Fire in the Lake (3 page)

For traditional Vietnamese the sense of limitation and enclosure was as much a part of individual life as of the life of the nation. In what is today northern and central Vietnam the single form of Vietnamese settlement duplicated the closed circle of the nation. Hidden from sight behind their high hedges of bamboos, the villages stood like nuclei within their surrounding circle of rice fields. Within the villages as within the nation the amount of arable land was absolutely inelastic. The population of the village remained stable, and so to accumulate wealth meant to deprive the rest of the community of land, to fatten while one’s neighbor starved. Vietnam is no longer a closed economic system, but the idea remains with the Vietnamese that great wealth is antisocial, not a sign of success but a sign of selfishness.

With a stable technology and a limited amount of land the traditional Vietnamese lived by constant repetition, by the sowing and reaping of rice and by the perpetuation of customary law. The Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors as the source of their lives, their fortunes, and their civilization. In the rites of ancestor worship the child imitated the gestures of his grandfather so that when he became the grandfather, he could repeat them exactly to his grandchildren. In this passage of time that had no history the death of a man marked no final end. Buried in the rice fields that sustained his family, the father would live on in the bodies of his children and grandchildren. As time wrapped around itself, the generations to come would regard him as the source of their present lives and the arbiter of their fate. In this continuum of the family “private property” did not really exist, for the father was less of an owner than a trustee of the land to be passed on to his children. To the Vietnamese the land itself was the sacred, constant element: the people flowed over the land like water, maintaining and fructifying it for the generations to come.

Late in the war — about 1968 — a Vietnamese soldier came with his unit to evacuate the people of a starving village in Quang Nam province so that the area might be turned into a “free fire zone.” While the villagers were boarding the great American helicopters, one old man ran away from the soldiers shouting that he would never leave his home. The soldiers followed the old man and found him hiding in a tunnel beside a small garden planted with a few pitiful stunted shrubs. When they tried to persuade him to go with the others, he refused, saying, “I have to stay behind to look after this piece of garden. Of all the property handed down to me by my ancestors, only this garden now remains. I have to guard it for my grandson.” Seeing the soldiers look askance, the old man admitted that his grandson had been conscripted and that he had not heard from him in two years. He paused, searching for an explanation, and then said, “If I leave, the graves of my ancestors, too, will become forest. How can I have the heart to leave?”

The soldiers turned away from the old man and departed, for they understood that for him to leave the land would be to acknowledge the final death of the family — a death without immortality. By deciding to stay he was deciding to sacrifice his life in postponement of that end. When the soldiers returned to the village fourteen months later, they found that an artillery shell had closed the entrance to the tunnel, making it a grave for the old man.
¹

Many American officials understood that the land and the graves of the ancestors were important to the Vietnamese. Had they understood exactly why, they might not have looked upon the wholesale creation of refugees as a “rational” method of defeating Communism. For the traditional villager, who spent his life immobile, bound to the rice land of his ancestors, the world was a very small place. It was in fact the village or
xa
, a word that in its original Chinese roots signified “the place where people come together to worship the spirits.” In this definition of society the character “earth” took precedence, for, as the source of life, the earth was the basis for the social contract between the members of the family and the members of the village. Americans live in a society of replaceable parts — in theory anyone can become President or sanitary inspector — but the Vietnamese lived in a society of particular people, all of whom knew each other by their place in the landscape. “Citizenship” in a Vietnamese village was personal and untransferable. In the past, few Vietnamese ever left their village in times of peace, for to do so was to leave society itself — all human attachments, all absolute rights and duties. When the soldiers of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese emperors came to the court of Hue, they prayed to the spirits of the Perfume River, “We are lost here [
depaysée
] and everything is unknown to us. We prostrate ourselves before you [in the hope that] you will lead us to the good and drive the evil away from us.”
²
The soldiers were “lost” in more than a geographical sense, for without their land and their place in the village, they were without a social identity. To drive the twentieth-century villager off his land was in the same way to drive him off the edges of his old life and to expose him directly to the political movement that could best provide him with a new identity.

