Foreword
Mandarin covers some seventy years, from 1883 to 1954, a momentous period in the history of Viet Nam which saw the death of colonialism and the birth of communism. We follow Bach, the Mandarin of the title, whose life mirrors these cataclysmic changes, at first as a boy in a rich and influential Court family in feudal Viet Nam at the turn of the century; then as an impassioned young man who flees French colonialism at home to live in self-imposed exile abroad at a time when Marxism, Socialism and Communism are reshaping the world; then as an embattled Mandarin struggling with the political and social realities of life under the Japanese occupation; and finally as an old man who looks back on life, after surviving a death sentence by the Viet Minh, who labeled him a blood-sucking landlord and oppressor of the people.
 

Excerpt from Part 1: Chapter 1: The Escapade
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That Sunday morning I woke up very early, my mind on fire, ready for adventure. Nanny Thao was snoring softly in her bed next to mine but Xuan was already awake. He was my houseboy and slept on a reed mat at the foot of my bed. I quickly pulled on loose-fitting, shiny black cotton pantaloons and a white, collar-less silk tunic with long sleeves, slipped into rubber-soled brown cloth slippers, taking care not to make any noise. Signaling for Xuan to follow, I sneaked out of the bedroom and ran silently downstairs into the grand, ornate main hall and out into the inner gardens, the pride and joy of my mother. My parents were still asleep, and the many inner compound servants were nowhere to be seen. At the main door, I looked at Xuan, my mind racing. He looked back; our eyes locked. His normally broad, homely face was excited, with eyes wide open and the eyebrows almost at the hairline. We both knew that today was the day.

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Excerpt from Part 1: Chapter 4: Uncles And Aunties
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When my father's friends visited us, everyone huddled together, sipped bitter green tea, sucked noisily on water pipes, drank rice wine and discussed politics long into the night. Mandarins or high Court officials, landowners and men of means, they advised the Emperor and had traditionally kept the country running through their control of the civil, military and security services. These men, who all called me "nephew" and whom I invariably addressed as "uncles", belonged to the traditional stream of Vietnamese society, like my father. They had black lacquered teeth, wore blue turbans and let their thumbnails grow long and curved to show they were scholars. Heirs to the scholar-warrior generations of yesteryear who had fought China to a standstill, they had decimated the Cham and Khmer empires in the 939 AD Southern March campaign, annexing central and southern Viet Nam in the process. Before the French colonized our country, these men had set their sight on Siam, and had sent spies and settlers into its northern provinces with a view to annexing them. They were born politicians who understood the exercise of power. In the French they saw greedy and domineering barbarians backed by muskets and cannons, a race without culture or creed. Unlike the Chinese, there was little to be learned from them and the quicker they could be thrown out the better.

"It took us a thousand years to evict the Chinese," they often said to me, "but the French won't even last a hundred".
 

Excerpt from Part 1: Chapter 9: My Village Wife
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Three months later, I was married to my village wife, Phuong. I had known her for many years, because she lived with her grandmother within the manor walls. Although they lived in the outer-compound, and Xuan and I played in the inner-compound with other inner-compound children, she and other outer-compound children would often join us. She was then a tall, cheerful girl who giggled a lot. Now she was a pleasant looking young woman, two years older than me. On our wedding night, I was a virgin, and I didn't know how to get started. I had seen farm animals mating, and dogs locked in coitus, but I knew vaguely that human beings did it differently. Until that day, no one had ever told me anything about sex.

When we found ourselves alone, finally, I closed the door of my bedroom and sat down on the bed. Nanny had long ago stopped sleeping in my room, as had Xuan. I looked at her, and she smiled. We were only a meter-and-a-half apart, but it could have been ten kilometers. My mind was a complete blank, and not the result of wu wei either. My years of gong fu training had deserted me in the first second after the door closed and a blindfolded dwarf could have beaten me up. Phuong could see I was nervous and had no idea what to do next, so she came over and sat down very near me. She laid a hand on my thigh, caressing me gently, while looking into my eyes. With growing horror, I felt an erection coming up. I turned and smiled at her, as if I had just seen her for the first time, wondering desperately what the Mad Monk would have done. I sat there, mouth agape, my mind and body having turned into a vegetable-like texture except for one part of me that I couldn't control, a part that was growing and throbbing in unison with the wild drumbeats of my heart.
 

