Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

THE ESSENCE OF SMALL PEOPLE BY GARY ALEXANDER

Ho Chi Minh City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, is home now, but my first conscious sensation was of our village in the Mekong River Delta, not far from Can Tho. The sweet stink of night soil. Mist drifting off the paddy in the morning. Utter silence but for birdsong.

The first memory that burned into my brain was me clinging to my mother’s legs, pressing with all my might. I was the second youngest of four. My baby brother was in her arms. We were standing in shade cast by an enormous American officer, an unjolly green giant. He reeked of butter and gunpowder. He had more hair on his arms than on his head.

My mother chanted over and over, “Me no VC. Me no VC. GI number one. GI number one.”

That was her only English, and she was trembling so hard I could barely hang on. My father was nowhere to be seen. Where was Father?

There were helicopters above us, hovering, bristling with guns and rockets, going whoompa whoompa whoompa. Dragonflies from hell, hovering above water buffalo that moved as slowly as the village pace.

A South Vietnamese Army interpreter spoke for the American. He said our village was a suspected Vietcong sanctuary.

“Me no VC. GI number one,” my mother replied.

The interpreter slapped her face hard. We swayed together, managing to keep our feet. Nobody moved to help her. Not the giant. Not the villagers who stood at our rear.

The American officer said that we harbored the enemy. He said we were communist sympathizers. He said we were ungrateful. He said we did not love our country. He said we were traitors. He said we were lower than snake shit. He said that he was declaring a free fire zone.

He gave us ten minutes to pack up and go. He gave us ten minutes to leave our home of ten centuries. The bones of our ancestors were in this ground. They could not leave. What would become of them? When the village was gone, they would be nowhere.

We carried what we could and watched the helicopters vaporize our village. Huts turned fiery orange and bubbled black into the sky. The smoke seared my nostrils with earth, life, and death. I saw faces in that smoke, old old faces that stretched in sooty agony as they rose and diffused in the air. The faces screamed, and so did I.

My mother took us to Saigon. This was before the city was named in honor of Uncle Ho. Our Saigon was not the leafy and elegant colonial Saigon, the Saigon of fine cafés and shops. Our Saigon was a shantytown, 100,000 of us per square kilometer. We had mud and rotted planks for roads. We had lazy rivers of piss and turds and garbage and typhoid. Our roofs were corrugated tin, hot as a stove. Our walls were printed cardboard, with the logos of Coca-Cola and Sony.

Let me tell you, my mother was a beauty. I remember most her aroma, how her perfume overwhelmed the rancid air. She wore makeup and Suzy Wong skirts. She went out at night.

My father never joined us in the city and she refused to discuss him. Years later, my older sister confided that he was working in the paddy that day and had lifted a hoe out of the muck. A jumpy helicopter gunner saw it as an AK-47. That was what happened to Father and why our village came to be a Vietcong sanctuary.

In 1975, when the North Vietnamese rumbled into Saigon in their tanks, my mother scrubbed the paint from her face and threw away the tight dresses. She wore black silk pajamas when she went out at night. We still had to eat.

By 1980, the Americans and their guns and their dollars were long gone. It was the time of the Carter-Reagan embargoes, when we had less to eat than ever. We moved in with Uncle Thanh, a widower with two grown children, a son and a daughter. He lived in an apartment on Yen Do Street, in a crumbling, stuccoed relic of a building. It had wooden shutters, a ceiling fan, and a water closet. Uncle Thanh and our family shared two rooms.

His house seemed like a French colonial mansion.

Uncle Thanh was stooped. He wore a perpetually bewildered look. He was ancient to me, although he was only in his fifties. Uncle Thanh sold food and drink from a wheeled cart, of which he was immensely proud. It was made of hardwood that he polished with a rag until it shone like glass. On the scrap-metal canopy not a speck of rust was tolerated, even during the monsoons when rain fell as if from a faucet. In joking tones, the Americans had nicknamed his cart and the thousands in Saigon like it as “Howard Johnsons.” Uncle Thanh neither knew nor cared what they had meant.

Every predawn, Uncle Thanh went to the Central Market for his merchandise — bread, meat, produce, pastries, whatever was available that he could afford. My mother helped him cook the meats and prepare sandwiches. Later in the day, he cooled bottles of soda and beer in the lower compartment with chunks of ice bought from men who pedaled their wagons in a furious race against the vertical sun.

I begged my mother to let me go with Uncle Thanh. Once a week she relented and permitted me to miss school to do so. I think she was relieved that I became attached to him. I regretted that my mother and I were not closer. It was not for lack of love. It was because she had so many other worries. Of her children, I could fend for myself the best.

