A memoir
1962
A table with a white cloth, lace at its edges holding a crumb or two. Tea, and a sponge cake weighted with cream, spotted with the pips of passionfruit, caught like flies. Never my favourite; they cracked in the mouth like inhaled insects on oven-hot days in Australia. I was eight.
Outside, eucalypts soared; long, grey leaves hanging, bark in strips. Beyond a fence, someone’s family sedan lurched past over potholes.
My mother was being passed around like some kind of curiosity. We were back on leave from somewhere they’d never heard of: Vietnam (the shriek of cicadas; paddies a throbbing green; the squaring of military shoulders; cocktails and canapes). They were all trying to think of something to ask, inclined their heads, white or mauve waves unmoving, smiles just so; flakes of pale face powder. Cardigans with little faux-pearl buttons. Plates were balanced on knees; the sudden hot dampness of fresh tea being poured.
‘Tell us,’ somebody said, and everyone looked around; my mother raised her eyebrow: pleasant, attentive.
‘Tell us: what’s it like living among the blacks?’
1963
November opened full of radio. Constant in the kitchen where the servants listened, sometimes working, sometimes standing with a dishcloth or a fork or a sprig of Vietnamese mint, faces towards the chattering machine. In order to hear every word, making very little noise themselves. Other days there may have been a clatter of cutlery, the slam of a cupboard door. A laugh; murmured disagreement between Chi Ba, who ran our house and directed the younger Chi Bai, and Thi, the cook. But on November 1 no sound came from the kitchen but that voice, travelling in ever tighter Vietnamese inflexion, tense, constant.
Yes, we had servants. Every Westerner lived with servants, along with every Vietnamese of elevated enough status. All was, absolutely, class-based. If you think about it, this is a part of the story. It always is. And it did mean we coincided with ordinary Vietnamese; Chi Ba was like my second mother.
In the next room, my mother and father sat, equally in silence. Radio America was excited, barking, wandering in and out of static; the ceiling fan ticked slowly around; the ice melted into two lots of two fingers of whisky, and two glasses were sipped, set down on two coasters on the glass-topped table. Click and click. Sometimes a creak from the bamboo couch. A muttered comment. Sometimes a phone call. Perhaps it would be news from the embassy, the Australian Embassy, where my father was an attache on aid. The news might contradict the last news.
My parents had already lived for years in South and South-East Asia, first in various mining communities and now because my father was an advisor to the Australian Embassy. He was long and rangy, his face made of bones. He swelled with Errol Flynn-like adventure and made quips about White Man’s burden, as a joke, sympathetic with the locals but still – Australians so often so very British then – but still half in love with the notion of Empire.
The idea of a coup was no surprise.
He made calls, gathered up the rumours gleaned from other people’s peeping from the windows of offices and apartments: the employees of foreign governments observing the local tumult. They said there were barricades in the streets. Once that morning a friend of my mother’s rang, an English woman married to an American. She was a roundish woman who cycled in flapping, English-woman’s shorts and pale-flowered cotton shirts. This morning she had pedaled along our road to the point towards the airport where it all became less urban. More grass; more villages. More children with dogs; more houses on stilts above water. The roads more pocked, gravelly, dirt hard-packed at the edge. And this morning, a sudden realization that there were no thin brown children running, calling at the fat white lady. No women in the doorways of huts perched over the water, slapping sudsy clothes in a basin before hurling the water in a sparkling arc to the river’s edge below. No husbands in conical hats, flexing their sun-blackened calves, poling the noses of their low boats into deeper water, nets heaped in the bow. Instead by the road there were men crouched in the grass, in uniforms, knuckles white around the barrels of their rifles. Unsmiling, not funny at all. Though, later, you could laugh at the close call. It was possible to laugh, at the fat white lady who wandered as accidental tourist into someone else’s crisis. Anyway, she realized her mistake, pedaled home, rang to tell my mother.
Rifle-fire pops. Outside the tall thick hedge around our large-roomed house (sweeping fans and Indian rugs; my bare feet slapping on cool tiles; flywire against insects), traffic was hushed; the popping sounded both close and far; once or twice a boom muffled by distance.
