Dissident
Voices:
The
NVA Experience in Novels by Vietnamese
by William J. Searle
Reprinted from War, Literature and the Arts, an International Journal of the Humanities, 1999.
To understand the Vietnam
War more fully, with greater instruction, we have to understand the Vietnamese.
—John
Balaban
It is no secret that frequently there is a contrast, a certain dissonance, between the official version of a war, the sanitized record of noble endeavor sanctioned by the government that sent its sons and daughters to it and the much grittier, often more bitter, portrait revealed in the memoirs and novels of the participants who survived the turmoil. This is especially true, as we all know, of the Vietnam War, in which the confidence and affirmation of General William Westmoreland's memoir A Soldier Reports is debunked by other American narratives too numerous to name that depict disillusionment, drug use, racism, desertion, loss of moral compass, bloodlust, conflicts within ranks, soldiers cracking under stress, sexual assault, and a breakdown of discipline, just to name a few.
Though
fewer in number, dissident voices questioning official versions of the American
War in Vietnam have arisen across the Pacific as well.
As a result, American readers now have the opportunity to balance the
triumphant view provided by Van Tien Dung's Our
Great Spring Victory (1977) with two 1995 English translations of North
Vietnamese novels: Duong Thu Huong's Novel
Without a Name, written in 1990, and Bao Ninh's 1994 novel The Sorrow of War. In each, our former enemy is given a very human
face. And though there are significant
issues concerning national identity, the focus of this brief study, each work
also contains, like its American counterparts, incidents of disillusionment,
drug use, racism, desertion, loss of moral compass, bloodlust, conflicts within
ranks, soldiers cracking under stress, sexual assault, and breakdowns of discipline.
But
before we turn to what the Irish Press referred to as "a tribute to the
sheer spirit of the Vietnamese," we must consider why such dissident
writers were allowed voice in the first place. Attached to Duong Thu Huong's
satire of Communist rule in Vietnam, a novel appropriately titled Paradise of the Blind, is "A Note About the Author" which
states:
In 1987, one year before this novel appeared, the Vietnamese
Communist party called on writers and journalists to shake off the stiff,
official Marxist style that had been imposed on them and encouraged them to
reassert their traditional role as social critics.
In this atmosphere of political openness and questioning, many Vietnamese
writers and intellectuals responded with literary works, films, novels, and
theatrical works that openly or implicitly criticized the excess of the party
by satirizing bureaucracy, ideology, and official corruption. (Paradise
268)
The note further points out that Duong's earlier novels—Beyond Illusions (1987), Fragments
of Lost Life (1989), and Paradise
of the Blind (1988)—are works in which "Duong denounced, in
simple, direct language, the dehumanization of her country" (Paradise 268-69). As an activist
in the 1980s, this "fearless and charismatic orator" was according
to the note, "driven by a deep need to bear witness to Vietnam's political
and spiritual chaos" (169). All
of this was too much for conservative Communist Party leaders in Vietnam—especially
in light of the spread of democracy in Eastern Europe and the rise of democratic
movements in China and Burma, far too close to home. Expulsion from the Party was followed on April
13, 1991 by arrest and imprisonment on several inflated charges, like "having
smuggled 'secret documents' out of the country" (270), which, one assumes,
were manuscripts of her novels. She
was released in November 1991, perhaps in part because human rights organizations,
namely PEN and Amnesty International, identified her as a political prisoner
(270). Some shackles still remain,
however, for she is no longer published in Vietnam.
The circumstances behind Duong's struggles—arrest, imprisonment, and
withdrawal of her novels from circulation in Vietnam together with the outrage
of international organizations—may have made the publication of Bao Ninh's
novel easier. But a more plausible reason may lie in the metafictional structure
of the novel itself, which serves as an aesthetic protective device.
Consider the last section of The Sorrow of War, where a naive redactor
claims that he "simply played the role of the Rubik's cube player, arranging
the order" (Sorrow 231). The censor may have anxiously swallowed the
redactor's disclaimer on the last several pages. As though the prior two hundred plus pages—in which the only
truly joyful times were pre-war—did not exist, the redactor rationalizes:
"Our lives may not be very happy, and they might well be sinful. But now we are living the most beautiful life
we could ever have hoped for, because it is a life of peace. Surely this was what the real author of this
novel intended to say?" (Sorrow
232). Calling the true author "the
last true Bourgeois of the district, rebellious, extremist" (229), the
fictional redactor further strengthens the case for the censor to believe
the redactor to be a reliable narrative voice of the novel, one with the appropriate
politics.
