Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  Over breakfast one morning in Saigon, I read an item in the English-language Vietnam News headed "Today in History": "In 1976, the Trans-Vietnam Railway is officially reopened after 30 years of the division of the country. Construction of the 1700 km line was completed in 1936."

  In 1973, I had traveled as far north as I could go on a train from Saigon, though some sections had been bombed out. I had reached the end of the line, the dreary and besieged city of Hue, near the coast. After that were some forward fire bases and the demilitarized zone—a no-go area.

  After breakfast, I got two train tickets. Mr. Lien, who helped me buy them, was fluent in English. He had been born in 1973, in November, the month I'd been here. He was bright, efficient, optimistic, and funny—no chip on his shoulder. One ticket was for the sleeper to Hue, where I'd been before, another from Hue to Hanoi, where I'd never been.

  NIGHT TRAIN TO HUE

  THE TYPHOON THAT was big news, a dark ominous blob on a TV weather map four days previously, hit Vietnam the day I left: heavy rain pelting sideways in glittering slashes on the open platform of Saigon Station, crackling on the old blackened cement and drenching the food stalls that had been set up to provision travelers. But I was smiling. Nothing like terrible weather to make a simple departure memorable and dramatic.

  Even in the rain and wind and brimming puddles, the station was orderly; the take-away food for sale included rice and chicken, dumplings and sausages, fruit, bottled water, cookies, beer. I bought my bagful and noticed that there were eight daily newspapers in Vietnamese, no noticeable police presence, no baggage check, no hassle at all, not the slightest intrusion into the traveler's privacy or solitude. My conductor was a polite and attractive thirty-year-old woman in a smart blue uniform. All this order, prosperity, and efficiency the Vietnamese had found for themselves after decades of war, in spite of us; we could take no credit for it.

  Travel in Vietnam for an American was a lesson in humility. They had lost two million civilians and a million soldiers, and we had lost more than 58,000 men and women. They did not talk about it on a personal level, at least not in a blaming way. It was not you, they said, it was your government.

  In my compartment in the soft-sleeper coach were two conferring twenty-somethings: Mr. Pham Van Hai was seeing off his wife. They sat in her berth, which was opposite mine, holding hands.

  "She is getting off at Qui Nhon," Mr. Pham said. "I am not going. She is visiting her family."

  I saw from my map that Qui Nhon was halfway to Hue, the capital of Binh Dinh Province, once a place of heavy fighting. But Mr. Pham did not mention that. He spoke of having grown up there, and, as there wasn't much work in Qui Nhon, he and his wife had left to look for jobs.

  "That's why we came to Saigon." No one I had met so far had used the name Ho Chi Minh City. Mr. Pham was in real estate, he said. "We're very busy. Everyone is looking for property."

  "It's a busy place."

  Mr. Pham shrugged and said, "Saigon is not a beautiful city. But it will be. I've seen Singapore and Bangkok. We need more foreign investment, like them. More companies coming here. We'll make it a beautiful city."

  Real estate was booming, he said. Apartment houses were going up, new buildings to meet the demand. He was also involved in construction, so he knew. While he spoke, his wife sat placidly listening. She was tall and slender. She looked athletic in her sweatpants and a sweatshirt lettered Gymnast.

  "Have a good trip," Mr. Pham said and gave me his business card. He stepped off the train as the whistle blew. That was surely one of the oddities of rail travel here and in many other places, the man leaving his young wife and a foreign stranger in a little compartment, and waving goodbye as they sat on their shelf-like beds, about to spend twelve hours together in congenial propinquity, rocking along side by side, pretty little woman and big hairy foreigner; yet he didn't seem bothered.

  Her name was Phuong. She was young and shy and very sweet. Later she told me with pleasure that she was one month pregnant and that she was heading home to tell the family the good news. She made her bed as the train left the Saigon suburbs, and she got under the covers and went to sleep while I watched the last of the city slip past, diminishing from apartment houses to bungalows to huts facing canals and paddy fields, the rain still coming down, and Phuong sleeping with her lips slightly apart and a kind of waxen color, a beguiling pallor that steals upon the face of someone in deep slumber. I made an effort to look out the window.

