The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  It would be three years before Phuc could bring herself to walk down the footpath. She had thought that, by then, a new house would stand on their property. From a distance, she saw the bombed ruins. She went no closer. A cloud came to block the sun, she silently lamented. Before we had so much; now we have nothing.

  FARTHER INLAND AND EVEN FARTHER FROM the rice bowl of the Mekong Delta, Tay Ninh’s heat felt much more oppressive than that of Trang Bang. Tung’s family was accustomed to the green and leafy landscape of a rural setting on the edges of Trang Bang. Tay Ninh was a city, with ordered blocks, tarmac roads. Those who lived in communities around the Holy See either operated businesses in nearby Long Hoa market or worked in the city center.

  In the ten square blocks of Gate Seven hamlet, dozens of houses, most built of wood and brick, were crowded cheek by jowl. The only trees were those that homeowners strategically planted to shade their homes. Ngoc’s house, built of wood with a roof of metal sheeting, betrayed the neglect of a rental property. It was falling down, in sore need of paint, and it had no shade. By day, the house heated up like an oven. By mid-morning, one had to seek relief under one of two soursop trees out back. The property also had no perimeter fence, so thieves were a constant worry. The rear lot was rough terrain, and mosquitoes were particularly troublesome. The floor of the house was pounded earth, and the bamboo furniture left behind broken and sagging. The toilet was a cement-lined hole a hundred steps to the rear of the house. Anyone using it had first to stop at the well to fill a pail to be carried along. How far the family had fallen was apparent whenever they visited Auntie Tiem three hamlets over in Gate Four. Their house in Trang Bang had once made her modest house look like that of the poor cousins; now its cement floor and the coconut palm shading its wooden roof looked like luxury.

  Yet again, the family’s crude living conditions took the greatest toll on Phuc. Pain had again become her insistent and demanding companion; even painkillers could not appease it. During the day, she depended on ice. At night, as the rest of the family slept fitfully in their hot, airless, cramped house, it was usually Tung who had to rush to Phuc’s side to pound her back or hold ice to it.

  The family’s every material need or wish was Nu’s to fulfill, and the list only grew longer. Painkillers for Phuc were among the essentials. Sacrifices had to be made. She could afford only two bicycles—used—one for Tung and one for Ngoc. When she could afford a third, it went to Phuc. She needed to minimize her exposure to the hot sun, and school, a mile away, was for her, a long, hot walk.

  The family’s adjustments to their divided life were many. Ngoc moved back from the Holy See; immediately upon the end of the war, the Communists had dismantled the Caodai administration there and confiscated all buildings but for the temple. As for Nu, not only was she cut off from a daily relationship with her children, but she could come home only if she closed shop, which she did once a year during Tet. The children lost the closeness of their extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. The two miles to Auntie Tiem’s was far enough away that, what with school and homework, visits were monthly at most. The family could not even be united to console each other in grief: the first year after the end of the war was marred by two deaths. The ailing Grandfather Kiem succumbed; and Tung and Nu lost a baby born to them, their ninth and last child. The infant was stricken with seizures and died at three months in Trang Bang, having never met his siblings in Tay Ninh.

  While Tung’s family had in common with their new neighbors in Tay Ninh their religious faith, they were viewed suspiciously because they had moved at war’s end from Trang Bang, an area known to have been contested during the war by the Viet Cong. Even had Tung and his family any inclination to speak of their past, because Tay Ninh had been a war-free zone, no resident there could fully understand what it had been like for them during the fighting, or how it felt to find one’s family home destroyed and lives uprooted.

  Once every two weeks, Tung took a bus from Tay Ninh to Trang Bang. He went directly to the noodle shop, timing his arrival and visit with Nu for after ten, when business slowed. He went nowhere else. Any of his former neighbors and friends that he did cross paths with would not so much as acknowledge an acquaintance. He visited no family; any relatives he saw, including Loan, were those who came to the noodle shop to help. A constant fear for Tung was that someone might have had reason to dislike or resent him, or have found something he once said vexing. They might be Viet Cong, he cautioned himself, and now in a position to take revenge.

  The night before her husband’s visits, Nu stayed up to prepare a stew. So that it would keep several days, she simmered it in salted water until the water evaporated. Tung would go home either that evening—one immediate change the war’s end brought was that one could travel freely at night—or the next day, with a hamper of rice and cooked food, plus a packet of money to last the family until his next visit.

  As ever, Nu had found the energy to start again. She’d borrowed here and there and rebuilt her business, a table and four stools at a time. Her comforts at the shop would always be spartan: a folding bamboo cot, a nail on which she hung her clothes. When she did have a moment, usually as she fell with exhaustion onto her cot at night, she wept with regret that she had not even the time to miss her children, never mind worry about their well-being. However, to wish for a different fate was not within her nature. The Vietnamese rely on an ancient proverb to stem worry about how they will survive upheaval in their lives: “Heaven creates the elephant; heaven will make grass.”

