6.
Imagine an octagonal structure. Each of the eight sides, named alphabetically from A to H, is in fact a long building, filled with cells. The inside wall of each lettered side is open—sealed with iron bars but otherwise transparent to the guards in the watchtower that stands in the center of the octagon. A hyper-rationalist prison built by the hyper-rationalist colonial power.
But look closer. The French only completed the prison as it had been conceived by the Japanese. The true model for the prison’s design is the I Ching—the famous Chinese Book of Changes. Look at the eight buildings that make up the octagon: each one is three stories high. Each building, therefore, corresponds to one of the original eight trigrams, the bat quai, which, paired up, constitute the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. Each floor is a line of the trigram and is either broken—yin—or unbroken—yang. In the architecture of the building, the break in the line is represented by a concrete wall that cuts the floor in two. So in what the French called Building A, on the north side of the prison, there are no dividing walls, because Building A corresponds to the trigram for Heaven: ☰. But in Building E—which sits opposite Building A, so on the south side of the prison—every floor is blocked by a concrete wall, so one cannot pass through E to get to D or F; E corresponds to the trigram for Earth: ☷.
I could see all this very clearly in the scale model of Chi Hoa in my grandparents’ apartment. Its intricate detailing was astonishing. It was mostly made of plaster, but painted to look like fading, weather-worn concrete. All the iron bars in the cells, and the ornamental gate at Death’s Door, were made of real metal, hand cut and polished. The one-way windows in the watchtower were made of real glass. The Buddhist pagoda in the yard of Building C was carved out of balsa wood, and each of its seven floors was painted a different shade of yellow.
Most astonishing of all were the details inside the cells. Leaning in very closely, I could see through the iron bars of the wing where my grandfather had been imprisoned, Section FG, the buildings making up the southwest and west sides of the octagon. Tiny painted numbers, in red, identified the different cells; I always looked for Cell 6. Inside I could see a mass of twisted bodies—I knew from what my grandfather had told me that there were about fifty bodies in all, so small in this model that it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. I could see the drop toilets at one end of the cell, at the other the thin mattresses for the trusties—prisoner-guards, like the concentration camp kapo—and their allies. I saw the bare concrete on which everyone else slept. With the aid of a magnifying glass I could see even more: the tiny chess sets with which they amused themselves, the lacquer bowls they ate rice from, fifty individual faces in the writhing mass.
Stepping back, I could see the tower in the middle of the octagon. The French believed the octagonal shape would allow their guards to see every prisoner at every waking moment, or at least give the impression to each prisoner that he or she was being watched at every moment. Meanwhile, adherents of feng shui believed the octagon was the source of the prison’s spiritual power. But I could also see the one inconsistency in the design: unlike all the other buildings, which had sloping, tiled roofs, the roof of Heaven, ☰—Building A—had been flattened, and was now a bare concrete surface.
It was to let out the ghosts, my grandfather once told me. We were in his room in the apartment in Boissy. Sitting hunched over on his hospital-style bed, coughing between short sentences, he looked like a ghost himself. Chi Hoa, he said, was too well designed; even the ghosts couldn’t get out. At night, the noise in the yard got so loud that none of us could sleep, prisoners or guards. They were confused, looking for their ancestors, for their ancestral village. Where was the family temple? Instead all they saw were the eight walls of the prison. A very strong shape, very hard to break through. Only the strongest ghost could have broken out of that octagon. Even then he would need help: he would need a sorcerer, tools, money. But they didn’t even have clothes or food. Who was going to burn paper offerings to them in Chi Hoa? So they wandered the yard at night, naked and sobbing. It was too much! The guards paid for a feng shui master to come in. He said, clear the path for these souls through Heaven. And that’s what they did, leveling the sloping roof and replacing it with a flat, concrete patio—a single stair, they said, to Heaven.
Did the ghosts all leave? Well, I still remember the day they finished the work. The ghosts, still naked but calling out in happiness now, started climbing up the iron bars of the cells. Soon the whole side of the building was nothing but skinny bodies and bare buttocks. Ghosts used their feet to push off the heads of the ones below. Some slipped and fell to the floor of the yard. It was a stampede. But eventually everyone who wanted to get out did. And then the only ghosts left were the ones with nowhere better to be.
