It's the government's way of dehumanizing people they want us to kill."
Calling them a name like 'Cong' is just an attempt to denigrate Asian people, part of the old Hong Kong, ching chong, ricky-ticky stereotype. "They are really the National Liberation Front. "There's no such thing as the Viet Cong," journalist Robert Scheer told us from the steps of the old Merritt College in Oakland.
The message from newspapers and the evening news was incessant: the South Vietnamese were a peace-loving, gentle, farming people being assailed by vicious hordes of Communists known as the Viet Cong. The drumbeats of war were fiercely booming across the nation. It was the fall of 1965, the year of the introduction of U.S. I CAN REMEMBER the first time someone tried to convince me that Vietnamese were real, human people and not just subjects in a newspaper article or the objects of somebody's Great Cause. Maybe they are ashamed that their leaders have put Uncle Ho on display in a ghastly tomb against his final wish to be cremated because "land is valuable and should be used for farming." I think whatever Vietnamese-Northerners, Southerners, or Viet-kieu -feel about this man and his ideologies, they respect him like all the underdog countries of the world. An Australian boy, towing his father, chirps, "Are we going to see a dead man? Are we? Is he really dead?" Behind the kid, the Vietnamese visitors are doing a funeral march, barely breathing, heads bowed, not a word. Lining the black granite corridor, scowling guards confiscate cameras and hush foreigners who seem to be in a wax-museum mood. For Uncle Ho's dignity, the officials don't charge admission to the Mausoleum, but the hourly event seethes with the subdued giddiness of a freak show.
I gawk at him with the rest of the tourists, half of them foreigners decked out in Spandex, cutoff jeans, sports bras, and Birkenstock sandals, the other half Vietnamese, sweaty and hot, quietly suffering in their best Sunday outfits. I find encased in a glass box like Sleeping Beauty. The published account of his odyssey reveals the secrets of his family's past, the heart of humanity and the deepest wounds of war. Former Silicon Valley engineer Andrew Pham left Vietnam as a child in a leaking boat and returned 20 years later as a grown man on a bicycle.
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