Lotus blossom day tags - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Larry Buttrose
HANOI IS AN ATTRACTIVE CITY OF LAKES and boulevards, of twisting, tamarind-shaded alleys in the old city, the opera and elegant Metro-pole Hotel in the French quarter. As in Ho Chi Minh City there is evident rising affluence and a profusion of fancy shops. Wartime propaganda posters sell for up to US $200 – often to American collectors. We purchase a reproduction of women guerrillas moving with rifles at the ready through a lake of pink lotus blossoms. Their unabashed beauty, and that of the lotuses, belies a deadly purpose. The title translates as The Southern Guerrilla Women are Full of Guts. We ask the sales assistant, dressed in fashionable clothes and trendy spectacles, to see a poster of Ho Chi Minh, and she places several before us. As we look, her manner changes. ‘He is our uncle,' she says quietly. Women like her fought on the battlefields, petite women who had once worn make-up and fashionable clothes. If needed, no doubt they would fight again.
‘The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past,' North Vietnamese army veteran Bao Ninh wrote in his famous novel The Sorrow of War, which rewinds the life of Kien, a foot-soldier who survives only to contend with the peace. The jump-cut narrative evokes profound horror and pathos, ghosts of a dreamscape jungle and subliminal eroticism, building to an overwhelmingly powerful climax. Critics place it among war classics; some argue it may be the finest war novel. Its hunted depths make it a unique work, echoing the extremes of the conflict. It is also a book about lost love, about writing; and about Hanoi, and its people. ‘At this moment the city was so calm he could practically hear the clouds blow over the rooftops. He thought of them as part of his own life being blown away in wispy sections, leaving vast, open areas of complete emptiness, as in his own life.'
WE MAKE CONTACT WITH FAM LUC and meet up at his house in Hanoi. Three of his collectors join us. One speaks excellent English and translates as we catch up with all the things half understood and left unsaid back in Ho Chi Minh City. We learn that Luc is a descendant of the famous poet Nguyen Du. Following his years as an artist in the North Vietnamese Army, his marriage broke up. He met a Frenchwoman who loved his paintings and collected many; their trysts conducted in secret to avoid the eyes of the then-disapproving officialdom. One day Luc returned to his room and found an envelope. It contained a key to a substantial Hanoi villa as payment for his works. The couple married and she took him to live in Paris, but he returned alone after only a month. Now the house is not quite as large. When the the road to the airport was widened the authorities cut off the fronts of houses in the way, including Luc's.
We go on to a restaurant by the lake, a massive earth-floored industrial shed with a row of woks in a far corner. The lake is moonlit, literally alive with catfish. Luc orders and large bowls of boiled river snails are brought out followed by freshwater shrimp, and a deep-fried whole catfish. The coup de grace is a basket of tiny birds, deep-fried whole. I do my best to pick off a miniscule wing, trying not to offend. Luc bites a head and chews, and Belle bites in as well. I keep my eyes down and reach for the prawns. Our fellow diners, Luc's collectors, are typical of the new Vietnam. One is a millionaire, another a professor of literature and Party official, the third a Hanoi real estate agent. They eat, chat and joke together. We down beers and start toasting the republic, the people and Ho Chi Minh. I have a copy of his Prison Diary, bought that day at the Temple of Literature, and read out ‘Moonlight', as requested by the professor, pausing for each line to be translated:
In jail is neither flower nor wine.
What could one do when the night is so exquisite?
To the window I go and look at the moonshine.
Through the bars the moon gazes at the poet.
Later a street hawker sells me a small book called Christmas Bombing: Dien Bien Phu in the Air. It is a forensically detached account of the saturation bombing of Hanoi by B52s in the closing days of 1972. The Paris Peace Talks had almost delivered an American withdrawal, but under pressure from the South Vietnamese over conditions, Nixon ordered the now infamous Christmas bombing. Before his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh had warned: ‘US armed forces are set to be defeated but they will only admit defeat after their loss in the skies of Hanoi.' Massive raids by nearly two hundred B52s were intended to bludgeon the North Vietnamese into accepting terms: Nixon's ordering of them was denounced as a criminal act around the world. On 18 December 1972 they started raining down high explosives from ten kilo-metres up, and by the time Nixon ended it eleven days later, the people of Hanoi had been subjected to some of the most intense bombing ever conducted, killing and maiming thousands, with severe damage to homes, hospitals and schools. But US losses were significant too – more than thirty B52s the Vietnamese claim. They say it was the losses, and not the global protests, which forced Nixon to stop bombing.
Our last day in Hanoi is very still and humid. As night falls a thunderstorm breaks over the city, the thunderclaps close overhead and very intense. One can only wonder how it must have felt when they were the bursts of bombs. The rain comes sheeting down. Below our window in Ma May Street I see people everywhere running for cover. I am reminded of something Bao Ninh wrote: ‘The spirit of Hanoi is strongest by night, even stronger in the rain.'
IN HO CHI MINH CITY THERE'S A CLUTCH of hotels down near the Saigon River famous from books and old news footage: the Continental, the Caravelle and the Rex, and further down, the Grand and the Majestic. They have roof garden bars which were popular with war correspondents, who could keep an eye on the city but stay out of range of tossed grenades. Now you can choose from cocktails including a B52, a Good Morning Vietnam, a Saigon Saigon and even a Hemingway (Bacardi, Maraschino liqueur, grapefruit juice – whatever would Papa have said?)
On our last evening before returning home we sit at a table at the Rex overlooking Lam Son Square in the middle of Ho Chi Minh Ciy. Above the frenetic traffic, small birds sweep around the square in swirling spirals, much like the swifts in the same hypnotic circuits above the piazzas of Europe. The Aussies downing beers at the next table are vets on a tour. What must they make of Vietnam now, with its shopping malls, fashions and youth culture? What was it they fought here for again? Something about stopping communism, tumbling dominoes? What was it for that five hundred of their mates died? What was it all about?
The question hangs unspoken in the air as the birds sweep past on their silent rounds. ♦