The Sun Hunters - Đông Yên

Vietnamese version: Người đi săn mặt trời - Đông Yên

 

 

One night in 1952, a powerful, rainless windstorm ravaged the areas south of Tam Ky, a district of Quang Nam, Vietnam. It came on so suddenly that the people had no time to take the usual storm preparations. It brought no rain, just hot, dry violent wind. It came on suddenly, waking up the people of the village, threatening to blow off their roofs. Families with young or healthy members attempted to rescue their homes by trying to secure the structures with coconut ropes, fastened to one side of the roof and then nailed to the ground with a short wooden stick.  

 

The following morning the winds stopped but the devastation remained. While no one died, many houses were ruined. The leaves of all the fruit trees and vegetables looked as if their leaves had been burned off by fire; so did most of the rice paddy fields. To the residents of the area, war refugees in Van Khuong, a small village south of Tam Ky, the storm became known as a firestorm, although there was no fire in the village.

 

The storm destroyed the year’s harvest of taros, bindweeds, sweet potatoes, maniocs, corns and wild lettuces.  However, sallow trees, eucalyptus, couch-grasses, cactuses and sugar canes were not affected. Healthy rice and glutinous rice paddies turned brown and withered into ash gray. The farmers tried to salvage anything they could to feed their cattle and livestock, but had little to eat for themselves.

 

Every year, at the beginning of winter or late fall, house owners provided themselves with four strong bamboo trunks long enough to run from their roof to the ground. They fastened two trunks together with coconut rope at top to form an upside “V,” then placed them on the roof as if it were a saddle. Each trunk ran down the roof to the ground on either side and was anchored firmly in the earth by shorter wooden sticks. Each roof was fitted with   two sets of bamboo Vs, which, if seen from above, appeared like two gods protecting the house against the storm with their open arms, or like a small raft flowing on an ocean of green grass. "Sticks against Heaven" was a common phrase for this simple protection from the elements.   

 

Taken symbolically, “Sticks against Heaven” represented the plight of a group of nomads stopping by a prehistoric prairie, littered with all kinds of evolutionary traces left by the Western civilization of the 1940s and 1950s. It signifies man’s timeless struggle against forces greater than himself such as the raw power of nature or the threats from enemy governing agents who confiscated their properties on a daily basis.  

 

For a time, life continued in the small village as it had before the storm. Every morning, Ba Nam, an old woman made banh nam, a kind of puff pastry made of rice powder and lean, to sell in the market. Every night, as before, Ong Han, an old man who lived by making banh u, a four-cornered rice dumpling made of glutinous rice, pork, and green beans, rode along on his bicycle carrying the pastry for sale. Every day, as before, a toothless man peddled his keo keo, a stretchable barley-sugar candy stuffed with peanuts, entertaining everybody with this song:

 

kẹo kéo thơm ngon vừa thơm vừa béo; người nào chồng bỏ chồng chê, ăn vô kẹo kéo chồng mê tới già.

 

(Aromatic and delicious barley-sugar – transforming husband disgusted women into husband endeared wives.)

 

            Shortly after, however, these peddlers showed up less frequently, and then disappeared for good when they no longer had the food to make these delicacies.  The evening street market became much less crowded, as the locals had little to sell. Everyone suffered great deprivation, but none as badly as the refugees from the war. They survived on dry sweet potato slices and dwindling rice reserves. 

 

Most of the refugees originated from districts once opulent and intellectually famous like Dien Ban or Duy Xuyen; from such renown cities as Hoi An, Danang; from wealthy townships like Vinh Dien, Tam Ky. Some young girls of these families still clung to their upper-class pretentions even though their families had become poor. They looked down on the locals. Before coming here, most of the refugees had traveled through, and settled in, various regions. Some had gone through the toxic water-infested areas in western Quang Nam such as Tien Phuoc, Que Son, Binh Hue, Phu Toan, Tran My, An Diem, Tien Lanh. They had even reached isolated upstream regions of Quang Ngai's Tra Khuc River such as An Lao, Tra Bong, Ba Gia Dong Ke; or An Thuong, a small township of Binh Dinh, about several kilometers west of Bong Son.

 

Wherever they went, the local residents viewed them with suspicion. They believed that they were temporary visitors, who would leave their village and return home once the war was over. As a result, the locals were not friendly or helpful to them.  Adding to the difficulty was that the refugees were often destitute. They had been forced to leave all their land, possessions, wealth, even children behind them as they ran for their lives. Without resources to buy or trade with local farmers and merchants, they were treated poorly.

 

However, there is an old adage: “The more faring, the more wisdom.” Because of their forced migration, the refugees became better able to accept changes in their lives. They were more inclined to have compassion for the misfortune of others; to challenge political institutions, social conventions, and authoritarianism. Since they had no home to look back on, they turned their eyes forward, living life as it came to them, relative and mutable. This kind of life was completely unfamiliar to the conventional, routine-bound and narrow-minded ways of the locals and perhaps a bit unsettling as well. 

  

Most of the locals lived far from the main national road beyond the arid sandy area occupied by the refugees. Their sturdy houses had tile roofs, tall bamboo hedges on all sides, and some rice paddies in the front. The refugees community consisted of dozens of houses scattered  in a small area then called Van Khuong or Ky Khuong, along the main national road, about fifty kilometers west of the Ben Vang River. This river also had another name, An Tan, and is known as Truong Giang today. This community stretched about half a kilometer north from the river. Some had their houses were a little farther from the main road, often nested among some sallow or bamboo trees as an attempt to mitigate summer heat.

 

Most of their houses were flimsy, hastily put together with thatch roofs, walls made of bamboo or palm leaves, floors made of saltwater mud flattened and then let dry. Their doors were made of nipa leaves and had a rectangular or square shape with the upper side tied to the horizontal bar of the roof. To open the door from the inside one had to push its lower side up and then use a vertical bamboo stick to keep it in position. Taking that stick away and letting the lower side down would close the door.

 

The only local that mingled with the refugees was Nam Vinh, the owner of small blacksmith shop located along the main road about several houses north of Trang's house. This blacksmith had long been there before the arrival of the refugees. He was notorious for beating his wife.  When he did so nobody intervened. He didn't get along well with his neighbors. They never bothered to raise their voice for fear of making things worse.

 

 

The refugees’ houses were as transient as their lives, not designed to last. If one day the door at some house didn't open as usual, it usually meant that the nomadic journey of those misfortunates inside had come to an end. No more concerns about weather along with the seasons of the year.  No more worries about bullets from French warplanes penetrating through their roofs or napalm raining fire down upon them. They were either gone or ready for a closed coffin.

 

The doors of refugees’ home were particularly symbolic of their lives. The doors of normal homes are built on a vertical rectangular frame, with one or two panes. It always opens or closes horizontally on a 180-degree plane, into a three-dimensional world. The residents come and go as they please. The refugees' door, however, is more limited. It was made of a single pane and opened vertically on a 90-degree plane, opening into a two-dimensional world, reminiscent of Abbott's Flatland.  The war had pushed them backward; forcing them to limit their existence from a fully realized three-dimensional world to two dimensions of life or death survival as an attempt to  cope with hostilities from worlds with more than two dimensions. They gradually narrowed the physical and spiritual space, flatly leaving behind losses like a train deliberately got rid of payload before crossing a collapsing bridge. Fortunately, they managed to withdraw from that third dimension, dimension of ambitions of civilizations intended to destroy them day after day.    

 

Year round they grew bindweeds, red peppers, aubrietias, sweet potatoes, sugar cane. They used oil cakes soaked in urine, and dried human waste as fertilizers. When spring approached they grew tomatoes and pumpkins.  Some of them brought what they had produced to the street market for sale in the evening beside many locals. This street market served as a source for the refugees to provide themselves with mash, rice, poultries, eggs, carambola, bean sprouts, vegetables and fruit in general.

 

But their primary earnings came from their traditional business of dyed textiles. They traveled by bicycle to Ha Lam, Thang Binh district, to purchase white fabrics, which they would dye or starch and sell. They consisted of four basic colors: brown, gray, dark gray, and black. For white and striped fabrics, they used starch to make them less flabby and wrinkled before selling them. Their customers came from Quang Ngai. The most popular products carried the mark "Phi Ma" of the Truong Huynhs, living in a sandy area about 500 meters west of the main road. "Truong Huynh" stood for the two brothers, Truong Bang and Truong Lieu, the big and the little, respectively.

Every transaction was made by means of an informal but heavily inflated currency named tin phieu, because the Viet Minh didn't allow the currency of Emperor Bao Dai. The economic conditions after 1952 appeared less arduous. Many refugees became rich despite the fact that the tin phieu had lost much of its value. They carried their cash in large rice bags when going to the suppliers. The cash sometimes weighed as much as the heavy fabrics they purchased. Both legs of the trip, therefore, would be equally burdensome.

 

With more cash, they bought high quality Sainte Étienne bicycles together with good accessories like head lights, rear lights, and French bicycle tires and inner tubes on the black market. They also bought French goods such as medicine and satins. They usually moved at night to avoid French airstrikes, unless they were sure about French fighter planes' daytime operation routine. 

 

The first leg of these planes trip began at Danang airbase and usually posed no major threats, as they had preset targets in other southern areas such as Quang Ngai or Binh Dinh. After achieving their primary mission, they flew low along the main road to avoid detection and maximize the death toll with their lethal strikes against civilians on the way back to Danang.  Travelers on the road attempted to calculate the return time of those planes and took shelter until after they had flown by. 

 

This calculation only worked for fighters flying in groups of two or more. Solo fighters were more difficult to predict because on the first leg of their trip, they flew very low and far out at sea so that nobody on land would be aware of them. They appeared without warning and did deadly damage to people on the road.  A lot of bicycle riders were shot to death from behind, their heads shorn off,  falling down to the ground while their bodies kept riding with the bicycle for a while before collapsing on a roadside.

 

Many people were cut down by these fighters. Ha, 20, a nephew of Ong Ba Dung was killed on his way back to Van Khuong from Chau O where he delivered his goods. The location where he was killed later became Chu Lai Airport, a U.S Marine Corps base. Bay Nguyen, an old woman, was shot to death right in front of her shelter, her intestines spilling out onto the ground. Shelters were usually far enough from their homes, closer to the railroad, as a precautionary measure in case the house might catch fire. That precaution, however, had a negative effect, as there wouldn't be enough time to reach the shelter after detecting incoming fighter planes, especially low-flying ones.

 

            Another deadly threat was a French five-engine fighter plane known as “The Junker.” This black, five-engine gruesome French fighter always flew low, relentlessly strafing pedestrians on its runs.  It carried all kinds of machine guns, pointing in all directions, shooting on all sides, which made it all the more lethal. Out of its victims, civilians represented the bulk part, because cong an agents (police in plainclothes), regular soldiers and guerrillas were almost nowhere to be found in these areas. When French raids occurred, it was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost; no single force dared resistance. Even when French aircraft hovered right on the head nobody thought of pulling the trigger.

 

Moving at night on bicycle with goods and money to avoid the deadly attacks by day, refugees became easy targets for thieves.  Surprisingly, throughout years until the Armistice Day, there were no crimes of robbery reported in the region. No reports of people killing each other for money or out of greed. People did close their doors at night, but never locked them. And even if they wished to lock them they actually didn't know how to with those flimsy doors of the nipa patches.

 

Nobody knows if this phenomenon was spontaneous or the result of the intense ordeals of war. The disciplines of sociology, ethics, or psychology have no explanation for it. It is likely that, when faced with the threat of death, man forgets his ego, recognizes in others the inherent good in their nature and denies that evil co-exists in goodness. Faced with a common enemy seeking to   kill them day and night, people often cling to each other to survive, whether consciously or unconsciously. The recognition of this basic human reality was one of the priceless belongings to be packed for their offspring on the way to the hostile world to come.   

 

It's impossible, however, to credit the Viet Minh regime at that time with this phenomenon. No political system, however good or however harsh, can persuade or force its citizens to be good or want to be good. As a matter of fact, the society of the Quang Nam natives, with respect to that time and geographic location, were not unlike a utopian society, a kind of paradise born of war.  That paradise cannot be found in Republic of Plato, Utopia of Thomas More, Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, or the workers' paradise in Workers' Paradise of Karl Marx; or any of so-called socialistic experiments. Their being good to one another had nothing to do with their being communists or communist sympathizers. In fact, the majority of the refugees were hostile to the local police regime. 

 

They were surrounded by cong an agents and under constant scrutiny. On the southwest was Ba Giao, who lived close to the river, about a kilometer from the main road.  On the northwest was Hai Nhi; and on the northeast was Nguyen Nam, a senior cong an. The three of them were locals, assigned by the region authorities in an attempt to control the refugees. Only the southeast region was vacant.  However, in the center of the community lived Tri Ba Xao, who functioned as both a tax collector and a cong an. His proximity allowed to him to intrude into the refugees' privacy.

 

Originally from Dien Ban, Quang Nam, Tri Ba Xao lived there with his wife and two children. Uninvited, he often paid "visits" to the refugees during lunch time and during special celebrations The refugees knew what to do when he came up on such occasions; but, however well they treated him, he would be on the alert for every infraction.  If their rice was served without dry sweet potato or manioc slices or if the meal contained too much fish or meat, he would criticize them in public or raise their taxes as punishment.

 

After the 1954 Geneva Accords, Ba Giao and Ba Xao went to Dap Da, Binh Dinh, a gathering point for shipments to North Vietnam. Hai Nhi's fate was unclear. Nguyen Nam himself refused to go to the North. He repeatedly boasted that in two years there would be a general election for national re-unification, so there was no need for everyone to go anywhere. Not long after, however, his corpse was found floating on the Ben Vang River. It turned out that the secret service of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime had captured him at night, tortured him, then killed him. During that time, they were active in the region and at night, yelling, screaming, and crying were often heard from the small forest close to the railroad west of the main road and south of the Ben Vang River. Killings by drowning became commonplace those days.

 

The harder the times, the closer the relationships between the refugees grew.  They became friendlier with each other and began to learn more about each other. This was true of women without husbands who supported their families alone such as Trang, Loc's mother, and Oanh, Dung's mother. They were in their early thirties. Loc and Dung were about seven or eight. Neither woman had a husband living with the family; and they became close friends. Their lives followed similar patterns before arriving at the village.

 

Trang and Sy, her husband, were from Dong Yen, a village in Duy Xuyen, Quang Nam. They left their village in 1945, crossing the Deo Cay Trao Gorge and roaming through various regions of mountains and forests.  They were sometimes even pushed as far as the valleys and forbidden mountains in Binh Hue, Tien Phuoc. Finally, they ended up in Chau O, a city in Quang Ngai.  Two years ago, in 1950, Sy decided to leave Chau O as an attempt of homecoming or at least as an attempt to move closer to Duy Xuyen or Vinh Dien to hopefully appease their homesickness. Actually he and his family settled in this village as the last stop. He had no slightest idea of going to French controlled cities. Many people were killed or imprisoned by the French authorities for attempting to enter “temporarily occupied zones” such as Danang or Hoi An. The French suspected that all people coming from "free zones" to be Viet Minh since those regions were under Viet Minh control.  

 

In late 1950, Oanh, together with Bai, her husband, and Dung, her son, came to the village after leaving An Thuong, a small township of Binh Dinh. They lived in a small cottage on the edge of the lagoon owned by Ong Cu, a local landlord. Hidden behind some bamboo trees in the back, a row of tall sandbox trees tall in the front, tall enough to give shadows in the afternoon. Their neighborhood consisted of only a few families, relatively isolated from the main part of the community about half a kilometer north. Houses were scarcely found between this neighborhood and the main community, as it was a small paddy-field owned also owned by Ong Cu.

Every evening Oanh went to the street market to purchase foods and vegetables. This market was close to Trang's house. The two women met in the market each evening and soon became close friends. They both made a living by winding cotton yarns into spools by hand. They would go to families with weaving looms to receive yarn rolls, out of which they then made yarn spools with a manual swiveling gadget. The yarn rolls were about half meter in diameter, half centimeter wide, and an intermediate phalange thick.

