Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (59 page)

Still with the dopey stoner's grin, Thanh said with gestures and mumbled words that he and Oanh had fought in the first Vietnamese offensive to overthrow Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge government. This was the so-called proxy war of the Carter administration, when with utter cynicism we stood by, encouraging the Chinese and hoping that Vietnam would be weakened.

I said, "Did you fight here too? Vietcong?"

"Oh, yes. 'Sixty-nine and later. Him too."

Their stoicism and toughness resembled that of many of the men described in Bao Ninh's novel. They had ferried food and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they said. Both had been bombed by American planes at a place called Con Meo (Cat Slope). Twelve years they'd been fighting, first the Americans, then the Cambodians; now they were construction workers in Hanoi, putting up new buildings.

"What your country?" Oanh asked.

"America."

The word surprised him a little and made him smile. He shook my hand. We all shook hands. As with Mr. Pham the day before, there was only friendliness in this encounter—no moralizing, no frowns, no scolding. Almost all the Vietnamese I met were like this—not backward-looking and vindictive scolds muttering, "Never forget!" but compassionate souls, getting on with their lives, hopeful and humane.

In
The Sorrow of War,
the main character, Kien, hears some soldiers in Hanoi talking about a victory in Cambodia. "But he knew it wasn't true that young Vietnamese loved war. Not true at all. If war came they would fight, and fight courageously. But that didn't mean they loved fighting. No. The ones who loved war were not the young men, but the others, like the politicians."

The train was pulling into Hue. The last time I'd been here, it had
been overrun by angry and frightened American soldiers, and looked like hell. The hell of war—mud and ruin and flames, the whole stinking city on the wane—which is no empty metaphor but actual hell.

***

HUE I REMEMBERED AS A BLASTED
, war-damaged, and mostly empty town of muddy streets and shuttered houses, one hotel called Morin Brothers, feeble lights, ARVN patrols hurrying in jeeps on pot-holed roads, and touts promising ecstasy on drug-and-whore cruises on small boats lit by hanging lanterns on the Perfume River. Prostitutes and soldiers were all that remained of a city shattered and all but destroyed in the Tet Offensive of 1968, when the Vietcong had held the citadel of Hue for twenty-four days, flying their flag over it. And it was flying over it again, but a rebuilt citadel and royal palace, the Forbidden Purple City, which had been mere hyperbole then and was reality now.

I stayed at Morin's again, the hotel by the river, but this was a reincarnated place. The city had been restored and enlarged: the French-built municipal buildings and churches and schools, the chinoiserie on the far bank, the neighborhoods of small shops, bungalows with walled gardens and courtyards, narrow lanes, bars, and small restaurants. The rickshaw drivers' trade had been revived, the so-called cyclos, and their patter too: "Massage, sir? You want girl? Nice girl! I take you!"

What appealed to me most about Hue was not its royal connection and its Indochinese hauteur or any of its temples, but rather the simple fact of its visible kitchens, the way—because of the heat, but also because it was a tranquil city—I could see people, women usually, cooking the evening meal, noodles in a big pot, or grilled meat, dumplings in a wok, and the families sitting down to eat on low wooden stools. Nothing was more indicative of peace than people unhurriedly eating and having plenty of food: domestic life being lived partly in the open, old women and small children sitting in doorways, watching the rain come down.

There was hardly any distinction between a private kitchen and a public restaurant. The open platform of a shophouse served as both: the woman shredding noodles into a soup pot with vegetables was chatting to her friends, minding her children, and serving customers, all at the same time.

Remembering the anxiety I had felt here in wartime, when I had never walked anywhere—I'd been driven fast to every destination—I
strolled across the river to the north bank and Dong Ba market to look upon the great piles of fruit and vegetables, the towers of pots and pans, the tea stalls, the slabs of catfish and eels and tuna, the spice bazaar, the stalls selling herbal medications, the shelves of snake wine (each bottle with a coiled cobra pickled inside), the stacks of clothes. Outside, where the market backed onto the river, a willowy girl in a conical straw hat was poling a sampan, standing in the stern and working her steering oar like a gondolier. At the embankment a woman was washing clothes in the river, some men were loading bales onto a barge, and families were settling into big boats for the long river journey to their villages. The boats moved over the river like water bugs, passing the old brewery, the decaying temples, the masses of bamboo lining the banks, the houseboats that were moored in clusters to create a floating village.

