by Tom Bissell
But perhaps this is letting Ho off the moral hook too easily. Here is a story Duiker has pulled from one of Ho's two self-penned biographies:
One day, a Chinese nurse who was assigned to care for Uncle [Ho's name for himself] asked him secretly: “Uncle, what is communism?” … The nurse knew that Communists were not smugglers, thieves, or murderers, so she couldn't understand why Communists were arrested.
“To put it simply,” Uncle replied, “Communists hope to make it so that Chinese nurses will not have to take orders from their British superiors.” The nurse looked at Uncle with wide eyes and replied, “Really?”
No doubt Ho believed this, and perhaps as time went on the self-slavery of Communism remained less odious than any kind of foreign domination. The often cited point that Communism was itself a foreign ideology is too facile an observation, and it begs the question of why every other political vision available to Ho had the associative venom of a wicked colonial legacy flowing through it. (Andre Malraux: “It is difficult to conceive of a courageous Annamite being other than a revolutionary”) During the Vietnam War, The New York Times interviewed some young South Vietnamese about why Communism appealed to them. One responded that he took “note of the fact that on this side we have half a million foreign troops while on the other side there are none.” When one takes into consideration the universal appeal of self-determination, the lengths to which foreigners were willing to go to prevent it in Vietnam, and the liberating promises (however qualified) of Communism, Ho Chi Minh was a Stalinist, certainly—and maybe the only Stalinist who can be forgiven it.
II
My father looked crumply-eyed over my shoulder, his mouth cast in the same emotionally undecided frown that I had noticed, with increasing frequency, in recent photographs of myself. My back to the street, I whirled around in my crackling wicker chair to have a look. Simultaneously a group of German (or perhaps French) tourists entered the cafe and crowded around its entrance while waiting for a hostess to escort them to a table. The men were red-faced and abdomenous, the women coltish and slim, sandals with socks all around. I turned back to my father with a querying look. “What is it?”
After a small, distracted shrug he said, “Nothing” and returned to the lightly oiled row of circular squid tubes arranged Olympic-ring-style upon his oval plate.
We were in Hue and had been here a little more than an hour. We had arrived at a small regional airport, in fact an old French airport, to meet Truong and Hien—our driver and guide, respectively. We had been told that Hien specialized in touring veterans of the American War, and with him we would spend the next twelve days. Both were friendly and, I thought, clearly touched by the nature of my father's and my trip. Hien had been shocked to learn that we lived so far apart in the United States and wondered whether we saw each other much. My father had answered, “I see him just enough not to dislike him.” Hien had then asked if we were hungry, brought us to this cafe, and then, with Truong, promptly disappeared.
Truong and Hien. In Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Fowler observes that it was difficult to assess the age of Vietnamese men because “they are boys and then they are old men.” Truong had a shaggy bowl haircut, a small mustache, long gangly arms, and a disarmingly goofy smile. Hien, only a few inches over five feet, was as compact and solid-looking as a dwarf male gymnast. He was additionally in possession of the single longest facial hair I had ever seen. It grew out of a mole on his cheek and was capable, literally, of being thrown over his shoulder. (Long mole hair is considered good luck in the Vietnamese culture.) Hien looked to be about thirty-six. He was fifty-two. Truong looked to be about twenty-two or twenty-three. He was thirty-six.
My father's tour of Vietnam had never taken him to Hue, and I had suffered from no particular mania to visit this city. But it was impressed upon us that a trip to Vietnam was not a trip to Vietnam without Hue, we had to see Hue. So now we ate in one of Hue's many small French-style cafes, sitting on wicker chairs covered with plush red cushions, our table draped with a velvety red tablecloth, large frondy plants lurking in every corner, while Jimmy Buffett's “Cheeseburger in Paradise” played at a low but nevertheless unacceptable volume. As my father sipped from a tiny cup of Vietnamese coffee—” Hooo, that'll curl your toenails”—I saw, over his shoulder, through one of the cafe's windows, the wide brown motionlessness of the Perfume River. Long, narrow wooden boats vaguely reminiscent of crocodiles floated along with ominous quietude. My eyes ached. The little sleep I had managed to get had been like slipping a grit-lined pillowcase over my brain. Jet lag had clipped off my nerves at their sparking ends.
