Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Her father, the curator at that time, had devised a plan for moving the ancient Buddhas, the stelae, the silk paintings, the porcelains, the gold work, and the scrolls to safety.

"He hid it all underground so it wouldn't be damaged by the American bombs," she said. "My father supervised the distribution and hiding of it. He put it in many different places, so even if some of it were bombed, the rest would be intact."

Mr. Vuong used the same systematic logic to disperse his family, scattering his five children to five different locations in or around Hanoi, to give the family a better chance to survive.

"If we had been in the same place, he would have lost us all, had a bomb hit us. Hanoi was bombed all the time by B-52s. Yet we all survived!"

"You knew what a B-52 bomber was?" I was impressed that a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl would recognize a specific aircraft. It was hard to imagine an American adolescent knowing such a thing, so why should she?

"Everyone knew this plane," she said. "And we were afraid, even in the bomb shelters."

"Do you remember the Christmas bombing?"

"I remember everything. I remember the day the bombs fell on Kham Thien Street," she said, drawing her silk scarf close with her slender fingers. "It was the nineteenth of December. A thousand people died there that day, and most of them were women and children. Every home was destroyed. It was very terrible to see."

"You saw it?"

"Yes. My aunt and my mother took me to see the damage," she said. "We saw many cratères—yes, craters—big holes in the road. And the dead, and the fires. I was so frightened. But my aunt and my mother said, 'We must see this. What has been done to us.' There's a monument on that street now."

"Were you living near there?"

"We were just outside Hanoi." She hesitated, then, seeming to remember, said, "We didn't have much to eat. In fact, we had very little food all through the war. We were always hungry. Even after the war was over we had so little rice. And it was stale rice—old rice."

"Because of the destruction?"

"No. Because of the American embargo, and the Chinese invasion."

We had withheld food from them. I did not say, though Mrs. Vuong surely knew, that the Chinese had invaded the northern provinces at a time when we were cozying up to them, and Americans took some pleasure in seeing the Vietnamese being thrashed in their hungry and weakened state.

"We were told that the targets were military bases."

She smiled sadly at this and said, "Everything was targeted. The whole city. Especially roads and bridges. Our bridge was bombed by the B-52s"—this was the Chuong Duong Bridge, across the Red River to Haiphong. "But we repaired it. Factories were especially targeted, no matter what they made. The bombings continued for years. Everything was bombed."

She meant not only Kham Thien Street but also the railways, the lakes, the pagodas, the mansions, the tenements and huts, the museums, the eleventh-century Van Mien Library, the eighteenth-century Catholic cathedral, the opera house, the ancient university Quoc Tu Giam with its stelae and statues and Confucian temple, the markets, and the suburbs—everything. Of the millions of tons of bombs we had dropped, many had fallen on her city. By 1968, when there were half a million American soldiers fighting in Vietnam, the British historian J. M. Roberts has written, "a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than fell on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War."

Outside the museum, rain had begun to fall. Hanoi is known for its frequently dreary weather, its cloudy days and its drizzle. Raindrops pattered on the windows and ran down the panes, and the wind sucked at the glass, rattling the casements.

"My mother had a friend whose husband worked at a factory that was bombed," Mrs. Vuong said. "The woman hurried to the factory as soon as she heard the news. She saw that it was smoking—it had burned. She couldn't see anything. But she wanted to find her husband, even if he was dead. But he wasn't there. Just ruins.

"She walked through the smoke and ashes, and she saw, lying among the cinders, one finger. A human finger with a ring on it. Their wedding ring! She knew then that her husband was dead. She took the finger home and had it buried. She kept the ring. And this year she gave the ring to her son, when he got married."

"What a story," I said.

"So many stories from that time," she said. "We were poor and we had no food, but we had esprit. My brothers wanted to fight the Americans. They wanted to be in the army. Ninety-nine percent of the boys in North Vietnam wanted to be in the army. To be a soldier was the greatest thing. No one hesitated. It was their spirit."

"So your brothers were soldiers?"