Tales from a Mountain City: A Vietnam War memoir

By Quynh Dao

Tales from a Mountain City is a blend of history and memoir told by a young Vietnamese girl growing up during the last years of the war and the communist regime. This is a poignant account of the innocence of a child, the innocence of a people, shattered again and again by the cruel tides of power and dogma, clinging tenaciously to their traditi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heart Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9780957748224

Quynh Dao

Quynh Dao escaped Vietnam by boat to Malaysia and came to Australia as a refugee in 1979. She is a member of Amnesty International.

Book preview

1

THE REVOLUTIONARY STORM IS HERE

Like a prisoner on death row who prays for a last-minute miracle, the people of Saigon remained hopeful to the final moment that their enemy would not arrive to defeat them.

Their hearts cried out in despair. Saigon, the capital of the Republic of South Vietnam, was its soul, its heart. That their city could be lost to the enemy in this dreadful war was inconceivable. Yet their minds told them the end was near.

I was in class at school in Dalat when the bad news came. Our history lesson was interrupted by an urgent knock at the door. The highland city in the north of my province had been lost, we were told. The Communists were on their way to Dalat, a popular mountain resort in the South, and my home town. Our teacher left immediately for a meeting in the principal’s office. When she returned, Miss Mi looked shattered.

‘Students, I just confirmed the news. The Communists are coming. We all have to go home now…’

Then she started to cry. All we students were confused and scared to see our teacher lose her composure. Miss Mi hastily left the classroom, and we followed in panic. The whole school seemed to be pouring towards the front gate.

The news had spread like wildfire. As soon as they heard, parents flocked to the school to pick up their sons and daughters. Everyone was frantically looking for their loved ones in the chaos of the crowd. Parents grabbed their children’s hands and ran towards their cars, then sped away. The older students ran home. Some little children whose parents had not yet arrived waited sobbing, lost and frightened. The teachers and other adults regarded them with pity, but did not stop to comfort them. Everyone had their own families to worry about.

After twenty years of bloody fighting, the United States had resolved to extract itself from the Vietnam mess. It had reduced aid to South Vietnam to an insignificant level. The soldiers of the South had to make do with what little they could get to sustain the struggle against a fierce enemy: the forces from the North, whose support from the Communist superpowers remained as strong as ever.

It was an uneven match. In the first few months of 1975, South Vietnamese strongholds from the heart of the country right down the Central Highlands had been lost to the Communist forces one by one, in quick succession.

Some people tried reason to cushion themselves against the horrible reality. The Americans had fought side by side with South Vietnamese for the worthy cause of freedom, they argued. Surely the world’s greatest power would not totally abandon its ally in their darkest time? Saigon could be used, people speculated, as a central base from which the army could regroup and rebuild their forces to launch a retaliatory attack, reclaiming the lost territories. At the very least, Saigon could be left as a neutral zone for those who did not want to live under Communist rule.

As news from the battlefields became grimmer, new people streamed into Saigon, down from the highland provinces, and up from the plains of the Mekong Delta.

In Dalat on that fateful day, my brother Tin came to collect me and my little sister Linh on his motorbike. When we got home, Mother was already packing. Father had emptied all the drawers and boxes that contained personal papers, letters and photos on to the floor. He was hastily sorting through them. Many he burnt.

Father buried Mother’s boots in the garden. She had bought this pair of South Vietnamese Army boots to protect her feet while she did the gardening. Gardening was her greatest pleasure.

Father had worked as a civil servant for over thirty years. Before his early retirement, he had served in the royal administration, the colonial administration and the South Vietnamese government. Everything about those years could be incriminating for us—and dangerous. The massacre during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Hue of thousands of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong—the common name for the Communist guerillas used in the South—was still fresh in people’s minds.

We were going to leave Dalat for Saigon. The only way for us to get there was by plane. All routes linked to the national highway had been blocked by the Communist forces. I went with Father to the railway station to get our tickets.

After the war had erupted twenty years before, the railways had shut down. The tracks had been sabotaged. The station was a run-down building which was usually deserted. Two carriages had sat there, unmoving, for as long as I could remember. Now the ticket office had been opened to sell plane tickets. The station yard swarmed with people. They were pushing, elbowing, screaming, crying, and abusing each other in order to get closer to the counter. Their money was held upright, tight in their fists. There was fear in their eyes and sweat trickled down their faces, even though it was now well into the first hours of the cold night in our mountain city.

