"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

(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.

v. Jean Lartéguy, Yellow Fever (1962; English Translation, 1965)

Lartéguy’s La Mal Jaune is a fictional representation from the French point of view of many of the events summarized in the first section of this chapter. Unlike Bosse’s novel, the focus here is on the movers-and-shakers rather than the peasantry, who remain in the background, with politics playing a central part in the action. Lartéguy’s novel frequently evokes an air of nostalgia for the old French colony, with the author in a number of passages lamenting the passing of an era. Graham Greene, who spent some time in Vietnam during this period, admitted that he shared this nostalgia “with so many retired colons and officers of the French Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.”71

The historical context of the first part of the novel is Hanoi, late 1955, three weeks before the city is to be handed over to the Communist Viet Minh. The main characters are a group of French journalists who live in a former brothel called the Press Camp, an appropriate setting, since pre-Communist Hanoi is often symbolized in the novel as a dying whore, personified by one