           

            Trang and Oanh were responsible for transferring yarns from these rolls into spin top-like cones having as their spool  a bamboo unflanged  cylinder about two decimeters long.  Sy and Bai made all the manual gadgets for their wives out of bamboo, wood, and rattan. From time to time, when nobody hired them to make yarn spools, Trang and Oanh would do such odd jobs for money as  transferring yarns from yarn spools to small yarn bobbins, a reed cylinder about two or three centimeters long and several millimeters in diameter. Weavers would insert these bobbins into their weaving shuttles. More often than not, they would go to more than one house to do this hire job on a single day to earn enough.

 

From 1950 to early 1952, Sy and Bai were often found together in the evening on the volleyball court at the end of the village. Sometimes there were enough players to two full teams. Whatever the number of players, they split the number evenly so that everyone could play. Among the players were Ve, Ho, Doi, Phan Nhi, Luong Chau, Le Lien, Chuan, Thiet, Tri, Thong – all men from the refugee community. Most of them surfaced in the community just as war refugees, showing absolutely no political interest.

Luong Chau and Le Lien had joined the resistance before 1945, returned home to Van Khuong for a while, then left to resume their duty. As a result of a Viet Minh staff reduction in 1950, Chau and Le Lien went back to their civilian life and began making a living by engaging in commerce. Together with Le Lien, Chau peddled fish sauce around the area. Later on he teamed up with Phan Nhi to sell French medicines, fabrics, and tire sandals. They traveled on bicycles to the outskirts of Danang or Vinh Dien for supplies and then carried their goods to their customers in Quang Ngai.

 

About one year later, Chau married Lien's eldest sister, who gave him two daughters and then a son. Unfortunately, his wife died shortly after giving birth to this son, leaving Chau's parents to care for his children.  Since the son lost his mother almost at birth, his grandparents called him Coi, meaning "orphan" in English. Coi, in turn, ended his short-lived fate a few days later.

 

After the Armistice Day, Le Lien, together with his family, returned to Dien Ban, where he joined the National Army; he died several years later. Luong Chau and Phan Nhi moved to Saigon in 1954 after the Geneva Accords were proclaimed and became among the wealthiest Quang Nam natives to move there.  

 

The rest of the young men in Van Khuong didn't join the resistance or the guerrilla forces. They didn't become Viet Minh cadres, cong an agents or local administrative employees, or participate in any way in the resistance movement of the Fifth Administrative Interzone. 

 

Sy and Bai didn't like these young men and did not associate with them. In fact, they hardly would talk in presence of others. On some rare occasions, they would speak to each other in vague and distant conversations without caring to whom they were speaking or who was listening to them.  In fact, after a while, very few people remembered Sy and Bai. But they remained close. That is when started the story of the Sun Hunters. 

 

Often, they would sit together and discuss their thoughts on the world and their own plight.

 

- "What do you think?” Sy would begin.  “Should we keep going this way forever? Fleeing forever? Should we know the reason we are fleeing?”

- “How can we find hope in a sunless world?” Bai replied

- “Hope doesn't mean choosing the lesser of two evils.”

- “In the current situation, the evil is endless on both sides. Do you agree with me?”

- “The world we're in is a physical world. The sun is far from us, far beyond our reach, emitting a kind of light that everybody needs for his or her survival.  Yet, it is unresponsive and indifferent to the human condition; its light shines on both the bad and the good, despite the fact that evil prevails against the good.  That sun views our world as an absolute contingency. Our world is dominated by evil and the sun in the sky seems to support it. The sun we need seems nowhere to be found so we have to go for it, and go beyond this war, beyond the two fronts. We need to start our journey as Sun Hunters, my friend. Never assume it as a prerequisite for our search endeavors that what we need must exist first. If we need anything then let's go for it, whether or not it exists. It sure will if we keep going for it. No departure, no arrival. That's what my grandfather always told my dad.”

- “Man’s nature contains both gods and devils. Gods alone don’t comprise the nature of man. There needs to be a balance for his existential components, good and evil. When man attempts to renounce his bad nature, his physical body stands witness to his potential for evil. All he can do is disguise it with clothes, jewelry, and adornments of all kinds that signify his sex, cultural and ethnic background, profession, social position and social class. At times, he uses clothes as straitjackets to hide and restrain his inner monster. Some cultures use outward appearance to make that monster more acceptable. Notwithstanding, devils will always be part of humanity. Evolution has helped man disguise himself, raising his intellect further and further; but in no way could it help him break free from his inner monster. The further his intellect develops, the more his monster's ambitions and requirements grow. The bigger the monster is, the more expensive his adornments are. That's why the stronger and the more advanced a man becomes, the meaner he grows.”

- “That's right. Man, however, first and foremost, is defined by his physical body. Yet, it is impossible to address his physical nature without addressing his spiritual nature. Attempting to use good against an evil world is like using eggs against stones. Conversely, evil alone cannot survive. People instinctively fight back in self-defense to protect themselves. Therefore, good and evil must co-exist in constant struggle. The temptation is that people link strength and power with evil. Being evil would be contingent to being strong, physically, financially, or politically. The stronger a person is, the more evil he is.”

- “Our sun shines down on our world indifferent to suffering. It is revolting.”

 

            No one knew what to make out of these serious yet strange discussions between Sy and Bai.

 

At that time, the evil they witnessed was darker than ever. French fighter aircraft regularly attacked schools with bombs and napalm.  For safety’s sake, no single school remained in one place more than three months; students were continuously transferred from the foot hills to bamboo woods or ball nut groves; from plains to mountains. If it were too dangerous to hold classes during the day, they were held at night. It was a great hardship for families.

 

First and second graders in the region went to a small school hidden away in the Van Long hamlet north of the village.  This school remained relatively stable during the war. Students from third grade to fifth grade, such as Loc and Dung, went to school farther away. Students of sixth grade or higher, went to the Le Khiet High School in Quang Ngai.  

 

The first school to be attacked with napalm was on the west side of Ho Giang, a small hill several hundred meters west of Cho Tram. Fortunately, the strike claimed no casualties because there were no classes on the day of the strike. The school was rebuilt nearby, on the edge of a rice paddy. Since this location proved relatively exposed and vulnerable, classes were held at night with kerosene lamps or candles for light. Students were required to dig individual shelter pits and collective bunkers against air strikes on the school. Parents and children traveled to school with straw torches to light their way in the darkness.

 

Barely a month later, the school was bombed in the daytime. Again there were no casualties because no day classes were held there during the day.  The school moved farther west into an old village hall surrounded by a sapling forest. The students had to dig new bunkers and shelter-pits. Sometime later, the local authorities said the French intelligence service might have spotted the new location. The school moved again. Each time, the school moved farther and farther toward the vicinities of the Truong Son mountain ranges.

 

After the school moved to a high mountain in Xuan Vinh, Trang, Oanh and the other parents stopped taking their children to school. It was too far, so they let them walk together in a group. However, whenever there was bombing somewhere, all the mothers traveled to their children's school to be sure they were safe. 

 

Although the school was on a mountain, the long route the children had to take to get there was dangerous. The first kilometer on the main route from home to Cho Tram was completely exposed, just white sand without many trees or houses.  Here and there on the roadside were some dry narrow ditches bordered with eucalyptuses.  These ditches would be empty except with heavy and long lasting rain, after which the water rapidly got away. From a low-flying fighter plane even an ant could be detected in that open space. In the past, a lot of people had been shot to death in this area, some right on the road, some in the ditches and next to some eucalyptuses, some on a farther sand dune, probably as a result of a failed attempt to reach some bushes far from the road. Having no shelters out there meant that pedestrians were easy targets. Human bodies, bicycles, clothes, bamboo poles and bamboo baskets littered the road from past attacks. 

 

Following the advice of their parents, the children walked quickly and kept an eye out for any place they could use as shelters in case of an airstrike. There was a small grove of sallow trees several meters west of the road. This grove, although not dense, would be adequate to hide them from incoming fighters, provided they detected them in enough time to get there. Another possible shelter was a fairly deep and wide ditch cutting across the main road not far from the residential area of Cho Tram. It had held a drain pipe for rainwater to go down to a small river close to the Trung Khoi estuary toward the ocean. The pipe had been long destroyed, leaving a deep trench with two sandy slopes.

 

The children would go to school very early in the morning, assuming that the enemy planes did not take off from the Danang Airbase until after having had breakfast. By that time, the kids would have passed through the open and dangerous portion of the road. Parents still worried that the pilots would change their schedules and attack earlier than expected. That's why, on the days their children had school, like other parents in the neighborhood, Trang and Oanh got real nervous after the kids' departure, keeping wondering where they could be now, whether they had crossed the abandoned drain pipe.

           

            One day, about ten children went to school early in the morning as usual.  They had walked only half a kilometer along the open road when they heard a plane coming toward them. By instinct, they threw all their notebooks and other stuff down and ran to the drain pipe ditch. Miraculously, the plane passed by without firing a single shot. It would have shot all of them down were it intended to. If it missed them with its front guns then it could have used its rear guns because this killing machine could fire in all directions. Otherwise, it could have turned around and resumed shooting to get done with the targets it had detected.  Those targets were a group of about ten children totally exposed on a sandy open space, unprotected by anything or anybody. That's unlike a flock of young birds carelessly flying on a stormy and risky sky. Not only might the pilot have seen them but he also might have known how many they were, what they carried with them… including the purely angelic auras radiating from their old palm-leaf hats on their heads, from their coarse, tattered, and faded clothes that their parents had made by hand and mended by hand, too.

 

French aircraft would frequently bombard schools, i.e., it's unlikely that French pilots showed any mercy for the refugees' children. Furthermore, the Junker's pilot was notorious for cold blood killing; and, indeed, he had killed a lot of innocent people. He was said to get real drunk before take-off, probably as an attempt to put his conscience to sleep before proceeding with killings.  That day, however, why didn't he open fire, in front or in rear?

 

That morning, when they heard huge roar of the Junker, Trang and Oanh panicked and immediately rushed out on bicycles in the direction of their children. When they got close to the drain pipe ditch, they saw some notebooks scattered on the sandy roadside.  Trang and Oanh stopped, dismounted, and looked down the road. They were happy to see no casualties. They picked all the notebooks up. Each notebook had a rectangular label on the upper right corner of the cover, with the name of the school, class, and the student's name.  None of those notebooks carried Loc's name or Dung's.  Trang put the notebooks in her bike's basket and they both resumed the trip to find the children.

 

They spotted the children several hundred meters west of Cho Tram, heading toward Tam Anh.  When first seeing them from afar they both rode all the faster. It's, however, impossible to go as fast as expected. Since the beginning of the war, Viet Minh had ordered all roads and bridges destroyed. On the main national road, at intervals of about five meters, they dug deep trenches about a meter wide and as long as half the road width. If one ditch started from one roadside then the other started from the other, alternating with each other, forcing travelers to crisscross the road to avoid falling into such ditches.  

 

As soon as they came close enough to the children, the two mothers shouted the names of their sons. All the children turned around with surprise and stopped until the adults joined them.

 

- “Where were you when the airplane showed up? Trang asked Loc.

- “We're close to the ditch,” Loc replied.

- “Did you have enough time to get shelter?”  

 - “No, Mom.  It surprised us; nobody thought it showed up so early.”

- “Did it open fire?”

- “ No, Mom.” 

 

Trang returned the notebooks to the children. Pushing their bicycles, they both walked along with them until they left the main road to enter the plain on the way to the mountain and watched them until they got to safety. They hurried home, worrying about riding a bicycle on this exposed road at such a time.

 

Once at home, Trang said to herself, "At least he has spared my son's life."

 

From that day on, as before, the five-engine Junker kept showing up with its strafes, casting terrors among the refugees, probably with the same drunken and bloodthirsty pilot.  Trang, however, viewed him differently. No one could understand this uncharacteristic act of mercy. As put by Georges Sand, "The monster is not so black as one thinks." Surely this applied to this pilot. In the world of that black and gruesome vessel there seemed to exist a certain small corner for a  mild light of kindness, a tiny star in a dark universe.  Trang felt grateful to the Heavens for that tiny star because it protected her son. 

 

 

However, since the near-attack of five-engine Junker, the parents no longer allowed the children to travel by the main road each day. Loc, Dung, and the other children went to school by crossing the plains on Monday night and stayed there in the school until the weekend. Parents packed their bags with rice, dry sweet potatoes or maniocs and other foodstuffs for them to eat during their five-day stay. Just a packing for some elementary students! It's not unlike a packing for troops.

 

Normally, refugee children would eat anything available when at home with the rest of the family and barely felt any hardship. However, when their mothers had to prepare separate provisions for them to take to school, their poverty became apparent. While it was difficult for them, Trang and Oanh did everything they could to provide their children with plenty of good food for school.

 

Emulating Viet Minh soldiers' packing method, parents would pack the foodstuffs in a sausage-shaped belt for their children to carry with them. This belt was a kind of cylindrical bag made of coarse cloth strips stitched together spirally. The bag must have one of its ends tied up, allowing an empty segment, before receiving foodstuffs through the other, which, in turn, would be tied up likewise,  when done. The ends were fastened together to form a circle. The belt was worn over one shoulder, going down diagonally to the opposite hip.

           

            Trang and the other refugee mothers purchased the cloth remnants from families with looms, i.e., bits and pieces with defects and of poor quality normally found at the beginning of the first output of the weaving products. Those were cheap and sometimes even given at no charge by nice loom owners. She designed and implemented the belt by hand. After fashioning the belts, she came to families with dyeing ovens for free dyeing, i.e., using the dye left over after the homeowner had removed his or her stuff from the oven.

 

There was no single direct road for the children to travel on their way from home to the school in the mountains. They had to follow a path that required them to cross a river at two different points. The first point was about one hour’s walk from the village. While a ferry boat was available to take them across, they couldn’t afford the charge, so they would take their clothes off, put them into their palm-leaf hat together with their notebooks and food belt, cross the river by swimming with one hand and holding the hat above the water with the other. Once on the other side, they'd quickly put their clothes on and started running to warm up from the cold water and to keep up with their schedule. 

           

            They'd walk about two more hours to reach the second crossing point, which was close to a long dam. They could have used the top walkway dam instead of swimming to cross the river at this point, but it had been blocked at both ends. The children, therefore, would have to strip, secure their possessions, and then swim across again. After crossing the river, they'd dress and walk one more hour across a forested plain before arriving at school at dawn. They were safe there in the daytime under the protection of the forest. French spies, however, were everywhere so classes would be held at night, for French bombarding would seldom take place at night. On Friday evening, they'd leave the mountain at sunset, walk about one hour across the coppice to come back to the crossing point near the dam upstream, cross the river, walk two more hours then cross back the river one more time to be home at midnight. Week after week, like a colony of ants, the children would go over and over with river crossing, plain crossing, going upstream to the mountain for school at night then river crossing, plain crossing again to get back downstream, also under the protection of the night. On the way back, they'd have their empty sausage-shaped belt straddling their right shoulder diagonally down to their left hip, reversing the way of carrying it on the first leg of their trip. Probably it could be just for fun because the belt would no longer have anything to be carried.

 

           That said, it'd seem inaccurate to say that belt was empty. If there's something to be carried on departure then there must be something to be carried on the way back, at least the knowledge they had received at school.  The curriculum would consist of math, history, geography, popular science, and, finally, political propaganda. Their teachers taught them that the Soviet Union would defeat the America with a "Universal Shield" against American atomic bombs and that the three Indochinese countries would soon become an alliance beside the Sino-Russo-Vietnamese Alliance. There would be no more traditional national borders; China would yield Canton to Vietnam. Out of that knowledge, how much would enter the sausage-shaped belt and how much would enter those nomadic ants' brain? If it really entered their brain then how much of it would remain along with their age and how much would go away for good? Between what'd be gone and what'd remain, which would surface as a contribution to the belongings of their nomadic journey?

 

Probably both; but that's not all.  The biggest and most sacred part lay with their priceless experiences they went through in their young days, the mornings when they were roaming through steppes, the nights when they crossed a river, the cold days of hunger, the risky moments in the shooting range of hostile strafes coming from a remote civilization on the other side of the globe.  Among their friends was the brackish river that would welcome them twice, on the high tide and on the ebb tide. When going upstream, the river took them to the south riverbank at the first rendezvous around three o'clock, and about two hours later, it took them back to the north riverbank for them to go to school.  On the ebb tide, it welcomed them back near the upstream dam, took them to the south riverbank, and, about two hours later, it helped them back to the north riverbank for them to rejoin their parents.  Also in that big part was their parents' limitless love, the blood and flesh of the fallen down people they loved, including the blood and flesh of their own friends. And, finally, it's the image of the nomadic raft flowing on an arid and sandy space throughout the episode of chaos and terrors. Were they undergoing a transformation journey?  Transformation from a colony of ants to what? Those ants' innocent and carefree faces wouldn't fail to give the world a notion about good and bad, about angels and evils.   

 

The memories of bomb explosions and bullet shrieks alternated with the cheerful songs of weaverbirds on summer days; the jungles turning yellow with each fall along the nomadic children's way to school, rambling around like carefree young birds; the melodious whistling of wind through sallow trees and green bamboo hedges; the sound of waves lapping the shore of the brackish river; and white clouds gracefully flying on the Long Ranges. Besides river crossings and steppe strolling, there were days of roaming on high mountains during the day before classes began at night. It was an idyllic world of small streams in rock shelters, thickets filled with wild mulberry trees, orchards of date-palms; purple myrtle flowers; and crystal-clear puddles abundant with yellow snails. Flocks of white herons flew across the sky in V formation, leisurely and gently clapping their wings, peacefully flying from the Long Ranges to the ocean, as if they carried messages of calm days somewhere ahead. With the interminable cicada summer songs in the bamboo forests, the moorhen’s summer calls, nocturnal coucal sounds, time slowed down and the life no longer hustled like a shuttle of the loom, back and forth with monotonous speed.

In March, when rice began blossoming, spreading fragrance around on serene evenings, the calls of the black cuckoo could be heard. Time also went with shattered loves of difficult times, and everlasting regrets as of indecisive rivers going upstream. But, even in stormy skies some stars glimmered to guiding these modern day nomads with hope as they  traveled, helping them  ignore the perils under their feet. Everything looked like natural strokes on a humanistic picture of the nomadic raft.

 

Trang would see that her husband Sy was becoming restless. His conversations with Bai were becoming more frequent and impassioned. Trang knew it would not be long before Sy would leave in his journey to find the sun.

 

One evening, she asked him,

- “Are you going to flee to the city?”

- “No,” Sy replied. “If I had that plan in mind then I would take you both with me. I'm not so cowardly as to pursue happiness for myself alone. These days, the French are killing innocent people in cold blood. They kill indiscriminately. Why could we join with murderers and robbers, those demons wearing all kinds of human civilized clothes and sporting fancy ways of?  Why would we bow our heads to creatures inclined to kill and enslave others by the sheer power of their war machines?”

- “Does that mean that you're going to join the resistance?”

           - “No. You know my family so well. Never will I do that. Anti-French stand doesn't necessarily mean submission to this police regime. Why would I sacrifice myself for a vague myth represented by butchers? However, I cannot stay idle, complacent like Ve, Ho, Doi, Chuan, Thiet, Tri, and Thong. I'm not as fortunate as those who have something to defend, protect, justify, some faith to live up to, or some cause to fight for. Stay home and raise our son.  Never think of escaping to the city.  Be careful. The situation grows more  dangerous with those cong an agents stalking day and night. Otherwise, you might incur trouble and bring harm to our son. If you both can survive this war, let our son select his own way when he is grown. Urge him to write in prose as well as in verse. It's one of the most feared weapons by any oligarchy or dictator. See that he forgets what he has learned about the Chino-Russo-Vietnamese alliance, the Laotian-Cambodian-Vietnamese alliance, the Russian Universal Shield, and China’s yielding Canton to Vietnam in the Comintern framework.”

 

- “But before you go, shouldn’t you know your destination, your reason for leaving and how long you will pursue your journey?”

- “Never assume that in order to begin search for what we need, it must exist. We must pursue it, whether or not it exists. It will come to exist if we keep searching for it. Without departure, there can be no arrival.”

 

            Sy left on July 15, 1943. Shortly after Sy's departure, Trang found out that Bai also had left Oanh, too.  Trang and Oanh would live as they did when their husbands were still at home and tried not to worry or succumb to sorrow or loneliness. In time, their sons no longer asked their mothers about their fathers as frequently as before.  When Loc did ask, Trang, half joking, half serious, replied, "Your dad went hunting for the sun." Both of them laughed.

 

Trang and Oanh spent many stormy seasons together. But on the Armistice Day in 1954, they parted. Oanh and her son went to Danang. Trang and her son took the train to Saigon. They were not the only refugees to leave Van Khuong.  Nam Da, who had a son named Tuan and a daughter named Tu moved to Qui Nhon. This family was very successful. He had his tin phieu notes converted to the Bao Dai currency. With the profit from the exchange, he and his wife purchased a concrete house on the Gia Long Street in Qui Nhon City and started a store for bicycle accessories. 

 

Many other refugees were not so fortunate. Believing in the permanent value of the tin phieu currency as well as in the trade agreement of the Geneva Accords, they lost all or most of the money they had saved during the evacuation period. At the beginning, the tin phieu currency was convertible; then it lost its value dramatically until…it became scrap paper, no longer convertible. Some other refugees such as On, returned to Vinh Dien. He and his family lived west of the An Tan Bridge, close to the river and close to agent Ba Giao's house. He had three nice and elegant young girls living almost isolated from everybody. Being among the farsighted refugees, On had more than enough cash to start a hardware store in Vinh Dien, right at the fork formed by the national road and the route to Hoi An.

 

Most of the other refugees went to Saigon and gathered mainly in Nga Tu Bay Hien to continue with their textile businesses. Not very long after their resettlement, most of them became successful and wealthy enough to afford the best education for their children. 

 

After the Armistice Day, some young men like Chuan, Doi, Ho, Ve, Thiet rushed to the Dap Da seaport in order to get shipped to North Vietnam. These elements were among those who lived as parasites during the evacuation period, stranding aimlessly as transient migrants, having no slight political notions, no single contribution to the refugee community.  At the end of the war, however, they were the first to go get aboard to the North, probably hoping to continue enjoying peace-time leisure in what they had heard was the paradise there.

 

Other men such as Luong Chau, and Le Lien, who had risked their lives and sacrificed their youth for the resistance, followed different paths. Le Lien, together with his family, traveled back to Bao An, his hometown. Chau left for Saigon together with his parents' family and his two daughters for re-settlement there. Phan Nhi also moved to Saigon on that occasion. After about five years of hardships in the new re-settlement, thanks to his peanut candy production, Nhi owned a four-story duplex right on the Truong Minh Giang Street, opposite the Ba Chuong Chapel. Almost at the same time, in Nga Tu Bay Hien, Chau grew wealthy with his textile business. He owned a brand new Mazda imported from Japan, and several Italian Vespa and Lambretta scooters. He remarried and had four very pretty daughters and three good looking sons. 

 

After the 1975 collapse of the regime in the South, some of the young men who had left for the North now came back to take important positions in the new administration. However, this was not the case for all who returned from the North. Some came back with disappointment and bitterness, especially when seeing the great achievements of their old friends who had stayed in the South after the Armistice. Most of the wealthy families in Nga Tu Bay Hien found themselves deprived of their properties, including gold, jewelries, houses, workshops in anti-comprado ransacks by the new ruling regime and forced to resettle in so-called “new economic zones.”

 

Pro-communist undercover agents like Ta Han and Phan Thanh Quang (alias Xang), however, were not only spared but also thrived as part of the new ruling class. Han and Quang were former war refugees like most of people living in Nga Tu Bay Hien.

 

People from the old Van Khuong refugee community experienced the irony of history.  Most of them had been on the side of the resistance. They had made sacrifice after sacrifice. Foreign invaders had deprived them of properties, including lands, houses, and investments. When the country was reunified, their assumption was that the new regime would protect them as the pre-1954 regime with which they had cooperated in the Fifth Administrative Interzone. But they soon learned differently.

 

Most of the Quang Nam families in Nga Tu Bay Hien fell victim to continuous ransacks and currency conversions. Worse, the local authorities tried their best to expel them to so-called new economic zones in an attempt to seize their houses. It was no different from the situation of 1945, when the French staged a war, wiped out everything they had, and forced them out of their homelands.

 

Why, however, did the new regime try to destroy the refugee community in Nga Tu Bay Hien? For  revenge?  Were the Communists demolishing the new bourgeoisie to establish a classless and fairer society? Was it just greed, an excuse to confiscate their properties for themselves? The second assumption seems to prevail. In reality, there was no so-called classless society or so-called proletariats in the real world. Those notions exist nowhere else but in the theory of Karl Marx’s workers’ paradise, a kind of utopia that would never come true, presently and perhaps any time in the future. The Vietnamese post-1975 society had simply replaced the conventional bourgeoisie with the red bourgeoisie, which went on suppressing and eliminating any group that had opposed it previously or were reluctant to cooperate with it now.

 

Throughout the war against the French, the Communists were clever enough to cover up the genuine selfish nature of their oppressive leadership, using the terms “proletariat” and “patriotism” to disguise their ultimate goal: to seize control and grow rich from their former enemies and allies alike. They barely concerned themselves with a so-called universal world. 

 

What kind of society are they going to establish? Would it be a flock of timid sheep shepherded by the party? Would these sheep be left alone if reticent on all injustices, exploitations, and deceptions?  Would they be entitled for all benefits and Golden Fleeces if they remained submissive to the regime, clapping their hands, with songs extolling class warfare and socialism's prominence?

With time, would they no longer remember their human origin that the regime has deprived them of? Someday, while looking around and just seeing rams, ewes, and lambs in motley fleeces, they might ask each other:

           

           - "Where are the shepherds and their ferocious sheepdogs?"

           - "Are we free, perhaps?

           - "Everything in this world has a price to pay, especially freedom. Who among us the sheep accepts sacrifices and fights in exchange for freedom?"

           - "But history has its own logic; by sheer contingency, who knows, would it bring in a surprise gift that it might think nobody needs any longer.

           - "We indeed no longer need freedom. It's only a notion that once kept us suffering when we were humans. History never brings in anything we didn't ask for. If it actually offers freedom now, it would be nothing else than a gratuitous, fortuitous, worthless gift, for we no longer need it. Further, giving something out also means having right to take it back, especially when it's given out gratis and unconditionally."

 

             The sheep are not aware that their socialism has grown so advanced that the shepherding oligarchy has dissolved itself, and the former shepherds themselves have transformed into sheep in red fleeces and segregated on high mountains. The freshest and greenest prairie below is for a minority of elite sheep in golden fleeces. The vast remaining steppe on the globe becomes the living environment for sheep flocks in motley fleeces, confined within zones surrounded by high enclosures; some of these sheep have been sent to slaughterhouses for noncompliance. Time keeps going and gradually helps the sheep stop questioning their fate, help them out of reminiscences about the time they were humans, and out of questions about evolution, which they assume is circular, whereby the start point and the ending point are the same.  History repeats itself; and, by residual human instinct, again, they wonder:

 

           - "Where are the shepherds and their ferocious sheepdogs?

           - "Maybe we are already free for good?"

           - "If freedom means being freed from our humanity then we are actually free.  But what about that high and stern enclosure?"

           - "It lies with the social agreement we have implicitly signed. On one hand, it protects us from wild animals. On the other hand, it has become part of our essence and survival; we cannot go without. Beyond that high and stern enclosure, we'd definitely find ourselves vulnerable because of so many unpredictable risks. In no way could we survive outside a finite space. Inside that enclosure we are a mild, classless society of motley sheep, equal to each other in terms of physical features, qualitative standards, social status, and inherent values. It's a perfect world free from tomorrow's worries, for tomorrow is responsibility of the red fleece sheep on the top, free from the past, for the past belongs to the bourgeoisie having nothing in common with our species or our evolutionary level.  We are not used to a world with glaring lights of freedom and ambitions, for our vision has been conditioned to a two-dimensional world without lights coming from a third dimension."

           - "Have we lost the sense of time because one day is the same as any other? We still experience days and nights, even months and years, but that these chronological measures of physical time that have nothing to do with reference points for the existential process. We do have a sense of birth and death, of hunger and thirst, of struggle for life, and of physiological needs. But, without a sense of progress, of context in time, can we be aware of what's going on with our fellow sheep?"

           - "In fact, we need not worry about that, for it's the responsibility and domain of the red fleece oligarchy on the top."

           - "We live in flocks but each individual is confined within a separate psychological space, unable to be aware of others' around us. Tacitly, we have assigned the red fleece oligarchy on the high mountains the right of taking care of our fate."

           - "We would become disoriented in thinking and acting were they not around."

- "This is the ultimate alienation. As assignees, the red fleece sheep become masters of our fate, yet blame their political blunders on us. Since the right is on their side, then the wrong is on ours."

- "When did we accept this alienated existence? It was when we deliberately gave up our human individuality to join the flock. From then on, we thought we kept evolving in life as though we still were humans, but, in fact, we just appeared to do so. We pretended to view others as humans, to view social relationships as human relationships; pretended to  comply with human codes of behavior regarding social institutions; pretended to soothe ourselves in the comfort of socialist ideological cradles, afraid of crying for fear of disturbing the nanny state; pretended to be on the way to a classless and free world; pretended that our thoughts and dreams meant something, that we were still aware of love and ambition; pretended to stop dreaming about individual freedom and its attendant tensions, antagonisms, and  transcendent aspirations; pretended to embrace the characteristics specific to  human civilization."

 

Is it true that only the bourgeoisie cares about the quality of life and its virtue? As put by Charles de Montesquieu, "Virtue is mostly impossible in a monarchy and nonexistent under despotism…. Virtue is not at all necessary to it."

 

At the time the shepherding oligarchies disband, beyond the sheep world, humans rejoin each other from wreckages on land and on the ocean. Soft dictatorships arise and gradually accumulate power and assets into the hands of opportunistic  oligarchic sharks with no clear cut national boundaries or plan for the future. Abandoned by their political and economic institutions because of greed, the majority of humankind becomes a disenfranchised, dependent class forced to subsist on whatever crumbs are left behind. Wealthy people get all the wealthier and monopolize access to power. The economically unprivileged are given the illusion of determining their future by voting in elections that are predetermined by a superpower oligarchy.

 

            They finally find themselves pushed back to tribes with such harsh living conditions that they wind up desirous and jealous of the world of the sheep. As a matter of fact, basically, those two worlds have no big differences: through gradualism, financial oligarchies have managed to turn deeper and deeper, wider and wider the gap between them and the classes to be governed to such a point that it's no longer possible for either group to interact with the other. The absolute incompetence on the part of society is precisely the ultimate goal of that untouchable oligarchy in both the human world and the world of the sheep.

 

Back to the post-Armistice period in 1954, Trang and her son left for Saigon, more specifically, to Trang Bang, about 50 kilometers from the capital, on the way to Tay Ninh to stay with her brother, Binh.  Before 1945, Binh had sneaked onto the train and managed to get to the South. After years of ups and downs, he finally got a job with the local customs service and settled down with a nice house near the Trang Bang market.

 

During her three-month stay there, Trang got in touch with Qui, Sy's cousin, living in Saigon.  Qui got her a job at a pharmacy on the Truong Minh Giang Street. Trang and her son then moved to Saigon and rented a small house on a narrow alley connecting the Trương Minh Giang Street to the Nguyen Hunh Duc Street. Six years later, Trang purchased a small house on the Truong Tan Buu Street, deep in the rear, close to the Nguyen Van Tap police station. At that time, Loc was attending college, working on his Math/Physics/Chemistry degree at the Saigon University of Science. 

 

Loc had grown up to be a student of science, yet held increasingly complex ideas about the reality his father had sought on his journey as a sun hunter.

