Hoi An is a wet place. It rains, it floods, and often it’s hot and humid. The shop houses are built for water, made of teak, and there are removable grates in the floors on the second story, with block and tackle hanging above them from the ceiling, so that when the floodwaters come, and they do regularly, furniture and merchandise can quickly be hoisted to safety.
The river rises a little while I’m in town; the remnants of Typhoon Lingling have swollen the Thu Bon so that on a high tide it rises over the river wall and floods Bach Dang, where the boats are tied up. I walk there at night, not suspecting, and am surprised to see the river in the town, the boats, well down by day, now looking ready to float into the lantern-lit streets.
Old Hoi An must be about the same size as Louang Phabang, and here, as there, I walk myself to exhaustion, looking. In love with the maroon wood and the faded, pastel stucco, I think of the town as unbombed and lucky now for the years of poverty that kept it from the wrecking ball (the bomb of progress).
In the evenings I wash the road dust from my feet, my face caked and hair thick with it. My room in the shop house pleases me; I’m able to continue looking at old Hoi An right into bed. But when I shower I find I can’t stand up. The tub has been raised six inches to accommodate the plumbing and that puts the top of my head two or three inches into the ceiling. I hunch, use the soap, getting as clean as I can.
::
Shiva
Late November 2001
My Son
I travel out of Hoi An on a rainy day, to see the Cham ruins at My Son Sanctuary. Bombed, most definitely bombed. The Cham civilization flowered in the region for around ten centuries. The Hindu statuary, here and at the Cham museum in Danang, is sometimes stiff, then again, sometimes an artist with a gift quickened the stone, and a lithe girl dances still, and Shiva wears a knowing smile.
Brick temples once crowded the precincts at My Son in several clusters. French archaeologists, around the turn into the twentieth century, catalogued some seventy buildings, and that centuries after this city, sacred to the Cham, was sacked by ethnic Vietnamese. But at My Son now very few buildings are still standing. I overhear a guide explaining how American B-52s reduced much of what was here to bricks in 1969. The account is less bitter than I expect; the guide seems to lay at least half the blame on the Viet Cong, who took shelter in the ruins, who chose to fight here. I finger a stele covered in the intricate script of sacred Pali, pocked by M-16s, and think of the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March with tank and rocket fire. How even before September 11 that act had turned back on the Taliban. Indeed, in Southeast Asia, the Buddhists I’ve talked to seem to regard those shots as the first proof of the Taliban’s ideological madness, of a karma that would lead to retribution.
Late one afternoon, I ask about another of the side trips on offer from Hoi An, to My Lai. I gaze into the face of the woman at the counter at the Vinh Hung and see a stricken look pass through her features, a wave of grief. I feel I should go, face the worst, the most shameful day of the Vietnam War, but I find I can’t. What I know already suddenly seems quite enough, as much as I can bear. I don’t need to see that tremor pass through another face.
So I walk down Tran Phu toward the market and drop into an unnamed café full of older Vietnamese men who welcome me to their number with a nod. I order white coffee and sit in one of the low, maroon, resin chairs. It’s very small, a size sold for children in America. The coffee comes and I relax out of being American into common humanity. But when I get up to leave, the chair sticks to my hips, and I have to pry it off with both hands.
::
Old Quarter
Early December 2001
Hanoi
I’ve come back to Hanoi, after an absence. In Hué, I watched the video on CNN, truckloads of Taliban fighters racing down dirt roads in Afghanistan to join the Northern Alliance, pledging themselves anew, ready to fight those remaining loyal to the Taliban cause. Some people just like a good scuffle, maybe.
But ideology creates a need for ideology, to carry slogans in place of a conscience or independent judgment, any flag to march under. And I don’t mean just soldiers. The flags of the world’s ideological tribes have been breeding. Everywhere it seems people are identifying with more restrictive definitions of what it means to be them and denying that imagination, love, or tolerance could ever allow anybody not them to understand them. Surely this is globalization’s twin? A way to resist the forces that would make us all alike?
Even in Hanoi, the capital and a surging, modern city, you cannot walk at all without meeting a Vietnamese woman carrying some load on a stick, a shoulder pole with wicker pans hanging from either end. They embody the traditional figure of justice; they carry the scales. And justice lies in the balance of the two pans.
There has been a lot of talk about justice recently, justice for the terrorists on board the jetliners on September 11, for bin Laden and Al-Qaida, for the Taliban and anyone else supporting “them.” As if justice in a case like this were possible. But it’s all pretty words and not what’s wanted, not at all. What “we” want is bloodier than that. The truer word is retribution, which means, at root, payback. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it. I am saying for our own sake we should call the things we want by their real names. And if what we hope to get, beyond the blood, is deterrence, we should acknowledge that deterrence shares its root with terror. To terrorize “them” so they won’t terrorize “us.”
There is little justice in bombs, which fall more like the proverbial rain, on the just and the unjust alike.
I sit eating persimmons and a mango with an acquaintance in a Hanoi coffee shop just down the block from what remains of the “Hanoi Hilton.” The coffee is good, the conversation pointed. David, an American living in the French Quarter, refuses to answer America to the question, Where are you from? He answers, I’m Jewish. He believes he has made the break, gotten free of national identity altogether. As I have not. While we talk, two women with shoulder poles and conical, straw hats pass each other on the sidewalk in front of the café, going opposite directions, each selling the same array of vegetables, and for a moment I can’t speak, just shake my head. I register this small scene as a rebuke to even pointed conversation. For a second what futility means is right there. And perseverance, because the women dip their hats only a little and keep on, undaunted.
In Hanoi there is little to remind me of the Vietnam War, though we bombed here, too, of course; the infamous “Christmas Bombing” ordered by Nixon at the end of 1972 killed some thirteen hundred Vietnamese. I remember those days, hearing how the Vietnamese didn’t value life the way “we” did, which somehow meant that our less than sixty thousand dead seemed more important than their three to five million. Those were the days, the upside down days, when “the best” agreed to go to Vietnam to fight and “the worst” said no. Love-it-or-leave-it days. And even now there is a great outcry about the reception “the best” got when they came home, and they did suffer and yes they needed all the help they could get to live in America again. I don’t begrudge them. They were only boys. But they hadn’t made the best decision to go. And it’s funny how the patriots’ cynical story about those who resisted carried the day: how just everybody against moved directly from protest marches to corporate boardrooms. As if those who found themselves vilified when they stood against the war came away unscathed, as if listening to the lies shoveled out of Washington didn’t make them forever doubters.
And doubters are forever ill at ease, always estranged. No monument for speaking out against the ideologues. No one to winnow the bums on skid row and say this one lost heart, lost the ability to believe, the ability to take part. No. At home, too, people were wasted, people who believed they lived in a country where freedom should be honored not only in the abstract but on the street.
I grow old, and am angry still.
And I wonder about the cheap America of the patriots these days, about those who believe the public good is best served by private greed. Buy something,