My family was lucky. We got tickets to depart the following day. Mother gave each of us a bag just big enough to squeeze in some clothes and personal items. A friend took us to the airport in his car. His family would leave the next day. We drove through the streets of the business district. They were silent and deserted, since all the shops were shut. No one was at the market. People had either retreated into their homes or already left. A few other vehicles were heading, like ours, to the airport.

The small airport terminal was packed with those who had managed to get plane tickets. Journeys by air were extremely rare for most people. Hardly anyone could afford them. We found that our plane was in fact an army helicopter. Passengers huddled against one another on the bare floor or sat on their bags. It was my very first flight. Throughout the journey, I didn’t lift my head from the sick bag.

The moment I set foot on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, hot wind beat against my face. The fierce heat seemed to penetrate my clothes and force itself into my body. All my life, I had been used to the cool climate of Dalat. This heat really bothered me. Sweat streamed down my face and saturated my clothes.

We found a taxi. It wove its crazy way through a maze of cars, bicycles, motorbikes and pedestrians, amassing into the crowded streets from every direction at the same time. At last we turned off the main street and followed a small dirty lane littered with rubbish. It stank of urine. We zigzagged by a few three-storey villas which proudly kept themselves apart from dark clusters of makeshift shelters and tiny wooden houses. Clothes were hung out to dry in front of each house.

Aunty Phan’s house was in a cul-de-sac behind the imposing wall of a Buddhist temple.

The narrow front of the brick house on its small piece of land concealed the large number of people who lived inside. When our family turned up, unannounced, Aunty Phan already had an earlier group of evacuees with her. Her eldest son Thanh, his wife and their three small children had come from Tan Chau, the province bordering Cambodia from which thousands of Communist soldiers had crossed into South Vietnamese territory.

Thanh had worked as an interpreter for the Americans, so he feared for his life. The Phans had four boys of their own, and also provided accommodation for five student boarders. My older sister Ba and my step-sister My had stayed there since starting university in Saigon. Our arrival, with Father, Mother, my brother Tin, my little sister Linh and myself added five more to the already crowded house.

This little home was very different from our family’s property in an exclusive street in Dalat. Aunty Phan was not well off. Uncle Phan often ran into debt through his gambling and drinking. Under the circumstances, owning their house was quite an achievement. We were just thankful to have somewhere to stay.

Uncle Phan did have some very useful skills. He had built the house and the extension himself. But Aunty Phan was the family’s breadwinner. She sold dry goods at the local market. Every day she carried huge woven baskets filled with rice and beans to her reserved spot in front of the temple. The boarders also provided a much-needed source of income for the family.

This was my first visit to see my relatives in Saigon. I was fifteen years old. Dalat was only three hundred kilometres north of Saigon, but because of the war travelling was extremely risky. There were frequent stories of cars and coaches being blown up; of roads closed because of mine explosions; and of huge mounds of dirt being dumped in the middle of the highway, forcing traffic to a halt. The Viet Cong would appear from nowhere and demand money, food and medicine. The main national road was also their line of supply. There had been many kidnappings, with hostages only being released if ransoms were paid. Travelling during wartime was mainly for intrepid merchants and other adventurers.

The steady flow of evacuees into Saigon had not dampened its lively, carefree spirit. It was the most cosmopolitan city in South Vietnam, and its entrepreneurial centre. Its people were open, outgoing, competitive and industrious. Coming from a sparsely-populated province known for its serenity and tranquillity, I had difficulty coping with the fast pace of life in Saigon. Its huge crowds talked fast and moved fast. My small-town girl’s prim and proper behaviour was totally at odds with what went on here. Saigon girls were bold, forward and fashion-conscious, in their flared jeans and tight T-shirts that clung to their breasts. The boys were smart, with shoulder-length hair and platform shoes. Noise was constant. Traditional Vietnamese opera, 1970’s American rock ’n’ roll and French songs sung in Vietnamese could be heard at the same time, all within the same neighbourhood. The monks’ chanting and the striking of the bells from the temple next door to Aunty Phan’s added to the interesting sound mix.

I did not dare go anywhere unless I was chaperoned by my parents, Ba or My. I could not contemplate crossing these busy streets by myself. Most of the time, I confined myself to the farthest corner of Aunty Phan’s house with a book. Because of the scorching heat, the book was used as a fan rather than something to read.

When Mother could no longer contain her anxiety, she took Linh and me to the temple to pray for our whole family: for the safety of my brother Chau, my four step-sisters and their families, and my two step-brothers who were in the South Vietnamese Army, battling the enemy in some unknown place. Like millions of other families scattered in the evacuation, we had heard nothing from them.

The war seemed a world away from affluent Saigon with its beautiful villas, its trendy cafés, its tree-lined boulevards, its busy markets full of marvellous food, its luxurious restaurants where businessmen talked deals, and its cabarets and nightclubs where people with money enjoyed a good time.

The worst fighting was going on in the central provinces bordering the North, the marshlands of the deep south, the rugged mountains bordering Laos in the west, and remote areas away from the main cities where the Communist forces had their strongest bases. There had been a number of guerrilla attacks in urban areas, towards which a missile was launched now and then, but these incidents were infrequent. The activities of Communist sympathisers in the cities were restricted, closely monitored by South Vietnamese authorities. City dwellers enjoyed relative peace during the war. The majority of Vietnamese people just wanted to get on with their lives.

It was in poor neighbourhoods such as Aunty Phan’s that Communist agents had most success in attracting supporters. The arrival of a large crowd of strangers at her house alerted the South Vietnamese police. In the middle of our second night in Saigon, we were woken up by two policemen.

‘Police here! Please open the door.’

‘Is there a Mai Dao living here?’ they asked when we let them in.

‘No, there is no Mai Dao here,’ Uncle Phan answered.

‘Your IDs, please.’ The policeman inspected Uncle Phan’s ID. ‘Mr Phan Dao. Thank you. And you?’ he gestured to Father. ‘Mr Nam Dao. And you?’

He looked at Uncle Phan’s son. ‘Mr Thanh Dao. How come there are so many people with the surname Dao?’ he exclaimed in exasperation.

‘These people are my relatives who have just arrived from Dalat and Tan Chau. They are escaping from the Communists. Nam Dao is my brother-in-law and Thanh Dao is my son.’

The policemen scanned our faces. ‘Okay, sorry for waking you up.’

The policemen then went to knock on the door of the house next door. ‘They’re looking for the daughter of the construction worker who lives at the other end of our street,’ Uncle Phan explained in a low voice. ‘She left school to join a Communist guerrilla group. Sometimes she sneaks back to town to see her family.’

While we were in Saigon, we paid a visit to Father’s distant cousins. Aunty Bay was in her late fifties. She was short and chubby and cranky. She was very critical of Nguyen Van Thieu, the then-President of South Vietnam. Every time he appeared on television, she would switch it off as though she could not stand the sight of him.

‘The flabby, moon-faced lout,’ she would mumble.

Her attitude could be explained because her husband, a labourer, was a Communist guerrilla who operated on the outskirts of Saigon. Occasionally he came home to visit his wife and obtain supplies. The neighbours knew what he was doing, but they chose to look the other way. Dobbing him in to the South Vietnamese police would gain them nothing but the wrath of the guerrillas, who had their ways of silencing people they did not like. In fact, the neighbours might even have given him a place to hide if the situation had demanded it. Neighbours have to live next to each other for a long time. People let the police do their duty, but were careful not to be seen as being too keen to side with the South Vietnamese authorities.

Aunty Bay’s only daughter had followed in her father’s footsteps. He had told her about the Communist utopia where everyone is treated equally, and where people work according to their ability but enjoy benefits according to their needs. The daughter was assigned the task of recruiting students with similar ideals. Her movements, however, were monitored and she was eventually arrested. A man from the South Vietnamese security police was in charge of her interrogation. He was handsome, and treated her with courtesy, the way a brother might treat a good-hearted but ignorant sister who needed explanation rather than admonition. He relayed to her accounts of life under Communism from the thousands of Northern soldiers who had defected and from the Northerners who had crossed the partition line to escape to the South. Over time, the two fell in love, and soon married. The daughter left her undercover activity, much to her parents’ disgust.

Aunty Bay lived with Aunty Phong in a small, modest house. Aunty Phong ran a snack stall in front of her house. Her customers were mainly students from the primary school nearby. Her husband, an undercover Communist, had been killed several years before by the South Vietnamese police in one of their raids. Her son, however, was a member of the South Vietnamese Army. All South Vietnamese men over the age of eighteen were subject to compulsory conscription. Only those with a good academic record or the right connections were spared military service. At the very least these could secure them a desk job.

We did not get to meet Aunty Phong’s son. As the enemy advanced towards Saigon, the army was on red alert. All conscripts were ordered to present themselves at their bases.

Aunty Bay and Aunty Phong were taken aback to see my family, their long-lost relatives, running away from the people they supported so warmly. Aunty Bay followed the progress of the war on television with an air of undisguised smugness.

