Though only a bottom feeding fish lurking in the darkest water, I nevertheless attracted the spooks' attention when I was living in Saigon from 1999 to 2001. I will recount my experience there since it echoes some of what we're going through here, and even prefigures what we will encounter. Most of my friends in Saigon were poets, a group that has become increasingly irrelevant in every postmodern society. With almost no one reading them, there was no longer a need to arrest poets, but still we were being watched, just in case. As a translator of Vietnamese literature into English, I also elicited extra scrutiny since I was a kind of gateway, not unlike, say, an editor of a dissident webzine. I had already published Night, Again, an anthology of fiction that included a number of banned writers.
Under that impossibly hot sun, we would often meet to drink iced beer and talk about everything. There was one among us whom everyone suspected to be an undercover cop, so the conversation had to be curbed whenever this sly dude was around. After so many decades under totalitarianism, people had well internalized which subjects, or even words, to avoid, at least in suspect company. That too will happen here, if we don't veer from our current vector, and Americans will also learn to become more suspicious of nearly everything and everyone. The currency of any oppressive government is a steady stream of lies, so in that sense, we're well on our way down that septic whirlpool. These days, almost every sentence that's burped up by an American official is a bald lie, with not even a farcical comb over, but here's the most insidious part to all this. Being lied to all the time, many of us will also learn to routinely pervert truth ourselves. Even our children will do this. You watch.
So I was definitely being watched, you see, but to what extent I didn't really know until 2001, when I was invited by the Lannan Foundation to give a poetry reading back in the States. Thinking I might not be allowed to return to Vietnam, I paid a corrupt cop $500 for a businessman's visa, since this afforded me multiple entries. Done with my little song and dance in Santa Fe, plus additional readings in Boston and New York, I flew back to Saigon with a large bag of books for my friends. Toting the contrabands, I readied myself to bribe the airport official, but luckily, he never even noticed them. The lateness of my arrival, past 2AM, might have had something to do with his negligence, but I was more than glad to save a few bucks.
After a day-long flight, I barely slept but was up by 8:30, such
was my excitement to give books to my friends, so I called to arrange a meeting
that very morning. Soon as I hung up the phone, however, it rang, and I mean
immediately, with barely a second in between, and the guy on the other end was,
you guess it, the cop assigned to monitor me. I still remember his first name,
"Viet," which is as patriotic as you can get. Very tersely, Viet huffed
that he was coming over to chat with me. Though he was clearly furious to find
out that I had left the country without his knowledge, he didn't mention this
fact when he showed up, but merely asked about my trip in a pseudo friendly
way. Before he arrived, though, I had hidden the most incriminating books under
my bed, but leaving enough on my desk so he had enough to frown at. Viet opened
a volume on Balthus, looked at the reproductions of the languorous and budding
nude teens, voiced his mild disapproval, but did not confiscate it. After
staying for at least half an hour, Viet left.
Speaking of confiscation, the Saigon post office had already seized my short story collection, Fake House, when this was sent to me earlier that year. I still have the receipt somewhere. On it, the reason given for the confiscation is that the book is "decadent and reactionary." I remember trying to argue with the post office official. I tried to reason that since the book was in English, it wouldn't have any impact whatsoever in Vietnam, but the lady didn't buy it. I also joked that since I was the author of the book, I couldn't corrupt myself. She didn't laugh.
Even after I left Vietnam in 2001, I was not done with its friendly and thorough intelligence service, for my writing in Vietnamese has several times provoked their irritated reaction. They'd send me a fake email accompanied by a virus, for example. Let's say I have a friend named WXYZ, with a Email address removed email account. The Vietnamese intelligence would set up a nearly identical account, _ Email address removed . See the difference? Just a _ before the other email address. Using this fake account, they would send me an email purportedly from WXYZ but with a virus in the attachment.
A Vietnamese-Australian academic returning to Saigon on a visit was called several times to the police station. At these interrogations, he would be asked about his associates inside the country and overseas, including me. Now, there is something very old school about these Vietnamese tactics, but don't think that America won't resort to them also, for when it comes to intimidation and violence, we can be as crude and naked as they come.
I won't bore you with more of these Vietnam incidents, but suffice it to say that even a lowly critic of the regime will be tracked by the government, for polemics and insights still matter, in spite of everything. Moreover, a government that feels itself vulnerable will naturally increase suppression. Look for a heavy crackdown on voices of dissent as our society becomes more unstable from the impending financial collapse, and as our economy deteriorates further from its already wretched condition. That, my fellow targets, is our true state of the union.
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