The Vietnam War

A Documentary Reader

Edward Miller

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119129202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

The Vietnam War is an outstanding collection of primary documents related to America's conflict in Vietnam which includes a balance of original American and Vietnamese perspectives, providing a uniquely varied range of insights into both American and Vietnamese experiences.

• Includes substantial non-American content, including many original English translations of Vietnamese-authored texts which showcase the diversity and complexity of Vietnamese experiences during the war
• Contains original American documents germane to the continuing debates about the causes, consequences and morality of the US intervention
• Incorporates personal histories of individual Americans and Vietnamese
• Introductory headnotes place each document in context
• Features a range of non-textual documents, including iconic photographs and political cartoons

Chapter 1
Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism

Tam Lang, I Pulled a Rickshaw (1932)¹

The 1920s and 1930s were a time of great political, social, and cultural upheaval in French Indochina. As some young Vietnamese embraced revolutionary causes, others became advocates for various kinds of social and cultural reform. While these reformers often criticized the colonial state and its policies, they maintained that national liberation required Vietnamese to abandon traditional practices in favor of “modern” notions about family life, gender roles, labor, education, and social relations. The reform impulse could be glimpsed in the work of Vietnamese novelists, memoirists, and journalists, many of whom styled themselves social realists, in imitation of their counterparts in France and other European countries.

One prominent Vietnamese social critic of the interwar period was Vu Dinh Chi, who wrote under the pen name of Tam Lang. A native of Hanoi, Tam Lang began working as a journalist in the 1920s and earned a reputation for attacking social injustice. In 1932, he garnered wide attention for his investigative report entitled “I pulled a Rickshaw” (Tôi kéo xe). The report detailed the hard lives and brutal exploitation of Hanoi rickshaw drivers, who transported well-to-do customers (both French and Vietnamese) around the city by pulling them in two-wheeled carriages. Tam Lang explained to readers that he had disguised himself as a coolie (a poor laborer) and took a job as a driver, which allowed him to experience the humiliation and degrading conditions of the trade. In the excerpts of the report presented here, Tam Lang describes spending the night with a fellow driver in an opium den in after a hard day of work on the streets. He also offers his assessment of responsibility for the suffering that he witnessed.

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A rickshaw lamp swung beneath my friend's hand like a flickering firefly. Passing a dike a little over 2 meters high, we descended into a deep depression that was as dark as a grave.

No longer could we see the row of electric lights along the Don Thuy Road. Obscured by the long dike, they gave off a dull glow above our heads. What a sad scene.

I followed my friend's footsteps. There were no stars in the sky. A pulsating chorus of croaking frogs and toads and crickets resounded all around me.

That's the area of the southern slums!

The home of a group of poor, wretched people. A torn basket full of rubbish at the foot of a row of imposing villas!

There was no ray of light. Not one tire mark. Here, the light of civilization is blocked by a wall of dirt; the wheel of progress is stopped by a long stretch of dike.

And yet something has managed to cross it!

This is the Opium Spirit with tortoiseshell red wings attached to its back. This is Miss Phu Dung, the spirit with the beautiful name that people know well how to call.²

That night, I saw Miss Phu Dung lie there, in the compartment of a leaf-covered dwelling that was slanted on a twisted house post and in which ten people were packed as though in a jar.

I bent down and slipped through a doorway that was no higher than a meter. My friend pointed out Tu, who was lying beside an opium tray. Then, taking off his blue outer shirt, my friend said: ‘This person wants to sleep here for a while.’

I nodded a greeting and handed over 2 sous I had just taken out of my pocket.

The person lying beside the opium tray lifted his head, raised his arm to take the money without uttering a word.

He was about forty, pale, and with sunken cheeks. His eyes were also deeply sunk into his head. His arms were as thin as reeds. His pants were rolled up above his knees, showing two legs that were no stouter than his arms.

Without being invited, I sat down on the bed beside our friend, who was lying there, smoking opium.

After exhaling a long trail of smoke, he sat up, drew his knees up, undid his flask on the opium pipe, bared his chest, rolled his sleeves up to his shoulders, and scraped the residue out of the flask.

In one corner, a number of others, all men, some wearing shirts, others bare-chested, were sitting on a piece of sleeping mat with their heads converging around a smoky lamp on a tray. They made noisy cries as they gathered around playing a kind of card game called ‘Bat’: ‘Pull’, ‘Turn it over’, ‘Bat’, ‘Damn your mother’, ‘Damn your father’.