Times were difficult, not that they had ever been easy. Food and drink were scarce, customers scarcer. Instead of the Americans and the French who preceded them, we had the Soviets, plump and unhappy, the color of lard. They were known as Americans Without Dollars.

Suddenly Uncle Thanh’s business improved. He had new merchandise to sell: American cigarettes. Vietnamese-made Ruby Queens tasted like asphalt and smelled like a car fire. Diplomats, journalists, and Party officials would pay 200 dong for a package of Salems or Winstons. To put that in perspective, my schoolteacher earned 600 dong per month.

Thanks to his newfound income, Uncle Thanh could afford to pay a few dong per week to a policeman for the privilege of moving his cart to an improved location, half a kilometer from home but very near Dong Khoi, the avenue of the rich.

During the French war, this elegant strip of bars, restaurants, and shops was Rue Catinat. In the American War it was Tu Do, or Freedom Street. Now it was Dong Khoi, the Street of Simultaneous Uprisings.

When Uncle Thanh thought my ears were old enough to hear such language, he said that since the flesh and sin trade had not diminished, Dong Khoi was commonly referred to as the Street of Simultaneous Erections. This was an unimaginable street where an evening of nightclub fun would cost six months’ wages for a laborer.

Uncle Thanh worked at the side of a theater. The cinema was out of business, doors nailed shut, pictures of Sabu on the marquee plastered over with posters of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the People’s Army and hero of Dien Bien Phu. Uncle Thanh could see Dong Khoi and customers could see his cart.

It was there that Comrade Vo approached him.

“Comrade Thanh,” he said. “I am happy to meet you. I am pleased you are so prosperous.”

Uncle Thanh presented a broad, jittery smile. Vo was our neighborhood political cadre. He was a northerner, dark and rat-faced and not much taller than I. Vo had simply moved into the home of Uncle Thanh’s friend, Minh, an office clerk. There had been whispers about Vo, hushed fears. Uncle Thanh avoided the stories as he sought to avoid the cadre himself.

“I came to see you,” Vo went on, “for I have wondered why I do not see you at political discussion meetings, either you or your lovely sister.”

Uncle Thanh replied so quietly that I could barely hear him. “I humbly think I am too old to be of value.”

“You are too old for improvement?” Vo asked incredulously. “You have lived under the puppet boot of imperialist decadence and you cannot change your thinking through education and self-criticism?”

Uncle Thanh lowered his eyes. I had never seen him so frightened and this frightened me.

“How is your son, Pham?”

Uncle Thanh looked up. He maintained his silence. I knew it hurt him to speak of Pham, whose crime had been to rise in the South Vietnamese Army to the rank of captain. After Liberation, he had been sent to the countryside for reeducation. Other officers in Thieu’s army had been reeducated and released. Pham had not.

“Your son fought bravely but wrongly, Thanh. Reports indicate that Pham is not receptive to new ideas.”

Uncle Thanh shrugged. “We receive few letters from him and I do not understand politics.”

“Perhaps I could contact his instructors. I can inquire of his progress and tell them he would be coming home to a family with proper revolutionary attitudes.”

Uncle Thanh bowed. “Thank you, Comrade.”

“Your daughter, Thi. She concerns me too.”

Uncle Thanh’s head came up with such a start that I flinched. I didn’t know Pham. Thi either. But I did know Thi had been a typist at USMACV Headquarters. She had many American friends, spoke their language, read their books, and wore Western clothing. She had escaped in one of the last helicopters to lift off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in 1975.

Thi married a Vietnamese man in San Francisco. They had good jobs and plenty of money. The Winstons and Salems came from Thi.

“I have little contact with her,” Uncle Thanh lied.

Comrade Vo smiled, looking through him. “Yes, of course. It is sad, not your fault that she was contaminated and corrupted. Nonetheless, those of mean spirit could say you are influenced by her cowardice and counterrevolutionary path.”

Uncle Thanh said, “I harm nobody.”

Vo walked around his cart. He slid open the lowest drawer and took from the compartment two packages of Salem cigarettes. Just helped himself.

“The road to socialist purity is arduous,” Vo said. “The end of the journey will not be reached until everyone is equal. In Ho Chi Minh City, this journey has proven especially grueling. Neocolonial reactionaries here cling to their decadent ways.

“However, patriotic sacrifice does not require that pleasure be shunned altogether. Our neighborhood citizens meet to learn the joys of revolutionary socialism after a long day of toil.

