The Lotus and the Storm (16 page)

My compass remains what it has always been. We all have one, that one singular person for whom love is freely given no matter the circumstances. There again, even now, is the unmistakable feeling of my sister's touch, our bedtime ritual. It lingers.

Sometimes the feeling that there is some other person standing next to me is so strong I have to turn and look. It is as if the person were hovering in my blind spot. Walking beside me.

And then it occurs to me. She is my first love. Her loss is the one I will never fully recover from. When she died she left me forever full of yearning.

MR. MINH, 2006, 1967

T
here was an American with green eyes the color of irrigated rice fields.

He came in 1963, but I did not meet him until 1966, at a training center as I entered my last week of a special command course. His name was John Clifford. He was one of several American advisers who gave us lessons in personnel management, patrol and ambush, night operations, marksmanship, small unit actions, intelligence, security, logistics. We were practicing bayonet thrusts and reviewing the mechanical workings of weapons, the simple logic of American firepower. A few of us were handed the prized M16.

He told us to watch animals for clues on how to search for food, water, and shelter in a survival situation. He asked us to call him Cliff. He was in our country not for a one-year tour of duty but to pursue more long-term strategic goals, the details of which were not shared with us. He was not young, as the American boys usually were. He had fought in Italy and Germany all through World War II. Years of combat had carved themselves into his rough-hewn face. I looked into his eyes and liked what they imparted—a full, piercing, rice-field-green presence. When we talked, I could feel the weight of his gaze on my face. I wasn't accustomed to such forthrightness.

He did not act like someone cast adrift in our country. His posture, his countenance, his eyes—nothing suggested calibration, restraint, or reserve. He was willing to be befriended. He ate our fruits—mangosteens, papayas, longans—though he insisted that they be tree-ripened. I watched as he skinned the hard rind of a longan with his teeth. He was equally game to try street food. He would eat a full bowl of pho for breakfast down to the last leisurely slurp and the last broken noodle that could be picked up with a pair of chopsticks. He would devour a heaping plate of raw green papaya salad with reckless enthusiasm.

The Americans had built a constellation of base camps around the country. Ours was located at the edge of Saigon. There we reviewed the ways of survival, honing method into instinct. The ability to fabricate something from whatever was available depended on the ability to watch the world with eyes that could see everything and miss nothing. The fact that a bee or an ant went into a hole in a tree might mean that the hole contained water. In this drifting landscape of jungle greens and moving shadows, we learned to make use of every camouflaged object, every part of the earth.

Cliff's willingness to listen distinguished him from the other American advisers and endeared him to me immediately. He and I were lunching together when news of yet another upheaval was announced. A car filled with explosives had blown up in the parking lot of a popular hotel. The explosion killed and injured more than a hundred U.S. and Vietnamese nationals. I looked at his face, tanned to a reddish brown by our sun. I could see he was trying to suppress his own emotions and gave me a consolatory glance.

“Dong Ha, Con Thien, Gio Linh have been attacked all within a short span of time. It's as if they've lined up all these towns and proceeded to knock them down. . . . You are too busy fighting among yourselves to fight the enemy.” He reached across the table and gave my hand a ferocious squeeze, as if to get my attention.

“I know, Cliff. The North has become very bold. I think they will go after the Central Highlands next.”

“To cut the South in half,” Cliff agreed.

“It's a shame we are such idiots,” I said. I felt the need to apologize for our absurdities. “To be fair, we're also in a difficult spot.”

We were a country defined by a long history of repelling foreign invasions. Our heroes were the Trung Sisters, Ngo Quyen, Tran Hung Dao—patriots who fought the Chinese. “You're part of the problem too, unfortunately,” I said to Cliff. “The North has managed to use your very presence for propaganda purposes.”

Cliff nodded and gave me a drawn-out “hmm” that signified less agreement than curiosity.

So I told him about a popular Vietnamese proverb.
“Cong ran can ga nha,”
I said, pronouncing each word slowly. “It means carrying a snake on your back, bringing it back home, and allowing it to kill your homegrown chickens.”

“I gather we're the snake.” Cliff chuckled sportingly.

