Late Blossom

by Laura Lam

  I’d been told by an overseas Vietnamese friend about the agony of passing through the fourteen desks at Tan Son Nhat airport a few years earlier, for lengthy questioning and inspection. I’d paid attention to every detail as he described them and became increasingly nervous. One piece of advice he’d given me was to take a carton of foreignmade cigarettes. This would smooth the way at the airport.

  I stepped down from the plane to board one of the airport buses leading to the immigration area. It was a hot and humid day, and even the most modest building was staffed with intimidating immigration officers in army uniform. The interior was dense with cigarette smoke. Most of the passengers on my plane were non-Vietnamese. None of them seemed to show any signs of anxiety.

  When I had applied for a tourist visa to Sai Gon I’d been instructed by the travel agency to submit five ID photos and had to fill in a pile of forms. I was told that upon my arrival at Tan Son Nhat airport I’d need to fill in more papers. At the first immigration desk, I slipped out the carton of Winston and placed it on the desk, “For you, Big Brother!” The man behind the desk tacitly acknowledged it. After glancing through the pages in my US passport, he smiled and gave instructions on how to proceed with the remaining requirements.

  As I walked away from his desk another man appeared by my side and offered to go through the entire procedure with me. I imagined he was an “assistant” to the first immigration official. He said, “Big Sister, is this your first time back?” He then said that he would accompany me until the end. When we came to the queue in front of the high counter, where my passport and visa would be carefully scrutinized, he walked off. My heart began to beat rapidly as I waited. This immigration officer stared at me and then at my passport. Although the questions were standard, I felt his contemptuous look, his harsh voice and his overall expression carried a hidden and negative message. The assistant was waiting for me discreetly on the other side of the high counter. I walked past and we both went to the baggage belt. We had to wait a long time. He lifted my suitcases, placed them on a trolley, and pushed it to the next queue. As if he guessed what was on my mind, he said, “Big Sister! All crimes have been forgiven, and you must no longer have fear.” He said that the government was encouraging Overseas Vietnamese Patriots (Viet Kieu Yeu Nuoc) to return, to help rebuild the country.

  At the last desk he lifted my bags off the trolley and placed them on the X-ray belt. I declared the contents in my luggage and handbag. The immigration man asked me what sort of jewellery I was wearing. He wrote on the declaration form that I had a pair of jade earrings, a jade bracelet, and a Seiko watch. He looked at me again to make sure he had not missed out anything before letting me go. I picked up my passport, gave two American dollars to the assistant, thanked him, sighed with relief, and wheeled the two suitcases as quickly as possible, through the sliding door.

  A crowd – my family was itself a crowd – was waiting at the entrance. My mother, my brothers and sister, their wives and children had come to the airport, eighteen of them altogether. My sister, Hong, said, “Father has to stay home to guard the house. Last night he didn’t sleep at all. For days he has been so anxious.” We left the airport in a large, rented white van, heading to my parents’ new house.

  I immediately noticed that Sai Gon was much poorer than it had been during the war years. There were at least four times the number of bicycles on the road. What struck me most was the appearance of the cyclos and their drivers. None of the cyclos had white cushions or polished metal frames as they used to. Now the cushions were torn, dusty, and covered in dark stains; the metal frames were old, rusted, bent, and damaged. Nearly all the drivers were wearing torn and dirty clothes, and their faces were symbols of extreme poverty. My sister told me that the majority of cyclo drivers in Sai Gon had been soldiers of the former South Vietnamese regime, unable to obtain jobs after their release from re-education camps. Even though the government was trying its best to create work opportunities for many of the poor, these men were the lowest on the list of priorities.

  My sister rang the doorbell. We heard my father’s footsteps. I heard the clinking of the house keys, knowing he was there on the other side. The folding door was pulled aside, and there he was, with his big smile, bent forward, straining to see us, “Has Hoa Lai arrived?” Shouting, “I’m here, Dad!” I embraced him.

  “Father has poor vision these days and eye glasses don’t seem to help.” said my sister. We walked through the patio and entered the living room. My siblings’ families filled the entire ground floor.

  Every day from morning to night, the house was full of people. The overcrowded conditions and the constant noise were hard to get used to. I handed my mother tien cho, market money so she and her four daughters-in-law could purchase food and prepare meals for everyone. The American dollars I brought were exchanged for Vietnamese piasters called dong, at a gold shop. Government banks in Sai Gon had their foreign currency bureaux but the exchange rate was too low.

  * * *

  One afternoon, I told Nhan to buy a new wooden desk for Father. He had his clothes, stacks of personal and household papers, money, hardware tools and everything else crammed inside a small wooden chest. He had difficulty finding anything. This was the same chest that he’d purchased when we all moved to Sai Gon in 1963. The new desk arrived and Nhan helped father to transfer his personal items to the desk. I noticed a beautiful gold frame, and in it a rectangular sheet of rice paper with gold edges, containing inscriptions in calligraphy. I asked him if I could look at the frame. They were revolutionary medal citations – awarded him by the Prime Minister shortly after the American War. He’d been given a high national award. He also had revolutionary medals, confirming his outstanding services with the nationalist intelligence during the two wars (my mother had taken the frame down from the living room wall and asked my father to lock it up before my arrival). I said to my father, “I didn’t know that you had worked for the Viet Cong!” With his usual calm and gentle smile, he said, “We’ll talk about this later, you and I, when we have some quiet time together.”