A few minutes later my father was again peering over my shoulder. His expression this time was small-eyed, considered, more thoughtful. “They're about the right age. Don't you think?”
I turned again. By now the tourists had been escorted to their seats, leaving the cafe's spacious and doorlessly sunlit entrance clear. A few feet from the jamb huddled a one-legged Vietnamese man, clad in a dirty yellow poncho to fend off the rain that had not yet fallen but would, today and every day. This man was, among other things, a dead ringer for Manuel Noriega. Just beyond the Vietnamese Noriega was an even older shirtless man whose left hand was a freakishly withered twig of bony flesh. In his right hand was his beggar bowl. They had not been there when we entered.
I swiveled back to my father, sobered, and stared at my plate of spring rolls. After a few moments I looked up. “Do you think they're veterans?”
He was still staring at them, his forehead deeply lined. “What else would they be?”
“I wonder which side.” But I probably did not need to wonder. Veterans from the NLF and PAVN were said to have some right to hospital beds and other shelter. These men were almost certainly ARVN. Already this morning—outside the airport, inside the airport, beside Hue's hotel while we dropped off our luggage—we had met so many Vietnamese men who claimed to have fought with the Americans that my father finally muttered, “If all these people were with us, then why the hell did we lose?”
My father continued to stare at the beggars, his eyes bulging in helpless concern. He shook his head and then began to fork away at his squid. “When we leave, we should give them something.”
This astounded me. My father's politics are best described as Orthodox Midwestern Independent, irritated by the moral superiority of the Left and uncomfortable with the moral certainty of the Right. But his fierce antipathy for those who did not, in his mind, work hard—street people, Europeans, his Communist son—coursed through the ironworks of his mind like a vein of molten slag. Were my father himself not a hard worker, this attitude would have been infuriating. But he was one of the hardest-working men I had ever known.
As for me, beggary made a hash of my conscience. Give it a face, render it helpless, place it before me, and my pockets were emptied. With beggars I was a hopeless enabler and not to be trusted. We finished eating (each of our bites requiring thirty preoccupied chews), settled the bill, tipped heavily, looked at each other, rose, pushed our chairs back under the table, and moved across the tourist-crowded restaurant like long-striding bureaucrats of munificence. At the entrance my father turned and whispered, “You take the other guy,” by which he meant the withered-handed man. I went over to him and caught a sidelong glance of my father handing to Noriega a 10,000-dong note. This was about seventy cents. Noriega took the money with a quiet nod. The withered-armed man was without expression as I searched through my bills for a 10,000-dong note. All I seemed to have were 20,000-, 50,000-, and 100,000-dong notes. No matter the denomination, a different-colored portrait of Uncle Ho stared kindly up at me. I caved in and gave the withered-armed gentleman 50,000 dong—a little over the considerable sum of $3.
Suddenly, a legless crablike man wearing a flip-flop sandal on each hand scuttled out from the shady interior of an across-the-street convenience shack. He moved with the disarming, skittering quickness of a longer-armed primate. As an image it was fairly nightmarish, as a
biophysical display nothing short of astounding. The crabman had for some reason dead-reckoned upon my father and scrambled right past me. By now a little crowd had gathered. They were mainly young Vietnamese who took in the unfolding and no doubt daily drama with smirking but not hostile amusement.
The crabman reached my father, whose clean khaki pants had never looked cleaner, whose blue shirt had never looked bluer. With heartrending proficiency the crabman extricated his begging hand from his filthy flip-flop's homemade webbing and held it up to my father. My open-mouthed father stared down at the crabman. But I too had more supplicants. They were emerging from the hibiscus and palm trees lining the street and from all the shacks and alleyways. A little boy in a wheelchair came rolling up to me and practically skidded to a stop inches from my Nikes. “What's cooking, bub?” he asked. I gave him money to make him go away, which he did. In fact, he wheeled on, directly toward my father.
My father and the crabman were still regarding each other, the crab-man's tongue unfurled with canine extravagance and my father's expression simply unprecedented. One would think that after nearly three decades of surprising, disappointing, pleasing, and worrying him, I would have seen all his possible permutations of facial expression. But this one was new. It was not a look of sadness or fear or anger or guilt. His face asked no questions and expected no answers. It was a face looking deeply into that of another human being and seeing no possibility but that of mercy. He gave the crabman a 50,000-dong note, the smallest bill, I gathered, that he now had. He turned away from the crabman, and though he had been trying to ignore the wheelchair boy he handed over some money to him as well. My father then walked on. Where he was headed in this city he had never visited I had little idea, but he was certainly in a hurry to get there. I moved after him, but after two steps another beggar latched on to my hand and softly tugged.
Hien materialized with panic-widened eyes and rushed up to my wandering-away father. When Hien grabbed him by the arm, it took my father a moment to turn around, and he looked down at Hien with a face simultaneously lost and thankful. lust as suddenly as Hien had appeared, the car pulled up to within two feet of the cafe's doorless front entrance. With Secret Service efficiency Hien pushed my father down into the backseat. The car went into sideways reverse, squirted forward, and was suddenly beside me. I handed out several more 50,000-dong notes before retreating into the car's air-conditioned interior. Hien slammed my door shut, a sound that seemed inordinately harsh. As we began to pull away, I looked out the window. What had felt like an invading army of the scrofulous and maimed I now saw as six or seven peaceful if insistent beggars sensibly plying their trade at one of Hue's major tourist arteries. The boy in the wheelchair was laughing, and the crabman dragged himself back toward his darkness. Only Noriega waved goodbye. Some tourists—an older couple, clad in white—were now emerging from the café. The remaining and extremely keyed-up beggars quickly gathered around them. I turned away. We had made this couple's egress from lunch much more difficult.
We drifted along in silence. My father's head lolled back against the seat. His glasses were off, his eyes open, his hands in his lap. It did not even seem as though he was breathing.
“Dad?”
Months later I would share with a friend the story of my father's run-in with the beggars of Hue. My friend was something of a Vietnam hand and would respond by telling me that such a collision was becoming a stock scene in the literature of Americans in the new Vietnam. My friend would not say this to be snide or dismissive. Even as I was watching my father and the crabman there had seemed a ghastly familiarity to it, an easy fatedness.
“Hey, Dad?”
My father's eyes were fixed on the car's ceiling. He was as oblivious to my voice as he was to Truong and Hien's respectful silence. It did not matter on which side those men had battled, who had wounded them, what had wounded them, or that the only people that boy in the wheelchair had likely ever fought were his brothers and sisters. As a young man, something in my father had compelled him to come to Vietnam, to engage in what he knew was war. Now he had come back to see what his youth's passion had contributed to. The reason this was becoming a stock scene in the literature of Americans in the new Vietnam was that a confrontation with the lingering costs of war was inevitable for every American who came here. It was inevitable and, for those who fought here, incalculably painful. Even a broken heart is a cliché.
“Dad?”
His mouth opened. “That was …” His voice was thick, throat-tightened. “I think that…” The sluice of his reddened eyes’ underrim glowed with moisture. He cleared his throat—a revving, strangely formal sound. “I think maybe that was probably a mistake.”
The rainy-season fog seemed to enhance rather than obscure the mossy, stony mystery of many of Hue's beautiful buildings. Around the taller structures’ square shoulders the fog looked like grand stoles of smoke or mist. Hue, the city of children, scholars, and kite flying, was the ne plus ultra of Vietnam's tourist industry and as such fiercely minded. While freelance tour guides were allowed to work in relative freedom through-out most of Vietnam, a tour guide caught without a proper license in Hue was given a commission-erasing fine of 2 million dong (about $140).