“Perhaps if I provide good cigarettes, the people will be more relaxed and amenable to improvement.”

Vo frowned at the Salems. “California tax stamps on the seals. Is that not the American province where many of the bad elements resettled?”

Uncle Thanh shrugged again.

Shaking his pinhead, Vo walked off. Was there anything about Uncle Thanh and his family Vo had not learned? When Vo was out of sight, I ran to the corner and peeked. The political cadre had lit up and was puffing like a chimney.

Uncle Thanh and my mother faithfully attended the political discussion meetings. They would come home, and we children expected if not revolutionary fervor at least a recounting of what they’d been taught. They were as silent as stones. I am certain Vo would regard the silence as a bad attitude, but Vo was not told. Uncle Thanh and my mother were not raising rodent informers.

It did not take me long to figure out why Uncle Thanh was not talking; the meetings made him angry. I made him smile when I asked if Comrade Vo was really giving out cigarettes at the meetings. It was a tight cold smile issued without comment.

Uncle Thanh did not appreciate being told what to do. I loved him for that alone. I almost convinced myself that I had inherited the trait from him. But I could not have, for Uncle Thanh was no more my mother’s brother, my biological uncle, than Uncle Ho.

When six share two rooms, you learn the facts of life at an early age. In the nights when the moon was fat, I would peek through a crack in the curtain that separated their bed from ours. I saw my mother straddling Uncle Thanh, rocking and gyrating, biting a knuckle so she did not cry out.

They never explained the complexities of their love to us children. I always believed they were waiting until we were older, though I doubt we would ever have been old enough. The passion of an older gentleman and a lady he met through less than proper circumstances surely embarrassed them.

I developed big eyes and ears. I spied as Uncle Thanh and my mother spoke in tense whispers of things they did not wish us children to hear. Their secret discussions usually concerned Comrade Vo.

“Minh’s wife complains about Vo,” my mother said. “He pays nothing for his food and expects his laundry done. Quoc the tailor mends trousers for Comrade Vo. He did not pay Quoc. Vo told him that in an ideal proletarian society, there is no money and everybody is equally wealthy. What does that mean? I am afraid that Vo will continue to take cigarettes from you.”

Uncle Thanh nodded. “If I refuse, he will have me arrested for being against the Revolution and harboring greedy imperialistic tendencies.”

“Does he have any word on Pham?”

“He says I must be patient.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

Uncle Thanh shook his head. “There will always be a Comrade Vo. There have always been governments that tell us what to do and what not to do, to tell us what to believe and how to behave. We are small people who must bend with the slightest breeze. That is the essence of small people. We can no more change these events than we can change the direction of the wind.”

My mother said, “It is a foul-smelling wind.”

There were other times when the discussions were arguments, a glassy-eyed, stammered code I was unable to break, other than that Uncle Thanh was dead set against and my mother was for, as there was no choice. It was too sad to watch. I could not guess then what this terrible thing was, though there was no question in my mind that Vo was the cause.

I began skipping school regularly, accompanying Uncle Thanh nearly every day. That was our secret from Mother. I promised to do my arithmetic tables and grammar, and he allowed me to pursue my practical education on the street. Comrade Vo was taking from us three packages of cigarettes per day. Mail service was erratic and customs officials at the airport stole with both hands. Shipments from Thi were unpredictable.

I took the packs that Thanh did not sell and Vo did not steal. I made them multiply. I traded them for cans of gasoline, which I traded for bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label (their USMACV PX seals intact), which I traded for tins of cooking oil (unopened, with the USAID clasped-hands label), which I traded for bags of Thai rice, which I traded for American cigarettes. On an average day I returned with a ratio of two packs to one, partially compensating for Vo’s thievery, but that did not make the cadre any easier for us to stomach.

On a soggy night soaked by the spring monsoon, my mother closed the shutters. One by one, our neighbors crept in, creating puddles where they stepped. I was puzzled about who called this dangerous meeting. It may have been my mother. Her eyes had been red throughout the day. It may have been Uncle Thanh. Say anything to him lately and you would have to say it again. It was as if his body was on Earth and his thoughts on Mars.

Actually, any of our guests might have called the meeting. Everybody was angry. Everybody had a story about Vo.

Minh, an office clerk, started. “Comrade Vo has not paid us a single dong. He lives in our home like it is his and he eats more than two men. I hint at payment and he repeats the stupid things he says at his meetings we are afraid not to attend. Revolutionary joy is sufficient payment and that we all must endure sacrifice, and so forth. He endlessly reminds me that I was a clerk for the Thieu puppet regime. Then he says that my cooperative attitude may earn me a promotion at my present job. He threatens and promises in a single breath.”

