The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  I’ve been having the hardest time remembering the flamboyant tree that grew outside my home, the only one still standing on my block after the siege. I’ve tried to locate my quiet neighbourhood on Google Street View, but it has completely changed, and in its place are gleaming motorcycles parked beside bustling storefronts. Most of the videos on YouTube about Hue, though, are of the Citadel — perhaps because of all the nostalgia that the Citadel provokes. Or rather the sentimentality. I recently learned that the word nostalgia pertains to memory, and most people who use YouTube as a resource have no real memories related to the imperial palaces. If forgetting about the Forbidden Purple City meant that my other memories of Hue would be uncovered, then I would choose to forget about the Forbidden Purple City.

  But then again, perhaps I am also guilty of “sentimentality,” because the monuments of the Forbidden Purple City had long burned down by the time I myself dwelled within the Citadel’s walls, after the siege. I was only present at the Forbidden Purple City when it was bare ground marked by loose foundations.

  During the siege, the Communists used its bare grounds as an operations base. Most of the surrounding palaces were also levelled by the siege’s end. This was the state of the Citadel as I remember it best: the crushed bricks within the piles of timber, the scent of ancient ironwood columns split down their seams, releasing an oddly fresh smell of pine. This was the smell of my livelihood.

  I managed to escape being drafted by the South Vietnamese army, and a couple of years after the siege I was employed as a historical consultant by the archaeological institute overseeing the conservation. No one, however, heeded my advice on proper restoration materials, and I was relegated to physical labour and being the site’s de facto security guard. I spent most of my days, nights even, within the Citadel’s brick walls. By this time the floating bodies had been pulled out of the moat and peasants were cultivating a water-borne spinach in the Royal Canal. I camped on these grounds as part of my restoration work, though restoration may not be the right word. The war was still on and resources were scarce. Preservation is perhaps a more suitable term, as it was not so much a matter of rebuilding as trying to clear the rubble into coherent piles throughout the palace grounds, vo bricks and tiles on one side, timber on another, mindful that some of the peasant volunteers were just there to steal ironwood to warm their hearths. I carried a French service pistol to wave at marauders. Meanwhile, Anh Binh volunteered on weekends to erect scaffolding to hold up the imperial roofs. He was paler than most of the labourers, having spent most of his days indoors, but he had a solid build and a greater stamina for hardship.

  We did what we could. The levelled palaces did not rise again, but neither did the remaining ones fall, including the Palace of Supreme Harmony, where the emperor had greeted subjects on his throne. Everything changed once again in 1975, when the Communists took over for good. At first they wanted to destroy all the remaining palaces as symbols of imperialism, but Ho Chi Minh himself saved the Citadel, saying that because it was built on the backs of peasants, it belonged to the peasants. As a restorer, I was suddenly doing the People’s work. My life was preserved. I had hope.

  The Communists continued the work of restoring some of the monuments in the Citadel, and I was retained once again as a historical consultant until I fled the country in 1980. But all my advice to the authorities on maintaining authenticity went in one ear and out the other. This was before UNESCO became involved with their Western standards of original materials and ancient means; instead, the local authorities favoured jerry-rigged restoration methods using whatever was available.

  I was a party to their sins. During my tenure at the Citadel I climbed dilapidated palaces to help roof them with crinkled metal. I sprayed ironwood columns with DDT to protect them from termites, making the wood’s complexion ashen. Most of the original columns had actually been harvested by the marauders (I was helpless to stop them — they knew I wouldn’t shoot), and I joined the other labourers in replacing the wooden beams with a type of ferroconcrete. On orders from my superiors, and with tears in my eyes, I held a quivering paintbrush over an antique pedestal, smothering whatever original gilt was left with an industrial paint.

