Late Blossom

by Laura Lam

  Witnessing the total destruction, my grandmother flew into a severe panic. She could no longer identify the spot she’d buried her gold. My mother arranged for two village men to dig up the entire ground but to no avail. Nothing was ever found. Although my mother later suspected that the men doing the digging had made off with the treasure. My grandmother was now destitute, and so were we. She would sit alone in the back garden for hours at a time, inconsolable. One evening she lamented:

  A bamboo bridge ought to be sturdy

  This one is rickety and unsteady

  How can I cross over such a flimsy bridge?

  To borrow a bowl for my rice

  To borrow a cup for my tea…

  While waiting for a new house to be built, we lived in a temporary shelter at the edge of the jungle. My mother relied on the assistance of my uncles and their sons to cut new timber, palm leaves, and bamboo. But since many of the bamboo bushes had been burned, and with every household needing trees at the same time, the materials became scarce. We could only manage a small house. My grandmother, fragile and ladylike, could only stand by helpless while the heavy work of rebuilding was going on, most of which was left to my mother. This did not produce good feelings between them, and late in 1957 it all finally came to a head.

  The new house was much smaller. My grandmother no longer had her own bedroom and she had to sleep in the living room. She suffered a huge loss of face and continued to grieve. My mother started to humiliate her, sometimes openly insulting her. It became so bad they could no longer tolerate each other’s presence in the same room and more than once I saw my grandmother crying alone in the back garden after one of my mother’s verbal attacks. Though I can hardly exonerate my mother for what happened, I can understand how my grandmother had become nothing but an additional burden to her, and how, in my father’s continued absence, she found it increasingly difficult to fend for us all.

  One day, quite by accident, I broke a ceramic bowl while helping my grandmother wash the dishes in the kitchen.

  “You little idiot!” my mother shouted. “How many have you broken so far? From now on you’re going to be eating out of a coconut shell!”

  My grandmother said to her, “I will buy us a replacement. Don’t tell her to eat out of a coconut shell.”

  My mother gave my grandmother the most contemptuous look.

  “She is my daughter!” she retorted. “And you couldn’t afford to buy another bowl. And I don’t listen to any damned fool!”

  To which my grandmother answered, “You are mean! And you have the temper of the most vicious lion!”

  I tried to retreat out the kitchen door but my mother had already taken her bamboo cane off the kitchen wall and seized me by the hair. I cried for help but she yanked me out of the kitchen. Once outside, she began beating me with the bamboo cane, whereupon my grandmother attacked her, struggling to wrench the cane from her hands. My grandmother failed. She was frail and my mother was physically tough. Excited, her face flushed, my mother beat me even harder. Finally, she let go of me, but that, as it turned out, was only the first installment. Later that night, shortly after I crept onto the divan with my grandmother in the living room, my mother came over, screaming and dragged me away to the back wall. She started beating my head with her fists. Her face was set in a grimace and her teeth clenched. While shouting, she also took hold of the precious pair of bedroom slippers my grandmother had given me and hurled them out of the house.

  I was too young to understand the wild ferocity of her rage. I can’t say that I understand it even now. She continued to shout and insult my grandmother and me for what seemed like hours, exorcising her peculiar rancour while I, for my part, sitting with my face in my hands, wept. Finally she ordered me to go to sleep in her room. This I did, stilling my tears but unable to calm the panic in my heart.

  Late that night, my grandmother packed all her clothes in a small suitcase and left it under the divan. My mother spotted it and realizing my grandmother intended to leave, quietly picked up the suitcase and hid it. Early the next morning, while it was still dark, my mother left the house and went to see her mother, taking my little brother with her. My grandmother went hunting for her suitcase and eventually found it under a pile of bamboo baskets. She left before sunrise, left without seeing me. I was still asleep in my mother’s bedroom and when I woke up it was to an utterly empty house.

  Dear Quan Yin,

  Please stop my mother from being so cruel. She is completely cruel and I will never love her as long as I live. I want my grandmother. Jasmine is now a shattered flower bud.

