Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE DAY TRAIN TO HANOI

EVEN 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.

Now I was in a seat on a passenger train, rattling north on tracks that ran beside the Street Without Joy, as the retreating French had called it, through sandy hills and gray swamps near the sea. What had been the demilitarized zone along the Ben Hai River, in Quang Tri Province just north of Hue, remained a litter of unexploded bombs and land mines and so many shattered tanks and shell casings that people still scavenged the area for scrap metal.

Dong Hoi was a town of new houses and bright tile roofs for a reason: having been burned to the ground, it had risen again. (Guidebook: "It was wiped off the map by U.S. bombing.") Here and there among its pink villas and bungalows, people were tending the fires at smoking kilns while others were stacking bricks, the place still being rebuilt. And the same was true of Vinh, a town that had been turned to dust by American bombs and was now rising. Most of the houses I saw beyond the 17th parallel were brand-new, the old ones having been burned or blown up.

But amid the newness the old Vietnam endured. Men up to their knees in mud in paddy fields, driving water buffaloes, a kind of harmony reflected in the geometry of their fields, and their conical hats, and the straight lines of their puddled lanes.

Later on, we passed the sudden humps of massive stone mountains with vertical sides and rounded summits. The train guard told me they were called Ouanh Binh. They extended for miles. Seeing a big domed cathedral in the distance, the conductor blessed himself with the sign of the cross to indicate to me that it was a Christian church.

Hearing us talking, another young man said hello and snatched my sunglasses. He put them on and clowned, jeering at me, for his friends.

"CIA! CIA!" he chanted.

"You think so?" I said.

"Yes. You CIA!" he said and poked his finger at me. But he was laughing. He then put the sunglasses on upside down and goofed around some more, and his friends laughed.

While his friends tried on my sunglasses and made faces, the conductor asked me where I was from, and when I told him, he said, "How do you feel being in Vietnam?"

"Happy that it's prosperous and sad that we bombed it."

"I think that too," he said. He wore a rather severe expression, and he knew that no matter where we were on this line to Hanoi there was a bomb crater. And the other visible fact of the trip was that the TV screen in this coach was showing Tom and Jerry cartoons, dubbed in Vietnamese.

The train was full of traveling Vietnamese, and though some got off at the smaller stations, most were headed to the capital. They watched the cartoons, they snoozed, they read, they chatted. Boxes of food were handed out to each passenger, containing rice, pickled cabbage, tofu, and something gray and rubbery that might have been meat but could also have been a patch for an inner tube. Outside, whenever we passed a field, people were working, bent over, hoeing or digging or plowing. Everything I saw was like the embodiment of peace and hope.

Even the young man who had fooled with my glasses made me hopeful. "CIA!" he called out when I passed his row to stretch my legs. But he was harmless — I often regard teasing as a form of confidence and affection. When we neared Hanoi, this same man helpfully told me some things I must see: the water puppets, the lakes, the Old Quarter, Ho's mausoleum.

***

MOST OF THE DAYLIGHT WAS gone by the time the train got to Hanoi, yet the glaring lamps and illuminated boulevards gave the city a greater dignity, the mystery of night shadows, in which glorious lakes and a huge opera house dominated, and that was when I realized what a wondrous place it was, a kind of Asiatic Paris.

I had no idea. But how was I to know? The noble city had always been represented to Americans as the enemy capital, a rat's nest of villains, and belittled by our propaganda, better off bombed and wiped off the map. That was another lesson in the twisted justification of war: demonized people are more deserving of death, rubbishy cities more deserving of destruction. Talk about them as inferior or taunted or pathologically hostile, and they're no great loss when they're gone.

The Parisian glamour had another dimension. I found a hotel on a back street in Frenchtown, near the well-known but much too expensive Metropole. I went for a late-night walk and realized that among the cafés and restaurants and elegant villas, all this Frenchness, there were also noodle shops and street vendors and hawkers huddled near the joints selling fresh beer and smoked fish. The vast, simple-looking, Europeanized city held another city that was more crowded and complex and Asian, and quite a bit cheaper.

Walking back to my hotel, feeling happy, I paused under a tree to watch the bikes and scooters go past when a motorbike bumped up the curb some feet away and came straight at me. Her arms apart on the handlebars, a young leering cat-faced woman with long hair and white gloves and thigh-high boots revved the engine and made kissing noises at me.

"Get on! You come me!" She hitched forward to make room for me on the seat.

"I come with you?"

