by Laura Lam
When we had finished wiping the rainwater off the floor of the room, Sister Gioi made chrysanthemum tea for herself, Dieu Thai and me. It was soothing. The symphony of rain and wind and thunder continued until midnight. By then many of the nuns had gone to bed, having to get up before the rooster’s crow for their morning meditation. I bade good night to Dieu Thai. She turned to look at me and saw some tears clinging to my eyelashes. She dashed to her clothing cabinet and quickly took out a white handkerchief.
“I will be all right, Sister,” I said to her. “Good night to you.” Through the remainder of the night I lay listening to the sounds of raindrops over the temple’s roof and each gentle motion of the passing wind. The room was cold and I shivered under the blanket Dieu Thai had placed at the side of my bedroll. Most of the night I thought about Robert. A relationship without future. A dead-end road.
Morning came, and with it the need to find new routines. Dieu Thai suggested that I make vegetarian steamed buns to sell at a road junction and she would lend me money to buy the ingredients. In the meantime, she would ask the senior nun to provide me refuge. The following morning I produced my first fifty steamed buns, each stuffed with tofu, quail eggs, mushrooms, peas, cabbage, and bean sprouts. They were nearly as large as a rice bowl. Some of the nuns commented that I was far too generous and suggested that I increase the price. I sat on the roadside every morning, wearing Dieu Thai’s clothes – a knee length cotton blouse in dark gray or brown, and matching trousers. My long hair was braided, rolled up at the back, and covered by a dark cotton scarf, which also covered part of my face. I looked like a novice. Afraid someone would recognize me, I was always alert and refrained from talking to passers by. Luckily, I encountered no one who knew me.
During the two months of sanctuary at the temple I made some new clothes for myself. One of the nuns sewed an ao dai for me and I sewed two Western style dresses, all in white. The money for the fabric came from my own income. Sister Gioi worried about my getting cold in the night so she began knitting a sweater for me, the colour of incense smoke.
I bought two pairs of leather shoes, one black and one white. They had fairly high heels. My life now was one of opposite extremes: cruelty and kindness, sorrow and joy, old and new, East and West… On the one hand, I was the humble looking young girl in the temple’s faded clothes and dusty sandals; on the other, a young lady in an elegant white dress and high heels at the side of a dignified gentleman in the affluent American setting.
To prepare for my date with Robert, I would return early to the temple from the dusty road. If Dieu Thai – my “guardian” – was in, we would have a chat. Then I’d take a bath in filtered rainwater and wash my hair with soap-berry shampoo produced by the nuns. One of the nuns had made for me a jar of rose-scented water from rose petals, which I sprinkled myself with after the bath. Each jar of rose water took six large roses. I wore very light lipstick and little powder on my cheeks, no mascara or hair spray. My nails were always kept in perfect condition. Robert once described this look as “pure and elegant beauty”.
The sisters were very tolerant. They overlooked rules in my case and appeared to trust my judgment. One of them even said, “I wouldn’t mind having an opportunity to practice English with your American friend.” When I was all dressed up for a date with Robert, my appearance shocked some of the senior nuns. However, several of the younger ones seemed to be tempted by my “sin” and wished that they could just once have a good time outside. One of them dared to accompany me to the Bachelor Officer Quarters. On arrival there she whispered to me, “I’m completely overwhelmed by the world of white men and their uniforms and all the decorations”. The words “white men”, spoken by a fellow Vietnamese, suddenly made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want anyone to see Robert as a “white ghost”. I still remember, when I was a child in the village, how my grandmother, and most everyone else, referred to people they had hardly had any contact with as white ghosts or white monsters. It made them mysterious, sinister, and different. But to me Robert was real, tangible, and attractive. The difference was simply a matter of geography. He was a Westerner, and that was all.
We left the BOQ and went to an Italian restaurant. Robert wanted to speak Vietnamese with the young nun, but she was anxious to practice her English. Every time he asked her a question in Vietnamese, she answered him in English!
