Lockhart Road
Cultural Attache
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- Mar 26, 2013
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THE CHINESE AND VIETNAM – SOME VERY PERSONAL INSIGHTS…
My first experience with Chinese in Vietnam – probably my first experience with Chinese anywhere – occurred in an unusual place. Up till then I didn’t even realise there were Chinese in Vietnam. I thought, because I hadn’t thought, that there were only Vietnamese in Vietnam, plus us – the Uc Dai Loi (Australians) – and a few too many Yanks with big guns, big planes and big talk.
Did not apply after dark
The place in question was a fortified village a couple of miles north of and outside the perimeter wire and minefields of the Aussie Task Force Base at Nui Dat, sixty or so miles south-east of Saigon. It was a ‘resettled’ village, i.e.: the inhabitants had watched their ancestral homes somewhere more sinister burnt to the ground, by us, been interrogated and pronounced ‘not Viet Cong after all,’ then been stuck in a hastily constructed community with a bleak concrete market hall in the middle of a defoliated dust bowl close to the evil eye of Nui Dat. I’d add here that the ‘not Viet Cong after all’ classification, in a lot of the individual cases, did not apply after dark.
The fortified village was called Ap Soui Nghe (pronounced Up Sooey Nay) under the so-called protection of a sandbagged fort just to the north-east, garrisoned by a Regional Force ARVN (South Vietnamese) infantry company complete with their families. I was for two months in early 1969 a member of a six- or seven-man Military Advisory Team (MAT), living in the ‘fort.’ We were all infantrymen from 9th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (9RAR). The MAT c.o. was Captain Lewis Tizard. He was ex-British Army, a nugget of a man with a highly-strung, excitable personality who used to ride around in a scout car during exercises in Australia with a pork-pie forage cap stuck on his rounded scone and carry on like Rommel. He was a unique bloke, and I was his batman at the time. We became special mates. I think of him all the time, glad to still have the photos of him that I took. Lew Tizard emerged from upper-crust roots in England, spoke like it and was highly educated. He took me under his wing and taught me a bit about a broad spectrum of subjects, one of which was Chinese in Vietnam.
“I’d be into that…”
“Take a look at that woman walking across the parade ground,” he said to me one day. “What’s different about her?” I checked the lady out. “Her skin is whiter, “ I observed. “Her features are different. Higher, more prominent cheekbones. She holds herself proudly, more so than those around her.” Lew nodded, smiling wistfully. “Lovely, isn’t she? She’s Chinese. If I wasn’t so happily married… if I didn’t have to set an example around here and wasn’t such a chocolate soldier, I’d be into that.” From then on I took more notice of the fairer-skinned population of the fort, and in the village, especially the women. And especially the schoolteacher, Co Hien – Miss Hien. She was an absolute catch in black pyjamas. The ARVN Coy. 2IC and the Montagnard CSM tried to endure a ménage a trois over Miss Hien, and then the loser ended up putting a Colt .45 in his mouth, pulling the trigger and blowing his bottom jaw off. The Chinese women in the community could do that to the lovelorn. They were more sophisticated, on a higher plane, inherently smarter, more aloof and impossible to score with. I decided Chinese women were worth knowing more about. I went to Hong Kong on my R&R… and this is where I’m still at.
I flew out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Saigon on 31 July 1969, on board a Qantas 707 to Sydney. My two years National Service was coming to its end and I’d survived nearly nine months in Vietnam. Sitting next to me was Yabbie, one of my two closest mates. We were together for recruit training at Puckapunyal, starting October 1967, and when he told me he was a crayfisherman from Port MacDonnell I said to him: “You are hereby renamed Yabbie.” We spent a night in King’s Cross, flew home to Adelaide next morning. Yabbie says he can’t recall that night. I sure can. Pink Pussycat and The Pink Panther, four hours of Sandra Nelson, our Charlie Company mascot, a 99% naked blown-up full-size photo of her on the wall of our Nui Dat boozer… We were ordered by some visiting prig of a Field Marshall to take it down or else. It stayed put. Diggers’ rights.
