Read Online Just As I Thought by Grace Paley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Grace Paley
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things about your own country? Have you forgotten Emerson? Have you forgotten Whitman? Jefferson?
We are all silenced. Americans and Vietnamese. Our American friend is abashed. He sits quietly. He does not, as I feared he might, begin to explain cautious Emerson, slaveholding Jefferson.
A couple of days later in Quangbinh province, we are reminded that South Vietnam’s Premier Diem and North Vietnam’s General Giap both come from this beloved province of fire, one an American puppet, the other the genius general of Dien Bien Phu and—as it turns out—of the defeat of the United States six years later. We are expected to have learned something from this fact about the contradictory—even warring-to-the-teeth—factions in one’s own indivisible always beloved country.
The poem “Two Villages” and the “Report from North Vietnam” are from a talk I gave at the Washington Square Methodist Church after returning from Vietnam. The year was 1969, the month August.
I didn’t know it at the time but ’69 was a key year, the one in which the war might have ended, but Nixon and Kissinger decided (while talking peace) to continue the war. (See Haldeman’s diaries, also the resignation of Kissinger’s key aides 1 over that decision.) When our little delegation stopped in Vientiane we were told by a young (at the time) fellow named, I believe, T. D. Allman, that B52 bombers were flying over Laos. We tried to talk about this at press conferences in New York, but were not heard, or at least not taken seriously. By the spring of 1970, the destruction of Cambodia had begun.
* * *
I must mention Lady Borton here. She was, is, a Friend, a Quaker. Her job during the war was to fit prostheses on Vietnamese civilian amputees. She was the woman who brought a congressman and the press to My Lai. She’s lived in both South Vietnam and North Vietnam. She published a book, Sensing the Enemy, about the Vietnamese boat people.
I wrote a preface to her most recent book, After Sorrow, which is about living among Vietnamese families in the Mekong Delta in 1989 and ’90. I haven’t included it because almost everything in that preface appears in the early reports in this section. But attention to her and her work belong in this book. I often wish I could have done this world some good in that Lady Borton way, offering political understanding and labor directly to those whose suffering was surely my responsibility.
* * *
I believe “Conversations in Moscow” needs no explanation. It seems fairly clear that we wanted Russian dissidents to know they had the active support of most of the antiwar movement. We hoped these remarkable people would recognize the troubles of those suffering U.S.-exported repression—Chile, Guatemala as examples. Of course, the Russians explained, that’s what it said in Pravda, too, so how could they believe it?
Home
Going to Minneapolis by air one day, on air, that is, held up in space on currents of air by a noisy, unimaginable machinery—skimming that air like some pebble of a casual god, I was crammed into a seat next to a woman who looked like a Vietnamese actress. Of course, I thought, she is really a middle- or upper-middle-class Asian woman, with rouged cheeks and narrowed lips, her hair done up by the dresser’s hand, her eyes lined into an approach to Caucasian.
Why did I think she was an actress? Because I’ve been in Vietnam. In 1969 I traveled by jeep on a dirt road called National Highway 1 from Hanoi to Vinh Linh, a tiny hamlet on the DMZ near the Ben Hai River. During this journey along the Vietnamese coast we traveled under what could be considered the American sky—since that’s where Americans were seen, floating, flying, dropping tons of ordnance (bombs), sometimes even falling down out of their planes to death, injury, prison on the Vietnamese earth. We often stopped in villages or in fields that had been villages to see how people could live on
We are all silenced. Americans and Vietnamese. Our American friend is abashed. He sits quietly. He does not, as I feared he might, begin to explain cautious Emerson, slaveholding Jefferson.
A couple of days later in Quangbinh province, we are reminded that South Vietnam’s Premier Diem and North Vietnam’s General Giap both come from this beloved province of fire, one an American puppet, the other the genius general of Dien Bien Phu and—as it turns out—of the defeat of the United States six years later. We are expected to have learned something from this fact about the contradictory—even warring-to-the-teeth—factions in one’s own indivisible always beloved country.
The poem “Two Villages” and the “Report from North Vietnam” are from a talk I gave at the Washington Square Methodist Church after returning from Vietnam. The year was 1969, the month August.
I didn’t know it at the time but ’69 was a key year, the one in which the war might have ended, but Nixon and Kissinger decided (while talking peace) to continue the war. (See Haldeman’s diaries, also the resignation of Kissinger’s key aides 1 over that decision.) When our little delegation stopped in Vientiane we were told by a young (at the time) fellow named, I believe, T. D. Allman, that B52 bombers were flying over Laos. We tried to talk about this at press conferences in New York, but were not heard, or at least not taken seriously. By the spring of 1970, the destruction of Cambodia had begun.
* * *
I must mention Lady Borton here. She was, is, a Friend, a Quaker. Her job during the war was to fit prostheses on Vietnamese civilian amputees. She was the woman who brought a congressman and the press to My Lai. She’s lived in both South Vietnam and North Vietnam. She published a book, Sensing the Enemy, about the Vietnamese boat people.
I wrote a preface to her most recent book, After Sorrow, which is about living among Vietnamese families in the Mekong Delta in 1989 and ’90. I haven’t included it because almost everything in that preface appears in the early reports in this section. But attention to her and her work belong in this book. I often wish I could have done this world some good in that Lady Borton way, offering political understanding and labor directly to those whose suffering was surely my responsibility.
* * *
I believe “Conversations in Moscow” needs no explanation. It seems fairly clear that we wanted Russian dissidents to know they had the active support of most of the antiwar movement. We hoped these remarkable people would recognize the troubles of those suffering U.S.-exported repression—Chile, Guatemala as examples. Of course, the Russians explained, that’s what it said in Pravda, too, so how could they believe it?
Home
Going to Minneapolis by air one day, on air, that is, held up in space on currents of air by a noisy, unimaginable machinery—skimming that air like some pebble of a casual god, I was crammed into a seat next to a woman who looked like a Vietnamese actress. Of course, I thought, she is really a middle- or upper-middle-class Asian woman, with rouged cheeks and narrowed lips, her hair done up by the dresser’s hand, her eyes lined into an approach to Caucasian.
Why did I think she was an actress? Because I’ve been in Vietnam. In 1969 I traveled by jeep on a dirt road called National Highway 1 from Hanoi to Vinh Linh, a tiny hamlet on the DMZ near the Ben Hai River. During this journey along the Vietnamese coast we traveled under what could be considered the American sky—since that’s where Americans were seen, floating, flying, dropping tons of ordnance (bombs), sometimes even falling down out of their planes to death, injury, prison on the Vietnamese earth. We often stopped in villages or in fields that had been villages to see how people could live on
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