Postcards From Nam

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “I am still active with the various South Vietnamese alumni associations.” He points to the entertainment center with a set of glass doors. It, too, is stacked with Vietnamese books and family pictures. I see a headshot of him as a virile young man, energetic, beaming, yet serious and commanding in his gait. The man in the picture wears a nicely cut suit of the 1960s, proudly holding a framed certificate, leaning against a mahogany desk in a high-ceilinged office of French colonial design.

  “That was taken inside the First Republic’s Presidential Palace, Dinh Gia Long,” he told me. “You’re probably too young to know.”

  “Tell me all about your career in South Vietnam.” I put admiration into my voice. He settles himself down on the chair facing mine, and begins his monologue. Almost an hour passes, and I seem to learn everything there is to know about some bureaucrat’s public service career, ended in a war that placed him on the losing side. He even mentions and gives me a cinematic description of the South Vietnamese intelligence in the 1960s and 1970s, supposedly paired with the CIA, so he claims. He needs no prompting by journalistic questioning. He is on a roll. The child in him is telling while the old man in him is reminiscing. Yet, it is never clear to me what he did in the South Vietnamese government, the First or the Second Republic.

  The confusion and vagueness continue in his storytelling, although it is also packed with details on how great it was. Occasionally I have to interrupt his marathon monologue with little exclamations here and there, only to demonstrate my fascination. I am getting closer to my target.

  “And then came the spring of 1975, the time of the great loss,” I probe in the voice of an innocent girl wanting to know. “Did you spend any time in a concentration camp?”

  He goes on for another half an hour about how he managed to travel to the farthest southern tip of the Vietnam peninsula, all the way to Ca Mau Bay, to escape the “reeducation” call by the new rulers of Saigon. From there, he planned his escape, using his veteran knowledge of intelligence and counterinsurgent activities, he brags.

  Why wasn’t an intelligence specialist (if that was what he was) evacuated by the Americans? The question lingers in my mind.

  “Uncle Dien, do you blame the Americans for leaving you behind and not evacuating you in April nineteen seventy-five?” I finally have to ask.

  “Oh my, tell me about it! They even left intelligence files identifying their Vietnamese employees at the US Embassy, as Martin himself was getting on the last helicopter, you know the story. It’s in Newsweek magazine.”

  Yet he says nothing about what other Vietnamese refugees have told me—that after the fall of Saigon, he successfully organized half a dozen trips without once being caught by the Communist government. He says nothing about the fact as told to me by one man who claimed that he used to work with Mr. Dien: Mr. Dien’s older brother was a high-ranked official within the Vietnamese Communist Party, who emerged after the Communist takeover of Saigon. After decades of separation due to a war that tore families apart, the brothers were reunited. The older brother decided to go into business with his younger brother, who used to fight on the other side of the war. In the late seventies, the brothers formed a partnership to sell space on fishing boats to ethnic Chinese Vietnamese who were expelled from their homes by the Communist government after the Vietnam-Sino War of 1979. The price for a space on a boat was measured by gold taels. The brothers accepted only gold.

  Maybe the rumor is just not true. Maybe the rumor is just part of the petty gossip started by those Vietnamese who dislike Mr. Dien and who have a flair for defamation. If Mr. Dien made his fortune collecting gold taels and selling spaces on fishing boats to hundreds of Boat People, his current lifestyle does not show any signs of such fortune. With all those gold taels, he should have lived much better. The house, the front yard, the old man’s living style do not exactly represent luxury.

  My heart races faster as I begin to get into the main purpose of my visit. He can just get angry and throw me out:

  “Your boat ran into pirates. There were two young men, no, in fact, it’s a young man and a child on your boat. Do you remember? Nam and Tiep?

  He stops smiling, staring at me sternly. A state of confusion takes over his eyes—the gaze has lost its focus.