Remember your history: Presidents died in November 1963. This is about the first assassination; the Vietnamese one. It happened at that point not quite mid-way in a war of twenty years and a hundred chapters; that tunneling beneath the edifices of colonists, imperialists, corporatists; that blazing oil on the troubled waters of religious overlordship (though here for ‘religion’ read ‘class’). Death; it seemed endless. How many ways can people die. It isn’t a question. Bombed, burned and buried. The blank face you wear for a life of disasters. ‘Weep once,’ the saying went in Vietnam, ‘and you weep forever.’
Nine years old, I sprawled on the tiled floor and read, and drew. School, for now, was out of the question; nuns at the French convent-school and all the parents had arrived at this conclusion at the same time; or perhaps there’d been an official veto. An official curfew on schools and everything else. I sprawled on the floor and read and drew. No homework today – none of the usual weepingly-long long division; none of the mathematical problems that began: ‘If a vigneron had five hectares of vines and each hectare produced eight dizaines bottles of wine …’; no rote-learning of passages of heroic French history. No blue-and-white rows of black-haired Asian children bending over their French vocabulary, practicing on narrow-lined paper the loops of French calligraphy. For the moment, no learning by heart French history that never for a moment mentioned this country. Vietnam.
Trois rois français firent des guerres en Italie;
là se distingua Bayard, le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche…
(Three French kings made war in Italy. There Bayard,
the fearless and irreproachable knight, fought with distinction…)
I may also have gone to my room for a short time, to pretend to be a prisoner eating bread and water in my cell of bedclothes draped over the backs of chairs. I may or may not have perceived the irony in this.
It was clearly not a time for the chatter of nine-year-olds. In any case, there were few nine-year-olds in that city at that time without a sophisticated knowledge of the politics of religion and of war. Even children knew the score, by and large. That war is sudden death and slow corruption. That war goes on to become a canker eating at the flesh of society. That in war, death may be the least of your problems.
In the sitting room, beneath the ceiling fan, the waiting hush from the street matched that in the house – in all the houses. Radio America was perhaps less than candid, or less than informed. Explosions sounded from down the road, from the direction of the battling city. My mother butted a cigarette, got up and clacked in her white sandals up the one step from sitting room to the dining room and across to the kitchen.
‘Chi Ba?’
‘Oui, Madame?’
‘Vous avez des nouvelles? Je crois que Radio America ne sait rien.’
And so Chi Ba became the news emissary from the kitchen. She and Thi listened, they made notes. She came with their translation. By evening – as the tree-bound lizard began its ‘tuc-too, tuc-too’ outside the dining room window in the sudden tropical dark – Chi Bai and Thi had a list of seventeen generals said to have gone over to the coup.
‘That should be sixteen,’ my father said to my mother. ‘Everyone knows Le Van Thy is ill and out of town.’ Nonetheless. The radio crackled in the kitchen and the voices on it were staccato.
Ordinary Vietnamese may once have cheered the Roman Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, but no longer. Nor did they applaud his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. They did not approve Nhu’s wife. Madame Nhu was, this November, processing through the US. She had joked about ‘barbeques’ when Buddhist monks immolated themselves in protest at the regime’s repression of Vietnamese Buddhists. The Ngo family deployed secret agents, it was known; Madame had her own female corps. Arrests were rife, even of students. There were rallies; there was dissent, there were jailings and death. Vietnamese Buddhism is full of passion and colour, and the presidential family was cold and deaf to it all. Madame Nhu dressed her elegant head in a beehive and introduced a scooped neck and a form-fitting shape to the traditional dress, the Au Dai. Madame sought to enlist the legend of the Trung Sisters to her cause, leaders (the story goes) of Vietnam against Chinese invaders. Looking back, I see it’s possible she thought of herself as a feminist; perhaps she banned dancing because of a perceived association with sexual commerce. And yet Vietnamese culture was tainted by her touch. Her corps of spies worked on, and Buddhists continued to die or riot or vanish into the prisons. For religion, read ‘class.’
