Read Online Just As I Thought by Grace Paley - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Grace Paley
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“for yourself.” On the long, long, twenty-six-hour flight I happened to notice a Diner’s Club magazine in the seat pocket. In it I saw to my amazement a wonderful map of Vietnam—kind of skinny with a fat little Mekong Delta bottom. Along the coasts there were stars—or were they tiny hotels where mountain resorts with stunning views of the sea would be planted by American hotel companies once the war was over? This was in 1969.
So if my understanding of Vietnam was imperfect, my understanding of my own country was growing daily.
In the following articles, two of which were originally talks, I have described the nature and the disposition of our tasks. We were seven—five men and two women. We had not come to sightsee, but we did see the terrible topography of war from Hanoi to the Ben Hai River, the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. Three of us were filmmakers and made a film (impounded on our return). Four of us had the task of accompanying three POWs back home. The Vietnamese had agreed to return these men through the offices of the antiwar movement. But all this is described in the next few pages.
I should say that there are certain problems of what I’d call overlapping in the following reports—that is, repeated information, since I spoke these stories to different audiences. I have cut much of that kind of repetition out, but here and there kept some descriptions for emphasis. For instance, the greenness of Hanoi was described nostalgically by a Vietnamese woman I’d met in an airplane who had been sent south in 1954 along with her entire Catholic school. It was what she dreamed of, that green, she said. And then the women who met me at the small Hanoi airport wanted to know if I had seen Hanoi’s greenness. I thought it must be the way the New Yorker stumbling through slum side streets, truck-jammed avenues holds in her head the picture of the fish-shaped island city heavy with skyline at its gasping mouth. ( My exiled city-loving head, anyway.)
A story that I’ve told many times, but didn’t get to in immediate spoken reports: One does meet a few important people on journeys of this sort. You are assumed by your hosts to be an important person in your country, whereas you are really a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement. So it was that we seven met with Pham Van Dong, the second or third in power and authority in North Vietnam.
This is the way these meetings usually progressed: After people are seated in some order we are welcomed in the kindest way. Then one of us (we are also drinking tea) expresses our happiness to be here in the country of our imagination, at last. One of the young Vietnamese men says how happy they are to see us here. One of us remarks on the great courageous Vietnamese people and our shame at their suffering, for which we are responsible. No no, one or maybe two of them say, it is not your personal fault, we know the great American people would not permit it if they had the power. One of the young Vietnamese continues: Soon the war will be over and we will meet here or in the United States and our families will know one another. My own heart is quite full by then, and I assure them our children will certainly know one another, and we will dine in one another’s houses—I see myself cooking up one of my good soups for Nhan and Phan (our translators), and so on and actually on.
Suddenly one of our number, a passionate young man, speaks up, wants to wash away all that cant, that false sentiment. He states, No no, you will not want to come to our country, it’s a racist country, you will be looked down on for your color alone, it is a country with a violent tradition, you could not bear it, Vietnam is not its only terrible intervention. But one of the young Vietnamese is horrified to hear this speech, this disloyalty. He cries out, How can you talk about your own country like that? How can you say these
So if my understanding of Vietnam was imperfect, my understanding of my own country was growing daily.
In the following articles, two of which were originally talks, I have described the nature and the disposition of our tasks. We were seven—five men and two women. We had not come to sightsee, but we did see the terrible topography of war from Hanoi to the Ben Hai River, the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. Three of us were filmmakers and made a film (impounded on our return). Four of us had the task of accompanying three POWs back home. The Vietnamese had agreed to return these men through the offices of the antiwar movement. But all this is described in the next few pages.
I should say that there are certain problems of what I’d call overlapping in the following reports—that is, repeated information, since I spoke these stories to different audiences. I have cut much of that kind of repetition out, but here and there kept some descriptions for emphasis. For instance, the greenness of Hanoi was described nostalgically by a Vietnamese woman I’d met in an airplane who had been sent south in 1954 along with her entire Catholic school. It was what she dreamed of, that green, she said. And then the women who met me at the small Hanoi airport wanted to know if I had seen Hanoi’s greenness. I thought it must be the way the New Yorker stumbling through slum side streets, truck-jammed avenues holds in her head the picture of the fish-shaped island city heavy with skyline at its gasping mouth. ( My exiled city-loving head, anyway.)
A story that I’ve told many times, but didn’t get to in immediate spoken reports: One does meet a few important people on journeys of this sort. You are assumed by your hosts to be an important person in your country, whereas you are really a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement. So it was that we seven met with Pham Van Dong, the second or third in power and authority in North Vietnam.
This is the way these meetings usually progressed: After people are seated in some order we are welcomed in the kindest way. Then one of us (we are also drinking tea) expresses our happiness to be here in the country of our imagination, at last. One of the young Vietnamese men says how happy they are to see us here. One of us remarks on the great courageous Vietnamese people and our shame at their suffering, for which we are responsible. No no, one or maybe two of them say, it is not your personal fault, we know the great American people would not permit it if they had the power. One of the young Vietnamese continues: Soon the war will be over and we will meet here or in the United States and our families will know one another. My own heart is quite full by then, and I assure them our children will certainly know one another, and we will dine in one another’s houses—I see myself cooking up one of my good soups for Nhan and Phan (our translators), and so on and actually on.
Suddenly one of our number, a passionate young man, speaks up, wants to wash away all that cant, that false sentiment. He states, No no, you will not want to come to our country, it’s a racist country, you will be looked down on for your color alone, it is a country with a violent tradition, you could not bear it, Vietnam is not its only terrible intervention. But one of the young Vietnamese is horrified to hear this speech, this disloyalty. He cries out, How can you talk about your own country like that? How can you say these
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