OF CULTURE, BOND AND BONDAGE: THE VIETNAMESE WOMAN WHO BLINDLY LOVES

CREATIVE PROSE

BY Uyen Nicole Duong, copyright 2009

I have had the most incredible Vietnamese crepe (banh xeo) in my life at a public housing complex in Denver.  Not just any kind of Banh Xeo, but the kind they make in Binh Dinh, or Nha Trang, central Vietnam. The mother of a Vietnamese young man invited me to their home. They’ve lived in Denver’s public housing for the past 10 years. She works in a restaurant to support her son. In that small kitchen, she stood and cooked. She must be about 5 years older than I. Very petite and young-looking, like most Vietnamese women.

The young man had looked me up at the University. Then he came in to see me.  He is not one of my students, but he offered to help me with my research about Vietnam, free of charge.  He spoke accented English, and told me he wanted to become a medical doctor only to do research and to help people. The young man is intelligent and ambitious.  He said he was born post-1975. Under communist Vietnam, he never went to school. He fished instead.  He learned to read here in America when he became a boat person at the age of 12. In America, he relied on the Vietnamese Catholic Church to have a sense of community and to learn how to write Vietnamese.   American public education took care of the English.

I left their house with a full container of banh xeo and a bag of books. The young man has collected all kinds of Vietnamese books for me, all the books that I had already read and knew pre -1975, like the whole collection of Tu Luc Van Doan (modern Vietnam’s first Independent Pen Club writing in the Roman alphabet).  He did not know that I had read all of those books pre-1975. 

What is scary to me is that the young man has told me he is now very upset that some Vietnamese man in California who allegedly heads a movement to free Vietnam has been arrested and awaiting extradition as a terrorist.  This is the young man’s hero, because the family believes that this Vietnamese Californian is leading a respectable resistance movement that will eventually overthrow the government of Vietnam.  As Catholics, the family is hardcore anti-communist.  Of course I know all this, the “resistance movement” business, simply because I have listened to first-generation Vietnamese talk, and have been sent their debates via the internet. 

My Tulips Have Grown East, 

watercolor on paper digitally inverted DNN C1998, 2009

I had sat there eating banh xeo and listening to them, single mother and son, these very simple Vietnamese who do not share my course of life. I thought about whether there would ever be a day when my husband and other outsiders could understand all of this. Will there be a day that any mainstream American can comfortably walk into this public housing project, looking down at the Vietnamese banh xeo  and understanding why I was sitting here, eating and thinking about a dark world called my exile culture, a kind of complexity that perhaps no Western historian can intuitively understand…

I thought of the Vietnamese musician who had written a song about returning to his homeland.  He had written the piece in a motel during his first trip back home from America.  The lyric spoke of how he did not know whether the place – the land on which he  walked – would still be dear to  him, still embracing him in its memory, bond and bondage, the missing child, the returning spirit…

There was another Vietnamese man whom I met during my last trip back to Vietnam.  This Vietnamese man, in his 40s but looking 30-ish, told me how he escaped – sleeping in front of some quay, some dock, waiting for the boat to come.  When it came, the boat evaded the darkness yet it also invaded the darkness.  It became a darting light.  And after the boat, came long days and nights of waiting and finally he was stranded in Europe – Norway of all places…

So the Vietnamese had spread themselves from Southeast Asia all the way to the ice land of the North Sea.  This man was my generation.

Not knowing how old he actually was, I addressed him the same way I addressed my students. Becoming a college professor has entitled me to think of the whole world as within my tutoring. As I listened to the story of his escape, the place where I sat that day – the steps of the rail station from Lao Cai to Sapa in North Vietnam – I all of a sudden felt very cold as though I were in Norway, or still sleeping on the cold ground of a ravaged Vietnam in transition, on the night he escaped in that flimsy boat – the light that split the darkness into home and exile…

And then there was the Vietnamese waiter in a Denver restaurant who always mishandled my bills, conveniently or unintentionally adding a few dollars for himself at times.  He, too, told me of how he escaped so that he did not have to join the Vietnamese army to fight the Chinese and the Cambodians (what was left of the Khmer Rouge) in 1978, how he had been stranded on one of the Spratly islands, and how he was so thirsty he tried to drink the Pacific Ocean, only to throw up…The ocean of course could not be drunk!  Sea water is never drinking water.  

How can my husband and the outsiders understand all of this? Intellectually my husband would understand because he is superbly intelligent.  But emotionally he cannot. 

For a long time, I kept thinking about these 3 Vietnamese men whose lives have been opened to me somewhat, at random. I kept comparing them to my American husband, who never lay on a cold and muddy ground to wait for a fishing boat, who never drank the Pacific water out of despair near the Spratlys, and who did not believe in any Vietnamese resistance movement. When I thought of what these 3 men told me, nostalgia came over me.  Why?  The explanation is very simple:  in a country of 80 million like Vietnam, the 51 percent is woman; the other 49 is man. The 51 percent is all ME.  The other 49 percent?  They are all my father, uncles, brothers, and all the sons I could have had. 

What does it mean to be a Vietnamese woman?  Somehow I have become the 51 percent.  Then I bear the other 49 percent’s pain. With their sadness in me, I must have engulfed the entire culture into my heart. 

And so, the very following year, I left my American husband (after 10 years of pondering over his pre-nuptial agreement, which I never signed…).  After 10 years, we never began that official honeymoon in Paris where he would bring me to the Ritz, because the prenupt sat between us always, and our careers also built the invisible walls around each of us.  Those walls kept me in America and off my husband went to Europe. So I called him my husband for 10 years while the paper was never signed and the separation became a way of life.

Once I left my husband, I decided, very consciously, that I would fall in love with a Vietnamese man, whose family members had died together with all that “resistance movement” and fight for liberty that sounded like a dream…Not just any dream, but a threatening dream that took all of the 49 percent of Vietnam into its darkness.  All those fathers, uncles, brothers and sons. The dream left the 51 percent blazed in the light, confused and ravaged.

I decided to love this Vietnamese man before I met him. Very unlike my normal self, I performed no due diligence on his background, disposition, character, or motive.  I ignored the darkness in him.  All I needed was his Vietnamese name.  And the light it exudes.

So that’s how I consciously decided on the form for my love of the culture.  It would become the love for this one man. My sampling of the 49 percent.  Loved by the 51 percent  blinded by the light. 

And then I find out….today….

The Vietnamese man that I have decided to love is nothing but the dream itself.  In that dream, there is the blinding light that has swept us Vietnamese women back into the culture where we all become homeless.

In the light that becomes my blindness, I cry.

Uyen December 2009