‘See how the South Vietnamese soldiers run like mice from their smoking burrows! Well, my husband will return here soon—and this time for good. He’ll be given an important position, I’m pretty sure about that,’ she told us.

The political situation in the South became more and more chaotic. In ten short days, the presidency changed hands three times. President Nguyen Van Thieu read his resignation speech on 21 April 1975. The elderly former Prime Minister, Tran Van Huong, subsequently assumed power. He would be replaced by General Duong Van Minh just before the capitulation of Saigon.

Soon we heard that former President Thieu and his family had fled the country. Those who were privileged and had inside information and contacts quickly followed suit. News of the flight of high-profile leaders added to the looming sense of dread and fear among the rest of the population. Television showed panicky crowds rushing to foreign countries’ embassies to apply for entry visas.

While my Aunty Bay enthusiastically anticipated a Communist victory, her daughter and son-in-law were among the first to escape. He was a member of the South Vietnamese security police in charge of interrogating detained Communists; she was a turncoat in the eyes of her former comrades. They would not stand a chance.

Father put together a visa application for our family. He went to the American and French embassies and waited for a long time, but came back empty-handed, shaking his head in despair. He told us it was sheer madness out there. It was impossible to get past the embassies’ front gates, which were heavily guarded to prevent the mob getting in.

But those who wanted to get out of the country kept trying. It was only those who had no connections, no money, and no means to go anywhere that awaited their fate with resignation—apart from people like Aunty Bay and Aunty Phong, of course. Every evening after dinner, the men of the neighbourhood gathered on the veranda at Uncle Phan’s to discuss current affairs.

‘Look, the way things are going, it won’t be long before the Communists are right here, face to face with you and me.’

‘Well, let’s wait and see. The Americans would not be so stupid as to let them swallow the South whole. Look, they need someone to protect Southeast Asia from the Communist advance.’

‘Come on, old man. They have shaken hands with China! Tell me, what do they care about Vietnam? Now they’re friends with the big boss, why do they need to bother with the servant?’

‘They can’t abandon South Vietnam just like that! How can they? We are their ally. We helped them keep the Communists away.’

‘Let me tell you something. There is no ally, no nothing in the political game. Either they need us or they don’t. It’s their own interests they care about. We’ve come to the point where they don’t need us any more. Now they are friends with the Communists. Why would they spend their money on us any more? Let me tell you another thing, Kissinger has already signed a secret deal with the North to let go of the South. So what can we do?’

As the men immersed themselves in discussion, the women quietly listened in. Uncle Phan would help himself to a few more drinks and the discussion would become heated. He would be very loud, forcing everyone else to also raise their voices. Aunty Phan would have to interfere.

‘Now, now, I beg you people. It’s late at night. Be quiet! Let the kids sleep, will you?’ Then the gathering would reluctantly disperse, only to start all over again the next day.

Until one night. The noise of bombing and explosions was so close that the house shook. Everyone left their beds and huddled together, alert and waiting. From the veranda, behind some rooftops, I watched the dark sky flare up like red fire.

Aunty Phan ran out into the laneway to find out what had happened. She came back breathless. ‘Look—there are so many evacuees out there. The temple is packed with them.’

She gathered together some old clothes and food for the evacuees, then rushed out again. Mother had everyone’s carry bags ready at our feet. Around my waist and my sister’s she tied cloth pouches with a gold tael inside. We were ready to run. Where to? Nobody knew.

Then the electricity went off. Everyone waited silently in the dark. The shrieking sounds of bombs pierced the air. They landed with loud explosions at frightening intervals. It was impossible to know from which direction they had come and where they would land. We suffered nerve-wrecking uncertainty for that whole night, well into the early hours of the following morning.

As dawn broke, the bombings gradually became spasmodic, and then stopped altogether. I dropped back to bed, exhausted.

It was quite late in the day when I awoke. The atmosphere was strangely peaceful compared with the never-ending bout of bombings the previous night. Nervously, I looked outside. The drooping branch of the star apple tree had a certain gentleness about it. Its leaves were a fresh bright green under the midday sun. I blinked my eyes a few times. This tree had always been there, yet this was the first time I had really noticed the shape of its trunk, the curve of its branches and how beautiful the leaves were. I looked up at the sky. It was a perfect blue with a slight shading of white cloud. The terrible night had somehow made me more appreciative of the things around me which, until this very moment, I had barely even noticed.

Everyone in the house sat glued to the television, waiting for updates on the night’s attack. Then at last some anti-war songs came on behind a blank screen. At the