  IN HONOR OF THEIR PATRIOT, THE COMMUNISTS, immediately upon their takeover of the south, renamed Saigon Ho Chi Minh City and gave its streets new revolutionary names. That the Communists’ true intentions were not to share but to seize power became evident weeks into the takeover. Hanoi was plainly uninterested in a national reconciliation or the coalition of a “third force” government; many southern patriots who had joined the resistance front had believed that one of these accommodations might follow a Communist victory. Instead, as those who had lived the secret life of a Communist agent surfaced to take control, the “liberation” of the south seemed to be a new campaign to divide the victors from the vanquished, to subjugate one to the other.

  After the war, Hanoi followed the north’s model for the south, creating neighborhood “cells” overseen by a leader who was both political commissar and police. Their job was to police reactionary thoughts and behavior. Conversations between more than two unrelated people were suspect. Public security agents and police, from both the military and civilian branches, were everywhere, uniformed and in plain clothes. At any time of the day or night, one was liable to enter a house without asking. In the north, the state would no more knock to come in than would a member of the family.

  It became quickly and eminently clear that the Communists would trust only other Communists. Hanoi reserved positions of power—from provincial positions on down to village chief and local tax collector—for the thousands of retired Communist soldiers it sent south, or for their southern collaborators. Few if any had the qualifications to perform such jobs. The price paid for years in the forest was that few could even read or write. However, after their arrival, northerners stopped boasting about “the north, where there is everything.” Many would be wide-eyed, bewildered at the sight of televisions, refrigerators and ceiling fans. Few had known the luxury of electricity. All were startled to see that southerners were better fed and clothed than any northerner, and rich enough to own motorscooters and cars, unheard of among peasants of North Vietnam. Southerners even appeared well spoken and well bred, contrary to what northerners had been taught. The typical northerner was from a village poorer than any in the south. He owned his clothes, maybe a van, on which to eat and sleep (but no other notable item of furniture), kitchen utensils and, maybe, a bicycle on which he rode to work. A staple of his diet was often manioc, which if eaten too much makes the skin swell and turn yellow.

  The instinct of the northe
rner assuming power was to grab at the riches that were there for the taking. Had the military official who had swindled Nu out of the family home not moved quickly, others would have beaten him to it. Cadres competed feverishly to either resell in the south or ship north for resale consumer goods, furnishings, air conditioners, refrigerators, machinery and equipment that had been removed from southern offices, factories and hospitals; even bathroom fixtures were stripped from hotels.

  The mass indoctrination of southerners began immediately. Beneath a portrait of Ho Chi Minh, hectoring cadres from the province, district, town and hamlet tried to outdo each other, lecturing for four or five hours on the same topic: the inspiring leadership of the Communist Party, the representative of the proletariat, in the final, great patriotic victory over the imperialist Americans and the puppet regime in Saigon. Tung and Ngoc attended the thrice-weekly meetings; their cell leader seemed not to care that Great Uncle did not, as if the thinking of an old man was unimportant. In Trang Bang, Nu explained that her lateness for the first meeting was because of its early start; half-past seven was still the peak of her morning rush. The cadre there threatened her, if she were late again, with a fine or banishment to a “new economic zone”—lands covered in scrub jungle or denuded by chemical defoliants where the new regime trucked the unemployed and troublemakers. Neighboring shopkeepers would later trip over one another to be the first to report Nu’s tardiness in hoisting the flag on a military holiday.

  The euphemistically named reeducation program that began one month after the takeover removed what benefit of the doubt southerners were still willing to give the new regime. At first, it seemed benign; former southern soldiers were ordered to report for thirty days’ reeducation. Among those who went were the husband of Auntie Anh and the husband and son of Auntie Tiem. Thirty days passed; no one returned. Tension mounted as the regime called for reeducation not just of “false soldiers” but also of “false authorities.” The net of suspicion fell on all former officials at every level of the Saigon regime, and on business people and religious leaders with real or suspected connections to the former regime or American interests. At the Holy See in Tay Ninh, police barred worshippers while they collected evidence later used to arrest religious leaders. Then it was doctors and teachers who had to report for reeducation. Teachers at Phuc’s high school were told to bring food and water for three days. In the middle of the night they were loaded into military vehicles, driven three hours, then marched deep into the forest. There they were left to clear trees for road construction. On the tenth day, a teacher stepped on a mine and was killed. All came home ill but dared not register a request for medical help for fear of reprimand, or of being given tainted medicine. Only through back channels could families find out where relatives sent for reeducation were held. Many were marched to northern camps, too far for families to bring food and medicines. Some would never return. Relatives were told that they had died of an unspecified illness, or that their status was “pardoned but not freed.”

  Auntie Anh’s husband did not return until five months later. Harsher punishment awaited Auntie Tiem’s husband and son, both ranking South Vietnamese military and both suspected of having been among the Caodai military who worked at developing strategies against the Viet Cong. The husband would be held six years. Two decades on, the son was still being held.

  Reeducation would not make one eligible for a job: “False thinking can take forever to correct,” cadres said. Southern doctors and teachers held their jobs only until they could be replaced by others with the correct revolutionary credentials. Auntie Anh’s husband taught himself to refurbish motorscooters. Auntie Tiem’s husband came home a broken man; she would have to support her three younger children by hawking sticky coconut treats to students on their way to school.

