by Laura Lam
One evening Robert suggested an early dinner so we would have more time to “talk” afterward. I looked at him suspiciously but he said with a half-smile that it wasn’t about “loving”. In any case, he said, it would be better to talk after dinner. I had no idea what he had in mind but when we left the restaurant and walked up to the roof terrace, I could see he was sad. We leaned against the balcony, his arms around me, my face resting on his chest. He lifted my face, kissed me, then reluctantly broke the news that his assignment in Viet Nam was not to be extended.
Earlier his superior had suggested that he would be promoted while in Viet Nam. We both hoped he might stay for another tour. Most officers were sent home after a space of two or three years. However, one of his senior-ranking friends had been promoted in Viet Nam and allowed to stay on. In my mind I wanted the Americans to leave Viet Nam, but in my heart I didn’t want Robert to go.
It was like being stabbed. We sat down and neither spoke. I took in a deep breath, staring at the little table between us. Robert rose and stood by my side. He reached for my hand. Kicking my shoes aside, I got up. My head fell on his right shoulder and I wept. I could feel the strength of his arms around me for a long time. By the time I lifted my head his shirt was soaked and smeared with makeup. His face was drawn, his eyelashes were damp with tears. Dabbing my eyes with his handkerchief, he held my head against his other shoulder. He whispered, “Your crying breaks my heart.”
Three weeks passed in a blur, and then we were sitting on the restaurant’s roof terrace again, talking about anything that came to mind. Yet so much was left unsaid. I was less discreet than I would normally be and toward the end of the evening I asked him certain intimate questions.
He confessed he’d had a sexual encounter with a Vietnamese woman. He said he desperately longed to be physically close to me. This tormented him. Consequently one night he’d taken up with one of the bargirls pestering him outside the BOQ. He said what he had done was “impure,” that he hated himself for it afterwards, and that he had no feelings whatsoever for her. He didn’t want to see her again and wanted to put the whole thing behind him and forget it.
He thought I would understand his problem and forgive him. For better or worse, I couldn’t. I let out my disgust and anger at him, “I hate you now. You repulse me. You are not sincere and I no longer trust you. How could you love one and sleep with another? Who knows how many women you said you love or have slept with.” I went on accusing him. He didn’t let out a word. Finally he lifted my chin against my will, gazed straight into my eyes and said, “You are my only love. I have loved nobody else.” There was anger in his voice. It was in his eyes too. Moments later he seemed to regain the warmth and tenderness I had previously known.
I was too confused to ask more questions. Why did he say so forcefully that he loved no other woman? What about his wife? Had he married out of convenience rather than love? How could he write letters to me each week with such intensity of feeling if he loved someone else?
He took me home. When we got into a taxi, neither spoke. I looked through the window, my chest like a heavy stone. He wanted to hold my hand but I wouldn’t let him. A little while before we got to my house he held my shoulders, then lifted my face toward him, saying gently, “Won’t you forgive me, my angel?”
I didn’t answer. I wanted to collapse on his shoulder and cry, in the knowledge that this might be our final goodbye. He said something about a farewell party – it would mean so much to him for me to be there – but I didn’t respond. I wanted to say no but couldn’t bring myself to.
That night I had another strange dream. Sitting at the edge of a bed, I called out, “Robert dear!” He came and put his arms around me. I looked up into his deep eyes, “With all my heart I love you. I am ready to give myself to you, without any condition.” He bent down and kissed me. He moved toward my legs, peeled all my clothes off and kissed me. He reached for my hand, wanting me to undress him. I woke up. I was sweating. The painful reality flooded back. It was too late.
I stayed home the night of his farewell party, in torment. I kept wondering if he was as heart-broken as I was. I wanted to punish him for betraying me but I also wanted him – wildly – to come and sweep me off my feet.
He didn’t.
Shortly afterwards I received a letter from him from America. Robert had written it during the flight home and mailed it at the airport when he landed. His despondency left me distraught. He said the pain of separation was too much for him to bear.
I wrote to him immediately.
Robert dear,
Very deep regret on my part. It was foolish of me not to allow us to enjoy love, enjoy it to the fullest. Please forgive me, before we go on with our own lives. I myself have already forgiven you. It is extremely painful for me to read your feelings and not be able to see you. It is extremely painful for me to write to you. The current pain is tearing me apart and it will take a very long time to heal - if it will ever be healed.
I love you. Jasmine
That year I had composed dozens of poems. I dedicated them to him in response to the passion he expressed in his love letters to me. He was now safe and I felt relief. From time to time I took out the picture he’d given me of the two girls, his daughters, and knew that, despite my fantasies, there was no way I could ever break up the life he’d gone back to in America. ***
After Robert’s departure I turned my attention to the village and wrote a series of letters, asking my maternal relatives about life and death in Truong An. Dai wrote and said that American troops had returned to the village in 1970. He described the following:
When the US Marine Corps arrived, they started shooting wildly across the village from ten gun-ships. Then they landed and marched inland, entering people’s houses, shooting as they went. Many peasants managed to escape and went into hiding in the jungle. While occupying their houses, the Americans seized their pigs and chickens and cooked their meals there. The Marines were accompanied by the ARVN force from Constance garrison, who knew the area well. The ARVN soldiers did what they were told to do. They were the servants and the Americans were their masters.
