by Laura Lam
Had I really expected a UN delegation to be on hand to greet me?
I was a young woman, one whom men considered pretty, with unusual eyes, and, despite my makeshift disguise, I was alone in the middle of a forest, a long, long way from home. I was lucky I hadn’t been raped by the border guards, much less shot in the back.
I turned back toward Long Hoa village, telling myself it would be useless to cry. I kept walking along slowly until I reached a coconut palm where I stopped, lowering myself against its trunk, and stared at the grass. I imagined waiting till dusk, then returning to the border in the hope of sneaking across. Or maybe finding the first soldier I had seen who, in my fantasy, was kinder than the others. Perhaps he would be there alone. The others would have gone off to eat, and I imagined him smiling at me and, without a word, letting me through the barbed wire. I imagined seeking out a family that lived in Long Hoa village. I would casually ask them about possible ways of entering Cambodia. If I was lucky, maybe they traded with Cambodians on the other side of the frontier and could be persuaded to sneak me across.
All of the above, none of the above. For as I sat there, immobilized, my back against the base of the tree, my mind racing through all these scenarios, the reality of my situation broke through. What in Quan Yin’s name was I doing there? A lone woman, a young lone woman, in the middle of a forest, like a character out of a fairy tale. But life wasn’t a fairy tale. Life was razor wire and men with guns. And also self-delusion. What a fool I was, what an absurdity, to think I could just blithely walk into Cambodia!
And even if I could, then what?
I thought of Mother Chin. She had agreed to wait at the Great Temple, but only for a couple of hours. If I hadn’t come back by then, she was to assume I’d made my way across and would be free to return to Sai Gon. Now time was wasting. I got up, but my legs had gone numb and I had to stamp my feet to get the tingling started. My eyes were burning, but I absolutely refused to cry. All I wanted was to get to Mother Chin. I started to run, but soon was out of breath and had a cramp in my side. I walked, as fast as possible, and ran when the pain went away. Finally I got to the village and then the temple. I dashed into the bathroom, changed clothes quickly, then stood still for a moment to regain my composure. I emerged once more in my white ao dai, looking just like all the other worshippers.
I found Mother Chin, standing outside the Great Temple, talking to a group of strangers. Her face showed no emotion, but her eyes studied me. She reached out her hand and took mine.
Pulling me close to her, she said softly, “Don’t be too discouraged child! There’s always hope. I will see what I can do to help you. We will talk more about this in Sai Gon.” We took a short walk around the temple grounds. I described what had happened. We then took the bus home.
* * *
I returned to work. With each passing day, though, the sense of the world unraveling – of my world unraveling – became more and more acute. Back in my neighbourhood, one night someone had planted a small Communist flag in front of a house near ours, and the sight of it threw everyone into a panic. The wife of Bay Ca was convinced we might have to flee at a moment’s notice, and she urged my mother, “We must pack our belongings. We must get ourselves ready. The Viet Cong are around here now.” I looked at my father for direction, but, for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom, he had nothing to say. His face was calm, his eyes far off. It was my mother who ordered us to pack our clothes.
That same night I wrote Andrew the following letter. It causes me no end of embarrassment now – what did I expect the poor man to do, a married Englishman living in Hong Kong? – but it reflects my anguished state of mind accurately enough.
Dear Andrew,
It’s Sunday afternoon. We’ve packed our clothes, but aren’t sure where to go. This week I met many refugees from the Central Highlands, who’d risked their lives escaping to Sai Gon. The refugees are now occupying bus stations and Tan Son Nhat airport.
A few days ago the Deputy Minister and I traveled to Di An, near Bien Hoa and as we passed by the Binh Loi bridge I saw several dead bodies lying at the foot of the bridge. Bien Hoa military airport has been hit with 87 rockets so far. The remaining provinces of Central Highlands are already in the hands of Northern troops.