All that represented the vitality, richness, and color of old Asia. But along with the snake wine and the powdered antlers for aphrodisiacs and the fragrant bricks of tea was the new Asia of ingenious piracy: knockoff Nikes, fake Tag Heuer watches for $15, Lacoste polo shirts, Zippo lighters, and mountains of bootleg CDs. And maybe a new Asia in the way Vietnamese traders incessantly badgered passersby, often screaming "Buy it!" at me the way the cyclo drivers howled "Massage!"—persistent to the point of being pests. But who could blame them?

"I worked for the Americans," one old hawker said. And an elderly cyclo driver told me, "I was a soldier with the Americans." I heard this often in Hue.

On a back street, I stopped to rest at an open-fronted shop, sitting on a stool out of the rain, and a woman appeared with a bowl of fish soup and a dish of hard-boiled quail eggs. I drank tea, and soon after the woman's teenage daughter came home from school and translated the woman's questions: Was I married? Did I have children? Did I like the fish soup (which the daughter called
banh canh ca loc)?
And where did I come from?

Ah, yes, American! Welcome! Have some more fish soup!

One thing struck me more than anything else in Hue. Never mind for the moment my memory of the lifelessness and apprehension, the weirdness of war: frenzy one minute and boredom the next, the bureaucracy and clumsy formality, the suspense that was also part of the terror. The difference was so great as almost to erase the memory.

I had been conscious of it since entering the country, though I had
not remarked on it or made a note. It was the people's clothes—the whiteness of the white dresses, the starched collars, the decorous
ao dais,
many men in shirtsleeves or in suits, the daintiness of children's tidy outfits, and not their newness but their cleanliness, a crisp and well-turned-out population that spoke with confidence and self-respect; even in the muddiest districts of Hue, the clothes were freshly laundered.

All this was new to me, the Hue of peacetime that did not in the least resemble the Hue of the war. The Vietcong gun emplacements and pillboxes on the old city walls looked more like antiquated follies than leftovers of battle. Apart from the citadel, it was not a rebuilt or restored place but rather a reincarnation, like much else in Vietnam, a whole city risen from the ashes of war.

I was praising the fish soup to a man in Hue who said, "You should try the eel soup."

Looking for eel soup, I found Mr. Son, whose shophouse, on a corner in the southeast part of the city, was another open kitchen that could have been a family's kitchen, because it contained only two tables and some stools. A hand-lettered sign said
Chao Luon
—eel soup. He had no other customers. He also sold beer, whiskey, canned meat, and dry noodles; his wife took in laundry. He had fish soup but no eel soup.

"Business is slow," Mr. Son said. "If I get more customers, I'll find another table."

"Your English is good."

"I worked for the American army. That's why."

"What years?"

"The bad years. 'Sixty-eight to the time they left. I was a cook at Camp Eagle. First Airborne." He explained that this camp was about ten miles outside Hue—the U.S. troops stayed away from the city.

When I finished eating, he said that if I came back the next day he would have eel soup for me. It was his grandmother's recipe.

Mr. Son was waiting for me the next night. I had looked forward to seeing him, because he was my age and spoke English, and he had been in Hue when I'd last visited, in that haunted and suspenseful period between the American withdrawal in 1972 and the fall of Saigon three years later.

Again I was the only customer. I drank beer and Mr. Son sat with me and served me eel soup and explained his grandmother's recipe. She had
been a cook in the royal palace from 1917 onward, when an emperor of the Nguyen dynasty had ruled from there.

Madame Son's eel soup: In a large pot, add a quantity of pork bones to a lot of water and simmer with vegetables for five hours. Strain and save the stock. Sauté onions and garlic in another large pot. Add delicate mushrooms, chilies, spices (anise and cardamom), green beans and white beans, and chopped eel. Add the stock. Bring to a boil and then simmer for about an hour.