  “Who?” he asks, appearing confused. His eyes blink nervously, as though a tick has developed. The folds of skin around the eyes are performing their own dance. My mentioning that part of his past has caused his face to lose its innocence. He is now a senile man afraid of remembering, or plainly suffering from the dementia of old age.

  “I am positive they were on your boat, Uncle Dien,” I say firmly. “They are friends of mine. They told me about your help. How good a manager you were. How you hired the best navigators. How you helped many South Vietnamese officers to escape through your own connections. Regarding that last trip, you would have got the refugees all the way to Indonesia and Singapore if it hadn’t been for the pirates. These boys are alive. And grateful to you. They actually sent you a gift.”

  I take the box out of my tote bag. It is a pair of cufflinks, engraved with his name. I bought the cufflinks myself and had the engravings made in Houston’s famous Galleria shopping center.

  “Oh how nice.” He regains part of his ease, beaming his innocent smile.

  I refuse to give up. “Tell me about the pirates, Uncle Dien.”

  Quickly, the innocent child in him, once at ease and bragging, is gone. Only the old man is speaking now, in a coarse, rampant voice, with lots of “uh” and “ah” and poor articulation. His eyes blink themselves into despair, the iris almost hidden behind the dancing folds of skin.

  “They took everything. All of my gold. They had guns and big knives. I had a pistol, but there were too many of them. They pressed me down and took my gun.”

  “What else did they do, please?”

  He does not answer. Instead, he looks blankly at me as though I were a ghost.

  “Please tell me, Uncle Dien.”

  A long pause ensues and then he opens his mouth with such great effort:

  “You can’t know. You can’t write about this. Just can’t. Not about us, the Vietnamese men…”

  He stammers himself into a frenzy. His eyes take hold of me, not just a pair of nervously blinking eyes, but rather two sockets of pain working themselves into an obvious muscle tic that can no longer be controlled.

  The tic around his eyes goes on for a long time.

  “That’s all I can tell you.” Uncle Dien makes the statement with definite finality, finishing the story not yet told. “I am getting old. I don’t remember much,” he says vaguely.

  Silence surrounds us and I do not want to push him. His mouth is closed, his eyes, cold and fish-like, stare past the window, his hands folding defensively in his lap.

  I get neither a hint nor a confirmation of the story that has been told to me by other Vietnamese who escaped on the same boat. Names of these Vietnamese have been provided to me by David Daugherty. In their version of the story, the legendary Uncle Dien got on his knees and begged, hands pressing together into the shape of a leaf, head bouncing back and forth in the Buddhist worshipping motion, pressed all the way down to the filthy oily bottom of the boat.

  “Uncle Dien, I only want to know what happened to the two brothers. Please help me,” I plead.

  “You see,” he picks up the empty glass I have put down on the coffee table, “it was the last trip I organized, so I myself got on it to leave the country. I didn’t allow women on the boat. Five times I took a bunch of escapees, all men, to Indonesia and then returned to Ca Mau. No women, absolutely. There was nothing else I could have done.”

  He continues to whisper, as though he could not help talking, at the same time lowering his voice in fear of being heard—fear of the painful memory, or perhaps his own conscience. Or simply the unbearable burden of having been there—the pain of being an accidental witness.

  “You should never write about this. It is not
good. Just not good. The last trip. Just a bunch of us older guys. But then I decided to take the two young boys.”

  He is gnawing his fingernails onto the glass, running them alongside it, unaware of the shrieking noise.

  “Two boys. Brothers. Both very pale and slender. One about sixteen. Could be older, I don’t know. Couldn’t tell his age exactly. The other one was about nine or ten. They were no good to us. Too skinny, too fragile. Couldn’t do a thing. I shoved them underneath the cabin near the engine and threw a mat over them. But then…”

  He places the glass down and then picks it up again nervously:

  “You see, those vampires, they overlooked the boys. I hid them well. But the little one started crying. So the vampires saw the little boy wiggling and they dragged him out. Tore up his clothes.”

  My heart stops.

  “And we all begged. And they were about to…” He does not finish the sentence, his fingers nervously plucking at the rim of the empty glass. He is not looking at me.

  “The older one heard his little brother cry. He got out. He said, ‘Kill me, take me instead.’ And then he got into a squabble with them. They said, ‘Oh well, big hero, better meat.’ First they beat him up, like cats playing with a mouse. And I thought all this time, poor boy playing hero, what a stupid fool, the beasts were getting mad and they would kill us all. But then the head of the vampires shouted they were running out of time, and he ordered the rest of the beasts to leave. So they put a knife to the neck of a few unlucky men, forcing them to leave our boat and board theirs. They threatened to set our boat on fire unless the men got on board with them. The leader, a crock of filth, particularly wanted the two kids. So he grabbed both of them and dragged them with him onto their boat. The older one struggled so hard he bit the vampire’s arm and got loose. They were right on the beasts’ gangplank, you see, right in between two boats.

  “Did they set your boat on fire?” I asked.

  “I was very much afraid they would. But they didn’t. Except for the boys, the other hostages offered no resistance, so the vampires never struck a match.”

  A crashing noise ensues. He has broken the glass, cutting himself. A tiny stream of blood seeps from the crack of his fingers onto his brown palm, smearing onto his knuckles, fingertips, and blackened nails. He smears his cut finger onto his dirty slacks, oblivious to the wound.

  “The older boy continued to struggle. He got loose and grabbed his little brother and shoved the child back onto our boat, just in time before the bloodsucking pirate grabbed the older boy again and dragged him on. Things were happening so quick they didn’t bother to go after the little one.”

  “Did he say anything? This brave young man?” My eyes are dry, but I hear both anxiety and the coming of choking tears in my voice.

  “He was saying something. I can’t remember exactly, but this much I remember. He fell a couple of times and the beast pulled him up, and from where I was, I could see his mouth moving, his chest and slender shoulders pressing forward as he was trying to shout out something. It was obvious he was still struggling so he could talk to his little brother. I couldn’t hear him. Things happened real, real fast, you know. The leader of the pirates believed in superstition, that they had to sail away before the sun died down. They were speaking in a combination of Thai and Cantonese, which I understood, and I was also guessing from their gestures that they had to sail on before sunset, and so they did not want to waste any more time with us.

  “So they sailed away before the sun died down, taking these few men and the older boy with them. I knew it was bad for those who were kidnapped and held hostage by the vampires, but at least for those of us who stayed with the boat, there was a chance for us to live.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “The engine of our boat was destroyed. So we floated for a whole night and then a couple of days, with no food or water. Worse, the vampires had also damaged our boat other ways, and it was gradually sinking. I knew how to swim.”

  “What happened to the other men?”

  “A few drowned.”

  “What happened to the young kid who stayed with your boat?”

  “He was on our boat, all the time hanging on to something, without a word spoken. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  I look deep into his eyes, and he refuses to meet my stare. I wait for him to continue, and he is now completely involved in placing his cut finger into his mouth to stop the bleeding. Eventually, he puts his whole hand on top of his tongue and stops talking all together.

  Again, there is no hint or confirmation of what the other survivors have recounted in their tales. According to one of the men who survived the ordeal, during those few days floating at sea, as the boat was gradually sinking, they were all struggling and fighting for a chance to live. At the last minute, a man was trying to get Tiep to hold on to a log. But Uncle Dien knocked Tiep out and took the log for himself.

  For a long time, we do not speak or look at each other. Uncle Dien seems to lose himself in the kind of concentration that accompanies one who travels into the past in order to figure out the present and predict the future.

  “You’ve talked to that miserable Dat the writer before coming here, haven’t you?” Uncle Dien asks me, without meeting my eyes. His gaze lingers, instead, alongside one of the coffee table’s edges.