One night in Bangkok – too hard to take
I flew back in to Tan Son Nhut, coincidentally, precisely twenty years later, 31 July 1989. The place instantly looked unchanged from the window of the jet: sandbagged gunship redoubts, iron shed terminal building… Streets with giant International Harvesters, left behind by the Yanks, charging about... Streets buzzing with beetle Renault cabs and swarm upon swarm of Lambrettas (still like that, Saigon, a rolling surf of scooters loaded with families including the dog... pillion passengers in flowing silk national dress, the ao dai, fascinating to sit and watch with a cold beer in hand). A ‘reunified’ Vietnam, all decisions made in Hanoi, had taken the first step to imitate Beijing and open up the country to the West. They called it Doi Moi. I flew in alone, scheduled to join up with a Belgian trade mission coming from the other direction. No direct flights from Hong Kong to Saigon then, had to travel via Bangkok, en route spending a night there – too hard to take – then board one of the twice-weekly flights to Tan Son Nhut on Thai or Singapore International. No credit cards either. Not trusted by Hanoi, credit cards: too plastic, too complicated, too American with the Yanks still on the official hate list. Greenbacks were okay, though, everything done in hard cash. Hypocritical, you say? I’d prefer pragmatic. The country needed foreign exchange in a hurry.
I checked into the Rex Hotel on a corner of the square in the city, spent three or four days there in between two meetings with the local power utility, one a senior engineer from Hue, watched hawk-like by the political party commissar from Hanoi. Southerners weren’t trusted to talk turkey with foreigners. I spent my days sitting in the restaurant by the hanging bamboo beaded curtains above the square and read Bonfire of the Vanities; terrific read, Tom Wolfe became an instant hit with me, not so Brian De Palma when the cast of the film version came out with Bruce Willis in the role of Peter Fallow, whom Wolfe wrote into his story as a Pommie lush and martini bludger. Trouble was Tom Wolfe then proceeded to write one book every ten years. The Right Stuff had been one of his best, also made into a movie. I ate in the Rex’s restaurant, tasty French cuisine, and cheap… great French red no white, and cheap. The first night in good old Saigon I tentatively checked out the disco that had already opened in the hotel basement. It was as dark as the bar in the Grand Hotel in Vung Tau where my initiation to Asian women, well… girls, took place in early February 1969. Never forget those cats’ eyes coming at me through the gloom, the long fingernails reaching out, grabbing my arm, hauling me into the nearest cubicle, emptying my wallet in under twenty minutes… This time, twenty years wiser, a desperately pretty lady showed me photos of the American GI who’d left her behind fifteen years earlier. “Please, sir… can you help me find him?”
A heap of vengeance
Across the square was the Caravelle Hotel. Both of the hotels are still there, the Caravelle now boringly redeveloped, not so the Rex which retains its old world charm – or at least it did when I last went into it three years ago – as does the Continental where I stayed on one of my subsequent business visits in the 1980s and early 1990s, drinking sundowners in its atmospheric Long Bar. But let’s get back to the subject by travelling back in time….
Between 1975 and 1989 a lot of very nasty stuff was heaped on the Chinese population of Vietnam, not just South Vietnam. They were stripped of all their worldly goods, Nazi-style, put on boats, any sort of boat whether it could float out of sight or not, and shoved out to sea. There was a heap of vengeance to be wreaked by Hanoi, and the Chinese, the ‘Jews of Asia,’ copped it right up the middle. Rusted leaking hulks with people hanging over their sides started running aground in Hong Kong. The refugees were processed into hastily constructed camps in Kowloon, fed and clothed and given paid menial work to do and, over the course of several years, were resettled in countries all around the world, including Australia.
Full of Soviet shit
The persecution of its ethnic Chinese by Hanoi did not go unnoticed in Beijing. In February 1979, the year Deng Xiaoping grabbed the reins and introduced China’s Open Door Policy, the PLA launched a punitive strike across the Sino-Vietnamese border. The war went on for a month, and the PLA was given a hiding before withdrawing. Part of the reason for its incursion, Beijing told the world, was to punish Hanoi for its treatment of its ethnic Chinese population. But there was another reason – a geopolitically strategic one that’s hardly known. Moscow had signed a Mutual Defence Treaty with Hanoi, and Deng wanted to test it. Beijing’s relationship with Moscow had gone rancid, and the northern borders of China were manned and on a war footing. Deng chose to check whether Moscow would in fact live up to its promise to come to Hanoi’s aid if Vietnam was attacked, suspecting that Moscow was full of Soviet shit. Deng was right on the money. The Kremlin sat on its hands all through the month-long Sino-Vietnamese War of early 1979. The Soviet Army was occupied with a higher priority campaign: Afghanistan, one they ultimately lost in a miserable fashion similar to the Americans earlier in Vietnam.
