Tormented

Summer 2003
Lawrence Tan

Like a wildfire across the forest
Like a hurricane across the land
I was swept under…

Like a tornado across the plain
Like a torrential monsoon rain
I was taken over…

Helplessly stricken
Long hair
Dark eyes
Intercepting all my thoughts
I am losing control…

What do I have to say?
When is the right time?
Where do we go from here?
Why, we are running out of time?

The fleeting glances
The teasing words
The warm embraces
Oh! They are all fake!

Like a ravaging fever
Like a sustaining chest pain
My soul is tormented

Like a cold winter night
Like in a darkest sky
My heart freezes over…

Grey sky
Blue heart
My pain
Your pleasure…

 

 

 

Cinema Phu Vinh

2003
Lawrence Tan

Some had lived in their Cinema Paradiso, others had been on their Polar Express… I had Cinema Phu Vinh.

  Cinema Phu Vinh is the only movie house in Phu Vinh, a small town and the  administrative seat of Vinh Binh aka Tra Vinh, about  200km Southwest of Saigon;  like in all small towns, the people are mostly friendly, unsophisticated and very easy  going compared to  those folks from big cities like Saigon. Most of the major business  owners were well known to the town folks by their first names. My  Uncle ran the  movie house. He lived in a complex attached to movie house with my grandparents  and my younger brother. It seemed  like my Uncle had this business for some time,  just like the movie house Tay Do in Can Tho. After the family business went  drastically  wrong and took a turn for the worse up in Saigon, they settled in this  town since the early 60s. I stayed up in Saigon and over time,  lived in different  relatives’ houses to continue my education. I spent many summers of my adolescent  years in Vinh Binh. Until the  last recent years, I did not realize how deep this place  had found its place in my heart.

I liked the movie house PHU VINH a lot. Every evening, the cinema PHU VINH opened for business around 5ish. The      retractable iron gates of the curved structure were pulled back on their tracks, and the people were welcome into the lobby via three  wide entrances. PHU VINH was located on the edge of the Centerville, looking from the movie house into the streets, connected to its  right towards the center of the town were the row houses of various businesses.

First, we had the popular neighborhood dive Hong Lac, which offered an unimpressive menu of noodles and other beverages such as coffee, beer and soft drinks. A Chinese family ran Hong Lac. The cook prepared the noodles in a small kitchen that occupied a front corner of the entrance where there was always a huge pot of boiling water next to a similarly huge pot of piping hot broth. They normally offered two kinds of noodles, a white flat one made of rice flour and the egg noodle, an angel hair-like yellowish noodle with a small body, supposedly made of flour and eggs. The fresh noodles were placed in a deep perforated ladle then dipped into the boiling water until it was cooked. After the water was well-drained, the noodles were placed into a fresh bowl. A few slices of cooked pork were then placed on top of it with some bean sprouts and chives. It was also customary to add a dash of fried lard to enhance the flavor. Add a few ladles of hot soup, and it was ready to serve. The menu and the layout of the place seemed to be pretty typical as I have seen it in many family restaurants. The menu was poor but the food was always good. I especially craved for those little pieces of hot peppers marinated in vinegar. I always had them in my bowl of hot noodle soup. On the weekends, Hong Lac made an effort to offer a small variety of baked pastries that went very well with a cup of hot coffee and condensed milk. It was definitely a casual place for the locals as a number of patrons could be seen folding and resting one of their legs comfortably on the chair while carefully sucking in their hot noodles. They must have practiced since their early childhood to feel comfortable in that kind of contorted position.

Next to that small restaurant was my friend, Manh’s house. He lived with his father, an herbalist, or Chinese doctor, his mom and a younger sister. Manh’s house was very humble. It was decorated with a few Chinese paintings and a large mirror on the wall along with a large calendar featuring some popular Chinese actresses or singers. The important thing was that it bears both the Gregorian as well as the lunar dates. There were a few chairs for the patients or guests and a small table on which there was always a small cushion in the shape of a pillow. It was used mainly for his dad’s patients to comfortably rest their left hands on it, palm up. His dad could read their pulses by gently placing three of his fingers on the patients’ wrists. By reading the pulses of a patient, the Chinese doctor could potentially detect the sources that caused the imbalance of the Yin and the Yang energy, the root cause of the sickness. He would then prescribe a concoction of various kinds of dry herbs and roots to help the body to regain the harmony of the inner energy emitted by the various organs. As each of our organs is categorized as Yin or Yang, they each have a counterpart. Each pair would emit a certain inner energy, maintaining a balance in a healthy body. If one organ acts up, it could upset the balance and the harmony of the inner workings of our body and therefore it causes us to be sick. The principle is to detect which part of your body was running wild, and the normal cure is to calm it down or trigger its counterpart to regulate it and bring it back to the normal level of activity. On the wall opposite the paintings, there was a built in set of shelves and small drawers labeled in Chinese where all the different kinds of dry herbs were stored. The preparation instructions would normally be to add four bowls of water to the herbs into a pot. Bring it to a boil until there was only two bowls worth of liquid left. The resulting cocktail normally tasted and smelled obnoxiously horrible. You would let it cool down, squeeze your nose and then try to swallow that stuff as fast as you could. Every time I am sick and think about that stuff, my system seems to speed up the recovery by itself.

Then there was a pool hall of only two tables. I wonder how they made ends meet after all. Then there were a few more houses of the same size before we reached the intersection that took us to the municipal bus stop. These houses were pretty narrow but long. I think they were about 14 to 16 feet wide at the most. Connected to the left of PHU VINH was a row of three houses, all connected inside and served as our residence. We used to live in all of them before we opened the one on the end, the widest house, which was about twice as wide as the others, for the Pho Map noodle house. That’s right, besides the movie theater business, my uncle ventured into the noodle house business. That was all right for me since Pho is like McDonald here in the States, it could be breakfast, lunch, snack and sometimes dinner too. Every now and then I asked the cook to drop a raw egg into my piping hot bowl of noodles. Beyond the noodle house wall was a small lot of land that ran along the side of the movie house protected by a wall. Next to our residence was
the gate to the side of the movie house. The auditorium had three wide double doors that opened to the side. When a show was over, we normally opened all the double doors to let the people leave the auditorium in addition to the front door to the lobby of the theater. Beyond the wall that bordered the side of the movie house was a neighborhood of wooden houses on beaten earth floors. A bicycle ride of about five minutes in this direction would take us straight to the riverbank.

PHU VINH was built on a corner lot; its facade follows a wide curvature that covers the two streets that intersect. The main structure that houses the theater was at least three stories high, and its opening was supported by two columns which divides the front into three wide openings with a set of cement steps that follow the curvature of the structure. Each was well finished with a full bull nose edge. Walking up the steps into the lobby area, the entrance to the auditorium was on the left of the structure. On the right hand side, one could see a recessed area protected by some decorative grids. Equally distanced within the recessed area were two small openings for the ticket windows. Most of the recessed area was covered by a curtain. The lobby was normally decorated with all the colorful posters and black and white photos of the current movies, as well as some of the upcoming films. Above the recessed area was a set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, there was a steel door labeled in red “Authorized Personnel Only”. It was the access door to the projection room.

Of course, I had access to the room, but I was not allowed to take any friends up there because of the materials and equipments. The room had a low window open to the auditorium. There were also three other small openings for an old slide projector and the two film projectors. In the back of the projection room, there was a window to the roof which we could easily climb through with the help of a chair. We would be on top of our residence, overlooking the area called ‘Lo Heo’ across the
street and a wide dirt path to a poor residential area that would lead to an area unknown to me. I had a few friends living there, but I never ventured far beyond their houses. The movies were shipped to us from Saigon via buses. They all came in sets of reels of 35mm films. Each reel was about two feet wide housed in a steel box. One of the projectionists, Mr. Trong, normally examined them for defects at least one day ahead of the first scheduled show. The only furniture there was a work table in a corner and a few chairs. The slide projector was used to project paid advertising slides. Two projectors were necessary to cut over from one reel to another reel. Each reel was numbered; we always loaded up the subsequent reel while the current reel was running. As the end of the current reel was coming close, the lead portion of the subsequent reel was started on the next projector. We would need two people to synchronize the cut over of the two projectors so that the audience experienced a seamless projection of the movies. We then took the finished reel down for rewinding and loaded up the subsequent reel on the same machine.

The Indian movies were normally the longest. They were just about one hour longer than the others because of their songs and dances. We marked the beginning and the end of each dancing and singing sequences during the first show. We would cut them off temporarily and reconnect them before we shipped the movie back to the distributor. It saves us and the audience time and the cost of showing it. The cutting part is self-explanatory. To reconnect two sequences of film, we used a sharp razor blade to thin up the lips of the connection frames of both section of films, lined them up on top of each other aligning the holes on the side then applied some acetone (nail polish remover) and press it down hard for a few second. The lips of the two sections then melted and effectively glued together.

The projection room had a schedule to follow, but it was really controlled by the office downstairs. Depending on the situation of the ticket sales, we would start the show on time or a few minutes late. The person who made that decision would push an electric bell that signaled the projection room to start the show. On cool evenings, I would bring my snack up to the projection room, open the back window for a breeze, prop my feet up on the window towards the auditorium and watch the movie comfortably, like from a first class balcony seat.