During the war the village
dinh
or shrine still stood in many of the villages of the south as testimony to the endurance of the traditional political design of the nation. In prehistoric times, before the advent of national government, the
dinhs
referred to the god of the particular earth beneath the village. In assuming temporal power, the emperors of Vietnam took on the responsibility to perform the rites of the agriculture for all the Vietnamese villages and replaced the local spirits with the spirits of national heroes and genii. Under their reign the
dinh
contained the imperial charter that incorporated the village into the empire, making an ellision between the ideas of “land,” “Emperor,” and “Vietnamese.” The French brushed away the sacred web of state, but they did not destroy this confluence of ideas. The Vietnamese call their nation
dat nuoc
, “earth and water” — the phrase referring both to the trickle of water through one rice field and the “mountains and rivers” of the nation.

Like the Celestial Empire of China, the Vietnamese empire was in one aspect a ritual state whose function was to preside over the sacred order of nature and society. At its apex the emperor stood as its supreme magician-god endowed with the responsibility to maintain the harmonious balance of the
yin
and the
yang
, the two related forces of the universe. His success in this enterprise (like that of the villagers in the rites of ancestor worship) depended upon the precision with which he followed the elaborate set of rituals governing his relations with the celestial authorities and the people of the empire. To act in conformity with the traditional etiquette was to insure harmony and prosperity for the entire nation. In
A.D.
1129 the Emperor Ly Than Tong proclaimed to the court: “We have little virtue; we have transgressed the order of Heaven, and upset the natural course of events; last year the spring was blighted by a long rain; this year there is a long drought.… Let the mandarins examine my past acts in order to discover any errors or faults, so that they may be remedied.”
³
In analyzing these disasters the emperor blamed them on his deviation from Tao, the traditional way, which was at once the most moral and the most scientific course.

As Americans are, so to speak, canted towards the future, the traditional Vietnamese were directed towards the past, both by the small tradition of the family and the great tradition of the state. Confucianism — the very foundation of the state — was not merely a “traditional religion,” as Judaism and Christianity are the traditional religions of the West. Originating in a society of ancestor worshipers, it was, like ancestor worship itself, a sacralization of the past. Unlike the great Semitic prophets, Confucius did not base his teachings on a single, contemporary revelation. “I for my part am not one of those who have innate knowledge,” he said. “I am simply one who loves the past and is diligent in investigating it.”
⁴
According to tradition, Confucius came to his wisdom through research into the great periods of Chinese civilization — the Chou empire and its predecessors in the distant past. Tradition presents the Master not as a revolutionary but as a true reactionary. Arriving at certain rules and precepts for the proper conduct of life, he did not pretend to have comprehended all wisdom, but merely to have set up guideposts pointing towards the Tao or true way of life. For him the Tao was the enlightened process of induction that led endlessly backwards into the past of civilization. The Tao may have been for him a secular concern, a matter of enlightened self-interest. (“The Master never spoke of the spirits,” reported his disciples, leaving the question moot.) But for later Confucians it had a sacred weight reinforced by magic and the supernatural.

For traditional Vietnamese, formal education consisted of the study of the Confucian texts — the works of the Master and the later commentaries. To pass beyond the small tradition of the family and the village was therefore not to escape the dominion of the past, but to enter into it more fully. The mandarins, the literate elite, directed all their scholarship not towards invention and progress, but towards a more perfect repetition of the past, a more perfect maintenance of the status quo. When a French steamship was sighted off the shores of Vietnam in the early nineteenth century (or so the story goes) the local mandarin-governor, instead of going to see it, researched the phenomenon in his texts, concluded it was a dragon, and dismissed the matter.
⁵