Rickshaw coolies robbing rickshaw coolies; crippled chickens scratching around the grinding stone to peck at empty husks!

A woman holding a child lay on a hammock that was hidden in the darkness. She popped her head out from time to time, opened her mouth and asked: ‘Did the “wooden fish” win, or who?’

My friend who brought me here, joined the group playing cards. I was left with Tu, and, having the opportunity, I coaxed him with a question: ‘Each day, how many pipes do you smoke?’

After putting the top back on the flask, he looked up at me: ‘Did you say this is the first time you’ve been here?'

‘Yes. The other man has just brought me here today.’

‘You look as though you’re from Hanoi.'

‘No, I just came down from the highlands a few days ago.’

With the opium pipe standing at the foot of the bed, Tu took a long draw on it. Without giving him the time to judge me, I asked again: ‘Each day, how many pipes do you smoke?’

Lying down slowly, Tu invited me to join him.

Inserting the point of the opium pick into the ball of residue and holding it up to the lamp, Tu said as he prepared the opium: ‘Twenty sous a day, as I have only one session at night. Mixed opium can be smoked many times and the residue lasts.’

‘So, in that case, how many pipes?’

‘Three pipes, sometimes four, but no more, because the residue gets too strong and damaging, and I haven't got the strength to draw on it.’

‘At 20 sous, you must spend 6 or 7 piastres a month.’

‘No, not that much. I cook the residue again, so that I save a bit each month.’

‘Smoking like that, surely you can't work at night?’

‘No, I only hire a rickshaw and pull it at night. During the day, it's extremely hot and very hard work.’

‘So if you work at night, when are you able to find the time to smoke opium?’

‘At 2 a.m. I return the rickshaw. I get back here a little before you just arrived. I smoke ‘till morning. After eating, I sleep until five in the afternoon, get up, eat again, and go to work.’

‘Money for hiring the rickshaw, for opium, and also for food; how can you make enough to afford it working only seven or eight hours?’

I asked him his story, and he smoked as he responded. By now, his cold attitude had completely disappeared. Hearing me ask the last question, he just laughed and did not answer…

The group playing cards had broken up. It was almost morning.

On a few flimsy bamboo beds, over ten coolies, who had just been fighting to fleece each other at cards, now lay rolling around exhausted, offering a sweaty banquet to the mosquitoes that swarmed above them.

Lying beside the miserable opium tray and preparing the opium for Tu to smoke, I had become his close friend.

Through the sounds of children crying, the heavy snoring of the half-dead gamblers, we continued to exchange confidences.

I didn't sleep throughout the whole night….

Now let me say to you here that perhaps there were times when you, Dear Readers, said to your friends: ‘That's enough! Why bother arguing with those rickshaw coolies!’

I must also confess that there have been times when I said to my friends: ‘Those coolies, why waste energy quarrelling with them!’

Dear Readers, I have been of the same mind as you: we have despised the class of people who pull other people.

But do they really deserve such contempt? Today, let us rethink this question.

Now, let's imagine that someone asked: ‘Who is to blame for the class of people in our society that works like animals pulling other people?’

What would you say?

If you think carefully, I dare say you would answer honestly as follows: ‘Society is to blame.’

According to its strict meaning, ‘society’ is all of the people who come from the same origins and who all live together under the same system, and that includes you and me.

Yes, you and me, all of us are equally at fault.

To lower a powerless person from his status as a human being to that of a horse, to give him two wooden shafts and say ‘I will sit up here while you pull me’ is the same as saying ‘You are not a human being.’

Having been unjustly denied membership in the human race, why do rickshaw coolies need self-respect?

We take away their dignity without knowing it. Why do we scorn them for supposedly doing undignified things?

The Trial Testimony of Phan Boi Chau (1925)³

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Phan Boi Chau was Vietnam's best-known anticolonial revolutionary. Phan grew up in the central Vietnamese province of Nghe An – the province in which Ho Chi Minh was born – during the early stages of the French conquest of Indochina. Although he spent years studying Confucian thought and classical Chinese texts, Phan opted not to pursue a career as a mandarin, on the grounds that the Vietnamese imperial bureaucracy had become the corrupt instrument of the French colonial state. In 1903, he founded a patriotic movement that recruited Vietnamese boys to go to Japan to be trained as revolutionaries. After he and his students were expelled from Japan in 1909, Phan continued his anti-French activism in southern China, where he and his followers tried ...