  Ngoc was always worried I would shoot my mouth off with a bourgeois remark at a cadre member and be hauled off to the re-education camps. The way the Communists were handling the project made me feel as if I was standing on uncertain ground to continue as a historical consultant, and this feeling manifested itself one morning in 1977 when, during a rooftop foot patrol, I tripped over a piece of jutting concrete. I broke my ankle. Ngoc, so busy at work, now had to set my bones for free while I lay on our bed biting on a rolled-up reed mat. She rubbed a paste made from her father’s secret recipe over my heel and up my shin that dried into a cast, then secured my mess of a foot with bamboo splints and bandages. I had made it through the whole war without breaking a bone in my body; now I stayed in bed for several weeks — the worst time in my life. For my wife it was the best time, she said, because for once she knew exactly where I was.

  Once my ankle healed and I was able to hobble under my own power, I returned to the Citadel. I still slept on the grounds of the Forbidden Purple City, but now it was only once a fortnight and largely for nostalgic reasons, for after my absence I realized how pointless my labours were. The remaining palaces around the Forbidden Purple City were more beautiful at night, when their perfect forms were backlit by the moon and one didn’t notice the broken roof tiles of the emperor’s writing pavilion or the bamboo scaffolding holding up the roof of the Palace of Supreme Harmony. At night the workmen’s laundry hanging from the moon-shaped windows turned into horse-dragons.

  One night I was standing in a minor pavilion overlooking a lotus pond and contemplating its eerie stillness when, through the beating horn-song of the cicadas, I heard the approach of footsteps. I was hobbling on a cane, no longer had my service pistol, and thought my ghost had come for me. And then I heard a familiar sniffling.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  It was Tiet Linh. She was carrying a lantern in her hands, royal yellow in colour and diamond-shaped. The size of a pineapple. She held it out towards me — a gift.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said. “Hobbling about in the dark. You’re going to break your one good foot.”

  I didn’t believe this was why she had come, of course, but I received her gift all the same. I put my lighter to the wick inside the lantern, and hung it off the lip of a carp-shaped rain sluice on the roof. I had not realized how dark the night was until that moment. Now I could see the flicker of the dragonflies just above the lily pads.

  “You didn’t come here just to give me a lamp, did you?”

  “I came to see the restoration.”

  Again, I didn’t believe her; why would she come at night? “Why are you interested?”

  “History students don’t have a monopoly over history,” she said, referring to our ongoing quibble over which of our respective subjects was the superior undertaking.

  “The Communists are building an approximation,” I said. “Which is the same as a desecration.” We looked out into the darkness towards the flag tower. The cicadas were getting louder, as if closing in.

  “It’s a desecration now,” she said.

  “No, it is in ruins now,” I said. “That is something completely different.” All the destruction around us was a result of war, which in Vietnam was a natural occurrence. What the Communists wanted to do was unnatural. To reclaim the past, they were willing to sweep away reality.

  “Are they going to rebuild the Forbidden Purple City?”

  “Goi oi, don’t get me started,” I said. I had heard rumours that one day, perhaps soon, they would start rebuilding in earnest, but one never knew what to believe from the Communists.

  We went into the altar space of a pavilion and looked out into the flat grounds that had once been the Forbidden Purple City. It once consisted of over fifty buildings
culminating in the emperor’s residential palace. Rice paddies took up a good part of the grounds now. All that was left of the emperor’s residential palace were some floor tiles and a little stairway, a few forlorn pedestals, a pair of brass cannons.

  She was smiling wickedly at me. “Imagine what it must have looked like,” she said.

  “I can’t even begin,” I said. There were no blueprints left of it, no photos. I feared that the Communists were just going to make something up out of thin air. Probably just a copycat of the Beijing palaces.

  “You can begin with this,” said Tiet Linh. She pulled something out of her handbag: another gift, a small stack of old black-and-white postcards tied with a string, worn along their edges. “I found this in my grandfather’s bedroom,” she said. “It’s from the 1920s.”

  I shuffled the postcards in my hands. Most of them were the typical portraits of exotic Indochine that the French colonials liked to send home — of water buffaloes in rice fields, of turbaned subjects hovering over bowls of strange food, or of naked courtesans holding opium pipes. But among these old photographs were a few with pristine edges, which crackled as I peeled them off, as if new.

