News, 27-28/2/00 (1)
hytran
* Peace is hell? Post-war Vietnam drifts in a sea of failed hopes and
ennui
MEMORIES OF A PURE SPRING
By Duong Thu Huong
Translated from the Vietnamese
by Nina McPherson and
Phan Huy Duong
Hyperion, 340 pp., $23.95
BY CAROLYN SEE
SJM, 27/2/00 - The good thing about a war is that even though the
suffering is horrendous and the losses immeasurable and the starvation
rampant and the world unimaginably cruel, the people who are fighting
tend to achieve a pretty clear focus. Someone else wants to kill them,
and that generates a strong motivation for them to stay alive. Memories
become sharp; experience, intense. Whatever else a war may turn out to
be, it functions as the ultimate attention-getting device.
But what happens afterward? Someone still has to find the food and cook
the meals, and after passionate lovemaking, children are likely to come
on the scene, and someone needs to take the kids to school, and someone
has to get out there and earn some money, and most of the jobs in this
world are a great big bore. People forget -- in their well-meaning
piety -- to mention that ``peace'' is a lot like not hitting yourself
in the head with a hammer. It feels great at first, when the pain
stops, but it's not a guarantee of joy by any means. The absence of
pain, for one thing, allows us time to think, to evaluate the life that
may have been so earnestly and thoughtlessly defended.
In this novel, Hoang Hung is in his early 40s when ``The War Against
the Americans'' is won in Vietnam. He spent his combat years as the
leader of an Artistic Troupe and Youth Brigade whose mission was to
``sing louder than the bombs'' -- to entertain soldiers under the most
appalling conditions. The troupe's heroism has been unquestioned, and
when the war ceases the entire ensemble is sent to a seaside city,
provincial capital of the central part of the country.
It should be a happy time. Hung is a hero; he's composed some wonderful
music for his troupe to perform during the years of battle, and he's
also had the immense good fortune to find Suong, a beautiful
16-year-old girl whom he's turned into ``the most famous singer in the
central provinces.''
So this should be the moment when Hung, his young wife and their baby
daughter reap their just rewards. But almost immediately, Hung is
repelled by what ``victory'' means. A heroic Vietnamese soldier
celebrates by driving around aimlessly in an American jeep. A young
couple, idealistic until now, shows an unseemly, materialistic delight
over their government-requisitioned apartment and a few sticks of
second-hand furniture. Is this what the glorious war was all about?
Just some vulgar, second-hand junk?
At this fragile time, a deputy chief of the Communist Party decides to
demote Hung, to relieve him of his leadership of the theatrical troupe
and transfer him over to a moribund department of ``arts'' where
nothing is going on. The reason is not political in any usual sense.
Hung was snippy to the deputy chief 10 years before, and now that the
war is over, the functionary has found the perfect opportunity to take
his revenge.
Hung is old enough to remember times before the war. His family was
prosperous and middle-class; his mother had money and kept the house
running while his father devoted his life to literature in the way of
an old-time classical Chinese scholar. When Hung finds himself suddenly
``unemployed and uninsured,'' in Western terminology, it seems a little
bit like home. Why shouldn't his wife keep on working hard and bring in
the money? Why shouldn't Hung stay at home and sulk? (Because being
fired from the troupe has mysteriously robbed him of all confidence; he
can't compose a note anymore.)
The truth is, Hung isn't suited to peace. He's bored to death. He's
useless, and instead of being grateful to his long-suffering wife, he
falls in with bad companions and into low circumstances. ``Memory of a
Pure Spring,'' then, is a kind of Vietnamese redaction of Theodore
Dreiser's ``Sister Carrie'' or a cinematic version of ``A Star Is
Born.''
There's not one bad thing that doesn't happen to this poor man. He
finds a tedious job and quits it. He's hanging around the beach on a
day when some boat people are arrested, and -- branded a traitor -- he
is sent off to a nightmarish re-education camp. After his wife
negotiates his release, Hung takes to drink, then opium and then finds
a pitiful whore who gives him a roaring case of ``Korean Syphilis,'' a
disease no antibiotic can cure.
This seems to be much more than a regional novel and much more than a
political one (although the author has been stripped of honor in her
own country and remains a cultural pariah there). This is about the war
against boredom, the demands of domesticity and breadwinning, the
(sometimes very dubious) consolations of art. Hung's ``bad companions''
are lost souls as well as failed artists; they're testing the limits of
degradation because they can't think of anything better to do. He and
his friends waste day after day, wasting the life that they so bravely
fought for.
None of Hung's memories can help him. His childhood belongs to a
bourgeois island of ersatz security that's irrevocably gone; but the
war years, with all their danger and idealism, have just as decisively
disappeared. The artist is often uniquely equipped to deal with the
consequences of devastation; it's sitting down to lunch every day and
getting the kids off to kindergarten that can spell despair. That's
true in ``peaceful'' Vietnam -- or anywhere else.
* A Vietnamese Doctor's Crusade for Trade: Healing vs. Wounds -
Commerce: Co Pham risked plenty in Little Saigon with homeland ties.
With pact pending, he pushes harder.
LAT, 27/2/00 - For nearly a decade, Dr. Co Pham has advocated
reconciliation and free trade between the United States and Vietnam,
engendering such fierce protests in Orange County's Little Saigon
community that he hired armed guards to protect his medical clinic.
Now, as the two nations edge closer to a sweeping trade accord nearly
25 years after the Vietnam War's end, the native of Hanoi has stepped
up his controversial campaign.
Pham, a physician who started out in America cleaning toilets, returned
to Vietnam last summer to visit relatives, then spent the rest of his
10-day trip urging top-level government officials to sign the trade
agreement. Back in California, he brought his gentle voice to National
Public Radio, arguing for the pact alongside U.S. Trade Representative
Charlene Barshefsky and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stanley Karnow.
Then last November, he hosted a group of Vietnamese government and
business leaders at an Orange County restaurant. It was the 15th such
delegation from Vietnam he's hosted in seven years.
"Trade will lead to democratization and improve conditions in Vietnam,"
said Pham, a sinewy man with jet-black hair, impeccably coiffured.
Le Van Bang, Vietnam's ambassador to the U.S., has come to know Pham
over the years, twice staying at Pham's spacious home in Huntington
Beach.
"For U.S.-Vietnamese relations now and in the future, he's playing an
important role," Bang said in a recent telephone interview. "He's
delivered on his promises. . . . He's brought American businessmen to
Vietnam and has introduced Vietnamese businessmen to American
businessmen in California."
But Pham's undertakings have earned him scores of enemies. The mere
mention of his name can evoke sneers and derision in some quarters of
Little Saigon. The community is the heart of the nation's biggest
Vietnamese population and home to roughly 200,000 Vietnamese Americans,
many of them former political detainees and ex-officers of the South
Vietnamese Army.
"Co Pham is a traitor," said Ky Ngo, 47, a leading anti-Communist
activist. "We're against him. We oppose him. We want to isolate him in
the community."
Said Diem Do, 36, another community leader who appeared on the radio
broadcast in August with Pham: "I would have thought that after all
these years he would see that what he's advocated hasn't worked at all.
The Vietnamese government is as hard-line as ever."
Pact's Prospect Brings Jitters
In 1994 the United States lifted its long trade embargo against Vietnam
and a year later normalized relations. Since then, travel between the
two countries has soared. But trade hasn't, partly because of high
tariffs and other barriers.
Two-way trade totaled just $800 million in 1998, less than one-half of
1% of the total U.S. volume, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.
That is expected to jump dramatically with the passage of the
agreement, says the World Bank. Vietnam has a population of 78 million,
although its per capita income was estimated in 1996 to be less than
$300.
Last July, U.S. and Vietnamese officials reached a tentative trade
agreement, but Vietnam has held off giving final approval. The delay is
blamed on government hard-liners who fear a loss of control over the
economy and the effects of fully opening to the West. Moreover, the
collapse of market economies during the Asian financial crisis,
analysts say, may have had a chilling effect on senior Vietnamese
officials.
There is some resistance, as well, among U.S. politicians, who complain
about human rights abuses in Vietnam. Yet many see the agreement
eventually being ratified.
That includes the current U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Douglas "Pete"
Peterson. Peterson says he doesn't know Pham. But others do and view
him as quite influential.
Henry Vo, president of International Trading Co. in Ontario, credits
Pham with helping him make important "connections" with business
leaders. Through Pham, Vo says he met a Hanoi-based importer who is now
interested in buying water pumps from him.
"Pham is a matchmaker," said Vo, whose company exports Teflon and pool
and spa equipment to Vietnam. His 1999 sales were $250,000.
"Pham was among the earliest to come forward supporting normalized
political and economic relations and has been quite outspoken, which
isn't an easy position to take," said Virginia Foote, president of the
U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council, a trade association with offices in
Washington and Hanoi.
Still, there is considerable disagreement about the benefits of a trade
accord to the United States.
Joseph Damond, deputy assistant U.S. trade representative, said,
"Vietnam has a lot of potential to become a good market for U.S.
exports and American investment." But some U.S. and other foreign
companies in Vietnam are pulling back, complaining about the hardships
of doing business there.
"There's this great illusion that Vietnam is some kind of El Dorado and
that everybody will make a lot of money there," said Karnow, author of
the best-selling book "Vietnam: A History." "The economy is terrible,"
he said in an interview. "Corruption is terrible. The bureaucracy is
terrible."
Biggest Medical Practice of Its Kind
Inside the Bolsa Medical Center, a salmon-colored building decorated
with pagodas, Pham faces little of the antagonism he encounters in the
streets. Wearing a white lab coat and glasses, he mixes easily with
colleagues and patients, some of whom have come from as far as San Jose
to see Pham, a gynecologist, and some 20 other mostly Vietnamese
physicians.
Every day an estimated 400 patients visit Bolsa Medical--the largest
Vietnamese medical operation under one roof in America, says Quan Dong
Nguyen, vice president of the Vietnamese Medical Assn. of the USA. Pham
refused to divulge information about the financial health of the
clinic, but knowledgeable sources said the medical center's annual
revenue approaches $9 million.
Pham worked hard to get this far professionally, and some say he is
risking it all by engaging in politics in a community still embittered
and scarred by the war.
Reputed Communist sympathizers have found themselves and their
businesses attacked. Last winter crowds of up to 15,000 marched for
weeks to protest a video store owner's display of a Communist
Vietnamese flag and a picture of the late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
A few months later, Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam's restaurant
was the scene of demonstrations because Lam didn't attend those
rallies. Lam said protesters screamed profanities at customers and
urinated on the side of his business.
"In Orange County, there's a climate of fear and intimidation that if
you express a view that's unpopular with some members of the Vietnamese
community, they will picket your business and even make threats against
your life," said Jeff Brody, an assistant professor of communications
at Cal State Fullerton and former journalist who has written
extensively on Vietnamese American affairs.
Like thousands of his compatriots, Pham remains haunted by the legacy
of the Vietnam War. Rarely does a day go by, he says, when he doesn't
think about why South Vietnam lost, what went wrong, how it could have
turned out differently.
The war shattered Pham's comfortable life, borne of his aristocratic
roots. He says his family, with close ties to the French colonial
government, had lived on a 1,000-acre estate in Hanoi and made money by
farming rice and other foods. But after the country was divided along
the 17th parallel into Communist-controlled North Vietnam and
U.S.-backed South Vietnam, in 1954, the Phams fled.
In Saigon, Pham studied medicine and earned his medical degree in 1970.
He then served in the South Vietnamese Army as a surgeon in Da Nang.
When Communist forces closed in, Pham and his wife, Thuy Bui, and their
10-month-old son, Cung, boarded a U.S. Navy ship. That was April 30,
1975--the day South Vietnam fell.
The Phams arrived at Camp Pendleton, then moved to Seattle, where Pham
and his wife, also a physician, worked as hospital orderlies. In 1976,
he returned to medical school for certification, first at Northwestern
University and later did his residency at Loma Linda University School
of Medicine.
In Orange County, he joined Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and
Medical Center, eventually becoming a member of the board of directors.
By the end of the 1980s, he was elected president of the
Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce.
"I would walk into restaurants in Little Saigon, and people would come
up to me to talk," he recalled wistfully. "I was a rising star."
A Guilt Born of Having Plenty
Pham says he, too, hated Communist Vietnam for a long time. He blamed
the Communists for upending his life and forcing him into exile. And
like many others in Little Saigon, he supported anti-Communist groups
and conservative U.S. politicians. A portrait of President George Bush
shaking his hand hangs on the walls of Pham's office.
But sometime in the early '90s, Pham underwent a change of heart. He
says he began feeling guilty. He realized that as he was getting rich
in America--he tooled around in a new Mercedes--millions of his former
countrymen in Vietnam struggled to get by. He concluded that the
hard-line approach toward Vietnam wasn't working and began advocating
the lifting of the U.S. embargo against the country.
On a hot August day in 1993, Pham met publicly with Ambassador Bang,
then Vietnam's ambassador to the United Nations. And his life changed
forever.
Picketers showed up at Pham's office. Friends shunned him. The
Vietnamese Physicians Assn. of Southern California stripped him of the
organization's presidency.
It only got worse when he led a delegation of two dozen Vietnamese
American businesspeople to Hanoi in 1994. Hundreds of demonstrators
marched at his medical clinic for days, and he was met with death
threats. At one point, he wore a bulletproof vest and paid bodyguards
to shadow him. Fearing for his safety, he took his political activities
underground.
He resurfaced publicly last summer, more determined than ever to broker
the trade accord.
His ambitions, though, seem to go beyond the passage of the pact. Early
in his marriage, Pham confessed to his wife that he hoped to one day
become president of South Vietnam. Asked whether he still harbors
political aspirations in Vietnam, he paused, then smiled and said, "No
comment."
But moments later, he said: "I think Vietnam in the future will want
somebody mainstream who they can trust, a strong, educated leader who
can speak to the East and the West.
"I love America," he continued. "It's been very, very good to me. But
I'm 100% Vietnamese, and I love my country."
Dr. Co Pham
Birth: Hanoi, Sept. 21, 1943.
Family: wife of 29 years, Thuy Bui; four children, ages 8 to 25.
Professional title: President of Bolsa Medical Group
Education: University of Saigon Medical School, M.D., 1970
Favorite Author: Robert McNamara, former U.S. Defense Secretary
Hobbies: jogging and reading
Childhood idol: Ngo Dinh Diem, former South Vietnamese premier
Proudest accomplishment: having four children
Biggest failure: inability to convince Vietnam to sign pending trade
pact.
Vietnam at a Glance
Capital: Hanoi
Monetary unit: 1 dong (D)
1 U.S.$ = 13,975 dong (Feb. 25)
Population 78 million
Urban-rural (1995): urban 20.8%; rural 79.2%.
Population projection: (2010) 88.6 million
Gross national product (1996): $22 billion in U.S. dollars
(Orange County est. gross regional product: $100 billion
Tourism (1994): receipts from visitors $85 million
Per capita income: (1996 est.) less than $300
Imports (1996): U.S. $13.6 billion
Exports (1996): U.S. $6.9 billion
Source Encyclopedia Britannica, Department of Commerce, Chapman
University
* Man charged in alleged Vietnam fraud
Toronto Sun, 27/2/00 - A man wanted in San Diego for allegedly running
a bogus money transfer company was in a Toronto court yesterday charged
with operating a similar scam here.
Major crime unit officers from 14 Division arrested the suspect at his
car parked outside Pearson Airport Friday night.
Although Det.-Const. Norm Marshall said the accused fraudster is a
millionaire, the only valuables with him were a $2,700 round-trip
ticket to Vietnam via Hong Kong, plus $100 in cash.
He is wanted in California for allegedly scamming $173,000 US from
people who hired a man to transfer the money to families in Vietnam.
Several alleged victims in Toronto complained to police about cash
they gave to a man to be forwarded to their families in Vietnam during
the recent Lunar New Year. Two said they gave a man money to send to
relatives for medicine.
The funds never arrived, and Marshall said he suspects there could be
many other alleged victims who have yet to contact police.
Although some people told police they gave a man "thousands of
dollars," one alleged victim handed over just $50.
"These aren't rich people," he said. "Most are hard-working people who
haven't much money."
Marshall said the accused man arrived in Canada from Vietnam in 1980.
He returned to his native country last summer, set up Saigon Trading
Services on Dundas St. W. and advertised offices in Ottawa, Cornwall,
Hamilton and Guelph.
Phouc Quang "Paul" Ho, 50, is charged with five counts of theft under
$5,000, one count of theft over $5,000, possession of stolen goods
worth more than $5,000 and defrauding the public.
* Local Institute Launched for Vietnamese Studies
LAT, 27/2/00 - Educators and leaders of Orange County's Vietnamese
community on Saturday inaugurated an institute for teaching Vietnamese
music, art, literature, language and history.
More than 150 educators and business leaders attended the launch of the
Viet Vien-Hoc Institute of Vietnamese Studies in Garden Grove. The
educators included several prominent academics from Vietnam, most of
whom taught at the University of Saigon and the University of Hue. They
will act as advisors to the center, and some will teach classes.
Dinh-Hoa Nguyen, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Southern
Illinois University and a Mountain View resident, will be the center's
director. Nguyen told the crowd Saturday that he hopes the institute
will spread knowledge about Vietnamese culture and prepare Vietnamese
Americans to teach humanities and social science in refugee communities
across the globe.
"We're going to teach about all aspects of Vietnamese civilization,"
Nguyen, a Hanoi native, said later in an interview. "We're very happy,
and we're very proud."
The "ultimate dream," he said, is to use the institute as a seed to
build a university for the Vietnamese community in the United States.
The institute expects about 30 students to take classes at first.
Sessions will get underway immediately; the first lecture will be today
1 to 4 p.m. Sy-Te Nguyen, an author and chairman of the institute's
literature department, will talk about the impact of literature on
education.
The institute is at 10872 Westminster Ave., Suite 202. Information:
Minh-Lan Nguyen at (714) 636-6967, (714) 456-4114 or in...@viethoc.org.
* Charles Krauthammer: Heroism of Vietnam endurance sets McCain apart
WASHINGTON (WP, 27/2/00) — Even John McCain seemed surprised by his
resurrection in Michigan. He had already begun saying, repeatedly, "I
am proud of the campaign we ran," precisely the kind of thing you say
when you are about to lose and withdraw.
On Tuesday night, however, McCain was joining the chorus of those
saying, with a touch of wonder, that there is "something out there"
keeping him aloft.
What is it?
Yes, the McCain phenomenon is anti-Clintonism in action, with McCain
the most anti-Clinton of all the candidates.
Yes, the McCain phenomenon is a Republican reclaiming the Perot voters
of 1992 — a not insignificant 19 percent of the electorate. These are
not Reagan Democrats (who were working-class ethnics) but more
suburban, more educated, more libertarian independents and Democrats
who are inclined to vote for reform (and might have drifted back to the
Reform Party were it not run by a bunch of nuts).
But there is something deeper going on out there, something that
explains the resilience of a campaign as fly-by-night, ad hoc, and
often disoriented as McCain's.
It begins with his autobiography, without a doubt the most important
campaign book in recent American history. It is striking how many
people bring the book for McCain to sign at rallies. It has become a
totem. And that is because no one who has read it can be unmoved by his
courage.
It is, interestingly, a peculiar kind of courage, a kind that fits
perfectly with America's still conflicted feelings about Vietnam.
McCain's military heroism is not the heroism of a warrior. He is no
Eisenhower liberating Europe.
He routed no enemy. He conquered no territory. Nor did he commit the
momentary act of insane self-sacrifice in the chaos and terror of
battle, as did, for example, fellow Sen. Bob Kerrey, who saved his
platoon in a firefight after losing part of a leg.
McCain's is not the heroism of conquest or even rescue, but of
endurance, and, even more important, endurance for principle. It is not
just that he suffered for 5 1/2 years in Hanoi. It is that he chose to
suffer by refusing the early release the North Vietnamese offered him
and insisted — with torture — he accept. He refused because that would
have violated the military code of conduct under which one does not
accept early release until those who have been captured earlier have
been released first.
Twenty-five years ago, it was impossible to imagine what a Vietnam War
hero would look like. Rambo was a guns-ablazing World War II hero
grafted onto Vietnam, a context so improbable as to make him a parody.
How to be a hero in a war that so many believed was immoral and wrong?
McCain has given us the answer. Even those who deeply opposed the war
and who still remain ambivalent about it, can only be moved and feel
ennobled by war service that consists of suffering and self-denial.
He suffered for our sins. He did not die for them, though he came very
close. At a subliminal level, this suffering has become in the public
imagination a kind of expiation for the war itself. It explains why
even people so ideologically distant from him find his experience so
moving and his appeal so powerful.
That war experience sets him apart from other politicians, others of
his generation, and other contenders for the presidency — most starkly
from George W. Bush.
It is not that one flew combat over North Vietnam while the other was a
member of the Texas Air National Guard. It is that the early release
that McCain refused —the essence of his heroism — was offered to him by
virtue of his parentage.
A few days after capturing him, the North Vietnamese discovered that
his father was an admiral, commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific.
Releasing the son of a famous and important American officer would have
been a propaganda coup for them. McCain denied them that. He then
endured years of torture for renouncing the privileges of his pedigree.
George W. Bush, on the other hand, has gained nothing but advantage
from his pedigree. At every turn — favor, friends, funding. This is no
criticism of Bush. It is what anyone in his position would do. It is
perfectly natural for a son to take advantage of whatever associations
nature and chance endowed him with.
It is just singularly unfortunate for him that his opponent in his
quest for the Republican nomination is a man who, offered precisely the
same paternal advantage, did what so few men would do: He turned it
down. Fiercely.
hyt...@my-deja.com
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