  In our Vietnamese way, it can be very impious for a much younger person to look straight into an elder’s eyes. But I am doing that now. I am patiently searching for his eyes, to match his gaze with my own. A thousand questions must be asked, yet no word is spoken.

  He finally looks up at me quickly before lowering his eyes again. I briefly see the eyes of an old man who is extremely hurt. Anger sparks from those eyes. It chills my spine. His eyes now linger alongside the coffee table:

  “Thang Dat Nha Van Nha Bao Khon Nan. Do Cho Chet!”

  He has just called “Mr. Dat the writer-journalist” a derogatory name. That miserable SOB, Dat.

  “He told you I had a Communist brother, right? Look at my family pictures over there.” He turns to the entertainment center.

  “Do you see any brother over there? Just me, my parents, my wife and children. I am the only son. I don’t have any brother from the North.” He pauses and then continues bitterly:

  “He told you I had connections to avoid concentration camps, right? I refused to register myself and left Saigon to go to another province farther south, where nobody knew me. That’s how I was able to stay away.” He swallows with difficulty, as though to hold his anger in.

  “He told you that I kneeled and begged on the boat, and took the log from the child, right? Don’t you know, it was Dat who kneeled and begged. He even rounded up the men for the pirates so that they would spare him. He offered them the boy instead. And then later after they left and the boat was sinking, he was the one who took the log from the boy to save himself. It wasn’t me. It was him. I was the one who tried to save the boy. I almost got both of us drowned.”

  Silence ensues. At some point, Uncle Dien looks up, and this time he meets my gaze, with a whisper:

  “Don’t you know who that miserable Dat really was, and still is? He is one of them.”

  “Who? Who are ‘they’?” I am genuinely confused.

  “Them! Who else?”

  The silent pause grasps me, and I tremble.

  “You know who they are,” he adds, looking at me intensely, with the same anger that burns. “I organized these trips, so I knew. They put their men on the boats. They sent them to America. They are all over now. In California. In Texas. They corrupt the community. Everywhere. I know, but what can I do? So I garden instead. That’s why they hate me. They want to redden America, too.”

  There is resolution in his eyes when they finally meet mine.

  I am horrified. By the thought.

  The eyes may have said that I am one of them. I am sent here by men like “the SOB Mr. Dat the writer-journalist.” Men who live a life of deceit.r />
  The horror numbs my limbs for a moment, when it finally occurs to me that Uncle Dien is suspecting me of being a Communist, like that Mr. Dat!

  I am one of those Communists disguised and sent to America on special missions to destroy the exile community? The idea is shocking and insane.

  I hurriedly reach inside my purse and show him my business card. My bar membership. I tell him about my grandparents, the condemned landlords of North Vietnam sentenced to be eliminated by Ho Chi Minh government. I tell him that here in America, I topped my J.D. class at Harvard Law School. The name Harvard somehow has its intended effect. It cools down the anger and suspicion in his eyes, and it helps label me justifiably as “free enterprise” and “no Communist.”

  I say, finally and definitively:

  “No, Uncle Dien, I am not one of them…definitely not. But, but…” I stammer on, “even Mr. Dat…as a journalist in the old country, he was supposed to cover the war, supposedly on our side…”

  “That’s what he told you and everybody else. Not true. Not true. He was a draft evader. He never fought in combat, not even for a second. Now he gets his money from who knows whom. The Communists, of course. The dude also lives off women’s skirts. Those spies, they could make themselves into anything. The ‘press’ badge in Saigon was no sweat to him. These spies even went to the concentration camps, too, to become sentries and to turn others in. They were all over Saigon; they were even inside the Presidential Palace, and they are here now. I should never have put that traitor on the boat. I should have known better. I had my suspicions, you know. But what choice did I have, then? I had to bribe them and take their orders for them to look the other way. I should have shot that SOB Dat that day on the boat. That’s why he defames me now. Him and his bosses. They want to cover their tracks, because I know. I know. I know. And they know I know. They definitely know how much I know.”