7.
It was much more bearable in Chi Hoa once most of the ghosts had gone, said my grandfather. The ones that were left understood their ghostly duty, which was to quietly haunt corridors in underused parts of the prison, and to speak when spoken to about their ghostly memories. They were useful too, for contacting dead relatives, or for a game of chess. And they knew things, if you knew how to listen. Take the meaning of his section of Chi Hoa, Section FG. Everyone knew what the trigrams represented, said my grandfather. But it took a ghost for me to learn what they meant for me.
Building F corresponds to the trigram for thunder: ☳; building G corresponds to the trigram for fire: ☲. Together, these two trigrams form Hexagram 21 in the I Ching, fire over thunder, or Shih Ho—which, my grandfather was fond of telling me, is all about justice. Without justice there can be no harmony.
One day, said my grandfather, the men in my cell, we pooled our resources. My grandfather marked off the currency on his long, thin fingers: cigarettes, scraps of paper, contraband salt, food packages from family. In return, we got fifty yarrow stalks. We used the stalks to consult the oracle: what kind of justice were we receiving? The answer was inauspicious. Nine at the top. It meant that our necks were fastened in wooden stocks. Our ears had disappeared beneath the brace. What did it mean? It meant that we were deaf to counsel, and our punishment was just.
8.
For a very long time, my grandfather told me, I could not accept the oracle’s answer. Perhaps it was right about the other men in my cell. But not me. I was not guilty. Well—and here my grandfather grinned at me, as if we were sharing a great joke—I was not guilty of anything they could charge me for.
Then, one day, he met a ghost from Nghe An province. My grandfather had noticed him before—he had a sour demeanor, and had kept himself apart from the other ghosts. One of my grandfather’s cellmates, a Chinaman named Tchen, had said that the sour ghost had been a legendary VC commando. He’d operated in the south, deep behind enemy lines—behind our lines, Tchen had said, correcting himself—for twenty-one years. He was only caught in the clean-up operation after the Tet Offensive. He lasted another six years in Chi Hoa. If he’d made it one more year, he’d have been liberated along with the other Viet Cong when Saigon fell. But dysentery got him—shat himself to death, Tchen had said. On the day of the great exodus over the leveled roof of Heaven, my grandfather remembered seeing the ghost’s puckered face watching without interest from his seat on the edge of the concrete washing basin in the yard. The next day, the day my grandfather met him, that’s where he was, sitting cross-legged on the side of the basin as fifty prisoners scrubbed themselves in the filthy water.
He smiled at me, said my grandfather. The effect was not exactly pleasant. Then he said, I come from Nghe An province. Cattle country. Our bullocks fetched top prices with Hanoi butchers. I can tell you’re a northerner. Perhaps you’ve had some of our beef in your pho, eh? I worked in an abattoir. It’s not the dirty profession you think. There was a time when we butchered animals in the open air, on the street. They still do that in the hamlets. But you’re a town boy, so what would you know about killing and flaying? You think of meat hooks, blood, knives. But do you think of the noise? And the smells—sweet blood mixed with excrement and bile and disinfectant—all wreathed in steam like mountain fog.
I thought that that was how life would be, said the sour ghost—and he looked right at me, said my grandfather. A life more or less the same as my father’s. But then came the floods. The dikes overflowed and the cattle starved. And sure enough, like locusts, the jauniers came calling.
The jaunier offered us three-year contracts on fifteen piastres a month, with a ten-piastre advance! What choice did I have? I knew—I thought I knew—about the plantations. I was no fool. But the cattle were dead, washed away in the rains, and Father and Mother were well into their autumn. So I signed their contract.
They called us tappers. At each tree I would cut a diagonal half spiral around the outside. Inside the tree, the sap runs in spiral tubes to the right, so by cutting down and to the left we sliced as many of the tubes as possible. I had to be careful to not cut too deep—the sap is in the bark, and cutting into the tree itself would make it sick. All told, it took twenty seconds to tap a tree, if you knew what you were doing. On an average day I tapped maybe a thousand trees. At the end of the cut I stuck a small wooden spout that piped the sap into a coconut shell. The sap bled out as a sticky, milky-white latex. Le bois qui pleure. The tree that cries.