  “Yes, look,” she said. “They took pictures of the Forbidden Purple City before it burned down.”

  I held one postcard up and took my time flipping through each photo, then looked back out to the rice paddies. I could see it all clearly now: the flying eaves of the grandest palace, the royal theatre and tea pavilion, the covered walkways where the eunuchs tiptoed towards their conspiracies.

  The postcards were only of the exterior of the Forbidden Purple City; to this day no photos of the inside of the emperor’s private residence are known to exist. And yet it is the insides that I saw most clearly in my mind. The sleeping chamber with its posh linens over smooth, hard beds. The kitchen with its artisans carving peacock garnishes out of carrots. Dragons and clouds painted on the columns in the various rooms. Poems in Chinese characters set in relief. These rooms have grown ever more vivid in my imagination each day since, with ever more perfectly authentic detail. My mind is so crowded now with such details of my own making that I sometimes hold my stomach in pain.

  I handed the postcards back to Tiet Linh. Then, as quickly as her spirits lifted, her face cracked.

  “Anh Binh is leaving me,” she said. She was tearing up.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I don’t trust him anymore,” she said.

  At the time I had no context for her statement, but the next year, in 1978, Anh Binh disappeared. Tiet Linh kept mum about his whereabouts, even let us believe he was dead, until we found out that he had re-emerged on the other side of the ocean, in Vancouver. He had escaped by boat under cover of night.

  “You must have had a fight, that’s all,” I said. “You should go home. I’m sure Anh Binh is worried about you.”

  “He can wait,” she said. She wanted me to show her the Citadel as I knew it.

  We left the grounds of the Forbidden Purple City and walked towards the pleasure gardens. I took her to a little pontoon boat hidden in the corner of the lotus pond and I pretended to be the emperor and she one of my eunuchs. I paddled, we serenaded the moon, and Tiet Linh recited her favourite lines from The Tale of Kieu:

  Due to my dismal generosity in past lives,

  I have to accept much suffering as compensation in this life.

  My body has been violated as a broken pot,

  I have to sell my body to repay for my mournful fate.

  “How depressing,” I said, though she sang the lines lightly, like a summer lullaby.

  “Do you remember during the siege, when your wife and my husband would come home together, always tired and silent?”

  “It was another life,” I said.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder about them?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Never.” And I meant it.

  I love hope, that is, the English word. My English sentence making is very good, though to this day my passengers sometimes have trouble understanding me because of my thick accent. I love the English language, though, how irreducible it is. Hope is true English, unlike optimism, which is an immigrant from the Latin world, with its messy notions of power and having the best. Such a pure word is hope that it cannot be broken down any further and stands for only itself — like those primal words meant to invoke animal sounds. Meow. Ruff. Hope. Even the Vietnamese term for hope, hy vong, isn’t so pure. Taken apart, vong can mean “an absurdity.”

  An absurdity — that is hope in Vietnamese.

  There was a knock on my door the night before the New Year’s Day concert. I grabbed a Club, the elongated metal steering wheel lock, before answering. I keep a few extra Clubs around, for they are handy for more than securing the steering wheel of my cab. I rent a laneway house in East Vancouver about two cab lengths long, with tin-thin walls and my bedroom window hugging the property line by the back alleyway. One can never be too cautious.

  It was the musician — the man — hugging one of his instrument cases, the one in the shape of a small coffin. The dan bau. The overhead lamp illuminated scratches on his face, a wicked play of shadows deepening the grooves, darkening his tears into blood drops.

  “Bac Gia,” he said, “I apologize for the disruption. But I was given your address, and I…”

  “Your wife did this?” I knew the answer, but took some satisfaction when he nodded to confirm my insights into the artistic temperament.

  “May we stay the night?” he said.

  I let him in, though there was no room for both of us to sleep unless I moved my kitchen table outside, which I was loath to do. I surrendered my bed to him and after he took his shoes off he quickly fell asleep, his instrument by his side, as if he had always lived here. I tried to sleep in my cab, but soon gave up and turned on the ignition.

