Читать книгу "There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War - Tom Burns - Страница 15

Bosse’s novel, which deserves to be better known, has its starting point with the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into North and South Vietnam in accordance with the Geneva agreements. The novel shows how the division affected the lives of rural people from the north, leaving aside Euro-American viewpoints to give a sympathetic portrayal of Vietnamese characters caught in a social upheaval that they hardly understand but that profoundly disrupts their lives. Here, for example, is the protagonist, Nam, right after his arrival in Haiphong, from which he will embark southward. He is amazed that there are no sentries or barbed-wire in the city, and he wanders around town gawking at the buildings and well-dressed women:

He stared at passing soldiers. They had the long noses, indeterminable ages, indistinguishable faces of white men, and they talked the way they walked—briskly…Nam stopped in front of one house, pink and colonnaded, a Western house undoubtedly because it was four stories high. Fronting it was grass, a whole plot of earth wasted on unimportant grass. Here was land enough to provide for a family of ten.69

With this technique of estrangement, the reader here becomes the foreigner, the other, seeing what would be a familiar kind of people, building, and yard through the protagonist’s eyes.

The narrative follows the classic pattern of the picaresque journey. The traveler is a resourceful young man, the eponymous hero known simply as “Nam,” as if he were representative of his country. It is also to the point that Nam often has to go by different names and play different roles, be now strong and decisive, now hesitant and deferential. The novel seems to be saying that bending to circumstance and improvising a proper role is necessary for these people struggling to survive under a succession of masters: French, Viet Minh, American, and South Vietnamese. The journey is hazardous, replete with material want, physical hardship, and psychological anxiety. Nam makes the classic metaphorical equation of a journey with life itself: “Nam gradually learns that the world was not a circle of peaceful days and nights, but it was more like the road itself, moving into the unknown” (225).

His journey consists of several stages: i) Nam’s departure from his native village and his murder of a guard; ii) the rigorous overland journey, punctuated by stops at villages along the way and marked by encounters with other people, mostly Catholics, who are trying to reach the ships that will take them south; iii) the sea journey from Haiphong to Saigon on an American ship; iv) the arrival in Saigon and his adventures there. The departure from Nam’s Catholic village, Ba Lang, is precipitated by the success of the Viet Minh in the war. The son of a mandarin landowner, Nam is literate and knows French. With his older brother in the priesthood, the family’s ten hectares of rice land would fall to him, an inheritance that would ensure his future as a farmer and the respect accorded him within the village. Nam is not a dreamer; he is content to follow traditional patterns of living, but when these patterns are radically disrupted by the war, he resigns himself to what life offers at the moment and tries not to regret things that he cannot control. Despite setbacks and losses that would drive many to despair, he never looks back.

How life is to be different under the Viet Minh is shown when his group enters the village. Political harangues, called “the Lesson,” are obligatory, and new taxes are levied, which the villagers do not understand: “unity contributions, and public subscriptions, and taxes for a thing called future development” (18). To undermine the power of the village priest, Nam’s brother, the time for hearing Mass is changed to coincide with the Lesson, by which the local Commissar means to suggest that the village church is no longer needed. The priest’s defiance brings on a threat to his life, symbolically in the form of a single chopstick—to be jabbed into his ear if he does not submit. He warns his brother Nam that his resistance will be paid not only by himself but by his whole family: “I am dead, I know that…And if you stay, you too are dead” (25). Nam must leave immediately; he is given money, a jade crucifix, and a piece of paper with instructions for the journey, which he is to memorize and then destroy. With great regret at leaving behind “the real wealth he had,” the family rice fields, Nam sets out on a journey that will take him first east, then north to Haiphong.

