“No, no. Thank you. It’s very kind of you. My wife expects me for dinner. If I don’t have a big appetite, she’ll think I have a mistress!” He pops with mirth, laughing at his own joke.
“It depends on how you eat. A cook always appreciates a diner with a whetted appetite,” I reply lamely, using a well-worn line. The double entendre hits him a second late. He claps his hands gleefully like a boy, and laughter rolls up from his round belly. I expect his laughter to taper off, but it grows. Soon, he is hammering the wall, hooting, spewing spittle. I try to cover my rice bowl, worrying that my host is a few bricks shy of a load. Nothing contagious, I hope.
Finally, he wipes the tears from his eyes. “Brother, are you a tourist? Visiting relatives?”
“Neither. My bus broke down. I’m just here for the night.”
“Ah, too bad,” he bubbles with genuine sympathy. “This province is beautiful. I grew up here. A village up-River.”
“Up the Mekong River?”
“Uh, yes.” He looks puzzled as though there exists no other river in the world. Like everyone I meet who lives or makes a living on the Mekong River, he refers to it the way peasants refer to Saigon as the City. “I was born up-River, but I traveled the length of the River many times.” He pauses significantly, very proud of this accomplishment. “I ferried bananas down the Mekong for thirty-five years and saved enough to buy this place. Believe me, there is a lot of beautiful scenery here.”
“Like what? The River?”
“No, no. The River is the River. There is a wonderful forest up near the mountain. There is a big temple there with a huge statue of Buddha. There is a garden, a pond, a trail for strolling, and a little waterfall.”
I keep eating and nod encouragingly for him to continue, though have no intention of sticking my head into another tourist trap. He announces that he has been noticing a steady stream of foreign tourists trickling into town, mostly through one of the two major hotels up the street. Word has been going around that the hotels are operating day tours up the mountain and around the River, and charging thirty dollars a Western head. He pops his eyes at me: Thirty American dollars a head! That is more than what his little inn makes on an average day. He wants to get in on the action, so he is going to offer me an irresistible deal: fifteen dollars for a full day’s tour provided I advise him on every aspect of hosting tours for Westerners. How to attract Westerners to his tours? What do they like to eat, drink, and see? Do they like roughing it or do they prefer airconditioned minivans? How much will they pay? My corpulent host dreams of one day owning a minor monopoly on the tourist trade. He’ll pick them up in Saigon, transport them to Chau Doc, lodge them at his inn, serve them food from his kitchen, motor them around the province, and deliver them back to Saigon—naturally, collecting every dollar they spend while in his charge from beginning to end.
I have heard this all before. Everyone has a plan for getting rich off foreigners. And as one who is privy to both worlds, I am perceived as a gold mine of free advice. I am used to entrepreneurs of every creed ribbing me: What the heck, Brother, they say, spill the beans. Let us in on the secret so we can roll in the dough. I have been propositioned many times, there is no graceful way to back down.
He is smiling the conspirator’s grin. I wince and grab my stomach, doubling over, grunting.
He jumps to his feet. “What’s wrong? Stomachache? Is it the food?”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s something I ate on the bus,” I moan, lying.
“Yes. Yes, it must be the food you ate on the road. You should never buy food on the side of the road. Very risky.”
“Excuse me. I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Yes, yes. But what about the tour?”
“I’m too sick to think about touring,” I cry, pushing him out and locking the door. I plop down on the bed, pitying the Vietnamese who believe with all their hearts that Vietnam, indeed, is the most gorgeous place on earth.
They have no idea that they have gnawed away their nature. There is not much left and they don’t even know it. They tell me: All the foreigners go to see this. All the foreigners go to see that. You should go, too. Go and behold big trees on big mountain. Go see this monument and that temple. They say it with such conviction that I don’t have the heart to tell them, you are lemonade-stand children gouging five bucks for a paper cup of Kool-Aid. Their only fault is the fact that they don’t know anything better exists beyond their borders. So they always ask me why foreigners are disgruntled after paying five U.S. dollars to look at a forty-foot waterfall or a pile of bricks.
No, my friends, I wish I could tell them, they are here to gawk at you. You small, dark people who in all your craziness defeated them. You smiling simple people who haunt their dreams, torture their fine sons now old with wrecked lives.