As long as Vietnamese society remained a closed system, its intellectual foundations remained flawless and immobile. Quite clearly, however, they could not survive contact with the West, for they were based on the premise that there was nothing new under the sun. But the coming of the French posed a terrible problem for the Vietnamese. Under the dominion of the old empire the Vietnamese were not members of a religious community (like the Christians of Byzantium or the Muslims of the Abbasid caliphate) but participants in a whole, indivisible culture. Like the Chinese, they considered those who lived outside of its seamless web to be by definition barbarians. When the Vietnamese conquered peoples of other cultures — such as the Chams — they included these people within the structure of empire only on condition of their total assimilation. The peoples they could not assimilate, they simply surrounded, amoeba-like, and left them to follow their own laws. The various montagnard tribes that lived beyond the zone of wet-rice cultivation retained their own languages, customs, and governments for thousands of years inside Vietnam. But with the arrival of the French forces in the nineteenth century the Vietnamese confronted a civilization more powerful than their own; for the first time since the Chinese conquest in the second century
B.C.
they faced the possibility of having to assimilate themselves. Confucianism was, after all, not merely a religion or an arbitrary morality, but a science that operated inside history. Confucius said, “If it is really possible to govern countries by ritual and yielding, there is no more to be said. But if it is not really possible, of what use is ritual?”
⁶
The rituals and the way of life they confirmed did not help the Vietnamese defend themselves against the French, and thus certain mandarins concluded they had to be abandoned. As the French armies swept across the Mekong Delta, Phan Thanh Giang, the governor of the western provinces, reconciled this logic with his loyalty to the nation by committing suicide and ordering his sons not to serve the French but to bring up their children in the French way.
⁷

Similarly, those mandarins who decided to resist the French saw the foreign armies as a threat not only to their national sovereignty and to their beliefs, but to their entire way of life. The southern patriots warned their people:

Our country has always been known as a land of deities; shall we now permit a horde of dogs and goats to stain it?

The moral obligations binding a king to his subjects, parents to their children, and husbands to their wives were highly respected. Everyone enjoyed the most peaceful relationships.

Our customs and habits were so perfect that in our country, in our ancestors’ tombs, and in our homes, all things were in a proper state.

But from the moment they arrived with their ill luck,

Happiness and peace seem to have departed from everywhere.
⁸

And the mandarins were correct: the French occupation changed the Vietnamese way of life permanently. Since the Second World War the Vietnamese have been waging a struggle not merely over the form of their state but over the nature of Vietnamese society, the very identity of the Vietnamese. It is the grandeur of the stakes involved that has made the struggle at once so intense and so opaque to Westerners.

Just before the fall of the Diem regime in 1963 the American journalists in Vietnam wrote long and somewhat puzzling analyses of the Buddhist demonstrations, in which they attempted to explain how much the rebellion against Diem owed to “purely religious” motives, how much to “purely political” ones. Like most Westerners, these journalists were so entrenched in their Western notion of the division of church and state that they could not imagine the Vietnamese might not make the distinction. But until the arrival of the European missionaries there was never such a thing as a church in Vietnam. Shaped by a millennium of Chinese rule and another of independence within the framework of Southeast Asia, the “Vietnamese religion” was a blend of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism sunken into a background of animism. More than a “religion” in any Western sense, it was the authority for, and the confirmation of, an entire way of life — an agriculture, a social structure, a political system. Its supernatural resembled one of those strange metaphysical puzzles of Jorge Luis Borges: an entire community imagines another one which, though magical and otherworldly, looks, detail for detail, like itself. In the courts of Hue and Thang-long, organization-minded genii presided over every government department and took responsibility for the success or failure of each mandarin’s enterprise. (During a long period of drought in the seventeenth century the Emperor Le Thai Ton ordered his mandarins: “Warn the genii on my behalf that if it doesn’t rain in three days, I will have their tablets boiled and thrown in the river so as to prevent my people from uselessly throwing away their money on them.”)
⁹
In the villages the peasants recognized hosts of local spirits and ghosts as well as the official genii delegated by the mandarins. In Paul Mus’s words, religion was the “spiritualization of the community itself” and “the administration of Heaven.” The “religion,” in some sense, was the state and vice versa — except that the emperor was not the representative of God on earth, but rather a collective moral personality, a representation of the sacred community to itself.