 

- “If the Earth is flat,” he began one day in a conversation with his mother, “then my father and Dung's father might be on an island at the end of the Pacific Ocean or on a high mountain of the Long Ranges because it's only at those extremes that one could get to the sun.”

- “But beyond that island you mentioned and beyond the Long Ranges would be an infinite space. Moreover, the Earth that we are on is not flat, as you know."

“I do know that the Earth is spherical; but the sun that my dad might be looking for could not be the sun of a spherical earth. His world would not be the physical world that we both are in. We, however, hardly can say that it's pure fantasy, for, at times, man wishes to go back in time or travel into the future as an attempt to appease his aspirations and reject the present.  If all to do is rejecting the present then dad has been successful. And only so doing appears too hard for me.”

“Are you thinking about following your father in his journey?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Anyway, make sure to get done with your Master's Degree, don't you?”

            “It no longer matters to me, mom,” Loc said firmly.  “Among my friends, some applied to military colleges; some got drafted into the army against their will; some disappeared into the jungles; some just keep moving around to dodge military services. There might be another path for me to follow as well. Remember what dad told you before leaving: ‘The sun we need seems nowhere to be found,  so we have to go for it, beyond this war, beyond the two fronts.’ It is in your diary. When leaving home, dad didn't make any promise to himself, did he? If someday, indeed, I'm no longer around with you then, at times, please go over your diary, especially the pages with those lines."

 

- “I needn't go over my diary.  After nearly twenty years, I remember by heart what your dad said. He also told me to let you choose your own path.”

- “Will you be sorry if I leave you?”

 

She thought for a moment.

- “No, I won't,” she said. “Are you thinking about going into the jungle?”

- “Going to the jungle is just an escape. During the evacuation time, right in the heart of the Fifth Administrative Interzone, dad didn't go into the jungle to join with the Viet Minh. Why will I go to the jungle now?”

“Then, why don't you stay with me and with your friends? Where else would you go?”

- “This society and this country are no longer ours.  In recent years, American troops have entered our country. Perhaps many people like that, but not me. Americans might treat each other very well in their own country, but they will not treat us with the same respect.”

- “How can you be so sure?”

           - “Some time ago on a trip to Trang Bang to see Uncle Binh, I witnessed some lousy behaviors of American soldiers in downtown Cu Chi.  It was around seven in the morning. The American soldiers were moving slowly on GMCs across the town. Stores along the main street were opened and crowds of people were moving back and forth. Groups of female students in white ao dai robes were on their way to school. The American soldiers were all sitting on the two side benches of the moving GMCs. Many of them reached down and snatched the girls walking on the sidewalk. Some other soldiers reached out to squeeze the young girls' breasts, laughing wildly. Since the vehicles were moving, when at last released by the soldiers, these girls fell face down to the ground. They did it naturally, self-complacently, and jubilantly, regarding our country as a play yard, if not a zoo with miserable and spiteful animals. They might have viewed our people as a species totally different from theirs, far behind on the evolutionary scale in terms of culture and civilization. Those lousy scenes might have recurred again and again in the past with their superiors' consent. It's an urban and government-controlled locale. What about remote and isolated areas where they launched operations? You might guess what people on the scene might have thought that morning, mightn't you?"

 - “I didn't go much and I didn’t see what you saw,” Trang replied. “But, I’ve seen similar things happen in Saigon.  The Americans have transformed the Southern regime into a stage for clowns, falling all over each other to comply with their  imperatives. Pervasive corruption in the military and in the government, uncontrollable soldiers in the city, prostitution, gangsters are worse than ever because of this occupation. I agree that in war, everything should be viewed in a relative fashion. However, everything has its own limit. If this trend continues, how could this regime win the war? Even if it wins, it would become, at best, a satellite of America. If it loses then we would find ourselves surrounded by an iron curtain like in Russia and China. Responsibility for this war could be attributed to the both sides, and, what's more, to foreign interventions. That said without taking into account the Cholon Chinese financiers' manipulation and disruption. These powerful ungrateful elements are making use of the colossal amounts of money and assets they had earned right in our country to undermine our republic with widespread bribery of our military and government leaders. They own our highest ranking officials.  If we don't lose to the Communists then we will lose to those Chinese financiers, which is an even gloomier perspective compared to long-lasting Chinese dominations. Even if we don't actually lose to the Chinese financiers yet then, to some extent, we have become their slaves whereas few are aware of that catastrophe or, if they are, for self-defense, they'd unlikely speak up. With respect to corruptions and briberies, our political system undergoes assaults on four sides, literally and figuratively. First, it's the bureaucrats on the top, having no other concerns than their own interests, their family's, and the interests of those who join with them, without any single worry about the common cause. Second, it's America with its scheme to make us docilely compliant with its own interests. Third, it's the North Communists, who are trying their best to clandestinely promoting corruptions as an attempt, on one hand, to blemish our republic's image, and, on the other hand, to implant their cover-up agents and spies into our political institutions. Fourth, and finally, it's the above-mentioned Chinese financiers, no less dangerous than the other three kinds of culprits. Responsibility, first and foremost, of course, lies with our leadership, not anyone else.”

- “If dad were still around with us his options would be the same as in the 1950s when we were in the Fifth Administrative Interzone. He definitely wouldn't accept a regime dominated by the generals coming from the French Expeditionary Army and the Bao Dai puppet government. Throughout those nine years in exile, we experienced all kinds of hardships, sufferings, and losses resulting from crimes perpetrated by that expeditionary army and that colonial administration. We harbored  no hatred and valued French culture and civilization. Nonetheless, we cannot support those who joined with cold blooded killers who chased us like chasing animals. We understood the meaning of the term 'freedom' so, like dad, we didn't side with the communists. We decided to stay in the South instead of going to a gathering point to be shipped the North. Freedom, however, barely could stand out as a reason persuasive enough for us to accept unconditionally history's arbitrary verdicts. A French saying goes, 'Between the two evils, choose the lesser.' That's right, of course, only if there's no third option. The above mentioned generals' anti-communism and military proficiencies are definitely undeniable. However, being anti-communist and military proficient is one thing; patriotism is another. They're definitely challenged on the patriotism issue."

           - "It seems the third option might sound like a solution of desperation and intellectual revolt, doesn't it?"

            - “Not necessarily, mom. The universe is not necessarily three-dimensional. Friends of humans are not necessarily only creatures on this Earth. We could leave the present, emigrate one more time; but this time we would travel to the future and go back to the present later, if we wish. We then would no longer be components of any human society, which is subjected to Earth time and the limited three-dimensional human world.”

           - "But when going, you should know where to go, what for, and when to stop?"

           - "It seems that you already raised that question to dad and it seems that you have been answered. Stop? Probably not. But return? Maybe, because it's time travelling; but return would not mean getting back to one's very past."

           - "It turns out that I would lose your dad and you yourself, for good, doesn't it?"

 - “If ever dad were alive and back to us then probably we'd hardly recognize him anymore. If I leave, come back later, and if you were still around, then you yourself barely could recognize me, either. That might be the price to pay; and that might not be a way of seeking happiness if happiness means ameliorating the existence of a social creature whose destiny is bound by others' destiny. It's rather a way of seeking genuine freedom, freedom from time, space, history, and man. We'd be free to move around with that kind of time travelling, free on every trajectory, free from disputes, schemes, ambitions, deceptions….Man then would no longer be defined as a historic animal, political animal, or a social animal.”

- “That means you would nullify your own being?”

“Not completely. Mankind would be able to sustain its being by making it transparent and by transforming the whole physical world into a world of light. Mankind then would no longer a prisoner to the destiny of others; no longer care about such terms as capitalism, communism or socialism. We would no longer be fooled by the promise of  a so-called workers' paradise or a universal world. Neither would he see those generals wearing French medals on their uniforms. He would come back to his absolute lonely world, isolated from humans, from the vast universe, from one-dimensional time, a sine qua non frame of reference for human survival, no longer siding with devils. He might still be mortal like all stars, galaxies, or even the universe; but at least he would receive a magnificent ending like the stars', with lights emitting throughout the universe, forever, carrying with them both his body and soul. This ending might take place before humans destroy their own Earth by themselves and transform it into tiny asteroids wandering in a risky universe, or into a dying planet agonizingly longing for a certain evolutionary cycle with a certain new species totally different from humans."

 - “Communism and socialism are the terms that would have disappeared long ago; they are among most blatantly and most rudely abused terms in modern and contemporary history. First and foremost, they stood out as the antipode or antithesis of imperialism and colonialism whereas the underlying theories were no more or less than subterfuge and deception, utopia, and discomfiture. As a result of the somber situation of the capitalist world in the late eighteenth century with the negative effects of the industrial revolution and the miserable conditions in the countries subjected to subsequent colonialism, humankind resorted to the antipode or antithesis of imperialism to cope with the demon the capitalists unleashed and allowed to show up full size. Generally speaking, coping with demons means resorting to divinities; but divinities only exist in myths, or at best in the world of religious practitioners submerging in prayers with eyes closed, not in the secular world. Encountering the bad, therefore, would resort to the worse. That's the real nature of so-called communism or socialism. Nowadays' dictatorial oligarchies are nothing but the incarnation of that hideous antipode. For this matter, the world is going from bad to worse, not vice versa. If, by Gresham's law, the bad money replaces the good money, then bad policies would gradually replace good policies, and obnoxious political regimes would gradually replace humanistic regimes. History is a matter of repetitions; but each iteration would be worse than the previous."

           - “Anyway, if we ever come back to the Earth then following would be the probable scenarios. On one hand, we would see a few oligarchies with obese financiers isolating themselves in some sanctuaries whereas outside would abound hooligans and slaves. On the other hand, red fleece oligarchies would reign on the high mountains while vast steppes would host flocks of motley sheep taking time making love, dancing, and grazing. Man we'd expect would be nowhere to be found.  Like in the human world, classes in the sheep world would be divided not horizontally but vertically as a fraction with upstairs and downstairs values or numerator and denominator. The upstairs would represent the class to be governed or governees, which would make them believe in the so-called people's sovereignty whereas the downstairs would represent the governing class or the governors, which would lure the governees into thinking that the governors would be people's servants. Lying downstairs, the denominator might comprise falsified numbers to hide actual values, unknown numbers belonging quiet, anonymous, and invisible owners.  The upstairs class would be persuaded that they have all physical and moral conveniences, including independence, freedom, and happiness, preached and bluffed on a daily basis; but, in fact, those would turn out fictional values; the actual would be lying downstairs because denominator also means designator, divisor, or determinant, thus playing a matriarchal or patrimonial role, not servant role, whereas the upstairs, a value to be divided by the downstairs, its mother or boss, would represent offspring or class to be governed, having no sovereignty at all. The more the governing oligarchy is racking up society's wealth the bigger the denominator grows; and the bigger the denominator grows the quicker the fraction itself goes to zero. That would be the ultimate outcome of the society of the sheep as well as of a human society dominated by financial oligarchies."

 

As a matter of fact, besides the group of generals coming from the French Expeditionary Army or trained by the French as mentioned above, the South's republic had a generation of young officers with a solid education  from military colleges established after 1954, such as the Duc Infantry School, the Air Force School, the Navy Academy, the Warfare College, and especially the VNMA (Vietnamese National Military Academy). These military institutions required most of these young people to have top grades from secondary school and a working competence in a foreign language French or English, or both. Some military colleges like the VNMA and the Warfare College, for example, provided their student officers with an academic program approximately analogous to a civilian university's.

 

Most of the academic instructors at these military colleges were university graduates; some even had a master's degree. Most of them had been drafted to be reserve officers; and, after graduating the university, they were appointed to these big military schools as instructors.  Their positions and titles were very humble compared to career officers in other divisions such as the military and staff departments; and therefore, to some extent, student officers didn't respect them as they did the military instructors.

 

This class of self-effacing and relatively neglected wartime intellectuals, however, helped influence future officers with ethical values. Nobody knows whether those values would go along with the young officers in their military career. Odds were that many of these educated young officers would wind up absorbed by the class of generals coming from the French Expeditionary Army or trained by the French, in uniforms decorated with French medals. This powerful class cast too large and too dark a shadow over the fate of the South's Republic.

 

If history were on the side of those young educated career officers, they would have assumed responsibility for the South's political fate. They would have surfaced as proficient military leaders, enlightened freedom fighters and proponents of a humanistic society. Unfortunately, the old generals still were on the top during the war and overruled the young officers. Even if they wanted to make an impact of the rising of the young republic, they could not.

 

Maybe because of this, North Vietnam gave the South's regime and armed forces the two labels ‘puppet government’ and ‘puppet troops.’ However, the label ‘puppet troops’ seems unjustified. Aside from a minority of generals on the top, a major part of the South's armed forces came into being and developed afterward, actually serving a sovereign country and unreceptive to the communist ideology directly embodied by the North Communists. Culturally speaking, those forces definitely prevailed by far against the North regime's inhuman and uncultivated killing machine. In addition to these young career officers, the AFRVN surfaced with quite a few reserve officers coming from universities, graduate or almost graduate. Behind those troops were scholars who once contributed their grey matter to one of the then loveliest civilizations in Southeast Asia, although that civilization was later let down by history. Behind those troops were sophisticated educational systems from the 17th latitude southward and from elementary levels to universities, promoted by teams of world standard teachers, not born to advocate hatred and deception, not coming to the world as instruments for class struggle criminals.  It's doubtful that the North was trying to defeat the South out of any ideology or patriotism; it's rather by jealousy and inferiority complex coming from the real big gap between a society that benefitted from two civilizations at the same time and its physically and intellectually rearward and destitute counterpart.

 

            It's no doubt that the AFRVN emerged as a good-versus-evil cause. History sometimes joins with the bad guys; but that fact is barely sufficient for humans to join with the bad guys, too. History's duplicity isn't sufficient either for the Americans to turn their back on their so-called allies and later to become accomplices of the bad guys. Right from the beginning, the Americans came here uninvited. They then went on with tremendous losses of lives and money as an attempt to serve their own country' interests, first and foremost. With time, however, history demonstrated that their strength didn't match their ambition. They gave up as a result of their own problems and incompetence; and it's also for their national interests that they let the South Vietnam down. Politics is a matter of change. As put by a guy in England, "A nation has no permanent enemies and no permanent friends, only permanent interests." Some other guy in America later paraphrased that statement and made it his own, saying, "We do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies – we only have permanent interests." Who is "we?" Greedy and mindless financial oligarchies? Of course, it's a rule. History would be lenient on this matter; but it would barely be with reference to all the losses and ordeals suffered by the South Vietnamese civilians, government officials, and armed forces in jail, re-education camps, on open seas…, let alone all the deep-rooted properties seized following the South's collapse, which would have been the South Vietnamese's responsibility ….without the duplicity on the part of the Americans, then assumed as their faithful allies, militarily and ethically. History would barely be lenient either for the American B52 carpet bombings against the North Vietnamese toward the end of the war. These bombings followed tacit pending agreements between Nixon/Kissinger and Mao-Tse Tong whereby the United States would pull out of South Vietnam in exchange for secret trade treaties with China. The Americans didn't carry out those bloody airstrikes as an attempt to end the war but rather as an attempt to speed up the above-mentioned secret trade treaties by forcing the Vietnamese Communist Party to surrender to Beijing and sign tacit agreements with territorial concessions on land and sea at the Vietnamese people's expense and on their back…in exchange for a so-called "Great Spring Victory (!)", a Chinese gift from Hell. The April 30, 1975 event turned out the mourning, not solely for the South Vietnamese, but also for all the Vietnamese people. Differently put, the American primary goal was to do their best to finalize lucrative trade treaties with China at Vietnam's expense before letting the South down for good. History made its first mistake when posing South Vietnam as a so-called ally of the Americans against its will whereas the opposite, that is, as one of their enemies, instead, would turn out desirable. Its second mistake, even worse, wound up turning Vietnam into a sacrifice for American interests, a game for dirty, mindless, and cynical politicians. History might be lenient for the Americans letting down South Vietnam but it would hardly be for their stabbing it in the back.

