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In the Crossfire

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In the Crossfire Laubat. His parents had taken effective “measures” to sway cer- tain secretaries in the Saigon Department of Education, and he was the candidate chosen. This was a bitter blow, the first time I came up against the invisible wall that my mother was powerless to cross. We felt miserable and helpless. With my local primary- In the Crossfire school diploma I was qualified to be a village teacher; but I wasonly Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary thirteen years old! My teacher felt sorry for me and made one last desperate move. At his own expense, he brought me to the Huynh Khuong Ninh boarding school in Saigon, crowded with children of Ngô Văn native notables, in the hope that I would be accepted free as a day pupil or at least as a boarder for a reduced fee. I didn’t see how, in either case, my mother could continue feeding me for another three or four years. At any rate, all that bargaining was in vain because the purveyors of education turned their backs on anyone without money. The most important person for me, as a child, was Anh Bay,Elder Brother Seven. When I was ten years old, he had to abandon his plough for a wrench and work as a mechanic’s assistant in the Di An railway depot, an hour’s walk from our house. A week before Tet — New Year’s Day — we went with Brother Seven to weed the grass around the family graves. On the twenty-third day of the twelfth moon, the day for celebrating the departure of the spiritof the hearth, he put up the cay neu — a long bamboo pole — at the far end of the courtyard. A small bamboo basket attached to the top of this pole contained offerings to the spirit on its way tothe heavens. On the eve of Tet, via this same cay neu the spirit would return to earth to its own altar. Depending on the spirit’s report, the Celestial Emperor would prolong or curtail one’s life. Elder Brother Seven also prepared bamboo firecrackers for our celebration and for friends in the village. I helped him grind burnt 2010 manioc stalks in a mortar into a fine charcoal dust. He explained 60 known as a “matchbox.” He intended to “arrange” our upcoming Certificat exam. It was dark by the time we reached the city. The coachman stopped the vehicle on a street in the Da Kaodis- trict. The master told us to wait there and vanished into adoor a hundred paces further on. A silver moon shone bright in the sky. The horse, unharnessed by the coachman, grazed peacefully on wisps of grass beside the road and deposited droppings at the foot of an electric pole while we chatted with the coachman. When the schoolmaster returned, he looked very much out of sorts. With- out a word to us, he signaled to the coachman to hitch up the horse. On the road home, no one broke the silence for a good while as the carriage tossed us about. Then, no longer able to contain hisicy anger, he burst out: “Balls! He wanted nothing to do with it.” In other words, the colleague in Saigon refused to go along with his little scheme. I supposed that he would try to enter into contact with other teachers in charge of proctoring the next examination. But ulti- mately no one “helped” me in either the written or the oral exam. Nevertheless, on Venerable Thiet’s demand, my mother had to pay him some thirty piasters as her share of his colleagues’ compensa- tion for “helping” me succeed. For her that meant producing quite a large number of hats. The following month, I took the scholarship examination at Chasseloup-Laubat High School. Fate struck once again. When my name was called, I realized I had left my student card where I was staying at my cousin’s. She lived in Thu Thiem, a hamlet on the other bank of Saigon River. The whole time from the school to her house and back, including the river crossing in a sampan, I was in a state of acute anxiety. Then once again we waited for the result. Things looked hopeful when the head of the district summoned my mother to investigate her financial situation, a sign that I was admissible. Yet at thestart of the new school year in September 1926, it was another “admissi- ble” boy, from a well-off family, who prepared to enter Chasseloup- 59 At the end of the elementary year the teacher chose two pupils to enter a competition for a scholarship — myself and an older boy. On the eve of the big day, Brother Seven took me to Sister Five’s house in Thi Nghe, so I could get to the Gia Dinh county seatnorth of Saigon on time the next day. The examination was to be held at Contents the Ba Chieu school. The afternoon was humid and swelteringly hot. We walked along the road from Hang Sanh to Thi Nghe. All of a sudden Introduction 6 a monsoon hit, blowing huge clouds that obscured the sky and the earth. A few seconds later, great daggers of raindrops shot Ngo Van, Relayer of Living History 12 obliquely down on us. I held my Chinese umbrella tight as a blast of wind turned the lacquered brown paper dome inside out and I. In The Land of the Cracked Bell 20 thrashed at the tattered shreds clinging desperately to the broken bamboo spokes. I wondered if that foul wind was not a bad omen Preface 21 and if my prospects for a scholarship were not shattered also. We reached Sister Five’s house at nightfall, completely drenched and Chapter 1: Arrest 25 my heart full of foreboding. Nevertheless, I made it through the ordeal of competition with- Chapter 2: Childhood 41 out even forgetting the “s” in torchis during the French dictation. Then came the wait. In the meantime, one of our buffalos began Chapter 3: Years of Apprenticeship 64 refusing to eat and staggered around, moaning out of pain and ex- Chapter 4: In the Central Prison 93 haustion. With tears in our eyes we had to resign ourselves to leading it away to die in a distant wild wood. Chapter 5: From One Prison to Another 118 A month later, the notable in charge of the village police sum- moned my mother, a widow with three dependent children, to in- Chapter 6: In the Mekong Delta 133 vestigate her financial situation. Eventually she was allotted 27pi- asters every three months — a fortune for a poor woman struggling Chapter 7: Caught in a Crossfire 151 night and day to produce hats for 10 or 20 centimes (a centime was one-hundredth of a piaster). Chapter 8: Toward Other Shores 174 Our schoolmaster, Venerable Thiet, was determined to see as Chapter 9: And My Friends? 186 many of his pupils as possible earn the Certificat d’études diploma, which would enhance the school’s reputation and especially his own reputation as its principal. One evening after school, he took me and another classmate to Saigon in a horse-drawn carriage 58 3 II. In the Land of Héloïse 218 My father reposes in our woods under the shade of the old cay go tree. On the third day after the burial, the monk came to perform Chapter 10: Worker in the Promised Land 219 the “opening of the tomb door,” a ceremony to allow my father to return home, where a shrine was dedicated to him. Every seven Chapter 11: New Radical Perspectives 234 days my mother offered him a meal. At the end of a hundred days and then again on the first anniversary of his death, the eighteenth Articles 243 day of the eleventh moon, the family gathered to organize a com- memorative offering. But after the second anniversary we discon- A Factory Occupation in May 1968 244 tinued any visible signs of mourning, since by that point we were supposed to have ceased to mourn him in our hearts. On Third World Struggles 256 With my father gone, my mother, faced with the worrisome task of providing our daily bowl of rice, redoubled her efforts to produce Reflections on the Vietnam War 258 conical palm-leaf hats for peasants. I learned to help her, and my brothers worked as hard as they could in the fields so that I could continue going to school. Appendix 262 I started learning French when I was about eleven. The indis- pensable dictionary, Larousse Élémentaire, could only be acquired Note on Stalinism and Trotskyism 263 in Saigon, a fifteen-kilometer hike from Thu Duc. That journey Chronology 269 marked a memorable moment in my life. I had to leave the house before dawn, in total darkness. Fatigue had no effect on me — I was Bibliography 280 too enchanted by my solitary walk through the night and then by the immensity of the rural landscape under the rising sun. At the Note on Names 286 Binh Loi bridge I gazed at the Saigon River, sparkling with lights. Up till then I had only known it as a blue line meandering across Abbreviations 288 the gray map of Gia Dinh province. I had gone to the teeming city of Saigon once before, on a trip with my father to buy bicarbonate in the hope of relieving his stom- ach pains. The pharmacy was opposite the Continental Hotel on Rue Catinat and next door to the Portail Bookstore.
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