  I drove to Tiet Linh’s house. I parked in the back alley and jimmied the gate to the yard. I knew that it would be futile if I rang any of the doorbells — her daughter would surely answer the door and shoo me away — and so I reached down to the ground and gathered some pebbles. I took the back-porch stairs up to the second-floor landing, stopping at the sight of a black metal cauldron gleaming between the wooden steps. It was a new Broil King, untarnished by charcoal dust or oil splatters. Anh Binh must have bought it just before he died.

  At the top of the landing I tossed the pebbles one at a time (the way I throw bread at the swans in Vancouver’s Lost Lagoon) at Tiet Linh’s bedroom window. Her pallor was ghostly as she drew back the blinds. In the moonlight haze she looked just as she had that night in the Forbidden Purple City.

  “I didn’t come here to serenade you,” I said. “And I’m not here to offer you any pity.”

  “That’s fine, as long as you’re not looking for any from me.”

  “You can’t just disappear.”

  “If it’s about the musician, he has nowhere to go. You can send him to a hotel and bill me.”

  “I knew it was a bad idea to get these young people pretending to be old-time musicians,” I said. “It’s unnatural.” I could tell that what I said enlivened her, because her cheeks darkened into what in the daylight would have been a bright vermilion.

  “Unnatural! You always claimed to be a historian, but you never had an appreciation for the old crafts. You have no ear for traditional music.”

  “Oh! Oh!” I said. “Don’t get me started!” But by now we couldn’t stop ourselves from entering that dark debate about whether vong co music had any value. I argued against the music with more vehemence than I actually felt. Tiet Linh’s daughter came to the window, only to be waved away by Tiet Linh, who was in mid-volley about some esoteric point. We were waking up the dogs in the neighbourhood, but we didn’t care. It was quite some time before I walked back down the stairs to my cab. I took one last look at the Broil King.

  “You can’t just disappear!” I said again, but by now Tiet Linh’s window was closed and all the lights were out.


  Among the four of us, Tiet Linh and I were known as the dreamers and Anh Binh and Ngoc as the schemers. Anh Binh was the first one to escape Vietnam, and Tiet Linh followed him the next year. Anh Binh then came up with a plan to sponsor me to Canada as his brother, even though we were unrelated. We shared the same last name — Nguyen — and never mind that about half of Vietnam shared this surname: his scheme worked. I would just have to find a way to get to Vancouver.

  When I told Ngoc to pack her things, she told me to go ahead without her. I was furious. She said she had a few things to tend to first with family and work, but that I shouldn’t delay in going and that she would join me soon thereafter. I left by boat with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, one that didn’t go away during the five months I spent at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, nor when I finally arrived in Vancouver. I had forgotten to bring a picture of Ngoc, not even a little wallet-sized photo. I thought it funny then. No matter, I thought, I would see her soon enough.

  Ngoc passed away a year after I arrived in Vancouver. She was, in fact, ill before then, and knew of her prognosis in Vietnam when I asked her to leave with me. Just like Anh Binh, she was a practical schemer and she wanted to leave me with my dreams unscathed.

  I still dream of the Forbidden Purple City. These days the Citadel is being restored with the expertise and funding of UNESCO and of countries as far-flung as Korea, Germany, and Poland. Now they use vo bricks and traditional tiles in the reconstruction. Ironwood has replaced the ferroconcrete, buffalo glue is now used, and the palaces are mortared by an authentic mixture of sugar cane molasses, lime, and local sand. I’ve been watching the progress on YouTube, the Forbidden Purple City rising in its vivid red splendour among the original palaces of the Citadel that remain, the colours of their tiles and columns dull by comparison. For a small price tourists can dress like the emperor and take photos in the palaces with a consort of actors playing eunuchs. With all the chaotic occurrences on YouTube, I can’t tell sometimes what is a documentary of the reconstruction and what is a historical melodrama. But altogether it is as though the war never happened. It is as though there was never any reason for us to leave the country.