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作品选读（一）
With the sickening feeling that I was now a stranger in my own homeland, I crossed the last few yards to my house with a lump in my throat and a growing sense of dread. Houses could be rebuilt and damaged dikes repaired—but the loss of our temples and shrines meant the death of our culture itself. It meant that a generation of children would grow up without fathers to teach them about their ancestors or the rituals of worship. Families would lose records of their lineage and with them the umbilicals to the very root of our society—not just old buildings and books, but people who once lived and loved like them. Our ties to our past were being severed, setting us adrift on a sea of borrowed Western materialism, disrespect for the elderly, and selfishness. The war no longer seemed like a fight to see which view would prevail. Instead, it had become a fight to see just how much and how far the Vietnam of my ancestors would be transformed. It was as if I was standing by the cradle of a dying child and speculating with its aunts and uncles on what the doomed baby would have looked like had it grown up. By tugging on their baby so brutally, both parents had wound up killing it. Even worse, the war now attacked Mother Earth—the seedbed of us all. This, to me, was the highest crime—the frenzied suicide of cannibals. How shall one mourn a lifeless planet?
Inside, the neat, clean home of my childhood was a hovel. What few furnishings and tools were left after the battles had been looted or burned for fuel. Our household shrine, which always greeted new arrivals as the centerpiece of our family’s pride, was in shambles. Immediately I saw the bag of bones and torn sinew that was my father lying in his bed. Our eyes met briefly but there was no sign of recognition in his dull face. Instead, he rolled away from me and asked:
“Where is your son?”
I crossed the room and knelt by his bed. I was afraid to touch him for fear of disturbing his wounds or tormenting his aching soul even more. He clutched his side as if his ribs hurt badly and I could see that his face was bruised and swollen.
“I am alone,” I answered, swallowing back my tears. “Who did this to you?”
“Dich”(The enemy.) It was a peasant’s standard answer.
I went to the kitchen and made some tea from a few dried leaves. It was as if my father knew he was dying and did not wish the house or its stores to survive him. If one must die alone, it should be in an empty place without wasting a thing.
When I returned, he was on his back. I held his poor, scabbed head and helped him drink some tea. I could see he was dehydrated, being unable to draw water from the well or get up to drink it even when neighbors brought some to the house.
“Where were you taken? What was the charge?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter.” My father drank gratefully and lay back on the bed. “The Americans came to examine our family bunker. Because it was so big, they thought Viet Cong might be hiding inside and ordered me to go in first. When I came out and told them no one was there, they didn’t believe me and threw in some grenades. One of them didn’t go off right away and the two Americans who went in afterward were killed. They were just boys—” My father coughed up blood. “I don’t blame them for being angry. That’s what war is all about, isn’t it? Bad luck. Bad karma.”
“So they beat you up?”
“They pinned a paper on my back that said ‘VC’ and took me to Hoa Cam District for interrogation. I don’t have to tell you what happened after that. I’m just lucky to be alive.”
As sad as I felt about my father’s misfortune, growing fury now burned inside me. There was no reason to beat this poor man almost to death because of a soldier’s tragic mistake.
I made my father as comfortable as possible and climbed the hill to the American fortress with my bucket of merchandise, intent on making a different kind of sale.
“Honcho?” I asked the first soldier I saw on the trail. I didn’t understand his answer, but eventually I made myself understood well enough to impress him with my harmlessness: “You buy? Very nice? No bum—bum! See captain. Where honcho?”
Eventually I made my way to an officer who poked around my bucket, which by now had been searched four or five times by Americans for explosives. When he finally understood I wanted to talk to him about more than the price of bracelets, he called for the camp’s Vietnamese translator.
“Thank...” I said, bowing politely to the frowning Republican soldier who was not from the Central Coast. I explained the situation quickly to him in Vietnamese. I told him there had been a terrible mistake and that my father lay badly wounded in our house down the hill. I told him I wanted the Americans to take him to a hospital where he would be cared for and to help repair his house when he came back. I told him I knew the Americans were required to do all these things by their own regulations.
The Republican translator only laughed at me. “Look, missy,” he said, “the Americans do what they damn well please around here. They don’t take orders from anybody, especially little Vietnamese girls. Now, if you’re smart, you’ll take your father and get the hell out of here!”
“But you didn’t even translate what I said to the captain!” I protested. “Come on—give the American a chance to speak for himself!”
“Look—” the translator exploded. “You’d better get out of here now or I’ll denounce you as VC! If you have a complaint, go to district headquarters like everyone else! Put your request through channels—and be prepared to spend some money. Now run along before I get mad!”
I gathered my things and went back down the hill. Although some GIs tried to wave me over, I was too upset to make a sale. I just wanted to help my father and keep things from getting worse.