Our neighbourhood French bakery was robbed yesterday at six thirty in the morning. The robbers wore army uniforms with guns when they entered. All the male workers immediately ran away, thinking that it was a police search for ID, forcing them to join the government army. Without any man in the bakery, the armed men tied up two women and stuffed their mouths with cleaning cloths while taking all the money. Everyone feared them so no witness dared to intervene.
There was a funeral for two young men in my neighbourhood yesterday. Within one year this family lost all three sons in battlefields. Most of the young men working in the Ministry had been ordered to join the government army by April 15th. Now people don’t see them or know where they are.
Andrew, you have done your best to get me out of this country but now I feel that I may have to resign to fate. I will write to you again tomorrow if there is any news. Maybe a letter from you will arrive at the office in the morning. I am enclosing three addresses of friends and relatives in Sai Gon for you to contact, in case you will not hear from me again. I love you very much. Jasmine
Later that night, I went to the altar of Quan Yin in our attic and prayed. She was the lady Buddha, known as the Goddess of Mercy. My soul had been attached to her since I was five years old. From our early days in the village, it was my paternal grandmother who told me about her. She said that I was the “flower bud of Quan Yin”. After she left our village in 1957, abandoning me against her will to my vengeful mother and inducing my own overwhelming sense of loss, I began talking with Quan Yin every night and I have continued ever since.
Dear Quan Yin,
I now wonder if I only have a short life on earth. Will you be ready to receive my soul? Please assure me that I have no fear of death.
* * *
I didn’t die that spring. I lived through it all. I survived to recount those desperate days when so many of my people begged and fought and debased themselves in countless shameful ways, for a small place on the crowded helicopters and planes of the fleeing Americans … and I was one of them.
RIPE FOR SERVITUDE
“When France arrived in Indochina, the Annamites were ripe for servitude”
Indochina Governor-General Paul Doumer
My birthplace is in the Mekong Delta, the southernmost region of Viet Nam. It’s a hot, humid, green, rural and marvelously fertile region that lies between the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea. At its northern edge, the land rises toward the Cambodian border. At its centre is a vast jungle swamp. Farther south and east there are hundreds of little streams running towards the sea and numerous farms, hamlets and villages scattered across the flat, green landscape. When I was a child it took us two days to reach the southern capital of Sai Gon. We traveled out of the village by sampan, then onto the road, then after passage on two ferries onto the road again.
The delta region is fed by the Mekong River, known to the Vietnamese as the River of the Nine Dragons (Song Cuu Long). From early childhood I’d been told that the Mekong has nine dragon mouths. It is more than four thousand kilometres long and one of the most important rivers in the world. Originating in the mountains of Tibet, the Mekong flows through China, Laos and along the Thai border, and then through Cambodia and Viet Nam before reaching the South China Sea through the wide delta that is spread across Viet Nam’s southern tip of Ca Mau. For centuries the region has been known as the Rice Bowl of Viet Nam.
At the beginning of the Nguyen dynasty, in 1802, the South was called the Six Provinces (Luc Tinh). By 1850 my maternal ancestors had become moderately prosperous in a stable and quiet agricultural country, one with its own traditional culture. In 1856, though, the French warship Catinat under Leheur de Ville-sur-Arc arrived in Da Nang and launc
hed a violent attack on the Vietnamese, making way for France’s invasion and a century of long and bloody wars. In 1867 the French gained complete control of the South and it immediately became their colony. They renamed the South “Cochinchina” and divided it into twenty-one provinces for colonial administration. To help strengthen their rule in the South, they attacked Ha Noi Citadel in 1873, and soon after took control of North and Central Viet Nam, as well as Cambodia, and Laos – these becoming France’s protectorates. The colony and the protectorates were both placed under the rule of a French Governor-General. So was “French Indochina” born.
All the Nguyen dynasty emperors were chosen by the French. In many instances, The French officials chose ‘rulers’ as young as seven years old simply because they were easy to control. However, with the exception of Emperors Khai Dinh and Bao Dai, they had shown opposition to French domination. These rebellious young emperors were sent into exile on various remote islands off the African coast.