  TAKING SIDES

  “It is the karma of people who have lost their country either to be crushed underfoot like worms and crickets or to make a revolution that smashes the cangues and chains which imprison them”

  Truong Sinh

  Of my four paternal granduncles, Khanh, Hai, Cuong, and Ba, three embarked on careers that clearly expressed the terrible divisions that lay in store for us all. While Ba quietly ran his jewellery business and practised Chinese medicine, Cuong – trained as a medical doctor in the French system – became a revolutionary. At one point he wrote, “I joined the revolutionary force in order to help liberate my country. I have no political ideology and do not wish to become part of any political party.” Although for a time, at the specific request of Ho Chi Minh, Cuong did lead a political party, and in 1945 he represented Cho Lon as a congressman in the short-lived government that preceded the French return. Cuong saw himself as a nationalist and did not become a communist.

  Khanh had given up teaching in order to join the revolutionary movement in 1940. He participated in the failed Sai Gon - Cho Lon revolt, which was part of the Southern Uprising (Nam Ky Khoi Nghia) masterminded by Nguyen Thi Bay. At the time, the French, who continued to run the country’s administration under a World War II agreement with the Japanese, had recognized Bay’s powerful influence and nicknamed her “La Reine Rouge”, or “The Red Queen”. They succeeded in capturing her and several other leaders. Khanh escaped and went into hiding with remnants of the Red Queen’s force.

  On 5 April 1941, the French executed the Red Queen and four other male leaders at a football field in Cho Lon. That day owners of all the shops and markets throughout Sai Gon and Cho Lon closed down their businesses – out of respect and defiance. Cuong also closed his medical clinic and personally witnessed the execution. As described by Cuong:

  When I arrived, dozens of colonial policemen were already present at the football field – to maintain security. A huge crowd of local people and expatriates were forming a ring around the area. The district chief of Cho Lon was made ‘the witness’ of the public execution. The French and their five prisoners arrived at the football field in a ritual and orderly manner. First in line was an impressive looking car carrying the French senior army officer and his subordinates. Second in line was a huge army truck carrying the firing squad and some members of the Foreign Legion. Third in line was another truck carrying Sister Bay, her four male colleagues, and several guards holding guns. Fourth in line was another truck carrying five empty coffins and a few colonial soldiers. Sister Bay – looking frail from her treatment in captivity – entered the execution ground wearing a black cotton suit and a white silk scarf. By her side were Brothers Muoi Thiep, Hai Trieu, Hai Dang, and Chau. A French Catholic priest was sent in to baptize her but she shook her head. They asked if she had any message for her family, she again shook her head. But she indicated that she wanted to speak to the people of Cho Lon, and they let her. Her voice was calm and clear, ‘My dear people! Please carry on with our struggle to liberate our country. This time we failed but you should never give up. Next time we will defeat the invaders and victory will be ours.’ The French wanted to blindfold Sister Bay before the execution but she refused, ‘I want to look straight at the gun barrels of my enemies!’ The firing squad was divided into two rows – standing and kneeling. When the series of gunshots ended, the five bodies were picked up a
nd thrown into the coffins. Among the mortified Vietnamese crowd, many covered their faces, others wept, the rest quietly walked away in deep anger. The French now started leaving the football field, again in a ritual and orderly manner.

  Cuong was badly shaken by the execution. Never before had he felt so humiliated.

  In the Mekong Delta, twenty-eight men and women under the leadership of Madame Nguyen Thi Thap were executed in the same month. Thap herself made a narrow escape.

  The French military court in Sai Gon sentenced to death five more individuals from the same uprising – Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Nguyen Van Cu, Ha Huy Tap, Phan Dang Luu, and Vo Van Tan. All were guillotined in Sai Gon on 28 August 1941. Minh Khai was significant for her advocacy of participation by women in the armed revolution envisioned by Ho Chi Minh, but also for the fact that she and Ho had been lovers. Moreover, she was Vo Nguyen Giap’s sister- in-law. When Giap’s wife Minh Giang and her sister Minh Khai were captured by the French, Giap himself had already escaped to China. Two years later, while he was still in hiding, his wife and their young child died in prison. Giap reported much later that these deaths had destroyed him. In the next decade he was to lead the jungle warfare army of fifty thousand men and women to annihilate the French at Dien Bien Phu.