In front of the entrance to the auditorium where the tickets were checked and in front of the tickets windows, there were a set of rails that suggested that lines should be formed. But I don’t think a lot of folks knew what they are for. When popular movies were showing, the people were always on top of one another. From inside the ticket windows, we would see about five hands sticking through, clinching on their money. Everybody was shouting for their orders of tickets. As we took the money out of one person’s hand, we would have to squeeze it and ask the person for number of tickets and the kind of seating because they were priced differently. That was how we knew what that particular person wanted because sometimes we had a hard time matching a hand with a person in the a pile of people out there. I guessed all the girls out there going to the movies like that didn’t mind me holding and squeezing their hands.

The entrance to the auditorium, at times, was just as chaotic. We had from groups of people who did not buy enough tickets on purpose and tried to squeeze through the entrance to the kids who asked the moviegoers to take them in as their children. Therefore we normally had two big guys checking tickets at the entrance, Ta^m and Xua^n, who was a Cambodian Vietnamese. People who came in late didn’t want to pay the full price of the tickets and tried to negotiate at the door. I guess we did allow for that. We always had a wooden box, as tall as a stool. It has a locked cover and a small slot for those occasions. Therefore, a family member or a trusted person was always at the entrance until closing time. Sometimes when I was short of cash, I would ‘volunteer’ at the entrance at the start of a show. My uncle would not mind as long as I didn’t abuse it, just enough for pocket money for the evening.

The blaring music seemed to contribute to the atmosphere of festivities outside the movie house. Sometimes my friends and I feasted on all kinds of snacks out there, like the marinated fruits such as the guava, green mango, tamarinds, and etc…. I loved having my fruits with a touch of salt and mashed red peppers, which sharpened their tastes. Then we would have a variety of sweet soups served warm or those cold fruit smoothies. The activities soon ended as we were about half an hour into the last show of the evening. The merchants started wrapping up, closing down and wheeling their food carts home.

It was then bed time for me as another good and fun day had concluded.

 

 

 

Another Time, Another Life

August 2004
Lawrence Tan

            Of course, I would not have asked much of my children. Just their mere appreciations of the lives they have in this land of opportunities would have made me happy. But even that sometimes seem so hard. But how can I blame them? Their point of references in life and mine are so far apart. Indeed they are so far apart…

 

A few years ago, my son threw a cyber party in our basement. We had about anywhere from fifteen to twenty kids. What followed was a kind of party I had never seen before. The kids must have brought in with them eight to ten computers. We ordered a bunch of pizzas and got some soft drinks. Within a short time, they had all the machines configured and networked together, and connected to the Web using our DSL line. They formed teams of two to three kids per station and started a cyber war. The participants included other teams on the Web too. These were the combatants in all kinds of fatigues. The idea was to score and to survive in a shoot out game within a cyber world, in some cyber town. The kids who came to the party were boys and girls, some boys with earrings, head shaved and with bandannas. That reminded me of the images of the pirates, as I saw them in some comic books when I grew up. Some came with strange hairstyles with colorful highlights, others with no style at all, just like straight from their beds. These were all college kids and Felix’s high-school friends. I did not think I had seen a quieter party before. They just sat there in groups and immersed in their own world, clicking their mice and tapping frantically on the keyboards all through the night. I came down the next morning and saw a few of them spreading out on the floor sleeping among the empty soda cans and pizza boxes, just like a true battlefield! It looked like they had a real good time. I was wondering what I was doing when I was at their age. I was also in a war, but not the cyber kind…

 

Out there in the fields, everything was so unpredictable. Sometimes we moved from place to place, other times we camped in one place for months on end. At times, like cub scouts, we got to learn all the fun stuffs, like to tell whether a cannon projectile was passing over us and into the distance or it was time to duck just by the way it whistled, or to recognize the unmistakable cracking of an AK47 versus that of an M16. The spots we stayed for months were the barren plains in Quang Tri or in the
mountainous hills overlooking Hue. From hill 362, I could tell where the city was in the distance, the size of the palm of my hand when it lighted up at sunset, making it feel so homey and me so distant and lonely. Have you ever seen those Chinese classical paintings depicting the mountainous hills that seemed to float on a layer of cloud? Well, indeed, every morning we seemed to wake up in a middle of an ancient painting. All we could see was the scattered hilltops popped up here and there among the clouds. It was so deceivingly peaceful and magical. The clouds gradually dissipated later in the morning as the sun came up higher. The irony was that we all realized that concealed in it were all kinds of booby traps and deadly ambushes devised by the beloved humankind.

A savvy soldier must equip himself with a nylon hammock in addition to the government issued stuffs. When we camped in a location, we set our defense perimeter, and then we set up our makeshift shelters. Basically we spread out, tied our hammocks to the tree trunks or to two strong posts planted on the ground; the poncho was used as a tent over a skeleton of wooden sticks made out of the tree branches, tied to the posts and above the hammock. On the rainy season, we collected a few pieces of rocks or branches and made a small-elevated platform on one end of the hammock, for our backpack so that the running rainwater on the ground would not soak it. Sometimes, that was home for an extended period. Due to the humidity from the ground, it was not healthy to sleep on it unless you had a protective layer. The nylon hammock was a more versatile and essential item that one would think. It was our bed and ultimately, it was our personal body bag. We used it to wrap the body of a fallen buddy, tied both of its ends on a stick and carried it to the extraction point where they were picked up and transported back to the base camp. I carried a corporal who slipped and fell into his own booby trap on a rainy day. He died instantly, we could not find one of his arm. I did not go and collect his body parts; but I helped carrying his body out to the transfer point. He was not particularly heavy; he was a small man. He was from the region. He was kind of a loner; he hardly spoke to anyone. I remember he always carried a nylon bag of tobacco, tied to his belt. He let me try it once, and I almost flipped over! But for some reason, a few months before, during the New Year, to my surprise, he gave me a hundred piasters for lucky money. I carried the back end of the stick, and when walking uphill, his feet kept knocking at my stomach, while I could see the fresh blood still dripping from the bottom of his hammock. Yes, there is always a first time to everything. Some guy who stationed on the same hill as the corporal told me that he reappeared at night asking them to find his missing arm!

The first time we reported to our unit, it took us two days to get there. About twenty of us were driven about over an hour from the city to the foot of this mountain. The road ended there and next to a large creek. From there, it took us about six hours to climb the first hill. We all equipped with about four hundred rounds of ammunitions, four grenades, a week’s worth of food, a bag of water, a rifle and your personal stuffs. Some kids also had to carry an M72 (Light Anti-tank Weapon). The climb was our first true challenge to our stamina. It was really hard uphill with all that stuff on our back. Some kids cried as they realized that it was no picnic at all. The sight of the hill was just terrifying, even though there were a few plants and vegetation; the entire mountainside was practically destroyed by B52 bombings. The remaining trunks of those big trees were all charred, scattered all over and to the distance formed such a macabre landscape. Our destinations were the units along the way into the mountain. I and another kid, Man, we were unfortunately assigned to the unit that was engaging in a firefight at the time, deep inside at the most forward position.

What was going on here? Wasn’t the cease-fire supposed to be in effect? It turned out that the cease-fire was only observed in locations visible to the International Committee, but it was largely ignored in other places. We were supposed to be the fresh troops filling in for the KIA or MIA. When we got to the top of the hill, we rested for about ten minutes and we were rushed on. The scout tried to get us there before nightfall, but I fainted due to exhaustion. They managed to revive me, but we stayed over night at one lookout spot and continued the next day until we reached the Company. Along the way, we crossed a creek; its water was knee high. It looked so pretty; the water meandered into the distance, just like in a painting; under normal circumstances, it would be a romantic spot for a picnic, deep inside the mountain! As we approached the unit, sporadic gunfire and explosions could be heard. Suddenly, I saw two soldiers heading towards our direction, on their way out. I remember one with a bloody arm on a makeshift sling. The other must be his escort. I asked them where they were going, the injured guy cracked a smile, seemed all excited and said to me: “I am going home, man!” At that moment, I told myself, “Rats! Is that how you can get out of this place?” And then I thought, “Or it could be worse!”. When we arrived at the destination, a barren hill surrounded with tall trees, we were supposed to present ourselves to the commanding officer there, but he dismissed us immediately and ordered us to spread out and find a foxhole or a shelter. As I was settling myself down in one of those holes, a guy came over and asked me about my emergency address. I asked him for what purpose, they already had all my information back in the HQ. He said that this was different; they wanted to know where to ship back my body! Much later, I thought the fellow might just follow procedures, since we were on the battlefield; but the way he said it sounded like that would be an eventual outcome. What an initiation ceremony!