But now it was July 1989, ten years later, and I was back in Saigon, a member of a new invasion force, a commercial one. Vietnam was in economic strife and needed to catch up with the PRC in a hurry. Guess who came back to Vietnam along with that commercial strike force. Yep… the Chinese – enthusiastically led by the entrepreneurs of Hong Kong and followed by others including the nouveau riche and powerbrokers of Mainland China. Check out Vietnam today – rebuilt by the West, especially rebuilt by the East in the guise of the Chinese, the very race of people that Hanoi had cast off in leaking boats during those despicable years in the wake of April 1975. Life can be ironic… especially in the Far East. I keep returning to that other appropriate adjective: pragmatic.
Epiphany
My most recent visit to Saigon was three years ago. I flew there with my wife, who’s Chinese, and my daughter. When I was invited to accompany them I laid down a few select conditions: “I’ll go if we can stay in the Sheraton, sit in the top floor bar and watch the sun set over the Saigon River. I’ll go if we can hire a car and drive down to Vung Tau. I want to see if the Grand Hotel is still there.” Indeed it is. The car was laid on, the Sheraton booked, by my wife’s brother-in-law, a typically successful Chinese businessman who’s doing a variety of stuff in Vietnam and employs Chinese staff in an office in Saigon. The drive took three hours each way. Vung Tau has expanded so violently it’s like an outer suburb of Saigon. The Grand retains its French profile, over which a golden paint job has been applied. It goes without saying that I checked out the bar, at least the spot where it used to be.
That large walled space is today a characterless storeroom full of ghosts of foxy bar girls with cat’s eyes and long fingernails and young fighting men desperate not to be sent back out into the jungle without putting up one last protest of basic carnality. The side door accessed via a backstreet, atop a set of steps leading to the corridor off which a heavy door used to open to the right and into the bar, has been bolted shut. I stood outside that door during my return visit three years ago, upon the exact same spot I’d first set foot on that brightly sunlit morning in early February 1969... and right there and then I experienced something I’ve since called an ‘epiphany.’ No heavenly spirit, no foxy ghost called Lan, appeared in front of me, however. What did happen was a time-warp flit up that flight of steps through one door, then a second door to the right into my youthful past. 41 years vanished before my eyes in a white flash. Where the hell have they gone? I asked myself. I was an emotional wreck for the remainder of that day, to the annoyance of my family members. Yet I'm so happy that I made the pilgrimage. It was something very special.
Bibliography
Enough random insights and thoughts on this subject for now. I’m sure that not many who browse the ‘Random Thoughts' thread will be keen to get into a long short-story like this has turned into. DonDynamite may prove an exception, I reckon, along with you, faquito – Mr Ambassador, sir. Thank you for your invitation to make this contribution. I may post excerpts in a future ‘Dear Fos’ Memo. I shall, more definitely, post what I’ve put together here on the ‘Remembering Fallen Mates – Peter Chant’ thread. Peter was one of us that sunny day in early February 1969 in Vung Tau, when we partied away our two-day In-Country R&R, known as 'R&C.' Ten days later, Pete was dead.
Appended here is the list of books I earlier threatened to include with this post:
VIETNAM: A HISTORY - The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War by Stanley Kurnow (The American perspective.)
VIETNAM – THE AUSTRALIAN WAR by Paul Ham
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST – by David Halberstam
A BRIGHT SHINING LIE – John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam – by Neil Sheehan
WHO THE HELL ARE WE FIGHTING? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars by Michael Hiam (I’ve just read this and wholly recommend it; the book lays down the facts on the great intelligence lie perpetrated by General Westmoreland’s MAC-V command in Saigon, and the gripping court case brought by him against CIA analyst Sam Adams, Mike Wallace and CBS for daring to bring the duping of America by Westmoreland and MAC-V to the attention of the country…)
HO CHI MINH – A LIFE by William J. Duiker
SAIGON – by Anthony Grey (Fiction based on fact, Vietnam’s history in a romantic Wilbur Smith style.)
VIEW FROM A LOW BOUGH by Barrie Crowley (Written by a member of Charlie Company, 9RAR, giving his personal view of being on the ground in Vietnam, of characters poorly camouflaged by nicknames whom we both knew in Vietnam… including Lew Tizard; and of incidents, some of which I was much too close to. The only real downer is his chapter describing his R&R in Hong Kong. Barrie sure missed his chance there.)