The nuns were always busy, with their morning and night meditations, sewing, knitting, cooking, growing vegetables, and soliciting public donations. I learned that many of them traveled regularly, but I never got to know where they went or what they did. I never asked. Ngoc Phuong was founded in 1958 by the head-nun, Sister Huynh Lien, and it soon became the inspiration for over one hundred Buddhist meditation centres throughout the South, including the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands. The temple, built with public donations, consisted of three buildings of French design, each with twostoreys, occupying approximately twenty-five hundred square metres. Surrounded by flower gardens, shady trees and courtyards, the buildings had a white exterior, with soft-yellow borders and religious motifs. The bo de, or linden trees were favourites of mine and I would often sit at the foot of one, reading a book or enjoying a conversation with one of the nuns. These trees provided cool shade and produced fragrant yellowish-white flowers in abundance. The interior walls of Ngoc Phuong were painted white and soft yellow. There were beautiful floral French tiles on the floors. The chinh dien, or central chamber was on the first floor of the middle building. Toward the back was a large shrine with the Buddha sitting on the lotus throne. The giang duong, or lecture hall, where the Mother Superior delivered all her speeches, was on the ground floor. The same hall was also used during the war for public meetings and for organizing public demonstrations.
It was a major centre of covert resistance. Regardless of rank order, there seemed to be an unspoken difference between the nuns who were politically active and the rest. I had particularly good relations with those who weren’t political. The Mother Superior always treated me with respect. One day I asked her about her views on various religions. We had a long discussion and she explained that Buddhism appealed to many Vietnamese people because they had been exposed to so much pain, suffering, and turmoil throughout the country’s long history.
The Vietnamese have a strong desire for happiness, she said, yet they also have a considerable capacity for renunciation, which is the Buddhist way of life. The Buddhist view of happiness is of a total happiness that only occurs beyond the earthly world. When the Buddha became enlightened, he is said to have reached the door to undying, or Nirvana. At the temple the senior nuns always empha- sized the practices of “right eating, right drinking, right breathing, right concentration, and right meditation”. They believed these were far more important than simple beliefs. Systematic meditation lies at the heart of the Buddhist life and leads to mental comfort and tranquility. Meditation helps the mind to become an instrument capable of seeing things as they really are. Genuine Buddhists do not worship the Buddha as a god. They respect him as a great teacher.
At home we had a small Buddhist shrine in the attic, the highest place. My father didn’t go to his temple on a regular basis, but my grandmother and I used to go to Ngoc Phuong each Full Moon and during most major Buddhist festivals. We traveled in a simple version of the horse-drawn carriage, with humble cushion seats and a modest canvas hood, led by an old horse and its emaciated owner. Grandmother wore either her black or dark blue silk ao dai. Her white hair was tied into a simple bun at the back. She carried a black umbrella. As a woman of the city, she would never wear a conical hat. I always wore a white ao dai. For every trip to the temple our basket held an offering of incense sticks, fresh marigolds or lotus, and some fresh fruits.
As my grandmother became more fragile with age, her monthly visits to the temple came to an end and she only went at Lunar New Year. The horse carriages became a thing of the past. Taxis and cyclos were considered too much of a luxury for regular use. Since
the temple was outside the city, there were no buses. It was difficult for her to travel on the lambretta, also known as motorcycle-taxi, or tuk tuk. When this vehicle moved, it shook up and down and produced loud squeaking noises like a wounded animal and emitted a trail of dark smoke. Often the number of passengers exceeded the seating capacity.
During my refuge there I met many of the nuns, but learned nothing of their family backgrounds, except for Sisters Dieu Thai and Gioi. As the most junior nuns in the temple, they wore gray or brown instead of saffron coloured robes. Gioi was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, who had been saved from deliberately drowning herself. Her ARVN soldier boyfriend had deserted her when he learned she was pregnant. She gave birth in the temple; but the child did not survive. Dieu Thai had comforted her and so became her best friend. Gioi worked as a nurse at my high school’s clinic.
Sister Dieu Thai and I spent time outdoors most evenings, especially when there was a moon. We sat on the green grass at the back garden, under a luminous sky. The rising moon flickered through the graceful leaves of the linden trees. We breathed in the slight breeze and talked for hours, like devoted sisters.
The night before a Full Moon, between four and five in the morning, we would get up and go to the kitchen. For early breakfast, we each helped ourselves to a bowl of rice and mung-bean porridge, with mustard cabbage pickles and salty bean curd cakes. Many of the nuns would be there, getting things organized for the feast of the Full Moon. I was assigned to the team that prepared vegetarian spring rolls and would fry tofu cakes, roast peanuts, and slice mushrooms and vegetables. I also helped with the preparation of puff eggplants, one of the temple’s famous dishes. Dieu Thai’s team made a chunky soup of pumpkin, fragrant squash, coconut milk, and fresh cashew nuts. Varieties of cooked tofu, salads, preserved radishes, pickles, dumplings, noodles, porridge, and bread were beautifully prepared. There was glutinous rice with a fruit puree for steaming, which brought out the flavour as well as the fragrance of the fruit. The rice was shaped into a dome over fresh banana leaves.
Around mid-morning, hundreds of followers of Buddha arrived at the main entrance, mostly women and young girls, beautifully dressed in the traditional Vietnamese ao dai in all colours of the rainbow. The nuns greeted them, led the way, then helped them arrange the vast quantity of fresh bouquets and numerous trays of fresh fruits – both inside and outside the temple. In the main courtyard, below the white marble statue of Quan Yin, women took turns saying their prayers. Some wept over the untimely deaths of loved ones. Their long dresses fluttered in the wind in the misty gray of the burning incense.
Inside, on the first floor, women knelt in front of the large Buddhist shrine and chanted prayers. A little later they descended to the lecture hall and took their seats on soft cushions. After an inspiring lecture on the teachings of Buddhism by the Mother Superior, people gathered in the gardens for the vegetarian feast. The head nun was a poet who often composed in the same office I had gone to find consolation following the deaths of my cousins. She was highly respected.
Sister Huynh Lien was also a political activist who regularly organized public protests against the war. For years she made the temple a temporary shelter for female political prisoners after their release. Most of them became incapacitated from torture. In the early sixties, when the Americans began sending their troops to Viet Nam, Sister Huynh Lien secretly joined the National Liberation Front. While she led many anti-war protests with other nuns, she failed to influence the ARVN regime. Ngoc Phuong became the main distribution centre for food and medical supplies for Nationalist troops in three major strategic locations: War Zone D (Bien Hoa and Long Binh), District IV of Sai Gon, and the Long An province (a revolutionary cradle and the birthplace of my paternal grandmother and granduncles).
Ngoc Phuong quickly became an ideal location for secret meetings and hiding senior members of the National Liberation Front. Earning the nickname Tong Hanh Dinh – General Executive Headquarters – the temple was the main communication base for public demonstrations against the war by women and students in South Viet Nam. From the mid-sixties on, small groups of nuns started leaving the temple, abandoning their religious life to join the NLF. Some of the nuns of Ngoc Phuong played an important role during the Battle of New Year’s Eve.
Toward the end of the war, street protests resulted in more and more bloody confrontations with the police. Many of the nuns and their followers were killed, imprisoned, or executed. In October 1974, the government sent troops to blockade the temple with razor wire and intimidate the nuns, labeling them “disguised Viet Cong”. Some of the surviving nuns managed to escape and the temple remained vacant until the end of the war. Meanwhile, in November 1974, Sister Huynh Lien, assisted by Mrs Ngo Ba Thanh, a prominent lawyer and political activist, led the remaining nuns in their final anti-war protest. Sister Huynh Lien described the confrontation with the police and the treatment of the nuns in her poem:
The police struck savagely at the nuns
Who were falling down and shedding blood
Immediately fellow countrymen and women rose up
The streets were now filled with a huge crowd
Army reinforcements quickly arrived from Xom Ga
Nuns of Ngoc Phuong whom they attacked…
As traffic was moving across Vo Di Nguy Street
They found two dead bodies among the wounded nuns
That summer I knew little of the temple’s underground activities and did not realize how committed Sister Huynh Lien was to the NLF. But I was certainly aware of the presence of women who had been political prisoners, and couldn’t help noticing the regular absences of sisters allocated to various parts of the country. I was fully aware of the nuns’ public protests against the regime. One day, I saw the following poem (by the poet Che Lan Vien) on a wall in the dormitory.
Awaiting an Execution Order
While waiting for the execution order
She decided to knit a cardigan
Her knitting was now completed
But her execution was delayed
Quickly she ripped the cardigan apart
And began to knit it all over again
What if they execute her suddenly tonight?
There were several stories told by the nuns among themselves, including one in which the Mother Superior had sat as a medium for a deceased NLF leader, wanting to send messages to the living.
The Americans then in Sai Gon, at least individually, seemed only vaguely aware of the forces ranked against them and the dangers they faced walking the streets. Sympathy for the Nationalist cause was far wider than it appeared, and the Southern regime had deluded itself into thinking they were up against a group of Communists who could be isolated by ideology. They were actually dealing with national pride on a large scale. The Southern army of conscripts fought without a sense of purpose. Stories of widespread corruption in the local administration only made the soldiers’ morale worse. The Nationalists, on the other hand, were beginning to sense their victory. Meanwhile, solitary Americans were at increasingly high risk of being attacked and kidnapped.
I lived in both worlds and moved between them daily. The more people were oppressed by the regime, the more I understood the nuns’ nationalist sympathies. But my heart was with an American lieutenant. Nothing made much sense. My involvements with the Americans had removed the national perspective. It was now substituted by the much more complex human factor.
I was beginning to sense, even if he didn’t himself, that Robert’s life had become much more precarious. I began to fear that he might be kidnapped by the NLF. Maybe, having experienced so much loss, I had come to anticipate the worst. But then according to Bay Ca’s daughter, Duyen, Uncle Nam took too much risk coming to our house every month in his army uniform. She thought it was too dangerous. Several government officials in charge of security in our area had been taken away in the night and executed.
If the NLF ever kidnapped Robert, I thought to myself, I would go to the
Mother Superior for help. Although I knew only part of her activities against the Sai Gon regime, I sensed that I could count on her. If they sent him into the jungle, I would join him and be willing to suffer with him.
My country was caught between two great opposing currents and I felt myself drawn into the whirlpools between them.
FAREWELL TO A DREAM
“Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell”
Emily Dickinson
On my way back to the temple, after having sold all the buns, I heard footsteps and voices behind me, “Big Sister! Big Sister!” Turning, I saw my brothers, Trung and Nghia. They rushed towards me and I stretched my arms out wide. After two months of worry and distress, my grandmother had guessed I might be at the temple, and so had sent them to look for me. “Grandma is weeping nearly every night. Sister please come home!” They told me my father was very angry with my mother. She assumed that I’d run away and sold my virtue to survive. Uncle Nam stopped by the house one evening and my mother told him, “There will be no need for you to come back here next month. She is gone, and gone for good.”
“What did Uncle Nam say to Mother?” I asked.
“Not much,” Nghia said. “He just looked very sad and walked out of the house.”
“He looked angry too,” Trung added.
I told my brothers that I had no desire to return home, but they cried and begged me to forgive my mother.
I knew her too well. If I continued at the temple, she would come and make an embarrassing scene in front of the nuns. I had to leave as soon as possible. I thought of lying to my brothers, telling them I would be back later that day, and after they left, I would simply disappear. But where would I go to live? And what about Robert? I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the only choice was to go back home. “I will be home later tonight. Will you tell Grandma that?” They both cheered. That evening I went to see Robert.