The next morning, I was told that I was dispatched to a forward squad and asked to leave some of my personal stuffs that I did not need behind. The sergeant would take care of them until I came back (sic!). I was briefed that the squad that I was going to join down there was so close to the enemy that we were not
allowed to use a spoon to eat out of the tin can. We used those broad leaves to scoop the food instead. We were supposed to whisper to each other’s ear only. Two of us were taken to that location to join three others already there. We were asked immediately to dig our own foxholes. We had to do it carefully, one scoop at a time, trying to make no noise. We spent all day doing that and the foxholes were still too small. Twice a day, someone carried the food down to our spot since we could not cook there. Besides the path I came from, there were two paths downhill from our locations, towards the enemy’s locations. We took turn to eat. Some of us guarded the paths; the safety pins of the grenades were all straightened out, ready to be pulled. The safety switch of the M16 was set to the off position, and ready to fire. We crouched there until the guys who finished the meal came and tapped on our shoulders. Then we reset the safety switch of the rifle and the pins of the grenades and made the switch. Those paths were guarded twenty-four hours.

At night we heard people snoring. But it was hard to tell which direction it came from. At times, at 7 o’clock in the morning, they fired their machine gun randomly at our directions. The first morning we were there, Man and I jumped into one of the fresh foxhole close by which we thought it was too small for one person. When the firing stopped, we had a hard time extracting ourselves out of it. I had never been so scared, almost peed in my pants! Following the barrage of gunfire, a voice came on a bullhorn: “Good morning everyone! Did you all had a good night sleep?”. Even when we were in the business of killing people, somebody still maintained their senses of humor! Some propaganda and finally some of their revolutionary songs followed the announcement. For a short while anyway, because not before long, we started to hear the cannon projectiles flying over our heads and crashing over the source of the broadcast which quiet them down for a few days! But the 7o’clock ritual in the morning continued every once a while. At one time, we were given the order of preparing to attack. Therefore, everybody geared up and waited for the green light. At that moment, I looked up in the sky, thought about my family and quietly said goodbye. We waited a whole afternoon and then came another order to stand down. Oof! What a relief! The next day another regiment came and replaced us. It took us one full day to pull out of that mountain. That was pretty damned close!

I think I was down at that spot for just about a week, I felt like months! It was during the rainy season. We had some bouts of torrential rains. We pulled out during nightfall to avoid their spies and scouts. Because moving in numbers like that would be so vulnerable to their artillery. On our way out, that beautiful little stream became a ferocious and roaring torrent. Due to the continuous rainstorms, it had swelled to become a much deeper and wider monster. We had to fall a tall tree on its bank to bridge to the other side. We strapped our rifle over our shoulder, sat on the tree trunk and slid our way across. I could feel the current pulling my legs really hard. There must be no mistakes or you would fall off and pulled away by the current into the dark water. We hardly had any moonlight that night; it was almost pitch dark and that made it even more difficult. At the other side of the bank, we had to climb a steep hill. On the way up there, I dropped my plastic bowl. I froze and listened to its fall knocking on the sides of the hill and realized how high up I was, and that scared the heck out of me!

One guy got lost in the dark. He started to call out, with the echo in the mountain; there was no way for us to know where it came from. One of us started to call out to him too, hoping for him to find his direction back to the column. Unfortunately, the poor guy’s voice seemed to be more and more distant and eventually faded altogether. The poor kid! He would probably last a few days and died out there somewhere in the mountain.

After another hour of walk, we rested at the foot of this hill overnight. We were so tired. I hung my hammock and fell asleep in it. Suddenly, I was awakened by the rain and realize that I was thoroughly soaked in it! I managed to gather some dry branches and attempted to make a fire under a canopy of some big trees that were not affected by the midnight rain. I was so cold. I trembled so much that I could not even strike a match. Finally, some guy came over and helped me. We had that fire going for a while anyway. It was warm and it was good. I changed into dry clothes in my backpack. My blanket and my hammock were all wet, but I had to fold and tie them to my backpack. Everybody woke up by then. We were ready to move out. On our way out on the trucks, some one pointed out to me when we passed by the Hamburger hill, Bastogne.

In those long and more peaceful locations, if we were to stay in a spot for an extended period of time, we would collect the carton boxes from the supply trips to make the tent floor, dug up just a few inches around it as water drain, just in case. That carton floor would give us a little bit more room to sit around with a few persons. Your tent was all you got during those cold and rainy days. In the daytime, I tied the hammock to the top of the tent to get it out of the way. My tent could accommodate four persons for a card game. We sipped tea or coffee along with a smoke or two, under the valuable candle light in the evening. Every now and then, small teams of soldiers passed by our station. And it was such a delight to see somebody that you knew. Even a hasty cup of tea or a small exchange of greetings and news of other acquaintances were so heartwarming. Out there, that was all you got. That was your family.

I read the Vietnamese version of The Godfather by Mario Puzzo the first time. I borrowed it from a deserter. A few of them were dispatched to our company; we had one in our squad. They were mainly used as slave labor, they were not given any weapon nor combat boots, and I was told when we engaged in a firefight, they would be rushed upfront as bait, either barehanded or sometimes they were given a grenade. Their rations were much meager compared to ours, so every now and then I gave the guy what I could spare. Officially, we were not to befriend with them, we were supposed to treat them like dogs, until they were re-instated. At times, I felt so sorry for the guy. They did not look any different than anyone of us. One guy completed his sentence and got re-instated. He asked to stay with us because our unit operated closed to his hometown and we had been together for a while. He was handed a helmet, an M16 and a pair of boots, a backpack with some extra stuffs. He was clearly so happy, he was then treated like one of us again, just promoted from the status of an animal to a foot soldier!

In one of those rare occasions where we camp in the outskirt of a village, at least we could see the people, notably the woman and girls, not like in the mountains for months without seeing a female. During that stay, I witnessed some strange stuff. A sergeant and I were invited into a house. While we were sitting there and chatted, the sergeant said that he could tell fortune. He asked the owner of the house to light up three incense sticks and decided to examine a girl, a guest of the house. He started out by closing his eyes and recited something then he sniffed the smoke from the incense sticks. Then he described to the girl, to her astonishment, accurately the location of her house and the different things around there such as a well, a big tree, the location of her bed, and etc…It was really scary. He talked about her problems in general terms to which she all agreed, and finally he gave her some advices. He was a northerner, and we were in the outskirt of Hue. I would not believe it if I were not there myself!

The daytime was so humid and warm. I was all sweaty in my khaki uniform. I tried very hard to take a nap in my hammock under the shade of the poncho. Suddenly my buddy woke me up by sticking a cold glass on my cheek. It was a glass of lemonade on ice! Oh! Heaven, where the heck did you get that? I said. He asked me to follow him. We walked for about a quarter of a mile to the village. He went in a house behind a stall where they sold a few kinds of soda and some snacks. He talked to the owner who handed him a guitar and then he started singing and playing the guitar at the same time. When he finished, a few folks and some kids applauded, then he turned around and asked the owner to give me a glass of hand squeezed lemonade on ice. What a guy!

Even though we seemed to stay far behind the battlefield but we were not totally immune from the war. I heard over the radio that one of the units in the hills just attacked and took over a hill successfully. Before the cheering was over, the bad news came. Somebody stepped on a booby trap. A few killed and a few injured. I was part of the team to go and pick them up. We set out early in the morning and did not reach the rendezvous point until the afternoon. Two of us carried a wounded guy. He was wrapped in his poncho like all the dead, except that they did not cover his face for him to breath. Every now and then, he asked me for water. I let the paramedic take care of him and not offering any water fearing that it would kill him. We did not get back until almost midnight. He was immediately picked up by another team to head out towards the ambulance. On my way back, I was so exhausted and slipped and fell into a pond. It was pretty deep; I swam right back to the bank and picked up by the team. I changed immediately when I got back to my spot and they let me sleep that whole night because I was on that mission the entire day before, otherwise I would have to guard another three hours at night. Each night we broke the guard up into four shifts. The first and last shifts were always preferable because it did not interrupt your sleep, but they normally last about an hour longer than the middle shifts. We were told to be careful to conceal our silhouettes, as when we moved, we would be targets for the snipers. I usually sat motionless against a big tree with the safety of my gun off for three hours straight. Every now and then, somebody would signal and come by to make sure that we were awake. All those long marches and climbs in the jungle and mountains, the fear and the boredom both physically and mentally overwhelmed me at times. On more than one occasion, I had thought to end it all. But the thought of my family had prevented me to do the silly things.

During the monsoon seasons, the mountains of Central Vietnam were particular colder because of the constant rain that would last a month at a time. Most of the time, there were no shower, just continuous drizzles for days after days. We wore our clothes as soon as we washed them so that they dried faster on our back. In one spot, there were three of us staying in a small clearing up on a hill covered mostly with trees and bushes. There were Sergeant Ta’nh, a Northerner, in his forties, Ma^ng, a kid from the South, who lost his right thumb, but was dragged into the service anyway and me. From our location, our main water supply was a creek, about half an hour to forty minutes walk. Every few days, we took our plastic water containers down, filled them with water and balanced them on both ends of a stick on our shoulder on our way back. The creek was about twenty to thirty feet wide; it was with running clear water. Due to its clarity, we could tell that its depth varied at different spots. At the crossing we were at, it was just knee deep all the way across. On other occasions, I walked along it and found that there were pretty deep spots. We filled our water containers, washed ourselves and sometimes harvested some fish. We all stood behind big pieces of rock on the bank, watching for a school of fish swimming upstream. As soon as it passed by us, we threw a small piece of rock in front of them and at the same time we slowly released a grenade into the water, behind the fishes. As soon as they were scared by the pebble, they turned around and heading downstream towards the grenade. Right after the grenade went off, we ran down stream, positioned ourselves there and used our helmet to shovel the stunned fishes over the sandy banks. Sometimes we got four sandbags full. We shared them with the other squads and we would have fish for days afterwards.