Immediately, he runs into trouble, in the form of a guard who demands le passeport, a document demanded of every traveler who strays far from his village. When the guard threatens to take him back, Nam reacts instinctively by killing the man with a knife. By this act, he is fatally committed to the journey south, like it or not: “Why would so many people have reason to go to Haiphong? He had none, not really, until he had killed the guard” (35). Many of the people who share Nam’s journey from north to south are Catholics who were urged by their priests to leave, who were even told that Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary had “gone south” (as one of Landsdale’s rumor campaigns actually put it). These people feared mistreatment or reprisals by the Viet Minh as well as by those people who remained, a well-founded fear on the evidence of the novel.

The second phase of the narrative begins with Nam on the road, a long journey on foot, and, in the later stages, by bus and boat (his progress can be followed on a map on the inside cover of the first edition, marked off by the names of the villages he reaches). There are frequent checkpoints, which show how completely the Viet Minh control the northern countryside. At the first, he has to lie about his origins to conceal his real identity, but the soldier does not believe him: “You smell only of manure, not fish, and your tongue is sharper than any fisherman’s” (43). Nam bribes the man; the Viet Minh soldiers encountered along the way are usually peasants, who are often corrupt and cruel, but rarely stupid.

At Vinh, the local people are hostile toward the refugees, calling them “traitors,” and the newcomers are herded into a compound, where pressure is brought to bear to make them give up and go home. A rousing patriotic rally is held in the square in front of the compound. The refugees are given no food and an offer of a water buffalo is made to anyone who goes back to his native village. A former tradesman, who explains that he is going south, “where the piastres are,” because the north is no longer “the weather for a merchant” (50), tells Nam that this offer is a ruse—it is always the same men who take up the offer. The narrative has a number of episodes that mean to show the continuous attempts of the Viet Minh to secure the people on the land, discouraging the exodus by patriotic appeals as well as deceit and outright force.

The refugees are made to convert their money to the new Viet Minh currency, stamped with the image of Ho Chi Minh. Nam feels satisfied that he gets back almost twice the amount in the exchange, but the merchant laughs at him: “The Vietminh will send money they got from you south and buy goods in Saigon. What you gave up was better money” (64). On a bus, the driver and guard stop at regular intervals to shake down the passengers, who must pay for the handfuls of rice they eat as well as so many piastres per kilometer traveled; those without money have to get off the bus. Nam’s book, one of his few possessions (a classic given him by his father) arouses suspicion in these illiterate peasants. They confiscate his jade crucifix as well as the book, and try to extort more money, but he has slyly distributed his money on different parts of his person to avoid losing it all. He does not waste time lamenting his losses: the “book had lost him a ride and a costly crucifix. He was well rid of the book” (90).

As he pursues his journey, “The sign of war was everywhere, and it was a negative sound: a lack of sound…no yapping or clucking or trumpeting” (91). When a group he travels with arrives at Than Hoa, they listen to a speech that will be heard repeatedly along the road. Refugees do not reach Saigon as the French promise, they are told, but are shipped to Africa, “a land of savages where men are strangled when too old for work. Americans, who have developed a great bomb, need more victims for testing: “that was why American ships were at Haiphong—to buy Viet slaves from the French” (105). These stories have an impact on the ignorant refugees, as do the myriad rumors that pop up whenever a new place is reached or new event takes place. In their insecurity and fear, these people are always prepared to believe the worst, and rumor campaigns prove to be an effective way to make them give up their plans to migrate south. Remembering the stories of old men in his home village, however, Nam is always skeptical: “Words but no medicine: that was what Nam was learning to expect from commissars. Words but no food. Words and detours, words and robbery, words and the vanity of peasants” (110). He thinks that the Commissars are no different from the priests: “Have faith...that’s what the le Commissaire says” (113).