 

            To some extent, the Vietnam War legacy might be visualized as a drama featuring an unfaithful woman, her rich but controlling lover, and her poor children and husband. The woman becomes infatuated with her wealthy lover, and she will do what he tells her to do.

 

To some extent, the Vietnam War legacy might be described as a drama featuring an unfaithful woman, her rich but controlling lover, and her poor children and husband. The woman becomes infatuated with her wealthy lover, and she will do what he tells her to do.

 

- "If you love me," said China, the lover, "I'll give you everything you want including the immense wealth of China with its billions of hungry and backward people eager to enjoy American stuff. I'll give them money and they'll give it back to you."

- "It's amazing, honey, thank you." said America, his lover.

- "But, you know, I'm not comfortable with your damned husband and kids hanging around."

- "What should I do about them honey?" asked America. "My husband and kids will not be capable of bothering us once I've left them and taken with me all they currently have including money, possessions, and real estate.  Don't worry about them."

- "I'm interested in the Paracel Islands."

- "You can take what you want. If I don’t stop you, nobody else will."

- "That's fine, honey, but there’s something else."

- “What's that?”

- "Your damned enemy in the North appears reluctant to comply with my requests and commands, especially with regard to territorial issues along our common borders."

- "No worries," replied America. "I'll teach them a good lesson with B52 carpet bombings. They will comply after that. They’re your lackeys anyway."

- "Good, honey," said China. "Everything that belongs to me will be yours, too."

- "Long live our love!" 

 

            Long live American and Chinese interests! Long live dirty, mindless, and cynical politicians! This drama highlights one paradox of modern history:  most of the time, losers in a war would apply a make-or-mar strategy which involves either total success or total ruin. Sometimes they hide their interests, awaiting new opportunities for revenge. Sometimes they'd wind up slaves of the winners. Sometimes they embrace their former enemies and reap the rewards. The last two options are favored by dirty, mindless, and cynical politicians.

 

Since the end of the Nixon administration, the United States has been in bed with Beijing, faithfully serving China's interests in return for their own interests, strengthening one of the most barbarous dictatorships in modern history.  

 

            As ever, the sun rises every morning in the East and sets every evening in the West. As ever, the famous sakura of Washington DC gracefully line the Tidal Basin at the National Cherry Blossom Festival in early spring, when the cherry blossoms bloom. As ever, on Mount Rushmore, the majestic faces of Richard Nixon and his successors quietly and proudly look out at the American blue sky with white clouds peacefully flowing year after year, season after season….without figuring out the American Doomsday looming on the horizon. As ever, American politicians go on boasting about values and ideals while totally unaware of what's going on in their own backyards. As ever, in the eyes of the Americans and many people in the rest of the world, American political institutions stand out as the  prototypes of human civilization regardless of the legacies of greed and oppression they support. No one knows where those prototypes would take this civilization to, eventually.

 

Fifteen years after the end of the war,  the United States received as political refugees most of South Vietnamese military officers and high ranking government  officials who all had spent at least three years in communist re-education camps, and civilians working for American organizations in the South. Fifteen years after the end of the war and after years in prison! Most of those so-called political refugees might have been scraps already. The Americans were kind enough to take them out of a hostile and retaliatory political regime and, for that matter, helped freeing that regime from unwanted encumbrances. The relief program was labeled Humanitarian Organization or HO.

 

            Unlike so many other actions taken by America, this effort was purely humanitarian, at least on the surface. It had nothing to do with freedom, democracy, and ideology. It was by no means an apology for the hardship America had caused. Beyond that HO label, however, was an immense necropolis of aborted dreams, unrecoverable losses, betrayed faiths, thwarted endeavors, never-ending mortifications and indelible memories of a renowned culture forever lost. Beyond that HO label was a flower thrown down by a condescending and haughty gravedigger into a grave of numberless souls missing on land and sea; unknown soldiers who had sacrificed their lives during the bloody war; the tortured lives of  forlorn and handicapped veterans who had the misfortune to survive without any support or care.  Beyond that grave were quite a few unlucky officers ineligible for the HO program. They all were taken care of by history.

 

            Ironically and magically, defectors turned out to be benefactors whereas victims wound up dependents; debtors, borrowers.

 

Here is what some of the most prestigious English dictionaries tell us:

           

Help or money given to people, countries, etc., in order to improve living conditions. -- Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary

 

Humanitarian' relates to efforts to help people who are living in very bad conditions and are suffering because of a war, flood, earthquake etc. -- Macmillan Dictionary

 

"Humanitarian" is concerned with improving bad living conditions and preventing unfair treatment of people. -Longman English Dictionary Online:

 

            In short, the term "Humanitarian" definitely confers a degrading and disingenuous denotation when referred to those who once risked their life with face up and high head throughout the South's fiery and bloody battlefields in an effort to desperately safeguard a forlorn republic. It definitely confers a contemptuous and outrageous denotation when referring to those intellectuals and elite social members of a civilization betrayed and aborted by both history and man. It definitely confers a condescending and supercilious denotation when referring to those valiant fighters as destitute uncultivated and uneducated rubbish. It definitely confers a deceitful and despicable denotation when that term is used by the very people who have once stabbed their own war companions in the back out of greed and cowardice.

 

 All nations make mistakes. America is no exception. Justice requires that America make a sincere admission of guilt for the suffering it has caused and take real actions to make amends. Instead, America has swept its sins under the rug and boasts about its virtue and strength as all oligarchies do.  It's no doubt the Americans erred, not for letting the South Vietnam down as a result of their incompetence but for stabbing the South Vietnamese in the back. Worse, by means of bloody B52 carpet bombings in the North at the end of the war, they used the Vietnamese people in the North as sacrifices to meet Beijing's requirements. Those bombings stood out as ugliest and meanest crimes against humans, being used not as an attempt to defeat the Communists but as an attempt to force the Vietnamese Communist Party to surrender to Beijing and to come up with secret agreements for territorial concessions in return for a so-called Spring Great Victory, a hideous gift from Zhongnanhai. At this point in history, one of the post-Nixon American presidents should have apologized to the Vietnamese people in both the North and the South. The Americans might flout a political regime that has collapsed but by no means should they flout a people that have fallen victim to duplicity by both man and history. For many across the globe, the American eagle can no longer take wing as it used to because it is weighed down with this moral and ethical debt.

 

Apology, of course, doesn't mean apology to the current political regime in Vietnam. Neither does it mean going placid, polite, gratifying, flattering, and respectful toward this political regime, one of the most rearward and awkward systems that's going against human evolutionary current. Apology doesn't mean, for the sake of a few American financial oligarchies, complicity with a corrupted, servile, and brutal political reality that's depriving the Vietnamese people of freedom, democracy, and virtue. Otherwise, it wouldn't be so unlike substituting old mistakes with new ones, worse, more perilous, and far more reprehensible. It wouldn't be so unlike adding new debts to unpaid ones. A sincere and righteous apology would mention the corruption of such terms as freedom and democracy used as rhetorical, empty, and treacherous slogans to dupe the Vietnamese people and the rest of the world. A true apology would involve a commitment to never letting this heinous situation ever happen again.  

Pragmatism is the basic rule of all politics. When left unchecked, however, it produces moral bankruptcy. This doctrine would end up pushing the United States deeper in history's quagmire of oppression and economic imperialism. Eventually, it could threaten the integrity of the United States itself. That doctrine might surface as a symptom of a downhill episode of a civilization which simply follows natural laws: what is clustered by man would wind up broken up by nature. Continents on Earth have been gradually split apart. Galaxies and universes keep running away from each other farther and farther. Human politics is no exception. Human politics is no exception.  America would not the first superpower to fall as a result of this doctrine. Some examples include:  Qin Shi Huang' Empire, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the former Soviet Union.

 

On the part of Hanoi, their propaganda almost relentlessly characterized the South as lackeys and traitors. However, was it patriotism that motivated the North to stage war or was it the ideology of communism as practiced in Russia and China?  Did Hanoi act as an independent body or was it an instrument of those two communist states? Moreover, communism and nationalism are two mutually exclusive political concepts. Communist ideals support a utopian world without national/political borders. Nationalism is based on independent and self-governing countries with unique political systems and firm borders. If one day history proves their communism utopian then it's no doubt that they'd keep stick to it, just for the sake of itself, as an attempt to justify their dictatorship and to keep serving the governing oligarchy's interests. Would Hanoi earnestly want a sovereign and democratic state in the South? Of course not. Neither do the Americans: they would hardly be able to manipulate the South regime.

 

Moreover, if Hanoi fought for the good cause of patriotism, why did so many people in the North rush to flee their homeland after the Geneva Accords in 1954? If Hanoi ever fought for the good cause of patriotism, why so many people, not only in the South, but also in the North, risked their life to flee Vietnam after the 1975 Paris Peace Accords? As a matter of fact, the North troops entered the South's townships and cities like barbarian troops, overwhelmingly astonished and mystified as if suddenly pushed into an evolutionary stage that was not theirs. Nevertheless, they had been told again and again that they were liberation troops whereas they themselves were liberated, indeed, thanks to some fainted lights left over from a deserted civilization though. If Hanoi fought for the good cause of patriotism then why didn't it  tell the Vietnamese people about secret agreements that their leadership had previously been forced to sign by China in exchange for the Party's survival?  Did it wage wars for the country or just for the Party? If Hanoi fought for the good cause of patriotism, why didn't it let the Vietnamese people exercise their actual sovereignty via general elections and actual power divisions instead of centralizing all powers in the hands of a totalitarian minority of the Communist Party? Were they obsessed as ever with a certain fear inherent to any authoritarian regimes? And, in turn, would they use fear as their primary weapon to control society? As observed by Montesquieu, "Despotic government has fear as its principle; and not many laws are needed for timid, ignorant, beaten-down people." 

 

In the years before 1975, there were a lot of anecdotes about why the North wanted to capture the South. Some said that people in the North, from Politburo officials to female assistants, corporals, students, teachers, were all dreaming about victory over the South because it would enable them to see Thanh Nga, opera super star of the South,  performing on a traditional opera stage; listen to the traditional tune, Truyen tinh Lan va Diep and  to such love songs as Tinh Ca, Ngan trung xa cach, Buon tan thu, Thu vang, Ha trang, Ben Xuan, Tinh nho, Bong nho duong chieu, Nua dem ngoai pho, and  Bai khong --- all of which were banned in the North. Some said that they were dreaming about the South capture so that  they would enjoy Tao Dan poetry recitation programs and the romantic works of Saigon's writers and poets...

Some said that they were dreaming about capturing the South so that their children could attend such nearly legendary schools  as Dong Khanh, Gia Long, Trung Vuong, Bui thi Xuan, Couvent des Oiseaux, Marie Curie, Chu Van An, Pestrus Ky, Yersin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Those haughty and aristocratic schools would help gradually free them and their children from their Stone Age civilization, their hunting and gathering culture.

 

One theme connects all these anecdotes: The North wanted to experience the sophisticated and civilized culture for which the South was famous. It's not unlike those barbarians eager to enter the South's capital one day to witness advanced species which had led them by many evolutionary stages.

 

After 1975, rumors surrounded the murder of Thanh Nga. One said that a certain party boss was so infatuated with Thanh Nga that his wife paid to have her killed. Another version went that a pro-Chinese faction was responsible for this murder because Thanh Nga played a key role in the play Duong Van Nga, a traditional opera with an obvious anti-Chinese content. Outsiders hardly knew which might be the right version; but, at least, one of them must be right, for no third version was available.

 

After the South's collapse, nearly all barbarians from the North found themselves stupefied by the sophisticated, modern culture of the South. Upon seeing a flush toilet bowl for the first time, they had no idea what it was. Many of them used it to wash their fruits and vegetables; others even used it as a fish tank. Imagine their shock when they flushed it by accident, and their fish were flushed away. All they could do was curse the American capitalist puppets for setting these cunning traps.  Even worse, they thought soap bars were some kind of candy. Their discomfort was comical.

 

Yet, they were too proud to admit their ignorance. The following conversation between a Northerner and Southerner illustrates this point:

 

- "Do you have TVs in the North?" the Southerner asked.

- "Oh, lots. We find them running everywhere on the street."

- "Do you have pianos?"

- "Oh, lots. We find them running everywhere on the street."

           - "Do you have cars?"

- "Oh, we have a lot of brand new and expensive cars running everywhere on the streets."

 

There were, however, people who came to the South to see their relatives after the Communist takeover. There is a story of one family that before they left for their trip, they disassembled a Chinese flask, put some cash in its bottom, and then reassembled it. They intended it as gift for their relatives to give them relief. They had been taught that people in the South were miserable, destitute and utterly exploited by the Americans and their puppets. On their arrival, however, they were so overwhelmed by relative luxury of their relatives’ simple home that they were afraid to enter for fear of making social faux pas.  

 

Finally, they decided to enter; and voila! Their relatives cheerfully welcomed them, very happy to see them after decades of separation. During their stay, they realized that Northern propaganda had lied about the South and hidden its incredibly high lifestyle, affluence, and daily conveniences. In comparison to the relative wealth of their relatives, the Chinese flask they had brought with them as a gift seemed primitive and old fashioned and they did not give it to them.  They began to have a chance to see many other things, not just their own shadow in the cave. And, first and foremost, it's the first time they witnessed a good cause defeated by devils.

 

For the first time they had gotten out of the dark cave their leaders use to control them for more than two decades. They began to see the South clearly and came to realize that they themselves they had been freed from cultural murkiness and a distorted worldview, all perpetrated by their leaders.

 

Many Northerners were amazed to behold the houses abandoned by Southerners who fled the country after the North won the war. They wondered, "Why flee from such comfortable places?” Would the South end up like Belshazzar’s wild party with all kinds of leftovers but with its soul gone for good, no matter what sort of civilization the takeover regime would bring up later.  The barbarians would go on dancing, chanting, and shouting because at last they had reached paradise despite the fact that it had been lost  forever.  

 

After their takeover of the South, the communists launched operations against its so-called "corruptive culture," by giving new names to the capital city, the streets, and the schools. The South's culture, however, barely restricted itself to physical items they tried their best to demolish similarly to Qin Shi Huang outlawing scholars, burying them  alive, and burning their books. They had won the war but they could do nothing against the obvious preponderance of the South's culture. They were vainly trying to extinguish the soul of a people with all its desires, aspirations, love, suffering, tensions, regrets, disappointments, hopes, revolts, dreams of the future, memories of the past, and endless self-expression. It could not be done.

 

By no means could humans stand as insensitive, mindless physical bodies, advancing with a charge bugler sound or dancing along with songs extolling leaders or eulogizing party oligarchy, marching with slogans infested with furor, irritation, blood, fire, and…deception. Genuine human beings are not compatible with an inhuman culture. In their desperate effort to subjugate the South, the communists deliberately killed their own dreams and unintentionally cut the wounds deeper of those in exile on the other side of the globe.  

 

At this point in their conversation, Trang wanted to change the subject to avoid thinking about her son's potential departure.

 

- “I just want to return to Van Khuong,” Trang said,” hopefully to find any trace of your dad. At the same time I'd like to go to Danang to see Dung and his mother. They might know something about  your dad, too.”

“I would be happy to go with you, mom.”

 

In June, 1967, Trang and her son left for Van Khuong by bus.  As the bus was leaving Quang Ngai, Trang began to recognize Chau O, the last township of this province before entering Quang Nam. After crossing the Chau O Bridge, she scanned both sides of the road in an attempt to recognize anything  familiar between Chau O and Tam Ky. Surprisingly, she no longer recognized anything. The once familiar O Vuong area had become an American airbase constructed in 1965 and called Chu Lai International Airport. She had heard of this airbase on the radio and in news articles, but it was bigger and noisier than she could have imagined.  An Tan was no longer recognizable either since it was filled with tall buildings and fashionable houses. The two bridges on the national road and the railroad which had been damaged had been re-constructed, and stood side by side magnificently on the Ben Vang River.

 

They both got out of the bus at a spot on the north side of the bridge and planned to walk slowly hoping to find any people they knew from times past. It was around nine o'clock in the morning. Trang wore a pair of dark brown pants, a gray short-sleeved cotton shirt. It was sunny and hot so she opened an umbrella, which was also gray. Loc wore a pair of navy tergale pants, a short-sleeved khaki shirt, and a khaki beret. Loc carried their luggage as they walked.

 

The houses along the road had changed dramatically. It was a completely different world, no longer the Van Khuong of long ago. Aside from the road itself, nothing resembled the refuge community she remembered during the time of evacuation. She tried to find  the location of their old house. She remembered the narrow walkway beside the house leading to a small manioc copse next to a thicket near the Ba Loi shrine. She also remembered some clumps of bamboos abundant with weaverbirds across the street. Beside these clumps of bamboos was another narrow walkway going across the railway to a sunken sandy patch always flooded in winter. Next to this narrow walkway was a small banyan tree, a little bit taller than the nearby house of Ba Huong Tham, the mother of Ho, Ve, and Thiet. Behind that house was the hut of Ba Nam, an old woman who lived by making banh nam. Nothing remained. Just rows of concrete houses and stores close to each other, and the noisy traffic of cars and American military vehicles. 

 

Trang and Loc came to what looked like a small restaurant close to the road on the ocean side. In the front, on each side of the main entrance was a plumeria taller than a man's height. Above the door was a trellis of bougainvillea splendid with pinkish purple flowers. The trellis cast a large shadow on the front yard. They entered.

 

 Inside, the bistro looked impressive. There was a display of the variety of beers, sodas, and imported cigarettes for sale. There were eight rectangular tables distributed into two rows on the two sides of the room. Each table had four elegant wooden chairs. A five-piece expensive nylon screen separated the counter from the rest of the room; but it covered just the left half of the room. Soft American music and soft lights provided an atmosphere much more pleasant than outside. Two ceiling fans worked to keep the place comfortably cool.

 

The small place was pretty crowded. There were already two young men enjoying their coffee at the second table from front to rear on the left hand side. At the fourth table of the same row were other four men, eating and drinking. Their table was crowded with empty beer cans.   

 

A young waitress about twenty-five years old, the same age as Loc, came forward to welcome them. Her dress and makeup indicated that she's not from this region. Her shoulder-length curled hair, knee-length, tight brown skirt and her short-sleeved bright burgundy montague spelled her urban background.

 

- “Please be seated over here,” she said with a Southern accent, indicating a table opposite the row where the men were sitting.

After Trang and Loc sat down, the girl asked politely,

- “How can I help you now?”

 

Trang looked at Loc as if expecting him to go ahead with his answer. Since Loc didn't say anything, she responded.

- “Do you serve lunch?”

- “Yes, Ma'am.”

She then picked up the menus on the table and handed one to each of them.

- “Today we have nem nuong^[1], grilled fish, banh beo ^[2], bun bo hue^[3],  or mi quang^[4]. I’ll be right back to take your orders.” 

 

One more time Trang turned to her son and then  pensively looked back to the menu, being absorbed in herself when hearing mi quang, as if for the first time since they got out of the bus she came to realize that this was Quang Nam, this was the evacuation territory they both had once been in. It turned out that this was the last leg of their journey in which the three souls had been chased forward without a chance to look back.  Happiness was lagging behind…. while ahead was an empty space….empty until one day they had to part as an attempt to reduce their physical beings targeted by their hunters, like animals shrinking themselves to avoid the hunters' arrow. No. That nomadic territory would no longer anywhere to be found on earth, forever. It represented their life's vicissitudes and hardships; and it's for that very fact that it surfaced as a priceless lifetime asset, an integral part of their soul itself. 

 

The physical existence of the nomadic territory was still there whereas its metaphysical existence had disappeared, leaving so strange a world as to make her absolutely alienated. She sat there like a witness of ups and downs; and it's until that very moment that she came to realize that human evolution, however desirable it was physically, wouldn't be necessarily what man might expect it to be; it might, on the contrary, give rise to heartbreaking losses like these.

 

She could never forget the stormy early winter days, suffering from hunger and cold and the fear of gunfire from the air and from the sea. She had gone through long periods of deprivation. She remembered having to prepare meager portions of rice and dried potato sticks by washing them separately so that they wouldn’t stick to each other, then laying the sticks on top of the rice in the pot. In that way, when the rice was ready, she took the potatoes for herself and served the rice for her son.

 

She could not forget those thundery nights sitting by a kerosene lamp with its blackened flue and its faint light, teaching her son to read or writing in her diary while  the wind kept battering the thin leaf walls and shaking the hut itself. Nor could she forget those rainy days when she would take her son to school, both of them shivering inside a raincoat made of nipa-leaves or palm-leaves, with cone-shaped leaf hats on their heads and areca sheath sandals under their feet. It rained relentlessly while the north wind lashed their faces. They kept their head low while walking, fighting the elements like two helpless animals on the prairie. 

 

She remembered that on the way to school, a walkway across a paddy was often submerged in water filled with leeches. The leeches would usually stay in shallow spots, in rice bushes, or reeds, and only rush out when detecting movement. Trang told Loc to run ahead quickly. She knew that his small legs would set the bloodsuckers on the move, but if he were quick enough, he could avoid most of them. Trang followed after him and suffered most of the attacks. Once on the other side, they both started removing the slimy black leeches from their legs before resuming.

 

At the beginning, just seeing a leech on her leg would terrify her; and after removing it and seeing her blood coming from the bite, she would be frightened to tears. She turned her head away from her son not wanting to frighten him. Somebody later on told her to apply some lime on their legs to repel the leeches. Normally, it would work, but on rainy days when the water was high, the lime didn't last long enough to deter the leeches. Before setting out, she would bring along a set of papers to use remove the leeches instead of removing them with their bare hands. When the water was too deep, she would carry her son on her back when crossing the sunken section and take all the bites herself.  

 

Before this sunken section was a large sandy patch. In summer, this patch was blazing hot from the sun. When tire sandals were not available, they often went barefoot. In order to cross the hot, sandy patch, Trang had to bring a  thin piece of cardboard about two feet wide. They would run as fast as possible on the hot sand, as long as they could, then drop the cardboard down and stand on it until their feet cooled down. They repeated that running-stopping process until the end of the sandy patch.  

 

And now… she thought about Sy, her husband. She and her son were searching for him with little or no trail to follow. Trang recollected what Sy had once said, “Never assume that in order to begin the search for what we need, it must exist. We must pursue it, whether or not it exists. It will come to exist if we keep searching for it. Without departure, there can be no arrival.” This was still an unsolved puzzle for her. Could this search be a futile challenge against destiny, characteristic of those who never compromise with reality, with the existing sun? 

 

The waitress came back and asked for their orders. Seeing his mother was still absorbed in herself, Loc spoke to the waitress.

- “What does mi quang come with, please?” 

“Besides beef and pork, we have snakehead fish, shrimps, and soft-shelled crabs.” 

 

The conversation brought Trang back to the present.

- “Do you have banana flower buds and green field cabbage to go with mi quang?” she asked.

- “Yes, Ma'am. We also have red pepper sauce made in Quang Ngai and Siamese red peppers.” 

- “What would you like?" Trang said to Loc.

- “Whatever you order.” 

- “Please bring us some iced orange juice first. After that, please give us two bowls of mi quang with snakehead fish, shrimps, and soft-shelled crabs.”

- “Yes, Ma'am.” 

 - “Mom,” Loc said after the waitress left. “The people who lived here with us have left. The current residents probably don’t know what happened more than ten years ago. We might not find any clues about dad in this new a community. I feel lost in this place, surrounded by strangers. No one will know anything about dad.”

 - “Yes. From the moment we got out of the bus I thought the same. Are we so changed or it is simply this place or both?” 

Loc did not respond.

When the girl put two glasses of orange juice on the table, Trang asked her:

- “Is there a boardinghouse nearby?”

- “Not any on this side of the bridge, only on the other side.”

- “Is there anybody still living in the sandy areas beyond the railroad?”

- “I was told that the original residents left after the Armistice. When the Chu Lai Airbase opened, people from other regions came in and built their houses everywhere, including those sandy areas.” 

“Thank you,” Trang said.

 

When their food arrived, they slowly enjoyed their mi quang and then some cocktails made with American canned fruit. From time to time, the men at the other tables looked at them inquisitively. But they soon lost interest and kept to themselves 

 

Trang remembered the small eating place formerly owned by Mr. and Mrs. Trong had mi quang as their primary item on their menus. However, she had no idea where it used to be. After the Armistice, their children would go to Cho Han in Danang to purchase sodas, candies, and other groceries made by the French or the Vietnamese there and bring them back to sell in the shop. They had a lot of customers among the refugees because almost everything was new to them.  Loc and Dung were very fond of the orange juice in dark blue low-necked bottles and the Tam Ky ice cream they sold there. Soon after, the Trongs left for Saigon. Their elder daughter, Hai Trong, and her husband owned a three-story building right on the Nguyen Van Thoai Street, Tan Binh District. 

 

Trang and Loc left the restaurant around two o'clock in the afternoon. As before, Loc carried the luggage and Trang held the umbrella over them to shield them from the hot sun. They walked slowly northward along the main national road until the end of the row of houses on the right hand side and then returned, walking on the opposite side until the An Tan Bridge. Along the way, Trang checked for any vestige of the old times. Neither she nor Loc found anything. The world they remembered was gone for good. 

 

Trang and his son were standing there, on the side of the Ben Vang River, watching it flowing under the bridge. Only this river has not changed, she thought, going up and down with the tides, day and night, whispering year round with the waves and the evening wind. As before, the river reflected the blue sky with white clouds, and the two rows of green sallow trees on the other riverbank. Now, however, it also reflected the vehicles rushing back and forth across the two rebuilt bridges.

 

As Loc surveyed the scene, he remembered it was June.

- “I'd like to go to the middle of the bridge to check if jellyfish still come up as they did when I was a kid,” Loc said.

 

They both then moved on the right walkway toward the center of the bridge, stopped and looked down over the rail into the river. In the evacuation time, after school or on holidays, Loc, Dung, and some other kids in the village went to this river to swim and catch jellyfish in summer. They would bring them home as a small gift for their mothers. Trang and the other mothers would patiently cure them with salt and mangosteen leaves. The final product would shrink down to a small percentage of the original catch, but it was a tasty addition to their sparse diet.

 

Sometimes, just a dim light at the end of the tunnel was enough to inspire man to go through the tunnel,  a faint hope to help him continue to struggle for survival. In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, even the skeleton   brought ashore by the old man although it no longer stands for happiness, reflects his struggle. 

- “Let's go to An Tan and look for a boardinghouse, have a shower, and change clothes,” Trang suggested.  “The buses for Danang probably don’t run again until tomorrow.” 

 

Once on the other side of the bridge, Loc started making inquiries about a nearest boardinghouse. He approached an old woman selling her sugarcane juice on the sidewalk.

 

- “Excuse me,” he asked politely, “Where's the nearest boardinghouse?”

- “It's on the way to the beach,” the old woman answered, pointing to the direction of the Chu Lai Airbase, away from the An Tan Bridge. “Go straight ahead until that fork, and then make a left.  Go several meters and you'll find it on the left hand side, close to two large trees. It's on the way to the An Hoa seaport.”

“What's its name?”

“I don't know, but you can’t miss it.” Loc thanked the old woman and followed her instructions.

 

Less than ten minutes later, Trang and Loc came up to the boardinghouse. Its blue iron door displayed a white sign with the red letters NHA TRO AN HOA. They checked in two people. The room had two divans, instead of beds. Both of them had olive-green mosquito nets gathered above. The boardinghouse had only one common bathroom. There was no running water. The water was stored in a big porcelain container. Towels and soap were the customer's responsibility, but were available there for a fee. They settled their things and took turns washing up.

 

After having dinner at another place on the main national road, they returned to the boardinghouse and inquired of the owner, an old woman, about the bus to Danang.

 

- “Starting at 8 o'clock in the morning, there are many buses for Danang from Saigon, Nha Trang, and Quang Ngai. If the buses have available seats, they stop on this side of the An Tan Bridge to pick up additional passengers heading for Tam Ky or Danang.”

“Does An Tan itself have buses heading for Danang?”

 

She shook her head.

- “Not any more. The station has moved to the other side of the bridge. However, it takes much longer with the buses at that station because they often stop to pick up passengers along the way. The big buses coming from farther south seldom stop to pick up passengers anywhere too close to Danang. Chu Lai is the last station they stop by.”

- “What about the buses heading for Saigon?”

           - “I only know the buses run by the Phi Long Tien Luc Company. ^[5] They stop at the same station. However, make sure they have available seats; otherwise, forget it. You might have to sit on folding stools, the floor or even stand. It’s a long trip. And be sure to take the bus heading directly to Saigon to avoid unwanted transfers on the way.”

             

They thanked the woman and went to their room. After dropping the mosquito nets down, Loc asked his mother:

- “Do you know Aunt Oanh's address in Danang?”

- “The last I heard, she and Dung were with one of her aunts on the Ong Ich Khiem Street. Her aunt had a grocery kiosk in Cho Con. That is all I know.”

- “Did she say the name of that aunt?”

- “No. I didn’t ask her.”.

- “But with so many grocery kiosks in the city, how could we find hers?”

- “Well, let's try anyway. Perhaps your Aunt Lieu will know.”

- “Does Aunt Lieu know we are coming?”

- “I didn't let her know. But she should be there. She works in the post office. Maybe she's home now.”

- “Mom, don't be so sure. If you didn't have her informed then it's better not go. Problems will arise if we have no sufficient information about Aunt Oanh and about Aunt Lieu. Do you know Danang well enough?”

 

            At this point, she felt like stalemated and began thinking. In the years before 1945, Sy's family was among the wealthiest in the Dong Yen Village so he and Phong, his brother, had each a motorbike to go to Hoi An, Vinh Dien, Danang frequently. They would go for business as well as for pleasure. From time to time, Sy took her with him to Hoi An, Vinh Dien, Danang; but she didn't know much about Danang, just going where Sy did, let alone innumerable changes that might have occurred for more than twenty years. Although the question Loc suddenly asked appeared embarrassing to her, she finally replied with frustration and unease:

 

           - "No, I don't."

 

            With that somewhat annoyed and sullen response, it was likely that she wanted to drop down that day's frustration and sadness encountered in Van Khuong and the uncertainty of the remaining journey like dropping a pebble down to a river. Actually, it's no pebble; it's rather a mightily weighty stone reluctant to get totally down with that tired and frustrated response.  It also seemed that she uttered that laconic answer as an attempt to shift part of her frustration to her son, and, at the same time, as a penalty against his somewhat rude question.

 

            Realizing a voice change on her mother's part, Loc immediately said:

-  "I'm sorry, mom."

-  "Don't be. It's all my fault."

 

That said, she rolled over, turning her back to her son. Sy's words returned to her:  It will come to exist if we keep searching for it. Without departure, there can be no arrival.

 

Sleep did not come easily to Trang that night. Her mind kept working. She knew that this world was too small compared to Sy's, and the space dimension that she and her son were travelling since the evacuation would not necessarily be the one in which Sy travelled. Then what was the point of continuing the search? Would they end up in worlds that would never overlap with each other? Was it possible that those long years in exile had taken them into space horizons that they themselves were so unaware of that she kept going on with the idea that Sy's world would be the same physical world as theirs with days and nights, four seasons, the presence of humans, past, future, and present, suffering and death, hope and tomorrow? Had their nomadic existence transformed their world into a hologram alienated from reality? Perhaps the boundaries between reality and illusion had vanished or at least intermingled. Perhaps that was the destiny of Sy, Trang and Loc. Would they ever be able to find Sy’s world?  

 

The following morning they abandoned their search and took a bus back home.

About one month later, Loc said good-bye to his mother and left home. It was July 15, 1967, exactly the day of his father's departure seventeen years before. Seventeen years ago, Trang watched her husband leave; now she watched her son leave. The universe keeps going around; but the starting point and the finish point never coincide. Life also goes around; but good events and mishaps never coincide exactly. Events never repeat; but the significance of events similar in nature  resonate in time and space. Trang recognized the similarity of these departures: Each man asserted his individual choice against the forces of society. Sy's chose between the French and the Viet Minh. Loc chose between the Saigon regime and the Communists.  

