VIÊTNAM, Red Hell my Love
Is the translation into English of the book
below...Now, more than thirty years after
publication into French and Vietnamese
( Hỏa-ngục-đỏ-mối-tình-tôi ) the author incidentally found this draft, completely forgotten. He wishes to put into Web an April 30th so people won't forget that day!
Enfer Rouge, Mon Amour : by Lucien Trong Edition du Seuil Paris (distributed in Canada by DiffusionDimedia,St-LaurentQuebec)1980.187p
April 30th 1975. Lucien Trọng, then a twenty-eight-year-old teaching assistant at the University of Saigon, attempted to escape from Vietnam. Captured at the dock, he spent the next three years in a reeducation campin the Mekong Delta. In late 1978, he was released and returned to Saigon. He escaped for good in May 1979 and now resides in Paris. His fascinating somewhat tremulous memoir combines two narrative strands....The first consists of life in the camp and the second relates a relationship with a fellow prisoner. What lifts it from banality is that it really happened, and the book itself is the price Trong has paid for suffering and growing up.
Moreover, his description of the camp is fair-minded and detailed, bringing much into focus. People quick to dismiss the book would probably include those who compares societies to omelettes, and people like Trong and Ly to the necessarily broken eggs. One of the many virtues of Enfer Rouge, Mon Amour is that it speaks from the ground, about many living people, using the voice of badly bruised, but still unbroken Vietnamese.
David P. CHANDLER Monash University, Australia ( Pacific Affairs )
South Vietnam. In June of 1975, the new regime ordered hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to report to authorities for «re-education" Re-education as it has been implemented in Vietnam is both a means of revenge and a sophisticated technique of repression and indoctrination which developed for several years in the North and extended to the South following the 1975 Communist takeover...
Amnesty International had appealed to Hanoi about the case of nearly 400 writers, poets and journalists and over 2,000 religious leaders, including Buddhist, Catholic and Protestant priests...REEDUCATION IN UNLIBERATED VIETNAM : LONELINESS, SUFFERING AND DEATH ( Ginetta Sagan - Stephen Denney )
FOREWORDS
It's sad to lose a friend. Everybody doesn't have a friend. And it's still sadder to lose one's nation, for now we are no longer more than wandering souls, stateless people.
What you're going to read is not a novel, it is a part of my life. And if sometimes the events follow themselves in disorder, that is because I am afraid to forget. To witness is becoming for me an obligation, even if it could seem useless. It's not about to yell my hatred. After a lot of suffering, remain in me only regrets.
The deceased, the living people in that Red Hell, please come to me and help me drawing up this book.
Lucien Trong
( I would like to apologize for my poor English and for the mistakes ...)
I. Mỹ Phước Tây Camp ( South Vietnam)
1. Bureau of the Direction 11. House of guards
2. House of cadres 12. Watch towers
3. Women's prison 13. River
4. Central kitchen 14. Football court
5. Theater stage 15. Barbed wires
6. Infirmary 16. North Vietnamese flag
7. Pigsty 17. Mine fields
8. Conex boxes 18. Central gate
9. Pond-latrines 19. Vegetables fields
- Cells 20. Rice fields
Re-education camp Rules
( Infraction involves punishment from chain in cells
or conex with suspension of visits and parcels )
Get out of the barbed wires ( escape )
Leave the cell without authorization
Change sleeping place
Go from one cell to another
Contact prisoner of another cell
Get close to the conex
Get close to the kitchen
Get close to the cadre house
Get close to the bureau
Get close to the barbed wires
Go to toilets out of schedules
Keep more than 5 piasters
Keep tools, sharp objects
Keep and drink alcohol
Play cards or hazard games
Cook out of authorizing time
Have contact with female prisoners
Have contact with mass people
Have contact with guards
Have contact with family out of visiting time
Disobey to cadres, cell's chiefs or responsibles
Refuse manual works
Have ideas or lubricated gestures
Keep, read books of corrupted regime
Talk about imperialism or puppet regime
Sing love songs of old regime
Discuss about politics
Critic revolution spirit
Damage tools
Damage dwellings
Have rebellion ideas
Have fetishist belief
Spread out reactionary propaganda
Be impolite to cadres and responsibles
Buy, sell, exchange clothes, provisions...
Dispute or quarrel among prisoners
To my fellow prisoners
Mỹ Phước Tây Camp - Cai Lậy
South Vietnam
1
I was born during the war in a shelter, my mother told me. Not far from the ruins and the smoky devastation of my village. The first war in Indochina had blasted a few months before in 1947 with the uprising of the Viet Minh a communist army led by Hô Chi Minh, and the bombing of Hai Phong port by the French fleet. My father was then an engineer working for Citroen, an automobile firm in Saigon. The imminence of my birth and the insecurity inside Saigon worried my father. He decided to stay in town and sent my pregnant mother and their two kids to her parents to Bên Tré in the Mekong Delta. My grandfather was a peasant who from working, became a land-owner and Tri Huyện hàm, honorific title of district “notability”. When the trouble touched the delta, my grandfather's house considered as one among the targets was burned down few days before my birth. Several members of my family were injured, including grandfather who died shortly after.
Having no refuge, escorted by two of the farmer's daughters who were our baby-sitters, my mother got on the way to the exodus with the children. She hoped to get back to Saigon. On the way, I was born before date. My mother wrapped the tiny baby with towels and tried to get away from the smoky devastation of the village, among cracklings of machine guns. She couldn't go very far then. The most efficient of Viet Minh weapons was sabotage. They sabotaged the roads, blew up the bridges. We were blocked in My Tho not far from Bên Tré, living there with nothing but some light luggage. The two maids Cuc and Dong were about sixteen or seventeen. To feed the three kids, they had to sell coconuts or anything they could.
Native of Tan An, not very far from Bên Tré, my father had studied in France, although his family could hardly afford. My grandfather on my father's side was a kind of local curer with medicinal herbs. He performed in a sampan, going from a village to a hamlet to cure poor peasants, most of the time for free. On his way, he met my grandmother a girl from a “good family” who packed up and joined him in his floating life. My grandfather was probably a good doctor, since a rich patient wanted to repay his gratitude by offering my father, then a smart school boy, a third-class ticket on a boat from Saigon to Paris. One day, my grandfather adopted a boy he had saved with his medical gift. Uncle Sanh, who later on would join the opposite camp as many members of his biological family who were Viet Minh. In Vietnam at that period of time, it happened that in the same family, brothers could be from two sides. If my father didn't go abroad for study and instead stayed in his home town infiltrated by reactionary members, would he have joined the Viet Minh like Uncle Sanh? My mother too had a sister, Aunt Di who was a Viet Minh sympathizer since she was married to a school teacher, who was a communist member. We will see later on how our family fate was involved with Aunt Di and Uncle Sanh.
French Indochina was an economical colony, a federation of the three Vietnam parts as well as Cambodia and Laos. It was formed some time after the landing of French troops in Vietnam on 1858. Vietnamese rebellions started some years later. Nationalism intensified during World War I. In 1930 the Vietnamese Nationalist Party ( Viêt Nam Quôc Dân Dang ) sponsored an uprising by Vietnamese soldiers of the French colonial Army. Without support, all the uprisings failed. After World War II, France weakened, left the place for a short period to Japan. Finally France was defeated at the battle of Diên Biên Phu. France and Vietnam had tied up from then on a complicated relationship of love-hatred, with a lot of complicity though. Following the Geneva Accord of 1954, the Viêt Minh became the government of North Viêt Nam, while the free South Vietnam had American allied. The Viet Công used the legacy of the Nationalist Party to liberate the country from colonialism, but in fact they were subordinated to Moscow and Peking. Later on after victory, the Nationalists would be bitterly disappointed and quickly pushed aside, if not simply eliminated!
Born premature and in such conditions, I was a sickly baby. One night, I was so weak that my mother, escorted by Dong, one of the girls, decided to bring me to the curer on the other side of the river, despite the curfew. They daubed their faces and clothes with mud in order to make themselves look ugly and avoid the outrage of the soldiers, French and north African colonies. After some barriers, passing the bridge with some corpses of Viet Minh exhibited, the soldiers stopped them. They finally let my pale mother and her skinny baby go but kept the young girl : Dong came back home the following day, bruised, changed. My mother had to sell her last black silk tunic for nursing her.
Nobody believed the survival of the wrinkled monkey that I became under the effect of sickness and malnutrition. Though, it was my brother who died very rapidly of diarrhea. My mother was no longer able to declare my birth, or declare his death. As soon as military conditions permitted it, we came back to Saigon while the war went on. Dong gave birth to a mixed race baby, left us and worked in a bar. We heard several years later that she left Vietnam for U.S.A with an American officer. If I talk a lot about my baby sitter, because she represented for me the fate of Vietnam : a generous being, who passed over one's hand to another, for whom the only possible liberty was exile, but would never forget.
In Saigon city, our life in spite of the war, was rather comfortable. But since their marriage was arranged according to the traditions, my parents didn't get along well. Married at nineteen to a young, bright but not very faithful husband, my fragile mother suffered a lot. According to Confucius women are all life subordinated to men. A good excuse for my father to go out without her. My mother kept silent, but she became like a fading flower. I remember one scene which marked my young mind for life. Pretending to be going out with friends, my father used to come home often very late at night. After ten years or so of marriage, my mother might feel that my father was at that time involved in a more serious relationship. One night, she decided to follow his car by renting a rickshaw.
She was then accompanied by her body-guard who happened to be me, a thin boy of seven or so. My nine year old sister stayed home with Cuc, her baby sitter. But when my mother saw my father's car in front of a flat, she almost fainted. The driver took us back home hurriedly. Later that night my father came back, perhaps drunk. For the first time, my mother said something about dining late and keeping the children waiting. She didn't finish that my father took a chair and with that chair broke most of the furniture. I still had in mind the image of my frightened mother protecting my sister. I grasped my father's waist. He dragged me around but I resisted. I was small but very determined. I did not let him go until he stopped smashing. To tell the truth, he did not mean to hurt us, just hit the closets . But in my head at that moment, I decided never to have such a family. Or not to have any family at all.
So I grew up in the middle of a national drama doubled with family conflicts. But I was unable to reconcile with anybody. And the war kept going on, much more in the provinces than in Saigon. Even though my parents were Buddhists, my father who took good care of our education, sent me to a Christian school named Taberd, a famous and puritan school managed by priests. I could study French and catechism there. Religious education just left me feeling ashamed about anything that preoccupied a teenage. Nevertheless I appreciated the colonial style buildings, the century age flaming trees in the central yard, and the outline of the black gown of the priests in the long quiet corridors, and specially one teacher who inspired much admiration. Frère Désiré was the principal. After I got my Baccalaureate and before I left for France, the last time I saw him, he told me: “Now that you will enter into adult life, remember one word under any circumstance: «Oser». Dareto do what you decide to do.”