ABSTRACT
The principal subject of the first half of this article is not the writer Dương Nghiễm Mậu, but the various kinds of social decay that took place in Saigon in the years following the fall of the southern republican government in 1975. This sets the stage for a depiction of the writer, one of the few who chose not to brave the ocean to escape Vietnam after the northern conquest. His literary activity, though greatly restricted, did not cease altogether. — Eric Henry.
KEYWORDS
Book-burning, revolutionaries, Fall of Saigon, Phạm Xuân Ân, reform camps
Figure 1. Nghiễm closes his eyes and smiles before a clock with drooping hands.
(Photo by Trần Cao Lĩnh).
“. . . People who harbor dissatisfactions usually resort to writing memorials to the throne. These scattered, pitiful memorials are usually ignored. There are some fellows who, having written a lot of them with no response, cast aside their robes and headdresses and return home to be civilian deputies, but are still content because they are receiving stipends from the imperial court. A few writers with a bit of self respect choose the path of withdrawal and obscurity. Because they don’t choose the path of banditry, their names are not to be found in Accounts of Marauders” (“An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải,” Dương Nghiễm Mậu, 2005).[1]
Figure 2. War correspondent Dương Nghiễm Mậu crossing the Tràng Tiền Bridge, destroyed in the Tết Mậu Thân 1968 battle; Huế, 1968. (Photo by Đinh Cường).
Bùi Giáng and the Path of Dương Nghiễm Mậu
After April 30, 1975, writers who neither escaped nor, like Dương Nghiễm Mậu, chose to remain, and who were not among the secret northern agents residing in the South, all awaited the day when they would enter captivity in the communists’ labor reform camps. During that tense and gloomy period, there was one person who with the utmost indifference went about seeking to visit his old friends in the arts. That person was none other than the poet Bùi Giáng of Conifer Leaves (Lá Hoa Cồn). This middle-aged poet was always thin and looked older than his age, his beard and hair unkempt as always. A startling apparition in the middle of Saigon, he had picked up from somewhere in the streets the uniform of a “puppet” soldier with the insignia of a full-bird colonel. Bùi Giang dared fate to swoop down on him directly, and went strutting wildly through the streets as if on military parade. This was perhaps the last beautiful image of the Vietnamese war: a new recruit volunteering to enter an army now utterly disbanded. And in his wanderings Bùi Giáng came also to the Ba Chuông (“three bells”) Church area, the section where Dương Nghiễm Mậu lived. Bùi Giáng walked obliviously into the narrow alley, festooned here and there with red flags, that led there. Alert and clear-headed, he remembered the precise place, knocked loudly on the door, and demanded to enter and see his old acquaintance. Faced with this situation, the quiet and retiring Dương Nghiễm Mậu was like a girl who finds herself on a pole. At that time, his neighbors were all still close associates. The nets cast by public security agents weren’t yet sufficient to cause trouble. After leaving Dương Nghiễm Mậu’s house, I don’t know if Bùi Giáng went to knock on other peoples’ doors, or if he went to the head of the Trương Minh Giảng Bridge and stood like a policeman directing traffic in the chaotic current of history and afterwards was struck by the “Thirty Revolutionaries”—Cách Mạng Ba Mươi—or was beaten by the security police till his face was puffy, but surely in the end he sought to return to the “queen mother” Kim Cương,[2] and sat before her door so he could wield his pen and write a poem to present to her.
Figure 3. The editorial board of Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa) before 1975 at 160 Phan Đình Phùng, Saigon. From the right: board chief Lê Ngộ Châu (d. 2006), Vũ Hạnh, Nguyễn Hiến Lê (d. 1984), Vi Huyền Đắc (d. 1976), Lê Phương Chi, and Võ Phiến. (Source: Internet).
During the week preceding April 30, 1975 members of the Mẹ Việt Nam (“Mothers of Vietnam”) Broadcasting Station, and the writers who worked with them, were offered a plan by the Americans to depart from Vietnam so as to avoid becoming objects of revenge. Before the day when they were to board a boat going to Phú Quốc Island, the writer Võ Phiến came and paid a visit to the editorial office of Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa), the “rice-pot” where he wrote Catching Children in the Green Fields, as he sat with Vũ Hạnh of Blood Pen (Bút Máu)—it was also the place to which he had been attached for eighteen years—as many years as that of the journal itself. As Lê Ngộ Châu, the editor-in-chief of Bách Khoa later related, Võ Phiến, knowing that he had to depart and, sensing that the future held no day of return, was plunged in deep sadness. He sat there weeping silently and finally left the editorial office without a word of farewell.
One day before the fall of Saigon, nearly the entire staff of the station Mothers of Vietnam—which included the families of Võ Phiến, author of Farewell (Giã Từ); Lê Tất Điếu, author of Destroying the Mountains (Phá Núi); Viên Linh, author of Metamorphosis (Hóa Thân); Túy Hồng, author of Face to Face With Myself on the Walls (Tôi Nhìn Tôi Trên Vách); and Thanh Nam, author of Small Shadow Long Road (Bóng Nhỏ Đường Dài)—were conducted from Phú Quốc Island to the large ship, Challenger, which lay ready in the ocean beyond. When Phú Quốc had faded into the distance on that occasion, Lê Tất Điều saw Võ Phiến weeping. Together with other ships of the Seventh Fleet, they floated on the eastern sea for several days in order to reach Guam. Guam had been the U.S. base for the squadrons of B52s that had gone on carpet bombing missions in the Vietnam War, which had the destructive impact of earthquakes The island of Guam had an area of only 552 square kilometers. After April 1972 it became a stopping point for hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees before they came to the United States. Vũ Khắc Khan of The Spirit of Turtle Tower (Thần Tháp Rùa), Nghiêm Xuân Hồng of Stranger from Afar Number 10 (Người Viễn Khách Thứ 10), and Mặc Đỗ of Sister Nương (Siu Cô Nương) and members of the Viewpoint (Quan Điểm) group all passed through there at various times before setting foot in American internment camps.