            Wherever we stationed, we set up booby traps at nightfall and dismantled them in the morning when we woke up. We were always radioed before any unit plan to go through our locations, just making sure that the area was cleared. The booby trap was real simple and deadly. We used an empty C-ration can, punctured four holes at the bottom, and tied a stick about four to six inches tall on its back. It was then planted solidly on one side of the path, concealed in the bushes. We pulled the pin off a grenade and stuffed it into the empty can locking its spoon in there. We tied a fishing line to the grenade and string it across the path and tied the other end to some branches or a piece of rock and made sure the line was taught. The idea was when somebody walked on the path and kicked the wire, the fishing line would pull the grenade out of the can, without its pin, the spoon would jump and it should explode next to the person. An instant kill guaranteed. We definitely took turn to do this. When dismantling them in the morning, I normally squatted on the top of the hill, prayed and looked and spotted clearly the line and the environment before I made a move. Very carefully, I approached the grenade, clutched it tightly, pulled it out of the can and stuffed its safety pin back in, bent it into the locking position then collected the fishing line and wrapped it around the grenade. The corporal set this up on a rainy day wearing his pair of flip-flop. When he turned around trying to walk back up the hill, he slipped and kicked the wire.

The plain of Quang Tri was a totally different landscape. I did not believe that I saw any trees at all. There were just barren hills, small bushes and may be some tall grass. Over time, we moved around that area a few times too. When we were first mobilized there, we were replacing another unit. Our truck column took the National Route 1, (The Highway of Horror). I saw all kind of stuffs left behind on both sides of the road by a column of population who were massacred by the Northern Vietnamese Army (NVA) artillery. The population tried to run away from the advancing forces when they jumped the parallel
17 in the beginning of 1973. There would be no legitimacy and satisfaction for the NVA to take over a piece of land without its population, therefore the communist forces discouraged the people from leaving by shelling indiscriminately the main highway where people were heading south.

We were told that our positions would be very close to the NVA (Bo^. Ddo^.i). How close? When I just got there and took over a position from a departing unit, I asked one of the guys where were the NVA? He pointed out to me at a few guys who were squatting in the distance, just about less than fifty yards from where we were. The location was a plain with some small hills. There were no trees at all. The whole place was pockmarked with bomb holes with the sizes of the ponds. Some were of pretty good sizes; as wide as small swimming pools, results of the 500lb bombs. After a few weeks of rainy days, they were all filled with water. We designated which one was for consumption and which one for bathing. These depressions were all normally deeper than the height of a person. There were actually two sets of barbed wire separating us. Between the barbed wires were the landmines. Ceasefire was actually in effect there. I could not see it, but the Tha.ch Ha~n river was behind the NVA. I had never been so close to them. For the first few days, I slept with my boots on. Over time, we engaged in conversations over a cup of coffee or tea in the late afternoon. We also tried to exchange cigarettes. There were some spots where we were close enough to throw cigarette packs to each other. We gave them Capstan or Ruby. What we got in return were some lousy quality product from their sides. If you stopped drawing on their cigarettes for about 30 seconds, they extinguished by themselves. I asked them why? They said that the cigarettes were designed purposely like that so that not to waste any tobacco (sic)! Each one of their cigarettes consumed about a quarter of my matchbook. Not before long, they sent in some low level propagandist. I noticed that when one guy talked to me, there was always another guy hiding in the bush listening in (part of the ‘threesome unit’ in which if one is at fault not being reported in times, all three would be responsible). I told him to jump out and join in the conversation, he slowly moved away from his position within the bushes and the tall grass into another position harder for me to see. It was so funny! When they talked to me, I discovered that they learnt those lines by heart. If I interrupted them in the middle of their discourse, they had to re-start from the very beginning of the paragraph! They told me that they learnt that last month, the workers of some manufacturer in Bie^n Ho`a demonstrated against the owner because they were mistreated. I told them to open their eyes and watch democracy at work and asked them if the workers in the North were not happy, would the government allow them to do the same? Their responses were their workers were always happy so there was no need for demonstrations. Nevertheless, sometimes we had pretty friendly exchanges about lives in the North and the South in general. At times, they were trying to test us by throwing a pack of cigarettes quite short of the concertina line on our side and into the field of landmines. They just want to see if we knew how to navigate through the minefield. We told them that we were not stupid.

We cooked two meals a day with the same kind of food most of the time. We always have a soup of xu xu (or xu ha`o) with the dried shrimps. I did not really care. When you were hungry enough, then even a simple meal would always taste good, especially with some crushed hot peppers. We started out to receive one C-ration pack each week; then twice a month and later, it became a monthly thing. We were told that the headquarters were running out of them. But every time when I could get back to town, I could buy them from the marketplace; there were plenty of them. Somebody stole them and sell them to the black market. On a few occasions, some of the guys caught snakes; they chopped it up into pieces and sautéed it. I got a piece and did not particularly like it; those guys did not even care to skin it. Everyone knew how to cook rice in an ammo box or sometime in a helmet (extra helmet for cooking). We brought the water to a boil then we dumped in the washed rice and kept the lid closed. When it was almost cooked, we diminished the fire at the bottom and put some of the burning charcoal on top of the ammo box so that the rice would be cooked evenly. I remembered I dreamt about a can of Coca Cola. If I had a can, I told myself, I would burry it in the mud for a few days just to keep it cool. At the beginning of the month, when we got paid, people always had a few packs of cigarettes. By close to the end of the month, we used to walk around with a can collecting the left-over cigarettes buds that people dumped on the ground and tried to survive until the next pay day.

We must have stayed in that same area for a few months. When we got there, it was totally dry except for the few large bomb holes. We were in need of dry wood to make the fire for cooking, so a few of us scouted around the area. On one occasion, we found a collapsed wooden bunker, shaped like the character V upside down; we started to dig into it to pull the wooden pillars out, suddenly I saw a human foot popped out of the rubble. The type of sandal still on the foot indicated it was an NVA. We left that place as fast as we could. We stayed in that location through the monsoon months. The sky was always grey and it rained incessantly, and finally the whole area was flooded. We got stuck on the hills. Before the flood, at least we could still see those ponds. When the plain was flooded, there was no way we could tell. But we still have to travel to the outside at least once a week for the supplies. There, normally four of us went with empty backpacks. We picked up the rations for other hills nearby too. They would come to us later when we got back. We would strip ourselves all the way down except for the shorts, and barefooted for easier walking and just in case we fell into those ponds we could manage easier. Someone had to play the scout and everybody else followed behind. The depth of the water varied from stomach to neck high. We carried the supplies on our heads. Very often, all of us were victims of the leeches. When we
got to a high spot where we could take a break, we would use a cigarette to burn the leeches off our body. All I needed to do was to touch each one of them with a burning cigarette; they would fall off from my body almost immediately. They were all over, even on my most intimate part. We just had to get used to it. The invisible ponds could also be so dangerous. There was one guy who had a few days of leave, left the company in the morning, disappeared and never reached the units on the outside. A few days later, we discovered his body when it floated to the top. When he left, he wore his entire outfit, had his heavy backpack on. When we found him, his rifle still strapped to his neck! His backpack must have slipped out somehow. He must have fallen into a pond and drowned.

Looking at the world my kids are growing up today and reflecting on my own time at those same ages, no wonder we have such a wide gap. Those supposed to be the prime years of my life. Lost and wasted. But I learnt to appreciate everything a little bit more, value any relationship that I got. However taking everything into considerations, I was damned lucky, I came out unscathed. A lot of other kids at my age were not so lucky. How many had perished in that war altogether from all sides? How many families were devastated? When the memorial wall for the American Vietnam veterans was inaugurated, I cried. Where is the one for us?

 

 

 

Reflections

Christmas 2005
Lawrence Tan

I used to love stories and fairy tales
Villains, heroes and magic spells
Knights, horses, dungeons and dragons
My secret world of illusions

Then came music, rhythms and lights
Friendship and the endless nights
Wines and songs, tears and laughter
Cool nights and warm get-togethers

It was just all Spring and Summer fragrances
I only knew love and games of innocence
But in the end, to me it was revealed
You were the only thing that was real

What is the color of the ocean, this morning?
I’ll tell you all about my feelings
Eyes closed, hoping not the somber grey
Hands clasped, with all my heart I pray

What is the color of your heart, this evening?
I might surrender my soul and everything
Is it by chance the color of love, pulsating red
To which I would be grateful, in love and glad

Christmas is already right around the corner
My time was helplessly stolen, I now wonder
It was just here! Looking back with longings and regrets
Time seem to fly by, wish it can slow down instead

And soon we are at the threshold of the New Year
Just another one like all others, it is no longer clear
Where had I been and what had I done
All the last thirty years, I am still gone

Like a good wine, I am aged
My mind still clear, but my heart still dazed
Since when it had been addicted
To the melodies of love and the heart-broken lyrics

 

 

 

A Walk On The Beach

Summer 2003
Lawrence Tan 

In memoriam of Monique Lee,

 

It had been a while since I felt that death had never seemed to be so possible and so real, especially when it happened to someone so close to you and at such a young age. The feeling of loss is so overwhelming. The sorrow still lingers. I composed this piece while our whole extended family vacationed together in a rented beach house in Nag Heads, North Carolina a few years ago. As you can tell, it was not written for Monique specifically. She was there with us at the time when I jotted down these lines. Every time I read these lines, I can’t help but thinking about her.

