“It is beyond imagination,” wrote Professor Kissinger just before joining the Nixon administration, “that parties that have been murdering and betraying each other for twenty-one years could work together as a team, giving joint instructions to the country.”8 It may be beyond the imagination of American officials, but it is not necessarily beyond that of the Vietnamese who have come to hold the Americans responsible for those murders and betrayals. It is true that there will never be a permanent coalition in which each party joins in an amicable agreement to disagree. The Vietnamese way is not that of a balance of power, but that of accommodation leading to unanimity. The majority of Vietnamese, in any case, do not belong to parties and have no interest in dividing themselves up to continue the fratricidal struggle. For them a coalition government would be the Middle Way so long desired that could modulate the differences between the political groups and lead to a national reconciliation.
But this reconciliation may be difficult to achieve. The Nixon administration is, after all, determined to prevent it. It is determined for the sake of what its officials imagine to be American prestige to force the Saigon government to go on fighting for as long as possible after an American troop withdrawal. At a time when all Vietnamese political parties have been shattered by the war and a half of the population depends on the United States, American economic aid and firepower will have a great deal of influence on the Vietnamese. If the force of the American peace movement has expended itself on obtaining American troop withdrawals, then Nixon may well succeed in compelling Vietnamese to kill each other for some time to come. His prediction of massacres may thus be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Whatever strategy the American government uses to carry on the war, it will only be delaying the inevitable. It is not just that the North Vietnamese and the NLF will refuse to surrender; it is that after all these years of war the Vietnamese have an immense desire for peace. And peace not merely as an end to violence; but peace as unity: the unity of north and south, the unity of a way of life and the continuity of Vietnamese history from the past into the future. Over the years, Americans have grown so used to a divided Vietnam that they have come to imagine these divisions as natural and permanent, but they are not so. In 1954 it was possible to imagine that the foreign powers could maintain the barriers between north and south, as they had maintained similar barriers in Germany and Korea. But the Vietnamese did not accept the division, and now after a decade of war the maintenance of it appears impossible even in the abstract. The Americans have destroyed the economic base of that region they hoped to preserve as a separate country. Furthermore, they have, instead of ending the drive for reunification, destroyed the regional political groups that held out in resistance against it. They have uprooted the sect populations and flattened the local ethnic, religious, and cultural peculiarities beneath a uniform, national disaster. If Vietnam is to be independent, it must now have a national government.
For the Vietnamese, domestic peace implies not merely the cessation of hostilities, but the victory of a single political system and way of life. In the past, “peace” meant the rule of that Confucian monarchy that certified the traditional way of life in the Vietnamese villages. Today, however, peace implies revolution — a complete change in the order of society. The NLF has been engaged in this project from its very beginning, but it is not alone; the southern sects have also worked for a social revolution in their own various ways. Even in 1946 revolution meant not so much the overthrow of an established order as the adjustment of society to those changes that had already taken place within it: the imposition of order upon disorder. In Vietnam the scope of the revolution ranged from the redistribution of wealth and power down to the relationship of the individual to his fellow men. Just what shape the new society should take has been a matter of debate, but there has been no debate on the necessity for a comprehensive new order. The American war with its “forced-draft urbanization” policies has only sharpened this need to the point where it is felt by the majority.
The slum children and the juvenile gangs are only the most visible manifestations of the disorder and the unease that underlies much of southern Vietnamese society. The cities, the army bases, and the refugee camps are filled with people who get along in one way or another, who cause no trouble and survive. Only the meaning of their lives has gone. Brought up to regard themselves as part of a larger enterprise — brought up in a world that would seem oppressive to most Westerners — they experience the fife of the cities as a profound alienation, a division of self. “Even the bar girl,” said one Vietnamese intellectual, “even the bar girl who now has money, who lives in the city and no longer wants to return to the country, who is accustomed to independence and gets along very well, even she feels guilty. At bottom she does not feel easy with herself, even after five or ten years of such work. She feels there is something missing. To find it she will give up her independence and all the advantages she now possesses.”9
Personally, socially, politically, the disorder of the cities is a highly unstable condition — a vacuum that craves the oxygen of organized society. The Americans might force the Vietnamese to accept the disorder for years, but behind the dam of American troops and American money the pressure is building towards one of those sudden historical shifts when “individualism” and its attendant corruption gives way to the discipline of the revolutionary community. When this shift takes place, the American officials will find it difficult to recognize their former protégés. They may well conclude that the “hard-core Communists” have brainwashed and terrorized them into submission, but they will be wrong. It will simply mean that the moment has arrived for the narrow flame of revolution to cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the American war. The effort will have to be greater than any other the Vietnamese have undertaken, but it will have to come, for it is the only way the Vietnamese of the south can restore their country and their history to themselves.
Afterword
I finished writing Fire in the Lake in 1971, four years before the war ended, and though I returned to Vietnam several times in those years, I never wanted to update it. Books have a certain structure, and when they're finished, they are, for better or worse, finished. Also, they are the product of a particular time in history and in the life of their author, and the time can't be recaptured. The light changes, the landscape alters, and so does one's state of knowledge and state of mind. Now, more than thirty years later, I have no intention of reflecting back on the war and trying to fill the subsequent history of Vietnam in just a few pages. But what I discovered on recent trips to Vietnam seems to me worth recording as kind of a coda to the book.
Driving across the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam a couple of years ago, Mary Cross, an American photographer, and I stopped at a cemetery with several handsome old tombs and a group of new earthen graves on mounds above the paddy land. In the distance we could see a procession coming down the lane from a nearby village to the sound of stringed instruments, gongs, and drums. In the lead were people with banners and flags from the local pagoda, and after them two lines of elderly women in brown and purple tunics carrying unlit straw torches and a long scroll with Buddhist iconography. Next came four men carrying a shrine with a photograph of the deceased — a patriarch in his seventies — an incense burner, and offerings of fruit and flowers. The musicians followed. Then, amid a crowd of family members in white headbands, six men rolled an ornate hearse with a double roof turned up, pagoda-style, at the corners. A middle-aged man, apparently the eldest son, walked backward in front of the hearse in filial deference. When the procession reached the cemetery, the coffin was lifted from its carriage and brought to the grave; incense sticks were lit, prayers were said, and the family wailed as the coffin was lowered into the ground. What we were witnessing, I realized, was a ceremony from precolonial times.
It was early March in the year 2000, just a month before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the war
. While exploring the countryside around Hanoi, I often came upon processions of people in brightly colored silk robes marching to the music of flutes and drums, with parasols overhead and the young men carrying a palanquin with the gilded red-and-gold throne of the tutelary spirit of the village. In central Vietnam, on the road between Hue and Danang, Mary saw a fisherman launching a decorated paper boat into a lagoon as an offering to the sea spirits. On an island in the Perfume River near Hue, the two of us watched a mother and daughter in red and yellow robes dance before an outdoor altar to thank a favorite goddess for lifting a spell that had made the mother ill. All over the country the Buddhist pagodas we visited were filled with Vietnamese pilgrims and tourists.
Watching such ceremonies, I sometimes imagined that all the upheavals of the past century, from the French conquest to revolution and two major wars, had been no more than a parenthesis in Vietnamese history. This is hardly the case. Vietnam has been profoundly marked by all of these events. Still, there has been an astonishing revival of traditional social and religious practices throughout the country in the past few years. What is more, the revival is most pronounced in the north — in the region that most enthusiastically supported the revolution and in which there has been a Communist government for half a century. But then the north is by far the oldest part of Vietnam and the wellspring of its traditional culture.
On my first postwar visit to Vietnam in 1993, I went with a group from an American foundation to see a new handicraft project in a village some twenty miles from Hanoi. Surrounded by a thick hedge of bamboo and thorny plants, the village was invisible from the road. Within the hedge was a labyrinth of narrow dirt lanes flanked by hedges and brick walls. Walking along the lanes and looking through the gates in the walls, we could see houses with tiled roofs and open fronts giving onto brick courtyards and tiny gardens. The village was a honeycomb in which each household maintained its privacy. Near the center of the village was a big rectangular primary school, built in the 1960s, with sports fields around it. But on the hillside above it was the village dinh, built in the old style with heavy wooden pillars supporting a red-tiled roof. Shaded by a huge old banyan tree, the dinh faced south, overlooking a pond.
The school aside, the village looked to me much like the traditional northern villages described by French scholars such as Paul Mus and Pierre Gourou. I had never expected to see one this physically intact. In the 1960s the DRV had collectivized the family farms, merged the villages into larger administrative units, and organized the farmers into specialized production brigades. The government had also modernized the irrigation systems and rationalized the division of the rice lands, creating straight lines where none had existed before. In 1986, after the collectivization program failed, creating a near-famine in parts of the north, the government dismantled the communes and reinstituted private enterprise and family farming. In the meantime, however, the population of the country had grown almost exponentially, spilling millions of people into cities, towns, and roadside settlements.
By 2000, the major roads out of Hanoi had become corridors so built up with houses, shops, and small businesses that it was difficult to catch a glimpse of the landscape beyond. But farther out in the countryside we could see from the heights of a dike the old-style settlements commanding their rice fields like fortresses. Physically and politically, these villages are hardly as they were in precolonial times. Still, some institutions of village life have not changed, and a surprising number of others have been revived since 1986.
From medieval times on, most villages had their own particular handicraft industry — and they do today. Driving in the countryside, we could see the raw materials stacked up by the roads: plywood near villages that made toothpicks or matches, bundles of reeds and straw by those that wove baskets or mats. Some villages continue to produce the same handicrafts they did centuries ago. Bat Trang, for example, just outside of Hanoi, has long been famous for its blue-and-white pottery, Chuong in Ha Tay province for the nom leaf covering for conical hats. In the village I visited in 1993, a young woman, a mother of three small children, had contracted with a Japanese company to make baskets of a traditional design, giving employment to dozens of households. Elsewhere, villagers had used their entrepreneurial skills to take advantage of the new demands of the Vietnamese market. In Duong Ho in Hai Duong province, a village known for its traditional woodblock prints, most families, we discovered, had turned their talents to making paper offerings for the ancestors. Officially the government still frowned on the practice of burning paper imitations of luxury goods people wanted their ancestors to have in the afterlife, but after the economic reforms of 1986, it had given up trying to stop the practice. In tune with the times, the villagers of Duong Ho were turning out not just paper shoes, umbrellas, and dress shirts, as in the old days, but paper motorcycles and cell phones as well.
In Dong Ky in Bac Ninh province, a village that has used its ancient woodworking skills to produce inlaid furniture for the international market, I talked with the manager of one family business, a young man with an executive air, about how he had coped with the Asian economic crisis of 1997 and what he was doing to fill the needs of an expanding Taiwanese market. Later he took us back to the family compound, where a tent was still up from a big family wedding held there the day before. His father, a Mr. Vu, gave us tea in the main house in front of the ancestral altar and discoursed on various subjects, including his service in the Viet Minh and the continuing relevance of Confucian values. A man in his seventies, Mr. Vu, we gathered, was the patriarch of a subclan, or extended family. He told us that the clan, which had seven branches in the village, kept genealogical records going back for centuries, and that everyone in the village knew his or her place in the patrilineage. Apparently neither revolution nor war nor business success had altered the family structure of Dong Ky.
As we were leaving the village, we stopped to watch a wrestling match in an open-air stadium. High school athletes were competing with wrestlers from a neighboring village, and the crowd was cheering and groaning with the fortunes of the local boys. It was a completely modern scene, but the tournament, we learned, was a part of the spring festival celebrating the patron genie of the village.
I happened upon several such festivals that March. The first was in Quang Ba, beyond the West Lake of Hanoi, a village that used to grow flowers but that has been built over and transformed into a residential neighborhood where many foreigners live. The dinh, a fine example of traditional architecture, just recently restored, had a lacquered and gilded altar decorated with flowers and miniature orange trees. One of the chief organizers, Mr. Vu Hoa My, welcomed me in rusty French and told me that the guardian spirit was Phuong Hung, an eighth-century king who had led an uprising against the Chinese. Mr. My was, it turned out, a retired government and Communist Party official who, he told me, had made money in real estate. He had given generously to the restoration of the dinh. I arrived just as the procession returned with the throne of the genie, pennants flying, musicians making a great noise, and a beautiful cloth dragon billowing out overhead. The procession, Mr. My said, had gone to the village pagoda to collect pure water — the dew of the morning. A couple of hundred people, the women in ao dais, the men in Western dress, had gathered to greet its return. After the throne had been ceremonially replaced in the dinh, a group of elderly men in blue Chinese-style robes said prayers before the altar. Families came forward out of the crowd with trays piled high with rice, vegetables, fruits, and cooked chickens. Leaving symbolic morsels on the altar, they asked the patron spirit to bless their meals and went outside to have their holiday photograph taken.
Afterward, amid a genial hubbub, the entertainment began. The village chess masters set up a human chess game in the courtyard with high school students dressed in robes representing kings, queens, knights, and pawns; the students sat on chairs and moved from square to square as directed. The play was fast, but one of the queens, who was hardly moved at all, got bored and read
a movie magazine through most of it. Meanwhile, a flock of ducks was let loose in the pond and little boys competed to capture the ducks with long-handled nets — or simply by diving in and grabbing them. In a field behind the dinh, men huddled around rings in which spurless fighting cocks struggled more or less energetically to force their opponents out of the ring.
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