Inheriting the War Read online

  I spent my advance to get copies of his financials and academic transcripts and military records, which I tried to divine like runes, but which stubbornly refused to reveal intelligible patterns. I tracked down people from his past and somewhat traumatized them with the truth of his nature. I came to think that, in the amateur’s assessment, my father was quite possibly a sociopath: He was profoundly gifted at lying and charming and bilking others while, at home, he was a slovenly, profane, inexpressibly miserable figure of terror. Those two versions of himself never crossed paths with each other.

  I traveled to Vietnam to try and retrace his steps at the Rex Hotel in Saigon, where he would have received his briefings to take back to the field. There’s a bar on the roof where the press would gather to do more drinking than reporting. I sat and looked over the city as giant Christmas lights were strung across a department store and carol snippets hung, disjointed, in the hot, thick air. It was hard to imagine how things would have looked back then, not least because what had been the so-certainly-threatening Communist scourge was obscured now by boutique, luxury shopping that felt like walking the streets of Soho. My father had never talked about this time in his life with me. He never really talked about any part of his life in an authentic way, but this part—the tail end of the first decade of the war—least of all.

  I rode on the rickety bus to the sweating, dust-ridden Cu Chi tunnels where, after being given a sobering history of the war by an elderly Vietnamese man—who up until he had no choice except to fight, had been training in the seminary—tourists excitedly mounted the decommissioned tank and posed for photographs, brandishing the turret’s machine gun. I went further through the jungle to the firing range. When I pulled the trigger of an M16, I thought I was going to vomit. Next to the range is a gift shop staffed by people forced to listen to every deafening round being fired for ten hours a day. A heavily pregnant dog lied on the cold concrete floor of the shop; I patted her absently while drinking a couple of cans of one-dollar beer, one after another, to erase the sensation of the gun from my hands.

  I puttered along the Mekong, lying in a hammock on the bow of a small boat for hours, until we arrived at a tiny fishing village at the end of a tiny estuary. At the village on the water, while the sun beat down on our necks and we dangled our feet in the river, we wordlessly ate charred, barely dead fish we folded into rice paper with cold noodles, fragrant, fresh mint and chopped chilis so hot I felt the heat on the outside of my face. Back in the dense, steaming city I daydreamed, briefly, of buying a motorcycle, abandoning the book I wasn’t writing, and living on cups of strong Vietnamese coffee and piping hot pho forever.

  I kept thinking of what the book was about: What would it say? What was its point? Why did it exist? People would ask me and I would say that it was about choices. Choices and their consequence. They would look at me like they didn’t understand.

  The book would have been about power—power in institutions, of social structures. Of wars and who wielded them. Of personal agency and people with none. I thought that I could impose a structure of order upon chaotic personal histories and reckon things right. The book would have been about memory. How memory is porous, fallible, tensile, illusory. It would have been a book of fiction even if it were, in the reportorial sense, true.

  I thought that the book might be about becoming, perhaps mine. I thought that if I looked hard enough into the past that something would be revealed. I thought it might have been a cleansing fire. But it wasn’t; it was a yoke. I had been seduced by the idea of being a writer, a writer of books. I imagined the book might advance my career, legitimize my tinkering. That isn’t a reason to write a book.

  The book would have ended up on a shelf labeled Sad and Torturous Family Histories. Or, Read These Books and Feel Great About Your Own Parents! For a book that was meant to be about how these experiences did not come to define me, in the end, the process of explaining that had taken over almost all of my interior; it was like getting a flu shot only to come down with a bout so debilitating it put you in the hospital.

  I lurked an email list I had been added to after my father died by someone who had served in his battalion. They would write to each other with news of their grandchildren’s graduations, and of commemorative group outings and increasingly of notices of those on the list who had died as well. There were barely any of them left alive now. I read their messages, keeping them all, for years. I was never quite able to invade their decades’ old web of careful connections, to disturb it, to dirty it up. So I watched as the years passed and their numbers thinned and their annual get-togethers grew increasingly more sedate. It was like witnessing a once mighty machine winding down. Where would my father ever have fit in to this? I didn’t have it, that sliver of ice.

  We aren’t who we can’t pretend to be.

  ANDREW LAM is an editor and writer at New America Media and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, a memoir that won a Pen Open Book Award, and a book of essays, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. His latest book is Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories. Lam has contributed stories and essays to numerous journals and newspapers and magazines. He is working on a novel.

  THE STORIES THEY CARRIED

  December 1994

  The image once gripped us—a small boat crowded with Vietnamese refugees bobbing on a vast, merciless sea. From its mast a ragged SOS flag flew while its equally ragged passengers waved thin arms at passing ships. “Help Us. We Love Freedom,” their sign said. “We Love USA!”

  Once during the cold war, we couldn’t get enough of their stories. Today, as the refugee crisis has become a pandemic, the charm Americans felt at the asylum seeker’s naïve enthusiasm for our country has turned into resignation and fear. The thirty-five thousand boat people of Southeast Asia now being sent back to Vietnam have no place in our New World Order narrative.

