Mourning Headband for Hue

Nha Ca, Olga Dror

Description

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Vietnam, January, 1968. As the citizens of Hue are preparing to celebrate Tet, the start of the Lunar New Year, Nha Ca arrives in the city to attend her father's funeral. Without warning, war erupts all around them, drastically changing or cutting short their lives. After a month of fighting, their beautiful city lies in ruins and thousands of people are dead. Mourning Headband for Hue tells the story of what happened during the fierce North Vietnamese offensive and is an unvarnished and riveting account of war as experienced by ordinary people caught up in the violence.

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Translator's Introduction
Small Preface: Writing to Admit Guilt
1. First Hours
2. The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer
3. Hodge-podge
4. On a Boat Trip
5. A Person from Tu Dam Comes Back and Tells His Story
6. Going Back into the Hell of the Fighting
7. Story from the Citadel
8. Returning to the Old House
9. A Dog in Midstream
10. Little Child of, Hue Little Child of Vietnam, I Wish You Luck!

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Women
• Woman
• Vietnam War
• Southeast Asia
• History of Asia
• The Women
• Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014320
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mourning Headband for Hue
Mourning Headband for Hue is a personal account of what happened in Hue during the month-long occupation of parts of the city by communist troops during the 1968 T t Offensive, a very bloody episode of the Vietnam War that inflicted extremely heavy losses on the civilian population in both human and material terms. Stranded in Hue where she had come to visit her family, the author found herself face-to-face with the war. Horrified, she recounts her experiences day by day as if weeping and wailing in the remembrance of the atrocities she has seen and heard. It is indeed a book laden with blood, sweat, and tears but records events without distorting them. With explanatory information on many persons and events provided by the translator, the book is a valuable document for the history of the Vietnam War.
NGUYEN THE ANH , Rector of Hue University at the time of the events described in this book; professor emeritus, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris-Sorbonne; and author most recently of Vietnam: A Journey into History (in French)

Mourning Headband for Hue
An Account of the Battle for Hue, Vietnam 1968
Nh Ca
Translated and with an Introduction by Olga Dror
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington Indianapolis
Frontis: Nh Ca with a mourning headband, at her father s funeral on the eve of the T t Offensive in Hue .

