Purple is for
Beautiful Love

Mark Lewandowski

Like most visitors to Hue, we focus first on the citadel, commissioned by Emperor Gia Long in the early 19th century after he moved the capitol from Hanoi.  The citadel’s moat, once traversed by the emperor’s concubines who paddled out to the lotus flowers to collect dewdrops for their master’s morning tea, remains intact, as does the ten-kilometer outer wall once protecting his royal personage.   But the Imperial city, and deeper into the complex, the Forbidden Purple City, have barely survived, first from fires in 1947, and more significantly, the Battle of Hue in 1968, the longest and bloodiest engagement of the Tet Offensive.   US Marines and members of the South Vietnamese Army followed the old adage that in order to save the town they had to destroy it.  They shelled the complex continuously, and later, they scoured the palace, building by building, blowing them up as they went.  After twenty-five days over five thousand Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers, as well as untold thousands of civilians, lay dead, and the smoldering ruins of Hue, the last real capital of a unified Vietnam before the French turned the monarch into a puppet in 1885, was once gain controlled by South Vietnam.

In 1993, eighteen years after South Vietnam’s government collapsed, the Americans evacuated, and Vietnam was once again unified and free of colonial aspirations, UNESCO named Hue a World Heritage Site.  The attention brought in money, accelerating the renovation and rebuilding of parts of the palace grounds.  Tourists like us wander about, stopping first at the massive southern gate, which survived the Battle of Hue, but still carries the pockmarks of bullet holes.  Inside, Ngo Mon, the main entrance to the Imperial City, is worth a long look, as is the “Palace of Supreme Harmony,” the old throne room.  Into the Forbidden Purple City we find the Thai Binh Reading Pavilion, essentially the emperor’s library, its sloping pagoda roof writhing with dragons, and surrounded by bonsai gardens.

We burn through our smartphone batteries snapping Instagram-bound photographs, but only twenty of the original 148 buildings of the complex have survived the travails of the 20th century.  Vast unplanted fields, many contained in squares by jagged foundations like bottom rows of rotted teeth, fill much of what must have been an exhilarating site, comparable to Beijing’s Forbidden City, which served as a model for Emperor Gia Long’s architects.  The magnificence of throne room and library is tempered by the brown grass now growing where people once loved and lived.  The fields are as memorable as the lacquered rooftops.  What might we be seeing if our government had simply stayed home?

After our tour, we pass through the back gate of the complex, once again crossing the shimmering moat.  We leave, not enriched by the beauty of the existing buildings, but stricken with guilt by what no longer remains.  Knowing about the crimes of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army—the thousands of citizens tortured, killed, and dumped in unmarked, common graves during the nearly four week occupation of Hue—serves as no panacea.  The cold dampening our guts overwhelms any question of “military necessity,” as it does when we visit Hiroshima and Dresden.  

Outside, our Vietnamese drivers wait for us.  We climb onto the backs of their motorbikes and embrace them from behind, leaning left when they want to turn left, right when they want to turn right, jolting forward when they hit the brake, and tilting back dangerously with every sudden acceleration.  At intersections our eyes expand in wonder, or shutter closed in fear, since, from each direction, six or seven columns of delivery trucks and taxis and BMWs and cycle rickshaws and other motorbikes, some carrying adult couples with two or three children, zip forward, jockeying for the same sweet spot in the middle.  Even though no light or traffic cop moderates this danse macabre, there’s no screeching rubber, or tearing metal, or shattering glass, or broken bodies, just a ballet following intuitive rules, a tight weave of machine and flesh.  Once through the maelstrom, our drivers laugh and accelerate and we loosen our grip on their sides.  Office buildings, awash in the colonial yellow the French favored, fall to the wayside and we speed along a canal fed by the Perfume River, zipping by rubber magnate-built mansions turned boutique hotels, their gated courtyards shaded by tamarind trees dripping red and blue and pink paper lanterns.  Soon the houses get smaller, pavement gives way to dirt and our way narrows.  The chickens and dogs loiter in front of houses, but they know to stay clear from our path.   The heads of small children pop out of windows and doorways, smiling and waving; their parents and grandparents mostly ignore us as we squeal by.  In order to navigate a ninety degree turn, our drivers jerk to a near stop and drop a foot to the ground and twist.  Patrons of a small café sit in tiny plastic chairs barely large enough for pre-schoolers.  They drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, unconcerned about this parade of motorbikes spinning and churning, burping exhaust just a couple feet away even though one reckless driver could send them flying like pins in a bowling lane.

At our destination, thighs and backs strained, we tumble off the bikes.  The drivers herd them to the side and immediately light up cigarettes.  

Our guide draws our attention.  He is small, almost stereotypically so.  Earlier in the tour he explained away his diminutiveness on the near starvation diet he endured as a child, right after the end of the war.  His father fought for both the South and North Vietnamese armies.

“This is one of my favorite places,” he says, gesturing to the house in front of us.  “The woman you are about to meet is very, very special.”