Excerpt from Part 2: Chapter 15: The Heaven And Earth Bombing
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The moment I walked into the Heaven and Earth teahouse, I felt there would be trouble. A little street urchin had handed me a cryptic note that morning which read in Chinese, "Meeting at Heaven and Earth teahouse at noon today. PBC".

It was lunchtime, and the centrally situated tavern was packed from wall to wall. Delicious smells wafted out of the kitchen, into the dining hall, out into Golden Gate Avenue. My mouth watered as my eyes swept the room. On the right sat the well-to-do, wearing silk robes, with long fingernails and perfectly plaited pig-tails, Manchurian style. They smelt of a faint perfume, their feet encased in satin-covered clogs with high cork soles. They smoked English cigarettes, or pipes with American tobacco that smelt of honey. This was called the Heaven Side. On the left of the room sat the other classes, some in working clothes, with uncombed hair, thick fingers, dirty fingernails, coarse accents and a common vocabulary. They ate large bowls of noodles, slurping up the liquid loudly. They smoked cheap, badly cured local tobacco. This was called the Earth Side.

I let my eyes rest upon the man next to Young Master Sung. A short, slim, shaven-headed man, his skin the color of gold, with heavy-lidded eyes, thick black eyebrows and dark jowls. He shielded his mouth politely when he laughed, and listened intently to whoever was speaking at the time, but never made eye contact. He listened a lot more than he spoke, nodding along with the speaker. When he did speak, he did so in a self-confident manner. He's a Japanese, I thought. After a while, I remembered who he was. He was on our list, at the Center. It was Colonel Mutsuharu Nakazono, of the Japanese Imperial Army, who had been seconded to the Japanese Ambassador to Peking.

Behind me, a group of Chinese students, all wearing the obligatory dark middle-school uniforms and sporting the mandatory shaven heads, were becoming noisier by the minute. They were singing a Chinese ditty that was popular at the time, in which Europeans were hungry wolves, the Japanese running dogs and the Russians barbarians at the gate. These three "turtle droppings and foul-smelling eggs", a common Cantonese insult, all wanted to exploit, rob and rape China. Not one word was said about the Manchurian rulers of China, who had been doing exactly that and more for some three hundred years, but every Han Chinese in the room knew immediately who the song was aimed at.

I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. The invisible man feared no danger, the Mad Monk had said. In one smooth movement, I slid beneath the table and at that very moment a violent explosion shook the room. Tables jumped into the air, teapots flew across the dining hall and customers fell to the floor. The many windows blew outward, and the explosion ripped out the delicate screens used to divide the room into private cubicles.

Excerpt from Part 2: Chapter 22: The Northern Alliance
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In Kunming, we were picked up by our Kuo Min Tang escort, which arranged for train tickets and private cars to Zheng Zhou and from thence to Peking. The KMT escort consisted of one army officer with a gold tooth and six surly-looking soldiers, all heavily armed because bandits often stopped the train to rob and rape the passengers. Near Chungking, half way to Zheng Zhou, the train came to a halt at a bend in the railroad track because large logs had been placed across them. On our right, just outside the window, was a sheer cliff with jagged rocks far below. On our left was scrubland at the foot of the mountain that we were circling to get north. A group of armed men, sitting on small, tan mountain ponies, had appeared from the bushes. The bandits all wore false red beards and carried assorted weapons, including old army rifles.

We were lined up along the left side of the train and the bandit leader, a villainous looking man with bandoleers of ammunition crisscrossing his thick chest, walked up and down, inspecting each man and woman carefully. He ran his hands over their clothes lightly, to see if they had wafers of 24 karat gold sewn into the lining of their clothes.