The sap bled out for four hours before it coagulated in the trees’ veins. So when I’d tapped a thousand trees, I could return to the first one to collect its coconut shell. We worked as long as there was daylight—eleven, twelve hours—with a fifteen-minute break at noon.
One day, after the sun had fallen, we were told that we could prepare our own meals that night. The foremen and their wives who ran the canteen were celebrating a French holiday, for their warrior-lady, Saint Joan. As it happened, the plantation store had a bullock for sale, surplus to their feast-day requirements—a scrawny thing, underfed. A bullock like that in Nghe An would be unsellable, we’d give him to the children to ride on, but on the plantation it seemed a blessing from the heavens. One woman—I won’t say her name, even now—bargained with the foremen’s wives to buy the bullock with some of our meager savings. They must have been impatient to begin their revelry, because we got the bullock at something like a fair price.
I volunteered to butcher it. I knew how to do it safely, and with the least pain for the poor beast. The woman who’d done the bargaining asked if she could help, and I didn’t know how to tell her about the steaming blood and viscera. I don’t know that it would have made any difference. So the two of us walked the bullock away from the buildings, out to where the jungle had already begun to reclaim its territory. My tools were blunt, and not suited to the task, but her help made up for it. After it was done, and I was splattered with blood, she smiled at me. Ignoring the glossy red smears that ran up past my elbow and halfway to my shoulder, she put her hand on mine and held it, for a handful of heartbeats. Then we gathered up the butchered meat and bones and went back to the others. That night, we ate as well as I’ve ever eaten.
From then on I felt a buoyant, hopeful secret between me and her. She smiled at everyone, and she had gentle words for all, but she reserved something different for me. The thought of her kept me going, among the endless trees, which were planted in such straight rows that by the mid-morning heat I was lost, drowning in weeping trees. Some nights, we sat together in the canteen. We didn’t talk very much, though I tried to tell her everything I could remember about Nghe An, home, my parents. She had little to say about herself, except that she hoped one day she could have children. That was the saddest thing about the plantation, she said. They didn’t let workers bring their families. No little faces, no bright voices. Where she came from—though she never said exactly where—there were children everywhere, and the children were everyone’s. They would wander in and out of neighbors’ homes, she said, and you would turn around in the kitchen and find them standing naked in the doorway, watching you.
Not long before our contracts were due to finish, my secret happiness was taken away. It had been a normal, back-breaking day when we returned to the dormitories to find the plantation owner with the chief foreman. The owner was a sickly man who normally lived in Saigon—he found plantation living was no good for the water in his lungs; being so remote, we were at least a day away from the nearest doctor. As soon as we were in sight, the foreman began yelling and screaming, holding up a small bottle, about the size of a man’s thumb. He ran among us, hitting out with a rubber truncheon, still yelling. We protected ourselves as best we could, covering our heads, our faces. A blow to my stomach had me doubled over when I heard her voice, saying, It’s mine, it’s mine. My vision was still blurry but I saw the foreman dragging her away by the hair, and now the other women were wailing and the men had finally found their voices. But the other foremen had arrived with their truncheons out, and some of them had run to grab guns.
The sickly plantation owner raised his hand for silence. She was on her knees, at his feet, thrown down there by the chief foreman. The hubbub started to die down when we saw the fleshy white hand raised aloft. When we had all fallen quiet, he said in his timorous voice that this woman at his feet had stolen a bottle of medicine from the plantation store. A woman next to me sobbed—the medicine had been for her. The plantation owner raised his hand again for silence. He said that a rider had been sent for the police commissaire, who would come tomorrow to dispense justice. The foremen started herding us into the dormitories. There would be no food tonight for anyone. Craning my neck, I could see them dragging her by her hair again, out toward the rubber trees.
That night, I snuck out of the dormitory. It was a big, low moon, so everything was lit up with a silver glow. I found her tied to a rubber tree in the first row. She looked exhausted but otherwise unhurt. When she saw me coming she gave me a tired smile, then slumped against the ropes again. I had nothing with which to cut her free, but I quickly saw that they had tied her quite simply—after all, who would be mad enough to free her?
But as my hands went to the knots, she shook her head. Where will I go, she asked. They will burn down any house that dares to take me in. If they don’t find me, they will beat every one of you senseless. And if somehow I found my way home, it would already be in ruins, and Mother and Father would be in prison, or worse. This is my fate, Anh, as your fate is to walk away tonight, finish your contract, and then live again. We will meet again on the bank of some distant river.
I left her among the weeping trees. The next day we were given the morning off, to wait for the police commissaire. They lined us up in ranks to witness their justice. By noon they were done and we were back among the trees. The sap was like blood to me. When the foremen called an end to our work, we were finally able to untie her body. We pooled together enough money to buy new clothes at the canteen, some paper for the burning, and a small portion of rice. She is buried along with the others, on the far side of the dormitories—as far away from those trees as possible.
9.
The men on Manus are being forced out. Their updates flash up on my phone: security forces are coming through and smashing the men’s makeshift water tanks and solar panels, confiscating phones and tablets. It is no longer my job to reply, but I do anyway, writing the same messages I wrote before: I hope you’re safe. I hope no one is hurt. And I get the same messages in reply: Thanks brother.
By now, the daytrippers have left and the river below me is quiet. In the library, undergraduates sit before great piles of books—on Roman history, molecular biology, the collected works of Philip Roth—which they ignore as they scroll through their news feeds. I still haven’t done any of the reading I came to the library to do, and soon enough it will be time for me to go home. But I am too full of Chi Hoa to open my books.
Am I guilty, after all, of making the same mistake as Bentham did with his panopticon? Have I failed to take seriously the life of the mind? I had thought my grandfather’s stories and images were a history of a place called Vietnam. But now I realize he was always speaking of some other place, not entirely coextensive with the thin, S-shaped spit of land between the sea and the mountains that bears that name on our maps.
I hesitate in assigning this other place a name: Gia Long, the Nguyen dynasty ruler who was the last man standing after thirty years of civil war, named his newly unified country Việt Nam. But that name—meaning South of the Viet—had been forced on him by the Chinese Emperor. It was a shock to me to read that the country running from the Red River Basin to the Mekong Delta was of such recent provenance—Gia Long had been a contemporary of Louis XVI, who welcomed Gia Long’s eldest son, Prince Cảnh, to the doomed court in Versailles, where the seven-year-old boy became a sensation, and a plaything of Marie Antoinette.
Gia Long had wanted to call his new country Nam Việt: the Viet of the South. But that had sounded, to the august ear of the Manchu Son of Heaven, Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, like a claim to China’s southern provinces. And as much as Gia Long styled himself on the great anti-Chinese warriors of the past, he was also a practical man, so Việt Nam it would be. In any case, the Chinese had their own name for this place: Annam. But that meant the Pacified South, and so was unacceptable to the inhabitants of the place, for obvious reasons. Gia Long’s son and successor, Minh Mạng, called his kingdom Đại Nam, the Great South, but only after the bloody conquest of much of what we now call Cambodia and Laos.
Then there were the French names, which were even more recent, but in some ways the ones most familiar to my grandfather: Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchine, the three “Vietnamese” partitions of colonial Indochine, alongside Kampuchea and Laos. Then, in an attempt to halt the progress of decolonization—much too little, much too late—it was known as the Indochinese Federation, junior member of the French Union. Next, there were the two Vietnams (note the contraction, which was, I suspect, an anglicization meant to appeal to the Americans), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of Vietnam, each laying claim to the whole S but in reality existing either side of the seventeenth parallel.
So the stories my grandfather told me were all part of a bigger history, a history of all of these places, and none of them: Vietnam, Nam Việt, Annam, Đại Nam, Tonkin, the DRV, Indochine, and ’Nam.