Before a week had passed, on April 5, 1975, Phạm Việt Châu, one of the long established authors of Bách Khoa and The Hundred Vietic States in the Fated Land (Trăm Việt Trên Vùng Định Mệnh) ended his existence in his own home when the communists had occupied all of the South. The sudden and very early death of a writer with a comprehensive vision of the history of his people and boundless creative ability, at the age of forty-three, was like a death knell foretelling many tragedies that would occur subsequently.
The Book-burning Campaign
In the days that followed April 30, 1975, two of Vũ Hạnh’s children, wearing black peasant bà ba outfits and with red bands around their arms came to the office of Bách Khoa, which was also where Lê Ngộ Châu and his wife lived. In front of people who were strangers to them, one of them, a girl, said with a proud air, “We’ve returned from Học Môn; all last night we made ambush attacks until dawn.” Unlucky villagers who happened to be on paths going through their fields that night were perhaps regarded by those youngsters as allies of the “puppet” government. The secret agents of the communists and the members of the “30 Revolutionaries”—Cách Mạng 30—were like copies of Mao’s red guards, but they appeared a decade later. These elements were the principal activists in the movement to track down and destroy all remnants of American cultural influence. They kicked and trampled on books, burned them in heaps, and even visited destruction on whole personal libraries. The books were ones that most of them had never read, including whole cabinet-fulls of books devoted to moral instruction. Books by members of “cultural commando squads” (biệt kích văn nghệ) were displayed in galleries devoted to “crimes of the American puppets” along with weapons and tiger cages. Naturally these books included works by Dương Nghiễm Mậu and even this author’s Green Belt.
I am moved by a line in Nguyễn Du’s poem, “Reading Xiao Qing’s Story,” that goes “Her luckless writing turned to ashes” (Văn chương vô mệnh lụy phần dư 文章無命累焚餘). More than two thousand years after the event, no one has forgotten the burning of books and burial of scholars (phần thư khanh nho焚書坑儒) of Qín Shǐ Huáng. But who knows if, after a hundred years, anyone in future generations will retain a memory of “There Was a Time of That Sort” (“Đã Có Một Thời Như Thế”)—the name of an article by Nhật Tiến about that stage in Vietnamese communist history when the regime burned books and imprisoned a whole generation of writers in the South?
1975: Phạm Xuân Ẩn and the Givral Restaurant
Before 1975, La Pagode, Brodard, and Givral were all places where I, Phạm Đình Vy (the publisher of the journal Compassion [Tình Thương]), and my medical friends had occasion now and then to frequent even after we had graduated from school. Givral was also a meeting place for journalists, such as Phạm Xuân Ẩn, Cao Giao, Nguyễn Tú, and Như Phong (Lê Văn Tiến). . . Phạm Xuân Ẩn was a former classmate of the writer Sơn Nam—they had been in middle school together in Cần Thơ. He was a southerner whose manner appeared rustic and simple. Throughout the Vietnam War Phạm Xuân Ẩn was known only as a correspondent for Reuters, after which he crossed over to The Times, which was in the Continental on the other side of the road. One also cannot neglect to mention the Caravelle Hotel, near the old parliament building, a gathering place for many foreign correspondents, and the location also of the offices of many news agencies and American broadcasting stations, such as ABC, NBC, and CBS. . . It was Morley Safer during during a CBS Evening News Broadcast on August 5, 1965 who showed a film of U.S. Marines who, as part of a broader operation, drove a group of people out of their village and then used Zippo lighters to burn down their homes, scenes that shook the White House and all of the United States like a deep scar in a war that had begun to be devoid of human principles. Seven years later, Nick Ut, an Associated Press war correspondent, took the photo “Napalm Girl,” in a skirmish that occurred in Trảng Bàng near Tây Ninh, on June 8, 1972. That was when the U.S. Congress cut off all further aid to South Vietnam.
Figure 4. From left: Cao Giao of Newsweek, Phạm Xuân Ẩn of The Times, Robert Shaplen of The New Yorker, Nguyễn Hữu Vượng of Newsweek, and Nguyễn Tú of Chính Luận. (Photo by Richard Avedon, Continental Hotel Saigon, April 17, 1971;
The Spy Who Loved Us, Thomas A. Bass).
Throughout the Vietnam war, this team of hardy journalists had the ability to determine the direction of public opinion through their reports of ugly events in particular places. This was sufficient to dampen the spirits of the American people, along with all the marines who came carrying weapons from halfway around the world. The traditions of the United States were a cause, not slight, though indirect, of the loss of the Free South, which was also the first lost war in American military history. And then that entire flock of journalists were able to escape scot-free before Saigon changed masters.
