IX. What happened to the Vietnam mestizo
The Vietnamese call them DUI DOI (dirty children), the offspring of Vietnamese women and Americans. They grew up amidst the bullying and contempt of their countrymen, becoming a sensitive medium of remembrance and at the same time a likeness of an enemy defeated more than a decade ago, so it is no wonder that most of them have left that country.
Since 1982, 2,800 Vietnamese mestizos have settled in the United States, and it is estimated that there are more than 20,000 such mestizos in Viet Nam. The White House has announced that the United States will fully recognize Vietnamese mestizos and their immediate families, including their adoptive parents, as long as the Government of Viet Nam allows them to leave the country. However, the departure process was made very slow by Vietnam’s cumbersome official process and the bribes that had to be paid and accepted. Both the Vietnamese and the United States Governments wanted to remove those who were not immediate family members but who were eager to use the mixed-race issue to travel abroad.
Before photographer P.J. Gullivers and other American journalists visited Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the spring of 1984, the Vietnamese authorities had rounded up many of those Vietnam War mestizos and hid them. However, Gullivers cajoled the tour guide under the guise of volunteering to take pictures, and finally tracked down the mestizos and published their photos in the weekly magazine Life.
Gullivers has been reporting on the Vietnam War since 1986 and has made several trips to Vietnam. He has found that the Vietnamese authorities treat these mixed-race children no differently from other Vietnamese, but those who apply for resettlement abroad are subjected to inhumane persecution: they do not receive subsidized food or health care, and they are not guaranteed personal safety or even legal protection.
Gullivers said: “Once those of mixed race in Vietnam declared, ‘We are no longer Vietnamese,’ they were brutally persecuted, from exile in remote areas or arrest, torture and imprisonment, to death at any time.”
So why are the Vietnamese authorities so hostile to those poor mestizos of the Vietnam War who are at the bottom of the social ladder? Why are they so afraid of this undisguised fact? Can the existence of Vietnamese mestizos really pose a threat to their regime?
It is not easy to answer such a complex question. From the historical and anthropological point of view, the composition of the Vietnamese nation is itself the result of an evolutionary process of repeated mixing; rather than the Vietnamese belonging to the yellow race, it would be more accurate to say that they belong to the yellow-white mixing race: the Chinese with yellow blood and the Indians with white blood, after a long process of mixing, have finally combined to become the Indochinese race.
Many of the world’s peoples have been formed through repeated mixing, and this intermixing has become even more intertwined in recent centuries. However, no hybrid in the world has ever been as hopelessly desperate as the hybrids of the Vietnam War, and no hybrid phenomenon has ever been so intensely disliked and hated as the hybridization of the Vietnam War.
In Vietnam, it was impossible for the French and Chinese, as well as Malays and Indians, to combine with the local Vietnamese and mix generation after generation, and it was hardly noticed how many French-Vietnamese, Chinese-Vietnamese, Malay-Vietnamese, and Indo-Vietnamese mestizos were produced, and, in the usual course of events, their existence was even forgotten in favor of their being regarded as a member of the entire Vietnamese nation.
Vietnam War mestizos are different, and it is generally believed in Vietnam that Vietnam War mestizos came about because Vietnamese women were raped by American soldiers. Of course, by G.I. soldiers, the Vietnamese mean soldiers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Turkey, and some African countries, in addition to South Korea and Taiwan, from 1954 to 1975. Over the course of two decades, untold numbers of Vietnamese women conceived and gave birth to and raised the offspring of American soldiers. Although the Vietnamese had their own unique sexual libidinous behavior, there was considerable value placed on a woman’s virginity. Knowing this, it is easy to understand why the Vietnamese authorities were so secretive about mixed-race Vietnamese.
Almost every person Vietnamese regarded Vietnamese mestizos as their national disgrace, as if the appearance of Vietnam War mestizos made every Vietnamese feel like being raped, which deeply stung the delusional Vietcong government. Although the Vietnamese often attacked the Americans during the Vietnam War by attacking them with words like massacre and rape, they had always believed that where the victors committed massacres and rapes, the losers suffered the fate of being massacred and raped. Are they not now committing mass killings and rapes of defenseless Cambodian women in the same way as their defeated enemies? How many Cambodian women have given birth to mixed Cambodian-Vietnamese children since November 25, 1978, after being raped by Vietnamese troops and immigrants.
However, those were matters of pride for the Vietcong Government, which was proud that only the victors mixed their blood with that of other races. When the U.S. government announced that it would take in all Vietnam War mestizos, the Vietcong government, as it always does, labeled the policy “another imperialist plot.” While pretending to be benevolent, General Secretary Le Bamboo made a statement to “give relief and rations to those unfortunate war orphans”, while ordering all “war orphans” to be hidden.
Mestizos from the Vietnam War became an official problem for the Vietcong Government in the 1980s, when some of them, at the instigation of their mothers, sought help from foreigners who came to Viet Nam to express their desire to leave the country. Although the excuses for their choice to settle in their “father’s” country were unimpeachable, in reality they were never choosy about which country they went to. To the further annoyance and dishonor of the Viet Cong government, the mothers of the mixed-race children of the Vietnam War, who had been portrayed by the Viet Cong government as victims of rape and brutalization, were also, without exception, eager to take the opportunity to leave their self-proclaimed “protectors”, the Viet Cong government.
In a letter hurriedly put into my hands by a young woman from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), it says: “I did live with Americans and had a child, Nguyen, in 1973. He does not want to go to school because he looks like an American, which humiliates him.”
Letters like the young woman’s were often handed over to foreign tourists or journalists in the hands of disheveled Vietnam War mestizos, some of whose mothers had taught them to write the initials “G.I.” (American soldier) for us. The Vietcong police tried, but failed, to incorporate all the mestizos into an internment center near Ho Chi Minh City before the American journalists arrived because they lacked accurate statistics.
Of all the mixed-race children of the Vietnam War, it was the offspring of black fathers and Vietnamese mothers who suffered the most. The Vietnamese have a long history of contempt for the blacks. They never regarded the black mercenaries in the French colonial army as occupiers, but called them “black pigs” with contempt, believing that they could only do dirty things. The Vietnamese were very persistent in this thinking, especially President Ngo Dinh Yen, who rudely refused to allow black American advisers into his army, and after 1964, a large number of black soldiers entered the country, and it is estimated that at least 5,000 or more mulattoes of black ancestry still live in the cities and villages of the south of the country.
Thirteen-year-old Le Thi Mai sits in a classroom at Vinh Phuc School in Ben Tre City, much taller than other Vietnamese girls her age. Her face is clearly of black ancestry, her skin is tanned and her hair, instead of being straight like other Vietnamese girls, has the curls of black hair.
Her mother gave birth 15 times, yet only 12 children survived, and Le Thi Mai was born when her mother was already 38 years old. As many Vietnamese women claimed after the war to avoid persecution by the Vietcong, Thi Mai’s mother insisted that she had been raped by a black soldier who had broken into her home and that her family had no memory of the incident. But when asked how she could explain the second birth and drowning of a child of Negro descent, which her son had told a reporter, the poor woman covered her face with her hands.