The war suffered too from the hysteria and suspicion hovering behind the sang-froid. In Saigon, Diem, rumour had it, took his ministerial papers to bed with him. The West wanted other papers signed, against the further development of war; but Diem and Nhu roiled against the US machine, the great mailed hand that demeaned and reached for control. At the other end of the country, Hanoi – the enemy from Diem’s vantage point – waited to see just what would happen when all that tension broke. Since August, there had been little secret about the whispering in the tiled corridors in Saigon, the whispering in the carpeted offices of Washington, the whispering along the telephone lines East and West. But whispers are whispers, and that was where the secrecy lay.
In the meantime, let it not be forgotten that Chi Ba was among those who decried in crowds the arrogance of Catholics against Buddhists. She was among those jostled and bruised. She knelt and lit joss-sticks in the temple, while I waited for her, and she marveled that the heart of the monk Thich Quang Duc had been plucked unharmed from the flames of his martyr’s funeral pyre.
I was Anglican because my mother said so; yet I had found a cross when we first moved into this house, and propped it next to my bed. I was loaded by then with the French nuns’ Roman Catholic influence, that gave the choice of bible classes or maths (I became very bad at maths); but Chi Ba’s outraged Buddhism had my absolute loyalty, too, even while I waited for a vision of the Virgin in the clouds. Nine-year-olds may both observe and contain the contradictions of belief.
Chi Ba had come, herself, from the North. She’d danced on the sand with her French lover, and dressed in his naval uniform and cap for the camera, before he’d sailed away in defeat in 1954. The ex-lovers of French sailors were among those who thronged then to the south, when Ho’s forces had slipped their victorious way – the shuffling of sandaled feet and the quiet whirring of bicycles – into Hanoi. And some of those who fled south were Buddhist, lonely amongst the bustling Catholics who poured by boat or train or car into Saigon.
Chi Ba brought the news of the coup to my parents, and returned to the kitchen, where noises of cooking had begun. Chopping; frying.
We ate a simple meal that night, in silence but for the endless talk from two radios. Chi Ba served with her head turned to the ceaseless rise-and-fall of Vietnamese commentary. The scrape of cutlery against plates; the scamper of a gecko across the wall. The Tucktu called outside in the dark.
If I spoke, they said, ‘Shhh’. But I remember the silence, as if everyone held their breath.
After dinner I drew, and later I painted.
We were on the porch by then, protected by fly-wire but open to breezes. Beyond the porch was the hedge and beyond this the Saigon night full of struggle. Tonight no music floated to us from my father’s gigantic hi-fi (the speakers taller than me and weighed down with sand: state of the art in 1963); there was only the foreground drone and whistle from Radio America and the background staccato from Radio Saigon.
I painted a butterfly, and was taken by the irony. I called it ‘Painted during a revolution’, but then there was a rustle from the hedge, and a sudden high, thin singing. A mosquito, I would have thought, but it was a sound my parents recognised. They knew the sounds of wars and insurrections.
We moved inside, away from passing bullets.
I had my bath, I went to bed. I read until I slept, talcum-powdered, curled up against the chill of the humming air-conditioner.
By next morning, everyone knew the coup was over. Diem and Nhu were dead, Madame exiled abroad. She wandered unloved for years until, finally, she lived and died alone and ignored in Rome.
A car came from the Embassy for my father. Perhaps he talked them into it; perhaps it came anyway. Eventually, after his pacing back and forth across the tiling, his hand in his jacket pocket jangling keys or coins. Outside, the bell rang, the gate was opened and the car rounded the island with its odd gazebo, its tropical greenery in great dark fans; it braked at the front door. He was off then, released from all that blind guesswork, that ceaseless radio murmuring or barking, full of rumour and supposition.
Beyond the hedge the silences, the rustlings and breathless rushing, the sometimes rattling and popping were gone. Near and far vehicles hummed and squeaked and horns sounded long, low or high, or brayed short and sharp, and there was cheering and calling back and forth and the hysterically ineffectual kerchink-kerchink of bicycle and cyclo bells.