  But stories are all that the refugees possess—all that stand between their freedom and forced repatriation.

  In the summer of 1991, as a cub reporter, I found myself with access to a refugee detention center called Whitehead at the western edge of Hong Kong. Journalists were, by and large, barred from entry to this place known for riots and gang fights and mass protests and a handful of self-immolations. There were eleven people, mostly women, who disemboweled themselves in protest of being forced back. The place, divided into sections, is built like a maximum security prison. Barbed wire on top of five-meter-high chicken wire fences.

  I got lucky. For several weeks I visited Whitehead (as well as several other refugee centers) as a Vietnamese interpreter for two human rights lawyers. The lawyers represented pro bono a few refugees whose cases, they felt, were strong enough to fight repatriation. No one among the Hong Kong authorities knew I was a journalist.

  But the refugees knew. The moment I entered the camp, I was swamped. News traveled fast. A journalist got in. He speaks Vietnamese. Talk to him. Tell him your stories.

  In many sections I visited I was called a “hero.” Several women called me their “savior.” I was neither. I was hoping for a story or two. I was sympathetic and hoping, in my own way, to help. I was willing to listen to their stories. And by listening, I was the only source of communication they had with the outside world.

  Everyone I met wanted to tell me his or her story. The boat people wanted to convey the injustice they had suffered, first under communist hands and now from Hong Kong authorities in conjunction with the UNHCR—United Nations High Commission on Refugees—who screened them out and deemed them economic refugees ineligible for asylum. Many were called liars when they told of communist atrocities, of oppression back home. In the late eighties, many came from North Vietnam—supposedly the winning side—and forced the international community, in tandem with the UNHCR, to reconsider their asylum policy. They produced the Comprehensive Plan of Action in 1989, which had two key points. The first was to screen all arrivals—to Hong Kong as well as to other ports o
f asylum—to determine whether the boat people were genuine refugees or, according to the UN Convention, ineligible “economic refugees.” The second point was more controversial, entailing the repatriation of those who failed the screening back to their home countries. For the first time since the war ended, Vietnamese boat people were being repatriated en masse.

  It was, of course, much easier for the power that be to not listen, to label them economic refugees and ship them back, a bunch of liars stripped of their stories at the end of history. The few thousand people in Whitehead Detention Center were all waiting to be sent back. There were apparently two categories, “voluntary repatriates” and “involuntary repatriates.”

  “Either way,” so one man told me, “all of us are condemned prisoners.”

  Such certainly will soon be the fate of Diep Tran, a forty-six-year-old former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army I met in Section 4. Caught while trying to escape in 1979, he was tortured and sent to a reeducation camp while his wife was forced to live with a communist cadre to prevent her family from being blacklisted and sent to the New Economic Zone.

  When he and his son finally did reach Hong Kong, he was denied refugee status because he lacked the $3,000 cash demanded by a screening official, he said. In protest, his son, Anh Huy, committed self-immolation in front of the UNHCR official. Tran showed me his son’s photos. One is of a smiling teenager. The other is a picture of a burnt, bloodied corpse flanked by grim-looking Vietnamese men.

  When he showed me the pictures, Tran’s eyes welled up with tears. “I didn’t expect him to do this. I didn’t escape so that my son would die right in front of my eyes.”

  In another section, Section 8, considered the most unruly of all eleven sections in Whitehead, thirty-eight-year-old Dai Nguyen pulled off his T-shirt and showed me the scars on his back. The scars described years of cruelty in a reeducation camp. But they failed to convince the screening officer of his political past. “I have no papers with me. No one told me that I had to have proof besides what I carry on my back.” He was waiting to be repatriated. On top of the barrack, someone had torn up a piece of tin and painted a picture of Lady Liberty holding her torch. Hanging on the wall of another was a sign written in blood: “Freedom Or Death.” In that same barrack, a teenager had tattooed Lady Liberty’s face onto his own chest, using ink from a pen, a needle, and a little mirror.

  Huong Nguyen, 43, a haggard-looking woman, spent ten years as a forced laborer in the New Economic Zone clearing jungle and watching her fellow laborers get blown to bits by land mines. She was pregnant and had a one-year-old child. Her husband, a South Vietnamese lieutenant, had been killed while trying to escape a reeducation camp. She had tried to escape in 1985 with her sons but wound up separated from them. In the end, the sons arrived in Hong Kong before the cutoff date of June 16, 1988, after which all arrivals had to be screened to qualify as political refugees. Although her sons arrived in time, she came on a different boat and was screened out.

  Lam A Lu was a Montagnard tribesman who fought for the United States and was sent to hard labor camp where he was tortured before he escaped. Hong Kong authorities judged his story a lie and denied him asylum, despite the seven bullet wounds in his body.

  If A Lu and Tran—both meeting the criteria required of political asylum seekers—were rejected, their fellow detainees wondered in despair, who could get accepted? Certainly not the Buddhist monk in Section 6 who fled Vietnam because he was forbidden to perform ceremonies in the rural area; nor the Catholic nun who was punished for singing Catholic songs. And certainly not a number of men and women who had worked for the US armed forces as interpreters or office workers during the war.

