GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | NONFICTION
Even the Women Must Fightby Karen Gottschang Turner with Phan Thanh Hao
John Wiley, New York, 1998, 224pp, $24.95
The role North Vietnamese women played in fighting the war.
EXCERPT:
ur neighbor, Phan Thanh Hao, had brought us together to examine a series
of paintings of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The artist, Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, a film
studio set designer at the time, had carried his water colors as he walked
down the Trail in 1974 to paint scenes for a film he wanted to produce. It
was to be called "The Song of the Ho Chi Minh Trail," to celebrate one of the
most potent symbols of Vietnamese resistance to the United States. Funds
for the film never materialized, and twenty years later his paintings had
become important historical pieces, for they preserved the artist's firsthand
response to wartime life. As we turned the paintings over one by one, to the
clatter of tired ceiling fans and the hum of an ancient Russian refrigerator,
we were surprised to find women in some of the pictures, engaged in the
danger, the drudgery, and the camaraderie that make up any war. We asked
whether the heavily burdened women crossing a mountain stream, the
exhausted women shoveling gravel to fill a bomb crater, or the teenagers
relaxing together in a secluded jungle station represented reality or the
artist's imagination.
Tuan told us that these women were real indeed, that their presence on the Trail had moved him deeply. "They had a deep spirit, a love of life, even as they did the hardest work. And there were so many of them on the roads." For him the Ho Chi Minh Trail was more than a maze of footpaths and roads, more than the main route for shipping supplies from the rear in the North to the regular army units and Viet Cong guerillas south of the seventeenth parallel. It was a potent symbol of Vietnamese patriotism and determination in the face of a technologically superior enemy. "The Trail," he told us, "stays in my mind. It was the only road that would lead us to victory and everyone knew how hard it was to build it." The women who used primitive tools to open and maintain the Trail represented for him the best traits of Vietnam itself: they were small but tough, ill-equipped but effective, romantic but realistic.
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