  It was all peaceful—the green fields, the children playing among fruit trees, the little stations with red tile roofs, the swamps and cornfields, the pigs snuffling, the chickens strutting in the orchards. I was thinking, Idyllic.

  I remembered Saigon as tense and deserted, the countryside gray and fortified; few people were planting anything then, many places off-limits. In my memory Vietnam was very dark, existing in a penumbra of fear—a sea of land mines where idle walking was unthinkable and many bridges were rigged with command-detonated bombs.

  That shadowy world was not my imagination. The war—its temporariness and its urgencies—had turned the whole of the south into a sea of mud and rutted roads from the heavy truck and tank traffic. Because of the relentless chemical defoliants we had dumped, none of the trees were very old or very large.

  We passed Bien Hoa, where I'd been before, and then the open countryside, hours of it. The big green and empty landscape was the reality of Vietnam; Saigon was exceptional in its dense population and its size and its cacophony. The rest of the country was just banana trees and buffaloes and farmers bent over their rice fields.

  I was reading a novel called The Sorrow of War, by a Vietnamese, Bao Ninh, who'd been a soldier. The book's setting was a district called the Jungle of the Screaming Souls, near Kontum, a bit northeast of where Phuong was headed. The novel was a love story, but it was also about battle, the ten survivors (Bao Ninh had been one himself) of a massacred brigade of five hundred, not long before the fall of Saigon in 1974. In other words, a battle that had taken place soon after I had last been here.

  Phuong woke up and yawned and saw me reading. She said she didn't know the book. She added, as though as a reason, that she did not feel well as a result of her pregnancy, which was also why she was going home.

  "My family will take care of me."

  "What sort of work do you do in Saigon?"

  "I am an inspector in a factory," she said. "We make leather shoes for women."

  I drew a picture of a fancy stiletto-heeled shoe on a page in my notebook. She looked at it and smiled. She said, "Yes!" They were exported to Europe and the United States.

  With the sort of bluntness that characterizes a traveler in such a country—I would never have hazarded these questions of an American—I asked her how much money she made and the details of her work. She said that she and her fellow workers earned $400 a month. Could that be true? Her husband earned $700 a month. These figures were much higher than the salaries of comparable workers I'd met in Romania and Turkey.

  After dark, at Cam Ranh—where I'd also been before, a beleaguered place then—two middle-aged men entered the compartment and took the upper berths. They were laborers; both carried hard hats. They stayed in their berths until dinner was served by the conductor in the blue uniform: each of us got a plastic tray, a box of rice, and containers of pickled vegetables.

  "You drink?" one of the men said. He offered me his bottle of banana wine. It was brownish, the color of weak tea. I sniffed it and out of politeness had a small swig that tasted like formaldehyde.

  Nha Trang, no less beleaguered in my memory, was the next stop.

  "This is a tourist city," Phuong said.

  The rain was heavy here, the typhoon whirling overhead, rain slapping the sides of nearby sheds. Phuong ran into the rain and hurried back to the compartment with two fat ears of steamed corn, one of which she held upright on her lap in her pale hand. She smiled and prepared it for me, peeling its shucks with delicate fingers.

&nbs
p; "What do you call this?"

  "Popcorn," she said.

  I read more of The Sorrow of War, then dozed, waking when the train arrived at Qui Nhon around midnight, and Phuong shook my hand and got off. A big wheezy man entered the compartment and immediately took her berth. He sat drinking beer and staring at me with muddied eyes. I worried about losing my briefcase, so I tucked it under my pillow and slept until dawn.

  The choppy sea, whipped by the storm, was only forty feet from the railway line, which skirted the shore; the remnants of the typhoon were soaking the whole coast. I had woken at Danang, where I'd also been before, another besieged city then, where a defiant railway man had taken me on an engine in the opposite direction to prove a point. In a smiling and slightly crazy way he'd said that there were possibly mines on the tracks, but even so, "the Vietcong can't stop us." I had found that very scary, unerasable in my mind because of my fear; and now the opposite, a soporific almost, as we rolled past the palm groves, and instead of gun emplacements on the mutilated shore there were beach resorts.