  That evening, like any other evening during my visit, my brothers and their families stayed until almost midnight. By the time they left my parents had gone to bed so we could not talk.

  I lay awake in the pleasant bedroom near the back of the house and listened to the soft wind blowing through the lace curtains. The air was filled with the sounds of a tropical city, cats and dogs, the breeze ruffling the bushes, traffic sounds on the road, and from my parents’ bedroom, the steady snoring of my father and the periodic coughing of my mother. A bouquet of white orchids my sister had arranged in a tall ceramic vase stood silently on the little table, silhouetted against the window-side wall. Darts of light from the hall shone on the corner of the ceiling. My mind slowly returned to my childhood in the village and adolescent years in Sai Gon. Looking at myself and my father now, in 1991, the extreme contrast struck me forcibly.

  Unlike many Vietnamese in America who had been torn between the two cultures and unable to adjust to the new world, I had been able to adapt and advance myself, and had become Westernised in my thinking and way of life. A university education in the West, a professional career, a Western husband -- all these had transformed me. When I looked at my beloved father, here and now, in the old Sai Gon, ageing and in poor health, my entire framework of understanding began to disintegrate and would need to be rebuilt. Living so long as an American, had I absorbed their views of the war and forgotten my family’s nationalism? Had I never understood the flag I was wrapped in at birth?

  I asked my sister to arrange an early dinner the next evening. When the others had gone, my father and I went to the patio on the second floor of the house to drink tea. I sat in the new hammock my mother had made. He was sitting upright in a new rattan chair.

  He said that people who had worked in the intelligence service rarely talked about their activities. He had never shared his experiences with anyone outside the small circle of National
ist colleagues.

  I reminded him that he had abandoned us when I was a child and told him I was still angry with him. I could not forget that eighth day of October, that rainy day, he suddenly left the village without saying goodbye.

  MY FATHER’S STORY

  We sat on the patio for three consecutive evenings. The first evening my father described his activities as a secret agent in the Mekong Delta.

  In 1945, at twenty-three, my father followed his uncle, Cuong, and joined the undercover Viet Minh. That year French troops attacked his home region of Can Tho and local residents waged a scorched-earth resistance war – burning down houses and markets to prevent the French from becoming established. The gold shop of his other uncle, Ba, was burned to ashes, after the family moved all their belongings to a family friend. My father, after undergoing intensive training for one year, was elected to the local executive committee and started recruiting young people for the Youth Leagues. In 1947 he became Secretary for the Viet Minh Front in Long My district, south of Can Tho. His motivation was simply patriotic. Restoring the country to its own people was enough in itself.

  In 1949, given his respected character and popularity in Long My, my father was appointed by the colonial authorities to be head of the Economic Committee for Truong An village. Secretly he still held the post of Secretary for the Viet Minh Front. Meanwhile, senior members of the Viet Minh in the South had settled in the “Jungle of Hell”, protected by the intelligence network of the Viet Minh Front.

  When Ngo Dinh Diem took power in South Viet Nam in July 1954 my father continued his work in the transportation of rice and other commodities in Truong An. It was at this time the new regime started building up the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam and anticipated the need to feed the army. The government was still waiting for confirmation of foreign funds from the United States and my father was asked to come up with a regular arrangement whereby local farmers would sell the food supplies on credit to the government. Local authorities would pay the farmers later.

  In early 1955 my father was asked by the Viet Minh to set up an underground intelligence base in Truong An. He enlisted the help of three men with revolutionary ideals – all of the Nguyen family. The eldest, Bay Tot, became my father’s right hand man. Bay Tot’s two younger brothers, Muoi Dien and Tam Bang (and also Muoi Dien’s wife) worked for him in Truong An. The three brothers had earlier provided protection to several leaders of the Nationalist force in the delta region, including the senior revolutionary Ha Huy Giap and the future Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet. My father felt that he could trust them.

  My father explained, “To help strengthen the regime, the Americans had assisted Diem’s younger brother Nhu to create a secret network of Catholics who had come down as refugees from the North, and Nhu named it the Can Lao. It contained ten separate and powerful intelligence agencies. Among them, the police force was considered as most crucial. Members of these agencies informed the government about any traitors, spies, or foreign plots, and kept a close watch on government officials at all levels.”

  In Long My, my father was able to cultivate the district’s chief, a Catholic appointed by the Diem regime. They got on well and when the government decided to set up a village council for Truong An in May 1955, he asked my father to help. This was when a Catholic friend named Quang became the council chief with my father as his financial secretary.

  My father’s secret network continued providing protection to key nationalist members, organizing new locations for bases, transferring intelligence personnel, and monitoring the activities of the ARVN troops at the Constance Garrison. He was under constant threat of discovery or betrayal and in regular torment over concealing what he knew.