The father of Lia, a woman he loves, dies. “To Nam that was a truth easier to grasp than the truth of seers, and of priests. Here was death. He had seen it before…There was solace for him in this lack of mystery” (116). He buries the old man and on the same night Lia gives herself to him and it is understood they will be man and wife. He accepts the gift of her father’s Japanese knife: “Think of it as the gift I would bring you from my father” (118), but he loses her in the confusion resulting from a botched escape by boat. “How foolish to accept a plan which so obviously had been devised blindly, out of greed not sense” (135), he chides himself. At Ninh Binh, further up the coast, he seeks out a man, Ton, who had known his father. The house is ramshackle from the outside, which turns out to be a clever disguise: “That a life of such luxurious calm lay behind the shabby façade of this house was a source of great wonder to Nam.” (144). The cunning, widely traveled Ton has achieved a separate peace with the enemy. “This too Nam admired: old Ton could hate the Vietminh and still live comfortably with them” (145). As Ton explains, “A man who feeds his enemies has no worry.”

Nam befriends a young man named Hai, a small-time thief and confidence-man with his own methods of survival. The two men become involved in another escape operation, but once again the operation is betrayed and soldiers appear on the beach just as the party is ready to sail. The boat takes a few hits but manages to pull away while Hai runs into the fishing-village, making a lot of noise to draw off the soldiers. With luck, the boat reaches the islands at the mouth of the Red River a few kilometers from Haiphong and is picked up by a French patrol boat. In fact, the refugees have made it to the port of North Vietnam right before the Viet Minh takeover. Nam realizes that now that he is out of their zone he can use his family name again, which is all that he has left in the world now that he has lost his land, family, woman, and friend.

In Haiphong, Nam is reminded of how far he has come in both distance and experience: “When a man left a place, all he could keep of it was a vague memory. Even if it had been the source of his life, now, away from it, it was only a detail or two—perhaps the image of a cedar in a field” (185). Memories are also insufficient to sustain a difficult present life and uncertain future. To buy food, the always pragmatic Namnamn decides to sell the Japanese knife that Lia had given him: “He would sell it because a gift from one’s woman was not worth much without the woman—not when life made money worth more than memory” (191).

The refugees are taken to a camp where they are sheltered in American-made tents designed for fifty people but packed with a hundred. Wild rumors proliferate: Chinese gunboats have machine-gunned thousands of people; the Vietminh are going to break the treaty and kill everyone in the camp; an epidemic is devastating another camp and would reach this one within days, and yet some people, frightened of what is to come, refuse to leave: “They grew fat and became the chief critics of the camp and slept most of the time” (199). A soldier who fought with the French tells stories about the Americans that Viet Minh propaganda could hardly improve on: “They worshipped a god of cleanliness, these Americans, and so if a man vomited on their ships, they cut his hands off…When their officers got hungry and wished for something special, they cut up a child and ate it” (201). On the way to the boats, the stories and rumors circulate unabated: the D.D.T. that the refugees are sprayed with is made of “terrible spirits” that will determine who can ship out: “the smoke kills off the weak.” A man harangues the frightened people with a description of a Viet Minh poster he has seen of the American ships: “the boats in the poster had their fronts open upon the water and were tipped, spilling people into the sea” (223).

The third phase of the narrative, the sea journey, lasts a week. The American crew is completely unaware of what is going on with their passengers: “They did not know a man had been murdered, or to what extent some passengers had been threatened by black marketeers” (225). The murder victim was extorting the navy-issued food from the passengers and then selling it back to them at high prices. A group of disgruntled men, urged on by a priest, get together and throw the fat man overboard. Everyone had expected the Americans to punish the exploiters, but to the general disappointment, “Americans show no more pride than dogs…Americans did not have the courage to punish men who made fools of them” (237). The reader understands that the Americans either did not know or were indifferent to these events, another example of narrative “estrangement.”

At their arrival in Saigon, the final stage of the narrative, the refugees are greeted with a brass band and a speech from the mayor but then left to their own devices. Nam’s suspicions about the good treatment on the sea voyage makes him think that “there was one reason for such good treatment—get cheap labor for the camp in Saigon” (247) and he jumps off the truck to avoid that fate. The south turns out to be inhospitable to northern refugees. After Nam runs out of money and has to find work, he decides to become a trishaw driver but the other drivers run him off, having no desire to share their customers from what they see as the riff-raff “off the boats” who threaten their livelihood. Nam resorts to begging, which turns out to be hard work. Once more, rather than lament his fate he adapts, learning the best attitudes to strike, the best places to beg (near bars, casinos, and brothels), and the best human types to beg from (Americans are best, although, in his pride, he cannot bear the contempt they have in their eyes), the Singhalese, sometimes the French; the worst are the Algerians, who kick him).