I ate it and we talked about the war. He said it was odd, but few people mentioned it anymore. Most people were too young to remember, or had been born in better times. The war, he said, was a miserable time, but he had learned to be a chef then and had enjoyed his work.

"I liked the Americans," he said. "They were good to me."

On a salary of about $30 a month—$300 in military scrip; the U.S. Army in Vietnam had printed its own money—he had started at the bottom in the kitchen.

"First, because I could write English, I made lists. 'Beans,' 'bread,' 'meat,' 'flour.' And I did some easy cooking. Spaghetti is easy. Hamburgers—easy too. The men ate the food."

He drank tea while I had the eel soup, which was spicy and thick from the beans and the chopped eel.

"Many of those men died," he said. "And many of my friends also died."

"What did you think?" I asked.

"It was terrible." He made a face. "And there was nothing here in Hue. Nothing! Just trouble. No people. Fighting now and then, and bombs."

"The American soldiers had left by the time I got here."

"They just went away." He was smiling, not in mirth but at the horror of it. "That was '72. The end of my work. I didn't know what to do. We all waited, and then it came—the VC."

"Where were you then?"

"Here, but I didn't stay. I ran. I had a motorbike and hid in the countryside. My house here was ruined. There were no records. No one knew what I had been doing. When I came back to Hue the soldiers found me."

"Were you scared?"

"Yes. I said to them, 'I like peace!' It was true."

"No prison time?"

"No prison." He got up and opened another bottle of beer for me. Then, settling again on his stool, he said, "The years after that were very bad. From '75 to '78 we had no food, no money, no clothes, nothing. It was almost worse than the war."

Those were the years of the American trade embargo—which lasted until 1994—when, petty-minded in defeat, we had hoped to make the Vietnamese regret that they'd won the war, and had punished them by withholding aid and food. And we had stood by while China invaded the north and became an army of occupation. Those were the first years of America's friendship with China, the hovering presence and ancient enemy of Vietnam.

While we were talking, Mr. Son's elderly father walked in from the street. He was a small, finely made man with a kindly face, a wispy beard, and bony hands. He was slightly built but seemed healthy.

"No smoking, no drinking," Mr. Son said of his father.

The man was in his early eighties and, as a lifelong resident of Hue, had seen a great deal—at least one emperor of the Nguyen dynasty at the royal palace, the French colonials, the Japanese, and the ructions of numerous battles, of which the massacres and beheadings of Tet in 1968 represented just one episode of many upheavals.

"He looks like Uncle Ho," I said.

"Ho was a good man," Mr. Son said. "He grew up near here. Even when he was important he wore simple clothes, not good ones." He laughed, thinking of it. "Just like you and me!"

The old man was smiling now. I commented on that.

"My father worked for the Americans. They liked him," Mr. Son said. "Things got better. They're good now. We're happy."

E
VEN DURING THE WAR
, when I had traveled here, I had thought that if Vietnam hadn't been so beautiful we would not have ravished it, nor would the French have bothered to colonize and plunder it. Its cool, steep, humped-up mountains and jungle-thick valleys and cloud forests sloped past fertile fields to the coastal heat of palmy, white sand beaches; its people were graceful and hard-working and willing; the warmth of its tropical enveloping climate made it seem a kind of Eden. Of course foreigners wanted to possess the land and its people, even if it meant bombing them to smithereens. But the Vietnamese were tenacious and self-possessed and had triumphed.

Up to this point I had not seen Hanoi, which was as stately as a precinct of Paris, as it was meant to be when it was the capital of French Indochina. The French had been humiliated in battle, had surrendered by the thousands, been taken captive, and driven out; but at least they had left long boulevards of imposing buildings behind. And we had left nothing except a multitude of scars and the trauma of the whole miserable business, ten years of terror and seven million tons of bombs.

We had occupied Hue but hadn't improved anything there. The small pink-and-white train station, sitting like a stale birthday cake on its own avenue, was a French colonial confection. It had been a wreck when I'd last seen it. It was back in business, thronged with people, efficient, with a clean waiting room and frequent trains. I got a ticket for the twelve-hour trip to Hanoi, something I had longed to do all those years ago.