  The Vietnamese continued to revolt and the French continued to slaughter them. The more executions Cuong witnessed or heard, the more resentful he became. He was now a different man. While trying to continue with his medical practice, Cuong waited for an opportunity. Ho Chi Minh was still in hiding and the executions had weakened the Nationalist leadership. Since 1931, the French had given Ho a death sentence in absentia, and there was a ransom of seventy-five thousand Indochinese piasters on his head. He was living as a fugitive, moving from one country to another, including imprisonment in Hong Kong by the British – who were working in collaboration with the French (he made a narrow escape with the dramatic assistance of the Hong Kong governor’s sympathetic wife). Ho had already spent many years in exile before, as the French Surété had been following him since 1919. During those unsettling years he had achieved fluency in French, English, Russian, and Chinese. He had also immersed himself in a diversity of contemporary political thinking.

  After studying the nature of the revolutions in the countries he had visited, Ho began to look for ways of governing Viet Nam as an alternative to exploitation by the French. He understood the specific political implications of the social movements and resentments inside the colony. The French did not underestimate him and would continue to hunt ruthlessly for him. Outside Viet Nam, he was equally in danger of being handed over to them by other powers. He was in danger wherever he went, including the seas, as these were being regularly patrolled by warships from Japan, Britain and the United States, as well as France.

  World War II changed the circumstances for most of the major powers. In August 1942 Ho thought it was time for him to return to his homeland – to mobilize people for a revolution. The secret journey ended in disaster. Someone recognized him while he was disguised as a tribal man at the Sino-Vietnamese border. He was arrested and sent to a notorious prison in Guangxi, under Chiang Kai-shek’s order. Failing to get any information out of him, they sent him to a sequence of twenty-nine more prisons. To cope with the inhumane conditions, he composed 133 poems describing his ordeal.

  In front of the prison gate, guards stand with rifles

  In the sky, masses of clouds carry away the moon

  The bed-bugs swam round like army tanks on manoeuvre

  The mosquitoes form squadrons attacking like fighter-planes

  My heart travels a thousand miles toward my native land

  My dream intervenes with sadness,

  Like a skein of a thousand threads

  Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison

  Ho Chi Minh, A Diary in Prison

  Ho had encountered similar risk fifteen years earlier in Shanghai. A thirteen-year old boy under his care named Ly Tu Trong had been detained and beaten in one of Chiang Kai-shek’s prisons. The child revealed nothing while Ho escaped to Thailand. The little boy, who remained loyal to Ho after his release, was later captured by the French. They guillotined him when he reached sixteen.

  It was not until January 1944 that Ho emerged from the Chinese gulag. Having suffered severe beatings while in prison, he was nearly blind and unable to walk. At least he could be reunited with fellow revolutionaries in a limestone cave in Pac Bo (near the northern border with China). Each day members of the group carried him to a mountain site and trained his feet to walk again. Life in the cave was extremely harsh and all the fugitives, including Vo Nguyen Giap, were in constant danger of being identified and captured by the French.

  With wide knowledge and experience from overseas, Ho taught his colleagues world history and modern day revolutions. He had written a book called “The Road To Liberation” (Duong Kach Menh) and used that as part of the teaching materials. From Pac Bo Ho made an emotional appeal to the nation and it spread in secret throughout the country, “All of you, revolutionary soldiers! The hour of liberation has come! Please raise our independence flag and lead the country’s men and women to destroy our common enemy…”

  People from all segments of society – teachers, lawyers, writers, artists, peasants, labourers, youths and elders of both sexes – responded to the appeal and committed themselves to the Nationalist movement. Without any reservation, Cuong closed down his medical clinic and joined the forces. In December that year Ho Chi Minh asked Vo Nguyen Giap to organize the Viet Minh army, a force that would consist of twenty percent women. The first woman military cadre was Ha Thi Que, who provided military and political training for Viet Minh troops in the Secure Zone. Ho Chi Minh’s appeal was re-enforced by the following poem:

  The ancients used to love singing about natural beauty

  Snow and flowers, moon and wind, clouds and mists, mountains and rivers

  Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack.