I saw a small movement from behind one of the cars and I recognized a dirty white face towel with red Chinese characters printed on it that I had seen tied to the tip of the muzzle of a heavy machine gun. I had noticed the weapon when we got on board the train. It was the notorious Maxim 7.92mm Model 1908, made in Germany, a weapon that had mowed down thousands in the opening years of World War One. It was cradled in the arms of a KMT sergeant. A breeze had made the towel move gently. The cloth prevented light reflecting from the muzzle and giving the gun's position away.

The bandit chief reached me, shoved his face into mine and said something. He had yellow, broken teeth and his breath would have curdled milk. His sausage-like fingers tightened around my arm. He had felt the jade tiger head my Father had given, sewn into my jacket, near the armpit. A rush of adrenalin surged through my veins. The reptilian mind, releasing minute quantities of the chemical, was priming the body for action. When the bandit chief tugged at my jacket I drove my fingers with great speed and precision into the hollow just below his Adam's apple. It was just like we had practiced under the Mad Monk except that there was no holding back this time, and it was easier to do it for real. Then the machine gun opened up and mowed every horseman down. I noticed that the KMT soldiers were also shooting the horses. The passengers immediately rushed to the fallen bandits, manhandling them roughly in a search for money or valuables, fighting among themselves. They stripped the bodies of their neck chains, bracelets, rings, knives, daggers and army boot. The officer was smiling broadly, his gold tooth flashing in the sunshine. His men were busy cutting up the horses and carrying huge chunks of meat, still spurting bright red blood, up into the empty carriages.
 

Excerpts from Part 3: Chapter 31: Red Sun, White Sky
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At the rate the Japanese army was stripping the country of everything that was edible, famine was inevitable and over the next three years whole villages began uprooting themselves and moving to the cities in search of food. In the countryside, children became dehydrated and died. Older men and women quietly passed away in their sleep at night. The Japanese, ever efficient and ever fearful of diseases, formed a burial force that drove from village to village to collect and cremate the bodies. In the cities, it was just as bad. One barefooted beggar, outside a house I was visiting in the capital, was tugging at the bell and chanting "So hungry, so hungry" repeatedly. The old man was barely covered by tattered rags, and his emaciated ribcage was showing. In his arms he held a very young girl. Her oversized head hung down at a strange angle, her mouth opened and shut but no sound came out. The German shepherds barked furiously, drawing us out onto the second floor verandah, from where we looked down on the scene. The servants ran out, chased the dogs off and shook their heads at the old man, waving their hands in the air to show that there was no food in the house. The man turned towards us, staring upwards. We saw that he was blind in one eye. He smiled a slow, quivering smile, revealing a toothless mouth, his hand pointing at the dying child. Then his eyebrows knitted, his mouth opened wide and he fell over, dead, still clutching tightly onto the child.
 

*****

On another occasion, while in the beach resort of Sam Son on family business, I saw a small, thin peasant woman sitting on a railing, wearing rough, brown rice sacks. She was holding a baby boy upside down by one leg with one hand, while skewering his anus with a piece of wire with the other, causing a fine chalk-like dust to drift onto her lap. She shook him about like a rag doll every now and again. His small, unformed penis flopped up and down as she tried to induce a bowel movement in the child, refusing to accept the fact that he was already dead. Both mother and son hadn't eaten for days, and the boy had been the first to succumb.


Excerpt from Part 3: Chapter 32: White Sun, Blue Sky
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In the main dining room, I had laid on a feast for the Nationalist officers. I remembered the KMT forces I had worked with in China, and knew that good food, and plenty of it, was the way to their heart. There were six of them, two of them colonels. Starting at noon, they ate their way steadily through piles of noodles, chickens, ducks, dog meat, goat meat and all sorts of seafood. They used their hands as well as spoons and chop-sticks, quaffing down fine French wine as if they were drinking beer, burping and belching noisily all the while to show their appreciation. During this disgusting display of gluttony and bad manners, I talked to them without stop in fluent Chinese, which surprised them. I expounded at length on my friendship with generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, my friendship with Dr Sun Yat Sen, my political party, named the VNQDD, which meant Kuo Min Tang in Vietnamese. I spoke about Peking and Canton and Shanghai as if I had lived there all my life, dropping names right, left and center like bombshells, aware that only respect for what I said could stop these gross and cunning peasants from digging up the manor in search of gold. They paused in their feeding every now and again when a name they recognized came out of my mouth, but there was no significant reaction. They had never met the generalissimo, had only vaguely heard of Dr Sun, and barely understood what republicanism was all about. None of them had ever been to Canton, let alone Shanghai. Peking could have been on another planet. In between cramming their mouths with food and belching, they told me they been on the run from the Japanese ever since they had been forcefully drafted by "those KMT bastards" and couldn't believe their luck when they were told they had won the war. They said that the same KMT bastards, now called the Nationalists, had sent them to Viet Nam as a reward and had told them they could take whatever war booty they liked.