And then in the first days of May, Givral came to be a meeting ground for friends who were stuck behind; they came there to learn who had remained and who had left and were agog to hear other news. Looking across the tables in the large, clear mirrors on the wall, I happened to see, and then meet with, Phạm Xuân Ẩn. Ẩn had previously come to pay a visit to the editorial offices of the student newspaper, Medicine and Compassion (Y Khoa Tình Thương), on Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm Street. The wife and children of Phạm Xuân Ẩn had been provided by The Times with means to escape the country several days before that, but Ẩn had remained. Looking a bit surprised and concerned, he said to me, “Vinh, why haven’t you left?”At the time this seemed merely a social pleasantry. It was only some time after that, when living within the barbed-wire realm of reducation camps, that I penetrated the meaning of Ẩn’s question. It was a warning to be on my guard against the passage of years and months in confinement, a policy that Ẩn was quite clear about. On the surface he was a journalist working for The Times, an American newspaper, whereas he had actually been working for many years as a military espionage agent for the Hanoi communists. Later on, Phạm Xuân Ẩn himself confessed to Morley Safer on the CBS program 60 Minutes that when Saigon fell, it was not at all easy to persuade the “30 soldiers of the Revolution” armed with AK 47s that he was a colonel in their army, and not a member of the CIA. “They could have killed me,” he said, “and barbecued my dog” (Flashback, Vietnam Revisited 1989, The Spy in Winter).
1975: The Fall of Saigon
On April 30, communist troops entered the city. At noon the government of the Southern Republic, issued an order to surrender. Showers of white confetti rained down from the upper stories of many city buildings—they were the shredded remains of military and official documents that had to be destroyed.
And then, not long afterward, the noise of metal treads resounded as T54 tanks carrying liberation flags rolled down Trần Hưng Đạo Street toward the center of Saigon.
1980: Better Not Come for a Visit
Three years after getting out of prison, I returned to a Saigon that had changed. If there was anything that still seemed familiar, it was a few friends, but few of them remained. The following vignette concerns one of the old acquaintances whom I first thought of visiting. He was a college professor who had graduated from a school in the United States and then returned to Vietnam at the end of the 1960s. He was full of ideals, and had big dreams about a social revolution. According to him, social justice would be the ultimate solution to a horrible war in which both sides, North and South, were stymied. I had met him in the United States and also, in subsequent years, in Vietnam. The quick collapse of the South was to him like “a shattered dream.” Though he had not been forced to endure years and months of imprisonment, his family’s circumstances, like those of the south in general, were clearly difficult. Bit by bit, he had sold his precious dictionaries, then high-priced items, to students from the north hungry for books. After that came paintings and pieces of sculpture, and finally there remained a large cabinet full of social science books that he had brought back from the United States. Those books were now without monetary value. He could do nothing with them but have them weighed and sold as pulp. And his wife, too, who was a teacher, had to sit in the marketplace trying to eke out a living. It was hard for him to endure the pain and shame this caused him.
When I met him, his face still bore the traits of an intellectual, and he welcomed me as he had always done, but there were clearly signs of anxiety in his eyes. His air was cordial, but he did not let this cordiality get out of hand, and looked apprehensively at the door as he spoke: “I’m glad to learn that you got out of prison, but I must also ask you not to come visiting.” The frank directness with which he spoke was like a bucket of cold water, but I understood his situation and was very sorry for him. His wife’s family in the United States were going through procedures that would allow them to sponsor him as an immigrant, and they thought that having a connection with a soldier of the “puppet” government and an internee in a labor reform camp might hinder the hoped-for journey of my friend to the shores of freedom. He was acting according to circumstances; I had no inclination to judge him and still regarded him with respect, and if I should at some point meet him again, it will surely be on a different continent. Quite soon, in the South a network of eyes and ears had grown up among the people and among the public security agents, a network comprehensive enough to create suspicion and fear.
Аfter I left his house, I felt a rush of joy when I ran into my close friend Nghiêu Đề. Nghiêu Đề informed me that he had just met Star Over Jungle (Sao Trên Rừng: Nguyễn Đức Sơn, an eccentric poet) coming down on a motorcycle from Đà Lạt, and was astonished to see him for the first time wearing a business suit with a tie. When Nghiêu Đề asked him the reason for this, Sơn laughed scornfully and said, “This is the only way I can avoid being confused with those people.”
1980: Trần Phong Giao Sitting Out in the Market
Trần Phong Giao was muscular in appearance, and had the dark skin of someone who worked outside under the sun, rather than with words in an office. He was well known as the secretary of the editorial board of the journal, Literаture (Văn), during the eight years from 1963 to 1971, a publication that enjoyed a special position in the literary life of the south due to its discoveries of new writers who went on to develop commanding reputations. After Literature, he tried his hand at many other jobs, all within the domain of journalism and publishing, and then became a librarian, but didn’t leave as many marks of his activities as he had in Literаture.
Not long after April 30, both he and his wife had to seek their living in the marketplace with a three-wheeled vehicle parked on Lê Thánh Tôn Street, where they stood selling bundles of firewood and clumps of bananas or bunches of fresh vegetables in order to feed their children. I went to visit him as soon as I got out of prison. He was still living in an alley near Kiệu Bridge, next to Tân Định District. He had become much thinner, and his legs were very weak, and his gait was unsteady. His only possession that had any value was a cabinet full of books in which the most treasured item was a complete set of Literature bound in leather—something he had created himself—but he wasn’t able to keep it. In order to have money for rice and medicine, he had to sell it to a Vietnamese from overseas (a Việt kiều) to bring back to the United States. Trần Phong Giao died in poverty and illness in 2005, though he did manage to live to a great age.
1981: And Frugal Family Meals
Nghiễm’s house was in an alley; it was narrow in front but went back fairly far. He was wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. His eyes were lively; he seemed always to be smiling at something, and gave the impression of being younger than someone born in 1936.
