In recognition

I can’t remember how he let me know that he was there, just behind me – with a word, or with a tap on the shoulder. 

Whatever way, I turned around.  I’d just filed off the bus with the others, was finding my bearings under an unfamiliar sun.  We’d crossed the footpath, adjusting backpacks and sunhats, past the beggars we’d been warned about; and now we stood in the courtyard, by the warplane and the tank.  When I turned around, the man was standing too close to me, surprised me with his face near my face, so that I wanted to step back, but I knew it would be rude. 

He put his hand in mine, only he didn’t have a hand. 

That was almost four years ago. 

As the cliché goes, I had fallen in love the moment I stepped off the plane – but then, when it came to travel, I was an inexperienced lover.  I gave my heart, enthusiastically, to pretty much every tarmac I set foot on.  This time, it was one of those cheap and cheerful tours for novices, where they package things for you: bus rides, food, history, morality, anguish.  Your itinerary is scheduled tidily around them. 

Travel is still a colonialist enterprise, no matter what I’d prefer to believe.  Sometimes, this is true in obvious ways.  Like when our tour group of wide-eyed kiwis took our guided bus to the Cu Chi tunnels.  You pull up in the carpark, pay your fare, enter the jungle through a turnstile.  Nowadays, the paths around the tunnels are carefully kept.  You stop at the curios, one by one, like the bamboo stake traps once buried beneath the earth.  When a soldier fell on them, the spikes impaled his feet and legs.  When he reached to try to extricate himself, he triggered further spikes, piercing other parts of his body.  The bamboo traps helped conceal the positions of combatants hiding underground.  They lived there, weeks at a time, eating and sleeping, relieving the functions of emaciated bodies.        

If you want to – if you do not suffer from claustrophobia, or a fear of the dark – you can hunch over, squeeze yourself through part of the tunnels.  The section for tourists has been spruced up for us, and widened.  Simply put, westerners are too fat for the tunnels as they were: our bodies and our wallets.  And when you’re done with the attractions, you exit through a giftshop.  There are souvenirs from whichever side of the war grabs your fancy.      

Sometimes the colonialist enterprise is a little less obvious.  Phuoc was our tour guide.  She sat up front by the bus driver, microphone in hand, narrating to our group the sights outside our windows.  As time went on, she began to tell us other things too: things that seemed sometimes scripted, sometimes not, about the pain of the people, their whenua, stretching back to centuries ago; about the origin of the name Saigon, before that too was taken away.  The day we drove to the Mekong, Phuoc explained how the people don’t trust the government, so they don’t pay tax.  Because the government struggles to fill its coffers, some state employers – especially teachers – are on the breadline.  Instead, the lucrative jobs are the ones involving tourists. 

I thought about this, about the cheap things bought at Ben Thanh market, the happy hour cocktails, the spas and pedicures.  I reflected that the nurturing of a child’s mind was worth less than the rubbing of my white feet.   

The courtyard, where the man took my hand, was outside the War Remnants Museum.  The museum is utilitarian, cheaply-tiled and commercial – a witness to agony and a hub of propaganda, because both of these things can be true.  You take the floors one at a time, walk past the pictures and displays around each one’s perimeter.  And between each floor, you stop and sit for a time on a bench seat, and you say it’s the heat, but that’s not really why you can’t breathe.  You think about the photos.  The young men – the smoothness of their faces in the minutes before execution, the thinness of the limbs torn from their bodies – remind you of your children.

In the courtyard, I was taken aback.  The man looked me right in the eye, and it was only after he took my hand that I looked down.  Both his own hands were gone, beneath the elbow, and the thing that I grasped was his forearm.  He had a basket of books for sale strung around his neck.  They were propaganda, I suppose.  I saw Phan Thi Kim Phuc on the cover of one, running in that famous photo, her clothes and skin burned from her child’s body.  The man was not old enough to have been a combatant.  He must have been a child himself when it happened.  When the US-led forces retreated, live ordnance was left everywhere, scattered like children’s toys.  The children were warned not to touch, but kids are kids wherever they are, playful and trusting and curious. 

My kiwi friend was standing beside me.  In the moment, I think we were both confused, wanted to do the right thing, couldn’t figure out what that was.  My friend offered money, but the man turned it down, perhaps a little indignantly.  He wanted to sell us a book.  The thing he needed, I suppose, was not just to make a living.  He needed recognition.

I never forgot this, always knew I wanted to write about it, didn’t know what I wanted to say.  Later, back in Aotearoa, I grappled with what it means to hold the values we profess to hold, yet to be part of whatever was this monstrous thing: to take a child’s hands. 

And I thought about the people that we sent to do the job.  They were young, mostly, with hands that not long before were those of children – because beyond a certain age life changes, and you know to protect your equity and save your hide.  So many of our soldiers were Māori.  They were not dupes, although they did their jobs in an arena where colonial brutality prevailed. They were certainly not cowards. They were our emissaries.  But when they got back, well, we didn’t want to know them.  Not when their wives miscarried, their tumours grew, their skin peeled.  They fought again, not just for our support and for care, but mostly for recognition.  And while that would start to come, slowly and grudgingly, some were gone before they could claim it.      

ANZAC Day will never be uncomplicated to me.  I will never be able to divide the world, its venal colonial spats, into good guys and bad; to pick a team and cheer from the sidelines, as others’ houses burn.  To me, that is a kind of moral abrogation – the kind that brings us to war in the first place.

But I know this: pain is as universal as it is human.  If it cannot heal, it turns to trauma.  And it cannot heal without recognition. 

During our last bus ride, the start of our journey back home, we were quieter: exhausted and fulfilled and thoughtful and thankful.  A man in our party rose to his feet, steadied himself in the aisle.  I can’t remember his name.  He and his wife were Māori, and around retirement age.  Something needed to be conveyed, to be shared amongst us.  He did not do it out of showmanship: nothing could have been further from his nature.  When I tried to thank him later, as we hauled our luggage, he was whakamā.

He sung a waiata for our hosts, Phuoc and the bus driver.  His voice lifted and fell as the bus swayed on the grey of the motorway, filled the space between us.  I think he wanted to say thank you, say goodbye; offer something beautiful from Aotearoa, in return for the raw and precious gift we had been given.  It was recognition.