"Me madam. Come my hotel. Get on!"

There is a stereotypical women's fantasy of being swept up by a handsome knight on a horse. This was related to it, a male fantasy you never dare think about: being confronted on a dark street and swept up by a long-haired woman astride a motorbike. Even so, I hesitated.

"You want boom-boom?"

"Yes I do," I said and laughed in admiration at the suddenness and ingenuity of it. "But I can't tonight."

"Forty dollar," she said. Fotty dolla, a kind of Boston accent.

I had to decline, not because I didn't want to, but because I was an older man and happily married and more interested in finding an Internet café to send my wife an e-mail than in hopping on the bike and being driven through the portals of love. This happened two more times as, unbidden, beauties on bikes mounted the sidewalk and, eagerly smiling, revving their engines, offered to speed me away. Each time they promised the same thing.

"Get on! You want boom-boom?"

***

HANOI WAS A FORMAL CITY of wide avenues, extravagant topiary and pretentious colonial mansions, picturesque villas with cupolas and mansard roofs, imposing ministerial buildings — every sort of pompous Gallic façade, including the nineteenth-century opera house — and many good restaurants; at the same time it was an improvised city of malodorous neighborhoods, labyrinthine streets, noodle shops, and open-air markets of screeching traders and squashed and stepped-on fruit. It was also a city of stately parks and lakes surrounded by landscaped perimeters. The French capital had been transformed into a Vietnamese capital without any sign that America had been involved. And of course we hadn't been: we had bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong harbor, and so our history in Hanoi was one of infamy and evil-intentioned outrages directed from the air.

I was continually struck by how most Vietnamese were willing to forgive, or move on, when the subject of the war came up. One exception to this was the memory, by those who had endured it, of what became known as the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. This unambiguously geno-cidal act of pure wickedness took place in December 1972, just weeks before the signing of the cease-fire, like a final spiteful slap, except that it was not a slap but rather a blitz of firebombs intended to incinerate and cow the Vietnamese.

Nixon had ordered this air strike in mid-December, and for eleven days the sky over the capital was black with B-52 bombers. In their circuit, they dropped forty thousand tons of bombs and aerial mines from Hanoi to Haiphong harbor, killing an estimated sixteen hundred Vietnamese. Twenty-three American planes were shot down, and we were outraged when the surviving pilots were imprisoned. "Military targets" was the justification we were given at the time by Nixon and Kissinger, but this lie was transparent propaganda. In one instance, in an old neighborhood of Hanoi, every house on Kham Thien Street was destroyed, with a great loss of civilian life — nearly all women and children, because their husbands and fathers were away fighting.

On my second day in Hanoi a man mentioned this to me. He was in his mid-fifties, and he recalled it, but all he said was "Very bad."

I found photographs of that bombing and others at the Army Museum. Once again, the pictures taken by American photographers were much more shocking than those of the Vietnamese.

In the courtyard of the museum, like an artist's installation, stood the wreckage of American planes, one of them propped upright, as tall as a four-story building, its nose cone approximating a church steeple. The whole assemblage of fuselages and wings and tails and insignia was given a bulging form. A plaque beside it noted that forty thousand American planes had been shot down over North Vietnam between 1961 and 1973. The message was tendentious in its tone and might have exaggerated the numbers, but there was no mistaking the power of this sculpture as a shrine to downed planes and the futility of that war.

How familiar it all was to me, and would have been to any American of my generation. The helmets and shoes, the medals and paraphernalia of captured U.S. soldiers; the excerpt from President Johnson's diary expressing dismay over the progress of the war, and an accompanying photo showing his distress, his fleshy features and comical nose; the American and European faces in the photographs displayed in the Peace Movement Room — the sort of pictures that are shown in American museums that have areas devoted to the 1960s, images of sign-carrying students, speechifying, picketing, and confrontations. That it showed less of the military history of the country than the human dimension, and that it was presented without any gloating, made it all the more upsetting.

A large square of cloth printed with the Stars and Stripes contained the following message in eight languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Lao, and Cambodian: I am a citizen of the USA. I do not speak your language. Misfortune forces me to seek your assistance in obtaining food, shelter and protection. Please take me to someone who will provide for my safety and see that I am returned to my people. My government will reward you.

This plea was intended to help an isolated American infantryman or downed bomber pilot lost in Vietnam. Its castaway's tone and its helpless appeal were intended to soften the heart of strangers or even of the enemy. I tried to imagine the effect such a printed message would have today, anywhere in America, if it read "I am a citizen of Iran" or "a member of Al Qaeda" or "a Palestinian national," and made the same plaintive requests, with an enemy flag unfurled on it.

