My Friend Nguyen
SANDERS, SOL
My Friend Nguyen By Sol Sanders The story of a democratic Vietnamese nationalist As I write, the French have begun a vast retreat which will probably result in their abandoning all North...
...In 1935, under an amnesty granted by Leon Blum's Popular Front government in France, Nguyen was released and returned to Hanoi to take up his role as a nationalist agitator...
...After almost an hour of questioning, he began to tell me of his activities...
...Nationalist leaders protested the pact, then fled to China...
...Broken as he was, I saw his resentment rise...
...That was six years ago...
...Everyone in Vietnam was confident that Roosevelt intended the Atlantic Charter to extend to Indo-China...
...We shall meet yet in a peaceful, free Vietnam...
...When we were not talking in my halting French and their cackling, singsong Indo-Chinese French, they would stop and discuss some point among themselves in multi-tonal Vietnamese...
...The Vietminh signed an agreement with the returning French forces which at the same time eliminated from the scene both the non-Communist nationalists and the Chinese Nationalist occupation army...
...I first met Nguyen when I was invited to dinner with a Vietnamese family...
...Bao Dai...
...Nguyen had hardly spoken beyond the first "enchante, monsieur" when suddenly my host turned to me and said, laughing: "This little one is our—as you say in America—our gangstair...
...We are human beings the same as they, are we not...
...It was with exultation that he and his friends saw the Japanese begin to menace Indo-China in 1940, after France fell to the Nazis...
...The days between March and August 1945 were exciting...
...The French authorities immediately began to consolidate their administration...
...Nguyen was released and returned to Hanoi...
...The Vietminh took hostages, French and Eurasian women and children, then fled down the Red River one night in late January 1947...
...We are a simple people...
...Finally, in March 1946, the end came...
...Nguyen and the young girl set up a tailor shop in the ruins of the family house on the narrow Street of Silk, in the older part of the city...
...In December, after Ho Chi Minh had returned from conferences at Fontainebleau without achieving agreement with the French on what the earlier pact had meant, bitter fighting broke out between the French and the Communist-led nationalists...
...But, in the name of all that is decent, we Americans must see to it that the thousands of Vietnamese patriots who jeopardized their lives in the anti-Communist battle are furnished the means to escape...
...For "le journaliste ameri-cain," my Vietnamese host had asked in about a dozen friends who represented the various political points of view current in the country, including a young lawyer, "a French citizen," who had a nebulous relation to the Communist-led Vietminh guerrillas...
...The conversation did not lag all evening...
...Yet, I was walking with him one day when he accidentally bumped into a French Army officer...
...Allow him to form a government representing all the anti-Communists and we shall rally the greater part of the Vietminh to us...
...partly because he was a practicing Catholic and partly because Indo-China's Communists were more French or Chinese than Vietnamese, Nguyen rejected their solution to colonialism...
...We need a figurehead, and Bao Dai represents the thousands of years of our struggle against the Chinese and then the French...
...Japanese agents in Hong Kong promised that they would support a Vietnamese nationalist rising against the French...
...In the confusion, Nguyen was left behind in his prison cell...
...Nguyen was part of a Vietnamese "army of about 2.000 men which tried in 1940 to move into Vietnam from Kwangsi in South China, through the famous Porte de Chine...
...he exclaimed later...
...It was a trying period for my friend Nguyen...
...He remains, like all Vietnamese, as bitter as ever toward the French...
...You know, Monsieur, how independent we are...
...Nguyen, despite the fact that he was with another white man, was cursed in typical colonialist fashion...
...Being a city-dweller, he generally wears Western clothes: the Vietnamese version of a French beret, little pointed shoes whose colors remind one of American fashions in the 1920s, and the usual dark worsted suit...
...As though talking to himself, he said only, "Ca, c'esl fini...
...The Japanese were defeated—that was evident...
...The United States, Britain and Russia had promised freedom to Asians...
...If you saw him in the streets of Hanoi, the lonely, forlorn city which has seen 8 years of civil war, you probably would not notice him...
...It seemed that the firing squad was only minutes away...
...When I saw Nguyen three years ago, in Hanoi, he was sadder than usual...
...As a leader of the anti-Communist nationalists, he was constantly dodging the Vietminh's dreaded secret police...
...What are his political convictions...
...What about Bao Dai and the "independent" Vietnam the French have set up...
...Now Nguyen manages to scrape together a living for himself, his wife and their two infants...
...Nguyen said he could not trace the beginnings of his feelings against the French, his patriotism, his sacrifice for what he considered Vietnam's right to independence...
...His brother-in-law, a newspaper editor, was shot down by a Communist assassin...
...His four years of exile passed slowly, but it gave him an opportunity to read and to think through the problems facing his country...