  One day in mid-1956 troops from the Garrison entered the house of my father’s men – the Nguyen brothers – who were staying with their parents. Both Bay Tot and Tam Bang had just returned home from the jungle three hours earlier and they were having a meal with their parents. Tam Bang got up quickly and ran off. One soldier threw a grenade at him. It exploded just as Tam Bang dived into the river. Bay Tot climbed into the rice barrel in the kitchen but they found him and interrogated him. They struck his head with rifles, trying to force a confession out of him. He remained silent and they continued to beat him until he was unconscious. One soldier rushed to the sun porch and grabbed a hammock. They wrapped his body inside it. Another soldier found a hammer and he started beating Bay Tot’s head and face until his eyes and brain spilled out. Then they took his body, still wrapped in the hammock, to Constance Garrison. At eight o’clock in the evening they shot at his dead body in the back yard.

  My father remembered the following morning: the chief of Constance Garrison made a public announcement, “Last night our soldiers tried to arrest Bay Tot but he ran away. He was shot trying to escape.”

  When Bay Tot’s hammered body was being shot behind the Garrison building that evening, my father and Quang were sitting in the village council’s office on the bank of the Constance Channel, drinking tea and chatting. Hearing a series of gunshots, Quang said, “We’re still in the period of cease fire. Why are they shooting now?” My father became very tense. Just before Bay Tot was captured my father had given him a stack of blank identity cards, each carrying the seal of the district’s office. Bay Tot had been instructed to “issue” these ID cards to new members of the intelligence network, in order to disguise their real identity. When he learned that they had fired at the body of Bay Tot, my father suffered a great anxiety, “The cards? What did he do with them? Did they find them?”

  A few days later there was a typhoon in Truong An. In a friendly conversation with the head of Constance Garrison, my father offered to take an ARVN sergeant out into to the jungle to gather palm leaves to replace the garrison’s roof. He knew all the local channels. He took the sergeant out in a sampan. As they moved slowly along they saw a man on the bank in black cotton clothes, wearing a conical hat. He had his back to the river. The sergeant shouted out, “That’s Tam Bang, he’s Viet Minh!” and raised his gun. My father quickly stopped him, saying loudly enough to be heard, “Don’t shoot without seeing his face. Let’s arrest him to make sure it’s Tam Bang.” Hearing this, Tam Bang rushed into the forest, leaving his hat behind. The sergeant could only fire wildly in the direction of his escape.

  The sergeant was angry but my father pacified him. At that time there was a woman sitting near the riverbank chopping wood, and she overheard all that was said.

  Later that evening Tam Bang’s mother came to see my father and thanked him for saving her son’s life. My father felt a chill in his spine and cut her dead, “No Madame, I did no such thing.” He signalled her to leave. Tam Bang was captured at a later date, and tortured. He ended up spending twenty years in a ‘tiger cage’ in the notorious Con Son Island prison. Like his elder brother Bay Tot, Tam Bang never revealed my father’s identity throughout his imprisonment. Without their loyalty my father would almost certainly have been executed.

  During the early years of the Diem regime the youngest of the three brothers, Muoi Dien, was an important contact between my father and the Viet Minh. One day in 1956 he came to warn my father that someone had reported him. The informer had said that my father owned a radio which he communicated with the Viet Minh. Muoi Dien said that ARVN troops from Phuoc Long would soon come to arrest my father.

  The next day, at five o’clock in the morning, my father suddenly heard a series of gunshots, a signal from Muoi Dien. At that time, I was asleep in my father’s arms in the hammock. He told me later, “That night you had been restless and your mother asked me to get you to sleep in the hammock. Muoi Dien’s signal alerted me, and I handed you to your mother and rushed through the back door. I crawled inside a haystack at the back of the Hoang’s house and later escaped to the jungle.”

  ARVN troops arrived at the house five minutes later and demanded to know where my father was. My mother remained calm and told them he had not been home for several days. They searc
hed the house but could find no evidence of him. They found my father’s watch and snatched it. The troops stayed until three o’clock the next afternoon before giving up.

  My father went to the Long My district chief to register a complaint about the accusations. The authorities in Phuoc Long made an apology to the chief and him. In the mean time my father transferred Muoi Dien to a village in Can Tho. However, led by a local spy, government troops began searching for Muoi Dien to make an arrest. Tam Bang described to me the events leading to Muoi Dien’s death:

  “Government troops found him strolling in an open field. He tried to run away but it was too late. They came running after him and shot him in the back. Injured, he kept running – hoping to reach the jungle at the edge of the field. But they soon reached him and finished him off.”

  My father resigned his job with the council and left Truong An four days later. His life and work were increasingly in danger and he needed a place with a better cover in Sai Gon. He joined the Ministry of Transportation.

  * * *

  I do not know about my father’s secret work in Sai Gon – if there was any. But it was clear that he did not wish to tell me more.

  The second evening my father described Cuong’s political life, including the dangerous journey to Ha Noi for the First National Assembly of Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary government. The last evening he talked about the revolutionary life of young Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) and Ho’s thirty years in exile searching for international support to help liberate the country. Father answered my questions, “Why did Ho Chi Minh choose Communism?” “What kind of a leader was Ho?” “Was he a nationalist or a communist?”