Trang continued to live alone in the same house on the Truong Tan Buu Street, which later was renamed Tran Quang Dieu Street. When the pharmacy had closed, she got a new job as a cashier at the Minh Chau Cinema on the Truong Minh Giang Street. She was nearly fifty but looked much older than her age. Her forehead started showing some wrinkles; her cheeks grew dryer. She had gained a little weight and her complexion was healthier. She had her hair permed.

 

Every night she would write in her diary as an attempt to soothe her loneliness for her husband and her son. She read a lot also. She studied English, French and German and practiced with French and English novels. She  often stayed up very late at night, as she had done during the last years of Loc’s university program. She remembered that he was not happy to see her mother to do so.

 

- “Mom, you shouldn't stay up so late,” he scolded her time and again. “Don't be like me. I have to study for my exams; you don't have to. You need your sleep because you have to work.”

- “I don't want you to be alone at night studying.”

- “But I'm grown up now. You don’t have to sit with me anymore.”  

 

She smiled as she remembered Loc’s words. During the evacuation time when he was in grade school, she sat beside him during the stormy nights because he was afraid.

Trang finally stopped staying up to be with him. Every night, however, even after going to bed and turning off the light, she always knew when his son was still up and when he went to bed.  

 

Despite the fact that she was alone now, she continued the habit of alternating chopstick ends when eating, a habit she had learned during the evacuation time. She used the individual end for handling food from each individual bowl and the community end for everything else on the table. 

 

Loc had adopted the same habit at every meal. Even when at his friends' houses for party, he observed that habit. At first, almost all his friends and their relatives were surprised, because they were not among those families who had once lived in refugee communities in Quang Nam or Quang Ngai. He then gave them thorough explanations on the subject; and everything had been fine since, especially when they heard him speaking with a genuine Quang Nam accent.  

 

Trang seldom had a chance to eat with others. Sometimes she would share a meal with some old friends from the evacuation time and from Quang Nam like Anh and her family. While Anh and her family didn't use chopsticks in this manner, they knew that it was common among those who had once lived in evacuation zones and accepted it as a lovely, dignified, and respectful custom with great cultural value. It manifests a discrete communication with others and respect for the privacy and well-being of those who share one's table.  It also signifies that each individual's innermost being, the awareness of the inherent solitude in each individual's destiny, of past trials and tribulations and the mysterious realm of itineraries for the future cannot be shared with others. 

 

The habit of alternating chopstick ends reflects the way refugees perceived the world. The community end signified their perception of the world outside. Every day, they would look through small opening of leaf door of their huts, barely opened at a ninety degree angle. It was the space for suspicion and hostility, hope, communication and dreams. The individual end represented their introspective space, a combination of the spiritual and physical world the refugees carried long during their nine-year journey from place to place. It included personal reminiscences, suffering and losses. That space was a lonely world.  Alternating the end of the chopsticks represented how refugees experienced the universe as one of tension, tautness, and antagonism without relief.  

 

Basically, the two chopsticks and their two ends might stand for the dichotomies of existence: spiritual and psychological; metaphysical and physical; abstract and concrete; success and failure; good and bad; right and wrong; individual and society; truth and deception, etc. Opposition and challenge create social progress, just as revolt and dissent serve as the foundation of freedom. Mistakes are the rule of politics, not the exception, just like skepticism is the rule of every religious, philosophical, and political conviction. The individual sometimes emerges as a means for society to move forward sometimes as the end result of its progress. Whether Trang knew it or not, alternating the ends of the chopsticks was symbolic of the fate of all mankind, including that of her husband and her son.

 

Trang lived a simple life. She did not drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. She took two meals each day, foregoing breakfast. While not a particularly religious person, she would go to the local Buddhist temple on the first and fifteenth days of each month according the lunar calendar. Even if she failed to go to temple on these days, her vegetarian diet wouldn't fail, though. When he lived with his mother, Loc would follow her example in diet and temple visits, especially on the Lunar New Year's Eve, called Tet. As refugees, they did not follow these practices; they were too busy just trying to survive. Going to temple and going vegetarian might help them remember those past hard times and might remind them that life is not just two or three meals a day.

 

            During the early years after their moving to Saigon, every morning, Trang and her son would ride together to the pharmacy on their only bicycle; and then Loc would use the bike to go to school.  After school in the evening, he went back to the pharmacy to pick his mother up. During that time, Anh would go to the pharmacy for medicines and made friends with Trang after realizing that both of them were from Duy Xuyen, Quang Nam.

 

Anh was married with three children. Her parents were also from Duy Xuyen, but they had moved to Hoi An before 1945. When the war broke out, they didn't evacuate and stayed there until 1960, when they all left for Saigon. Anh and her parents were Christians. During the years before 1975, Anh served as a nurse at an American hospital near the Phi Long Gate of the Tan Son Nhat Airport. 

 

Now and then, especially on holidays, Trang would bicycle to Anh's house on the Vo Di Nguy Street, Phu Nhuan. She and Anh were friends for more than seven years.

 

One night in April 1975, Anh came to see Trang on her new moped  with momentous news.

- “We are going to the airport tomorrow for evacuation of Saigon.  If you wish, get prepared and come along with us.” 

Trang didn't reply at once. Instead, she went to the kitchen and fixed two cups of tea, one for Anh and the other for herself.

- “I hope you enjoy this tea. It's made from fresh tea leaves that one of my relatives in Tam Ky sent me.”

- “Oh my Gosh! Trang, how can you go on about tea and tea leaves at a time like this? It's a life-and-death situation. Don't you know that?”

- “Anh, I lived in evacuation zone for ten years. What is there for me to worry about it this time? At worst, it would be as miserable as it was before, but that is not a life-and-death matter for me.  I appreciate your kindness, but I don't want to go anywhere.”

- “Nobody in this world wants to go through hell twice. The first time you and your family had no choice and had to pay the price of suffering for nine years.  It is different now.”

           - “There's always a price to pay, Anh,” Trang said, sipping her tea. “In the last evacuation, my husband left me. Now, my son has gone to pursue his own life. What you think is a choice turns out, in fact, a division's remainder which might appear greater than the divisor itself in the eyes of many and, probably, even in your eyes, too. Going now is an unknown factor for me, a factor I have carried along in my soul for more than ten years since my husband's departure. I wish you and your folks good trip out of the country. Don't feel bad about me. I will be fine.” 

 

            Her world had nothing to do with this lonely woman's world. In a certain space dimension, she would also have Sy and Loc. And Sy's world of and Loc's would definitely have nothing to do with remote lands with geographic and physical values and accessible by air or by sea. To go or not to go, therefore, would be the same: they wouldn't belong to any world with the presence of the sun rising in the morning in the East and setting in the evening in the West, with human political boundaries. Their choice would be neither this side nor that side, for, from either side, evils should be infinite.

 

Since their trip to Chu Lai, then Loc's departure, and thereafter, Trang failed to get any information about Oanh and her son. Dung, like his father, could have gone in search of a world of his own, just as Loc had done. Such worlds might be parallel to each other forever and might never intersect with each other in time and space. Trang came to understand that was the nature of the worlds of the sun hunters.

 

 

 

Postscript

 

It was February 1980, shortly after the beginning of Monkey Lunar New Year or Canh Than Tet, ^[6] Trang returned to visit her homeland in Duy Xuyen, Quang Nam. It had been five years since her last visit with Loc.  Trang found herself struck by such tremendous changes once again.

 

Her in-laws had lived in a huge house there. It had had a three-sections, all constructed of tile with a separate annex for the kitchen in the backyard. The foundation was built high above the ground with a five-step stone stairway in front of each of the three sections. The gardens that surrounded the house had been immense. In the front, there were a wild tea fence, and two high bamboo hedges on the each side. In the back, a stone wall ran parallel with a row of tall areca trees, some of which supported evergreen betels. In the back part of the garden there had been jack-fruit, guavas, custard-apples, lemons, tangerines, bananas, and papayas. Two profuse plumerias about half as tall as the areca trees stood at the rear garden corners.

 

Next to the kitchen was a night-blooming jasmine trellis, giving out its sweet aroma on summer nights. Two gigantic magnolias dominated the two front corners of the garden. Two polyscia rows, low and straight, bordered the main alley running from the main gate to the front yard, which itself was bordered by dozens of cape jasmines on both sides of this alley. A bead-tree row about ten strong spread evenly on the two sides of the main gate along the wild tea hedge.  

 

 

At that time, the area on the other side of the road had no houses, just some bamboo bushes at one end and an old banyan tree on the other. The partly sandy road in front of the house was just wide enough for an ox-cart to move on, with all kinds of grass growing pell-mell on both sides. During the rainy season, everything was underwater, including the road, the front yard, back yard, and the area on the other side of the road. Only the three-section house was preserved from flooding, thanks to its high foundation. Since the kitchen was not raised high enough, it would be submerged in water as well. In the evening and throughout the night, melancholy frog calls filled the air until the waters drained.

 

She remembered the train horn sadly blow from the Chiem Son Bridge like an echo from an unknown and inaccessible world outside the village. Dark clouds would idly drift on Mount Non Truot, a premonition of peaceful days' coming to an end.  

 

But now, she found no single vestige of her in-laws’ large home and gardens. The wild tea hedge was gone, replaced by wild bushes, flowering shrubs, thatch copses, couch-grasses. The foundation was still there but the three-section mansion and the kitchen annex were gone for good. Trees and vegetables in the garden had long disappeared. In their place were now two deep bomb craters, one at the left corner of the old garden, the other right on the right side of the foundation. According to Mr. Huong Bang , one of Sy's uncles in the Dong Yen village, these two bomb craters were the result of an attack toward the end of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.             

 

Even the two craters had changed. They had become ponds full of mosses and weeds about a meter high. Tadpoles swam around the surface of the water. Dragonflies kept going back and forth on papyruses along the edges. The rising areas around the craters were covered with wild plants, weeds, pebbles, dry branches, bomb shrapnel, decayed timbers, and other miscellaneous debris. According to Mr. Huong Bang , the banyan tree and the bamboos on the other side of the road had been destroyed by napalm bombs sometime before 1954. 

 

Several years later, Trang decided to move back to her homeland. Mr. Huong Bang  and his three sons volunteered to build a new house for Trang on the site of the house in which Trang, Sy and Loc lived in 1945. The construction got started in early 1983, that is, more than a year before Trang actually came back to Quang Nam to live. At that time, she used her savings as an advance for Mr. Huong Bang  to purchase the construction materials. In case the advance was inadequate, she would cover the difference after selling her house on the Tran Quang Dieu Street. 

 

Before starting construction, they filled up the two bomb craters and removed the damaged stone wall in the backyard. Using some of the foundation from the original mansion, they built a smaller house with only one section and no separate kitchen annex. It had a zigzag-tiled roof, brick walls, wooden doors, and a pattern-tiled floor. The front yard was also reduced in size and cemented over. The main gate sported two iron wings painted dark cyan.  

 

When they were done with the house, they re-built fences around the garden with cement blocks. In the front, they planted a new wild tea hedge along the cement block wall.  They also planted two rows of polyscia. The cape jasmines were replaced by bougainvilleas.

 

 

During the construction, a group of workers were working on the uninhabited land on the other side of the road.  Mr. Huong Bang later found out that Thu Hue, a native of the Dong Yen Village that returned and was building a new home as well. The land originally was owned by his blood brother, who had died together with her wife and two children in the war. His original dwelling in a reclosed hamlet deeper in the village now turned out too desolate and barren for him to live in.

 

Trang returned in 1984 and moved into her new home. The road itself was now cemented and wider than before. On the other side of the road, both the home of Mr. Huong Mua and the banyan tree next to it were gone. In their place were green rice paddies and corn fields, fully irrigated by crystal clear water quietly and tenderly flowing, reflecting some green and leafy bead-trees bright in the summer sun. Beyond the rice paddies were old wattles, tall eucalyptuses, and some reed bushes. She could not remember whether they were there the last time she visited. The bead-trees had been planted after the war.

In the middle of that green corn field arose a magnificent red tile mansion. From afar, it was impossible to know if it was a dwelling place or an ancestry memorial.

 

She asked Mr. Huong Bang  if he knew anything about Mr. Huong Mua and his family, but he did not know. 

 

Trang was happy to get settled in her new home. During the time she was away, the new plantings had grown. The once low wild tea hedge was now as high as the cement block wall itself, blocking it from outside. The new garden, while beautiful, seemed too vast for her now, highlighting her loneliness and alienation. The purple red flowers of the bougainvillea in the front yard were in full bloom and reminded her that she was beginning a new chapter in her life in a new world.

 

Except for Mr. Huong Bang and his sons, everything seemed to make her feel estranged from her past life there. The new house and garden were comfortable but were not capable of taking her back to her past, to the space she had felt happiness, love, and hope. She was happy the wars were over, but she remained wistful for the past. While she knew she was back in her homeland, she did not feel at home. Space now seemed too big and too small at the same time. It all seemed unsettling.

 

Daytime seemed to be getting shorter and shorter; nighttime seemed to end sooner than usual. Only the twilight seemed to be growing longer and longer, filled with of sad cicada songs, reviving old memories of distant train horns going back and forth at Chiem Son; dark clouds flowing leisurely on Mount Non Truot; eucalyptuses whispering in the evening wind; the brook along the roadside, murmuring like a carefree symphony from a carefree universe. The world seemed empty of human presence, tranquil with a language barely understandable to her.

 

Her concept of time was growing fainter and fainter. Dates, the seasons, even day and night seems to flow into each other. She lost track of how long she had been back in Quang Nam. The endless twilight brought her closer to Sy and Loc somehow. 

 

One day Trang received a letter from her husband. It was dated July 15, 1952, that is, exactly two years from the day Sy left home. While the date on the letter made her think that it was a letter from the past, she knew that it could not be. It read:

 

 

My Beloved Ones,

I put the date according to a calendar on the planet I'm on now, but I'm not sure if it coincides with the date on Earth, where you and our son are. One thing that is certain is that the present in which I'm living and writing this letter and the present in which you both are living are the same. If there's a difference, it is in reference to time frame. No matter when this letter reaches you, it still is as timely as when it was sent. Since thoughts travel at the speed of light, they will be as fresh and timely as when I wrote them.

 

 While it is 1952 in my world, it could be ten years later or more in your world. I have travelled farther into your future whereas in your reference frame, I'm still in your past. Since the time I left you and our son, I have spent two years in the new time frame; I am still almost as I was. You may not be the same. Who knows? You and our son might be very old or no longer around.

 

Upon reading these words, she became aware of her age for the first time. Strange to think that Sy was close to the same age as Loc is now when he set off on his journey. Only two years in Sy's world and so many vicissitudes in this world! The letter continued.

 

I'm sorry if that hurts you. Whether alive or dead, young or old, you'll be always mine notwithstanding. You will always the angel in the robe made from silk from the mulberry-and-silkworm era with the Thu Bon River and Mount Nui Chua behind you. You will always be the poor refugee woman, dragging from wildernesses to forbidden mountains, from steep gorges to deep valleys, undergoing hardship after hardship, sustaining your survival along with bombing and gunfire day and night. Whether you're alive or dead, we will always be immortal and together because we belong to the two worlds that never intercept each other, and never concern ourselves with being young or old, alive or dead.

 

Trang knew that while she was permanently connected to her husband and son,  it was impossible for her to be reunited with them even if she lived forever. They all existed in parallel worlds, worlds which would never intersect. Perhaps, this parallel existence meant happiness to the sun hunters. She wondered where Sy was in this immeasurable universe. She continued reading.  

 

I've actually left the solar system, left the very sun rising in the east every morning and setting in the west every evening and presides over the criminals probably now reigning on your Earth over both the sheep world and the human world.   I have yet to find the sun I seek. At least I've gotten away from the sun I don't want to see every day. The world I'm in now has no day and night,  just a kind of continuous time and continuous light.