Later, in an effort to show appreciation for what had been a sumptuous feed, they declared that they were sure they would not receive as much hospitality anywhere as I had shown them. Then, remembering that they were officers of the Nationalist Army, which had won the war, they talked among themselves to see what gift they could give me, their host. After some intense discussion, one of the colonels walked over and ceremoniously handed me a small Nationalist flag, a blazing white sun against an imperial blue sky on a red background. I thanked him profusely.

Excerpts from Part 4: Chapter 37: My Second Trial
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Small soldiers in green uniforms stood all around me. They stood in a disciplined circle, guns casually slung across their backs. This was the bo doi, the Viet Minh infantry that had dealt the French Expeditionary Corps a death blow at Dien Bien Phu only nine months before. The crowd looked at the soldiers with a sense of unease. The green men were relaxed, but unsmiling. They seemed to respond to some sort of internal control mechanism and went about their business without any orders being given.

In front of the judge lay piles of documents, bound with string, carefully prepared by the People's Committee of Thanh Hoa. In a biscuit tin were a number of pencils and pens. In another tin, five or six wooden stamps, the ultimate sign of authority. It was the second day of the Lunar New Year, a moonless night, and it was bitterly cold. Luckily, the fine drizzle that often accompanies the Lunar New Year was missing that night. Outside the circle a crowd had formed of peasant families and ex-servicemen. Half of the crowd was made up of locals, who had turned up in anticipation of a good show. The other half had been trucked in by the army from outlying villages. Land Reform trials were important events in the communist calendar because they brought home in a most graphic way the basic tenet of Marxism-Leninism: the inevitability of class war, which led to the triumph of the masses and the building of socialism. Consequently, great efforts were made to ensure full attendance, with maximum crowd participation.

My hands had been tied behind my back. My hair and eyebrows had been crudely shaved off and around my neck I wore a large cardboard sign, like all the other landlords, on which my crime had been written. On mine, crude letters in black paint screamed "I drank the people's blood".

*****
 

At about midnight, the trials began. The first landlord was made to stand up and walk around the edge of the circle, facing out into the crowd. It was Tam, the son of Lord Hung, my father's close friend. The charges against him were read, one by one, by the presiding judge. The crowd howled and hooted at each charge, working itself up into a state of fury, spitting and throwing dirt at the landlord who walked slowly by, held up by two soldiers. Finally, the judge held up his hands and the crowd lapsed into respectful silence. Official stamps were now solemnly affixed to the charge sheets, indicating that the charges had been made public. The government, being of the people, wanted to show the transparency of its actions. The first stage of this landlord's trial was over.

 

*****
 

A number of hands went up. Those concerned were invited to come forward and add to the crimes already recorded. This was the most exciting part of the trials. Hatred and envy that had festered in the consciousness of the masses over hundreds of generations could finally surface. Ordinary and inconsequential people could now step forward and accuse the rich and the powerful of real or imagined crimes. Since there was no need to back up these accusations with any evidence or proof, the accusers could have a field day dreaming things up and hurling them at the accused, who was very often a person they had never met. Some peasants, having drunk rice wine all night, would stand up, stumble through the line of soldiers right up to the landlord, spit in his face and begin to rave and rant incoherently before falling down dead drunk. The crowd would laugh and jeer at the landlord, and cheer the drunk on. One woman ran up to the first landlord being tried and began slapping and kicking him, screaming invective at him, accusing him of repeated rape. Encouraged, more and more people came forward with additional charges. Someone shouted out "Long live the Party! Long live our Land Reform program!" and soon this cry was taken up by the crowd. The judge smiled and held up his hands; calm returned and the trial ground on. The circuit judge's fifth man, the Land Reform cadre who had aroused the crowd, casually blended into the throng and moved to the other side of the circle. It was going to be a long night, and he knew his intervention would be needed again. It wouldn't do for him to keep popping up in the same place all the time, always with the same message of support for the government. He sank back into an empty space, yawned and took a nap.