From the looks of it, she is well liked by her peers. She told reporters that she was proud to be a Pioneer Leader and that she had many close friends. In particular, she emphasized that she was Vietnamese and had no desire to leave Vietnam for the United States. When she finished speaking, she subconsciously glanced at the Vietnamese principal, a dry, thin man of forty, who stood beside her. The principal seemed content to invite the American reporter to film the students filling out registration forms.
This was obviously a test. Students lined up in front of one of the offices, casting curious glances at us from time to time. Ma fills out the registration form without thinking, and firmly writes the word “Kinh” (Vietnamese). However, she stopped when she was filling in the father’s column, and then, with her pen, she made a deletion sign, the kind of symbol that usually indicates death. When she turned around, tears were already streaming down her cheeks.
“It was a touching scene.” Griffiths, a reporter for the weekly magazine Life, said, “I finally understood what made those children say in one voice that they did not want to leave Vietnam. I will never forget the tears that welled up as the girl turned around, even though the Vietnamese officials deliberately blocked the lens of the camera I was holding.”
All journalists understand that it would be unthinkable to get a civilian under the Vietcong government to speak the truth in public, and that contact with those civilians alone could only cause them fear, as that would probably lead to their being suspected or even jailed, a charge that certainly would not be a problem for a government that has no rule of law, as the Vietcong do.
Even then, Tuan Thi Mau, who had shaken off his fear and was now living peacefully in San Francisco, USA, disclosed what really happened in Vietnam to the Vietnam mestizos who contained black blood.
Fifteen-year-old Tuan Thi Mau, who entered the country at 5.2 feet tall and weighing 105 pounds (1.58 meters, 42.3 kilograms), was dark-skinned and long-limbed, and contained more black blood than any other mixed-race child of the Vietnam War, which is why she was bullied in Vietnam, and her seven half-brothers and sisters felt so humiliated by this.
Tuan Thi Mau was born in the mountains near Bang My Thu in Doi Lac Province in southern Vietnam, where a U.S. Air Force base once stood. Later, her family moved to An Phuoc town in the coastal province of Ninh Thuan.
Speaking about her life in Viet Nam, Mau said that all the Vietnamese children called her “black pig” and often beat her, and that her seven siblings gradually ignored her and separated from her at meals. At school, Vietnamese students refused to sit near her, and they developed an uncontrollable hostility towards girls who were much taller than they were, which the teachers did not try to eliminate. Instead, when she was twelve years old, she was raped by a male teacher. The teacher lured and threatened U. in the middle of the day, took her to an empty school building and raped her for months, even when she was pregnant, describing her as “pining for her American invader father”.
One afternoon, the teacher instigated several male students to stop U after school and take her to the woods outside the town to beat her, then stripped her naked, gagged her, tied her to a tree, and, after placing her school bag over her head, kicked her violently in the abdomen, thus causing her to miscarry. Early the next morning, a villager living nearby found the girl unconscious, naked and tied to a tree pole, and rushed the villagers to take her to the hospital.
Dau claimed that she had been publicly gang-raped by several male students and that the teachers and principal did not care. Her mother took her to the VC security officers and told them what had happened, but the VC security officers brutally insulted them and threw them out. After that, U had to drop out of school to avoid discrimination by teachers and students. However, that did not mean that she had found a place to live.
U didn’t apply for emigration to the United States in the first place; in fact, she never had the luxury of doing so. After escaping from a home that discriminated against her, U joined the ranks of beggars and peddlers, selling coconuts and peanuts to sunbathing Russians at a private beach in the coastal city of Toufon. Her companions were people who, like her, were mixed-race Vietnamese or homeless war orphans. So she was content with her life there. “I don’t want to go back to my family, and I don’t want to go to the U.S. I’ve heard that black people are often killed in the U.S. It’s too dangerous there.” U said to a reporter for the first time.
Joining U in selling peanuts in Headon Beach was a thirteen-year-old mixed-race girl named Xuemei. She looked very Irish, Griffith said, and her turquoise-blue eyes and innocent smile made her a very good business. Dressed in a yellow shirt that was threadbare in many places and fat blue pants. Xuemei sat calmly under an empty parasol at the beach laughing with her companion. She didn’t know where her mother was or anything about her father’s move to the United States, but she understood that she was different from other Vietnamese. Her expression seemed to say, “What’s the big deal? There are many children in Vietnam who are orphans, and it’s not the end of the world.”
Vietcong officials were quick and cheerful to authorize the departure of Vietnamese mestizos who had been reduced to beggars and vagabonds. In their view, the Americans were simply removing some of the “trash” from Vietnam. President Ngo Dinh Yen had tried to get rid of that kind of “garbage” (he had launched a campaign to “clean up the city”), but it drew more criticism and attacks. The Viet Cong government did not want to be like President Ngo Dinh Yen, but wanted to take advantage of an American “mistake” (as they perceived it) to help them create an image of benevolence and to solve a problem that had been a headache for them and which they could not solve. This is good for them in every way.
However, not long after that, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), Le Bamboo, suddenly accused the U.S. of “attempting to win the hearts and minds” of the people by resettling war orphans and “vilifying” the CPV government, which he believed was again engaged in a “conspiracy” under the guise of benevolence. He believed that the United States was again engaging in a “conspiracy” under the guise of benevolence.
On July 13, 1985, Nguyen Kieu Thach, Foreign Minister of the Communist Party of Vietnam, told Western journalists: “It is shameless that the United States, which waged a war of aggression that resulted in the creation of a large number of orphans, is trying to use this as a way to show its benevolence by placing some flowers on the unhealed wounds of the Vietnamese people today. Why don’t those philanthropists stop before sticking a knife into someone’s heart and specialize in giving away coffins to show off what they are doing?”
Since then, many mestizos have “disappeared” in public and have been placed by the Vietcong police in shelters located in the suburbs or in the countryside; others have “demanded that their applications be withdrawn”.
The sixteen-year-old was running desperately, fleeing into the rice paddies to avoid the American reporter who was interviewing him because he thought the photographer would take him to the United States, where the Vietcong police had intimidated him in that way. Finally, after much reassurance and coaxing from the photographer, he accepted to be photographed in the middle of a circle of taunting children.
The young man named Ching was abandoned at the age of five by his parents, who could not bear the discriminatory stares and ridicule of the people who raised him as an adoptive parent. Unable to bear the taunts and insults of his classmates, he quietly left school and moved to the countryside six miles away from Penang to farm rice. He was content with that life of farming, fearing that American journalists would spoil his life in the peaceful place he had finally escaped to, where no one taunted him.
Many of the Vietnam War mestizos had been subjected to similar intimidation by the Viet Cong and, as a result, they no longer dared to express their desire to go to the United States. For those who did go to the United States or actively sought help from Western journalists, the outcome was mostly tragic.
Eight mixed-race children who escaped from the Vinh Long Shelter in February 1986 and fled across the sea to Thailand recounted the real atrocities of the Viet Cong police who brutally mistreated them.
Those eight mixed-race Vietnamese were helped by a kindly Vietnamese fisherman who escaped from the town of Dim Jong via the Gulf of Siam to Nien Oo, Chuang Thaburi, Thailand, and then obtained registration to resettle in the U.S. The fisherman, De, who had escorted them, was shot and killed by a Viet Cong patrol boat.
Eighteen-year-old Bui Thi Thanh, who has blue eyes and is clearly the most tragic of the eight Vietnam XHEs, showed reporters the deep scars left by the coconut hair rope that had been strangled into her flesh on her arms and legs. The Thai doctor who treated and examined her, Dr. Satchan Chatralong, said. It’s horrible,” said Chaludarong, a Thai doctor who examined her. I simply do not know how the Vietcong police brutalized this girl, who still has at least dozens of wounds on her body that are still septic.”
One of the eight Vietnamese mestizos who escaped to Nien Tho, Thanh, aged fourteen, witnessed the brutalization of Thanh by Viet Cong police. He said that one afternoon, because Thanh had fallen asleep during a study session, she was tied to a bench in the house by the Vietcong police, who ordered the other mestizos to beat her in the stomach and chest with a long bamboo board. If someone did not beat her hard enough, they were also tied to the bench. Thanh was beaten so hard that blood flowed from the corners of her mouth and she had to keep cursing herself. The Vietcong police decided that the beatings were not enough to punish the others, so they sent Thanh and another mixed-race child outside to catch two wasps, then ripped off Thanh’s clothes and forced them to sting Thanh’s nipples with the wasps. Sung and the boy aimed the tails of the wasps at Qing’s two nipples, causing the wasps’ poisonous needles to sting in. Green’s nipples swelled up so much that they dripped pus for many days. The Vietcong police not only did not allow treatment, but forced Sung and the boy to suck the pus from her swollen nipples with their mouths and drink it every day before the study session.
“The Vietcong police hated me very much.” Thanh said, “I was reluctant to be a Vietnamese because once I told an American reporter that I wanted to go to the United States as soon as possible.”
Thanh was taken from her residence in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) by Viet Cong police. Before taking her away, the Vietcong police warned her adoptive parents that she would be severely punished if she communicated with the United States again. As a result, her parents remained silent during the year that Thanh was taken away.
As a “dangerous person”, Thanh was regularly subjected to corporal punishment and a variety of brutal beatings and physical torture by the Viet Cong police, and in May 1985, the director of the shelter, Vinh, raped her. Fearing that she would tell the other mestizos about the incident, Vinh put her in a very small room alone. Nevertheless, Qing managed to tell someone else about the incident, and an enraged Wing began to torture her with various forms of venom.
One day, Wing took Green to a house behind the shelter. It was his private residence, a few hundred meters from the shelter. He put Qing in his secret “snake cave”, a room filled with hundreds of snakes, with a top-to-bottom barbed wire fence at the entrance, which allowed him to observe the snakes. Immediately after being pushed into the “snake cave”, Qing was attacked by snakes, and was bitten in many places on her body and face. She looked at the creepy snakes and screamed in agony, while Rong stood outside the barbed-wire fence and watched, dragging Qing out only after she had passed out from the terror and snake bites.
Qing was not the first person to be put into the “snake cave”, nor was she the most tragic victim, for that room was filled with non-venomous snakes, specifically designed to maim and terrorize those who violated the rules and resisted; while in the other room, where Rong had taken her to watch the execution of a twenty-five year old villager, all the poisonous snakes were used in a variety of vicious ways. snakes. Qing had seen the woman stripped naked and thrown into a cage, the vipers scrambling into the woman’s body through her nostrils, mouth, vagina, and anus, and the vipers on the outside wrapping around her limbs and biting at her skin, and within a few minutes she had died of convulsions in every one of them.
Although Qing repeatedly “repented” of her sins and begged him to release her, Wing kept her locked up for nearly three months, and every one to two days he threw Qing into the “snake cave” to be tortured.
While torturing Green, Wing always asked her menacingly if she still wanted to go to America, even though Green had long ago sworn that she had dismissed that idea.
In the final months of his escape from the Vinh Long internment center, Boring resorted to even more brutal torture of the Vietnamese mestizos in his custody. He often ordered the mestizos to strip naked together and stand in the hot sun, or forced them to beat each other; and every night, he would bring a mestizo girl to his residence, force her to drink large quantities of alcohol until she was intoxicated, and then he would satisfy his animalistic desires with all kinds of indecent rapes and abuses.
On one occasion, a fifteen-year-old mulatto girl attempted to strangle Vinh with a rope while she slept soundly, and Vinh found out. He immediately rallied all of his Vietnam War mestizos and had them dig a deep hole in the yard and bury the attempted “murderer” alive.
The girl, whose hands were tied behind her back, was pushed into the pit and the earth was filled up to her jaw. Wing ordered all the Vietnam mestizos to kneel around the girl, whose only head was still exposed, and watch her die. It rained heavily just before dawn, and the muddy water flowed straight into the girl’s mouth; her face was suffocated to a purple color, and she couldn’t stop spitting out the dirty water that flowed into her mouth, gasping for breath with difficulty. Gradually, she was suffocating so much that her eyes almost glazed over, gasping for air so that she couldn’t spit out the muddy water in time to swallow it. Hours later, the girl died with her head tilted to one side. Instead, Wing cut off her hair before burying her. It was said that the girl’s hair was worth a lot of money on the black market in Vietnam.
The brutally tortured Vietnamese mestizos finally escaped from the Vinh Long shelter before the arrival of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, they fled to the southwestern tip of Hoa Cien province and were helped by a sympathetic fisherman to escape from that evil world on his fishing boat.
Eight Vietnamese mestizos were hospitalized. They all bore wounds of varying degrees of severity, and one of the boys, only 10 years old, still had a long nail in his leg, which he said was Wing’s punishment for kicking stones.
At first, the Vietcong government denounced the report on what happened to the eight mestizo children in Vinh Long Shelter as “the usual imperialist tactics”, but then, in the face of a large number of facts and evidences, it suddenly shut up about it, especially when the American journalists presented the diagnosis of the injuries of the mestizo children and their complaints in public. Nguyen Quy Sek, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Communist Party of Viet Nam (VC), played deaf-mute and rudely said: “Even if that is true, it was never caused at the Vinh Long shelter.”
This damaging lie by the Viet Cong government is becoming increasingly embarrassing in the face of mounting evidence. Every Vietnam mestizo who has come to settle in the United States and their relatives have testified that they have been intimidated and obstructed to a greater or lesser degree by the Vietcong government when they went through the process of leaving the country, and some have been physically persecuted as a result. Two hundred journalists from Time, Newsweek, Paris Match, Der Spiegel and other Western-language newspapers responded to a plea for help from a mixed-race Vietnamese of black ancestry during the Vietcong celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1985, and saw the Vietcong police push the young man out of the crowd, handcuff him and drag him away.