...In the end, he was released...
...They are not Communists—only the leaders, and even they do not want the Chinese Communists to come to Vietnam...
...It was a career familiar to many Asians, that of a national revolutionary...
...But the days dragged on into weeks and the weeks into months...
...In August, the Japanese surrendered...
...Nguyen smiled deprecatingly...
...Bao Dai, urged by some advisers (including the present Vietnamese Premier, Ngo Dinh Diem) to go to Saigon and turn himself over to the British as Vietnamese Chief of State, and told by others that he would be considered a "collaborator," chose still another alternative: He abdicated the throne and, under the pretext of acting as the Republic's representative to the Chinese Nationalists, escaped into China...
...Within two weeks, the small band of guerrillas which had fought the Japanese in the jungles and which were led by the Communist Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Ho Chi Minh as he came to be known later, arrived in Hanoi...
...He has been in jail so often...
...Like many another young man in Asia, he was attracted by Marx and the Communists...
...Nguyen managed to survive...
...Political tracts were smuggled in from Hong Kong, where Nguyen Hai Than, the old scholarly Vietnamese nationalist emigre and friend of China's Sun Yat-sen, plotted against the French...
...But in Nguyen's case it was particularly a kaleidoscope of Vietnam, of the forces at work in Indo-China during the past 20 years...
...In Hanoi, where he went to the lycee and later to the university to study law, Nguyen became active in student politics...
...But peace still did not come for Nguyen...
...But they met heavy French opposition and found that the Japanese had double-crossed them: A deal had been made between the Japanese Army and the Vichy French representative in Indo-China, Admiral Decoux...
...Nguyen, as the leader of one student group, was sent into exile at Lai Chau, the capital of the isolated Thai country in western Tongking—just across the mountains from ill-fated Dienbienphu...
...In 1945, the Japanese finally overthrew the Vichy French administration and set up an "independent" Vietnam under the young Annamese emperor Bao Dai...
...He was arrested, this time by fellow Vietnamese, and held in Hanoi...
...Nowadays he takes no part in politics, even though political developments are in a constant flux...
...In 1931, the French rounded up subversives...
...Nguyen was not so lucky...
...Exploit us, imprison us, but why must they insult us...
...The news had come that the Governor of the North had been purged: he was considered too friendly to the Americans...
...Discouraged and tired, he set about making some sort of life for himself in the ruins of Hanoi and Vietnam...
...My friend's name is Nguyen, but that does not distinguish him from thousands of other Vietnamese who have taken the name of the royal family, the ancestors of the present Chief of State, Bao Dai...
...It took months to convince the French bureaucracy that he no longer was interested in politics, that he had suffered from the Communists and was not a Vietminh sympathizer...
...If the Communists take Hanoi, it will probably mean prison or, more likely, the firing squad for him...
...In fact, he had grown up in the isolated delta country of Phatdiem (recently evacuated by the French), south of Hanoi at the mouth of the great Red River, in North Vietnam...
...Later, fiery tracts were taken from La Lutte, the Tror-skyist journal in Saigon...
...Life was hard for this small group...
...But with help from the Chinese Nationalist Government?which used the Vietnamese nationalists as a lever against French interference in China's southern province of Yunnan and in Shanghai—and with money he earned as a tailor...
...Like most of his countrymen, he is small and rather dark...
...Immediately, Ho and his wild-eyed little group declared the independence of the "Democratic Republic of Vietnam...
...This story is slightly fictionalized (to protect the individual involved), but it is a true picture of what the free world leaves behind...
...After two years, however, he was forced to flee to Hong Kong, where he joined a growing colony of Vietnamese emigres led by Nguyen Hai Than...
...My Friend Nguyen By Sol Sanders The story of a democratic Vietnamese nationalist As I write, the French have begun a vast retreat which will probably result in their abandoning all North Indo-China...
...If you were invited to his home, he might dress up in a padded Vietnamese gown and the little black mandarin crown...
...Not yet 50, he is already as weary as an old man...
...A young cousin from his home village had fled to Hanoi in the wake of the Vietminh's scorched-earth campaign against the French...
...Again Nguyen was taken off to prison...
...and Nguyen shrugged his shoulders...
...He spoke his mind so loudly that the Japanese placed him under arrest...
...He has since been reinstated...
...The French were too weak to come back and take over their former colony...
...First on the Surete's program was a roundup of all "dangerous" nationalists...
...Why he was not shot he will never know...
...He is a pauvre type, certainly, but he is not the villain of the piece...
...Again Nguyen was exiled, this time to Cha Pa on the Vietnamese-Chinese border...
...Nguyen was not as wise as his comrades...
...But his parting words were: "We Vietnamese have courage...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 30