Most of the museumgoers were Vietnamese. They and the museum attendants, seeing me, greeted me with a smile, asking where I was from.

"America."

"Welcome."

I wanted to meet someone in Hanoi who had lived through the bombing. Hanoi was a walkable city. I strolled around for a few days, in the Old Quarter and among the huddled shops and temples and through the big market. I saw the water puppets and Ho's mausoleum and the museum dedicated to Ho's life and achievements.

Rather than eating alone in a proper restaurant — a depressing activity anywhere, sitting and staring — I roamed and browsed and grazed, snacking on noodles and bowls of soup, chatting with people in fresh-beer bars and coffee shops, looking for witnesses.

Invariably, while walking, a motorcycle with a biker babe on board would pull up beside me and demand that I get on behind her.

"You come! Boom-boom!"

This even happened in the area of cloisters and villas and temples and embassies near the National Museum of Fine Arts, where I had gone one day to look at silk paintings and bronzes.

There I found the witness I had hoped to meet, a woman who had been in her early teens at the time of the Christmas bombing. She was now the mother of two girls. Wearing a tissuey silk scarf that accented her fine-boned face and luminous eyes, she was beautiful in the Vietnamese way, slightly built, a dancer's body, svelte, almost skeletal, yet looking indestructible. The delicacy of her fragile-seeming features — and this seemed true of all Vietnamese women I met — was in great contrast to her powerful spirit and her prompt and appreciative manner. This put me in mind of how thirty years of war, successfully defending their country, had given the Vietnamese unshakable faith in themselves and made them unusually resourceful and alert.

She was Vuong Hoa Binh, the daughter of the late Vuong Nhu Chiem, who had been the curator of the museum, where she worked and where I met her, purely by chance. She smiled easily, she was articulate, and she had lived in or near Hanoi throughout the war.

"What is your country?" she had asked.

I told her. She welcomed me. I said, "Was this museum damaged in the war?"

"It was bombed," she said. "The whole city was bombed, of course."

Her father, the curator at that time, had devised a plan for moving the ancient Buddhas, the stelae, the silk paintings, the porcelains, the gold work, and the scrolls to safety.

"He hid it all underground so it wouldn't be damaged by the American bombs," she said. "My father supervised the distribution and hiding of it. He put it in many different places, so even if some of it were bombed, the rest would be intact."

Mr. Vuong used the same systematic logic to disperse his family, scattering his five children to five different locations in or around Hanoi, to give the family a better chance to survive.

"If we had been in the same place, he would have lost us all, had a bomb hit us. Hanoi was bombed all the time by B-52s. Yet we all survived!"

"You knew what a B-52 bomber was?" I was impressed that a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl would recognize a specific aircraft. It was hard to imagine an American adolescent knowing such a thing, so why should she?

"Everyone knew this plane," she said. "And we were afraid, even in the bomb shelters."

"Do you remember the Christmas bombing?"

"I remember everything. I remember the day the bombs fell on Kham Thien Street," she said, drawing her silk scarf close with her slender fingers. "It was the nineteenth of December. A thousand people died there that day, and most of them were women and children. Every home was destroyed. It was very terrible to see."

"You saw it?"

"Yes. My aunt and my mother took me to see the damage," she said. "We saw many cratères—yes, craters — big holes in the road. And the dead, and the fires. I was so frightened. But my aunt and my mother said, 'We must see this. What has been done to us.' There's a monument on that street now."

"Were you living near there?"

"We were just outside Hanoi." She hesitated, then, seeming to remember, said, "We didn't have much to eat. In fact, we had very little food all through the war. We were always hungry. Even after the war was over we had so little rice. And it was stale rice — old rice."

"Because of the destruction?"

"No. Because of the American embargo, and the Chinese invasion."

We had withheld food from them. I did not say, though Mrs. Vuong surely knew, that the Chinese had invaded the northern provinces at a time when we were cozying up to them, and Americans took some pleasure in seeing the Vietnamese being thrashed in their hungry and weakened state.

"We were told that the targets were military bases."

She smiled sadly at this and said, "Everything was targeted. The whole city. Especially roads and bridges. Our bridge was bombed by the B-52s" — this was the Chuong Duong Bridge, across the Red River to Haiphong. "But we repaired it. Factories were especially targeted, no matter what they made. The bombings continued for years. Everything was bombed."