On August 24, 1982, Peter Hastings, a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Weekly, saw a Vietcong policeman on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) who had tried to talk to him. Peter Hastings, a reporter for the Far East Economic Weekly, saw Vietcong police on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) viciously knock to the ground and take away by the ears a blue-eyed mixed-race Vietcong boy of about 10 years of age who had tried to talk to them. The boy was said to have escaped from a nearby internment center where hundreds of mestizos were held before Western journalists arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).
Life photographer Griffiths interviewed the Luan Tinkle family living in Ho Chi Minh City. Eighteen-year-old mixed-race girl Luan Tinkle and her mother, Hu Thi Thuy, make ends meet by selling clothes on the black market, as their food rations and welfare have been suspended since Hu Thi Thuy applied to resettle in the United States. Undaunted by the sanctions imposed by the Vietcong government, however, they decided to donate their house despite the uncertainty of obtaining permission to leave the country.
“Every single one of them was horrified.” Griffiths said as he recalled meeting Phan Thi Thu Huong, a fourteen-year-old mixed-race girl. Huong had been granted an exit visa and was living with her mother and aunt in a small house in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) with only two dimly lit apartments. “This was the first mixed-race girl I photographed in Vietnam, when the police stood outside the house and the windowsill was crowded with watching children. I got out of there as quickly as I could after filming before the officials from the local People’s Committee arrived. The atmosphere was going to be horrible as soon as those people arrived.”
“Happiness isn’t rice, it’s a motorcycle!” So says fifteen-year-old mixed-race Wang Chin Sau Thanh (aka Phillipo). His biological father, a native of Texas, left Vietnam in 1973. Sung’s situation is obviously much better than the living conditions of other mixed-race Vietnam War children. He and his mother live in a very comfortable house, a legacy of his grandfather, who was a senior staff member of the French Embassy in Saigon during the war years. Thanh excitedly told the reporter that he was going to settle in the United States.
Another mixed-race girl in a very similar situation to Thanh, Ong Thi My Linh, age twelve, and her mother, Ong Thi My Phuong, were also granted visas to the United States. Ling’s biological father, a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, left Vietnam for his home country when Ling was just born.
However, obtaining an immigrant visa as successfully as Thanh Hoa Phuong’s was quite difficult, and the widespread bribery and bureaucracy of Vietcong government officials and the ferocity of police persecution left a significant number of mixed-race Vietnamese stranded at the bottom of the social ladder.
In an empty wooden hut in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) housing twenty people, Nguyen Thi Hiep waited with her two mixed-race children: twelve-year-old daughter Nguyen Thi Xuan Thao and eleven-year-old son Nguyen Tuan Anh for visas to travel to the United States. According to Nguyen Thi Hoa, the father of Truong and Inh was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and at the time he already had a wife and two daughters in the United States.
Another mixed-race girl I interviewed, Le Thi Linh, encountered the same situation. Her father had also returned to the United States a few years before the end of the war. At first, seventeen-year-old Le Thi Linh received money and goods from her father regularly, and since receiving an unaddressed letter from his American wife, she has not gotten any news about her father. “Stop trying to contact my husband.” The woman said this to her at the end of the letter.
When I interviewed her, all she had in her hand was a tattered photo of her father 1970 away with her mother. When Lian was just three months old, her mother died. Since then, Lian has been living with her adoptive mother, Hinh Tran Thi Phinh, who owns a store in Ho Chi Minh City’s West End, and after she and Phinh received their departure visas, their regular business was hampered. They feared that the government would confiscate their home and store from their relatives once they left. Binh recently wrote to a friend in the United States, “When we had no hope of leaving Vietnam, we were worried and anxious. Now that we are allowed to leave, we are panicked and sad.”
The issue of the Vietnam War mestizos now seems to be over, albeit not so satisfactorily, and all the mestizos who were able to leave are scrambling to escape from Vietnam and settle in Western countries. Numerous reports and pictures show that they are doing well there, yet they have not forgotten that they lived in Vietnam, nor have they forgotten their relatives and friends who were stranded there without obtaining visas. Most of them have now become citizens of their host country and, in the words of Henry Gon, “They are now living in Vietnam. In the words of Henri Gon, “This is my country, but we must always remember that we came from Vietnam and escaped from a rule to which we never want to return.”
X. Fifth generation rulers
In the early morning of April 30, 1985, Hanoi awoke from the sweltering air to the sound of thousands of bicycles, limousines, and low-seat pedicabs moving along the streets, as well as the tired sound of even older French trams passing through the intersections, and the opening of stores, institutions, and malls.
“We have now become masters of our own destiny.” Former VC Captain Nguyen Lien said this to Western journalists, a smile on his face.
Although things are still the same as they were decades ago, the city is now the center of the whole of Vietnam, not just half of it. Since the declaration of unconditional surrender by the government of Yang Ming in the south, the Vietcong government, which completed the “reunification” after twenty years of hard war, has been fighting for another ten years to consolidate its power, first of all by openly deteriorating its relations with its ally, China, which had supported it with all its might in its victories, and by driving out 300,000 Chinese expatriates and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, who had been living in the land for several generations, and then by purging the government of pro-Chinese elements and ethnic Chinese. Then it began purging the government of pro-Chinese elements and southern cadres, creating forced “new economic zones” and confiscating private businesses in the South, and then sending Vietnamese troops into Cambodia along with Laotian troops to help the pro-Vietnamese elements of Han San Lin drive out the pro-Chinese “Khmer Rouge”. “Khmer Rouge”, drove a large number of Indochinese refugees to Southeast Asian countries, fought with Chinese troops near the border, and harassed and invaded the Thai-Cambodian border.
It seems that the Viet Cong Government has done too much in just 10 years to keep the eyes of the world focused, again and again, on that once equally volatile place. The Viet Cong Government, the fifth generation of rulers after the Chinese, the French, the Japanese and the Americans, like its predecessors, has produced a series of shocking and disturbing events from time to time.
“1975 marked the real reunification of this country.” Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) Mayor Mui Zhi Thuy told foreign journalists at a parade commemorating the 10th anniversary of the seizure of Saigon by Viet Cong forces.
At the same time as Hanoi, in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), howitzers roar, military bands play “Under the Flag of the Golden Star”, soldiers and militiamen, some of them carrying captured American M-16 and M-1 rifles, walk behind Soviet T-54 tanks, and Soviet Mi-21 jets roar across the blue sky. -The Soviet Mi-21 jets whistled across the blue sky; Vietnam veterans, motorcycle soldiers and workers wearing dozens of medals disproportionate to their small stature mingled around a huge portrait of former Vietcong leader Ho Chi Minh, holding a dumbbell, with Ho’s stirring words written underneath the picture. Underneath the portrait were Ho’s stirring words, “Everyone come for early exercise!” In front of the reviewing stand, surrounded by a blue curtain and a red juan, young men and women in colorful costumes performed beautiful dances.
The parade starts at the famous zoo and passes through downtown on “April 30th Street.”
(the former U.S. Embassy used to be located on this street), and continued on to the “Unification Building”.
On the reviewing stand, Politburo members with more than nine years of seniority waved their hands haughtily as they watched the poorly executed show and recalled with glee how they had taken 150 billion dollars and 58,022 lives from the Americans.
Sitting in the center of the reviewing stand that day were Truong Trang, President of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), Le Duc, General Secretary of the CPV, and Pham Van Dong, Prime Minister of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). They wanted to show the national pride of the Vietcong after their victory, but at the same time, they wanted to cover up the paradoxical and absurd dilemma of a country that, despite receiving two billion dollars a year in Soviet aid, was still in extreme poverty. The one million unemployed and the resulting drug addiction, prostitution, begging and hooliganism caused by the Vietcong government’s “New Economic Policy”, which has spread to every corner of the city after a decade of occupation, seems to be a perfect mockery of the Vietcong government’s takeover.
However, it is ironic that the Vietcong government has no shame in referring to all the evils caused by its bureaucratic dictatorship of 10 years as a long overdue “war wound”, a “wound” that never seems to heal and will always help the Vietcong out of their predicament. “.
In fact, during the entire decade from 1975 to 1985, the Vietcong government did not formulate any concrete plans for real construction or economic recovery, but devoted all its energy to factional fighting, repression of democrats and extreme dictatorship, and the raiding of people’s money. One of its slogans was “Together through thick and thin!” Ten years on, more and more Vietnamese are caught up in the “hard” situation, and the “hard” seems to last forever.
The method of transferring its crimes against the people has led the Vietcong government to create one incident after another, starting with sending the people of the South to “new economic zones” disguised as concentration camps and labor camps to “develop the economy” in the same zones in the barren virgin forests without any tools. “This is obviously absurd, since the real aim of the Vietcong Government is to eliminate the moderate citizens and the poor and to hide the fact of the extreme poverty caused by its tyranny.
However, instead of solving the problem in any way, the brutal tactics of the Vietcong Government provoked even greater discontent and resistance from the people. Many people risked their lives to escape from the “new economic zones” of the Vietcong Government, just as they had escaped from President Ngo Dinh Nhan’s “reclamation zones”.
To deal with a social phenomenon that it does not care about at all, but which is always troubling it, the Vietcong Government sends its troops to invade neighboring Cambodia on the one hand, and provokes disputes with its former ally, China, on the other hand, so as to divert the people’s strong resentment against it and the attention of world public opinion.
As a filler for the desperate emptiness of its self-proclaimed “representation of the people”, the Vietcong Government is desperate to maintain its established status as a super-military power. Its 1.2 million-strong army, the fourth-largest conventional army in the world, is supplemented by an unspecified but sizeable militia and other military organizations in disguise, and is kept in a state of high alert, like targeting sparrows. This huge expenditure was totally unnecessary, but the Vietnamese people, under the distorted propaganda of the Government of Viet Nam of what it called “threats from various countries, especially from the North and Southwest”, did not realize this dastardly and poorly conceived tactic. Hundreds of thousands of regular troops of the Vietcong government and 100,000 Vietnamese who have entered Cambodia under various guises are trying to subjugate the hard-fighting Khmer Rouge and other anti-Vietnamese armed forces; and on the Sino-Vietnamese border in the north, about a hundred kilometers long, there is a collection of 650,000 elite regular troops, from which localized reports of gun battles and skirmishes are coming in from time to time. The reports of localized gun battles and skirmishes have been coming from there from time to time.
Stirring up hatred between ethnic groups, which the Vietcong government has successfully used to confuse the people to overthrow the government of the South, has today been very successful in leading the Vietnamese people to two neighboring countries: Cambodia and China.
Although China’s Mao Tse-tung had unreservedly made every self-sacrifice to aid the North Vietnamese in their two-decade-long war, the Vietcong government easily exploited the historical Chinese emperor’s 1,000 years of control over Vietnam to foment antagonism and fear of the Chinese; in just a few years, they transformed their twelve-year “Chinese comrades” into “war gamblers” and “hegemonists seeking to control Vietnam”. In just a few years, they have transformed the “Chinese comrades” of twelve years into “war gamblers” and “hegemonists seeking to control Vietnam”. The Vietcong government endeavored to convince the Vietnamese people that “China is the real, ancient enemy that has always wanted to dominate Indochina and especially Viet Nam, as it did a thousand years ago, and that only the Soviets are friends, sincere socialist friends.”
On the morning of April 21, 1982, Peter Hastings and I were accompanied by a Vietnamese interpreter. Hastings, accompanied by a Vietnamese interpreter, traveled via Highway 3 to the provincial capital of Cao Bang, only thirty kilometers from the Vietnam-China border. We waited for almost an hour at the Long Binh Bridge, built by the French in 1896, which crosses the Red River. This was the place where the other communists had shipped a steady stream of food, machinery, weapons, civilian supplies, and other materials into Vietnam to support the North Vietnamese in their continuing fight against American aerial bombardment, and where the Chinese had then dumped their artillery shells in furious retaliation in 1979.
The landscape of northern Vietnam is stunning, with terraced rice or early rice, fields of potatoes and other assorted vegetables, rivers and streams flowing through the limestone mountains along the Vietnam-China border, and local townspeople still farming in ragged clothes as they did after I saw them in 1954, as if the clock had stopped since that time.
A forty-two year old Vietnamese Lieutenant Colonel accompanied us and told us very seriously that he had done nothing but fight in his life, first with the French, then with the Americans and the Chinese. When we laughed and asked him about the Chinese army, he still said in a disdainful tone, “Can’t beat us, never could beat us.”
“What about the Japanese?” Peter B. Hastings asked.
“Neither can the Japanese, they can’t beat us at all.” He said, taking off his Viet Cong army cap, a cork visor with a red star, for Peter to wear. When we commented on the ugly Soviet-style caps and uniforms that the Vietnamese police had just replaced, he said, “We’re used to it.”
Dongchu, with a population of 5,000, was the last town that the Chinese army occupied and then abruptly withdrew. As we walked along the main road, we saw that the building in the bamboo forest was still standing intact, while other houses had anti-China slogans scrawled on their walls. Up to 1,000 feet (304.9 meters) high, there were several towers that had collapsed, and a radar screen of the Chinese army was rotating on a peak in the distance.
I aimed my camera at that hill, however the VC Lt. Colonel blocked the shot with great speed, “No pictures!” He told me, pointing to a sign.
On February 17, 1979, the Chinese government announced that it would “punish” the Vietcong government for the killings of Chinese soldiers and frontiersmen and its invasion of Cambodia, and sent 200,000 Chinese troops to capture many cities in North Vietnam.
That retaliation lasted a month, advancing 40 kilometers along the Vietnamese-Chinese border until it was withdrawn on March 15th. The Chinese claimed a million Vietnamese casualties in that battle, compared to 20,000 Chinese military casualties.On April 18, Vietnam and China held armistice talks in Hanoi, but they soon ran aground in a quarrel of mutual non-concession. Thereafter, the Vietnamese and Chinese governments, under the supervision of the International Red Cross, carried out an exchange of prisoners of war on the Vietnam-China border at number zero, but a reporter present at the meeting said, “It was a demonstration of mutual aggression.”
Hastings and I flattered the Vietcong lieutenant colonel, listened to him, and offered him cigarettes and beer, which he had always denounced as “imperialist” country life, he finally agreed to give us half a day’s free time, but, of course, he still had to instruct us, as if we were children, with a few specific “requests” and, with our repeated promises, went into a nearby restaurant with the Vietnamese interpreter. Of course, he still had a few specific “demands” to make of us, as if he were a child, and with our repeated promises, he and the Vietnamese interpreter went into a nearby restaurant.
If every Vietnamese, accompanied by the Vietcong lieutenant colonel and interpreter, gave us a few one-size-fits-all replies, the citizens of the town kept staring at us with the same amazement as if they had discovered aliens in the case of two foreigners walking alone.
“Lien so!” shouted the raggedly dressed Vietnamese children, pointing their fingers at us as they gazed greedily at the “Sun” beer we were holding.
I took a bucket of Coca-Cola out of my bag and handed it to a little boy. He took it and tasted it and immediately stopped drinking it, he didn’t like the taste of that drink. Those kids wanted to walk away with nothing more than little light-up toys, a piece of tin, or a piece of nylon rope would make them ecstatic.
We soon realized that even though the children were following us, if we asked them questions, they seemed unusually frightened and stared at us, refusing to say a word. Then one of the bolder boys began to relax his guard and told us a lot about what was happening in his family and corrected my Vietnamese pronunciation. However, just then his mother, a young woman in her twenties, suddenly appeared and tried to pull him away, but he would not leave, and he walked out of the crowd with his mother pulling and cajoling him, and then we heard the sound of slapping and the little boy’s instrument, which caused us to leave in embarrassment, no longer daring to talk to those children.
The townspeople had a fear of foreigners and were reluctant to answer the questions we asked. It was clear that the shadow of the Vietcong police was a constant threat, especially since talking to foreigners was often suspected of revealing secrets about the Vietcong that did not exist and that the civilians could not possibly know.
Deciding to walk a little farther, Peter Hastings and I came to a rice field just outside the town. Hastings and I arrived at a rice field just outside the town. In the rice field, a group of Nong women wearing blue headscarves were busy planting seedlings under the hot sun.
“We often hear gunshots.” An old Nung man told us. “All the sparrows are scared away. That can be a good thing.”
He told us that since 1977, many troops had come near the border. The young men in his village had joined the militia and various military studies were held regularly. The villagers had been told that China was about to start a war of aggression against Viet Nam, so many guard posts had been placed in the mountains and on the roads. When we asked him what he personally thought of the Chinese, he repeated the absurd statement of the Vietcong government propaganda agency that China’s aid to us was a conspiracy to try to control Viet Nam, adding, however, that during the war years, his family and the people in his village depended on Chinese shipments of food and cloth because the villagers were unable to grow any rice at all under the bombardment of the United States airplanes.
The old man said that the Vietnamese police had taken fourteen Chinese sympathizers from the village, “who had been denounced by other villagers as `Vietnamese traitors’.” In addition, he spoke of China’s “punitive” war against Vietnam.
“We took our rations and possessions and hid in the mountains,” he recalled. He recalled, “There was the sound of fierce gunfire on all sides, and in some places there were fires. Later, the retreating soldiers changed their clothes and hid in the forest with us, hearing that the Chinese army was trying to wipe out Vietnam and had killed all the people in the villages they passed through. All the people were very afraid and a few Chinese who lived in the village were also killed.” He pointed to a wall in the village and told us, “When I was running away, I saw two skins nailed to the wall, with big nipples, which were peeled off from the Chinese women who were killed. After the Chinese army took over the town, they started to search the town and took away a few people who did not escape, but they never came back. They didn’t kill anyone, that was done by our village militia,” he said with complete certainty. “All the people knew about that.”
We asked him if he had seen any Chinese soldiers. He replied that there were many Chinese soldiers captured, about 50 or so, who were kept in a military fortification in the mountains and were later taken to the town. He claimed with great certainty that he had seen a Chinese battalion commander with shaggy hair and who spoke Vietnamese. He whispered that the villagers had also killed a Chinese prisoner.
“After the Chinese army withdrew, we all returned to the village.” He said. “The tractors and farm implements were smashed, and there was no food left in the storehouse, but they didn’t burn down our houses, and the militia placed the bodies of the two men who had been killed in the square and held a general meeting saying that all those who had not escaped had been captured by the Chinese army and shot. At noon that day, the militia pulled a buffalo from outside the village, coming over the hill, and one of the Chinese prisoners was a Chinese woman, very young, with a steel helmet over her head, and stripped naked, with slogans written in paint on her breasts, and red paint on her face. The militia tied the female captive to a big tree in the middle of the village and were going to send her to the town after lunch, but the villagers surrounded the female captive and beat her with sticks; one of the villagers put locusts on the female captive’s nipples to let the locusts burrow into them, and then they whipped the locusts out with a bamboo board. The militia came to stop them after dinner, but were dragged away by their relatives, and the next morning I heard that the female captive had been burned to death.
The story of the old Nung man reminds me of many familiar scenes from the Vietnam War era, but they sound so strange today. MacArthur, who occupied Japan, once said, “Asians cannot instantly turn an enemy into a prisoner of war. The enemy will always be the enemy.” I am well aware of this, especially because the Vietnamese’s fanatical snobbery has led to many things that should not have happened. On December 25, 1978, after a year’s preparation, the Vietcong government dispatched Laotian troops equipped with Soviet MiG-19 fighters and L1-28 bombers, who had been fighting with Cambodia for a year, to launch an all-out attack on Cambodia. On December 25, 1979, after a year’s preparation, the Vietnamese government launched an all-out attack on Cambodia, in which all captured Khmer Rouge and civilians were massacred in a bloody massacre, and on January 7, 1979, the Vietnamese army seized Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, and shot every passer-by who saw it.
The Bangkok Post published the words of an overseas Thai who witnessed the situation in Phnom Penh: “There was the sound of gunfire and artillery everywhere, and Soviet T-54 tanks ran over many fleeing citizens in the streets. In the afternoon, the streets were empty, and the Vietcong began to enter the residential areas to carry out massacres, and people’s screams rang out. In the evening, the Vietcong broke into the building across the street from the house where I was living, and urged out a sixteen-year-old girl named Sélé, whom more than twenty Vietcong gang-raped in the street outside the building, and finally dragged the unconscious girl into an approaching tank and pulled her away.”
A few days before the fall of Phnom Penh, Prince Sihanouk escaped and later exposed the aggression of the Vietcong government at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, and at the same time, he resigned from his post as a representative of the Pol Pot regime because he believed that the plundering of private property, the abolition of the currency in favor of food rations, the closure of all schools and the massacres of Cambodians, which he had practiced in the three years of his rule in the city of Pol Pot, had tainted that country.
Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Kiep Sek told the Times after the Viet Cong troops had invaded Cambodia’s Six Nations: “We demand that Pol Pot’s crimes be liquidated. China must stop giving it aid and Thailand must stop providing sanctuary so that we can gradually withdraw our troops from Cambodia. We don’t have to execute Pol Pot, he can go to China or Bangkok, or stay in the prison of Sipadol, which is fair enough. Maybe he can open a barroom like Nguyen Cao Chi (former South Vietnamese vice president).”
In fact, Nguyen Cocchi was opening several hotels in California before he went bankrupt in 1985.
The Pol Pot regime was in such a difficult position because the extreme measures it had taken during its three years in power had aroused widespread discontent and provided Viet Nam with a pretext for supporting the regime of Han Son Nyunt. In any case, however, Democratic Kampuchea has always had a legitimate seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and the international community has consistently adopted demands for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia; at the same time, the Khmer Rouge has taken steps in keeping with this, and Pol Pot, who is disliked by all sides, has ceased to appear in public, and has been replaced by a new leader. Pol Pot, who was disliked by all sides, no longer made public appearances, and was replaced by Khieu Samphan, a semi-aristocratic revolutionary who had been ostracized during Pol Pot’s time.
Born into a family of senior clerks in Svay Rieng province, a rice-rich area close to the Vietnamese border, Khieu Samphan spent his early years studying in France and earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris, after which he served as editor-in-chief of Phnom Penh’s The Observer newspaper. He is therefore an acceptable figure in both the West and Communist China, at least more enlightened and neutral than Pol Pot.
With the mediation of various parties, Khieu Samphan created a coalition government with Prince Sihanouk and Son Sang on June 22, 1983, so that the military forces opposing Vietnam were supported by all sides of the international community.
Although the Vietcong government celebrated “successes” such as the capture of Saigon and the occupation of Cambodia with festivities, it was also reminiscent of a victory that had been achieved at great cost. In another attempt to show the world its triumph, the Vietcong government, which hated and feared foreigners, allowed all 253 tourists to enter the country in 1983, and hosted 400 foreign journalists and technical experts, most of them Americans. Many observers believed that Hanoi’s willingness to accommodate journalists so readily underscored its strong desire to restore relations with Washington. However, in the context of all the efforts made by the Vietcong government, its peace offensive appeared to be so ungrounded as to be absurdly naive.
Needless to say, this ambivalence seemed to dominate the Viet Cong government’s activities in celebrating the capture of Saigon. Before the procession began, Ho Chi Minh City’s Party Secretary Nguyen Van Linh stood up to celebrate Vietnam’s status as “at the forefront of the struggle for the noble ideals of mankind,” and trumpeted its victory in the “strategy of defeating global reactionaries and U.S. imperialism” as well as its “strategy of defeating the global reactionaries and U.S. imperialism. However, even Nguyen Van Linh could not be a hero in the struggle. But even Nguyen Van Linh could not help but notice that Vietnam was surrounded by signs of decay: Ho Chi Minh City, a city of 3.5 million people, was in ruins, water and electricity supplies were extremely inadequate, there were nearly one million unemployed and an endless stream of prostitution, drug addiction, begging and hooliganism, and official corruption was more prevalent than ever before and caused resentment among the majority of the population.
“Ten years on,” complained Nguyen Van Linh, “reactionary, corrupt neo-colonialism has spoiled an unknown number of young people, leaving us with an acute and persistent crisis.”
Today Ho Chi Minh City still retains the richness of the old Saigon, like a faded wife with jewels to sell. Cyclo drivers provide a steady supply of “pretty young girls” for Western tourists, street side middlemen compete to buy dollars at a rate several times (100:1) higher than the official price, and along Nguyen Hue Street, the black market is filled with young men in tight shirts and patterned work shirts and pants, and sunglasses, who fill stalls with the latest color televisions and stereo equipment. Young men in tight shirts and patterned overalls and fashionable sunglasses fill stalls with the latest color televisions and stereo equipment.
Scenes from the war years linger in people’s memories. Not far from the former Liberty Street (now renamed Rongju Street), a fifty-two year old woman ran a cold drink store. During the war, people used to use this place as a place of entertainment. The old woman smiles at the memory of the past, when she had her own bar and used to play cards on the counter with her American friends. Now she can only rely on her former American friends to give her things to sell along the street to barely make ends meet, and what little savings she had were lost in three attempts to go to the United States and failed. Nevertheless, she still says eagerly, “If I can save up a little money, maybe I’ll try again.”
Talk about this standard of living not being what it used to be is heard everywhere in Vietnam, and anyone who remembers it has first-hand experience of it. On the ferry from My Thu to Ben Tre, a thin man in his mid-forties told Halsted, the Times’ director of photography, about his training as a former government soldier in the U.S. state of New Mexico. Now he works on a farm, digging ditches and growing rice; has his life improved?
“I think it’s better now than before.” He said, glancing a little nervously to the west before whispering again, “Everyone is so poor. I know the previous regime wasn’t good, but there’s no hope now.”
Former South Vietnamese Army Major General Nguyen Huong Hung, a talented deputy chief of staff, was rumored at the time to have cooperated with the Viet Cong in staging the army’s insurgency. Yet he repeated to Western journalists the current state of scarcity of goods, and the North’s rejection of them. “Even the leaders of the former Liberation Front are no longer reused, and many southern cadres have been purged.
Ho Chi Minh’s friend Hoang Van Huong fled to China, to the point where former Liberation Front Chairman Nguyen Huu Thuy and General Secretary Hoang Tan Phat were also blamed.” He points to the broken electric fan on the ceiling. “The electricity goes out every day, and even when it does, it doesn’t reach the required voltage, so at night it’s pitch black and the room is so stuffy that you can’t breathe.”
All military and political officials of the former Government were sent to the “re-education camp” in Chi Hoa Prison, near Saigon, for rehabilitation, while lower-ranking personnel were sent to more distant locations. Local Vietcong officials arranged for Western journalists to visit “re-education camp” No. K-4, about 50 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City. With its lotus ponds and lovely gardens, it appeared to be a place of healing. However, soon afterward, Western journalists found a sign at the entrance: “Admission is 5 dong per person, free for children under 10 years old.” When the reporter asked if K-4 was a model “re-education camp” for the Vietcong government.
time, but rather a place built by inmates for visitors to convalesce.
(Original text at the end of the paragraph; South Guo note may be missing)
In 1988, during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, the Vietcong government released 1,014 former senior government officials, so that as of today, according to Hanoi, only one hundred and fifty-nine are still in custody and will soon be released.
The belief in the social system was such that the Vietcong government demanded unconditional obedience to its rule from everyone, and any discontent could lead to imprisonment or even death. Although such harsh measures led to the adoption of an attitude of silence by the majority of the population, and the marches in which southerners used to participate died down. But discontent with the Vietcong government was everywhere, even among those who benefited from the new system.