In
any case, both Duong and Bao have by their experiences earned the right to
both create and criticize. The biographical facts printed on the dustjackets
are brief, but telling. Duong, serving
as a volunteer in a Communist Youth Brigade, spent seven years in the most
heavily bombarded section of Vietnam, "living in tunnels and underground
shelters alongside North Vietnamese troops." Of the original forty members of her unit,
only three survived. Even more appalling
casualties were suffered by Bao's unit. He is one of ten survivors of a brigade of 500 who entered combat
in 1969. It is good to remember that
for the North Vietnamese, there was no one year or thirteen month tour of
duty; enlistment was for the duration. To
provide epic scope to their work, both authors create protagonists who serve
ten year stints, from 1965 until victory in 1975, from the introduction of
American ground forces until the fall of Saigon, from initial enthusiasm to
gut-wrenching disillusionment.
Like
good epics, both novels provide a glimpse of happier earlier times before
the American war as well as depict life outside the combat zone.
Duong's Novel Without a Name, more traditional
in structure than Bao's metafictional work, provides readers with an odyssey
of sorts, Captain Quan's special mission to help a boyhood friend driven insane
by the war. Flashbacks, nostalgic
conversations with old friends, bizarre meetings with eccentric characters,
transparently symbolic dreams, and a visit home flesh out the journey. Bao's The
Sorrows of War, wider in scope, is a combat veteran's attempt to fulfill
what he believes to be a sacred duty, to depict the pain of war, and to do
that the metafictional author Kien has to include the cruelties of peace,
for him an additional ten year odyssey.
Despite
their differences in structure, there is a common link, aside from the horrors
of jungle combat, between both novels—disillusionment with the war and
ultimately with the political system that espoused it.
This unrelenting theme is echoed by several chords.
The suffering of Vietnamese women brought on by the war is acknowledged
and depicted, the timeless rhythm of Vietnamese civilian life is of greater
worth than military glory, and criticism of Communist bureaucrats reinforces
the fact that Vietnamese patriotism is indeed distinct from Communism. In both Duong and Bao, Marxism is an ideology
dwarfed by the spirit of the Vietnamese people, perhaps a last vestige of
western imperialism ready to crumble. While
criticism of the current system is overt in Novel Without a Name, it is perhaps all the more telling because implicit
in The Sorrow of War.
In
Duong's Novel Without a Name, the suffering of women may, in part, be due
to their very subordinate status, even marginalization, within Vietnamese
society. Quan's remembrance of his
childhood suggests as much: "In a mother's heart, there is no glory worth
the life of a child, no ideal higher than the desire to give happiness. But this village was ruled by the authority
of the father" (125). According
to Quan, his father, a Viet Minh veteran of the anti-French resistance, is
"nothing but a brute, a cruel, hateful presence" (113), whose pettiness,
anger, and even vindictiveness caused, in Quan's opinion, his mother to die
within eighteen months of his return. His
father, more of a warrior than a farmer, more of a Viet Minh than a father,
nags Quan's younger brother to enlist, it is implied, to curry favor with
the local Communist bureaucracy. Instead
of studying to become a computer scientist, the young Quang soon becomes one
of the honored dead.
The death of Quan's mother when he was a mere seven years old has a lasting
impact—for he dreams of her constantly, prays to his mother's soul to
guide him when he is astray in the jungle, invokes the names of the mothers
of soldiers he must discipline, even makes a special visit to return the belongings
of a dead soldier that he finds by chance (in a maze-like valley) to the deceased's
grieving mother. Though Quan consistently remarks on the pain
of Vietnamese women who lost their sons, he, like his father before him, cruelly
mistreats a woman he once loved, his former fiance, seduced by a local cadre.
War
is not easy on women in Bao's novel either, but the suffering he depicts is
restricted to the young, where it is often violent, sexual in nature.
In those intoxicating, blissful early days of the war, Kien's high
school sweetheart Phuong accompanies him on a train only to be raped by Vietnamese
laborers, then mistakenly abandoned by her boyfriend, and becomes so jaded
by these cruelties that she assumes a life of prostitution and promiscuity
that can only drive her and Kien apart on his return home.