Though I lived close to Chợ Cũ (“Old Market”), a place full of sidewalk stalls and restaurants, very convenient for casual snacking, I would often stop by his house after my day’s work rather than returning home, and let Trang, Nghiễm’s wife add a pair of chopsticks to the table so I could partake of dishes which, though plain, were delicious because they were imbued with the happiness of their home. During our imprisonment, Nghiễm and I had grown accustomed to meals that left you hungry day and night. After getting out, meals were enough to take the edge off one’s hunger even if they consisted only of vegetables and beans. For adults, such inadequacies didn’t matter, but for young children still in the phase of “rapid eating and rapid growing,” such meals had to be regarded as nutritionally inadequate. If it was not a day when I had to go out late, I would always stop by the market and purchase something to eat and bring it to Nghiễm’s to add to the platter. With an added meat dish and a bit of something salty, those days, with their two children at the table, were like parties. When we met, Nghiễm and I didn’t talk much. It seemed that the things Nghiễm was writing here and there, didn’t have to be brought into conversation for us to understand each other. Only Trang, Nghiễm’s wife, after an exhausting day of teaching, would enliven us with amusing accounts of things that happened in her day. The South was still rich in natural resources—the only hindrance to ordinary living was the regime’s policy of imposing poverty and controlling each stomach through the imposition of food rationing
1982: Dương Nghiễm Mậu and a Different Thanh Tâm Tuyền
I met Thanh Tâm Tuyền at the time of Saigon’s downfall (April 30, 1975) in a small house in Gia Định. His wife had just given birth to their youngest child in the chaotic circumstances that prevailed in the Nguyễn Văn Học Hospital. A Different Sunday (Một Chủ Nhật Khác), his last novel from “a time to love and a time to die,” had just then been printed but had not yet been distributed. When I left prison in 1982, I met the Thanh Tâm Tuyền of Fire Kitchen (Bếp Lửa). He was the same age as Dương Nghiễm Mậu, but he seemed much older. He had the blackened complexion of a man who had suffered chronic malaria (sốt rét kinh niên). It was hard to imagine how such a thin, frail man had survived seven years of imprisonment in which he suffered hunger and cold every day in the mountain camps of the North. Throughout seven years of cutting bamboo and chipping wood in the mountains, his legs stabbed by bamboo, and with no operating rooms or medicines, he still survived. To resist the cold in prison, he took up the habit of smoking water pipes (hút thuốc lào). Though without pen or paper, he still made poems, depending on his memory alone, but returned to traditional verse forms when he did so. Poems Somewhere Far Away (Thơ ở Đâu Xa) was his last collection of poems made in prison. He published them in the United States in 1990.
In 1993, in a rare interview, Thanh Tâm Tuyền explained the evolution of style that had taken place in his writing: “Faire de la poésie dans un camp de redressement, c’est aussi retourner à la poésie de tradition Populaire” (Making poetry in a labor reform camp was also a return to the traditional verse forms of our people). (From Lê Hữu Khóa, “Thanh Tâm Tuyền: La poésie entre la guere et le Camp,” Publications de l’Université de Provence, France).
In a very private setting he recalled that Thái Thanh, with whom he was friends, had ceased completely to perform as a singer after 1975. Hearing that Thanh Tâm Tuyền had just gotten out of prison, she paid him a visit, taking a guitar with her, and sang the poems of his that had been turned into song lyrics: “Pink Night” (“Đêm Màu Hồng”), “Half My Soul in Pain,” (“Nửa Hồn Thương Đau”), “Fresh Tears from the Rock” (“Lệ Đá Xanh”). . . though his heart was warmed by this meeting with an old friend, his sensibilities were not sufficiently intact to be receptive to those sounds of former times. He said “no” to many people who wanted to meet him and maintained the same attitude after emigrating to the United States. That reserve of his stirred the writer Mai Thảo once or twice to anger.
Then there was another meeting between us at the end of 1982. Dương Nghiễm Mậu, Doãn Quốc Sỹ, Thanh Tâm Tuyền, and I walked from Nghiễm’s house to a little sidewalk bar on Trương Minh Giảng Street in Saigon near the railroad. What Nghiễm wanted to drink was always a bottle of beer. One of us happened to mention Tô Thùy Yên, author of A Journey to the Spratly Islands (Trường Sa Hành)—he was still in prison. Nobody dwelt on Yên’s current miseries; instead, the conversation turned to luckier friends in distant regions. We recalled a few people who had gotten away before 1975: Thanh Nam–Tuy Hồng, Vũ Khắc Khoan, Mặc Đỗ, Võ Phiến, Lê Tất Điều, and Viên Linh . . . and then the name of Mai Thảo, author of “The Last Testament on a Peak Near Heaven” (“Bản Chúc Thư Trên Ngọn Đỉnh Trời”) came up like a point where all these matters converged. He was a unique example of a writer who eluded the efforts of the communists to hunt him down during his two years of hiding in Saigon. Even so, many people had taken risks to shield him. Trần Dạ Từ, author of Confiding My Love in the Night (Tỏ Tình Trong Đêm), together with many other writers and journalists, was in prison. Nhã Ca, author of Spread the Mourning Headband for Huế (Giải Khăn Sô cho Huế) got out of prison early, and had to care for a swarm of little children—but she and they had to keep “uncle” Mai Thảo hidden in their house, a multi-story structure on a corner of Tự Do Street. This was the last hiding place of Mai Thảo until he managed to escape, relatively early, on a boat that took him across the ocean to Pulau Besar in Malaysia.
In 1979, two years after Mai Thảo’s escape, one must speak of another mortally risky ocean journey of eighty-one boat people that included Nhật Tiến, author of The One Who Pulled the Curtain (Người Kéo Màn), and Từ Mẫn (Võ Thăng Tiết), publisher of Bamboo Leaves (Lá Bối), and the married journalist-pair Dương Phục–Vũ Thanh Thủy. . . This group met with disaster when they were attacked by Thái sea pirates on Koh Kra Island, an event that became known to the public quite early through the testimony of Nhật Tiến, and which began to disturb the conscience of the world. This was the starting point of the later Movement to Rescue the Boat People.
After our meeting at Nghiễm’s house, Thanh Tâm Tuyền began preparing to emigrate to the United States in accordance with the provisions of the “Humanitarian Operation,” though his heart’s inclination (tâm thái—his own expression) lay entirely with his homeland, which he didn’t wish to leave for a distant place. As for Doãn Quốc Sỹ, author of Three Lives of Fire and Incense (Ba Sinh Hương Lửa), he would be imprisoned for a total of fourteen years before he emigrated in 1995 and met Mai Thảo in Orange County.
Figure 5. Doãn Quốc Sỹ and Thanh Tâm Tuyền in front of Saigon’s Cathedral
of the Virgin Mary, 1985.
1982: Dương Nghiễm Mâu (1936–2016); Biographical Data
Dương Nghiễm Mậu’s real name was Phí Ích Nghiễm. He was born in 1936, the same year as Thanh Tâm Tuyền and Thảo Trường.[3] He attended the Hàng Than elementary school, and then went to the Chu Văn An Мiddle school in Hanoi. I also attended those two schools, but Nghiễm was five years older than I was. Probably it was because he was several grades ahead of me that we did not meet. He emigrated to the South in 1954, and from 1957 on wrote many occasional essays, articles, short stories, and novels for Creation (Sáng Tạo), Twentieth Century (Thế kỷ 20), Cyclopedia (Bách Khoa), Intersection (Giao Điểm), and Writings on Politics (Chính Văn). For a short time he was active in the group Long Range Future Prospects (Đàm Trường Viễn Kiến) of Nguyễn Đức Quỳnh, author of Who Has Crossed the Bridge (Ai Có Qua Cầu). Starting in 1962, he worked for the journal, The Arts (Văn Nghệ), with Lý Hoàng Phong, the elder brother of the poet Quách Thoại. His first short story collection was I Must Be Resigned (Cũng Đành), published by The Arts in 1963. His first novel, My Mother’s Legacy (Gia Tài Của Mẹ), won the National Prize for Literature in 1966. He entered the armed services in 1966 with the rank of “Assimilation Corporal” (hạ sĩ đồng hóa), and worked from then until 1975 as a war correspondent. He was arrested after 1975 and released from prison in 1977, after which he did lacquer work for a living. Dương Nghiễm Mậu died suddenly of a heart attack on August 2, 2016, at the age of eighty.
2006: Rainstorms in Saigon
If one wants to reach the Ba Chuông Church area from a small hotel near Tự Do Street, going on foot is too long a hike, and taxis get caught in traffic, so I chose a Honda motorcycle taxi, but could not avoid seizures of panic because its operator was too reckless; he snaked along at high speed, went against the direction of traffic, and even leapt on to a sidewalk full of pedestrians because he thought it was safer than following the rules of the road. I had no scrap of paper with the address written on it, but I have a nearly photographic memory, so I thought I would be able to find my way to Dương Nghiễm Mậu’s house, which still lay in the same narrow alley, though we had not met for many years. The house had been rebuilt and was taller by another story. Nghiễm was now a lacquerwork artist, and his wife Trang still taught English at Marie Curie. His two sons had graduated from college and gone to work. The whole family had worked with all their might to be able to live as they now did.
Figure 6. A number of the published works of Dương Nghiễm Mậu.
(Phan Nguyên, personal archives).
Figure 7. Dương Nghiễm Mậu in Saigon in 1997 in a photo given to Võ Phiến by Thế Uyên. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).
When a Writer becomes a Patient
After many years I met Nghiễm again in September 2006, when he had attained a great age. Thanh Tâm Tuyền had just died six months earlier (March 2006). Như Phong, author of Smoke and Waves, had been dead for five years, since December, 2001. Mai Thảo, the poet of We See Our Images: So Many Shrines, had died eight years earlier (January 1998) in the same year as Nghiêu Đề, author of A Hundred-year Head of Hair (Ngọn Tóc Trăm Năm). They were all Vietnamese artists who had chosen freedom, and thus had to live in exile and be buried far from their homeland.
Nghiễm had just suffered an accident at the age of seventy. While walking on the sidewalk he had been hit by a motorcycle, no doubt a motorcycle taxi, that surged up and hit him, breaking his anklebone. It had to be operated on, and he wore a cast for two weeks, after which, since his ankle was still swollen and painful, he had to go about on crutches. Nghiễm was good at putting up with such things, and never complained about the pain, but his symptoms worried me. I felt he needed to be examined again, so as to obtain a second opinion. I thought of a medical colleague of mine, a specialist in posture who taught medicine. His friends called him “the man with gold hands,” due to his success in operating on people with muskuloskeletal injuries. He had an office where he worked after hours, and I suggested to Nghiễm that he go there for a consultation. Nghiễm was a bit reluctant, but finally went because he felt he couldn’t refuse a friend.
