TADIOTO

I wrote this for a Ha Noi magazine, back in April and May of this year.   It was part of a series called “Confessions of an Accidental Modern Vietnamese  Nomad.”   Or some such pretentious title.  Here goes:

What happened to April?  I mean, I hadn’t even thought of a good trick for you for April fool’s.  Zip, it was gone.  Now it’s May.  Joke’s on me.

Actually, April fool’s is a time for mourning.   I was thinking of Trinh Cong Son, Viet Nam’s most well-known composer.  Born in Hue in 1939, he died in Saigon on April 1^st, 2001.  Thousands lined the streets for his funeral.

Trinh Cong Son continues to touch millions decades after he penned countless love ballads.  He also woke millions in the 1960s and 1970s to the horror of war – he was even accused of making people fall asleep, tuning out, turning off, because he described the destruction of war in his songs with such a direct and deft touch.

Bodies afloat on rivers,

Drying on the fields,

Lying on the city’s roofs,

Under temple eaves,

On deserted porches, in the cold rain:

Next to the old and frail

There are those still innocent.

Which of these is my little one,

In these graves

By the beds of corn and potato?*

They say Trinh Cong Son took all the suffering of the people in the entire country and put it inside him.

I see a touch of remorse in the moment of separation

I see the faces of the loveless:

some lives remain naïve, others,

on the path of love, arrive at their goal.

Wonder how in the heart there’s still trust

in these dying words.**

Trinh Cong Son’s songs tore me apart.  And yet, like all of my friends, all the people I knew in my youth, I carried them in my head like a monk’s mantra.  As an adult I travel with his tapes and recordings, and no matter where I am he takes me back to Viet Nam.  For many years, and still today, I am translating the lines that become sentimental and corny in English, but his songs are universal enough, or maybe people can relate to the despair in his words.

Neither foolish nor blind, I’ve exhausted all words of joy.

I hear sighs underneath the winds of fall and winter

And regrets quietly drifting away.

There were tears when we kissed,

Canyons where we buried our first love,

Such heavy steps for so modest a fate.

Cups of wine wait at the bar in night’s darkness,

Friends are pale like the sick,

Laughter and sobs, vast.**

April is also a terrible sadness – it marks when I and thousands of Vietnamese left home after the Viet Nam war.  We’ve lived with it for nearly forty years.  And here’s a confession: I’ve made a living off that war.  I’ve written countless essays on the topic, been on numerous TV and radio programs, got quoted in many newspapers, all about the war.  I’ve been involved in writing books and movie scripts.  I’ve been paid well enough, by publishers and school programs and libraries and magazines.  They wanted war.

In all these years as we Vietnamese live with family separation, with memories of those who died during the war, with traces of trauma that affected our lives abroad, we did all we could to remind people that Viet Nam is not a war.

For people outside, the words Viet Nam simply mean a war, a metaphor for bad decisions, for bad American foreign policies.  We kept saying Viet Nam is a nation, a culture, a people, laughter as well as sadness.

Still, every April, we Vietnamese in America got busy – we’re invited everywhere.  “Tell us what it was like, tell us how bad it is.  We wanna know…”  There were veterans, writers, history students.  They wanted war.

They wanted to see us through a lens that refused to see the Vietnamese as anything but victims of war, and perhaps relieve them of whatever guilt.

Sure, it was important, but the more we talked, the more we realized it didn’t stop anybody from going to war, it didn’t help to avoid mistakes.  People are still being killed, bombs and mines continue to explode.  Families are still being destroyed.

Of late, I’ve discovered I have a new topic.  Instead of war, I could write about whores.  Forgive this politically incorrect indiscretion.

I’ve discovered you can make “war” rhyme with “whore.”  I wrote a song with the line “George and Wayne once shared a whore.”

George and Wayne are friends, one a writer, the other a poet.  They did share the Viet Nam war.  But it’s just simpler to write about them sharing a sex worker, and I could be living off whores—becoming a pimp of sort.  I could talk about doors, and floors, and shores.  Not wars and horrors.

In Viet Nam, people seem to have moved on.  The end of April is a celebration for the government, and people can have a day off work.

And then May 1^st comes around.  It’s time to honor the workers of the world. But as we revisit that old slogan, Workers of the World, Unite!, perhaps we should consider Workers of the World, We Apologize! You’ve gone through bad times, you’re still being exploited, and your lot isn’t really improving.

In America, where workers are being laid off by the thousands and losing their homes, celebration of workers happens on Labor Day – in September.  May is instead Asian American Heritage Month, and libraries and newspapers and universities run programs and articles about Asians living in America.  Sure it’s a celebration of their presence in America.  We have the month of May, but then we become invisible for the rest of the year.  It amuses me that when May comes around, I’m asked to come to universities and libraries, and write for newspapers, and they’ll want to hear about the war again.  If not, they will ask me to talk of lanterns, dragons, and kitchens.  TV programs will be about golden temples, lotuses and Zen, and Secrets of Eastern Empires, and red silk.

We’re asked to ignore the high-powered Asian woman working as a lawyer on Wall Street, or the economic analyst in Congress, or a cop in Arizona.

I’m no longer having to face such vexing images and memories.  One thing I certainly like about living in Ha Noi is the fact that few talk about the war, and May is just May.  Time is not marked by these tired histories, and it passes in different ways.

A friend was visiting last week from the San Francisco.  We went up to the mountains in Tam Dao.  Sitting in the quietness away from Ha Noi, we revisited the 20 years since we’d known each other, and we talked of future plans.  “I thought I’d be done with these projects in my life by the time I turn 60,” I said to Trung.

“No, you will carry on until you’re 80,” he said.  “Too many ideas, too many dreams.”

Unfulfilled.  Trung didn’t have to say the word – but it stayed in the air like a giant balloon.  But with all the travels, the war, the books, the stories I’ve dealt with, I’ve been busy.  I always thought by the time I turn 60, I would have had enough.  Time to be content, to let go.

For a while Trung and I stayed in the cold misty air, each of us silent.  I sensed he was, like me, thinking of all the months of April and all the months of May that have gone past.  And in my head, the sadness of Trinh Cong Son returned.

Inside my heart the sound of the long horn hastens

I count each passing hour in my bed of illness

Remembering the few times near pretty cheeks and lips. **

Once there was April, and then May.  And all that happened.  And all the talking.  Now, in the silence of the mountains, we know it’s almost too late.  But, still, we imagine better months of April and May.

*Song for the Bodies, by Trinh Cong Son, transl. by NQD

** Drifting Away, by Trinh Cong Son, transl. by NQD