Displacement

In 1948 a young Vietnamese nobleman set off from Hanoi for the family estate to be with his wife, who was expecting another child. Along the way, he stayed overnight at the estate of a relative. The following day, a French patrol came to the local village, searching for resistance fighters. Most of the village went into hiding. The few who remained were herded into a courtyard: “a handful of elders, cripples, drunkards, and one oversleeper”. Three were immediately shot as suspected sympathisers with the Viet Minh. The soldiers threatened to shoot the nobleman. He spoke up for himself in fluent, elegant French, explaining that he was an aristocrat, brother of the late magistrate of his region, wealthy, landowning, “and sworn enemy of the Viet Minh”. This was all true, although, like most families of substance, the family secretly supported the Viet Minh with food and supplies on demand, just as they did for the French. There wasn’t much choice in the matter.

The French soldiers are quite entertained by the man’s arguments. What they hear is not a person of authority to be taken seriously, but merely a Vietnamese who speaks excellent French. They need a new interpreter, as the last one was killed by a sniper. The man is taken prisoner, shackled; he finds himself a slave. “His lineage, wealth, education—even his family’s long-standing obedience to France—didn’t save him the indignity of being led from village to village on a chain. He was fed when he worked, whipped when he refused.” He is a “useful piece of equipment”, passed from one commander to another as the French fight the Viet Minh across the Red River Delta. “They gave him no respite and paid him no wages.” On the march, he is used as “a pack animal for the regiment’s supplies”. He serves for a year. In 1949 the French forces retrench themselves and release all the local workers, cooks, and “the strange interpreter—the learned barbarian well-versed in Voltaire”.

The young man is the father of Thong Van Pham, narrator of The Eaves of Heaven. “My father returned to us,” says Thong,

a barefoot beggar with neither a bedroll on his back nor a single piaster in his pocket. As raw-boned and light-shadowed as the famine victims that once roamed the land, he staggered through the Ancestral Gate, sunburned and covered in bleeding scabs. No one dared touch him. Lice lined the collar of his shirt and nested in the stitching of his pants.

He was thirty-one.

Thong’s father never recovers from this experience. During his year of unwilling service, his wife has died, leaving several young children. Through the difficult years to come, he retreats into opium addiction. The family, like the Vietnamese nation, is in disarray, partly due to their own choices, but mainly as a result of forces over which they have no control. There will be no peace for more than twenty-five years.

The Eaves of Heaven is written by Vietnamese-American novelist Andrew Pham, and narrated in the voice of his father, Thong Van Pham. It is a memoir, an attempt to tell the true history of a family, the son writing in the voice of the father. The preface tells us that Andrew and Thong collaborated closely on the book, but it is published under Andrew’s name, “on behalf of” his father. The result is a fascinating hybrid genre, at once memoir, history and novel; something like Gertrude Stein’s memoir of her partner, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but to more serious purpose.

Thong Van Pham was born in the mid-1930s to a wealthy family in the Red River Delta in the north of Vietnam. The family had been rewarded with a large area of land in the early nineteenth century for their services to King Nguyen Anh, who unified the country in 1802. Over the next 100 years, the Phams became a large and powerful clan within Vietnam’s feudal system. By and large, such families supported the French colonisation of Vietnam, and the French in turn made good use of the local nobility in the colonial administration. It was a mutually supportive system, while it lasted.

Thong’s father spent much of his young adulthood enjoying himself in Hanoi while his wife and other relatives ran the huge estate. By the late 1940s, Vietnam had been through years of turmoil as independence groups attempted to drive out the French, and also fought among themselves. During the Second World War, the Japanese occupied Vietnam and seized so much of the Vietnamese rice crops that the country suffered years of famine. Large numbers of people were displaced in their search for food. “More than a million starved to death; millions more suffered from hunger and disease.”

After the Second World War, the Americans and British helped the French to return to power in Vietnam, in the face of powerful, if disunited, local opposition. Years of civil unrest and guerrilla warfare followed, until the French were finally defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. But Vietnam would not achieve independence for another generation. The American intervention started officially in the early 1960s, although in fact the USA had been discreetly involved in Vietnam for more than a decade; Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American (1955) tells something of this secret history.

Under the Geneva Accords of 1954, Vietnam was divided into separate nations, North and South. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary until elections in 1956. It was obvious that Ho Chi Minh had enough support in both parts of the country to win the election. So the South Vietnam government, with the support of the Americans, simply refused to participate. Civil conflict continued through the 1950s. It was not until 1975, after a devastating war against the Americans, that Vietnam was reunified and independent. Thong played a small part in this momentous history, but unwillingly, and in some ways, he feels, on the wrong side.

One of Thong’s most vivid memories from childhood is collecting crickets in the fields and setting them to fight with one another. It is cruel to the crickets, but a source of great excitement and amusement to the kids. Many of those children laughing in the rice paddies in the early 1940s would not live to adulthood, reflects Thong. War, famine, displacement and deprivation left none of them untouched. “We would all fight battles not of our choosing. We would be fierce crickets.”