Fortuitously, Nam spots Lia, his woman from the road, who has become the mistress of a married Frenchman. She tells him how she escaped and met a man on the ship who promised to take her to a cabaret for a fee, where she could learn to dance and dress in the western fashion and earn a living off foreigners. Lia is a prototype of the ubiquitous Vietnamese bar-girl in later novels. When she offers him money, he refuses, telling her that he will come for her. “Come for me? You do not have enough money for a banana” (257), she replies. He is not so much humiliated by this retort as surprised, for by traditional standards women are supposed to be obedient. “I am ashamed for your father,” he says and walks away. As the weeks go by, he finds that he no longer remembers her as a colonial whore, “her toneless voice, her unfamiliar eyes” but in the images of their nights together on the way to Haiphong. Once again, it does not pay to lament the past.

While begging outside the big casino owned by the Binh Xuyen, the Vietnamese mafia, he sees the owner get out of his big car and his bodyguards beat up a beggar foolish enough to approach him. The beggar turns out to be Hai, who has had many adventures since that day in the fishing-village (he was able to hustle some money on the boat but now has to admit that “Saigon hands are faster than mine”). His plan is to work a religious con-game, doing the work of God for the Cao Dai sect, which, he has discovered “were soldiers more than preachers, and merchants more than soldiers” (269), but he is killed by a stray bullet during a riot. Saigon is currently in the throes of political and social upheaval: Viet Minh agents, Caodaists, Hoa Hao, and Nationalist soldiers “all come together in vicious mêlées that more often than not left someone dead or wounded on the cobblestones” (268). The novel ends when Nam, who has lost his woman and his friend for the second time, decides to go to the labor camp after all, which Hai informed him was not really too bad, just unsuitable for one who is used to living off other people’s money.

The Journey of Tao Kim Nam might be called “Vietnamese picaresque,” with the tragi-comic adventures of a protagonist who, like the classic picaro, is forced to live on his wits and for the present moment alone. Picaresque narratives reflect the every-man-for-himself circumstances of a precarious social environment, where official authority is often the oppressor and survival depends on a combination of lucky breaks and individual cunning. The novel throughout emphasizes the disruption of traditional patriarchal continuity in the Vietnamese family, its close ties, and the relegation of women to subservient roles. Although Nam, at the start of his journey, “had shown little interest in the news of the French and Vietminh War, which has been raging five years” (16), these larger events determine his life in ways that he could not have imagined. Nam is politically naïve but no fool; he successfully overcomes the obstacles of capricious weather, surly officials, greedy soldiers, lack of money, and constant hunger by being “quick” (smart, clever, cunning), by learning from experience, keeping his own counsel and concealing information, and listening carefully.

In this novel about anonymous people, the political background is taken for granted rather than explicitly evoked. President Ngo Dinh Diem, who is never mentioned, has yet to restore order in his confused kingdom and gain the confidence of the Americans who are to maintain him in power. He will continuously neglect reforms that might have given him some legitimacy in the face of Communist successes for a palatial preoccupation with maintaining the power of his family through repression and military force.70 At the same time, the novel’s portrayal of the Viet Minh is hardly sympathetic. The idealism of Ho Chi Minh is nowhere in evidence except in debased form—in the slogans mouthed by the commissars. What is seen at the ground level is the petty cruelties and exploitation of common soldiers and officials, who, at the same time, claim that the refugees fleeing the regime are traitors. Without engaging the political aspects of Vietnamese society in any depth, this well-written novel, which seems to have been totally neglected by commentators, provides a glimpse of the enormous social problems of the entire country, north and south, especially the poverty and ignorance of the peasants who formed 90% of the population during the period.