I had no address, but I knew that the office of Doctor Võ Thành Phụng was on Lê Văn Duyệt Street, opposite from the former headquarters of the General Labor Confederation. With a broken ankle that was still swollen and painful, getting in and out of a taxi wasn’t easy for Nghiễm. A tropical rainstorm continued to pelt down on us from the time we left his house to the time when he was able to step into the doctor’s office. On meeting Võ Thành Phụng’s wife, and finding that she knew that the patient was Dương Nghiễm Mậu, I found that I had little further role to play. She had been a reader for many years and was very familiar with the writings of Dương Nghiễm Mậu from the pages of such journals as Literature, The Arts, and Creation that she had read years ago, not to mention Nghiễm’s many books. The office was filled with clients, due to the arrangements she had made. Nghiễm was the first patient to receive the special favor of an early consultation. Dr. Phụng and I studied some x-ray films clearly showing that the break had not yet healed, but that the bones were not much displaced, so a second operation would not be necessary; we would need only to protect the ankle. Busy as he was with professional matters, Dr. Phụng was perhaps not a reader of Dương Nghiễm Mậu the way his wife was, but Nghiễm naturally became a special patient there that day. It had not yet stopped raining as we returned home in the taxi. I joked with Nghiễm that in my life as a writer, I had never had the good fortune to meet a female reader so in love with literature and so pleased with my work. Never a demonstrative man, Nghiễm responded only with a gentle smile.
An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải
Before 1975, on reading “Jīng Kē with the Tyrant on the Treacherous Soil of Qín,”[4] I saw that the stories of Nghiễm Mậu involved carefully selected situations that were highly symbolic and filled with hidden meanings. In writing about ancient events, he was speaking of the present day. After crossing the River Yì, Jīng Kē was able to make his way into the ruler’s court. When he placed his dagger on the neck of the Qín king, the king, instead of trembling, raised his face and laughed, upon which Jīng Kē suddenly saw everything clearly: if he killed the tyrant, then another would take his place . . . and the image of Jīng Kē creeping back out of the palace was an image of unlimited pain—like a harbinger of injustice in the present day.
Nghiễm’s “Unofficial Account of Từ Hải” was written about ten years after 1975 (Gia Định, 2005). Từ Hải was a character whom Nghiễm was much inclined to cherish. Phí Ích Bành (Nghiễm’s younger brother) gave me a sealed envelope with sixteen pages that bore words and lines in his handwriting. I read those pages at once, and saw in that “Unofficial Account of Từ Hải,” that this man, who was half a hero and half a bandit, was quite different from the character in the “official” account who chose the path of official stipends and immurement in a court.
Figure 8. Dương Nghiễm Mậu with a broken ankle, sitting and smiling in front of his bookshelves, his arms resting on a walker. (Photo by Ngô Thế Vinh, September 2006).
Here is an excerpt from “An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải” that deals with social issues:
One day, Master Kǒng was riding along a road in a carriage when he saw an old man who approached and greeted him. Kǒngzǐ had the driver halt the carriage, upon which it was immediately surrounded by a crowd of thin, ragged children. The old man said, “I’ve heard that you know a lot of words, so I’ve come to beg you for a few.” Kǒngzǐ at once opened a wooden chest, took out a book, and handed it to the man. The old man grasped the book, gazed at it a bit, then turned over some pages, looking up and down at them. Then he closed the book and returned it to Kǒngzǐ, saying, “I don’t know how to use this for anything.” There was a volley of crude laughter from a man who was naked except for a codpiece, who said, “These books have no value for people with no food to eat and don’t know how to read. Go down into the rice fields, sir, plough the soil, and take some rice to give them—that would be more useful.” The story went only that far—so I don’t know what Kǒngzǐ did.
Figure 9. “An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải” with a handwritten inscription by Dương Nghiễm Mậu. (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).
In “An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải,” Dương Nghiễm Mậu also wrote about the world of literary officials:
In Accounts of Marauders, the people who rise up and turn into bandits are usually boatmen, farmers, herdsmen, or woodsmen; one never encounters anyone who gained the highest prize in the examinations. Not a single bandit writes prose poems or has been any sort of government official or teacher before becoming a bandit. In other books, one reads that people who harbor dissatisfactions usually resort to writing memorials to the throne. Sometimes they demand that corrupt officials be executed, sometimes they denounce high taxes that lead to the starvation of poor farmers, and sometimes they protest the executions of honest people. . . but these scattered, pitiful memorials are usually ignored. There are some fellows who, having written a lot with no response, cast aside their robes and headdresses and return home to be civilian deputies, but are still content because they are receiving stipends from the imperial court. A few writers with a bit of self respect choose the path of withdrawal and obscurity. Because they don’t choose the path of banditry, their names are not to be found in Accounts of Marauders.
Dương Nghiễn Mậu adds a few concluding words: “The pages that have been written about these figures by the ancients sometimes give rise to doubts. . . many books record that Từ Hải died on the battlefield amid a hail of arrows—a hero must have a heroic death. In ‘An Unofficial Account of Từ Hải,’ he dies at the end, but not in the midst of a battle; he dies a different sort of death.”
Then, passing from the ancient story to modern times, he writes: “Many books create heroes, such as people who turn themselves into living torches, or stuff themselves into the muzzles of cannons, or embrace bombs and hurl themselves into an enemy horde and die. Such heroes, though seen in books, are never traceable elsewhere.”
It seems we should add here that the house that Nghiễm and his family lived in was not far from the Nguyễn Văn Trỗi Bridge on Công Lý Street during the anti-U.S. war, so one cannot neglect to mention the case of Lê Văn Tám who used gasoline to turn himself into a living torch in Thị Nghè in 1945 during the Resistance War against the French. Trần Huy Liệu, the head of the Information Bureau of the “people’s” Democratic Republic of Vietnam, determined that this man was a propagandistic creation who had never existed in reality.