  “You are excused from reeducation,” authorities told Loan, acknowledging her escorted forays into the forest for the Viet Cong during the war. “But you cannot have your teaching job back.” Her widow’s pension was no longer payable because her husband had been a “false soldier.” Only Viet Cong or Communist veterans and their families were entitled to state benefits.

  Over the years, every time Loan tried to get any job on the state payroll, even a clerk’s job at a state store, she was refused: “Your husband was an interpreter for America.” She endured denunciations: “Anyone who worked for America sat around watching American films and eating chocolate!” At least Loan was able to say she worked at her mother’s noodle shop, allowing her to avoid deportation to the new economic zones. Over the years, she would support herself and her daughter by selling, one by one, her colorful silk ao dais.

  THE UNITED STATES CONTINUED TO REFUSE to recognize the regime in Hanoi. (Other Western countries, including Canada, had established diplomatic relations with North Vietnam upon its signing of the Paris accord.) One month after Hanoi’s takeover, the United States extended to the whole of the country, including the south, the embargo that it had put in place against North Vietnam back in 1964. It also acted to block aid to Vietnam from institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

  One effect of America’s isolation of Vietnam was to hasten Hanoi’s resolve to march the capitalist south down the socialist road. At first, Hanoi nationalized only those sectors and industries owned by the former regime. But any prudent notion of waiting to see how the south would recover economically from the war was short-lived. Hanoi overlooked just how badly the south had been damaged by the war. The physical devastation alone was widespread: roads, bridges and rail lines had been bombed. The social structure had been turned upside down: cities were clogged with the dispossessed and homeless; the exodus in the last panicky days had drained the south of its educated and professional elite.

  In an attitude that would prevail for the next decade, Hanoi held that the policies and structures that had worked in converting the north to socialism were good enough for the south. It ignored the stark differences between the conditions in the north and in the south during the two Communist takeovers, thirty years apart. Where northerners had been mostly rural and impoverished, southerners were mostly urban and at least middle income. Where northerners had been brought to their knees by famine caused by the ruthless and misguided policies of the occupying Japanese, southerners were mired in economic recession caused by the American withdrawal. What had worked in the north would, over the next decade, sow chaos and hasten the deterioration of the southern economy. It would encourage graft and corruption, from top- to low-level cadres. During the Saigon regime, corruption, though more notorious, had been the preserve of the elite and their cronies.

  Hanoi immediately moved to bring rice distribution under the state’s control, setting the purchase price at the level it was in the north. There, supply met demand. In the south, a shortfall prevailed. Farmers shunned the low price and diverted their production to the black market. Cadres at state stores did the same with state supplies there. The shortage immediately became a crisis.

  Hanoi also imposed rationing on essential goods, sold through state stores and consumer cooperatives. It shut down free markets. In those that did remain open, traders were harassed with steep license fees, taxes and fines. It took aim at the rich, seeking to rout profiteers by instituting sudden recalls of the dong, limiting how many old bills could be exchanged for new. The result was widespread hardship overnight. Before the first year was out, the Communists had struck at the commercial middle class by collectivizing small traders: hog farmers, tailors, shoemakers, leather-goods makers, printers, mat weavers and construction workers came under state control.

  In Trang Bang, daily life had quickly become doctrinaire. Free markets evaporated before they were closed down. The state determined what was best for Nu’s business. It decided her maximum daily allotments of rice, meat, soya sauce, fish sauce, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate and other essentials. Her shopping at state stores consumed much time but yielded little. Soon, rice and meat were in short supply,
or of such inferior quality that Nu couldn’t bring herself to buy them. She steadfastly refused to water her soups down. I don’t want to cheat the customers, she told herself, preferring to shut her doors early when she ran out of food to serve.

  Two categories of people could ease the difficulties of the new life. The first were the former rich, with gold or valuable possessions hidden that they could sell as needed for food on the free market or the black market. The second were those on the winning side of the war, who could keep their heads up while everyone else had theirs down. They were the ones going door to door offering to buy household goods; they were the ones with access to cash, trucks to carry goods away and space at work places to store them until they could be resold. Jobs on the state payroll entitled them to a household ration booklet, and gave them ways and means to cheat or get around the system. That was of far more value than the salary, which, set according to the schedule in the north, didn’t go far in the south.

  Nu and her family were in the third category: everyone else, left to fend for themselves. Their choice was opening a family business or finding something to sell. As every packet of money he brought home from Nu bought less than the last, Tung and the family had to find ways to make money. He tried cultivating the finicky but fast-growing pepper plant in pots, selling the corns to middlemen. Ngoc tried pulling a flatbed trailer behind his bicycle, to transport goods and to gather wood from the forest and burn it into charcoal. He bought blocks of ice to chip and sell door to door, or he rushed out with the crowd to buy state newspapers—propaganda remained cheap—to resell as bags to wrap food. Tung and Nu conspired in smuggling coffee beans from Trang Bang to Tay Ninh, where they were in short supply and fetched a good price. Tung would sew them inside his trouser legs and hope to escape the notice of the highway police, who boarded buses and confiscated goods at will, often sharing the proceeds of their corruption with the driver.