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作品选读（二）
Crossing the checkerboard rice paddies on the dikes with the setting sun warm on my face was like moving back in time. As we splashed through a shallow causeway onto the island, my legs felt younger and a song popped into my head—one I remembered hearing my mother and sister Hai sing during the war with the French. It’s about a Viet Minh fighter returning home after being too long at the front. I sang it softly:
So long ago I left this place
Of home—cooked meals,
Rau muon soup and purple eggplant,
And villagers toiling in the fields
Under hot noon sun or foggy morning,
They carry buckets and plant new rice
I must return to this sacred spot:
The motherland that gave me life
Back I’ve come now to my farm
I’ll plant crops and take
One meal in the morning and one at night,
From the land, all that she gives
Vietnam gives rain
To wash away death and make plants grow;
And from the draught inside my heart
Make rivers of happiness overflow
When the song ended, we were standing in a clearing just big enough for a couple of kids to kick around a ball. Near a line of brush a few yards away was a shallow indentation, barely perceptible, and its sister pile of dirt eroded by twenty years of wind and rain—yin and yang of what this nightmare playground and those years had been all about. I think the crew was a little disappointed at this pint—sized “killing field.” It was not a graveyard or even a place of execution, but an area set aside by the Viet Cong to make its victims think it so. Still, at the time, it had been enough to do its job. I always felt very uncomfortable thinking about this place and now I realized why. It was not just the unfair trial and threatened execution or even my rape—as horrible as those things were—that tormented me. What I hated and feared most about this place was that, for at least a little while during my stay on earth, other humans had taken away my spirit—my will to love. I had talked and written a lot in the last few years about forgiveness. I had been able to forgive the two VC guards, Loi and Tau, for the terrible things they did to me, but that was easy compared to what the cosmic god was now calling on me to do. I now had to forgive myself for the biggest sin of all from those years: turning my back on life. I now knew why coming back to this place, and starting the clinic nearby, was so important. Others may call it charity, but I was really saving my soul.
In the vans going back to the hotel, I asked the boys what they thought about the place where their mom grew up.
“Is it always this hot?” Jimmy asked.
“This is a nice day,” I laughed. “Wait for the summer monsoon!”
“We had enough trouble carrying all that video gear in shorts and T-shirts,” Tommy added. “I can’t imagine GIs patrolling the paddies in fatigues and backpacks. Even if you got up the energy to move, you’d sink in the mud up to your knees. Unbelievable! I wonder why they never dressed for the occasion?”
“At least I got to ride on a water buffalo,” Jimmy said.
“You mean that dinky little cow I saw you sitting on when we got back?” I teased.
“Well—it’s a lot bigger when you get close up.”
“It was just a small cow!”
“Let’s just tell people I rode a water buffalo, okay? And leave it at that.”
The next day, after seeing the television crew off, Tommy met some girls who invited him to a concert in Danang. When he returned, the other boys teased him to death.
“Hey, Tom,” Jimmy said, “you want Mom to call the village matchmaker?”
“You’re just jealous ’cause they’re cuter than that cow you dated in Ky La.”
Bathroom towels, wrapped into whips, snapped like gunfire and I thought they would wreck the hotel room.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough!” I shouted. “Of course, Jimmy, Grandma Phung is right. You’re a young man now. Pretty soon you’ll be finished with college and ready to settle down. I can have Ba Ngoai start looking for a nice Vietnamese girl for you.”
“Whoaa—hold it! Time out!” Jimmy made a T with his hands. “Vietnamese girls are too shy. Tom says you can’t even hold their hands while you’re dancing. All they want to do is practice their English and talk about school.”
“Of course,” I said proudly. “These are village girls! They want to impress you with their seriousness. You have to be patient. In America, finding love is like grabbing a Big Mac. Here, it’s like planting rice. You can’t sow and reap in the same evening, for goodness sake!”
“How about just spreading some fertilizer?” Tommy asked.
I belted him with a pillow myself and the other boys jumped on top of him.
“If you talk like that, you’ll never find a girlfriend in Vietnam,” I said. “These girls are too nice for you!”
I sounded just like my mother. Secretly, though, I could think of nothing better than for my sons to discover the love of their life among the poor girls of Vietnam—I knew what strong hearts and willing hands they could bring to a marriage, to complement and fulfill a good man’s life. I also knew, of course, what any rural girl would be up against in America, even though my boys had my example—written down now, like a textbook!—to advise them. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. There were some things, in the East and West, each generation insists on learning for itself.
We left Vietnam a slightly different family. In many respects, the trip had brought us closer together. The boys had seen their mother’s origin and no longer had to imagine it from books, old photos, and stories. In other ways, though, the hairline gap of age and culture that had always existed between me and my sons now grew into the gulf that always and inevitably separates the generations, especially in the West. I could no longer pretend that my boys were somehow displaced Vietnamese—surrogate villagers provided by... to decorate my life with familiar things. More clearly than I, they saw Vietnam’s wretchedness as part of the bigger wretchedness of all mankind. Their perspective was one of globe—straddling, well-educated Americans—businessmen, doctors, lawyers, artists, whatever they would become—not a country girl with a third-grade education trying to heal in a day the wounds of an entire people. Just as each trip instructed me further about my mission, so it caused me to realize that my American sons truly had life missions of their own. Without question, our lives and missions would intersect from time to time, but their karma was their own. Such is the discovery every mother makes and the lesson every child must learn. As for us, we could not have asked for better teachers.
