Fire in the Lake (19 page)

During the 1940’s thousands of young Vietnamese volunteered to join the youth corps of the Vichyite French regime in Saigon. Through the crowds of older people the peasant boys strutted in time to the music, carrying their rifles at a precise angle and showing off their new uniforms.
⁶³
Young fascists? Two or three years later the same peasant boys would fall into the first ranks of the Viet Minh and the French partisan army. A generation later, multiplied thousands upon thousands, their sons would volunteer for the National Liberation Front and the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam. “But why? But why?” the counterinsurgency experts would ask over and over again. And two generations of peasant boys would patiently answer, “I liked the idea of heroism,” “I was in debt,” “I wanted to free my country,” “I always wanted to have an official position and to own a small gun.”
⁶⁴
The pronoun they used was itself an explanation:
toi.
An old word, it had in the 1930’s gained currency in the language as a translation for the French first person singular, the neutral, the independent, I, me. In using it the young peasants stood suddenly free of their families and their villages to become, in the older meaning of the word, “subjects of the king.”
⁶⁵

Released by a similar explosion in the early nineteenth century, the peasant-soldiers of France had marched off to the Napoleonic wars to learn (at the expense of Europe and finally Vietnam), if not the liberty, at least the equality and fraternity of the revolution. But in the service of the Diem regime the young Vietnamese of the 1950’s and 1960’s marched only as far as the next village — there to confront the same situation they had left at home. From their instructors — reflections of themselves in uniform — they learned only how to fill out a form, how to shoot a gun, and how to parrot a few words — “republic,” “Personalism,” “nation” — which for all the reference in their experience might have been words in a foreign language. But if they learned nothing, they forgot nothing. Uninstructed, they behaved in keeping not with the organizational charts, but with what they had learned as children in a world still
terra incognita
to the American advisers.

Their world — the Vietnam they continued to respond to — was a world of small, nearly closed systems linked only by the emperor and his mandarins. Within the hedges of the village each person knew his place within the hierarchy of a few families. At birth each child took his place, as it were on an escalator, and held it while moving upwards through the generations. Traditional Vietnam — Ngo Dinh Diem’s Vietnam — was a society of
persons,
not of
roles:
the village elder did not become the village councilor as an American might become President, he
was
the village councilor, his position set in all time by the laws of filial succession, or the “natural order of the universe.”
⁶⁶
Not only was the Vietnamese village a much smaller world than could support a modern nation-state, but its internal structure was such that it would not easily translate into a Western-style army or administration. To employ one useful fiction, the “social contract” of traditional Vietnamese society was the very contrary of Rousseau’s free association between equals — the concept on which modern Western constitutions are based. Rather than a bargain made between peers, it was a contract made almost exclusively in vertical between the generations of the patriarchal family.
⁶⁷
When a group such as the village council gathered, it found its unity by indirection through the relationship of each man to the patriarch. This hierarchical structure was the very foundation of the society itself. As one old Vietnamese proverb goes, “To be without leaders, to obey no one, is unworthy of man: it is to behave like the animals.”
⁶⁸

As the whole society was modeled on the family, so every relationship, except the rare and precious one of “friend,” was analogous to the primary one between father and son. The nature of that primary bond was the heart of the Vietnamese
terra incognita.
Vietnamese society differed considerably from that of the Chinese, but the similarities were great enough for the purposes of contrast with the West. In his study of Chinese psychology Professor Richard Solomon has provided valuable insights into that father-son relationship and, incidentally, into the character of Ngo Dinh Diem himself and the whole logic of his regime.
⁶⁹

At the foot of the mountain, thunder:

The image of PROVIDING NOURISHMENT.

Thus the superior man is careful of his words

And temperate in eating and drinking.

—
I Ching
⁷⁰

The image of the open mouth, represented in this verse, has a particular poignancy in China and Vietnam, for in both countries it was traditionally the father (the adults) who in times of famine or other disaster had claim to the first available food — even if it meant leaving the children to starve. Westerners might consider such a code of conduct immoral, but it was not so within its proper context. To the same end of propagating a civilization, the traditional, Confucian father built a system of social security radically different from that of his Western contemporary. When a Western father gives his child the “inalienable right” to the first and best food, he is (to put it crudely) bribing the child so that when he reaches manhood and independence the child will remember his debt (and support him in his old age). To the same end the Confucian father used a different method of coercion. Rather than prepare the child for independence by implanting his authority in the form of guilt, the Confucian father kept his child from attaining the same degree of autonomy. Obedient to the dictates of filial piety, the child remained, relatively speaking, a child with respect to his father for the whole of his lifetime. In the Confucian world filial piety was the key to all wisdom and virtue. As Western parents teach their children to “obey all commandments,” and to “learn principles,” or, in other words, to internalize their authority, the Confucian father taught his child to obey his parents — in other words, to remain dependent upon external authority. In the image of the open mouth the actions of talking and eating are joined, for it was by talking that the father affirmed his authority to demand that the child feed him in old age.