  (Ho Chi Minh. On reading an anthology of a thousand poets)

  Khanh, who had been involved in the 1940 insurrection, had gone with members of the defeated rebels to Rung Sac, where he lived during the five years of Japanese occupation. The Vietnamese were now fighting two enemies at the same time – the French and the Japanese. Rung Sac is a jungle area immediately south of Sai Gon, considered strategically important to the Nationalist armies during the French and the American wars. It is heart-shaped and covers an area of seven hundred square kilometres, with hundreds of small rivers criss-crossing the land like a spider’s web. On the east, the jungle river system connects Sai Gon with the South China Sea. Known as the “throat” of Sai Gon, it separates the city from the southernmost part of the country. There are thousands of tiny islands which appear only at low tide and where mangrove trees grow in thick layers, their roots tangled like strands of spaghetti.

  After the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, the Nationalist force of Sai Gon - Cho Lon emerged from Rung Sac. This was the year Khanh was captured by the French and subjected to repeated interrogation under severe torture, which left him crippled. Despite the last-minute medical care of his brother Cuong, he died later in a hospital. Before his death his daughters succeeded in persuading him to renounce the revolution. This left him without honour among the revolutionary half of my divided family.

  The last of my grandmother’s four brothers was Hai. Such are the strange fortunes of families in periods of war that he was appointed to high positions by the French colonial administration and later by the American-backed regime.

  Among all his uncles, my father felt closest to Cuong. He said to me:

  In 1937, Cuong had done a remarkable thing: he got a medical degree from the University of Indochina in Ha Noi – the best place to study in the entire country. After that he opened a private practice in Cho Lon. While I was still going to school I would meet Cuong every so often, and he would give me an a
llowance of three Indochinese dollars each time. In those days ten cents would buy two kilos of pork, so this was more than just pocket money.

  Following the August Revolution in 1945 (Cach Mang Thang Tam), Cuong was elected to represent Cho Lon in the First National Assembly of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary government. In January 1946 he participated in a remarkable journey on foot to Ha Noi. He and four other representatives were in constant danger of being killed by the French. At this time colonial troops were in control of all routes between cities and towns and were cutting off the flow of Vietnamese travelers between the North and the South.

  Crossing through hidden paths, forests, and remote villages, the group was led by Madame Nguyen Thi Thap, the elected representative of My Tho province. She had met Cuong and another colleague secretly at a pineapple field near Cho Lon, each carrying just a small backpack. A few days later representatives from three other provinces joined up with them. The group walked through a vast jungle before reaching the rubber plantations of Bien Hoa, which were entirely under French control. After two weeks, they arrived at the first Viet Minh station of Ben Vinh, in a stretch of jungle between the two rivers Dong Nai and Song Be. They had a short rest and restocked their food supply. A guide was to accompany them to the Central Highlands, the formidable mountainous region shaped by the Truong Son Mountain Range. The guide was armed with a rifle and a machete, and his mission was to protect the un-armed group at any cost.

  To avoid detection they traveled by night, and regularly had to deal with the raw nature of the jungle. One morning they reached a huge waterfall in Tri An and decided to take a rest and to cook a meal. It was overcast and the thunderous sound of the waterfall was the only noise they heard. The forest was so dense there was almost no light from the sky. After a day’s rest they resumed their journey at nightfall but encountered jungle leeches (con vat). These glued themselves to a person’s neck, under arms and legs. Touching whole clusters of them, the person’s hand was smeared with blood. One of the men lit some matches and could see swarms of leeches, ready to attack the human body. Once they escaped the leech territory they met nests of giant black ants. In the dark, without realizing, they stepped on these nests and armies of vicious aunts stung their feet and knees before crawling inside their clothing.