Quoc the tailor said, “I repair his clothes and I am sewing him a new shirt. He said I incompetently repaired a seam. A sleeve tore while he was at an important Party conference. He lost face. The sleeve came apart because Comrade Vo is getting fat from Minh’s food. He knows that before Liberation I altered South Vietnamese Army uniforms and sewed insignia on them. He promises to have my cloth ration increased, but as yet he has not.”

Phu, a mechanic, was next. “When Saigon was choked with cars and motorbikes, I repaired them and sold parts. Comrade Vo says I was a running-dog lackey of the bourgeois. My customers today are bicyclists. I gave Vo tires for his bicycle. His tires were worn out and he had to get around for vital Party business. He lied. I saw his bicycle. The tires are good. He sold my tires on the black market. You must stand in line for hours to buy a tire at a government store, if they have any in stock at all. Comrade Vo says he knows somebody who can supply me all the tires I want. I have not seen this ‘somebody.’ ”

Lan the barber spoke. Nguyen the fishmonger spoke. Canh, a cyclo driver, spoke. Their stories were different but the same. Comrade Vo had his hair cut free, ate free fish, and rode for free in a pedicab.

“You have the most to lose, Thanh,” Quoc said. “Vo has power over your son. Can he really have Pham released from the camp?”

“I have no idea,” Uncle Thanh said bitterly.

Minh said angrily, “Having him in my home is unbearable. We must do something!”

“We cannot,” Canh answered. “Vo is but a strand of hair on the monster.”

“What if we pluck the hair?” said Thanh. “Rip it out by the roots.”

“If we remove the hair, it may grow back even coarser. That is stupid talk that will get us jailed or even killed,” my mother blurted. “Will somebody please talk to Thanh? He will not listen to me when I tell him that he cannot touch Vo.”

The room fell silent. It was then that I knew my mother had arranged this gathering. My thoughts were drifting to the incineration of our village and our ancestors. Either my nose filled with the hot stench of smoke my mind generated or with dust. I sneezed.

They dragged me from under the bed where I was hiding. My sandal had gotten hooked around a twine-wrapped cardboard box, and it came out with me. I was chastised by Uncle Thanh for not being elsewhere with the other children and gently cuffed by my mother. Everybody had a good laugh at my expense and the tension diminished.

Then Uncle Thanh undid the twine and lifted the lid. A smile radiated across his face.

“I had forgotten these things Thi did not have room or time to take with her. I could swear I destroyed everything incriminating the day the communists arrived,” he said, removing the contents with loving care, one item at a time.

My mother looked at me oddly, then Uncle Thanh, swiveling her head. “What are you two thinking?”

Thanh was smiling, knowing what I was thinking.

Uncle Thanh and I went right to work on our plan. Other major players were Minh and his family, who got Vo out of Minh’s house on a pretext. Canh and Phu and Nguyen reported Vo’s suspiciously counterrevolutionary behavior to four different revolutionary committees. I was a burglar in reverse, who gave rather than took.

Comrade Vo pleaded his innocence mightily as unhearing soldiers prodded him out of Minh’s house with bayonets. Other soldiers examined the treasonous material as they loaded Vo into a truck.

These were the belongings abandoned by Thi, the belongings found in Vo’s room:

A novel, The Quiet American, by Graham Greene.

A schoolbook devoted to the study of democracy.

A volume of English-language poetry.

The framed photograph of a former American leader.

A Time magazine.

Uncle Thanh and I had carefully cut out the picture of the former American leader from the Time magazine cover and mounted it in a nice brass and glass frame. It was the American president who was forced to leave office — in the manner that the last Americans had fled Saigon in 1975 from the U.S. Embassy rooftop — by helicopter.

One week to the day after Comrade Vo was taken away, Pham came through our door. He was thin and his clothes were ragged, but to Uncle Thanh he had never looked better.

Following hugs and kisses and tears and laughter, Pham said, “It is a miracle. A man from this neighborhood arrived, a counterrevolutionary traitor of the worst sort. We were ordered to avoid him whenever possible. He was put to work in the paddies, doing the hardest stoop labor at the hottest time of the day. The camp commissar came to me and said the traitor had denounced me. Therefore I must have chosen the correct path. My rehabilitation was complete. Can anybody explain what this means?”

“We changed the direction of the wind,” Uncle Thanh said.