 

It's then no different from the never-ending twilight of this place, she thought. Was that the goal of the sun hunters: to find an infinite space in which boundaries keep expanding forever beyond the limits of day and night?  

 

After I departed with Bai, we went different ways and lost touch with one another. If you and Oanh have any information about Bai then please let me know. Make sure to write me a long a letter as soon as possible. It will relieve my missing you and our son. When you are finished, go by boat upstream on the Thu Bon River to Nong Son and then to the twin mountains of Hon Kem Da Dung. ^[7]  Go up the west side of the west wing as high as possible. Get there on a sunny day, and then burn  your letter, letting the ashes go with the wind. I'll receive your letter.  Tell our son I miss him.

 

I love you and I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

 

Sy.

 

Trang was overwhelmed by Sy’s letter. Thought about what he said a long time before beginning her letter to him. There were so many things she had to say him, so many experiences she wanted to share with him. What should she include in the letter? Trang didn't begin writing right away as told by Sy, so overwhelmed as she was by perplexities and antagonisms. Cicadas went on singing in the garden and train horns continued coming from the Chiem Son Bridge. At times, in sleep, she fancied hearing the waves slapping on the Thu Bon River. What should she write? It's not a matter of idea shortage but rather of idea overabundance with too many options to choose from.

 

            As she read and re-read Sy’s letter, the name of the twin mountain range Hon Kem Da Dung took hold of her mind. She remembered that when she came home in 1980 she had traveled to Nong Son, then to Hon Kem Da Dung, to behold the two mountains with some friends. They marveled that nature created these mountains to protect the Quang Nam natives against the ferocious waters propelling down from Mount Ngoc Linh in the Long Range Mountains like a monstrous sword splitting its way down Thu Bon River to the Cua Dai seaport before emptying in the ocean. It's certain that, more than once, Sy might have been there before the war and so infatuated with that legendary site that he was so focused on the matter. That time, however, she fared like other sightseers, with ordinary and popular travelling means used by most other sightseers, without following any specific itinerary of her own. Popular itineraries and travelling means would always be safer and more effective. Following Sy's instructions, by contrast, definitely should be risky and challenging, especially when that itinerary was no familiar to her. To her belief, however, she would manage, simply because it's what she should do as told by a voice from a faraway universe other than the one she was in. That universe stood out now as an extension of her destiny.

 

It took her long time, but she wrote the letter.

 

Duy Xuyen, July 15, 2000

 

My Dear,

 

As I’ve lost all concept of days and times, the day and the month I put on the top of this letter are the same as on your letter.  Only the year 2000 is an estimate as it's likely we're about fifty years apart based on the year you put on your letter, 1952. I live in a never-ending twilight. My insight tells me that Earth entered the new millennium long ago. Thus it's likely I'm about fifty years older than you are! Luckily I'm still alive on Earth, at least in the sense that being alive means sharing immortality with you as you say in your letter.

 

The happiest day of my life was the day I received your letter. I’ve been waiting to hear from you for so long. I've read your letter word by word. I can feel your warm breath in the words; see the late summer yellow rice fields when we first dated; and smell the sweet aroma coming from the plumerias, the magnolias in the evening and the night-blooming jasmines. I was flooded with memories about those evenings when we were boating along the mulberry fields on the small tributary flowing from the Thu Bon River, the moonlight nights at the village hall submerged in fragrances coming from areca trees and grapefruits. Thank you for bringing me back to those beatific days. 

 

Four years after your departure, the war came to an end. Our country was separated into two zones, the northern zone governed by the Communists, and the southern zone, starting from the 17th parallel, governed by the Republic of Vietnam. I then left with our son for Saigon, where I rejoined Binh, my brother, living in Trang Bang and Qui, one of your cousins, who got me a job at a drugstore on the Truong Minh Giang Street. Loc, our son, graduated from the Saigon University, Faculty of Science in 1966 and left home in 1967, exactly 17 years to the day after your departure. I haven't heard from him since. Neither have I from Bai, Oanh, and Dung. 

 

Not long after the Armistice, hostilities resumed between the Front of Liberation of South Vietnam and North Vietnam, on one hand, and on the other hand, the Republic of Vietnam and the United States. In April 1975, the Americans lost the war and pulled out of Vietnam, letting the South come under the control of the Communists. Many people in Saigon left by air to settle in foreign countries.  Millions of others fled the country by boat, leaving behind their properties, which would be seized later by the occupying forces. Out of the boat people, few reached their destination in free countries whereas most of them lost their lives on the ocean or to pirates. Most of high-ranking government officials and military officers were sent to re-education camps whereas their families were ordered to so-called new economic zones, leaving their houses in the hands of the occupying forces.

 

I resumed living under a communist regime as we did during the Franco-Vietnamese War. This time, however, things were worse, by far, for the Communists no longer hesitated to expose their base political instincts. I recall your saying that the stronger a man grows the meaner he becomes. You were right.  They had all the power and became as mean and cunning, as those uneducated and uncultivated barbarian-like troops who invaded our civilized cities before them. They tried their best to steal everything in the South and take their trophies back to the North, whereas they kept boasting that the South was the rubbish heap left by American Imperialism. Honestly, there were no lootings or robberies in a conventional sense. Instead of allowing individuals to loot the South, they organized large-scale, brutal systematic political repossessions of our property according to their jungle laws. 

 

They labeled the wealthy in the South "bourgeois" and then ripped them off with successive house ransacks without warrants and money conversion operations without notice. The first money conversion operation occurred on June 6, 1975, the second on February 2, 1978, and the third on September 14, 1985. The operations were kept absolutely secret until the last minute and were carried out abruptly in less than a day. The value ratios between the old and the new currencies varied between 10 to 1 and 500 to 1, depending on each scheme. The legally convertible amounts were restricted to set limits and varied depending on the categories of owners. No South Vietnamese benefited and most lost money. They had no other alternative than keeping their mouth shut for fear of jail.

 

As a matter of fact, those money conversion operations amounted to legalized robbery. The responsible agents, operating in groups, caught their targets by surprise, stayed with them for at least three days and nights in a row. They confiscated money, jewelry and anything that was valuable, especially gold. Before leaving with their spoils, they had their victims sign an “official receipt” which meant nothing. Many people were thrown in  jail and lost their homes also.  

 

My dear, the April 1975 event turned out a drastic transmogrification of our world,  physically, ethically, philosophically and linguistically. What had been evil became virtuous. Barbarian fanaticism was labeled as the intellectual pinnacle; robbery and ransack were now inventory management; rip-off and swindle were now money conversion. China's puppet clan was labeled the vanguard party; labor camps, re-education camps; expulsion zones, new economic zones; invasion, liberation; hooliganism, socialism; human trafficking, labor export; prostitution, marriage to foreigners.  

 

The occupying forces have gradually replaced the South's wealthy with their red capitalists inside and outside the country. As a result of political influences, labor exploitation, corruption, and embezzlement, they became rich. The gap has become wide and deep between the affluent leadership and the rest of the country. Injustice has become a chronic societal disease.  

 

This trend is becoming common throughout the world. Autocratic countries are now going unchecked because the Western nations are no longer strong. Europe is now weakened economically, financially, socially, and even militarily. Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has gradually stepped down for its number one position and is chronically in debt. The American policy is now gradually crippled by its increasingly cumbersome, costly and bloated bureaucracy. Only financial oligarchies, representing less than one percent of the American population, are obscenely wealthy and control the country. The majority of the American people, although by far better off compared to ordinary citizens in autocratic states around the world, have become part of the dependent class at the mercy of the powerful. American political and educational institutions subsist, buried in debt with no hope of repayment. It seems the American Founders' dreams are gone with them, replaced by a shortsighted and base pragmatism advocated by overbearing and greedy mercantilists.

 

For these mercantilists, the United States is no longer their valued homeland, just a place   for them to get rich without regard for their country or fellow citizens.  If money blurs vision and conscience, so does pragmatism. As a result, American national wisdom has become obscured as well. The so-called “national interest” is responsible for blemishing the American icon and diminishing the American role in the international arena. Greedy mercantilism accounts for the moral and financial bankruptcy of the once proud superpower. The American eagle has found itself almost grounded as the present space of the world now turns out too small for its wings.  It's this cynical mercantilist class that killed the Republic of South Vietnam and subjugated the whole Vietnam under a fifth Chinese dominion with a “neo-ethnoarchy” called the Vietnamese Communist Party. 

           

Yes, here again, I repeat myself. The Communists tried their best to consume everything in the South wherever they found it,, then take the leftovers to the North. Afterward, they called that the South the rubbish of American Imperialism. Ironically, today, they and their offspring are turning to the Americans for business, education, and, first and foremost, money laundering. Generally speaking, most businesses built in America by people from Vietnam and scholarships granted to students from Vietnam would serve as cloaks for spiriting away illegal money. They're trying their best to get a U.S. permanent residency for their offspring, keeping them from being sent back to Vietnam as scheduled, freeing them from a so-called socialist motherland of theirs. For the current leadership and their accessories, Vietnam is just a transit for them to get rich before running away.  As for education, in particular, they and their children do rely on some schooling they earn from Western capitalism to gradually wash away their barbarian nature, or, rather, to gradually have Western Capitalism liberating them from their inherent ignorance, from their ludicrous, bolshie, and utopian arrogance. The Americans seem enthusiastically and joyously cooperative for this matter, as it'd be a priceless opportunity for them, on one hand, to tentatively show the world who won whom, and, on the other hand, to give rise to investments by American financial oligarchies and, worse,  to Vietnam's increasing bleeding and bleeding… whereas our country barely gets out of poverty despite of the illicit overbearing affluence of the Communist leadership and their accessories.

 

All that said, you, and especially our son, however, can be sure that I'm not among those so-called anti-communists who live outside our country. I don’t have anything in common with them. History has failed them, and America has failed them. Their page is turned, leaving only nostalgia for the past and some rather symbolic gestures to appease their conscience.

 

Hope, if any, might lie with those who chose to stay in our country but unreceptive to Communist-granted Golden Fleeces.  I've witnessed quite a few Vietnamese nationals who have come back, bringing with them the spoils of their lives in America. They show off their jewelry, money, and clothes. After making a living abroad as dishwashers or empty can collectors, some come back here like princes or princesses. Among those might be some who dub themselves anti-communists or at least claim politics as an excuse for their departure. Some high-profile politicians or artists of the old regime, for money or for fame, make  critical statements that  disgrace themselves and the regime they once served. They claim politics was the reason for their departure. That's fine. However, suppose communism no longer controls this country? I wonder how many of them would ever wholeheartedly consider returning for good.  

 

After losing the Vietnam War, the Americans joined in with the Chinese to make money with the potentially immense market provided by the “new” China. Even before the Americans abandoned South Vietnam, they carried out intensive B52 bombings on the North to force the Vietnamese Communist Party to kneel down and sign secret treaties with Beijing for the territorial concessions which included our Paracel Islands. The Vietnamese Politburo has been China's puppet state ever since. In 1979, when power shifted to the side of the pro-Soviet faction, the Vietnamese Communists  attempted to revolt against China, leading to a short invasion by China to assert its authority. But shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China managed to regain dominion over the Vietnamese Communist Party. 

 

The Americans entered South Vietnam allegedly as freedom fighters against the Communist expansion. When pulling out as losers, they not only joined in with Communist countries to make money but also became obsequious in their support of them. Gradually, American secretaries of states, ambassadors, consul generals behave like timid pandas on the Asian front. While boasting with all kinds of democratic rhetoric, they keep turning left, right, and back again, never looking straight ahead. Worse, some high-profile figures in the U.S. legislature, corporations, media, and universities overtly have come  to revere Communism, completely forgetting the legendary eagle of freedom  their founders have installed in the White House. American pro-communist penny-a-liners abound, being fed by the dishonest big money of red capitalists and their offspring.

 

Americans have become apathetic politically like many people in communist countries. That's understandable as the actual power lies not with elected officials but with a hidden elite system which advocates pragmatism, disregard of national boundaries, ideologies, or virtues. That's a convergence point of this system's worldview. The rise of the Communist counterpart may yet surface as both a symptom and a cause of the end of the world for the United Sates and for the West. 

 

After 1975, I continued to live in Saigon until 1984, when I finally came back to Duy Xuyen for good. With the kind assistance of Uncle Huong Bang  and his sons I had a new small house built right on the foundation of your parents' old house in Dong Yen, where we were once together before the war. After moving in, I've re-installed altars for Loc's grandparents, both paternal and maternal, But I have installed none for you and our son. I believe that you both are alive, somewhere in this immense and mysterious universe, in unknown space dimensions. Moreover, like you once said, we share immortality in parallel universes. 

 

After experiencing the two wars, I've realized that you're right. Criminals now pervade and the world proliferates with more and more dictators and more and more legalized sting systems. It seems there's no way back today; and humanity, with closed eyes, keeps moving toward a rendezvous with destiny. Our planet seems to be coming to an end; but, I'm afraid, humans might destroy themselves before the end of the world.  

 

I'm now living in a world of motley sheep. It’s unclear to me what kind of fleece I'm in and when they will take me to the slaughter like the other poor sheep. Even if the sheep are not taken to a slaughter, their souls end up taken away to a gloomy world confined within immense and invisible enclosures. Happiness is now nowhere to be found. Red oligarchies with their golden-fleece accessories go on gnawing away at society for their own sake and for the sake of foreign financial oligarchies. They are lawfully protected criminal bands supported and encouraged by Western cynical political systems on the decline. These systems are transforming human civilization into an economic slavery to debts  owed to opulent but barbarous autocrats, while giving lip service to such values as democracy, freedom, and human rights.

 

Humans are not desperate enough yet to form a rebel proletariat; but that reality is not far away. The current gap has become too big and too deep between governors and governees. But even if that proletariat has not taken form economically, my sheep flock is now proletarian spiritually and intellectually. It was that feeling of  absolute alienation that made me come back to our homeland. I had to get away from the stench of sheep and the relentless daily sacrificial chants that deaden their memory of what it is like to be human, to hope, to dream, to seize their own destiny.  

 

When finished with this letter, I'll do exactly as you tell me to do.  I'll go by boat  on the Thu Bon River, starting from our hometown Duy Xuyen, to Nong Son and then to the Hon Kem Da Dung Mountains. I'll climb the west cliff of the west wing on a sunny day, as high as possible. After reading this letter out loud one last time, I'll burn it and let the ashes fly with the wind.

 

Make sure to respond to me as soon as possible. It's best to come back to me in my dreams. With you, I will have a chance to relive those wonderful sunny days when we first met. With you, I will forget these cold lonely days and all relentless memories. With you, I will find a way through this never-ending twilight. Without you, I don’t  know where to go, what to do, where to end up, and how to end up.

 

Please try your best to get in touch with our son.  Of course, I don't mean it in a physical sense as we'd do on Earth, but just as the way you have looked for me and got in touch with me now.

 

I love you.

 

Trang

 

When she finished her letter, she followed Sy’s instructions. She was guided by a voice she trusted from a faraway universe other than the one she was in. That universe now became part of her destiny.

 

(.......................................................)

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End Notes:

 

[1] Nem nuong: grilled meat rolls.

[2] Banh beo: round rice slices with shrimp toppings.

[3] Bun bo Hue: beef noodle soup, special product of Hue

[4] Mi Quang: Special product of Quang Nam, fixed with flat rice noodles and meat or seafood.

[5] Phi Long Tien Luc: one of the biggest bus companies of the South before 1975.

[6] Monkey Lunar New Year: Vietnamese New Year, more commonly known as Tết or "Tết Nguyên Đán", the counterpart of Western New Year, but based on a luna-solar calendar. Monkey Year is ninth in the cycle following the Sheep Year, and recur every twelfth year. Twelve Vietnamese zodiac years are Rat, Ox , Tiger , Cat, Dragon , Snake , Horse , Sheep , Monkey , Rooster , Dog and Pig.

[7] Hon Kem Da Dung: A two-wing stone mountain range in the upstream regions of the Thu Bon River, Quang Nam province, with steep cliffs, with one wing stretching out westward and the other eastward while leaving a relatively narrow space to let the downstream ferocious flow of this river through.