For me, there is only one man-made wonder in Vietnam worth the price of admission. In the month and a half I have been in Vietnam, I’ve dutifully trekked to nearly every museum, park, and point of interest listed in a pamphlet supplied by my cousin Viet. Most of the time, Viet accompanied me, using the occasion to practice his English. Of all the places we visited, there is only one that embodies the national psyche like nothing else I’ve seen since.
It was not far from one of the most palatial war memorials in Vietnam—a temple-like structure, sculpted and painted in gold, its monolithic walls etched with tens of thousands of names of war heroes killed in combat, a conceptual copy of the U.S. Vietnam War Memorial. We wandered about and came to a restaurant where a group of construction workers was building a resort for foreigners. There was a sad little black bear in a ten-by-ten-foot cage. With the exception of the dense forest of flagpole trees, cottonwood-like, covering the Cu Chi Tunnel, the local region had been transformed into farmland uninterrupted for scores of miles. We rode our motorbike along a scenic river, touring the countryside, and came to a gate at the edge of a forest. A large hand-painted billboard marked the entrance to the Cu Chi Tunnel.
An old soldier, nothing but a coatrack in uniform, handed us our tickets at the gate. Seeing that it was our first time, he took on an air of importance and rasped, “In Asia, there are two man-made wonders: one you can see from outer space, one you can’t see even when you’re standing on it.”
He was liberally equating the Great Wall of China with the Viet Cong’s Cu Chi Tunnel, both products of wars. The greatest war tunnel in the history of man, Cu Chi was over 260 kilometers of tunnels, traps, barracks, ammunition dumps, and military headquarters, all designed for the final assault on Saigon.
Now it is a major tourist attraction and a venue for government propaganda. Tourists, two-thirds foreigners, one-third Vietnamese, come by the busloads. The staff are soldiers and civilians, some dressed in black pajamas and handwoven scarves, uniforms of Viet Cong guerrillas. We were grouped with other Vietnamese visitors seated in a large gazebo to watch a war video about American atrocities spiced with a hefty dose of commentary on the evil of Western capitalism. A young soldier led us into a maze of trails twisting back and forth through the jungle. Great bomb-gouged pits, now weeded with vegetation, gaped like giant satellite dishes, testimonies of unsuccessful U.S. attempts to destroy the tunnels. He showed us invisible trapdoors, tiger pits for men, and grenade-rigged manholes.
We shimmied down ladders into caverns, hand-dug in secrecy one scoop of earth at a time. These once served as the headquarters of the Cu Chi operation. Although some areas had been enlarged to accommodate foreign tourists, the chambers were anything but spacious. Most were barely five feet ten inches in height, the tunnels three feet tall. The air was hot and wet, full of the mustiness of packed earth. It was difficult to take a lungful. It had to be breathed in sips. In some sections, the subterranean structure had three tiers, brilliantly designed to withstand prolonged bombing and surface siege. The network of corridors was riddled with booby traps. There were all sorts of amenities, from sleeping quarters to kitchens to training centers. It was a cross between the warren of Peter
Pan and his band of lost children and the Stone Mountain Kingdom of Tolkien’s dwarfs. Only it was real and crazy and deadly.
After half an hour tunneling on our hands and knees, we escaped to the surface, gasping. Another group headed down. A well-fed British woman in her fifties was desperately wriggling into the opening. Her male companion and a Vietnamese tour guide struggled to help her into the passage. One tried to keep the woman from getting stuck, the other tried to prevent her from falling through. Standing next to us, two Vietnamese soldiers watched with amazement plain on their faces. They were both about five feet tall and a hundred pounds—roughly the size of the Vietnamese Rat People who built the Cu Chi Tunnels.
“How do Westerners get so fat?” one soldier asked another.
After due reflection, the man replied, “Eggs and butter.” His companion nodded in deep agreement, both of them mentally calculating—the wealth—how many dozen eggs and pounds of butter it took to amass a three-hundred-pound body.