           I woke up before six this morning and changed quickly into a more appropriate attire for an early morning walk, putting on my pair of long pants and a turtleneck just in case. I was not sure how it would be like out there on the beach. My brother-in-law was already out at the door with Lambmy, his dog. Except very few cars that occasionally passed by, the street was basically still asleep. We crossed the street, walked about a block and turned onto a public access path towards the beach.

          The path actually took us to a good size wooden structure that housed the public facilities such as restrooms and a set of outdoor shower stalls. Beyond the public house, the path continued and crossed over a small sand dune proliferated with wild grass and onto a set of wooden stairs down to the beach. As we approached the public house where the ocean was still hidden from view, the august orchestral symphony of the rushing and crashing waves can already be heard.

          Hanging above and behind us, the moon still can be seen, fading and retreating by the minutes, making way for the promising sun for another bright and warm day. The sun was still nowhere to be seen, but just like a stroke of a brush, its aurora had already painted a small strip of the horizon with a comfortable bluish color. The beach, normally stretched for miles, was quietly covered by a thick fog. The visibility was just about five feet. As we proceeded onto the beach towards the ocean and its continuous thunders of the crashing waves, I was suddenly taken over by a sense of awe, submission and fear. It reminded me of a tragic journey along the coast of Vietnam which seemed like a lifetime ago…

          Except for the crashing waves, there seemed to be hardly any soul around yet. We walked about a quarter of a mile heading towards North. It was such a strange and eerie scene as the silhouettes of a few early risers started to appear and disappear in front and behind us. As the fog started to dissipate, the outlines of the beach houses on the hill started to appear to the West. Except a few plastic bottles, the beach was relatively clean. The high tide deposited sporadic traces of the fine seaweeds about at least twenty feet away. I also noticed a lot of traces of busy creatures all over the sand. My brother-in-law told me that the crabs came out and were very active at night. By the traces, I could imagine that there was a whole nocturnal gathering of busy crabs there every night.

          On the way back, as the fog started to clear up some more, we saw the tiny sandpipers rushed into the receding waves, trying to feed on whatever carried in from the ocean. Then like a constant and repeating game that they had perfected, they amused themselves by quickly evading the next incoming rush of the water. Along the way, I had saved three lives. A crab that got turned over on its back, it looked like it had been in a violent fight and lost one of his two large legs. Two tiny silver fishes washed ashore, one looked like still jumping around trying to get my attention and fight its way desperately back to the waters, the other looked more subdued. Nevertheless, I threw all three of them back to the waters. Some credit towards my children…I hope.

 

 

 

Heartbeats Of The Fall

November 2003
Lawrence Tan

The night was young and the moon was bright
The music filled the air and the hold was tight
I danced through the evening and into the morning
But my heart still soaked in loneliness and wandering

Was it the music, the crowd, the smoke or the night?
I wanted to give myself up and my chest was so tight
I needed more beer and wine until the evening was ripe
Hopefully to free myself from the illusions of life

I know I got the songs and the sways
It is just I have to deliver them someday
As I close my eyes, the romantic melodies
Lull me into my own world of realities

Through your window, under the moon and the stars
Like my soul, your beloved tree bears a few scars
Like all willows on a pond, my soul weeps
At the thought of a face my heart forever keeps

I knew it was wrong, it had never been right
But it all seemed so fine under that moonlight
Was it her eyes, her mouth or her hair?
That made the ‘me’ say I don’t really care

Is that still love or is that hate
I can’t tell because I am truly dazed
Please help me to get out of this quagmire
Please help me to extinguish this fire

 

 

 

A Short Reflection Of Fall

September 2003
Lawrence Tan

Ever since I settled in Virginia in 1975, I had chances to travel to a number of places around the country and overseas. Except the one and a half year I worked in Southern California and another equally long period I worked in Saudi Arabia, I have spent much shorter times in a number of other States and visited other places such as Canada, Europe and Southeast Asia. However, Virginia has always been my home. Anywhere else, I would feel like a stranger. Of course, I once had another place called home, but now it seems like it only exists in my dreams.

In the earlier years when I used to travel, each time coming home to Virginia, as the plane approached Dulles Airport, from the air, it was such a wonderful feeling to see the ominous color of green covering the ground all over. The warm feeling of homecoming sets in while I was driving through the hilly and winding roads both sides of which are mostly populated by all kinds of trees including pines and evergreen. The State and the Fairfax County in particular we live in have done an excellent job in preserving the natural environment. I just love Virginia. After all, I spend more than half of my life here where I raised all my kids and watched them blossomed.

          Virginia is located in a very special spot. After living here for so many years, I have noticed that harsh snowstorms normally devastated further north; further south is always under the menace of the hurricanes every year. Every now and then, we get the tail ends of things but never have to confront the brunt of both kinds of extreme weathers.

I had friends that used to live in New York and eventually some of them migrated over to the West Coast due to the harsh winter up there. I guess we are the lucky ones who settled in Virginia. Virginia is for Lovers. In Virginia, you would experience the taste of the four seasons. However, spring and fall are rather short, from just a few weeks to sometimes a few days! But I always have something to look forward to. The humidity in the summer is sometimes unbearable. But we have Ocean City and Virginia Beach there, just a few hours away. When the kids were younger, we used to drive up to Valleyfield, Canada every winter and spent our X’mas up there. The Hua live in that tiny francophone town where people speak Quebecquois. It takes about 45 minutes from there to Montreal. Our friend Huy worked for GoodYear Valleyfield since he graduated from college up there in the early 1970s. They used to drive down here in the summertime and we took all the kids to Ocean City for a few days, every year, like a ritual, because that’s what the kids wanted to do. Besides the crab feasts, the ocean, the kids loved to go to those mini-golf parks across the street from the boardwalk. Every now and then we could arrange to take an additional trip to the West Coast or overseas.

One year, we took them to Whistler to ski. The scenery of the mountain there was nothing short of spectacular. We don’t ski, but we tried to take the kids to ski every year until the last two years. The ride up to the Blackcomb on the lift to its chalet (about 6000 feet?) is about twenty minutes; total silence. I have never experienced silence the way it was there. I felt its thick presence actually wrapped around me. My kids are fortunate compared to myself, they have been to places I did not even know nor dreamt of at their ages.

          But the fall is for me, every year I wait for it to come patiently. I don’t remember since when I started to fall in love with it. I embrace the pace of things in the fall. Fall is like a Sonata, it goes deep and slow enough for me to have time to sink in, to fall in love again, versus a Concerto where every note is strong, clear and forward like the crashes of the oncoming waves and laced with some staccato notes just to accent the space and time. Fall is my color. The beautiful colors of the leaves in the Shenandoah, which run from gold to red to brown with a multitude of hues in between, have inspired a lot of gazers and photographers every year. I have to admit I had been up there only once, a long time ago. We have plenty of magnificent colors around here too in our local areas. During fall, the morning is chilly enough for a light sweater, or at times, it is comfortable enough for me to brave the wind with open windows while driving to work in the morning.

           Fall reminds me so much of Dalat. I believe I was there with my mom perhaps just for a few months during a sad and turbulent time of my family. I was seven years old; I still recall clearly my heart was with my grandmother in Saigon. I was never happy, no matter how hard my mom tried. I think I broke her heart.

          Before we know it, Halloween is around the corner, then Thanksgivings and Christmas, the whole works, the Holiday Seasons. The weather is cold but everybody is warm at heart preparing for the Holiday Seasons. Perhaps, the pace of fall is the pace of my heart.

 

 

 

The Year Of The Monkey

2003
Lawrence Tan

          It was hard enough to go through our adolescent years when we had to cope with so many issues that seemed to come at us all at once in just a few short years. Our physical change, our self realization, the search and formation of an attitude, an identity, the yearning to understand more of everything that happened around us and the careful attempt to fit in with our peers as they were going through our same experience. All of that exerted an enormous amount of pressure on us. We started to have feelings that we had never experienced before, we were expected a little bit more by everyone around us. Growing up was tough enough, for our generation, war had no doubt accentuated and accelerated it.