The omnipresence of the Perfume River gave Hue's streets the busy maritime feeling of long, wide docks. In the past the banks of the Perfume had been repositories for what Communists usually refer to as Vietnam's “social evils”: drugs, prostitution, gambling, and fun in general. The government was said to have cleared away much of this six or seven years ago during one of its remindful crackdowns. As we drove along the Perfume's edge my father and I silently observed skinny brown men in shorts and sandals squatting on the bows of their sampans. Large tourist “dragon boats” painted a cheerfully ugly mixture of blue and yellow and green chugged down the Perfume's center, leaving a wake that looked as though the river were being unzipped. Hue's riverfront alternated between pretty restaurants, elegant colonial buildings, a latex mattress factory, and what were little more than bamboo lean-tos with rusty metal roofs. We passed a lonely-looking Catholic church, the old French Cercle Sportif building (now Hue's tourist center), and a neighborhood said to be populated by such beautiful young women that it had often been raided by members of Hue's royal family in search of concubines. We finally stopped and spent a few minutes wandering around the grounds of the Quoc Hoc, or National School, the most prestigious secondary institute in all of Vietnam.
It was founded in 1896 by the emperor Thanh Thai, one of imperial France's less distinguished client rulers. The giggling orgy enthusiast's only lasting legacy was this academy, which, after Thai was sent into exile, was superintended for many years by his gloomy minister of rites, Ngo Dinh Kha, the father of future South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, who himself studied here. Operated under French supervision, the school taught its economically diverse student body a sophisticated curriculum of French and Vietnamese subjects and was designed to educate a new generation of Westernized Vietnamese bureaucrats intended to replace the imperial court the French themselves had made useless by corrupting. The French thus wound up educating the generation that would throw their Gallic asses out of Indochina. Within the classrooms of the National School, Ho Chi Minh became well known among his schoolmates for asking too many questions and the quickness with which he picked up languages; Vo Nguyen Giap, the future general who would best the French at Dien Bien Phu, first developed his lifelong fondness for French language and history (and, ominously, his fascination with Robespierre); and Pham Van Dong, North Vietnam's future prime minister, studied like the proper nobleman's son he was and, unlike Ho and Giap, avoided being expelled.
To find in Hue at one time a conflux of such celebrated personalities was not unusual. In this way Hue is unique: Hanoi and Saigon, which have long battled with Hue for the distinction of Vietnam's flagship city, became areas of wealth and political significance only with the advent of colonialism, whereas Hue's significance predates the
formal arrival of the French. Hue became the capital of Vietnam in 1802 after two hundred years of civil war, when the triumphant lords of the Nguyen Dynasty moved their throne here from northern Vietnam. This move of centralization was a signal to any remaining pockets of resistance that the whole of Vietnam was under Nguyen control. (The Nguyen Dynasty would nominally endure until 1945.) Despite its status of capital, Hue always remained relatively small. When Ho Chi Minh's bureaucrat father worked here in the late 1890s, it was home to fewer than 10,000 citizens. As a city of immense cultural importance, Hue was the recipient of several wartime gentlemen's agreements that it not be touched, no matter the chaos surrounding it. Yet it had also been the site of some of Vietnamese history's most wanton slaughter.
In 1844, a French missionary imprisoned by Vietnam's ruler became the first official justification France used to act militarily against this distant land of water buffaloes, small men, and green mountains. After a series of inconclusive confrontations (one somehow involved the USS Constitution) and a brief, violent battle, France was content for several years to allow merely its traders and missionaries to operate in Vietnam. The first French soldiers arrived in force in 1858, again under the pretext of protecting the Vietnamese Catholics its missionaries had managed to ensoul. France initially focused on capturing Hue, but local resistance, and the unexpected difficulty of traversing the jungle, stopped its forces en route. Instead the French invaders captured the insignificant fishing village of Saigon and over the next few years made highly one-sided deals with Hue's hapless Nguyen emperor, Tu Due, who was in effect forced to trade land to ensure the security of his throne.