The house is a simple rectangle of two floors, with wide doors and tiles on the ground floor to combat Vietnam’s heat.  A tricycle and other kids toys sit at the bottom of stairs built into the left wall.  These lead to the second floor and an open landing, which is anchored by a Buddhist shrine honoring a dead ancestor.  Gaudy paintings of the Virgin Mary and scenes from the Passion hang on either side of the Buddhist shrine.

Below the landing, on a pillow, sits the woman we came to see.  She wears a black dress that falls to her knees.  Underneath patterned stockings of some sort, also black.  During our visit she never once stops sewing a conical hat of the kind still favored by farmers working rice paddies.  Her right arm ends before the elbow.  At the end of the stump there is a marble of flesh.  She spools the thread between stump and marble, occasionally unwinding to feed the needle in her left hand.  We’re close, but see no wrinkles, no gray in her black hair.  Were we to see her on the street we’d assume she was thirty, thirty-five tops, not the fifty she actually is.  To a person we are struck dumb by her beauty.

Before we saw her we didn’t actually know she was missing an arm; our guide only told us she was an Agent Orange victim.  On the way to and from Halong Bay we stopped at a workshop employing victims of Agent Orange, and we would stop at others later.  Much of the fine needlework and woodwork from Vietnam is produced in these kinds of workshops, including the elaborate pop-up cards now available for sale in our home country.  Like the majority of artists plying their craft in these workshops, the one-armed women wasn’t personally exposed to Agent Orange (most of those who did have probably been dead for years); her father was while fighting in the jungle for the North Vietnamese army.  On a rare leave to Hue he managed to impregnate his young wife.  Soon after she fled Hue during the Tet Offensive.  He died during the battle for his city. 

We soon enough realize he is the man pictured in the shrine on the landing above his daughter.

One of us is finally able to ask a question, perhaps sparked by the kid’s toys at the bottom of the staircase.

“Does she live here with her family?”

As the smiling woman continues to work on the conical hat, our guide answers:

“Yes, an extended family.  But she has no kids.  No one would marry her.”

Our Western hackles raise.  How are those born with defects treated in this country?

“Why not?” one asks imperiously, while the rest of us think it.  

But let’s face it; we have all likely discounted a potential mate for far more trivial reasons.

“It’s the Agent Orange,” our guide says.  “People are afraid to have children with victims.  Having children is very, very important in Vietnam.  We are still a third world country.  Caring for the disabled is very expensive.  At least this woman can work.  Not all can.” 

We think of the stories we’ve heard about the children born to Vietnamese women, but sired by American soldiers.  Many were dumped in the streets, or drowned in rice paddies.  Mothers expelled from their families and ostracized by society.  But who to blame?  The mothers left to their own devices, or the American men, our compatriots, who abandoned them? 

The woman holds up the conical hat and says something to the guide.  Her cheeks redden slightly.

“The colors of the ribbons mean something,” he said.

The ribbon serving as chinstrap is pink.

“Pink is for hot love.”

Someone clears his throat.  

On the surface, at least, Vietnam retains conservative views on premarital sex.  We wonder if the woman has ever been touched, or if she has ever made love.  We doubt it.  She is something of an “old maid,” which we realize is a sexist and out of date concept, but here she is: this woman who radiates beauty and has likely never felt the urgency of physical passion, who probably never will, all because one of our fellow Americans, skirting the treetops, dumped Agent Orange on her father.  All before she was born.

The woman holds up another hat.  This one has a purple ribbon.  She murmurs something to our guide, who smiles wide back to her.

“And purple?” one of us asks.  “Does it mean something?”

“Beautiful love,” our guide says.

We suck in our breath and say nothing, just listen to the woman work, thread pulling through the palm leaves of the hat, and occasionally unraveling some lead from her stump.  The toys to the side are not her kid’s, and she never knew the father honored in the shrine above her, the man who unwittingly imparted to her this legacy of a deformity.

This phrase, “Beautiful Love,” is so nonspecific, nearly nonsensical, yet in these moments, it means something to us.  The guilt we felt visiting Hue’s old fortress, all that slaughter, all that destruction, passes away.  We flew thousands of miles over the Pacific not to feel guilt, or the exhilaration of a motorcycle ride, but to experience beauty.  We think of Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” the beautiful anguish of a mother holding not a god, but the broken body of her son.  We think of wandering the Jewish district of Seville, the narrow lanes, the overhanging eaves, all now quaint and compelling, even though the compactness is a result of ghettoization.  From temples built by slaves to cathedrals raised by serfs, on trains, buses and planes we plug into our phones and sway to music conceived in the bloodied cotton fields of the antebellum South.  We recognize that beauty sometimes rises from the ashes of pain and suffering.

Our guide looks at his phone.

“We must leave soon,” he says.  “But please, if you’d like to buy a conical hat, it is cheaper here than a shop.”

A conical hat costs two and a half dollars.  On a good day the woman with one arm can make two.

We’d like to buy them all, but we are just tourists with luggage constraints.  Such a fragile thing would never make the journey back across the ocean.

“Can we just give her money?’  one of us asks.

Initially, this seems like an awful idea.  Are we not just commodifying her beauty?  Is she just another tourist attraction? 

After some hesitation, we drop bills in front of her, like she is a sidewalk huckster with open guitar case. She greets each bill with a shy smile and small nod.