  Dripping banana trees, gray sodden dunes, slender sampans drawn up above the tide line, the windows of the compartment streaming with rain. The beer drinker had vanished at Danang. The conductor brought the remaining three of us bowls of noodles. I broke out the tangerines I'd bought at Saigon Station and shared them with the two men—the construction workers—who were now sitting opposite me.

  Though they spoke basic English, we didn't say much at first. Oanh, the smaller, more wiry of the two, finished his noodles and drank his banana wine by the capful. His friend, Thanh, then surprised and slightly alarmed me by kneeling and locking the compartment door.

  "Why are you locking it?" I asked.

  Thanh smiled, touching one finger to his cheek in an I-know-what-I'm-doing gesture, and pulled a plastic bag from his pants pocket. He sat and opened it, and I caught a whiff of the nutty aroma of dampened marijuana.

  Thanh rolled a piece of newspaper, forming a stiff narrow tube about eight inches long. He poked it full of ganja, creating a classic doobie, then fired it up, sucked on it a little, inhaled, and wheezed with bubbling lungs, his eyes crossing. Then Oanh took a hit, and gurgled happily. And then it was my turn—a blazing jay at seven in the morning.

  When we had finished this dawn ritual, Thanh scattered the evidence out the window and unlocked the door.

  "What is that stuff?" I asked, slurring my speech.

  "Phien" he said, pronouncing it fyeh.

  They were both smiling quietly, sitting contentedly as the train raced along the shore past rain-swept paddies and flooded fields. Some houses were also flooded, their verandas underwater, the water filling the first floor. The coast road was a well-paved thoroughfare with a guardrail and good drainage, much more substantial and better made than, say, the Kamehameha Highway on the coast of Oahu. Apart from a few cars and some men whizzing along on motorbikes wearing plastic capes, there was no traffic. A big jolly billboard advertising a brand of rice stood where before—at the beginning of a railway bridge and a culvert—I would have seen a gun emplacement.

  The news at that moment was of the Iraq War, and so (though I found that news depressing) it was heartening to see this coherence and serenity: life after war, no hard feelings, no blame, the buried past, people looking ahead.

  To lighten my load of books, I was transcribing quotations from the Pol Pot biography into my notebook. Recognizing Pol Pot's face on the cover, Oanh tapped it.

  "Pol Pot," I said.

  "Bad man," he said.

  He spoke a little in Vietnamese to Thanh. Then Thanh said, "We fight," and he tapped Pol Pot's face. He took my pen and wrote 1976 and 1978 in my notebook, and showed me two fingers, meaning two years in Cambodia. He pointed to Oanh. "Him too."

  Still with the dopey stoner's grin, Thanh said with gestures and mumbled words that he and Oanh had fought in the first Vietnamese offensive to overthrow Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge government. This was the so-called proxy war of the Carter administration, when with utter cynicism we stood by, encouraging the Chinese and hoping that Vietnam would be weakened.

  I said, "Did you fight here too? Vietcong?"

  "Oh, yes. 'Sixty-nine and later. Him too."

  Their stoicism and toughness resembled that of many of the men described in Bao Ninh's novel. They had ferried food and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they said. Both had been bombed by American planes at a place called Con Meo (Cat Slope). Twelve years they'd been fighting, first the Americans, then the Cambodians; now they were construction workers in Hanoi, putting up new buildings.

  "What your country?" Oanh asked.

  "America."

  The word surprised him a little and made him smile. He shook my hand. We all shook hands. As with Mr. Pham the day before, there was only friendliness in this encounter—no moralizing, no frowns, no scolding. Almost all the Vietnamese I met were like this—not backward-looking and vindictive scolds muttering, "Never forget!" but compassionate souls, getting on with their lives, hopeful and humane.

  In The Sorrow of War, the main character, Kien, hears some soldiers in Hanoi talking about a victory in Cambodia. "But he knew it wasn't true that young Vietnamese loved war. Not true at all. If war came they would fight, and fight courageously. But that didn't mean they loved fighting. No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others, like the politicians."