In the Vietnamese Army, most of the younger officers also felt a strong dislike for the hypocritical and stereotypical policies of the Viet Cong. “I had to maintain an unbearable seriousness at all times.” One young officer said. “I had to respect the elderly and couldn’t go into love affairs. I couldn’t get anything of value and had to act as if I didn’t care at all.”
Villagers in Penang province often talk about the defoliants sprayed by United States aircraft. That agent had withered all the coconut trees that provided their main source of income. The son of forty-nine-year-old Vu Van Kyung, a former Vietcong cadre, is seventeen but looks only two years old, and is said to have suffered stunted development due to dioxin poisoning. At the Free Women’s Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Dr. Nguyen Thi Nguyen said that, although there was no final word on the matter, the number of infant deaths caused by naked women exposed to the defoliant was as high as those who were clothed, with obvious after-effects.
The demons of war still roam in every corner, and ten years have not made it fade in the minds of the Vietnamese, especially in South Vietnam. On a river in Ben Tre, children fish from the bow of a half-sunken American patrol boat, the gun barrels on the deck like a laundromat; the formerly bustling Tau Ton beach has become quiet, with a few sunbathing Soviet and Polish tourists lying on the empty sand, while children playing in the collapsed former American barracks not far away and the Vietnamese mestizos selling snacks are a reminder of what happened there. What happened there.
Maybe someday people will finally forget about that war, but not yet, because the people there still compare the Vietnam of now and before; maybe they really do think that the system is really better than before, or not at all different from before. So what will Vietnam be like in the future? It is hard to predict.
However, I just hope that another change in it won’t be as brutally depressing as it was before.
[Book Ends]
Translation table.
Due to the influence of Chinese culture on Vietnam and some Southeast Asian countries, most of their names have fixed Chinese characters corresponding to them, and it is quite difficult to translate from English to Chinese. For example, mao in Vietnamese can be the Chinese characters for Mao, Mao, Bao, Cap, Mao, Mao, Maung, Banner, Ninety, Ang, etc., but in English it is mao, and the translator has made a lot of efforts and consulted some researchers of the Vietnamese language, but inevitably, there are still inadvertent irregularities.
Therefore, this list of translations (excluding translations from other countries) is hereby provided for verification.
(Chapter I)
Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh Trie Dinh Chiu Dinh Ab Nha Ngan Goose Lu Han Lu Han Le Tuong Duc Lai Xiangyi Vu Thong Tjoen Vu Thong Sinh Boi Thi Oa Bui Thi Wah Nguyen Xinh Thuy Nguyen Vinh Thuy Nguyen Van VI Nguyen Van Vi Capiain Lan Capt. Linh Tran Tro Tran Truong Truong Huy Ho Thong Minh Hu Thong Minh Duong Van Minh Yang Minh Minh Le DUan Lai Bamboo Shoots Tran Van Don Chen Van Dun Phan Boi CHao Phan Pei Chu Vu Nguyen Giap Vu Won Kha Nho Dinh Diem Ngo Dinh Diem Ngo Ting Yen Hai Hai Tseng Tse Sheng Tsang Chak Sang Bao Bai Bao Da Vu Hong Khanh Vu Hong Hinh Trinh The Minh Tay Sai Minh Nguyen Van Hnh Nguyen Van Sinh Hien Captain Giai Giai Capt. Tran Thien Khiem Chen Shanqian Le Ngoc Chan Lai Nguyen Le Van Kim Lai Van Kim Ly Chen Hou Li Zhenhou (Chapter 2)
Phong Defense Prince Bao Loc Bao Loc Prince Madame Long Mrs. Le Thi Xuan Lai Thi Chun Tran Thi Nga Chen Thi Su Moth Vu Van Mau Vu Van Mau Ngo Dinh Nho Ngo Ting Coward Tran Chanh Thanh Chen Van Cheng Ngo Dinh Jin Ngo Ting Chiem Vu Nhoc Cac Vu Nguyet Vu Thi Quye Vu Thi Juan Tran Kim Tuyen Tran Kim Xuan Phan Quang Dan Pham Quang Thang Pham Van Thonh Pham Van Bucket Nhuyen Van Tho Nguyen Van Tho
(Chapter III)
Pham Khac Minh Pham Khac Minh Toan Calculation
Ngo Trung Hieu Ng Chong Hau Le Vinh Tri Lai Wing Chi Luc Force Thuy Water
Ly Ly Ly Tran Cong Que Chen Gong Gui Pham Van Dong Pham Van Dong
(Chapter IV)
Nguyen Cao Ky Nguyen Cao Ky Huy Fai Nguyen Van Thieu Nguyen Van Thieu Nguyen Van Thieu Ton That Dinh Sun Moo Ching
(Chapter V)
Thuc Suk Can Chin
Tran Van Huong Chen Wen Xiang Ta Van Van Tse Van Yuan Dinh Dinh Dinh Ngan Silver
Kounsi, Pholmi, Pholmi, Simong, Simong.
King Sri Savang Vatihanna Visana
(Chapter VI)
Mgiuem Thi Kieu Nguyen Thi Giao Nguyen Nhoc Thi Nguyen Nguyen Ngoc Thi Cong Cong Tao Thai
Phan Nghiem Ngat Phan Yen Yi Ta Van Thanh Xie Wen Qing Quach Thung Duc Guo Cong De Heng Samrin Han Sang Lin O Tuyet Duc Xue Chau Thanh Thuoc Zhu Thanh Thuong Phan Thi Can Phan Thi Jin Ha Ngoc Luong Ho Ngoc Leong Thanad Sinsuk Thanad Sinsuk Thanad Thung Duc Phan Hy Vinh Phan Xi Rong Nguyen Lac Hoa Nguyen Lac Hoa Nguyen Lo Hoa Phan Hy Vinh Phan Xi Vinh Nguyen Lac Hoa Nguyen Lac Hoa
(Chapter VII)
Lieutenant General Lon Nol Lieutenant General Lon Nol
Vu Dinh Chieu Vu Ting Chieu Giang Jiang
Nguyen Van Tan Nguyen Van Sinh Sacvcma Sai Uma Dan Min Do Thi Tinh Du Thi Love Nhung Velvet Doyiela Doyiela Duc Hoan Duc Hwan
(Chapter VIII)
Ton Duc Thang Sun De Sheng Hoang Thi Van Huang Thi Yun Lanh Than An Lang Chon An Ly Lee
Giahvun Gia Man Nguyen Van Phuc Nguyen Van Phuc Do Van Dinh Do Van Chien Chan Hoa Man Phan Quy Nhon Phan Quy Nhon Pol Plt Pol Plt Nguyen Cao Minh Nguyen Cao Minh Nguyen Souvannalay Souvannalay Su Boon Nam Lik Jean Mguyen Jane Nguyen Hung Vu Xiong Vu Chue Ying Mao Chau Nhuyen Hau Khanh Nguyen Hau Hinh Phonemany Chanpraseuth Nemani Kampalaso Nemany Chanpraseuth