As manifested in the naming process (the ego becomes “your child,” “your younger brother,” “your humble servant,” and so forth), the project of Confucian education was to persuade the child that his very identity depended upon his maintaining a given “place” within the society. While the rites of ancestor worship raised conformity and continuity to sacred powers, the elaborate manners of the Confucian household discouraged self-assertiveness and invention. Traditional Vietnamese children were to be seen and not heard. In school as at home they learned not by questioning but by repetition. Chastened for competing with their elders or scrapping with other children, they learned to hold in their feelings — particularly their hostility and aggressiveness — in the interests of holding their “place” and maintaining the “harmony” of the community as a whole. For the Vietnamese, “sincerity” implied fidelity not to personal feelings but to social norms, to “correct behavior” relative to place in the social hierarchy. One young Vietnamese — I shall call him Huong — gave an American interviewer a revealing account of the upbringing of a twentieth-century Vietnamese child whose father was replaced by a stepfather. He said at one point:

When I was in school, my teacher taught me to be polite to my father and mother and brothers and sisters. Not only in the family, but in society, I was taught to be polite to everyone. I didn’t like my stepfather, but he was my mother’s husband, it meant that he was higher than my rank in the family. Therefore, I had to respect him.
⁷¹

In the Confucian world the child also had to renounce much of what Westerners would consider his essential personality: his desire to dominate others, to revenge wrongs, his desire for intellectual mastery over tradition. The child’s station was to be his identity, his social face, the man. As leverage for this considerable work of repression, the Confucian father sometimes threatened the child not only with punishment but with an actual dissolution of the blood contract. As one American-educated girl told this writer about her very aristocratic Confucian family:

When they found out I wanted to marry an American, they were very angry. They didn’t say anything — they hardly talked to me at all. One night when I was out with M., they actually locked me out of the house. A few nights later my father woke me up at two in the morning. I was scared he would throw me out of the house. But he didn’t. He was so mad. He talked on and on about the family, saying that it was like a great tree, and we were only leaves on its branches, and I hadn’t the right to break it apart.

Such real threats were, of course, reserved for moments of crisis, when the child by showing independence threatened to give up his (or her) essential role in the family. (And the occasion would occur more and more as the modern world opened up new alternatives.) But the threat was often implied, for having brought up the child without “internalized” values, the father feared that the child would otherwise lack the Confucian “self-control” to fulfill his filial obligations. Even in the 1960’s young Vietnamese typically described their own fathers as “stern,” “cold,” and “distant” — men who, unlike their “warm,” “easygoing” mothers, refused to show their paternal affection. Kept in constant suspense about the father’s loyalty to him, the child came to understand that any challenge to authority might actually prove dangerous. Even in the most Westernized of Vietnamese households childish revolt took the form of self-punishment. If the child believed his parents had done him an injustice, he (or she), rather than cry or argue, would retreat from them and carry on a hunger strike until his parents came to conciliate him.
⁷²
As the father wore the mask of authority, so the son came to wear the mask of deference, the “politeness” that Huong spoke of.

Writing in the 1930’s, one French ethnologist described the mandarins of Hue (perhaps the friends and relatives of Ngo Dinh Diem) as looking up to the genii of their ministries “with a touching sense of fear and humility, at the same time of faith and confidence.”
⁷³
In the language of the psychologists, the Vietnamese child (civil servant) felt a deep ambivalence about the father (higher authority). On the one hand he feared that his father might lack the “self-control” to fulfill his end of the bargain; on the other hand he saw him to be the only source of security, both physical and intellectual. The relationship between father and son would be deep. It could also be warm when, as under normal circumstances, a mutual trust existed. But when that trust did not exist, as it did not between Huong and his stepfather, then the tension could become acute. Huong said:

Although my family had a good standard of living, I was not happy with it. I felt that my stepfather didn’t like me.… Once I went out to play with my friends and I quarreled with a friend of mine. When I came home, my stepfather blamed me and would have hit me if my mother hadn’t stopped him. He made me feel that, since I was not his son, he could do anything to me he wanted. To me he was a stranger living in my house, enjoying my family’s property, and yet he bullied me.
⁷⁴

The much desired “social harmony” was in fact very difficult to maintain, and particularly so outside the blood family. Beneath the thin crust of “respect,” the relationship between father and son, governor and governed, rested on a delicate balance between the need for “nourishment” and the fear of exploitation. If there were not a deep feeling of confidence between them — such as the mandarins had for their genii and the Saigonese girl had for her father — the relationship would break apart. In a small stable community such as Hue, the traditional village, or the unbroken family, the child or subordinate would have some reason for confidence in his superiors, for his superiors were effectively boxed in. The village patriarch could no more replace his villagers than the father could replace his children. He had no other “place” to go, and thus it was clearly and demonstrably in his long-term interests to fulfill his part of the bargain. If he did not exercise “self-control,” if he was not “careful in his words and temperate in eating and drinking,” he risked losing his subordinates either by starving them or by driving them away — and, consequently, losing his own position. Authority, therefore, was acceptable on condition that it was insured by the “net ropes” of kinship or long personal association. And in Vietnam the “net ropes” were not very long: in China they sustained cities and embraced provinces, but in northern and central Vietnam they reached only as far as the hedges of the village, in southern Vietnam only to the limits of the hamlet. Despite their Confucian education, the villagers traditionally resented and resisted the mandarins. When a stranger acquired land in one of the enclosed villages, his family would not be accepted into the community for at least a generation: its initial members could not be trusted, for having no “place” in the village, they had no basis for “correct behavior,” or, morality.

When I was at home, I loved my mother and she loved me, too. The only person I didn’t like was my stepfather. Sometimes he didn’t do anything to hurt me, it was just the way he glanced at me. I had the impression that he disliked me. Sometimes he criticized me and I would be angry with him for several days.
⁷⁵

In speaking of his stepfather Huong suggested what might be the central dilemma of the Diem regime: the officials appointed from outside the village
were not
the village authorities any more than Huong’s stepfather was his father. However they might behave, the villagers would not trust them, and they would need no evidence to support their suspicions. Huong was asked whether the local Diemist officials and soldiers were good men or bad, and he replied: