, living in tents under three cement canopies.

  Walking to and from her elementary school, which was across the highway from the Caodai temple, Phuc sometimes encountered soldiers in twos or threes, walking into town for something to eat, or going back to barracks.

  “Chau Chu!” Phuc would call out, addressing each as “Uncle.”

  It was her eldest sister, Loan, who brought a government soldier into the family. Petite, with long shiny hair, and the oval face and delicate mouth considered classic hallmarks of beauty, Loan was also one of the town’s best-dressed girls, her ao dais made from colorful silk that Nu bought from Cambodian salesmen. A soldier in barracks in Trang Bang whom Loan met at the noodle shop professed his love for her. Many boys had already done so; Nang’s was the first she returned.

  Nang, whose only family were his father and younger sister in Danang, became a regular at the family’s house on his days off. An interpreter for the South Vietnamese regular army, his English was good enough that he could provide a running commentary on television programs rebroadcast from the West. He kept Loan’s younger siblings in supply of their favorite Western candy, Wrigley’s gum.

  Nang introduced to the family the first and only Americans they’d met: two fair-haired, strapping American soldiers. Every time he brought them home with him, by the time they reached the house, there would be a crush of children in attendance. “Hello My!” the Americans would call out to Phuc, singling her out to put on their shoulders. My, an American soldier’s nickname for Vietnamese girls, was a play on two of its several meanings, “America” and “beautiful.” It was the nickname Tung and Nu had given Phuc at birth, since it can also mean “newborn kitten,” which her tiny helplessness brought to mind. Whenever the Americans visited, they would lift Phuc and the children higher than they could climb into the jackfruit trees. They’d plunk them into army-issue sacks made in America of sturdy nylon and hold sac
k races.

  Within weeks, Nang was asking Tung for permission to marry his daughter. Tung thought Loan, at sixteen, too young; she had just completed the tenth grade and was enrolled in a teacher-training course. Disconsolate at being refused, Nang attempted suicide with an overdose of pills, which caused Tung to relent. As social convention demanded, he and Nu held a celebration that overstated their social standing and lasted three days (only the poor could use the excuse of the fates of the harvest to shorten it). The bride and groom took their places at the feast on a heart-shaped stage, made of palm fronds and bedecked with flowers, built in front of the veranda. To feed seventy guests, Nu did not have to borrow a single item.

  Hardly had the new son-in-law moved in when he was transferred to a combat division in Tay Ninh province, close enough that he could come home on days off and during any lulls in action. His and Loan’s firstborn, a son, heralded a season of babies. Auntie Anh had her second, a son. And Tung and Nu had a seventh, a fourth son. So unplanned was this arrival that Nu’s sixth-born and third son, at age four, was still on the breast.

  Phuc was seven and in the second grade when she felt the first stab of the sorrow of war, and for the first time witnessed grief. Her brother Tam burst into her classroom. “Brother-in-law is dead!” he told her. She ran home after him, sobbing and afraid at the prospect of seeing Nang’s body. There was no body. Phuc saw Loan, crying and unable to stop her small son’s wailing. Adults standing around were talking of how the boy must have known of his father’s murder; since the day before, he had been crying inconsolably. Two soldiers from Nang’s unit, who delivered Nang’s dog tags and watch to Loan, had told of how, the day before, the Viet Cong had ambushed his barracks, tossing a grenade through a window and killing him as he lay sleeping in his hammock.

  A day later the flag-draped casket arrived and was placed in the house before a shrine honoring Caodai. For three days, professional mourners sang to musical accompaniment before the bier. On the third day after the burial, the family prayed at the grave for Nang’s soul to depart for the ancestral altar. Tung placed his dead son-in-law’s picture on the altar with those of the family’s ancestors, in hopes that his spirit would be appeased and not become evil or resentful, as could happen with those who die prematurely or horribly.

  Seven days after Nang’s death, his father and sister arrived from Danang. They had come immediately upon receipt of Tung’s telegram. A loud argument ensued. Nang’s father wanted his only son returned to the ancestral birthplace, but did not have the money to bring the body back. Tung gave in, saving face because the first of the memorial ceremonies honoring the departed (on the eighth day, followed by the fourteenth, the forty-ninth, and the hundredth day, after which only the anniversary is celebrated) had yet to be observed. He paid for the exhumation and transport of the body to Danang, and for Loan and her son to accompany the body there. Loan returned to Trang Bang alone. Her father-in-law had asked that she leave his grandson behind, especially as she was two months pregnant and would soon have his son’s second child to keep her company.

  There was one small consolation for Loan in her husband’s death, in that he had died for the Saigon regime. As a legitimate war widow, she could openly grieve and receive condolences, as well as a government army widow’s pension. Other fathers, husbands or sons who had slipped away to join the Viet Cong did not come home for years, if at all. Without word, their families wondered if they had died. Often when confirmation of death did come, no body followed. Or if there was a body, the families held no funeral. Neighbors whispered about so and so “crying with the door shut” or “crying on the inside.”

  No one knew that, in a few short years, roles would be reversed, and being on the winning or losing side of the war would be all that mattered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TWO VIETNAMESE SAYINGS CAPTURE THE attempt of the Vietnamese peasant to influence fate, and the futility of trying. One is ancient, the other modern. The first goes: “Sell distant kin, buy close neighbors.” The second describes the trial of the peasant’s life under conditions of guerrilla war, as being “caught between the sticky rice and the bean.”

  Since their earliest beginnings, the Viet people have faced the question of where to place their allegiance, near or far. In the first century, the famous Trung sisters led a rebellion against the ruling Chinese. It failed, but touched off almost a millennium of struggle for independence. Nine centuries later the Chinese would be driven out, and it would take nine more for the Vietnamese to extend, both by conquest and resettlement, their empire down the length of the 1,000-mile, S-shaped peninsula that is modern-day Vietnam. The natural north-south axis already had the effect of dividing kin, but division was formalized three times in three centuries: first in the eighteenth century, again during the rule of the French in the late nineteenth century, and then, some six decades later, upon the end of the Franco-Viet Minh war.

  With the resumption of war under the Americans, allegiances returned to what they had been during the war with the French, clandestine. Those united against the Saigon regime were either infiltrators from the north or southerners joining the resistance. The latter lived as commandos in the jungle or among the people, leading dangerous double lives at virtually every level of society, from Saigon down to the smallest hamlet, from the army and police to corporations and the media.

  The average peasant cared nothing for politics and wanted only to be left alone. At most, he leaned to whichever side harassed him less. However, both the Saigon government and the Viet Cong sought to force him to declare his sympathies at the very least, by day and by night. He was, as the saying went, caught between the two, between the sticky rice and the bean—a favorite daily fare made by steaming inside a banana leaf glutinous white rice with black beans, which, once cooked, are inseparable. And so it was for the peasant, living entrapped and beholden to both sides. Any notion of choice of allegiance was nothing but a pretense.

  KIM PHUC’S FAMILY HAD INHERITED THEIR peasant sympathies in the war from choices made in her grandparents’ generation. The decision of Grandfather Kiem and Grandmother Tao to follow Caodai aligned peasant with priest in a popular peasant movement with its own political affiliations (at its peak in the early 1950s, one in eight South Vietnamese were Caodai). Like other powerful, quasi-political organizations at the time, including the Buddhist sect of Hoa Hao, the Caodai organization maintained a large army, serving their own organization. When war broke out with the French, the Caodai played it both ways: they made a fragile alliance with the Viet Minh and at the same time gave qualified support to the French, in exchange for preserving autonomy in lands they controlled around the Holy See in Tay Ninh and in areas of the Mekong Delta where they held important military posts. In the last years of the Franco-Viet Minh war, the Caodai alliance with the Viet Minh collapsed and the sect made a deal with the French. In exchange for arms, they protected French posts in Tay Ninh, and in return, the French allowed the Caodai to function autonomously in Tay Ninh province, even to levy their own taxes. The Caodai were able to drive the Viet Minh from that province and, for a few years, peacefully build an economic empire.

  In the province of Hau Nghia, which fell outside the Caodai stronghold in Tay Ninh, the teenage Tung, upon graduation from high school, hoped to escape recruitment by the Viet Minh by going to college in Saigon. Instead, the French targeted him to spy on the Viet Minh on visits home. There, he was coerced by the Caodai army to drop out of school. In the two years before he married Nu, and for the first two years of their marriage, he drove his aunt’s truck as a cover for trips into the forest, on the orders of the Caodai army, to embalm Viet Minh dead, to prepare them for their journey home. He was released from his duties when the Caodai’s alliance with the Viet Minh collapsed. Yet more upheaval came to the Caodai with Diem’s 1955 rise to power in the newly proclaimed South Vietnam, when he sought to eliminate by force the Caodai and other political-religious sects. Diem had Caodai dignitaries hunted down and arres
ted, and absorbed their army into the government’s. The Ho Phap fled to Cambodia and died in exile there in 1959. When Diem was murdered in 1963, the Holy See fell back into Caodai hands, but by then the empire had shrunk considerably. However, some six thousand of the Caodai army, who had neither surrendered nor been captured, continued to protect the lands around the Holy See itself.

  It was inevitable that Nu and the Viet Cong would cross paths. From the first day she rented space on Route 1, her routine was the same, day in and day out. Once she left her sleeping household and stepped out the back door, her shadow joined the others who haunted the night. The only thing that could frighten her was an encounter with a shiftless ghost, among them her dead son-in-law’s. She was ever afraid it might be lurking at the perimeter of the property, not satisfied by the picture on the altar.

  After the Tet Offensive, the Communists’ strategy was to keep the pressure on the Saigon regime by stepping up an economic offensive against the capital. The commercial ribbon of Route 1 was an obvious target for such tactical warfare. Fearing for Nu’s safety in the hour of the Viet Cong, Great Uncle made her a fire-lamp to identify her as a peasant with legitimate business in the night. Blinded by her own light, often Nu didn’t see the Viet Cong—who camouflaged themselves by wearing black pajamas and, as well, blackening their faces—until she brushed shoulders with one. Sometimes, all she caught by the light of her lamp was a checkered, black-and-white scarf, the trademark khan ran worn by the southern revolutionary. Once on the highway, Nu extinguished her lamp to better look for tomb-like hillocks, which were often set in potholes; one had to be careful to avoid the trip wire that would set off the mine or grenades inside. Often she had to detour around crude barricades erected of debris and broken furniture.