Napalm and Chewing Gum

Napalm and Chewing Gum

Anthony Ginn

Published by Anthony Ginn at Smashwords.

Copyright 2012 Anthony Ginn

Smashwords Editon, License notes.

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"Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin."

Chapter 1.

Silk Bag.

Su hadn’t noticed the battle of the sugar grains, raging in the corner. Her attention was on the square green tin, on a shelf high on the wall of the bamboo hut where she’d grown up. It was hiding under dust, rust and gifts from ill-mannered mice.

Su’s three year old brother, Cho, sat behind her. He’d discovered grains of white sugar in the gaps in the bamboo mat, and was patiently transferring them to his mouth with his fingers. A platoon of black ants had discovered his precious white crystals and was stealing them. He attacked from above, with a potato. In war, everybody loses. The battle of the sugar grains was no different. The ants cut their losses and retreated. The mushy potato dissolved all the sugar. Cho began to moan.

Su lifted the tin from the shelf and placed it on top of the small black and white TV. The TV sat on a wooden box in the corner of the hut. It was connected to a black car battery with bare, silver metal cable. Three slightly blurred, grey army officers mouthed magnificent plans on the weekly, People’s Army Show, but Su wasn’t listening. She had other things on her mind. She was leaving home. She was seventeen and pregnant. She’d been feeling sick in the morning and missed her period. Whatever was in there, she didn’t want to know about it. It was a letter she didn’t want to open.

Beneath the dirt, the tin displayed a faded, steaming cup of Milo, a malt drink made from powder. The Milo tin contained Su’s most precious possessions. In fact, besides a change of clothes in a plastic bag by the door, it contained everything she owned.

If you find China on a map of the world, and slowly run your finger down the east coast, it will eventually cross the border and find itself in Vietnam. The part of the world beneath your finger is known as Southeast Asia. It hangs beneath China into the sea, like a baby monkey clinging to the belly of its mother. To the west is the Bay of Thailand and to the east, the South China Sea. Vietnam stands upright, like a dragon on hind legs, facing the South China Sea. Lao is at the dragons’ back, squashed between Vietnam and Thailand. China towers over its head, and Cambodia is curled up in a ball, fast asleep at its feet.

If your finger stops halfway down the Vietnamese coast, on the dragon’s belly button, it has arrived at the ancient city of Hue, which is where our story takes place.

Hue was once the capital of Vietnam. The city is divided by the Perfume river. On the north bank is a massive, old, walled fort, called the Citadel. It is one of the most famous buildings in Vietnam and known throughout the world.

Across the river from the Citadel, and downstream on the edge of town is an area called Doc Tri, which was also known around the world. Unlike the Citadel, it is not in the tourist bible, The Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam. But if you worked for the World Health Organisation, you’d probably know that Doc Tri, Hue, had one of the highest typhoid rates in the world. This is the home of Su’s family.

A herd of flimsy bamboo huts squatted in untidy rows. In the rainy season the ground became a muddy swamp. Su, her mother and the hut that was their home, hitched up their skirts and stood on their skinny bamboo legs in the mud for a few weeks, waiting for it to stop raining . In the hot season the paths became hard ruts and potholes. There was no piped water, electricity or plumbing. Nobody paid rent. The district was popular with mosquitoes, flies, rats, mice, and spiders. For Su, it was home. It was the only place she’d ever lived. She was lucky. She’d grown up in a loving family, surrounded by kind and caring neighbours.

But now she was leaving, taking only a plastic bag with her best white cotton suit, and her Grandmother’s bag.

Su was in turmoil. Something had grabbed hold of her life and was dragging it off somewhere. Something mysterious was happening inside her that made her feel sick in the morning. Things were no longer under her control. And in the middle of this turmoil, she was leaving home.

She glanced around. She was going to miss the warmth and love of her family. She couldn’t imagine life without her noisy big brother Anh, her noisy little brother Cho, her noisy, clumsy, superstitious mother, her quiet sensitive father and her war battered grandfather. Their hut was divided by a curtain at bedtime, and now a curtain was being drawn between Su and her family.

Su was short. She had long black hair and a lovely smile. She owned two sets of clothes; her fake western style jeans and T-shirt, and her white suit, called an ao-da. The ao-da was a long blouse with a high collar and slits up the side, and a pair of loose, long, white cotton trousers. The white suit sat in a plastic bag by the door. Along with her silk bag, it was the only thing she would take when she left home. When she went out, along with her jeans and T-shirt, she’d wear her conical bamboo hat, long gloves that went past her elbows, and a scarf to wrap around the her face. Young Vietnamese girls avoided the sun with a passion. Pale skin was valued and dark skin was was to be avoided at all costs. This was opposite to the girls in the West, who did all they could to get sun tans and make their skin darker.

