The Grim Silent Dark

On our last night in Hue, we returned to the Mandarin Cafe where we had lunch the previous day.  The walls of the cafe are filled with wonderful photographs of the people and landscapes of Viet Nam, the work of the owner we were told.  We were each given a post card of one of his photographs, and shown many albums of his work.  The owner himself--Mr. Cu--greeted us when we returned for a light supper.

We had heard he had served with the South Vietnamese army before reunification.  Indeed, when he found out we were from the US, he told us with great pride he had been a fire fighter on the runway of a nearby Army base.  His bitterness about the war, or rather its aftermath, was quite evident.  Neither he nor his family were able to get work because of his collaboration with the US. This is consistent with what we've read and heard from several sources.  He ended up making money by repairing old watches and selling them, until he made enough to start this restaurant.  He seemed overly eager to share his negative feelings about the communists, and had derogatory things to say about the North Vietnamese.

Huy spoke candidly today about the re-education efforts (in fact, he used the term "brainwashing") of more than 100,000 South Vietnamese collaborators, including the father of one of his friends in Saigon, who endured the "re-education" camp for seven years. For years, he refused to allow anyone from North Vietnam in his home.  Although many, like this man, blame the north for their predicament, Huy says it is not a regional divide, but a philosophical one.  After all, he points out, many who now live in the south were originally from the north, and vice versa.

Case in point: one of the nation's leading photographers is Dao Hoa Nu.  She was born in Hue, educated at Catholic schools, and moved to Saigon with her family when she was 15.  I came upon a profile of her in the Vietnam Airlines flight magazine, a light weight journal otherwise devoted to fashion and beauty care. An aspiring singer, her career was cut short "amidst the endemic post-war hardship nationwide," and ended up selling sweet soup on the streets of Saigon.  Somehow she managed to get into photography, and has been very successful.  But what struck me was the following quote from her:

"Out of my lens are horizons that bear no resemblance to each other: paddy fields, rivers, mist drenched mountains, or sometimes the grim silent dark that enfolds us all.  They are always the miraculous and profound poetry."

It's not that I have been looking for this, exactly.  It's just I wonder how a people could survive so much pain, so much loss, over centuries and appear so forgiving and optimistic. In Buddhism, there is an acknowledgement that suffering exists, and always will.  That one of our responsibilities is "to bring joy to one person in the morning, and ease the suffering of one person in the evening." Somehow Huy's humor and generous spirit are more profound to me when understood in the context of the grim silent dark.