          1968 seemed to be an unremarkable year like all the previous years. My plans were the same. I had about a week off from school so I planned to be with my grandparents in Vinh Binh. I had the permission from my relatives to go and stay with Nguyen Tam Thien overnight and we hired a taxi early next morning to take us to the inter-city bus stop in Cholon. Thien’s Mom lived in my neighborhood, off Cao Thang street. He stayed in his father’s complex on Tran Hung Dao, close to the Dai Nam Movies Theater. Every now and then, he visited his Mom. This complex was two or three stories high and it was so big that it occupied an entire small city block. Every time I passed by and looked for him, I had to get somebody to go upstairs and get him; I got lost one time venturing up there by myself. Apparently, there were a number of families of all the aunts and uncles who shared that building.

That was the first time we traveled together. The bus was scheduled to leave at around 6 o’clock in the morning for a good five to six hours trip. It depended on whether we encountered the blockade set up by the guerillas the night before. Every now and then they came out at night and piled up dirt, rocks and buried a mine or two in the middle of the road to inconvenience the traffic flow. When that happened, we had to wait for the government’s military to come and dismantle it before the traffic flow resumed.

Thien’s grandpa, Mr. Nguyen Van Hao, built a pagoda on the outskirts of the city of Vinh Binh and planned a burial ground for the family. So, it went without saying that Thien was always welcome there at the temple. From what I remember, from the outside, the temple was a good size structure and it seemed to have plenty of light. It was the only building there on the side of the road. I guess the people normally came by on bicycle, motorcycle or ox-carts. It was a perfect place for the monks. It was a serene place surrounded mostly by rice paddies and close enough to the main road traveled by the inter-city buses; supplies could be dropped off easily. Tam Thien got off there, about half an hour to town. I gave him the instructions to find me if he decided to go to town. We would dine and wine together if he ever showed up. But he never did.

          I think I was there a few days already. One evening, I heard the rumor that the guerillas are amassing their forces close to town; but I had heard those kinds of things every now and then over the years. The people there were so used to the distant canons and bombs, but being from Saigon I was always a little bit more sensitive and worried. Sometimes from the rooftop, I could see the flares floating in the distant sky, like those lost souls from the battlefields who have not figured out which way is home. It was just past 9PM in the evening. I was shooting some pool with my friends in a billiard hall on the riverside. Suddenly I saw a military truck stopped, dropping off a few soldiers who quickly got into positions and set up the heavy machine guns. They were not the M60’s. At the time the military still used the WW II equipment. I got worried and scared, stopped the game, hopped on my bicycle and started riding home. As soon as I got to the Movie House, I heard a government car coming by and declared immediate curfew via its bullhorn. It ordered everybody to go home and stay in the house until further notification. We cut short the movie show and passed along the same message to the audience. The people started leaving in a fairly orderly fashion…

          It must be about 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning; I was awakened by a shot to the wall above my bed. Some of the plaster came down on me from the wall. The target was the neon light right above my bed and I heard somebody was yelling from the street ordering us to turn off the light. I also saw my uncle quietly beckoning me from the doorway to the auditorium to leave. I jumped off the bed and ran crouching towards the switch, turned the light off and followed my uncle. We ran through the entire length of the auditorium to the dugout below the stage. The auditorium was larger than most of the movie houses I have seen in the States where we live. From the large dugout area below the stage, there were two openings with a few steps each going up towards a large backyard. Up on the backyard, right next to the opening on the left and attached to the building, there were a shower stall and a makeshift kitchen shared by the families who lived in the dugout. Beyond the set of steps on the right, way into the yard, there was an open well; a bucket attached to a rope was almost always there sitting on the ground besides the well. The men in their boxers and the kids living in the dugout sometimes got their showers there; the backyard was as wide as the movie theater ground. That was where we let all the chicken, duckling and a couple of pigs run wild. One of the pigs was mine, my grandmother raised it for me, and another one was my brother’s. When mine was big enough, she would sell it as supplement to my school tuition in Saigon and other expenditures.

          From the auditorium, the dugout was accessible from both sides of the stage via access doors. Behind each access door, the floor was split and there was a few steps leading up to the stage behind the huge movie screen and another set leading down to the dugout area. The movie screen could be slid off all the way to the back wall to make room for a stage area every time an opera troop came by and performed for a few days. There were three families living in the dugout area beneath the stage. The men were all employees of the movie theater. The painter artist, Hoa Si, who was an ethnic Chinese, but he spoke Vietnamese better than his ancestral language. He was married and had a small boy. He also had a young assistant and painted all our advertisement canvas panels, each one was around 8′ X 8′. The colors used on the canvas panels were the washable kind. The right corner of the dug out, close to the staircase to the auditorium was used as his studio where he kept all his bowls of colors and paint brushes with his partially finished work for the next movies. These panels when completed were mounted and displayed on each side of the movie house for the currently shown feature film for a few days until the next feature film. I loved to spend time down there just to watch him work. It was so much fun for me to watch the pictures coming to life under his strokes of colors. After a canvas was complete, we would spray a thin layer of light and washable glue to protect it from the rain. In a larger city such as Saigon, a movie could last about anywhere from a week to two before you ran out of audience. At Phu Vinh, a feature film could last three days at the most. The second family was Mr. Muoi’s, one of the ushers, his wife and their young kids, a boy and a girl, Dzung and Hoa. Then there was the family of Mr. Trong, one of the projectionists, with a small son of around three. Besides the common area of the dug out, their private areas consisted of their beds and maybe a small table and a small piece of furniture. Each family fashioned a curtain or two to cover their areas for privacy. Seeing people raised their family like that really made me think hard at times. How many bedrooms do we want now?

          The backyard, an atrium,  was surrounded by a wall and beyond the wall, the back of the row houses of the surrounding streets. There were five of us altogether, my grandparents, my uncle, my younger brother and I. We stayed there with the other three families hoping that the situation would eventually ease off, but we ended up staying there all night until around 4:00PM the next day. Then suddenly an explosion shook the whole building and dust was all over the air. As soon as it settled, Mr. Muoi and Kinh, my younger brother decided to crawl up to the auditorium to assess the situation. After a few short minutes, they came back and told us that the gate of the movie house was hit; the grille was mostly destroyed and all twisted, and the lobby collapsed. We decided that it was too dangerous there, the combatants (either side) might come in any time and we would be stuck in between. So we decided to take a chance….

          We decided to leave the dug-out. We did not know the source of the explosion. It could be a 155mm canon shell or a rocket from a helicopter. In either case, that meant only one thing, that the guerilla force was in the neighborhood. Since we were right underneath the stage, and behind the projection screen, there is really nothing solid above us except a wooden floor. If god forbid, if one of those shells landed in there, we would not have a chance.

          After the explosion, there were a lot of confusions. We had to make some fast decisions. We had a couple of challenges, we did not want to be exposed in the backyard fearing that the helicopter above would mistake us for the combatants of the other side because I understand that the guerillas did not wear uniform. The second difficulty that we faced was to figure out how to get my grandparents over the wall. My grandfather always had a limp because one of his legs suffered atrophy when he was young.

          We started yelling across the backyard that we needed help and a ladder. After a few minutes, low and behold, we saw a ladder lowered from across the wall. We wait until the sound of the helicopter seemed to fly by then Kinh dashed out across the yard and on to the ladder. He got over it before the helicopter started approaching again. Then we let a few other folks go next asking them to wait on the other side to help my grandparents on their way down. My uncle dashed off with my grandmother, he was behind her on the ladder, and they went over. Then my grandfather and I took our turn. I was behind him.  He was kind of slow, but I was there just in case he slipped. During that commotion, I saw the painter used a long bamboo stick stirring the open well, kept calling for his son with a desperate and tiring voice, “Vinh, where are you?”. He lost his son during the confusions; he was trying to see if his son fell into the well. Somewhere along the line, I knew the helicopter had seen us, because the time it took to climb the ladder and over the wall.

          We all ended up in a narrow back alley of the back of other people’s houses. We scattered and went to different houses. Our family stayed together and ended up in a house that sold motorcycles and parts. There was really not much space in there. I think we had less than twenty people all sitting on the floor, wherever we could make room for ourselves. We did not know what to think, all of us were still under shock. The owner of the house turned out to be somebody that my uncle knew. The house we were in shared a common open well with the house next door. Above the well was a door that divided the houses. When the well was covered with a solid wooden lid, they can open the door above it and climb back and forth between the two houses. I was told that the residents of the houses were relatives. We were there for hours; not knowing what would to do next. What would you do? The movie house was destroyed and going back there was not an option. What would happen next? The people that owned that house we were in asked my uncle to join them in the house next door to play some cards to pass the time. My uncle politely refused. I would think he had his mind at the time on many things other than a card game. Just about half an hour later, there was a big explosion that shook the house we were in. The plaster and the dust were all over the air. By the time we recovered, we realized that a rocket hit the house next door. There was a lot of screaming and crying and of course the confusion reigned over. There were a lot of dead and injured people next door. Some who survived climbed over the well and came to our side, dazed and confused. My uncle was real lucky! My brother and I dashed to the door immediately. It was a solid folding steel door and it was locked from the inside and we needed the key to unlock it. We all pushed towards the door to try to leave the house. I was afraid that the house we were in would be the next target. I started yelling for the key while the owner said she forgot where she placed it!

