The Bamboo Grove

Ninh Bình, Việt Nam. Several years after the war’s end. A group of children ran barefoot across a garden filled with banana plants and Vietnamese mints, passing the rows of lettuce, sweet potatoes, and flowers until they arrived under the protective arms of a bamboo grove whose tall, golden culms reached high, rustling and humming in the breeze.

The children, giggling, bent and brushed away layers of dry leaves, revealing the lid of a secret shelter.

They stopped chatting and laughing when they lowered themselves into the shelter, for they knew it was a sacred place: this shelter had protected their family from American bombs. Among the children was a girl who didn’t leave after all the others had. She stayed. Her fingers intertwined with the bamboo roots. Years later, she would understand she was a blank page onto which the singing bamboo would write their stories.

Years later, the girl would move away from her village, but the tall, golden bamboo culms often visit her in her dreams. They tremble as they tell her about the bombs. The bombs from America that darkened the sky of her village, that exploded into terror, that left craters bigger than ponds, that burned people, animals, and houses to ash. The bombs that sent heaven tumbling down into the earth.

The Bullets

If I told you I have touched thousands of bullets, would you believe me?

Yes, it is true.

I was a young girl—6 years old when I first touched the cold metal of death. Not on a gun whose mouth was still hot and smoky but on a rice field, where my parents and brothers and I would yield seasons of new life.

It’s a dike filled with wild grass that my father had gotten permission to cultivate, for we were too poor to afford proper farming land, and when my hands dug into the earth, I touched the remnants of the war. The dike was the practice shooting range for soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Việt Nam, or ARVN, who would go and shoot and kill and protect.

I didn’t want to touch the coldness of death, but we were forced to make use of this land since a prison sentence was hanging above our head—the American Trade Embargo, which isolated us from most of the world and would last for nearly 30 years.

We had to grow our own food or starve, so with my family I dug up thousands and thousands of bullets, then sold them as scrap metal.

I was 6 years old, and I don’t remember much, just the cold touch of the bullets, the casings of bullets that had been fired, bullets that remained intact. The cold feeling still runs in my blood because I know somewhere on this earth, many young people are being turned into soldiers, firing bullets onto others, and blood is still being spilled onto the earth. Some of those being killed are 6 years old, as old as I was when I first touched the cold metal of death.

The Mother

It was a beautiful Monday morning, and the sky was so blue I could almost see myself in it: a 13-year-old girl walking to school, her bag heavy with books and with hope.

But then screams replaced birdsong, so my feet ran faster than my thoughts to a grove of trees surrounded by people.

Thirteen years old, and I didn’t know I should not have been there. Should not have looked up, for I would stare at love at its most painful moment: a woman’s lifeless body dangling from a tree branch.

I couldn’t see her face, but I saw her feet, dusty and cracked as if she had walked the entire earth to search for something. When the people lowered her, I saw that she was the elderly woman who walked by our house every day, carrying a heavy bamboo basket.

A few days earlier, my mother had bought some steamed manioc and sweet potatoes from this elderly woman. She said she had been waiting for her two sons who hadn’t come back from the war, who were regarded as traitors since they had fought alongside the Americans. She said she waited for them for 11 years and two days. “That’s four thousand and seventeen days,” she told my mother, speaking each word clearly.

That Monday morning, standing under the blue dome of a vast sky, I saw the pain of love edged on the elderly woman’s face. A mother in waiting, even in her death.

I couldn’t look away.

I still can’t look away after 38 years.

Incense on April 30

On April 30, white funeral smoke twirls up from incense sticks. Incense from millions of people who perished in the Việt Nam War. No common memorial is large enough to bear their names. No single language can acknowledge their death because they come from different corners of the earth: Việt Nam, the United States, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan. . . . One war, many nations, too many lives lost.

I have burned incense for my two uncles who fought against each other, on opposite sides of the war. One was killed in battle while his wife was pregnant with his baby daughter. Another one defeated death, but the war took away a part of his soul, and he was never whole again. I have burnt incense for a mother whose body I saw dangling from a tree branch when I walked to school as a little girl; the mother had been waiting for more than 11 years for her two sons to return from the war, and when hope ran out, she decided to take her own life. I have burnt incense for soldiers whose graves I have seen at cemeteries all over Việt Nam. Incense for rows and rows of graves marked “Unknown Soldier.” I once stood in silence next to a grave with two headstones bearing two names. Two mothers had each believed the remains of the man under that grave belonged to her son.

I have burnt incense for some of my friends who lost their lives in the vast ocean as they joined the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat refugees.

As the smoke of my incense twirled up, I have prayed for a better future. I have prayed for the millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians who are still suffering from the impact of the deadly chemical Agent Orange, 19.5 million gallons of which the U.S. military sprayed onto Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia during the war. I have prayed for those babies who are still being born deformed because of the chemical. I have prayed for a mother who once cried on my shoulder outside an orphanage because she couldn’t take care of her deformed son and had to give him up to the orphanage. Before that, her husband had died because of illnesses caused by Agent Orange. Her question still lives in me after all those years: “Can you imagine how it feels, having to give up your own child because you are unable to take care of him?”

I have burnt incense for thousands of people killed after the war due to unexploded bombs. Even though I had seen many bomb craters during my childhood, I didn’t know that American aircraft had dropped over five million tons of bombs on Việt Nam, two million tons on Laos, and half a million tons on Cambodia. Many of those killed were innocent civilians. Today, approximately 800,000 tons of unexploded ordnance is still buried in the soil of Việt Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. Left over by the war, these bombs and explosives still kill innocent children.

I have prayed for the hundreds of thousands of families who are still searching for their loved ones, missing from the war.

And I have prayed for the millions of soldiers involved in the terrifying war, many of whom lost their lives and many of whom died later due to suicide. Those lucky enough to survive are suffering from PTSD and trauma, as well as the devastating impact of Agent Orange.

When I was a small child, I stood on the dirt road of my village in Việt Nam, looking at the devastation around me, as well as at the people who had lost their family members or their arms and legs. I asked myself: “Why can’t humans love humans more? Haven’t we done enough to each other?”

Nearly 50 years later, I am still searching for answers. I will keep searching until I find them.

Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of the global bestselling novels The Mountains Sing and Dust Child, Winner of the BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the International Book Awards, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Nota Bene Prize, the Rhegium Julii Award, the Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction, as well as runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has published 12 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam. Her writing has been translated into more than 20 languages.