“It's an accusation that the North is lobbing quite successfully.”

Cliff ordered another beer. “This is good,” he said, reading the label. “Thirty-three. Stronger than it looks.”

“Rice lager,” I said.

“I get it. They've managed to play up the nationalism angle and present themselves as the true nationalists,” Cliff said with quiet authority. “By associating with us, you're now the illegitimate collaborators.” His face turned sweaty and red. I suggested looking for shade but he wanted to stay and continue the conversation.

“From day one, we knew this would be an issue. President Diem struggled with it,” I explained. “He needed American aid but wasn't sure about paying the price of an American presence in our country. He and his brother Nhu even contacted, secretly of course, the highest leadership in Hanoi to work out a negotiated settlement that would bypass the Americans and cut short American involvement in our country.”

“I didn't know that,” Cliff said. As a military man, he was not naturally inclined toward the clotted, underground world of political intrigue.

Quietly, I wondered if the maneuver was meant to bring about a negotiated peace and unification or was simply a means for his brother, the controversial Mr. Nhu, to thumb his nose at the Americans, to wriggle from the grip of American pressure for reform.

“Have you heard of Mieczyslaw Maneli?” I asked.

Cliff shook his head slowly, his head lolled back as if to retrieve a memory. “I don't think so.” He had his elbow on the table, supporting his chin with his hand.

In case I was mispronouncing his name, I wrote it on a napkin and showed it to Cliff. He shook his head and repeated, “I don't know him.” I looked at my watch and ordered a fresh round of squid. “Maneli was the Polish middleman between Saigon and Hanoi. Neither we nor they wanted our secret dealings known.”

“Why not exactly?”

“Russia and China would not want a negotiated settlement. They don't want Vietnam to be sovereign or neutral. So they aren't in favor of compromise or a negotiated peace. What they want is a Vietnam firmly within the Communist camp.”

“And the American position was what?” Cliff asked.

“Who knows? Do the Americans even know?”

Cliff laughed. “Well put, well put,” he said.

“The American position is probably to keep us within the American orbit. And dependent. In any event, President Diem didn't trust the American position, whatever it might have been. So he kept the Maneli affair secret from the Americans as well.”

I had Cliff's continuing attention. “If you know our history, and the Chinese and Soviets certainly
do,
you would see that it's in their interest to keep you in this war. So they can trumpet your presence. They want you stuck here while they remain offstage, calling the shots.”

Cliff closed his eyes as if to give the matter serious mental consideration. “I can see how complicated everything is,” he said in his customary, level voice.

“Exactly. A war has to be seen from so many angles,” I said, surprised that I was mouthing what was essentially Phong's stock position. This included the American domestic scene, which few Vietnamese considered or understood. Indeed, my doubts about American commitment to overseas battles in the far-flung corners of the world were confirmed years ago when I was first sent, along with a handful of other Vietnamese, to an American officers' training school at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. We landed, and right away we let out a soft, collective sigh. Ahhh. So this is America, we thought. A country the size of a continent. Beautiful. Free. So rich, so vast, and so startlingly separate from the rest of the world, loosed from the teeming continents of poverty far away. A country like that could afford to be unruffled and detached—oblivious to miseries beyond its borders.

Every week Cliff and I would lunch together at Saigon's family-owned eateries. We were a country preoccupied with food. Practically every house doubled as a storefront designed to satisfy our culinary cravings, from the most delicately wrought to the more parochial but hearty fare. We ate sweet pork buns, steamed rice crepes, fried bread, rice rolls wrapped in banana leaves.

After our first few lunches, I invited him home. He was already adapted to our habits of eating and drinking. Still, my wife made sure we served only cooked vegetables and beef, well done. We excluded one of my favorites, green papaya salad, because it was raw. Our water, my wife decided, should be just fine even for an American. It was always boiled first, left to cool, and then filtered. Still, when we were seated at the table, I was surprised to see bottled water instead. In the center tray was an impressive mound of appetizers—spring rolls, grilled lemongrass beef wrapped in grape leaves, crab claws fried with a dash of salt and pepper.