 

*****

"Comrade Bach, you have been arrested by the people so that we can bring you to a public trial. Between now and then, we ask you to tell us where you have buried the Trinh fortune. If you tell us, leniency will be shown at the trial. If you don't, the people will impose the maximum penalty. Do you understand what I am saying?"

"Yes, I do," I answered.

"You will address me, and everyone you talk to from now on, as 'comrade'. Is that understood?"

"Yes, comrade," I answered meekly, keeping my head down. It was no use irritating them. "The money of the Trinh clan was sent to the south, little by little, over a period of years. There is almost none left in the manor," I volunteered.

"Why was it sent south?" he asked, his voice hardening.

"Because my children all wanted to live in Sai Gon, where their work had taken them, and because I needed capital there to build up my new trading house. For import-export, it is easier to do business from there than from Ha Noi."

"Were you intending to move south?"

"No. My ancestors' graves are here, and I am already old. I will be buried here, but I have to take care of my children and their future."

Excerpts from Part 4: Chapter 39: Releasing the Spirit
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I was at the Orange Pagoda with the Mad Monk. The Master was sitting on a stone bench, one leg drawn up under him, looking at the beaten earth. One hand massaged his toes, the other held a fan. Occasionally, he fanned himself. I was in front of him, on the same level, but I was neither sitting nor standing. I was just there. I was the young boy I had been then, bright, alert, strong, eager to learn; but I was also the old man I was now, tired, broken, dressed in stinking rags. The Mad Monk hadn't changed. He had never changed in all the years I had known him. He was talking to me, but he wasn't saying anything. He never looked at me in front of him. He did not know I was there. My body was in prison, my spirit was there in front of my Master. He died a long time ago so we must have been meeting in Heaven. It was a surreal scene, and though he never opened his mouth and never once looked at me, I heard every word he was saying to me. And although I hadn't asked him anything, he knew why I had come.

"Master, if an unnatural death is inevitable, should a spirit be saved?" I asked, without asking.

The Mad Monk never looked at me, but he knew what I had said. The answer was not long in coming.

"Lord Buddha forbids suicide. Confucius says nothing on the matter, but the tao believes in the ebb and flow of life, which includes the giving of life, as when a mother gives birth, and the taking of life, as when a terminally ill man is put out of his misery by loving hands, to end his pain and release his spirit. In the same way, the man who is prepared can save his spirit by releasing it before death. With chi gong, it takes only one single heartbeat."

 

*****

I locked my throat and anal muscles for the final step. My heart, a bodily organ, smiled at the thought that I was about to release my spirit and save it from desecration. Imperceptibly, the two Cosmic Gateways were drawing even.

Across the cosmos, I saw my Father, and behind him my Mother. They couldn't see me but they were facing in my direction, smiling. They knew I was coming towards them. Behind them were uncles and aunties who had looked after me during my childhood, their arms raised, their hands reaching towards me. I saw nanny, and then Xuan. Everyone was as they had been when I was still a boy. No one had aged. As the elixir of life seeped out of my lungs, I saw them more clearly than ever. Without standing up I moved towards them, smiling too. My Father raised his arms and opened his mouth to say something and the sound of heavy chains being pulled against a metallic post came out. Shocked and surprised, I unintentionally opened my anal and throat muscles and my chest was subjected to a violent blow as fresh oxygen flooded back into my starving lungs. I saw the Gateway of Death rapidly receding into the distance and I reached out desperately, crying out to my parents.

 

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