Because the Americans so dominated the area, I felt comparatively safe staying near my house and tending to my father. Unlike the Republicans, who commandeered civilian houses for their quarters, the Americans kept their distance and so managed to avoid a lot of friction with the peasants. I no longer tried to sell anything (the villagers still hated anyone who dealt with the invaders) and pretended I didn’t speak English when their troops stopped me from time to time. Although people going to the toilet or gathering firewood were still shot occasionally by jumpy soldiers, things remained blessedly quiet. It had been months since a major Viet Cong attack and a new, if smaller, generation of children now played in Ky La’s streets. More dangerous were the Koreans who now patrolled the American sector. Because a child from our village once walked into their camp and exploded a Viet Cong bomb wired to his body, the Koreans took terrible retribution against the children themselves (whom they saw simply as little Viet Cong). After the incident, some Korean soldiers went to a school, snatched up some boys, threw them into a well, and tossed a grenade in afterward as an example to the others. To the villagers, these Koreans were like the Moroccans—tougher and meaner than the white soldiers they supported. Like the Japanese of World War II, they seemed to have no conscience and went about their duties as ruthless killing machines. No wonder they found my country a perfect place to ply their terrible trade.
I discovered that most of the kids I grew up with (those who had not been killed in the fighting) had married or moved away. Girls my age, if they had not yet married, were considered burdens on their family—old maids who consumed food without producing children. They also attracted the unsavory attention of soldiers, which always led to trouble. One reason so many of our young women wound up in the cities was because the shortage of available men made them liabilities to their families. At least a dutiful grown—up daughter could work as a housekeeper, nanny, hostess, or prostitute and send back money to the family who no longer wanted her. Many families, too, had been uprooted—like the refugees from Bai Gian or those who had been moved so that their houses could be bulldozed to provide a better fire zone for the Americans. For every soldier who went to battle, a hundred civilians moved ahead of him—to get out of the way; or behind him—following in his wake the way leaves are pulled along in a cyclone, hoping to live off his garbage, his money, and when all else failed, his mercy.
This is not to say that rubble and refugees were the only by—products of our war. Hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and countless motorbikes, luxury cars, TVs, stereos, refrigerators, air conditioners, and crates of cigarettes, liquor, and cosmetics were imported for the Vietnamese elite and the Americans who supported them. This created a new class of privileged people—wealthy young officers, officials, and war profiteers—who supplanted the elderly as objects of veneration. Consequently, displaced farmers—old people, now, as well as young—became their servants, working as maids to the madams or bootblacks for fuzz—cheeked GIs. It was a common sight to see old people prostrate themselves before these young... crying lay ong—I beg you, sir!—where before such elderly people paid homage to no one but their ancestors. It was a world turned on its head.
Of those villagers who remained in Ky La, many were disfigured from the war, suffering amputated limbs, jagged scars, or the diseases that followed malnutrition or took over a body no longer inhabited by a happy human spirit.
Saddest of all these, perhaps, was Ong Xa Quang, a once—wealthy man who had been like a second father to me in the village. Quang was a handsome, good—natured man who sent two sons north in 1954. Of his two remaining sons, one was drafted by the Republican army and the other, much later, joined the Viet Cong. His two daughters married men who also went north, and so were left widows for at least the duration of the war. When I went to visit Quang I found his home and his life in ruins. He had lost both legs to an American mine, and every last son had been killed in battle. His wife now neglected him (she wasn’t home when I called) because he was so much trouble to care for and he looked malnourished and on the verge of starvation. Still, he counted himself lucky. Fate had spared his life while it took the lives of so many others around him. All his suffering was part of his life’s education—but for what purpose, he admitted he was still not wise enough to know. Nonetheless, Quang said I should remember everything he told me, and to forget none of the details of the tragedies I myself had seen and was yet to see. I gave him a daughter’s tearful hug and left, knowing I would probably never see him alive again.
I walked to the hill behind my house where my father had taken me when I was a little girl—the hill where he told me about my destiny and duty as a Phung Thi woman. I surveyed the broken dikes and battered crops and empty animal pens of my once flourishing village. I saw the ghosts of my friends and relatives going about their work and a generation of children who would never be born playing in the muddy fields and dusty streets. I wondered about the martyrs and heroes of our ancient legends—shouldn’t they be here to throw back the invaders and punish the Vietnamese on both sides who were making our country not just a graveyard, but a sewer of corruption and prison of fear? Could a... who made such saints as well as ordinary people truly be a god if he couldn’t feel our suffering with us? For that matter, what use was... at all when people, not deities, seemed to cause our problems on earth?
I shut my eyes and called on my spirit sense to answer but I heard no reply. It was as if life’s cycle was no longer birth, growth, and death but only endless dying brought about by endless war. I realized that I, along with so many of my countrymen, had been born into war and that my soul knew nothing else. I tried to imagine people somewhere who knew only peace—what a paradise! How many souls in that world were blessed with the simple privilege of saying good—bye to their loved ones before they died? And how many of those loved ones died with the smile of a life well lived on their lips—knowing that their existence added up to something more than a number in a “body count” or another human brick on a towering wall of corpses? Perhaps such a place was America, although American wives and mothers, too, were losing husbands and sons every day in the evil vortex between heaven and hell that my country had become.
I sat on the hill for a very long time, like a vessel waiting to be filled up with rain-soft wisdom from heaven—but the sun simply drifted lower in the west and the insects buzzed and the tin roofs of the American camp shimmered in the heat and my village and the war sat heavily—unmoved and unmovable like an oppressive gravestone—on my land and in my heart. I got up and dusted off my pants. It was time to feed my father.
Back home, I told him about my visit to “our hilltop.” I said I now regretted fleeing Ky La. Perhaps it would have been better to stay and fight—to fight the Americans with the Viet Cong or the Viet Cong with the Republicans or to fight both together by myself and with anyone else who would join me.