I sat, with the cat; my mother and Chi Ba stood still and listened. My mother, as if sitting were out of the question; Chi Ba because she was poised as if alone on an island when her true place – natural, proper, deserved – was in the tumult all around it. You could read her mind: she should be there. She should be out there.
Perhaps that lasted only a minute. Perhaps we watched from the porch as Chi Ba went to the gate and leaned out, calling to people passing in the street. Perhaps she called to my mother: ‘C’est tout fini pour le President, Madame!’ Her voice ringing with the tension of triumph, the headiness of victory, the atavistic pant of victory. Her movements quick and nervous.
It was a catching thing, caught from Chi Ba’s breathlessness and the throb and pitch that washed from the other side of the hedge. My mother ran outside for our car – a great finned American beast with its Virgin Mary on the dashboard from a former owner – and we were soon nosing through the gate. We were going to see the revolution, my mother, Chi Ba and I. She had telephoned my father; she’d bring him film and she had her own camera.
We swung to the left, towards the city.
What can I say? What a happy, vengeful crowd that day. It tore down the statue of the Trung Sisters, the legends stolen by Madame and now laid low: the fate of heroism misused. A sister’s metal head was kicked about the square while garlands and fruit were passed up to the soldiers in their armoured cars, to these young men who had helped bring down the dictator and his brother.
But then the war came back and with it a queue of Vietnamese Presidents and generals bickering and battling like warlords; while the US sneered at the disintegration yet could not leave and could not win. Their GIs died in droves. Vietnamese died in greater droves, and living GIs collected their ears as mementoes, like scalps. Young women, whose parents were pious and simple in the countryside tending their fields, became prostitutes, great white hands meaty on their shoulders, pushing them onto thin mattresses.
There were realisations from much earlier: that Asians could not claim a brotherhood with white nations, just because they shared a colonized history. Ho Chi Minh had assumed at one time they could. He’d even asked for US support. There is still a monument in Hanoi that states ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’.
It’s all too much, even for irony.
The obvious questions arise. What if the Americans had accepted that link Ho had asked of them, of one colonized nation to another? What if the chest-thumping, the swinging medals, the square-jawed masculinity had been put aside at any point and the simple fact accepted that this was a country in search of its own future?
What if the West stopped creating its own enemies? What if the West stopped establishing lifetimes of pain and consequences, the blasting of countless lives in country after country? What if it rectified the mistakes of history, saw where enemies had been herded together with decades of death the outcome…and said this must stop?
Cenotaphs remembering the dead now straggle along Vietnam’s highways; houses are broken still, whose occupants are long dead and empty, sad as ghosts behind trees. That napalmed girl runs through history, skin burned from her body, slow with shock.
Chi Ba, I’m told, took on the robes of a Buddhist nun before the war ended. After we left. After the Têt offensive; after and during all that continued breakage of life.
I never knew what became of her family in the north, before her escape to the south, before we met.
My mother and I of course, left by plane. It was at the end of 1964; we were served coq au vin endlessly, meal after meal, in celebration of approaching Christmas. My father, obsessed by this war, knew Vietnam’s South, with the West, could not win (of course he knew). Yet he stayed on. By then, Saigon’s smashed windows had all been replaced by perspex, and the black market ruled. By the time of the south’s ignominious fall, my father, too, had left for home.
—o0o—
Decades after that war, in Australia, I would meet a young woman – let’s call her Mai – who’d been a five-year-old among those who left Vietnam by boat in the 80s. After the victory by the north, those on the wrong side in the war were marked as losers, as the enemy. It was a rickety, rusty, water-swamped boat where they all died a thousand deaths from fear, hunger and thirst until they arrived at refuge. Her father still grieves for family on another boat, who’d died just that one death, when attacked by pirates. Mai’s aunty and her cousins. Children. Teenagers. The young; the old.
Mai still avoids the beach and all that ceaseless, whispering, greedy water.
©J Crozier