She meant not only Kham Thien Street but also the railways, the lakes, the pagodas, the mansions, the tenements and huts, the museums, the eleventh-century Van Mien Library, the eighteenth-century Catholic cathedral, the opera house, the ancient university Quoc Tu Giam with its stelae and statues and Confucian temple, the markets, and the suburbs — everything. Of the millions of tons of bombs we had dropped, many had fallen on her city. By 1968, when there were half a million American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the British historian J. M. Roberts has written, "a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than fell on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War."

Outside the museum, rain had begun to fall. Hanoi is known for its frequently dreary weather, its cloudy days and its drizzle. Raindrops pattered on the windows and ran down the panes, and the wind sucked at the glass, rattling the casements.

"My mother had a friend whose husband worked at a factory that was bombed," Mrs. Vuong said. "The woman hurried to the factory as soon as she heard the news. She saw that it was smoking — it had burned. She couldn't see anything. But she wanted to find her husband, even if he was dead. But he wasn't there. Just ruins.

"She walked through the smoke and ashes, and she saw, lying among the cinders, one finger. A human finger with a ring on it. Their wedding ring! She knew then that her husband was dead. She took the finger home and had it buried. She kept the ring. And this year she gave the ring to her son, when he got married."

"What a story," I said.

"So many stories from that time," she said. "We were poor and we had no food, but we had esprit. My brothers wanted to fight the Americans. They wanted to be in the army. Ninety-nine percent of the boys in North Vietnam wanted to be in the army. To be a soldier was the greatest thing. No one hesitated. It was their spirit."

"So your brothers were soldiers?"

"Another story," she said, smiling again. "One of my brothers went to the army recruiter. He came home crying, because he didn't have enough age or weight. He was just a small boy — too young. He kept crying, 'I want to be a soldier!' My other brother was accepted. He was so happy to be given a chance to fight."

"What did your parents think?"

"They were happy. My mother was so happy she went to a lot of trouble to find the right ingredients for spring rolls for him. It wasn't easy in Hanoi then! She had to search everywhere. We had a party. Everyone was happy, my brother most of all, celebrating that at last he was a soldier. He was about seventeen."

We were standing beside the big windows of the museum, the Buddhas and porcelains behind us, one of the more formal and completely European-looking neighborhoods of the city out the window. The rain-streaked panes gave the old French buildings across the courtyard the blur and muted color of an impressionist painting.

"It's a beautiful city," I said.

"Hanoi is losing its beauty," Mrs. Vuong said. "It was so quiet before. It was smaller. Just bicycles. No motorbikes. Now it's noisy, and the people are not Hanoi people. They're from the countryside. They don't know the city."

She thought a moment, adding, "And we are changing. We were poor but we had spirit. I knew my father so well. I knew his life. I knew what he needed. My children don't know what we've been through. I try to tell them. It's impossible for them to understand. I can't explain it to them."

"But aren't these good times?" I was thinking of the markets that were packed with consumer goods, full of food. I was also thinking of the vitality of the country, the tremendous sense of pride, no visible poverty — nothing like the present-day wreckage of Cambodia and its demoralized people.

"Yes, there's more money, more food, but less spirit. I read books, but my two girls are always using computers. They don't read. They love American films." And with a kind of wonderment and resignation, she said, "They want to go to America."

"It's easy to get there now," I said, but I was just gabbling. I was thinking of the bombing, the hunger, the death, the severed finger with the wedding ring on it, the party for a soldier, with specially made spring rolls on platters, celebrating the departure of a teenager, off to fight Americans.

"The world is small," Mrs. Vuong was saying.

I said, "Do you hate me?" and realized as I was saying it that I was becoming tearful, which was a kind of nausea too, I suppose, absurd self-disgust, as my eyes filled.

"No, I don't hate you," Mrs. Vuong said, but that made me feel worse.

She was looking serene, as she had when I first saw her, the small slight figure in the museum, like a dancer. But now she was a little distracted, probably thinking of her daughters in front of computers.

"That was a different time."

***

PASSING THE OPERA HOUSE the night before I left Hanoi, I saw people gathering on the steps for a performance, a play advertised as Huyen Thoai Cuoc Song (Myth of the Living), by the Vietnamese playwright Le Quy Duong.

Finding the ticket office closed, I walked around outside and looked for an explanation. The only English-speaker was a tall, smiling young man in a suit and tie. He had the look of someone who had a ticket. He was beaming from the top of the long flight of steps in front of the floodlit opera house.

"How do I get a ticket to this play?" I asked.

"You can't," he said. "It's by invitation only."

"What a shame. Is it a musical?"

"Some music. Some film. Mixed media."

"In Vietnamese?"

"No. Body language," he said.

"I'd like to see it," I said. "Who is Le Quy Duong?"

"I am Le Quy Duong," he said.

"So why not invite me to your play?" I said. "I'm a writer too."

He looked amused at my presumption and gave me an envelope with an invitation inside.

His play was, as he said, mixed media, full of gongs and drums, with dazzling lights, mime, masks, and floating smoke. The opera house was full. I sat back and tried to divine the creation myth amid the swordplay, the prancing skeletons, and the love story. The thing had gusto and was so full of life, so plumped with startling events and sonorous music, that it didn't need explanation.

Afterwards, as I was walking to the lobby, a man said, "Can you be interviewed?"

"You know who I am?"

"You are the man who…" He faltered, then said, "Le Quy Duong says you speak English."

"That's me. I speak English."

I praised the play and then headed into the street, and not twenty yards from the opera house a motorcycle skidded to a halt next to me. The beauty on board revved her engine, hitched herself forward to make room for me, and said, "You want boom-boom?"

I thanked her and kept walking.

***

It had been my dream in 1973 to go north on the train and onward to China. But the upheavals! The Vietnam War was only one. In China, the Cultural Revolution had convulsed every part of the country. Travel to these places was impossible. So I had flown from Saigon to Tokyo, where I resumed my Railway Bazaar.

But countries open and close. Time passed. The Vietnam War ended. And soon after Mao died, in 1976, the Cultural Revolution was over. China opened to curious travelers around 1980, the year I sailed down the Yangtze. The U.S. trade embargo, lifted in 1994, was the beginning of Vietnam's economic progress. All the borders were open now.

I got a China visa. I bought a ticket on the overnight train to Lao Cai, the northernmost station on the line from Hanoi, on the Chinese border. This was a simple trip. I left Hanoi at around ten on another night train. Besides the Vietnamese, there were a few backpackers and tourists headed to Sapa, a resort town in the hills above Lao Cai, where tribal people lived — Black Hmong and Red Zao and Tay people.

In a noodle shop in Lao Cai the next morning, eating my usual breakfast — a pile of fried rice with an egg on top — a passing motorcyclist asked me if I wanted a ride to the border. I said yes, he put my bag on his lap, and he rode me through town to a building and an archway on the bank of the Red River. I walked through, got my passport stamped, and kept walking through another archway, into China.

The frenzy of China was immediate, even in the early morning, in the border town of Hekou. All the trade was going south, over the bridge; the streets were thick with trucks. From Hekou I could still see smoke rising from Vietnamese bungalows. Lao Cai was a country town of friendly folk; Hekou was a modernized town of go-getters.

I boarded a bus for Kunming. The trip took all day, winding amid the jungles of Yunnan Province, where I saw that an eight-lane highway was being built through the villages of the Miao people, in their pink hats and pink aprons, and other tribal people with colorful epaulettes. The superhighway under construction was raised on cement pillars that marched across valleys and rubber plantations and bamboo groves. Chinese engineers had gouged a great furrow amid the jungles of southern Yunnan, leaving another blight on the landscape, displacing people, putting up signs, bulldozing virgin forest. Troops had marched through here to go to war with the Vietnamese less than thirty years ago, but in a way this bulldozing, because it would last forever, was worse than war.

Kunming, a small habitable city I had once visited and written about, was now an ugly sprawl of Chinese-cheesy buildings and four million people. I succeeded in getting to Kunming by land — from Singapore, two thousand miles. Grown rich on its tobacco crop and manufacturing, Kunming had an enormous Louis Vuitton store and a Maserati dealership and a traffic problem and persistent prostitutes. The Chinese word for hooker is gai, chicken.

"Are you a gai because you like men?"

"No. I don't like men. I like money."

China exists in its present form because the Chinese want money. Once, America was like that. Maybe this accounted for my desire to leave. Not revulsion, but the tedium and growing irritation of listening to people express their wish for money, that they'd do anything to make it. Who wants to hear people boasting about their greed and their promiscuity? I left for Japan, reveling in the thought that I was done with China — its factory-blighted landscape, its unbreathable air, its un-budging commissars, and its honking born-again capitalists. Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant's greedy dream of development. I was happy to leave.