Thirty-two years after 1975, at the instigation of the poet Nguyễn Quốc Thái,[5] the Phương Nam Company republished four short story collections of Dương Nghiễm Mậu: A Pair of Eyes in Heaven (Đôi Mắt Trên Trời), I Must Be Resigned to It (Cũng Đành), Good Looks (Nhan Sắc), The Sound of the Youngest Child’s Flute (Tiếng Sáo Người Em Út), and the novel Nguyệt in the Mango Grove (Nguyệt Đồng Xoài) by Lê Xuyên. Immediately afterward, Vũ Hạnh, who was past eighty, like an old butcher who could not lay aside his cleaver, wrote an article in which he attacked Dương Nghiễn Mậu and Lê Xuyên, and poured blame on the Phương Nam Company.
Vũ Hạnh wrote, “The books of Dương Nghiễm Mậu are pervaded by a reactionary spirit that will push the young into opposition to the revolution, and resistance to the duty to liberate the country from the domination of the invading imperialists, and as for the books of Lê Xuyên, they are degenerate.” Continuing, he wrote, “For this reason there is much indignation and rage among readers when they see that Phương Nam is printing and distributing the books of Dương Nghiễm Mậu. . . To take these poisonous weapons out, refresh them with new paint, and then hawk them in the market, is a serious offense to the honor of the country.” And finally he added, “The authors Dương Nghiễm Mậu and Lê Xuyên are again living in the city and are being fairly treated; they have not met with any harassment at all.”
It seems I should also record here that before 1975 many groups of writers, not devoid of compassion, had more than once signed petitions urging that Vũ Hạnh be pardoned. Vũ Hạnh was also shielded by the Vietnamese PEN Club. When he was given a prison sentence, the priest Thanh Lăng himself, the chairman of the association, stepped forth to protect him. But Vũ Hạnh neverthless continued to carry on his anti-government activities in public.
After 1975, many writers and journalists of the South died of mistreatment in prison, such as Hiếu Chân (Nguyễn Hoạt), Hoàng Vĩnh Lộc, Nguyễn Mạnh Côn, Phạm Văn Sơn, Trần Văn Tuyên, Trần Việt Sơn, Vũ Ngọc Các, Anh Tuấn (Nguyễn Tuấn Phát), and Dương Hùng Cường. . . or died soon after release from prison, like Hồ Hữu Tường and Vũ Hoàng Chương. The ones who survived all had to put aside their pens: Dương Nghiễm Mậu had do lacquerwork, and Lê Xuyên had to sit on the street selling cigarettes. Trần Lê Nguyễn, author of The Storm of the Era (Bão Thời Đại), had to stand selling newspapers to get through the days, Nguyễn Mộng Giác, author of One Way Street (Đường Một Chiều), had to work as a food-processing worker in a noodle factory, and Trần Hoài Thư, author of The Pensive Blade of Grass (Ngọn Cỏ Ngậm Ngùi) had to turn to a livelihood mirrored in the title of his book, Itinerant Ice Cream Vendor (Người Bán Cà Rem Dạo).
Nghiễm was a good-hearted person; if anyone mentioned the Vũ Hạnh incident to him, he would just laugh, and maintain a tolerant tone. He believed that the world had more good people than ones who were ill-disposed, and that the ones who were ill-disposed would come to see their own errors. Nghiễm was excessively optimistic. That he had been plunged in misery for more than forty years was due to the actions of such “ill-disposed” people—so now that he was “close to the earth and far from heaven,” why had they not seen their error, why had they not repented? A person well acquainted with Vũ Hạnh observed that, “his fierceness was like a protective screen—a sort of raison d’être, a proof of the existence of Vũ Hạnh as a communist person.”
An article, “Vũ Hạnh in the Old Days” (“Ngày Xưa Vũ Hạnh”) says that, “though a concealed communist living in the region, he none the less lived elegantly and was treated with the respect due to a writer. He now lives among the victors, swaggers about obliviously, and makes the fiercest noises in the Committee for the Evaluation of the Literature of the South in the National Library. His writing is a stream of clichés, of slogans thrown out with no thought, such as ‘the author is a puppet through and through, the content of his work shows him to be a reactionary, degenerate slave’” (Lý Đợi, Talawas, May 10, 2007), Vũ Hạnh These Days (Vũ Hạnh Ngày Nay, the name of a set of books by Huy Đức).
Vũ Hạnh is just about as old as Võ Phiến and will soon step into his nineties, and still uses such expressions as “our party, the boat which, being oared along, carries the true doctrine,” and he continues to pursue even the democratically-inclined younger writers. A typical example is the article he wrote criticizing Nhã Thuyên and his group “Speak Out” (Nhóm Mở Miệng) with its well known spokesmen Lý Đợi and Bùi Chát (“What Can One See in a Masterful Dissertation with Fallacious Arguments” [“Thấy Gì Từ Một Luận Văn Sai Lạc,” The Arts no. 29, 2013]).
Perhaps the tragedy of Vũ Hạnh is like that of the altered communists who stepped into the twenty-first century exemplifying bad faith—living with two faces. They keep on shouting slogans and beating war drums for things in which they have not the slightest remaining belief. Vũ Hạnh never stopped uttering harsh criticisms of the United States, but he nevertheless sent his children there to study, and then, when they grew up, to reside. And Vũ Hạnh continued to go back and forth to the United States with no restraint whatsoever.
Figure 10. Left: Dương Nghiễm Mậu. (Photo by Phan Nguyên, Saigon, 2011); right: Từ Hải and His Life Adventures, an iron pen drawing by Nguyễn Trung based on a painting by Dương Nghiễm Mậu. (Photo by Phí Từ Việt).
To return to Nghiễm, many people still think that, aside from being imprisoned, and having to do lacquer work for a living, Dương Nghiễm Mậu ceased writing. This is perhaps not correct. Nghiễm had no new books published within the country throughout a period of forty years after 1975. But, as far as I know, he continued writing, and among his writings is “A Personal Account of Nguyễn Du,” (Tự Truyện Nguyễn Du) which is evidently a large work. I believe he completed it in every detail.
California Rain, Saigon Rain
California is still in drought, but perhaps there are downpours with enough drops to remind one of the rains in Saigon. I remember the day I went to visit a friend on one of those rainy afternoons, with many sections of flooded streets.
It is a happiness—distant, but still a happiness— to have a friend like Nghiễm, who, wherever he may be, and whatever upheavals may be occurring around him, is still the familiar Dương Nghiễm Mậu with that book Good Looks (Nhan Sắc), consistent and reliable as he has always been, and endowed with the courage to say “no.” My impression of Nghiễm is that he lived in the mainstream of the literary life of the South, from very early in its history until 1975, and throughout the forty years that have since passed he has been right in his homeland, rising and descending with the fate of his country. He has been a quite reliable witness throughout that period, and everyone believes the things he writes.
Concluding Words
My first intention was to write an article about my old and valued friend Dương Nghiễm Mậu, including his pilgrimage of forty years subsequent to the fall of the South. I had scarcely written seven thousand words when a series of recollections, like black and white movie clips, came unbidden into my mind, some of a public, and some of a very private, nature stirred into life by what I was writing.
So, forty years have elapsed between 1975 and 2015—in the life of a human being, no more than a passing breeze, and only a blink in the eyes of history, but it has also been a long, tortuous road filled with upheavals. In another eyeblink, the generation of people who authored books in the period 1954 to 1975 will disappear, as they all, without exception, return to dust. Some of them may evoke certain memories in me due to what they wrote, but they must also recount their lives of suffering, and the incessant deaths that occurred among them. As for the literature of the South we must not fail to produce a “white book,” a livre blanc, a repository of memories for future generations of Vietnamese.
Figure 11. The writer Trần Hoài Thư sitting and stitching together legacies in the Bản Thảo Library. (Photo by THT from a video taken with an iPhone).
With regard to restoring the legacy of the Literature of the South, we must not fail to mention one name: Trần Hoài Thư of the Manuscripts in Thư’s Library (Thư Quán Bản Thảo). He has had the courage and persistence through many years to devote himself to restoring works of that period that were hunted down and destroyed.
It is not too early to record the facts of an actual historical period, different from the fake versions that the communists have produced and are still producing, before history turns a page and we enter a new era.
Dương Nghiễm Mậu Has Left Us
Nguyên Khai was the first person to announce the news: Dương Nghiễm Mậu suddenly passed away at 9:30 P.M. on Tuesday, August 2, 2016 in Saigon, perhaps due to a heart attack. He was eighty when he died. I at once emailed letters of condolence to his wife, Hồ Thị Ngọc Trang, and his two children, Phí Từ Việt and Phí Từ Việt Hà.
Situated abroad as I was, I responded to a request from Đinh Quang Anh Thái to act as a representative for Dương Nghiễm Mậu’s circle of friends by writing a few lines for publication in the newspaper, Người Việt
The writer Dương Nghiễm Mậu suddenly passed away, to the great regret of all his loving friends. He was not only a commanding figure in the world of Vietnamese literature, but also a person of great moral authority, as may be seen in the consistency of his work and actions in every situation that life exposed him to till the day of his death. ‘What falls to earth is the earthly ghost; the brightness is what remains.’ Farewell my friend.
A remaining matter that much concerned me was the legacy of Dương Nghiễm Mậu, which included A Personal Account of Nguyễn Du, a work that preoccupied him for a long time. I, at once, phoned Phí Ích Bành, a younger brother of Dương Nghiễm Mậu who is currently a journalist in southern California. He reassured me right away: “Don’t worry, Vinh, the family is aware of this and is very concerned to do the right thing.”
My hope, then, is that A Personal Account of Nguyễn Du, a major work, and all the remaining parts of the legacy of Dương Nghiễm Mậu, shall one by one be published, first in southern California and then elsewhere. That is an important component of the literature of Vietnam in the present era.
- Saigon 1975 – California 2015.
[1] Từ Hải is the name of a character in The Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du (1766–1820) a narrative poem known to all Vietnamese. In the poem Từ Hải, a warlord, is depicted as a gallant, swashbuckling hero.
[2] Kim Cương was a famous stage actress.
[3] Thảo Trường (1936–2010); real name Trần Duy Hinh; born in Nam Định; imprisoned in labor reform camps for 17 years after 1975; emigrated to the United States in 1993.
[4] This title refers to a famous story about an attempt made by the daredevil Jīng Kē to assassinate Qín Shǐ Huángdì shortly before the latter conquered all of China and founded the Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE).
[5] Nguyễn Quốc Thái was the person who introduced the songwriter, Phạm Duy, to the Phương Nam company. This company made it possible for Phạm Duy to return to Vietnam from his exile in the United States by building a house for him in - Saigon.