The Pham clan loses its wealth, its lands, and its power in the upheavals of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1954 they move to the south of Vietnam. It is very different from their homeland in the north, but they are made welcome, and Thong manages to create a new life for himself. He is full of hope. He is poor now, but he has a good education and is building a career as a teacher and scholar. He meets a wonderful young woman and they marry, against Thong’s father’s objections. By the early 1960s, they have built a precarious but happy life, with a baby and a modest house in Saigon, their first home to have a toilet.

Working as a teacher, Thong tries to avoid joining either side in the political and military conflicts. People are under pressure from both the Saigon government and the Resistance (now the National Liberation Front, dismissively called the Viet Cong by the Saigon government). Whichever side one supports, one is at risk of being harassed or killed by the other. Many people try to appease both. It is like the days of the fighting between the Viet Minh and the French, when both sides arrested and murdered civilians caught in the conflict. As a boy, Thong had witnessed the public humiliation, torture and killing of a civilian village man by a French patrol. The other side, the Viet Minh, imprisoned, tortured and finally executed Thong’s teacher, Uncle Uc. It is impossible to remain neutral, and for some people, almost impossible to take sides. Since the 1940s, thinks Thong, “We had gone nowhere.”

In 1963, Thong is conscripted into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the South Vietnamese army. He is sent to a training camp in Quang Trung. The men live in tents in a bare enclosure; no bushes, no trees. They spend days and weeks just waiting. On the first day, they go to the army kitchen tent for lunch. “A handful of men sat at the tables staring morosely into their tins.” It immediately becomes obvious why. “Hungry, I tried a spoonful of rice and spat it out. It was foul, mildewed rice. I picked out a couple of rice worms and laid them on the table.” The meal contains no vegetables or meat. It looks and tastes disgusting. The men shake their heads in dismay. “Our reactions didn’t surprise the cook. He pointed us to a diner in the middle of the compound.”

At the private diner, they can get a decent meal. But they have to pay for it themselves, and prices are high. Army wages are low. Thong learns that the army pays a set amount of money to the unit per man per day. If the commander can feed the men more cheaply, he can pocket the difference. The food is so cheap as to be inedible, so the men have no choice but to buy from the diner, which charges three times the market price to the 700 men in camp. It makes a good profit. The commander gets a “healthy kickback percentage from the [diner] operator”. This is the only healthy thing in camp. The men are impoverished, underfed and resentful.

“We were expected to fight for our country,” says Thong,

and yet here we were, exactly where they put us, squatting under the searing sun, thirsty and hungry, crazy with insect bites, out of our minds with boredom, simply so our own superiors—the men to whom we were to entrust our lives—could steal from us repeatedly.

Those who came into the army with any sense of patriotism, he argues, soon lost it. The first experience in the ARVN, says Thong, “sowed a festering doubt in the soldier’s mind about his leaders, and it taught him from the very beginning to fend for himself. And it made him certain that the enemy had worthier leaders.”

Thong’s later experience at officer training school is no better. He concludes that the leadership of the South Vietnamese army is permeated by corruption, inefficiency and apathy. He has a lot of respect for the ordinary men who serve, but feels they have been undermined before they even start fighting. “No one around me actually harbored any hope of winning this war.”

Thong serves in the army for six years. He is released a few months before the Tet Offensive of 1968, when Viet Cong troops attack many towns, cities and US bases in the south. Even Saigon comes under attack. American claims to be winning the war start to look rather thin. “The Americans will never desert us,” says Thong at the time, hoping to settle back into civilian life, and refusing to see the political realities. “There are many ways of abandoning a cause,” responds his father. Thong’s father is “the consummate living room politician, spending all his lucid hours debating war and politics with his opium cronies”. But the father is right; this is the beginning of the end of the American commitment to South Vietnam. “The official death toll [of the Tet Offensive and the fighting which followed] would be staggering: 3895 Americans; 4954 ARVN troops; and 14,300 South Vietnamese civilians. And the VC would lose 58,373 men and women.”

Thong is recalled to the South Vietnamese army shortly after the Tet Offensive. “My four-month life as a civilian was over.” The Americans start to withdraw troops in the early 1970s. At the same time, US President Nixon orders massive bombing raids on North Vietnam, and secretly bombs neighbouring Cambodia. Many thousands of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian people are killed and injured.

In 1973, the last American troops leave. The South Vietnamese army has no chance of winning on its own. Some of its troops desert; others stay until the end, and fight bravely. The communists win the war, finally taking over Saigon in April 1975. As many historians have remarked, this was the outcome which could have been achieved any time in the 1950s or 1960s, without the years of bloodshed and the accumulation of bitterness inevitably caused by war; not to mention the lost lives, the devastated countryside, and the long legacy of toxic chemicals used during the war. To this day, there are babies born in Vietnam with severe disabilities caused by Agent Orange and other defoliants used by the Americans to destroy the jungles in which the guerrillas hid. History suggests that much of this could have been avoided. Pham’s books show us something of the lived experiences of Vietnamese people who lived and fought through three wars.

When the war ends in 1975, people welcome peace, of course, but many in the south are frightened. What will the new nation of Vietnam be like? What will happen to those who supported the Americans and the US-backed Saigon regime? The victorious side regards them as traitors. Like many others who served, willingly or not, in the Saigon army, Thong fears retaliation, and fears for the safety of his family. They try to leave, as do thousands of others. Promising leads fail. Eventually they go to the coastal town of Rach Gia, hoping to escape by boat. The whole family is arrested. Thong is sent to a re-education camp as a suspected supporter of the Saigon regime. Conditions in the camp are harsh. The prisoners are employed to clear fields of land mines. Many die in the process. Others are executed by the Viet Cong. Incredibly, Thong manages to conceal the fact of his service in the ARVN. Had this been known, he would almost certainly have been killed.

The re-education camp is a terrible experience. Thong’s wife Anh spends what little money they have left on medicines which help him through the illnesses of camp life. Eventually a relative who served on the Viet Cong side, and is now a respected elder in the new regime, puts in a plea for Thong’s release. This is done at considerable personal risk, for which Thong is grateful. “Prison [is] the cruelest of man’s inventions”, he remarks. In the camp, time is arrested; the men are paralysingly bored, as well as paralysed with fear. In the evenings, prisoners are put on trial and some are executed. No one knows whose name will be called next. While he has long understood and even admired those Vietnamese who opposed the French and then the Americans, he cannot help but feel embittered by his experiences of prison.

I remembered how, in my impassioned youth, my heart had swelled with pride at the sight of brown pajama-clad fighters, our brave young men and women—our Resistance—coming to my family’s estate for supplies. How thrilled I had been when they defeated the Algerian Mohammed [the leader of a French group which had terrorised villagers near Thong’s home] and drove the French from our land. How I had wanted so desperately to join the Resistance, to fight injustice, to strike back at the oppressors. I would have become a part of this [the retaliation against those who supported South Vietnam and the Americans].

Do the ends truly justify the means?

And to what ends had we arrived?

They had won the war, the populace, and the country in its entirety. This [imprisonment and executions] was barbaric. This was ridiculously vindictive. It was all so senseless.

Thong is released from prison in January 1976. Eerily, he feels he is reliving his father’s experience of being released by the French in 1949:

This was my rebirth. I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and saw the image of my father decades earlier looking back at me—that shadow of a man the French had released, the emaciated body, the sun-charred face, the cracked lips, the sunken red eyes, wrinkles as deep as scars. Barefoot and penniless, we were equally impoverished across a generation.

The book concludes on the day Thong is released from the camp. He has no money for food or transport. He is helped by an elderly man whose son had served with the communist forces and was killed in the American war. Thong admits to this man the secret he has concealed through the months of imprisonment, hard labour, and interrogation: that he served as an officer in the ARVN. He feels he owes the old man the truth, though it puts his life at risk. As they part, they grasp hands.

I wanted to remember the gnarled contours of his bony farmer’s fingers. The weight of our tragedy, its horrific intensity so vast I dared not peer into its depth.

It wasn’t over; not for my people, not for me.

Where can he go; how can he live in peace? Thong loves his country, north and south, but now: “There was no shelter left. Nothing here beneath the eaves of heaven remained untouched by the war.” He knows he has to leave, risking everything at sea, to try and reach safety with his wife and children. “For life, I must risk everything precious to me yet again. May the gods be merciful. May our ancestors watch over us.”

After further hardships, we know from Andrew Pham’s previous book, Catfish and Mandala (1999), the family escape as “boat people” and eventually settle in the United States. But this too comes at considerable cost. How do people recover from the traumas of war and displacement? As Jacqueline Rose argues in The Last Resistance: “There is a baggage of the mind. When you move across a national boundary, you are just as likely to carry your enemies with you. Nothing, as psychoanalysis will testify, is ever simply left behind.” Pham and his father manage, however, to lay some of Vietnam’s old hatreds to rest, not least through the process of bearing witness to their own lives.

Like other Vietnamese writers, Pham has a remarkable capacity to forgive. But if there is forgiveness, there must be no forgetting, and this for me is why Pham’s books are important works of our time. As Rose says of other major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century—W.G. Sebald, Freud, and Shulamith Hareven—they are all brilliant story-tellers, “master craftsmen who allow us to glimpse the past as it ferments inside the mind”.

Andrew Pham’s books are survivors’ tales, optimistic in a way, yet they also convey the high price of survival. For his sister Chi, the suffering was too great. Some years after moving to the USA, she committed suicide. This tragedy is the traumatic, barely articulated heart of Catfish and Mandala. The Eaves of Heaven helps us to understand how people can seem to survive an unbearable series of loss and displacement. But events might return to haunt them, or their children, long afterwards.

Trudi Tate is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.