          Then her husband said he had it and shouldered his way to the door and unlock it. I told him not to open right away. We needed to peek outside first to see if it was safe to do so. Then again my brother went out first, because he was a young kid, hopefully the combatants would recognize that and the civilians would follow. We ran across the street by a group of two or three persons at a time. My uncle had my grand mother on his back; I had my grandfather on mine. Kinh was in front of us. I
remembered seeing an old man lying across the street, propped himself up with one of his arm, his head was all bloody. He was moaning about something. I guessed he was too weak to scream.

          After I got to the other side of the street I looked back to the houses we just left. There was indeed a hole on the roof of the house next door, still smoking. I don’t recall how many more neighborhoods we ran by or how many streets we crossed. We tried to run as far away as we could from that trouble zone.

          Eventually, we ended up in the back alley of another neighborhood. By this time as a group, we were really scattered but our family still managed to stay together. A lady in her fifties that owned one of the houses stood in her back door and waved us into her house, God bless her heart! They were also some kind of merchant that I don’t recall anymore. After she closed the door, we had about two to three families in her house. We all stayed downstairs and slept on the floor wherever we can find a space. The owner and her family lived upstairs.

          Our family occupied the part of the floor that was closest to the steel door. The next morning, they came down and open the door and it turned out that their house was right at the market place. It was customary for a lot of families to live upstairs of their stores. Beyond the sidewalk in front of their house, was the gathering place of the market place. There were a lot of little stalls (sa.p) that sold anything you need, from clothes to foodstuff. All that time, we did not know how to thank the owner of the house. Of course, we all understood that we would use their resources only when absolutely necessary. That means no showers. The food I believed my family had some cash but we would just spend as little as we could, even on food, therefore all the meals were really meager. So it seemed like we were in the area of town controlled by the government troupes. But you never knew! At least we did not have to run no more at the time and that would give us a chance to think about the next step.

          So we settled there. Due to the location where there were people bustling most of the time in the daytime. We learnt to deal with the situation over time. I did not dare to venture too far away from the house in the daytime because there were a few times when the government announced curfew in broad daylight due to some emergency situations. We got inside the house, closed and locked the door. When the steel retractable door is closed, I could not see the outside. At night when there were soldiers or the paramilitary walked by, I could see a little bit of their shadow through the crack underneath the door. And every time I heard them yelling or screaming at night, my heart seemed to jump out of my mouth. I laid there worried about any firefight in the area would be the end of us. This is the end of the road; there were no more places that we can go to.

          Eventually, the fighting died down, we were allowed to go back momentarily to the movie house to get the things that we need but we were not allowed to stay there, so at least we could have some clothes to change. But we still got no showers. Have any of you tried not to shower for a month? The first thing I experienced was there was some pattern developed on my skin. I think it was the dust and your perspiration that settled on your skin so you started to look like a grey patterned gecko. Eventually, the situation got better, I ventured out in the daytime to look for some friends of mine. Luu Thai was one of my closest friends. His house is facing the municipal bus stop where all the buses would arrive and depart from there to and from other towns such as Vinh Long and Saigon. His Mom died when he was young, he lived with his father and his stepmother both of whom were really nice to me every time I hang out at his place. He also had a younger sister, perhaps ten years old. His family was in the grain business. They carried all kinds of grain, red, green and black beans, rice and etc.. So at least, one would not have to worry about being hungry there. And besides, those sacks of grains could make good shelters just in case. After we first re-connected, knowing our situation, he said his family wanted to help. And of course, I told them the first thing we needed, a shower for everyone. I went back to the place we stayed and told my family.

          And of course I was treated like a hero! Mind you that this is a cold shower! Normally, we would boil some water and mixed it with some cold water for the shower, but at a time like that, that was out of the question. A simple and typical bathroom, a big steel vat filled with water and an empty plastic can that floats on water was all that you need. And of course a piece of Savon Vietnam with the profile of a woman’s face embossed on it. American soap like Dial or Camay would wash and smell better but that would be too luxurious. The first splash of water after a month of deprivation is something worth taking time to enjoy. Gosh! The water was so cold, but my body got used to it real quick after a few more splashes. Then came the wonderful soap that lathered all over my body, watching all the flowery patterns disappearing from my skin were such a delight. A sense of freshness and a new me came over me. I put on my pajamas and walked out the bathroom hungry. I don’t actually recall how it was in Saigon any more but down there in that small town. A lot of people walked around town in the daytime comfortably in their pajamas. It was such a customary things that you would not even think twice about doing it because everybody else were doing it. The next thing Luu Thai gave me was a pack of Salem since I smoked at the time. He told me not to tell anybody else since we had other friends that came by too. Wow! The first puff was so wonderful, the nicotine rush from a Salem cigarette sent me to where a cupful of Nyquil would do for you. My arms and body felt so relaxed, I just let it go, let it go…

          Nah! I am not going back to that habit, don’t worry…

          Eventually, his parent invited us to come and stay in their house as they made a makeshift area for our family in their vast warehouse, which is in the back of the first floor. We moved there because it would be a much better place and we felt like we were in the way of the other family for so long. After we moved to Luu Thai’s house not very long, about a few days, we got re-connected with my father in Saigon. He chartered a Cessna to come down there and picked us up. I left Vinh Binh with mixed emotions. We fed up of living in other people’s house and we saw no way of reconstructing the movie house, we just had to move on. When we settled down back in Saigon, I had time to think about it and realized that my whole childhood world is gone. For the first few years, I often reflected about the people, the movie house, my friends, the various places that we used to have such a good times. There was no longer any excuse to go back there any more!

          Farewell Tra Vinh, farewell my childhood and farewell my field of dreams!

          Additional notes:

          1968 was the beginning of a string of terrible years culminating in the defeat of the government of South Vietnam in 1975. The Tet offensive in 1968 was a coordinated attack from the local guerillas of the communist forces on all the major cities throughout Central and South Vietnam. It was an attempt to take over the South by surprise and by force. They were eventually routed, but not before causing a lot of damages in the inner cities. After this battle, the local guerillas forces suffered a lot of loss in personnel. That was when the time was ripe for the North Vietnamese to come down and help, moving closer down to the South to fill in the void.

          The conflict in Vietnam cost the American side around fifty eight thousands lives, the Vietnamese, both the North and the South altogether between one to two millions lives.

          In recent years, Vietnam and America re-established diplomatic relationship, business as usual…

Hello Autumn

Fall 2004
Lawrence Tan

Hello Autumn, hello again
So glad to see you, my friend
Please come in and grab a seat
Get a bite and kick up your feet

Something warm or something cold
Or you might want to try something bold?
Here, with this glass of wine
Let me toast this…friendship of mine

A bag of songs, a box of love
Butterflies and a peace loving dove
I saved them up thinking about you
One for me, all for us two

A ray of sun, a river breeze
My heart races, my heart freezes
A good kid, a hungry child
My heart sinks, my heart goes wild

Hello Autumn, hello my friend
What have you done last year, tell me again
A spoonful of love, a handful of sparkles
A taste of honey, a short time of marvels

You disappeared as suddenly as you came
Left me bewildered, never knew your real name
Where are you from, and what do you do
Not that it matters as long as I can see you
Now that you are here
I forget all the tears

This time, I swear I’ll hold on to you tight
I swear never again let you out of my sight
Promise me that you’ll stay a bit longer
Don’t let Winter Spring or Summer
Come between us like the yesteryears
Just the thought of which would bring me tears

 

 

 

For Better Or For Worse

December 2003
Lawrence Tan         

          I believe everything in life is relative. Everything including what we term as the good and the bad, the joys and the sufferings, the pretty and the ugly things and obviously even our own existence are relative to time and space. Sometimes, the good can be found in the bad, beauty can be found in the ugly and vice versa. We would fail miserably in the long run if we judge and handle everything in life by the principle of just black and white. Even in the digital world, there is something called fuzzy logic.           I learn that time will heal all, if it does not, then the subject will eventually expire, therefore the sufferings will dissipate, hence time will definitely heal. The scopes of things around us depend very much on our perspective. Again, this perspective can shift as we move to another environment or as time goes by. Thus the magnitude and the significance of everything that happens around us vary depending on where we are at in relation to time and space. The more focused the perspective, the more intensified the feelings will be. On the contrary, in a wider perspective, all things seem to be less serious. A life is so insignificant in the universe where distance is measured in terms of light years and time in millions of years.

          Once again, when my family left Trà Vinh(Vinh Binh), we left behind all we had. In some way, this time was not as drastic as when we left our ancestral home in Haiphong, but it was no less pain. We left a lot of friends, acquaintances, and a way of life behind. I left my friends and my dear town where I grew up each summer in the most significant years of my life. It was there that I experienced the change in me, from a boy to an adolescent and into a young man. It was there that I felt joy and happiness. It was there that I hung my dreams on every summer. It was there that I felt true love and attentions from my grandmother who always worried for my well-being. After all, I am her first grandson of her eldest boy; this ranking bears some important significance in traditional Chinese family. Sometimes I told her that she worried too much, but deep down inside, I felt pampered, I felt loved and warmth. And I realized that the attention I got would only last through the summer until I had to return to Saigon.