Stretching along the eastern coast of the Indochinese Peninsula, Viet Nam is S-shaped, with a coastline of 3,260 kilometres and a land area of 329,566 square kilometres. The French, at the time, were not particularly interested in North and Central Viet Nam (which they renamed Tonkin and Annam) since these regions consisted of mostly mountains and hills. But they considered the South – Cochinchina – as the “Jewel of the Far East” because it was the richest part of Indochina, with the largest rice and fruit farms, vast rubber and coffee plantations, great cotton fields, and good production of spices. The South also contained significant mines, including gold. In addition, Sai Gon was a growing international port.
Can Tho – the provincial capital of Hau Giang province in the South – had been the birthplace of my maternal ancestors. Several generations of my mother’s people had owned farmland on which they cultivated rice, coconuts, citrus fruit, bananas, and mangoes. This was good land for fruit trees, high enough to escape the floods that often accompanied the heavy rainy season. They were able to live comfortably, and like many others in Can Tho, had been classified at the beginning of the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945) as minor landowners (tieu dien chu).
The arrival of the French, however, brought sudden and drastic changes. The legitimacy of the former land ownership system was challenged by new officials appointed by the French, and supported by the French army. During raids, French troops burned houses, killed water buffaloes, and destroyed the residents’ stores of rice. Many of the inhabitants were obliged to flee and became refugees overnight. My maternal grandmother once told me:
Shortly after the colonial government gained complete control of our territory, those who had not returned or could not produce ownership papers to satisfy the French bureaucracy, had their land confiscated. Your great grandparents were among those victims. In our case, the deeds proving ownership had been destroyed during the invasion. They had lost everything, virtually everything that they had ever owned.
Many of the key policies were set by the Governor-General, Paul Doumer, whose regime (from 1897) was rapacious and arrogant. Typical of his touch were: the government opium monopoly with a profit of four hundred percent taken from a population encouraged in the addiction; taxes payable only in silver, and at six times the rate of the earlier regime; regional quotas for the required consumption of French alcohol; a ban on traditional rice wine distilling; a monopoly on salt with a profit margin of eight hundred percent.
This colonial administration produced a situation in which, by 1939, over fifty per cent of the peasant population was landless, while five per cent of the population – the major landlords (dai dien chu) – held forty-five percent of the land. The colonialists themselves had acquired much land; for example, in the year 1930 alone, they were “given” ten thousand hectares of land in the rich delta area of Cochinchina. For decades the greatest proportion of Viet Nam’s industrial profits ended up in Paris, while the local people’s needs for education and medical care were virtually ignored. No Vietnamese could hold an administrative post higher than the lowest French official. As Franklin Roosevelt observed in 1944 during a discussion of post-war policy on Indochina, France had “milked it for one hundred years”, and left its people “worse off than they were at the beginning.”
Since their skills were those of farmers, my now-landless great grandparents had no choice but to work for the new landlords as labourers. My grandmother described the situation of her parents:
They were still hoping that one day something would change, and the ancestral land would be returned to the family. But that day never came. As poor labourers, they had very few clothes and not enough food to keep the family going. For years they worked like slaves, while the harvests and all the revenues flowed directly to their masters.
With so little income, my great grandparents couldn’t keep up with the payment of their head taxes (thue than) – to be paid in silver, so they left Can Tho and emigrated to a rural village called Truong An, south of Can Tho, where I was born. My maternal grandmother, who herself had endured what she called “unbearable hardships” often recited to us children a poem by the revolutionary Phan Boi Chau, which invariably moved her to tears:
How do we grieve for the Six Provinces of the South?
A thousand years of hard work and sacrifice now gone
The mountains, the rivers, all dark and forbidding
Talking with the people, who does not feel this deep sorrow?
My maternal grandmother had five children. My mother was the youngest, a woman of medium build, with a fine complexion and a pretty face. From a very early age she worked in the fields, helping to support the family. She had no opportunity for education. Not that there was a formal school in the village in those days. Only later did the Nationalist movement led by the Viet Minh (The League for the Independence of Viet Nam) take it upon itself to raise the level of literacy throughout the country, and members of both sexes would be given equal opportunity – insisted on by Ho Chi Minh, and with a clear message to the nation, “You must learn to read and write in order to know, and you must know in order to carry out a revolution.” The Nationalists recruited volunteers to offer reading and writing lessons in Vietnamese (Quoc Ngu) through the Mass Education Program (Binh Dan Hoc Vu). Throughout the country, classes were brought to people’s homes, to village communes, to factories and rice fields, aboard fishing boats, and so on. My mother would eventually join one of these classes and begin learning how to read and write – at age twelve. She described her experience:
Before the Program was made compulsory, I, as a child, would from time to time come to observe a class – being held privately in the house of a village elder. I stood behind the palm leaf wall at the outside corner of the classroom and quietly watched the boys learning their lessons. When I asked my mother to let me go there for the lessons, she said that she couldn’t afford it. She also warned me that if I knew how to read and write, I would write love letters to boys and that would lead to dangerous consequences.
Such conservative attitudes would eventually change, following an awareness campaign that included an outpouring of poems encouraging girls to attend literacy classes:
Likewise, dear girl,
Your beauty is worth nothing
If your mind is still a blank.
The year my mother turned thirteen, my grandmother decided to distil rice wine to supplement their meagre farming income. This was illegal, and my grandmother had to hide the operation in the bushes. She and my mother worked quietly at night. Every day, while the elder children were working in the fields, my mother would sell the homemade wine surreptitiously at the Truong An market place. One afternoon, a terrible accident occurred and it would change my mother’s life. In her words:
There was a woman who ran a butcher’s stall and I was selling wine just next to it. That day the butcher’s husband appeared at her stall and asked for money. She refused, saying that he wanted the money only for gambling. While they were arguing, the butcher got more and more angry
and started insulting the husband. In a rage, he seized a large ceramic bowl from the front of the stall and hurled it at her, but the bowl missed his wife and hit my head instead. All I could remember was a loud crash, my ears went deaf, I felt dizzy, and then I passed out. When I woke up, I was in bed, while my widowed mother was weeping next to me. She said that someone at the market had brought me home, and that I had bled heavily from the forehead. Following this accident I became paralysed for about two months.
As there were no medical facilities in the village, all my grandmother and aunts could do was to stem the bleeding and hope for her recovery. Having access to a medical doctor was extremely rare for those living in villages at the time. After ninety years of colonial rule, the French provided the country with two doctors for every one hundred thousand Vietnamese.
The front of my mother’s skull had been fractured and the physical sign of it would remain for the rest of her life. So would the psychological scars. My maternal relatives, I learned later, noticed changes in my mother’s mood and behaviour shortly after the accident. She became angry for no apparent reason and also began to use profane language. She may have healed physically but her mental condition and judgment had been drastically affected. Her violent rages would mark our family life for decades to follow. In other respects my mother was a child of her time. Her family had gone from prosperity to destitution in two generations. She grew up at a bare-subsistence level. This left her with a permanent obsession with money. There was never enough, never any to spare. She was also fiercely protective of her own children, and she feared the white foreigners, “Those white monsters have ruined our lives. They have taken so much from our people. Without them, we would not have been living in such misery. What rights did they have, to control the fate of our family?” So, when the Viet Minh underground movement began to take shape with the aim of regaining the country from the French, it was altogether natural that my mother would join it. At age fourteen, she took on the duty of sewing black cotton uniforms for the Viet Minh’s popular forces and the Nationalist flags – red background with a gold star. Five years later, immediately after my birth, she would wrap me in one of those flags.