Cho began moaning. Su turned to see what was bothering him. The battered potato, speckled with dead ants, moved up towards his mouth. It tasted sweet. He stopped moaning.

Su lifted the tin from the TV, still broadcasting the babbling with grey soldiers. She hadn’t opened her box of treasure for almost a year. It had sat on the shelf, gathering dust, while Su was stumbling through the maze from child to woman. She sat down on the bamboo mat, blew the mess from the lid and opened it.

Sitting on a flat newspaper parcel on the bottom of the tin, was a beautiful silk bag. Her mother gave it to her a couple of years ago, when she’d turned sixteen. Su called it Grandma’s bag, just as her mother had, and her mother before that. Nobody knew how old it was. It came from the mountains, in the north, where her mother’s family lived. The family were part of the long lost Tay tribe.

When Genghis Khan and his army, invaded China six hundred years ago, tens of thousands of people packed their bags and fled south. They knew he would kill every man, woman and child in any city that resisted his army. The Tay people sensibly joined the migration. They became part of a massive refugee problem caused by the Mongol warlord and eventually settled in the mountains in North Vietnam, where they’ve lived ever since.

They had their own language, their own unique style of dress, and, although they knew little science or geography, they were brilliant at arts and crafts. Their fine woven silk and delicate, intricate basketwork was famous throughout Vietnam.

It was a tradition for Tay women to teach their daughters the crafts that their mother’s had taught them.

Su carefully lifted the bag from the tin, placed it on the mat and looked at the beautifully embroidered geometric design on the side, a divided circle, surrounded by waves. She had seen the same image in temples and above the doors of grand houses in the wealthy part of the city. In Vietnamese, the symbol was called, nan cuo, which means watchful eye.

She stared at the eye and remembered sitting on her mother’s knee and listening to stories about the Grandma she never met, the bag, and the cool mountains, where mulberries grew and her mother’s people, the Tay, lived. She’d explained how the eye would always watch over Su and keep her from harm. She explained the five waves, in a neat circle around the eye, on the side of the bag.

This wave is a little baby, in the spirit world, waiting to be born. This one is a little girl. This one is a young lady. This one is a wife and a mother, and this is a grandma. Then grandma goes back to the spirit world and waits to be born again.

She would put the bag down, take Su’s hand, and make circles with her finger in the palm, saying,

Round and around and around we go. pause for a second, then tickle Su. The game never failed to delight.

Beneath the waves, the centre of the eye was a circle, divided into two tadpoles forming the letter ‘S’. The tadpoles were called Yin and Yang. They were the opposites in life; sweet and sour, happy and sad, hot and cold, good and bad, male and female. Remove one of the tadpoles and the other one swims away You can’t have one without the other. Life is made of equal amounts of each tadpole.

Baby Cho shrieked again. An ant had crawled onto his nose and he’d hit himself, trying to get rid of it.

Su looked at him. He was a nuisance who needed constant attention. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine one of them growing inside her. She was adamant. There must be some mistake. She was far too young to have one. She wouldn’t have a clue what to do with one. They just made a mess everywhere, and cried, and needed feeding all the time. It was ridiculous to imagine having one. It was better that adults looked after them.

She looked at the watchful eye. The idea that babies sat around in a place called The Spirit World, waiting to be born again, seemed ridiculous. The whole subject made her angry. She wanted to shout so loud, that any baby, anywhere, stayed away from her for at least five years.

Cho continued sucking the sweet potato. Su’s attention returned to her precious silk bag. Her mother told her how the bag had travelled down from the highlands many years ago, with Great Grandma Mol, when Su’s grandmother was a little baby. While Europeans and Americans were discovering television, rock and roll and Elvis Presley, Uncle Ho and the Vietnamese were fighting a war with the French.

In school, Su, and her brother Anh learned how the heroic General Giap had defeated the French Imperialist invaders at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Eight thousand Vietnamese died in the battle, over twenty thousand were wounded, including Mol’s husband, their Great Grandfather Ky. A dark-skinned, North African soldier in the French army had shot him in the leg and shattered his shin bone.

Great grandma Mol received news that her husband was in hospital in Hue. She packed the silk bag in a bundle with her other possessions and travelled down to Hue with her three little girls.

Mol her daughters spent their first two nights in Hue sleeping on the railway station. There she met Another Tay woman, who took her and the girls home, to her bamboo hut on the marshy ground on the south side of the river. Soon Mol had her own hut. The place was called Doc Tri. It would become notorious for its high rate of typhoid and within a year, Great Grandma Mol, and her Tay friend, would