As each summer concluded, part of me was excited thinking about going back to my high school(JJR) and starting a whole new school year, but of course my heart was heavy on the morning when I had to board the 6:00AM bus and leaving my grandparents, my uncle and my kid brother behind for another year. While I was always excited during the first nights in Vinh Binh at the beginning of the summer, I spent my first nights back in Saigon reminiscing my summer and the good time I had, often with tears on the pillow. However, I always looked forward to the day when I could go and pick up the books at school for the new school year. Like every year, the line was never too bad; we had to show a slip of paper (perhaps showing that the tuition is paid?) to a school official behind a window of an office, he then handed out a pile of books. We rarely got any new books, most of them were used. The first thing when I got home was to find a cozy corner to settle myself in and then enjoyed flipping through the books to see what would I be learning in the next coming school year.

After the New Year (1968, Tet Mau Than), we were once again uprooted and displaced. The life adjustment up in Saigon was hard. We had nothing left. People no longer greeted and treated us warmly as when we migrated from the North bringing along some wealth with us. When we got back to Saigon, I went back to my relatives’ home where I stayed at the time, off the Cao Thang street in Saigon. My grandparents, my uncle and my brother temporary settled on the top floor of my granduncle (my grandmother’s brother) house on Nguyen Trai Street in Cholon. The top floor was really a terrace with a tin roof; there wasn’t really any rooms per say. So basically they camped there until we figured out the next move. While they stayed there, my granduncle got sick and passed away. After he was no longer there, we started to hear unpleasant comments from the relatives. Sometimes those words even came from my grandma’s friends, those who used to be part of her entourage in the old days. Now they hung around our relatives instead. Since they stayed on top of the second floor, it was most difficult for my grandfather to walk those flights of stairs everyday because of his limp. On the rainy days, they used those large plastic sheets to deflect the rain from all the open sides of the terrace. Every time I thought about the general situation of our family, I felt deeply saddened. From a long and well-established family in the North, now we were reduced to almost homeless and subjected to all kinds of humiliations! My father lived in a flat closed to the Hoa Binh marketplace but it could not accommodate our whole family. I came and visited them mostly on the weekends. I believe I went and visited my Mom in NhaTrang that summer.

Eventually, my uncle found a job working as a foreman for a company called Amtraco, across the river in Khanh Hoi. It was a favor from a long time friend, Gia’. He was then some kind of a big wig there. He had his own office and a chauffeur. He used to hang around with my uncle during the first years in Saigon when we were still relatively well-off. My uncle foolishly burnt a lot of money in parties and with friends. I remembered him well; back then, like a number of others, he used to call my uncle ‘Anh Cuong’, a form of respect, all the time. My uncle got me a summer job at Amtraco. At times, I heard Gia yelling “Cuong! Where the heck are you?”, and my uncle would say “Yes Sir, I am right here!” I was so enraged, but that was life, wasn’t it? Seeing that I was upset, my uncle consoled me “Don’t you worry about it. After all, that’s life! All you have to do is work and study hard”. My uncle used to be a proud and carefree person; he now accepted the realities of life and took its beatings with stride. For that, I loved him more. As a young man with plenty of pride, my heart bled for him… Before this job, I was tutoring for pocket money. It was not so bad, but the job in Amtraco got me twice the money for working on the weekends only. I still remember the lunches in a humble food stand in the neighborhood across from our workplace. I loved the pickled mustard and the sliced pork in jelly and being with my uncle. I felt he was even closer to me than my father. At this time of his life, his kids, a daughter and a son, lived with their Mom. They were brainwashed and forbidden to come and visit him. As I grew older and became a father myself, I then realized how deeply that had hurt him. One good thing in Amtraco was that there was an old American manager, Mr. Tallyho. I got to practice my English with him and eventually I tutored him and a friend of his, a black man, elementary French! Of course I charged each one of them twice as much as the kids I used to tutor before. That was pretty good money on top of my salary in Amtraco as part time jobs. It was there that I read my very first English book ever, The World of Suzy Wong, at lunch and break times.

During this time we had moved out of our relatives’ house and to the Chi La(ng district. We rented a flat in a back alley. The owner is a retired Major in the Vietnamese Army. His house faced the Chi La(ng street. The back of his house was facing us across a narrow alley. My father and I then moved back there with them. It was the first time in many years we were reunited and lived together again as a family. The flat was tiny; we all lived in one room. My grandma and my brother on one bed, my grandfather in his favorite plastic chair, my uncle took the sofa, my father and I took the rest of the room on the floor. There were two more floors above us; each occupied by a bargirl. There was no other access except going through our floor. Each night each one of them brought in with them a different GI. Next to the door, there was a tiny desk against a window. I hung a light bulb there and spent a lot of nights studying for my TuTai II(equivalent to SAT). The older I got the more I felt the untold pains and the humiliations of my grandparents. Sometimes I saw my grandfather going through his check stubs of the transactions from his better days when we had our business, servants, chauffeur and almost a permanent entourage of friends who hang around our family for fun. I started to develop a pretty bitter attitude towards life. I refused to participate in any large gatherings that involve the relatives. I felt their hypocrisy and did not feel that I belong to those crowds no more.

At the time, I studied in Thuong Hien and my brother was in some school close to the movie theater Khai Hoan. I had a Honda. I dropped him there in the morning and picked him up after school. My grandmother managed to have some friends about her age to help her to cook meals in a makeshift kitchen in the open for us every day. I had a hard time adjusting to that level of poverty. That was the time when I saw some of my friends started having girl friends, but I realized that as far as for me, under the circumstances, that was really out of the question. I did not want to know anybody, I was afraid that she would know where I live. At the time, the only JJR friend I still visited sometimes but also fairly infrequently was Be Duc Viet who lived with his mom and his sister on a small street close to the Truong Minh Giang bridge.

          Eventually my father got a job offer from the family of Mr. Lam Cat to work in Cam Ranh, a town in the Southern tip of VietNam. Mrs. Cat was a good friend of my grand-mother, they know each other since the early days in Saigon. Mr. Cat and his sons were very successful entrepreneurs getting lucrative construction contracts from the Americans. I believe Lam Quang, his youngest son, now is the owner of the well-known restaurant Vien Dong in Southern California.

          One morning in the summer of 1969, my grandfather suffered an aneurysm and fell in the bathroom. He called out for my brother who was close by; he panicked and in turn called me. I ran back from the front of the house and both of us carried him onto a chair. While my uncle ran out and tried to call an ambulance, I talked to him. His speech started to slur, I quietly tried to pinch his right arm and realized that he no longer could feel any pain. He told my grandmother that he wanted some congee and asked me to change him in his best suit. I was scared but my brother and I helped him to put on his jacket and his pair of pants. He asked me to help him to comb his hair and I respectfully did. By the time the ambulance arrived he drifted into unconsciousness. When I got to the hospital on my Honda, a young doctor came out of the emergency room and said “He had left”. I took it rather calmly at first, but within a few minutes I burst in tears realizing that I had lost him. He was just there this morning! I slumped down from where I stood, holding my head against my knees, his images of the different times in my life started to parade through my mind. His last image was sitting in front of our place in Chi Lang, holding a bunch of check stubs, he’d got that distant look of a beaten and defeated man reminiscing the old times. At that image, a thought came to my mind that was may be it was time for him to stop suffering. May be he had paid off his debts; I should let him go. My brother helped me to clean his body for the very last time with a piece of cloth and some warm water. The next morning when I woke up, seeing his old beaten yellow plastic chair, I started to cry like a baby. I missed him so much! I remembered grandma put her hand on my head comforting me. My father flew back in time from Cam Ranh for his funeral.

          During grandpa’s funeral, I took away the incense sticks from some of the old family friends while they were paying respect to my grandfather for the last time, and I asked them to leave! The turncoats that now preoccupied themselves to badmouth our family because we were no longer what we used to be. My uncle stopped me but he did not apologize to those people. Since our place was so tiny, his images were everywhere in our minds. We decided to move.

          From Chi Lang we rent and moved into a larger and more decent flat on the Tran Hoang Quan Street in Cholon, pretty close to the Tiger Beer and the soccer stadium Cong Hoa. I believe that was in an ‘Officers’ Quarter’, owned by a major in the VN Air Force, a family friend. As time went by, we started to adjust to the new place. My uncle’s job was getting better and one day, he brought home a small refrigerator. Then a few months later he brought home a black and white TV. Even though the place was much better than Chi Lang, it was still very small for our family. However, it started to feel like a home.

          The year was 1970. Luu Thai, my closest friend from Vinh Binh caught up with me. We corresponded every now and then after my family moved to Saigon. He invited us to go back to Vinh Binh to attend his wedding. His family had chartered a plane with all his and his bride’s relatives from Saigon/Cholon. At the thought of going back there, I was so happy. I just could not wait. My uncle and I accepted the invitation. By this time, I started my first year of study in Van Hanh University. My uncle flew with me down to Vinh Binh. My mind was totally preoccupied with the excitements and the expectations to see the old friends and the old place.