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8. Her Story as History Too
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163 8 Her Story as History Too One night we got to arguing while sitting around the foxhole. Someone asked, “Would you shoot a woman if you had to?” Well, I don’t know, guess it would be different if she had a weapon. I don’t really know, would you? Army captain James Landing, to Farm Journal, October 1967 The women peasants were constantly on the front rank of the struggle in the countryside. When this political army temporarily stops direct struggle, it will engage in the production of foods and weapons, do afforestation work, dig trenches, make spikes, fence their fighting villages, or perform their duty as transporters, scouts, or messengers to help the armymen. North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, 1964 Nguyen Thi Bay saw the flames and smoke leaping skyward from her family home as she approached, paddling her sampan after visiting a relative. She ran toward the house to salvage belongings; instead, she found her elder brother with blood gushing from his head and her twelve-year-old brother with a gashed-up face. Her parents had escaped the terror because they were working in nearby rice fields of the Mekong Delta. 164 her story as history too Several jets had circled her family’s house about five times and then bombed and strafed it in April 1965, the nineteen-year-old told me. She had found her bloodied elder brother near the family bomb shelter; he had not had time to dive into it before being pummeled. “In our villages the peasants built two kinds of shelters,” according to Bay, whose name translates as “Seventh Child.” One kind of shelter is inside the house right under the bed, usually a highly polished wooden plank platform. “When we hear any artillery, mortars, or ground fire, we just roll out of bed into the trench,” she explained to me. The second kind of shelter is usually in the yard or garden and is used when aerial bombing and strafing starts. Even the family dog knew exactly which hole to run into because he could tell the difference between a cargo plane and a fighter. “When there was mortar or artillery shelling, he ran into the shelter under the bed,” Bay continued, but he did not even run out of the house when a cargo plane passed over. Some families in her village had pretty plush bomb shelters. She recounted, “Some have put their money together to build a community shelter deep in the ground with concrete walls and floor so they can sleep there during the nighttime.” She rushed her elder brother to a medical clinic, but the doctors decided to leave the metal in his head and his face still crisscrossed with scars. “After that my parents moved into the province town to live with my uncle and aunt, and I came to Saigon to get a maid’s job to help support them,” she explained. She was paid one thousand piastres (ten dollars) a month, plus room and board.1 Working women such as Bay usually wore comfortable, cotton pajamalike trousers, and a loose fitting, long-sleeved overblouse with a rounded neckline—no garish colors but mostly black or white and almost always fastidiously clean, whether in urban retail shops and stalls or rice planting in the countryside. Their waist-length jet-black hair was usually pulled back into a ponytail or coiled atop their heads. I was impressed with their quiet, stoic resilience, tireless energy, and seeming iron-willed acceptance of a boxed-in lifestyle, but I also often commiserated with them for what I saw as a future of limited opportunities and perhaps relentless heartbreak. Although Vietnamese women played a vital role [44.200.169.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:59 GMT) her story as history too 165 in Vietnam’s economic sphere, they were culturally and socially subservient in the Confucian-molded patriarchal society that expected them unquestioningly to obey their fathers, husbands, and husbands’ family. In contrast, the Communists denounced such “feudal customs and ideology ” and promised equality between men and women as fundamental for “building a new society.”2 “Surviving amidst a Savage, Never-Ending Holocaust” I interviewed Bay in late 1965 and incorporated her story into a five-part series about Vietnamese women that would become one of my most intriguing assignments because it opened wide a window onto how the war was disrupting everyday family life. To my surprise editors gave the series a Madison...