Economic conditions after the war force the youngest sister of one
Kien's friends into the same demeaning trade.
By far the unluckiest female in The
Sorrow of War is Hoa, a troop guide from the North, who during Tet of
1968 saves fifteen wounded North Vietnamese soldiers, first by shooting the
dog of American trackers, then by "diverting the patrol from the trail
which would have led directly to the sick and wounded troops, almost powerless
to defend themselves against such a fit, well-armed force" (Sorrow 191). Her reward for such bravery is gang rape and, it is assumed, murder
by an American patrol. When Kien questions
the meaning of her death he inadvertently implies the role of many Vietnamese
women in war, "Was it that such sacrifices were now an everyday occurrence?"
(Sorrow 192).
While there is no shortage of combat in Novel
Without a Name, the rendering of the immemorial rhythms of Vietnamese
life provides a more fully human face to the Vietnamese.
Quan's earliest childhood memory, reiterated several times in the novel,
deals with the birth of his brother. The
agony of childbirth quickly gives way to a more affirmative interchange between
mother and sons: "A final ray of sun lights her face; her eyes shine
with tenderness. Her face is clear
again. I grab the tiny red feet and
rub them against my cheeks. 'Little
brother. Little brother" (14). The
sentimental portrait above is followed intermittently in the novel by a plethora
of nostalgic vignettes, recounting harvest festivals, childhood pranks, schoolboy
lessons, teenage insensitivities, adolescent love, tea rituals in base camps,
the chance meeting between male soldiers and female volunteers, and the memory
of the sound of a flute recalling earlier pastoral times.
Return to prewar peaceful existence is always a consummation devoutly
to be wished: "Homecoming: the return to the native village.
Showers of tenderness. The
same dream haunted our days as soldiers.
Native Soil. These two words expressed everything we had lived for, cherished,
adored" (110).
After costly combat operations, Quan poignantly daydreams of happier times
and wishes for the possibility of future renewal in images of cyclical rebirth:
Happy to have survived, I let my mind wander back to my village,
let it follow the length of the dikes, through the fields.
Wild ducks honked their way across the sky. I had gathered my lost
fragments of life, had drank [sic] a bit of blue sky from the bottom of a
cup.... Perhaps I could grow again like a strand of paddy spared the harvest,
bent by hatred and storms but still able to flower, to bear fruit. (247)
Even the glorious victory in Saigon on April 30, 1975 pales in contrast to
a more perennial appeal—love of the Vietnamese countryside:
I see myself break away from the crowd.
I grab onto red and gold lacquered posts, grope my way out a door,
through ruined fields. Bits of fodder
still lie about. In the distance the marshes glisten. A flock of storks paddles about in the silt,
chasing tiny shrimp. I track them,
silent as a shadow, my bare feet plunging into the grass, into the mud. (282)
While the novel reminds us that the blood of Vietnamese soldiers nourishes
the land, it is clear that the reverse is also true.
The broader canvas of The Sorrow of War reminds us of other aspects
of Vietnamese life, other immemorial rhythms. In fact, as a novel about writing a novel, much of the book immerses
us in Vietnamese culture. We read
of Vietnamese poets, artists, musicians as well as of Vietnamese folklore,
folk sayings, and religious practices. References
to family altars, ghosts of the deceased, gift-giving at lunar festivals,
the beauty of Hanoi in the springtime, and the naive innocence of adolescent
romance reinforce Kien's assertions that "he knew it wasn't true that
young Vietnamese loved war" (75). Prewar experience is always idealized in the novel, for we hear
that the past was "a never-ending story of loyalty, friendship, brotherhood,
comradeship and honesty" (227).
However, even in a novel whose setting is primarily urban, one in which Kien
reminisces and writes of those memories, we learn of the appeal of more traditional
Vietnamese life—being in harmony with the land.
After the war, many North Vietnamese veterans returned to the Central
Highlands to enjoy "healthy, outdoor, free living" (196). Kien remembers a particularly idyllic moment years earlier when
his unit came upon a South Vietnamese coffee plantation untouched as yet by
the conflict. Kien and several of
his soldiers shared coffee with the owners in an atmosphere described as one
of "intimacy and warmth" (198).
Calling the incident a "special memory," Kien cites the owner's
words at length: