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Baby in One Hand, Sword in the OtherAuthor(s): CAROLINE SUTTONSource: The North American Review, Vol. 294, No. 1 (JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2009), pp. 3-6Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20697702 .

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NAR

Baby in One Hand, Sword in the Other CAROLINE SUTTON

When I thought about Viet nam, that is, when I lived through the war, and much later taught Vietnam novels to privileged high schoolers, I thought about men: my friend who got out of the draft on a claim of insanity, war

correspondent Michael Herr racing towards the Citadel in Hue while the

sky exploded, Tim O'Brien and his

doppelg?nger, the man he killed, or did

not, the soldier who carried his girl friend's panty hose, the soldier who carried the thumb of a Vietnamese boy. I didn't think about the women.

Some thirty years after helicopters evacuated two thousand Americans and Vietnamese from the embassy in

Saigon to aircraft carriers offshore, I traveled to Viet Nam and arrived,

uneventfully, at the Hanoi airport. It was 5 p.m. and overcast. The air was

tan, littered with dust kicked up by cars and swarms of motorbikes. Amidst staccato honking, schoolgirls pedaled by with face masks and white

gloves. A woman walked along the

highway with a shoulder pole and two

pyramids of dragon fruit, her low, even

stride and bend at the knee betraying the weight.

I stayed at the Army Hotel, a four

story enclave concealed by a wall from a small street where cyclos waited and stores sold water and cigarettes. The

place was majestic, with its rows of balconies gazing toward an inner

courtyard, yet chilly and utilitarian. Built in the early '60s, it harbored a

musty scent beneath something peppery and sweet that I couldn't iden

tify. When I arrived, the woman at the desk glanced up. She sat very straight, a

high counter in front of her. Her hair was pulled back tight in a knot, and the

navy suit was tailored to her slim frame. She wore no earrings, nor any

jewelry that I could see, nor makeup on

her high forehead and alabaster cheeks. I offered my name. She nodded and

slowly opened a notebook with lines

penned in uniform letters leaning slightly to the right, the fs crossed with a lilt like an eyebrow, the ys and g's curled into a teardrop, the 9's

sublimely balanced on a curving stem. "I'll need your passports for some

time," she said. Oh, she was cool. I

probably would have turned over my mother's wedding ring had she asked.

My days and nights being reversed, I

slept fitfully and finally popped an

Ambien at 3 a.m., leaving me aimless and dislocated at breakfast. I stared at the flaccid French toast and fish soup, settled on coffee, and sat down with the Viet Nam News. "Sappers defuse

40-year-old US bomb in So'n La

Province," read one headline. Such finds appeared to be pretty routine. In

this case, flash floods in the northern

highlands had exposed several unex

ploded bombs. The Defense Ministry's Bomb and Mine Disposal Centre "esti mates the total of contaminated land at

66,000 sq. km, or 20 percent of all Viet Nam." On the same page other head lines read "Acute diarrhoea resurfaces,"

"Hanoi environment police nab animal

trafficking ring," and "Global Summit

urges women to become business

leaders." In June 2008 Hanoi would host the annual summit, whose presi dent, Irene Natividad, remarked that women trafficking, "a giant business"

affecting many women and girls, was on the agenda. "We must act to protect

them from being the slaves of a muddy industry." I remembered seeing women

behind bars in the back alleys of Calcutta when I was an impressionable twenty-one, women I wanted to look at

but felt too afraid and self-conscious. As one girl watched me pass, she swept her sari across her face and turned

away, leaving an image of one walnut

eye between bars in a mist of incense. Here I didn't know what I would see or

fail to see.

Not surprisingly, my Eyewitness Travel Guide touted the Old Quarter of Hanoi for its quaint streets and cheap shopping. Motorbikes and bicycles jammed the narrow streets, wedging in the taxis with their cargo of blank faces and dark suits. I picked my way along the sidewalk, disoriented by heady smells and car horns and intertwining streets, one exploding with pink stuffed animals dangling from open store

fronts, one alive with paper lanterns

swishing and spinning in the wind. While men sat on the sidewalk playing Go, women leaned in the doorways, watching for customers; they sat behind counters figuring accounts; they hawked motorbike parts, wooden

doors, cooking pots. At noon they prepared noodle broth with charred

ginger and cloves on one-burner stoves on the sidewalk and squatted on stools, babies on their laps, toddlers with wool

caps leaning against their knees. I never

heard a child cry, never saw a toddler bolt into the street, never saw a hand raised against a child. A tall woman with gray hair and sun-faded skirt

approached me with a plate of six rolls dusted with sugar. She raised the tray and looked into my eyes, smiled when I

declined, and passed by me in a single gesture as quiet and light as a shadow

puppet. I felt messy and scattered. Although I

wasn't strolling around in a tank top and short shorts as the occasional

fleshy tourist was doing, I was sloppy in my skirt and long-sleeved shirt, my hair curling just the wrong way, my

jean jacket neither feminine nor cool. Even the school girls whirring by on

bikes in their navy skirts and white blouses were more poised than I and,

oddly, more feminine than the

Bangkok girls who wore basically the same uniform, though their skirts showed more thigh and rode lower on

the hips, and their tight shirts were

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unbuttoned at the top, creating a

triangle of skin and a gleam of silver or

gold. All these observations were odd to me because I'd never cared much about clothes. And as a teacher, I'd

barely noticed what my students wore, never turned in a single one for

breaking the dress code, which I didn't believe in, and they knew it.

But what I noted here, which sparked such a quick and perhaps irrational

response, was not only clothes. It was

grace and reserve planted in a heritage of occupation and suppression, growing and daring to bloom like the almond tree that still stands in the

courtyard of the "Hanoi Hilton," which was seen by Vietnamese prisoners of the French, by American prisoners of the Vietnamese, and now by straggling clusters of hushed tourists. From some

where in my memory, buried like the mines throughout Southeast Asia, arose an image of a nun walking calmly into a temple compound and seating herself in lotus position and lighting herself on fire. For too long she sat there, sat

upright, her hands in front of her

pressed together like lovers who are

incomplete, one without the other. I was ten when I saw that on the news, and I had buried it, even when I went to Washington eight years later to

protest the war.

Madame Nhu, sister-in-law to

President Diem and self-appointed first

lady, had applauded the Buddhist immolations: "I would clap hands at

seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the

madness of others," she wrote to the New York Times. Her logic was obvi

ously offensive, but also twisted, the

justification a cover-up both for her own vicious loyalty to Catholicism (she had converted from Mahayana Buddhism) and for her hostility to any other potent social force in Saigon. She was presumptuous, modern, provoca

tive in her decollete gowns and beehive hair styles, and at times so aggravating that Diem reportedly threw a pricey porcelain vase at her, which missed, hit a wall, and shattered, an image that,

given the man's presidency, fairly drips with symbolism. Known as "the

Dragon Lady," Nhu organized a troop of women soldiers and personally, in her long silk dresses, offered lessons in

shooting. She also sponsored the

Family Law, which ( until repealed in

1963) abolished polygamy and gave women partial ownership of marital

properties. Controversial as she was,

she evoked a heritage of powerful women and, in fact, had the gall to

These were the women who showed up as

background figures in American movies.

claim descent from two national hero ines: the Trung Sisters, who led thirty thousand into battle and captured sixty-five citadels from the Chinese in AD 40. The elder sister, Trung Trac, rallied her dissident husband to help her or, depending on the version of the

story, avenged his death at the hands of the Chinese military. She established a

peaceful kingdom stretching from Hue to southern China in which women

could own land and hold a share in inheritances. When the Chinese

quashed the kingdom in AD 43, the sisters threw themselves into the Red

River, committing suicide in aristo cratic style. But the story doesn't end there. A thousand years later two statues washed ashore. The Vietnamese believed them to be the petrified remains of the Trungs' bodies and built a temple in their honor, which stands beside a man-made lake in the Hai Ba

Trung district of Hanoi. It is usually closed, as I discovered, which was

tantalizing but perhaps fitting. I was an outsider, after all, the enemy

in the American War, a citizen of the

country that had detonated three times the tonnage of bombs on North Viet

Nam as was dropped on Europe, Asia, and Africa combined during World

War II. It wasn't the propaganda in the Ho Chi Minh Museum or the photo graphs of Ho meeting with world leaders that brought this home to me.

It was an exhibit I came across acciden

tally while heading, peacefully, to the Confucian Temple of Literature. In front of a nondescript building under

going renovation was a black-and

white sign, reading: Viet Nam Women's Museum. Two female guards took my money and locked up my bag. Feeling like a trespasser, I entered the ground

floor exhibit, the only one open, and walked quietly in my cork sandals. Alone in the chilly room with its tile floor and rifles behind glass, I stared at

photographs of the faces of women

who had fought the French and the

Americans, women with broad cheek

bones, distant smiles, cropped hair. In one corner of the room were a

hammock, rubber sandals, and a crude fire pit, and on the wall nearby, a letter from a soldier to her mother, asserting her will to fight and commitment to

defeating "the imperialist Americans." Yet she longed for home and assured her mother she would return. Another

display showed a loose shirt and slacks in which women had stitched military

messages they carried from one village to another. (These were the women

who showed up as background figures in American movies like Platoon?a

Nixon favorite?and served as grounds for taking out villages.) Between 1965 and 1968, seventy thousand women

worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

cutting away jungle with hoes,

repairing bridges that had been blasted and would be again, subsisting on grass and wild vegetables until napalm denuded the forests. Another sixty thousand went into combat with the Viet Cong. I had not read about them in the '60s, and I wondered where the omission lay. In my mind's eye, women were not a force, but shadowy victims like those of My Lai, clutching their babies and cradling the heads of old men in their arms.

In the hallway of the museum stood a towering statue of a woman with bold breasts and a stylized skirt swirled around her legs. One thick arm was

rigid, hand flexed. The other supported a male child on her shoulder. She was

made of gold, and a domed ceiling loomed over her. "Like a female breast," said the guard, "and the lights are like

milk." The explicit femaleness of it all did not strike me as sexist. Women

fought because they wanted homes and families. As it turned out, many did not come back; many who did, having suffered from malnutrition and

malaria, had lost their ability to have children.

Thousands of miles away, young American women like me (who were not going to war) were questioning the

very notion of home and family. I

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remember nights in a college dorm

talking with my friend Kate whose

mother, a photographer living in Greenwich Village, married a lawyer, moved to Westchester, New York, and

spiraled into depression. In light of her mother's experience, Kate grew wary of

marriage. Writing poems, we swore,

was it; having kids and making angel food cakes was what our mothers did.

We rejected that as stridently as we

protested the Vietnam War. I recall

running across the Washington Mall,

my bare feet glancing off pebbles, my hair tangled, my eyes stinging from tear

gas. Some years later, when I did move

from Manhattan to the suburbs, when I did have two kids and got a dog, the

experience was colored by the ethos of the early '70s when convention smacked of resignation. Some things had changed. Perhaps in the lingering spirit of independence, or as a feminist stance against male doctors, we consid

ered childbirth heroic if done without

drugs. C-sections were a last resort,

almost a capitulation to the system. Thus indoctrinated, I naively endan

gered the life of my son. And there I was in one of the best hospitals in the

country, sophisticated medical

expertise at hand, with all the choices that Vietnamese women never had. No,

motherhood was not something to talk about at parties. When I gave up my

publishing job to stay home with my kids, when I knew I wanted to be a

mother above all else, I still felt like a

traitor. Even my father, who was a

chauvinist, got edgy when he saw me

dishing up warm cereal and pushing swings. "I'm sure you'll keep one hand in the fire," he said.

Phung Thi Chinh, a noblewoman who fought alongside the Trungs when the Chinese returned, gave birth in the

midst of battle and allegedly kept fighting, baby in one hand, sword in the other. I pictured her, literally, squat ting behind someone's shield, catching her infant, and severing the umbilical cord with a swift and deliberate stroke of the sword that had severed the heads of her enemies while horses thundered

by and the air blew red with dust. While in Hanoi I read Even the

Women Must Fight, which reports the

story of Kim Cue, a pediatrician, who

spent ten years in the jungle during the American War overseeing a hospital

that sorely lacked anesthesia, medi

cines, and food. She had a baby out

there, without her husband, and the next day the hospital was bombed. "I

put my son on my back, and we ran

from the helicopters," she told author Karen Turner. "If my son cried, I knew we would all be killed. I breast-fed him to keep him quiet. If he whimpered, my heart would stop."

Vietnamese women raise their

daughters on tales of the Trungs and other warrior women like Lady Trieu, an orphan, who was nine feet tall and

gathered an army of ten thousand to

battle the Chinese in the third century. As the story goes, she flung her pendu lous breasts over her shoulder and

charged into the fray on the back of an

elephant, a sword in each hand, crying, "I want only to ride the waves, slay the

big whale of the Eastern sea, clean up our frontiers and save the people from

drowning. Why should I imitate others, bow my head, stoop over, and be the concubine of whatever man?" Her

clarion call echoes in the letter I saw in the Women s Museum that expresses such singleness of purpose. When Ho Chi Minh made a personal appeal to the people of Viet Nam in 1966, the number of men and women who volunteered exceeded the district

quotas tenfold. The women who signed up broke the strictures of Chinese

patriarchy Viet Nam had inherited; Confucian men believed women

belonged at home. But as one older Vietnamese woman told me, "If I didn't

fight, I would have no home, no chil dren."

The American women who went to Viet Nam also volunteered, but since the Pentagon prohibited them from

combat, they served as nurses, air

traffic controllers, and intelligence and

language specialists. The majority were

white, middle-class girls who carried a

Catholic nursing school diploma in one

hand, a lot of idealism in the other. While Vietnamese women saw their children lose limbs to mines and their

rooftops vanish in flames, Americans watched selected scenes on black-and

white TV half a globe away. Until these volunteers saw the horrors first hand

(the same mutilation that the men in combat witnessed), they subscribed to old scripts of war?as perhaps some

young women do today.

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Although she never went to the front

lines, Kieu epitomizes service and sacrifice. She is the heroine of a nine teenth century epic by Du Nguyen,

which I read, sitting on a bench beside Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi as I watched

young guys watching clusters of school

girls. When a specious claim is made

against Kieu s father, the young girl opts to save his house and name by selling herself to a purported suitor, in

fact, a pimp. Kieu is not only a

beauty?"her eyes were autumn

streams, her brows spring hills"?but also a musician who plays the lute and

composes "a song called Cruel Fate /to mourn all women in soul-rending strains." Torn from her family, she is

alternately saved and lost like the dust of a dandelion. She falls in love three

times, is sold, deceived, whipped, and

molested, acts as slave to a jealous wife, and marries a virulent rebel king. Later, as a widowed queen, she arrests the

people who wronged her and judges them, freeing some, executing others. Since the poem was published on the heels of the Tay Son peasant rebellion

against the Chinese, this scene was

potent then and has remained a

favorite among the Vietnamese. But the

triumph is bittersweet. By the time Kieu s first love finds her, the one to

whom she was engaged in a sort of Romeo and Juliet fervor, she feels so

used and corrupted that she agrees

only to a platonic marriage, which

apparently elevates her in his eyes. Violated and pure, the state of the woman becomes the state of the

country, which had been invaded for most of its history and would, as

Nguyen may have sensed, be invaded

again?leaving many women childless.

Although Nguyen's disquieting and un-American conclusion was "[T]alent and disaster form a pair," Viet Nam has

progressed, especially on the economic

front, which rewards certain kinds of talent. In 1968, at the age of sixteen,

Nguyen Thi Mai Thanh helped treat

wounded soldiers in the jungle outside

of Saigon. When she contracted

malaria, she escaped north by walking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Today, as CEO of Ree Corporation, a construction and real estate company, she is worth $55

million. Despite the demands of her

corporate climb, Ms Mai Thanh usually ate dinner with her family and,

according to her son, appeared composed and calm. She is not alone in her success. Women head companies

that represent 30 percent of stock market capitalization in Viet Nam, as

opposed to 2 percent of Fortune 500

I'm not facing life-or death situations in which a cry of hunger is a virtual death sentence.

companies in the States. Of self

employed workers, women comprise the vast majority, suggesting their

fighting heritage survives in a country whose language has no word for femi nism.

In 2008, for the first time, a major art exhibit by Vietnamese women, called "Changing Identity," traveled to the US to be displayed in six cities over

the next two years. At Mills College artist Ly Huong Ly created concentric circles of pink plastic maxi pads, remi niscent of a Buddhist Karmic circle, and in performance stuck pads on

herself, which she asked the audience to daub with red paint. Juxtaposed

with this normally private female

symbol were traditional bamboo baskets used by Vietnamese women to

carry groceries and sort grain, the

performance thereby inviting us to

look beneath the veneer of women's

public lives. While in Hanoi I did not, in fact, see

the women behind closed doors, who believe so deeply in home and family that they put up with battery and scorn

those who abandon it for their own

safety. Nor did I see the women being trafficked to countries throughout Southeast Asia, the fifty thousand women in the brothels of Cambodia,

many of whom are Vietnamese teens, nor those who marry Chinese men

and, like Kieu, are sold. I saw few streetwalkers in Hanoi, but maybe I

didn't know how to look.

Although traveling quickens the senses and keeps you on the alert, it reminds you how flimsy your percep tions might be. It's a sort of paradox that feels like eating and growing hungrier at the same time. Like many, I

usually accept that my perceptions?

remotely accurate or not?stem from

the way in which the world is centered to me. But traveling in Asia provokes blatant de-centering of the kind that

may have led Jacques Derrida to remark at a meeting in Baltimore, "I dont believe that there is any percep tion." I can read all I want and hypoth esize a reasonable connection between what I read and what I saw, or between what I saw and what exists, and have little idea if the connection is any more

than a cobweb dangling fancifully in

my mind's eye. But maybe that doesn't matter as long as the impressions, like a

measurable earthquake, shift the

ground underfoot even a little. I'm not

facing life-or-death situations in which a cry of hunger is a virtual death sentence. Still, as the mother of a

twenty-year-old launching her life and the daughter of a ninety-year-old ending hers, I can't be needy. When the

pain of separation, change, or misun

derstanding arises, I lack the steadfast

goals of the Vietnamese women. But even if I can't divine what those are, I can emulate the grace with which they walk towards them, just as, daily, they thread their way across the intersec tions in Hanoi where motorbikes and bikes and cars converge without stop lights or lanes and where they must

pace their steps with the flow of traffic in the ceaseless pulse of that city. When I checked out of the Army

Hotel in Hanoi, I waited for a few minutes while a newly arrived American tourist wrangled over the location of her room. Her toddler

whined like a coyote and darted for the door when her mother's back was

turned. The mother glanced over her

shoulder, seized the child's arm, and

produced a lollipop. The woman

behind the desk and I waited, betraying nothing. When I stepped up, she rifled

through a drawer and, with two hands and a nod, passed me the bill, hand written in lovely blue ink. I pretended to review it and quickly paid cash. As the woman turned back to her books, I

added, "I think you still have my pass

port."

"Oh," she started, a hint of embar rassment rising on her cheek, a smile

just flickering on her lips. As she handed it to me, I bowed slightly and

remarked, "It was probably safer with

you."

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