  The train was pulling into Hue. The last time I'd been here, it had been overrun by angry and frightened American soldiers, and looked like hell. The hell of war—mud and ruin and flames, the whole stinking city on the wane—which is no empty metaphor but actual hell.

  ***

  HUE I REMEMBERED AS A BLASTED, war-damaged, and mostly empty town of muddy streets and shuttered houses, one hotel called Morin Brothers, feeble lights, ARVN patrols hurrying in jeeps on pot-holed roads, and touts promising ecstasy on drug-and-whore cruises on small boats lit by hanging lanterns on the Perfume River. Prostitutes and soldiers were all that remained of a city shattered and all but destroyed in the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong had held the citadel of Hue for twenty-four days, flying their flag over it. And it was flying over it again, but a rebuilt citadel and royal palace, the Forbidden Purple City, which had been mere hyperbole then and was reality now.

  I stayed at Morin's again, the hotel by the river, but this was a reincarnated place. The city had been restored and enlarged: the French-built municipal buildings and churches and schools, the chinoiserie on the far bank, the neighborhoods of small shops, bungalows with walled gardens and courtyards, narrow lanes, bars, and small restaurants. The rickshaw drivers' trade had been revived, the so-called cyclos, and their patter too: "Massage, sir? You want girl? Nice girl! I take you!"

  What appealed to me most about Hue was not its royal connection and its Indochinese hauteur or any of its temples, but rather the simple fact of its visible kitchens, the way—because of the heat, but also because it was a tranquil city—I could see people, women usually, cooking the evening meal, noodles in a big pot, or grilled meat, dumplings in a wok, and the families sitting down to eat on low wooden stools. Nothing was more indicative of peace than people unhurriedly eating and having plenty of food: domestic life being lived partly in the open, old women and small children sitting in doorways, watching the rain come down.

  There was hardly any distinction between a private kitchen and a public restaurant. The open platform of a shophouse served as both: the woman shredding noodles into a soup pot with vegetables was chatting to her friends, minding her children, and serving customers, all at the same time.

  Remembering the anxiety I had felt here in wartime, when I had never walked anywhere—I'd been driven fast to every destination—I strolled across the river to the north bank and Dong Ba market to look upon the great piles of fruit and vegetables, the towers of pots and pans, the tea stalls, the slabs of catfish and eels and tuna, the spice bazaar, the stalls selling herbal medications, the shelves of snake w
ine (each bottle with a coiled cobra pickled inside), the stacks of clothes. Outside, where the market backed onto the river, a willowy girl in a conical straw hat was poling a sampan, standing in the stern and working her steering oar like a gondolier. At the embankment a woman was washing clothes in the river, some men were loading bales onto a barge, and families were settling into big boats for the long river journey to their villages. The boats moved over the river like water bugs, passing the old brewery, the decaying temples, the masses of bamboo lining the banks, the houseboats that were moored in clusters to create a floating village.

  All that represented the vitality, richness, and color of old Asia. But along with the snake wine and the powdered antlers for aphrodisiacs and the fragrant bricks of tea was the new Asia of ingenious piracy: knockoff Nikes, fake Tag Heuer watches for $15, Lacoste polo shirts, Zippo lighters, and mountains of bootleg CDs. And maybe a new Asia in the way Vietnamese traders incessantly badgered passersby, often screaming "Buy it!" at me the way the cyclo drivers howled "Massage!"—persistent to the point of being pests. But who could blame them?

  "I worked for the Americans," one old hawker said. And an elderly cyclo driver told me, "I was a soldier with the Americans." I heard this often in Hue.

  On a back street, I stopped to rest at an open-fronted shop, sitting on a stool out of the rain, and a woman appeared with a bowl of fish soup and a dish of hard-boiled quail eggs. I drank tea, and soon after the woman's teenage daughter came home from school and translated the woman's questions: Was I married? Did I have children? Did I like the fish soup (which the daughter called banh canh ca loc)? And where did I come from?

  Ah, yes, American! Welcome! Have some more fish soup!