  The stories are endless, each one more tragic than the next. For these storytellers, the end of their story was this: the free world no longer exists.

  Were it not for the cruelty of the joke, Huong Nguyen might find her story laughable. A woman who laughed easily despite her circumstances, she said, “I ran out of tears. So now I just laugh when I can.” Her sons, who share the same history as their mother, now live in Santa Ana, California. Their mother, on the other hand, has become a “living ghost.”

  When forced repatriation began in July 1989 it provoked an international uproar. A few years later, it has become international acceptance. Britain, running Hong Kong for a few years yet, even signed a treaty with Vietnam making repatriation of the Hong Kong people possible.

  The stateless population, in the meantime, is growing. More and more are born into no-man’s-land. Hong Kong refugee camps have one of the highest birth rates in the world.

  Consider the children. Refugee children know next to nothing about policies regarding them. Although stateless the moment they opened their eyes, like children anywhere else they played where they could, and in the afternoon at Whitehead their laughter rang out.

  Yet, it is hard to imagine a happy childhood in such a desolate place. Theirs is a world of chicken wings in red plastic buckets, wet gooey rice in rusted tin pails, bunk beds that sheltered whole families, tick bites and rashes, unbearable temperatures, and odious stench. Under oppressive corrugated-roof hangars in punishing humid summer heat often reaching 100 degrees, people ate and slept. Fights broke out regularly and every few weeks or so someone would hang him or herself in the latrines. In the camps, hurried and banal and careless sex went on behind flimsy, ragged curtains next to which children played hopscotch or sang.

  High overhead jumbo jets soared across the Hong Kong sky, going to who knows where. But for a child born in one of those camps the plane might as well belong to a world of fantasy. His world is grounded to a reality that is defined by smallness, and the borders of his country are made of chicken wire fences, ones he cannot cross. One child who had never lived in a real house, never, for that matter, seen one with his own eyes, referred to the bunk bed he shared with his family of four as “my house.”

  A scene came back to me recently and I was surprised that I could have forgotten it. One late afternoon in Whitehead a group of children were trying to retrieve a bright red wildflower growing a few feet outside the fence using a thin stick of firewood. Nature was all around the center, the sea sparkled and gleamed, but it was all out of reach. I remember a guard standing outside the fence watching, idly smoking a cigarette while the children tried in vain to retrieve the flower.

  I had told myself I would get those kids some flowers the next time I came back into the camp but then, so busy taking notes and listening to people with life and death stories, I simply forgot.

  “Is it true, Uncle,” a child about seven asked me one early morning, “that at the red light you stop and at the green light you go?” Other boys were listening intently. They had been betting—with what I didn’t know—as to who was right. Born inside the camps, they had never seen traffic lights before, except on the TV in the communal cafeteria.

  “You go when it’s green,” I told them. “You stop when it’s red.”

  For the West the lesson about itself is sobering. Our compassion for those who fled from our enemies’ territories—President Reagan, who saw himself as someone who had defeated communism, in his farewell speech recalled a Vietnamese boat person calling out to an American sailor, “Hey, Freedom Man” before being rescued—turned into what everyone now begins to call fatigue.

  We suffer from compassion fatigue, the pundits tell me. There are too many refugees. Haitians. Cubans. Afghans. Tibetans. Chinese. You name it. Don’t you know the borders have melted? The West frets. Lady Liberty turns her back. Too many love the USA. Too many love freedom. It is not necessarily, in the final analysis, a good thing in the post–cold war era.

  A refugee from a communist country once had a role in the story Americans told themselves. He who risked his life jumping over the barbed wire fence in Berlin or sailed across the treacherous sea from Vietnam to search for freedom reassured those at the end of the exodus trail that the American way of life represented something worth having, that th
ey lived on the right side of the cold war divide.

  Once, the West readily opened its arms to these poor souls to validate the myth, and to score political points in their constant vigilance against communism. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . .

  Overnight, so now it seems, refugees and illegal immigrants and migrant workers and even the domestic homelessness have melted into an indistinguishable blur. Recoiling from our earlier idealism, we Americans tell ourselves homelessness is now an inherent part of the New Disorderly World and something out of our control.

  As it is, “the outside of Vietnam,” Diep Tran told me, sighing, “has become the same as the inside of Vietnam. You have no rights if you are homeless and countryless. You don’t even have the rights to your own story, your own words.”

  “Hong Kong simply has had enough with refugees,” said Duyen Nguyen, a Vietnamese American in his late thirties who is a deputy director for the US Joint Volunteer Program in Hong Kong. A consummate fighter for refugee rights, Duyen always looked tired. As he talked to me he took off his thick glasses and looked out the window of his office to the crowded, mildew-stained buildings in Kowloon, where Hong Kong Chinese lived in tiny spaces. Descendants from refugees of another war, their colorful laundry hung on wires of every tiny balcony like a thousand Mark Rothko paintings. “Besides, there is pressure to get rid of the problem by the time China takes over in 1997,” he added.