I wake early and return to the Chau Doc bus depot at 4 a.m. The whole crew is already up and prepping the vehicle. The engine’s idling. It sounds no better to me than it did yesterday. Madame is haggling with a woman at the back of the bus. Driver greets me with a slug to the shoulder and offers me the same prize seat behind him. I decline. “No way. You drivers scare me. I get heart attacks watching you play chicken.” Driver and Mechanic roar as if it is a joke. I shrug and go to the rear of the bus. They pull out of the lot at 4:30 a.m. with only half the seats filled. A mile down the road, they pick up what must have been the ten fattest Vietnamese I’ve ever seen. Madame argues privately with one of the new passengers. A thin-faced man sits down gingerly next to me and I see his obesity is all in padding of odd rectangular shapes straining against his trousers and jacket. No one else seems to take any notice so I do the same. Our bus hiccups onward.
A bus traveling in the opposite direction flicks its headlights madly. As it blows by, the drivers exchange hand signals. Our vehicle slows down. Madame gives an order. The fat people hop to their feet and begin to strip, pulling out from under jackets and trousers cartons of bootlegged cigarettes, not the expensive American brands but ordinary tobacco grown and rolled locally. They distribute the contraband to other passengers, begging people to “hold” the cigarettes for them until the bus crosses into the next province. Some refuse, most accept the legal limit of one carton. Madame drops four on my lap, saying “Help me out, Brother. Don’t worry. It’s fine.” Seeing my hesitation, she shoves them down the front of my windbreaker. “Try not to smash them. I’ll come back for them later.”
Sure enough we roll into a checkpoint a few minutes later. Two other buses languish by the side of the road being inspected by a handful of cops. I have an urge to kick myself in the head. I look under my seat for a place to stash the cigarettes. No luck. Around me is a riot of produce and luggage. If I put them on the floor, they have a good chance of falling through the cracks and right onto the road. A cop climbs aboard, commands Driver to kill the engine. Madame tries chatting him up, but he marches brusquely down the aisle and sweeps passengers with his flashlight. My hands are clammy. Sinking lower in my seat, I take off my spectacles and pull my baseball cap down over my eyes. The cop opens luggage randomly and inspects the contents, Madame at his elbow babbling in her friendliest voice. I have a flashback of the Viet Cong nabbing my family outside Rach Gia. The cigarette cartons feel dangerous, like the stacks of American dollars my mother had made me carry the day we all went to prison.
“What is this?” the cop asks a woman, shoving a bag at her.
“Don’t know. That’s not mine,” the woman bubbles, shaking her head vigorously.
The cop holds up the duffel bag, which is filled with maybe a dozen cigarette cartons. “Who owns these?” he shouts at the rest of the passengers.
No one answers. He simply walks off the bus with the booty. Madame follows the cop out. When she comes back, Driver starts the engine and rolls us back on the road. I ask Madame why the cop didn’t search the rest of the bus. He must have known we are hiding ten times what he found. She smiles at my naivete. “No,” she explains, “they don’t do that, Brother. If they get too efficient at search and seizure, no one will be smuggling anymore. And where would they be? No more free cigarettes. Understand?”
We arrive at the Rach Gia bus depot around noon. I bid the crew a sad farewell and thank them for their hospitality. We trade addresses, but being folks of the road, they know as well as I do that it is unlikely that we will ever cross paths again. So I teach them the truest farewell I know, the one I received from Tom and Patty when I left Portland, Oregon: “So long, I’ll see you when I see you.”
I take a Tuk-tuk—the cheapest transportation available—into Rach Gia some seven miles away. The vehicle looks like an army truck shrunk to clown size. It has the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle and a tiny two-stroke engine hardly larger than that of a lawn mower. I cram into the toy vehicle with fourteen other people, including the driver and his sidekick, and one duck. Knees up around his ears, the young driver, a lanky Vietnamese with the build of a second-string basketball player, handles the three-wheeled vehicle like a madman, jerking it this way and that, punishing it like a go-cart, scaring the fleas off me but delivering me intact nonetheless to downtown Rach Gia.
I wander through the waterfront district, which is like any other waterfront district in the Third World, festooned with the rags and shards of the poor. I look out of place with my jeans and backpack, and women start catcalling me from doorways and the dirty men with their sandals slopping in the mud urge me to take up the ladies’ offers. I try to talk to them but soon grow bored with their single-minded pursuit of earning a living. Around dinner, I splurge on the most expensive room available at a cold-water hostel in the fisherfolk’s quarter: $2.50 a night for a windowless partitioned room with a padlock. All night cat-sized rats scurry in the rafters and on the floor under my bed.
Morning, I go down to the market and follow the smell of Vietnamese doughnuts to a pushcart where a young husband and wife are frying sweet dough. They wrap me four pieces in newspaper, the oil waxing through the newsprint. The fried dough is doughnut-sized except without the hole and nowhere as sweet. I munch on them, walking up and down the crazy waterfront, trying to find a trustworthy motorbike driver to take me out to Minh Luong Prison. I have no idea where it is, and I don’t even know if anyone knows what I’m looking for. I pick a middle-aged man on a hunch and offer him five bucks for driving me around all day. He introduces himself as Truong and accepts my offer. I hand him one of my doughnuts to start our day properly.
Narrating local history, he loops us through Rach Gia, while I sit on the back of his ancient 50cc Honda cub. When he seems comfortable talking to me, I ask him if he knows anything about Minh Luong Prison.
“Of course, I almost died there,” he shouts matter-of-factly over the wind. “You know, it used to be a garrison?” Yes, yes, I say, go on. “I was in the South Vietnamese army,” he says. “Stationed there. Can you believe it: I got to go on leave the day the Viet Cong attacked the garrison. I went home to see my family in the afternoon and that night, THAT night, the Viet Cong came in and wiped out everybody. No survivors. No prisoners. I came back the next day and everybody was dead.”
“Why did you join the army? Did you hate Communism?”
“Ha!” he snorts. “Drafted. I was a kid. Nineteen. Never even seen a Viet Cong in my life. I didn’t know what they looked like. They might as well have had horns for all I knew.”
Truong was incarcerated and sent to reeducation camp for two years. On his release, he couldn’t get a job because he was a former Nationalist soldier. His application to open a shop was repeatedly denied. So his wife sold produce in the fish market and he worked as a motorbike-taxi driver. He is bitter, but hopeful that things will change.
He rambles freely as he coaxes the motorbike down the gnarly asphalt, dodging trucks and bicyclists. Bam. Rattle. The chain has sn
apped out of the gears and lodges between the cogs and the frame. We bang it loose, reset it, and continue. A mile later, we roll onto a red dirt road and the tire pops. We walk it to a shop and wait while an old man burns on a patch. Hours after we started, we make it to a village.
“Here it is,” Truong announces. “This is Minh Luong Village.”
“I don’t remember any village. Brick houses, markets. Where did all this come from? Where are the farms, the rice paddies?”
Twenty years have sprouted a village around Minh Luong. The compound itself has changed, too. None of the old structures survived. New blocky buildings and new fences everywhere. All gone, says Truong. The incarceration ended in the late eighties. I make him drive around the village and approach the compound from every direction, trying to look inside. Armed guards are posted around the institution. I make him do another circuit. And another. Nothing looks familiar. I feel stupid. Not knowing what else to do, I whip out my camera. Truong goes ballistic: “What in the hell do you think you’re doing? You want to get me killed? They’ll jail and beat us both. What are you thinking? They’re police. POLICE! Don’t you understand? Anything, they can do anything they want. I don’t want to spend another two goddamn years of my life in jail. Why are you so stupid!”
He wrestles the camera from me and puts it in his pocket. I can tell he wants to give me a taste of his knuckles. He glares at me, then mounts his bike and revs up the engine. 1 hop on before he can change his mind. We pull away fast.
He parks us at a café far down the street, still within sight of the compound. I apologize and make it up to him with a round of beer and lunch. Truong drinks his beer in two long pulls. Stripped of his joviality, he looks like an old man, shriveled up, charred from too much punishment in the sun. Worn like an old leather bag. Empty now. Here is a man, the very sort, perhaps, the very one that my father had recruited when he was the Province Director of Propaganda. A sense of remorse opens my eyes to the old soldier—taxi driver, this remnant of my father’s world looking back at me with tired eyes.
Catfish and Mandala Page 17
