Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

Epilogue

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one’s father was born and where one’s father was buried. My father’s father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace. The region is famous for producing hardcore revolutionaries and hardcore Catholics. My parents were among the latter. The geographical proximity of revolutionaries to the religious often makes me wonder what a different direction my life might have taken, what a different war I might have inherited.

I went to my father’s homeland to pay my respects, only to discover that my father’s father was not buried in his mausoleum. Soil and the smoke of incense smudged the mausoleum, which stood near the compound built by my father’s father, where my uncles and most of my cousins still lived. The date of my father’s father’s death was inscribed at the mausoleum’s peak, and beneath it lay two tombs. My paternal aunt and the wives of my uncles pulled weeds, swept away the dust, and lit incense. Above the tomb of my father’s mother was a black-and-white photograph of a sad face that had also peered at me from the mantel of my childhood home. But next to her the tomb of my father’s father was empty, no stone slab to seal it, no name above it, no body inside. What remained of my father’s father was buried kilometers away, in a muddy field near the railroad tracks, far from the living, laid to rest ten years ago.

I lit incense at his tomb. Later my uncles did the same in their father’s compound, in front of his photograph. I knew this man only by his title, my father’s father. I would never be expected to call him by his name even if I had known him. Only when I was home in California did it strike me that I did not know the name of my father’s father. But I remembered his face vividly from the photograph on my parents’ mantel. Some years after my visit, this image, his image, was placed next to that of his wife, above his tomb.

That picture will become the kind of memory that the filmmaker Chris Marker talked about, the kind that fascinate me the most, “those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.”¹ I have inherited many of these memories, from the refugees among whom I grew up, from the Americans whose manners and customs I took as my own, and from my mother and father. They rarely discussed the war that had shaped them indelibly, but their lives exuded the force of memories of which they rarely spoke.

I remember what happened a few times after my mother came home from a twelve-hour workday, with even more work yet to do at home. They labored like this every day of the year except for Christmas, Easter, and New Year. Having lost almost everything, they nearly killed themselves to earn it back. She asked me if I wanted to go for a drive with her, without my father. Perhaps I was eleven or twelve, maybe younger. We drove silently in the night, the windows rolled down for the cool breeze. The radio was off. My parents never listened to the radio in the car. She would not speak to me, or perhaps she did and I did not listen or do not recall. Even if she did speak to me, I do not know what I would have said. We drove into the hills in silence and then we returned home. Perhaps this was her way of reaching out to me, the boy who had lost his mother tongue, or who had cut it off in favor of his adopted tongue. Perhaps she simply needed a few minutes away from work and my father, whom she saw every minute of the day. What did she think of, what did she remember. Now I cannot ask. Her memories are vanishing and her body is slow to obey her. She will not be counted as one of war’s casualties, but what else do you call someone who lost her country, her wealth, her family, her parents, her daughter, and her peace of mind because of the war.

I recall what Marker also said about “the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”² Yes, remembering and forgetting entwine together, a double helix making us who we are, one never without the other. I want to remember, but so much has been forgotten or silenced. My own personal memory is faulty. Through my youth, I had a memory of soldiers firing from our boat onto another boat as we floated on the South China Sea. I was four. My brother, seven years older, says the shooting never happened. As an adult, I remembered my mother being hospitalized when I was a child. A few years ago, when I discovered a memoir that I had written in college, I read in my own words that she was in the hospital at that time, not years before. Her illness and that strange ward with its mumbling patients had made me feel like I was a frightened child. That feeling was what I remembered.

As for my father, it is pointless to ask him about the past. His relationship to the past is to muffle it, at least in my presence. Although I have visited his homeland, I have never visited my own origin, the town where I was born, because he has forbidden it. More than once he has said to me, “You can never go back there!” Too many people will remember him and persecute me, or so he believes. I think of what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said of his father, who survived the Holocaust: “I hadn’t a clue as to how to find the places my father had been telling me he grew up in, and he wasn’t of much help except to tell us not to go at all because they kill Jews there. Using the present tense: ‘They kill Jews there. Don’t go!’ He was afraid for us.”³ Like Spiegelman’s father, my own must believe in rememories that do not die, those mnemonic menaces that retain their fatal force. And while I have disobeyed my father in many things, I cannot in this one thing. The paternal injunction is too strong, the specter of the unknown past too unsettling. What is it that he remembers of this place, what will he not tell me, what if he is right? This absence as a forbidding presence is the opposite of memory. Perhaps some things will never be remembered, and yet also never forgotten. Perhaps some things will remain unspoken, and yet always heard. Perhaps I will only visit where I was born after my father has passed on. Then it will be too late to see what it is he remembers, the rememory having at last expired. This is the paradox of the past, of trauma, of loss, of war, a true war story where there is no ending but the unknown, no conversation except that which cannot be finished.

I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.⁴