This book is a co-publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone [phone] Fax [phone]
2014 by Nh Ca (Tr n Th Thu V n) and Vi t B o Daily News, Inc. English translation of Gi i kh n s cho Hu 1969 by Nh Ca (Tr n Th Thu V n) Translation 2014 by Olga Dror
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nh Ca, [date] author. [Gi i kh n s cho Hu . English] Mourning headband for Hue : an account of the battle for Hue, Vietnam 1968 / Nh Ca ; translated and with an introduction by Olga Dror. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-253-01417-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01432-0 (ebook) 1. Nh Ca, [date] 2. Vietnam War, 1961-1975 - Personal narratives, Vietnamese. 3. Vietnam War, 1961-1975 - Campaigns - Vietnam - Hu . 4. Tet Offensive, 1968. I. Dror, Olga, translator, writer of introduction. II. Nh Ca, [date] Gi i kh n s cho Hu . Translation of: III. Title. DS 559.5.N59613 2014 959.704 3092 - dc23
2014005693
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
In Vietnam, when a person dies, the family members tie a white crepe mourning band around their heads .
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Translator s Introduction
Map of the Key Places Mentioned in the Book
List of Characters
Small Preface: Writing to Take Responsibility
1 First Hours
2 The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer
3 On a Boat Trip
4 Hodge-podge
5 A Person from T m Comes Back and Tells His Story
6 Going Back into the Hell of the Fighting
7 Story from the Citadel
8 Returning to the Old House
9 A Dog in Midstream
10 Little Child of Hue, Little Child of Vietnam, I Wish You Luck
Acknowledgments
The work you are about to read, Gi i Kh n S Cho Hu (Mourning Headband for Hue), was written by a prominent South Vietnamese female writer, Nh Ca, and is an account of events as seen through her own eyes and the eyes of other civilians caught in the midst of the T t Offensive in the city of Hue between January 30 and February 28, 1968.
In the course of my work on Mourning Headband for Hue , I consulted with many Vietnamese who were on both sides of the war and who in its aftermath have held different views about the book, and this has afforded to me a more inclusive, if not comprehensive, perspective on Nh Ca s work and the events in Hue during the T t Offensive. Some of the people I consulted are mentioned by name in my introduction, and I would like to express here my sincere appreciation for their willingness to share their views. The names of the others I do not provide, not out of disrespect but in honoring their wishes, as the events in Hue during 1968 are still a highly sensitive topic both in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. While for the readers they remain anonymous, I warmly remember all of them as a great source of encouragement for my work and of knowledge about the country and the language. I also felt their love for their country and for their countrymen, whether in Vietnam or overseas.
I benefited from anonymous reviewers who supported the publication and who drew my attention to the places that could be improved.
Shawn McHale of George Washington University, Patricia Pelley of Texas Tech University, and Dale Baum, Terry Anderson, and Brian Rouleau, my colleagues at Texas A M, read and commented on my work at various stages, lending their kind hearts and sharp eyes and significantly improving the manuscript. Peter Zinoman of the University of California, Berkeley, has been a strong supporter of the project, its careful reader, and a treasury of excellent advice.
I found a most patient and engaged ally in Robert Sloan, the editor-in-chief of Indiana University Press. He guided me gently but firmly through the entire process. Michelle Sybert very effectively managed the production of the book. In Julie Bush I found an extremely thorough and astute editor who not only improved my English rendition of Nh Ca s work but also identified my typos in Vietnamese without knowing the language - not a small feat. Her ability to do this will always remain a mystery to me and is proof of her excellent editorial work.
My parents, Ella Levitskaya and Alexander Massarsky, and my grandmother, Olga Zhivotovskaya, all lived and suffered through World War II in St. Petersburg, Russia. They have always been a source of strength and inspiration for me. Their lives, as well as the lives of my other close relatives who lived through the war ignited my desire to better understand the experience of civilians in wartime. In many ways my work on this book is a legacy of their influence on me. My son, Michael Dror, read portions of the translation and helped me to clarify my introduction, posing pertinent and well-focused questions. My husband, Keith Taylor of Cornell University and a veteran of the war in Vietnam, was and is always there for me and for the translation, and perhaps he knows it already by heart; he also made the map.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Nh Ca, the author of Mourning Headband for Hue , and her husband, poet Tr n D T , for their generous cooperation and willingness to share with me their painful memories of the war.
All the mistakes are mine.
Note on Translation
Whatever people think about the war in vietnam, Most agree that in many ways Americans appropriated that war and very often did not try to understand their Vietnamese allies and opponents. Thus, my main goal in translating Mourning Headband for Hue was not to misappropriate Nh Ca s work by turning it into an American wartime horror story with Vietnamese names but rather to give readers a chance to hear otherwise silenced Vietnamese voices. To achieve this, I tried to stay as close as possible to Nh Ca s original work while at the same time not forgetting that it should be easily accessible for English-speaking readers. This proved to be a difficult task. I often consulted with Nh Ca to be sure that I did not violate her intent. She helped me with amazing grace and patience.
The work was written in 1969, in the midst of war, with the author still in a state of shock. Thus, there were some points in her writing that needed clarification. I intentionally chose to translate the original 1969 edition so that I could work with the unadulterated voice from the time of the war, the version written shortly after the events of the 1968 T t Offensive and the tragedy of Hue took place, not the later, perhaps slightly edited, version that was published in the United States in 2008 on the fortieth anniversary of the events described in Mourning Headband for Hue . As requested by the author, I made some minor corrections in the text, and they should not be perceived as mistranslation. I also made necessary clarifications because of the Vietnamese grammar or because of some confusion that became apparent during translation. In addition, with the permission of the author, I reordered chapters 3 and 4 for the sake of the flow of the narrative.
I attempted to stay faithful to the Vietnamese spirit and idiom of the work. I found it to be important to keep, at least partially, the Vietnamese system of personal pronouns when people address each other because the Vietnamese language does not have a simple you. Unlike in English, Vietnamese pronouns reflect the structure of society and a constant awareness of one s position vis- -vis other people, be it at work, with neighbors, or within a family. That s why the you on the following pages will be in such forms as elder brother, elder sister, aunt, and uncle but also in compounds like I and my sister, in which the word order