Cliff arrived in uniform. He was broad-shouldered; the carriage of his body was soldierly, angular, and erect. He spoke a few sentences in Vietnamese to show that he had learned the language and was making an effort. And for the rest of the evening we alternated between French and English. A half-smile lingered perpetually on his face, as if he would allow himself only a half dose of pleasure.

He had a wife and three sons, nineteen, seventeen, and sixteen, at home somewhere in New York, not in the city but in the mountains. I pictured pristine streams where he taught his sons to fish, fields of flowers through which they ran. My wife reciprocated with the basic facts about our family. “Yes, two girls,” she said, her face opening up exquisitely. “Mai and Khanh, inseparable.” While I struggled with the corkscrew in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, I could hear pleasantries being exchanged. My wife told Cliff about her family being from the rice-growing Mekong Delta and mine being from Laos. “But he's Vietnamese,” she added. Cliff nodded and asked if there were many Laotians in Vietnam. “No,” she said. “But many Chinese.” Moments later, when Cliff expressed an interest in the lacquer paintings on the walls, she seemed pleased and led him to her two favorite paintings. “Look at these,” she said proudly.

“I drove to several factories that make ceramics and lacquered products but didn't see anything as beautiful as these. I'd like to buy a few to send back home,” Cliff said.

“You need to go to the right place. We'll take you to Bien Hoa, about an hour away. The best factories are there. These paintings have more than ten layers of lacquer. They won't crack. So you see they are beautifully polished. Here is a traditional Buddhist scene,” she said. “A lotus pond which is meant to convey serenity.”

“I can see the superior quality here,” Cliff said agreeably.

“And this one is of the two women warriors in our history who rode on elephant backs, led an army, and defeated invaders from China,” she explained.

“Yes, yes, I'm quite aware of the Trung Sisters. I had read about them when I was preparing to come to Vietnam. And your husband here has invoked their names many times since we've become friends,” Cliff said, his smile lingering as he examined the lacquered details. “I understand they weren't the only woman warriors either.”

“True. We also have Madame Trieu,” my wife explained appreciatively.

“I do believe she was the one who uttered the famous words about riding the tempest and taming the waves and rejecting the lot of women who bow their heads.” Cliff sipped his wine and slyly winked at me.

My wife's eyebrows shot up. She was impressed. “That's right. And those women are quite representative of Vietnamese women in general, I should add,” she said. Her voice dropped as she looked at me to confirm her assertion.

“Quite so,” I said.

“I'm impressed you know so much about our history, Cliff,” my wife said, gazing at him thoughtfully.

“As I said, I wanted to learn about the country before coming,” he answered. “You can tell a lot about a country by the historical figures it celebrates as national heroes. I noticed right away when I arrived that you have major boulevards named after the Trung Sisters and Madame Trieu.”

My wife continued to look at him, almost in a clinical, appraising way. I imagined she was wondering what I myself had wondered many times. Why such a man would leave his country to come here.

To help, he answered amiably when she asked. The simplicity was so startling that I could tell she wasn't sure whether it was true. “What do you get in return?” my wife asked.

“Me? Contentment. Satisfaction that one has made an important contribution,” he answered.

“What about your country? What does it get in return?”

Cliff shrugged. “I am more concerned with my own decisions. What
I
can do. Whether
I
can help. The big picture is beyond my control.”

She seemed genuinely surprised. We were sitting at the dinner table. My wife urged me to pour the wine, nudging me gently with her elbow.

“So simple?” Quy persisted.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Some things are simple. If you allow them to be stripped to their true essence, you would see simplicity.”

My wife hardly blinked. “Really? Can you give me an example?”

“It's easy enough. Loyalty, for example. Loyalty is very simple. You don't abandon someone who has been a friend to you at his moment of need.”

“But can't there come a time when you have to let go? There are limits to everything, even friendship.”

Cliff closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “What is that scent? The flowers here give off such an incredible fragrance.”

“Oh, that? It's the dwarf ylang-ylang. It blooms all year on our terrace,” my wife said. “It's the flower that gives Chanel N° 5 its signature scent.”