The Marines left much destruction in their wake, then went to raid other villages. The peasants were left contemplating ways of retaliating. The villages that had been raided by the US Marines organized three women to attack American troops in Rach Rang, Ca Mau. The women transported two bombs, each weighing seven hundred pounds to the port where the US-ARVN forces were in control. Both bombs exploded, killing dozens of American and ARVN men. Six gun-ships were damaged. The remaining gun-ships left the area in a hurry. Later a poem was dedicated to the three women:
Attacking the enemy’s warships in day light
You sisters, a group of heroines!
Already a legend when you were masters of those rivers
Nine months have passed and the enemy dared not return
The combined US-ARVN forces made numerous attempts to herd the residents of Truong An into the Strategic Hamlets for good. But the peasants tore down the hamlet compounds each year. By then nearly every family had a son or daughter in the National Liberation Front. A few of them also owned a radio, and they would gather secretly at New Year to talk about loved ones in the jungles, share their grievances, and listen to Uncle Ho’s New Year messages from Ha Noi.
APPLES TOO PRECIOUS TO EAT
My innocence is lost - a broken vase,
My body shall pay off my debts to life.
Kieu
In the autumn of 1971 my grandmother went to sleep forever. My father and I were at work and my mother telephoned him from a public phone booth to say that grandmother had failed to wake up and was no longer breathing. He immediately telephoned Uncle Nam, then we both got into a taxi and hurried home.
I knelt at her bedside and put my hand over her chest. It was still warm but there was no heartbeat. “Grandma! Grandma!” I called her as I held her right hand and squeezed it gently. There was no response.
Standing solemnly behind me were father and Uncle Nam. My father stated that grandmother was dead but Nam, more distraught than I’d ever seen him, refused to accept it. He put his ear to her chest, listening for a heartbeat. He exclaimed, “The heart is still beating! I’m going to get the doctor in now.” Then he dashed out and went to his car.
We knelt at my grandmother’s bedside. Father said to me in a gentle and comforting voice, “Your grandma had always wished that in her old age she would die in her sleep. I suppose eighty-three is a good age to leave this world and to join the ancestors.”
In less than half an hour, Uncle Nam rushed in with one of the best Western-trained doctors in Sai Gon. The doctor speedily examined my grandmother. He even tried to revive her and I thought I saw some life in her for a second or two. Then her body went stiff. Nam looked at the doctor and demanded him to try again. The doctor shook his head. There was nothing he could do. He bowed his head and bade us goodbye. There were tears in Nam’s eyes.
He then surprised us by turning on my mother. He explained that “cruelty” had contributed to my grandmother’s “poor health” and shortened her life. “She could have lived much longer!” he declared.
This sudden sharpness in his voice took my mother aback. She burst into tears. Pretending not to notice, Nam continued to scold her until she got up and left the room. I watched her go out into the alley through the kitchen door. Nam took a chair and sat next to my grandmother’s bed, not saying another word. I brought him a cup of tea but he declined. He was in army uniform, but the stern cast of the prominent military commander had gone from his face and been replaced by sorrow.
To the Vietnamese, dying in one’s sleep in old age is considered most fortunate. We were equally pleased my grandmother hadn’t died away from home. The Vietnamese believe that carrying a corpse home is bad luck. There are no funeral homes in Viet Nam, and therefore, if a person is seriously ill with little chance of survival while receiving hospital treatment, family members rush the patient home before he or she dies.
Nam wanted to pay the funeral expenses but my father resisted, saying that he and I would pay. Furthermore, he said, my grandma wouldn’t have wanted an elaborate funeral. I was disappointed that my father had refused Nam’s help. I said nothing. When Nam left, my parents talked about the funeral expenses. They decided not to use our savings. Instead, my mother offered to sell the gold bracelet my grandmother had given her when they first met eighteen years earlier in the village. The jewellery shop weighed it at two taels of solid gold. About half of the cash was then used for the funeral and burial costs.
My mother and Nam’s sister, Co Hai, washed grandmother’s body with scented lotion. They then dressed her in her blue silk ao dai and black silk trousers. Her face was covered with a piece of white cotton cloth, a symbolic barrier between the deceased and the living. It was also meant to shield family members and relatives from emotional outbursts. I trimmed her nails and placed the cuttings in four small sacks, one attached to each hand and foot. Three years later her body would be exhumed, a common Vietnamese practice, and the bones transferred to an earthenware container for a final burial or cremation. The nail clippings would help to identify the correct bones.
I placed a bowl of uncooked rice on the lid of the coffin – in the belief it kept the dead body from arising. My brothers and I took turns standing guard, in case cats or dogs came into the house. It was said that if an animal jumped over a coffin, the body inside was revived temporarily and behaved strangely so as to scare the wits out of anyone present.
Because we were poor, my grandmother’s coffin had not been bought in advance. Earlier generations of my paternal relatives had always bought coffins for senior family members ahead of time and kept them in the house for months, even years before the person fell ill and actually died. When my great grandparents died, each was buried temporarily in the back garden for several months before being moved to a permanent location. This was to prevent thieves from stealing valuable items from inside the coffin. The practice of buying coffins ahead of time by well-to-do families was followed by Nam and Nghiem. They acquired coffins and also had graves constructed in advance for Granduncle Ba and his wife.
Vietnamese Buddhists, believing in re-incarnation, are not supposed to fear death. Without death there is no rebirth. Grandmother used to say that dying is a natural life process on the Wheel of Rebirth. It is understood that life is not a straight line of birth leading to death but a circle of life and death, repeated.
For three days following my grandmother’s death we gathered in front of a specially erected altar near her coffin and prayed. We made an offering of food to her spirit. On the altar, the oil lamps, candles and incense sticks were kept burning all the time. We dressed in long white cotton gowns with white funeral headbands. Flower wreaths arrived from relatives and friends with sympathy messages. We placed them in rows alongside the walls. Every night a Buddhist monk in a saffron cassock held a prayer ceremony for grandmother’s soul. On the fourth day the monk and my father led the funeral procession. The coffin, surrounded by the wreaths, was transported to the cemetery in a black van. We walked behind all the way to the cemetery, a two-hour journey. Along the route, golden votive papers were scattered as symbolic money for my grandmother to use in heaven. My father didn’t hire musicians for the funeral procession. A thay dia ly, or geomancer, had been consulted to choose a burial site.
* * *
I took stock of myself now as the dutiful eldest daughter in our very modest house, with a quiet father, four younger brothers, a baby sister, a scowling mother, noisy neighbours, and some distinguished relatives. We lived in relative poverty as the war that had killed many of our family and friends crept slowly closer and closer. Our standard of living was better on my new salary but my mother feared the rampant inflation would catch up with us. She moaned about it.
The Ministry of Transportation where my father and I worked had a management structure which included an American Advisory Board. The head of the Board was an American named George. He was heavy-set, grey-haired and in his mid-fifties. His office was at one of the USAID buildings in central Sai Gon. He came to the agency once a week to meet with his two American subordinates (who had their office in our building) and the Vietnamese director. Officially he was the advisor to the Ministry.
I wanted to study English at the USAID English language centre. To be accepted as a student there the application had to contain the signature of a sponsoring American. George offered to sponsor me. I thought now that Robert had gone there would be no one to teach me English. I worried that what fluency I had acquired would deteriorate.
Eight months after I had started my accounting job, the Vietnamese director found out about my English skills and promoted and transferred me to the American Advisory Board, working directly with the two Americans. George approved the transfer. I received a big increase in salary. Although the director never said anything directly to me, I sensed that in his mind I would become his ally in his dealings with the Americans. I felt dubious. How much could a twenty-one year old help him? But I was willing to go along with it because I preferred working with Americans and the raise I had received significantly improved my family’s financial situation.
Whenever George came to the agency for meetings he would refer to me as “the charming young lady”, without calling me by my name. I quickly learned that he bore a lot of resentment towards the Vietnamese director and to a senior American who had a much closer working relationship with the Minister of Transportation than George himself. According to him, all of them – the minister, the other American, and the director --were seriously corrupt and ought to be in jail. He also scolded me, “You work in the accounting department. You must have known that they are cheating.” He showed me an accounting report from the Vietnamese director and pointed out the suspicious money losses.
Meanwhile, the director expected me to be on his side and to speak “positively” on his behalf. He wanted
me to gather useful information from the Americans. The situation became increasingly sensitive and I found myself being pulled in opposite directions. The director had his own source of resentment, telling me that the Americans were making far too much money and he was getting only a fraction of it for all the work he did. To deal with such inequality, he asserted, the Vietnamese resorted to their only remedy – corruption.
Some weeks later, George informed me the minister was planning to take action to remove him from his advisory position at the ministry. He suspected – correctly – that I might have talked to them about his resentment and the evidence of corruption he had been collecting. I confessed. I apologized, explaining that I had been hopelessly caught between two forces.
On a number of occasions George asked me to meet him confidentially at his office. One day, after his regular visit to the ministry, he suggested that we have dinner at a French restaurant. I was his ally, he said, someone he could talk to, someone who understood him. I hesitated but as he persisted I agreed. He offered to pick me up from my house in his car, but I persuaded him to let me take a taxi to his apartment first. We would then go to the French restaurant in his car. To return, I’d already planned to take a taxi straight home. This way I would avoid gossiping in my neighbourhood.
At George’s apartment, I rang the doorbell and waited for him in the entrance hall. He opened the door and invited me in for a drink in his large living room, which I could see had an attached study. He took out photo albums from a drawer in the study and began telling me in detail about his family. He was very proud, he said, to be a grandfather.
Sitting in his study, I glanced into the living room and noticed that my beaded shoes were on the coffee table. Upon arrival, I had placed them near the entrance door according to Vietnamese custom. He had moved them and put them on the coffee table. This was strange but perhaps there was some American custom involved that I knew nothing about.