Back in the United States, the movie rights to my book were optioned by Oliver Stone, an Oscar-winning filmmaker who was a Vietnam veteran himself. He saw in my story the third installment of his great Vietnam trilogy, which began with Platoon and continued with Born on the Fourth of July. We met to discuss the project and I found him to be a down-to-earth, creative person who tried unsuccessfully to hide his big heart and generous spirit. Like so many veterans I had worked with, he still held in a lot of anger about the war. But he also had the... given soul of an artist, which allowed him to appreciate his feelings and transform them into compelling, and ultimately healing, images on film. I saw in Oliver a kindred spirit who could help my story touch a much bigger world audience that only movies can reach.
He was also a man who liked to make things happen.
Three days after he had asked to see plans for the Mother’s Love Clinic and background information about East Meets West, he donated a check for the amount needed to finish our work. Just as miraculously, as if triggered by this first domino, we received our license from the State Department to build our clinic and our waivers to the 1942 Trading with the Enemy Act. Brick by brick, the wall that had isolated my old from my new country was coming down.
In September 1989, I was back in Vietnam. Several uncles had arrived at Danang and were going to Ky La for the clinic’s grand opening two days hence. I hitched a ride with them and appeared at my mother’s door shortly after sundown.
“I’m going to spend the night in my village,” I announced to my mother and Hai. Once the clinic was opened, the village and its spirits would enter a new life cycle. These would be the last two nights I could recapture the world of my youth.
Hai checked all the windows for eavesdroppers and my mother blew out the lights to discourage visitors. With my uncles, we sat together on the floor like kids telling ghost stories in the dark.
“This reminds me of 1975,” Hai said with a laugh, “when the North took over Danang. Everyone ran to the American Army PX at China Beach because they were giving away the food. I grabbed a couple of empty sacks and went down myself. I was a little angry that the Republicans were charging an entry fee, but I paid and filled my bags. When I came out, a Southern soldier took my loot—yes, just grabbed it. They were using the peasants to do their dirty work! I started shouting and punching the soldier when shots rang out. Somebody yelled ‘ Giai phong, giai phong !—Liberate the people!’—and quick as a wink, the Republicans had shed their uniforms and hidden their rifles. The man who had just stolen my bag tried to trade it back for some of my clothes—can you believe it? Anyway, the Northern soldiers surrounded the place. They arrested the Republicans and tied them to the heavy bags so they couldn’t run away, then let the peasants go. I hated to lose that big bag of loot, but it was good to see those bullies get what they deserved!”
Everyone laughed but my mother. “Tonight reminds me of the night the village psychic told me about Sau Ban—”
I stopped laughing, too. This was news to me.
“Somebody told you what happened to my brother?” I asked.
My mother shifted her tiny body on the mat and looked up, as if she could see the stars through our thatched roof.
“Not long ago, Bon Nghe hired an ong thay xac dong down South to locate Sau Ban’s remains. He interviewed a lot of villagers and believes he knows what happened. Sau Ban was serving with a cannon squad in the Dai Loc District just before the Tet Offensive in 1968—just before your father died. He was scouting from a hilltop fort and spotted a column of American tanks. He signaled his gun crew to fire but they missed the lead tank, and a moment later every cannon in the U.S. column had zeroed in on their position. His crew was wiped out in the first salvo, although Sau Ban, who was gravely wounded, was able to crawl away before the American troopers came. He lay in the sun all day until a VC medical team came along and took him to an underground hospital. They arrived about midnight, but it was too late. Your brother died and his body was buried at Dai Hong. Some of the older villagers have corroborated this story. That’s where we’ll go to find him—someday.”
A mosquito buzzed in my ear and I swatted it away. My mother was right. The house—each building in every village—had a spirit separate and apart from the generations of people who inhabited it. That spark of life, granted by Mother Earth, is what animates the world and binds a people to a place. Into this ancient, vibrant web, I was about to introduce a new entity, a place of healing, like a wandering herbalist come to help the sick and give the dying a little comfort. The day after tomorrow, my old world would be gone forever. We could only hope the new one would be better.
After talking a little more about Sau Ban, I turned to my mother, “So, Mama Du, you’re happy with your life?”
“What kind of question is that for an old lady? You have to be my age to realize that just being alive is a blessing—a miracle! From the smallest bug to the biggest whale, everything rejoices at being alive. When you stop to think about it, that’s all that counts. Hai Ngai and the others talk about independence from invaders and I suppose that’s okay. It gives people something to think about from the time they’re born and have everything to learn and the time they die and have forgotten it all. To tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to passing over into the spirit world. We have a lot of new ghosts out here in the countryside.”
“What do you mean, Mama Du?”
“I mean that a lot of people sacrificed in the war have come back as babies, and many of those are now young men and women. They’re dissatisfied with what now passes for peace. They want to make things better and, one way or another, they’re going to do it. How do you think your clinic got built? If the old ghosts didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be here. That’s what this country is all about now, Bay Ly—life, not death. Your clinic is just one of its new green shoots.”
At eight the next morning, all the honored guests had arrived: officials from the Health Ministry and Red Cross; physicians and nurses from town who would rotate shifts in the clinic; minor functionaries from a variety of provincial departments; and, of course, every villager who could walk and many who could not.