And where these stories took place for me, once I’d heard them, well, that was somewhere else again—less populated than my grandfather’s places, and less detailed. Flatter, like a map or a diorama, but one that more often than not appeared to me out of focus, as if fading away at the edges.
What, then, to call this place? It is a heavy responsibility. We had hesitated over naming Edith, deflecting the question from family and midwives day after day in the hospital. Finally we wrote it down on a scrap of paper while she lay grizzling in the cot next to us—and only then, when it had been committed to paper, could we say it aloud to ourselves. In that ordinary—indeed, compulsory—parental act there is something of the arrogance of conquerors and explorers, and the false reverence of town planners.
Still, a place without a name is not a place at all. So I will call this place Anam—with one N—a place with a curious topography, bending as it does toward memory, and whose guiding principle is anamnesis, which, according to one’s persuasion, might be the Ancient Greek belief that our eternal souls have forgotten all there is to know, or the Catholic act of salvation through worshipful remembrance.
Anam, I imagine remembering my grandfather saying, was raised on dragon’s blood. An ancient governor, so the story goes, who was reckless in his desire to clear a path through the mountains, wounding the veins of the sacred monster and creating three rivers, the Clear, the Red, and the Black, which dump 105 million cubic yards of rich alluvial soil in the great northern delta every year, so that the reddish dirt rises twenty inches a century. From that rich loam, my grandfather might have said, sprang a peculiar race of men: the Anamites.
The Anamites are marked out by two exceptional traits: they are fecund, masters of all things procreative—fucking and conceiving, incubating and delivering—and thus are given to expansion and proliferation, first marching north and west from the northern delta to populate the lands of the less fecund, and then, more recently, taking to planes and boats to establish Little Saigons in Paris, San Jose, Cabramatta, and Footscray; and, secondly, they are masters of memory, so good at remembering that they remember things that never happened, and things that are best forgotten.
In these two ways, at least, my grandfather was a typical Anamite—and Chi Hoa prison a city-state of Anam. From his cell in solitary confinement—where he had been put for lingering too long to listen to ghosts—he heard the sound of children laughing. At first, my grandfather told me, he flinched at the sound. It had been many years since he’d heard children laughing at play—long enough to have forgotten that the sound children make when playing is more like shrieking, because their play is in deadly earnest, and together their many voices produce a kind of high-pitched keening that penetrates your thinking.
Here, in this tall, square concrete chamber, with his ankles in iron chains, and with the laughter-shrieking filtering in through the tiny rectangle three meters above his head, my grandfather populated his memories with his own children, with his sons, racing their trikes through the apartment on Rue Catinat, the best street in Saigon; he remembered the strange mixture of embarrassment and pride at the rude, unselfconscious life of his sons as they interrupted his brother-in-law and the other great men who would gather in the apartment to discuss matters of state. And he remembered how important that had always been to him, the life of the flesh, the feeling of the sun on his back as he stood on the diving board at the Cercle Sportif, posing for a photo to mark his entry to the most exclusive sporting club in wartime Saigon. He remembered his pleasure at his own tensing muscles as he dived in, the pleasant cooling rush of water that met him.
And here is the mystery of it, proof positive that Chi Hoa is the innermost citadel of Anam, a magic, perhaps even sacred place, as any place where so many souls have suffered and died must be: then he populated his memories with me and my brothers, all of us as yet unborn—unhoped for, even—but somehow he imagined us, projecting his memories forward into the future, seeing us on a beach, his Australian grandsons, who spoke English and no Vietnamese, who played laughing-shrieking in the sun and the sand—yes, full of that rude life—who knew nothing about Chi Hoa or prisons or Communists, and who did not think very much about the stooped, quiet old man wearing a three-piece suit in the forty-degree heat on the sand behind them, a man whom my grandfather recognized, in the trail of his thinking there in the solitary confinement cell, as some future version of himself—albeit a frail, broken version, wraithlike—and it was then, in the grips of that vision, that he knew that he would, after all, survive Chi Hoa—that he would survive this cell and survive Section FG, that he would even survive a journey over oceans to this harsh, sunny beach, to stalk in silence after his offspring’s offspring—yes, he would survive, if that could be called survival.
