A Woman in Vietnam -- Attractive, Graceful, Demure

My waitress at the Mountain View Hotel in Sapa, Vietnam.

"They are, all of them, attractive, graceful, demure women who confirm immediately Hue's reputation as a repository of unusual female charm. Keeping themselves just beyond arm's reach, they project an aura of intimacy that is as binding as it is unmotivated."

- Justin Wintle, Romancing Vietnam

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Several weeks after completing a six-week visit to Vietnam, I came across Justin Wintle's book at a bookstore in Bangkok. A British journalist who traveled the length of Vietnam for three months in 1989-90, Wintle's observations -- on war, women, communism, culture, and everything else -- were delightful to read.

When I read the passage above, I thought not of the city named Hue (which he refers to) but of my waitress named Hue (who I met in the town of Sapa, several hundred miles to the north). On my first day in Vietnam, it was Hue who served my dinner at the Mountain View Hotel. In her early twenties, she told me she routinely worked 18-hour shifts. What she did not tell me (but what I saw in my three days there) was that at the end of each shift she still smiled.

That night, I sat alone at my restaurant table, entranced by everything around me, including Hue. I was already falling in love with Vietnam, which means I was already feeling intense sorrow over the war that obliterated the lives of so many people (some put the number of Vietnamese dead as high as four million). With the help of dim candlelight, I scribbled down thoughts late into the night, which later would constitute a chapter in the book I hope to one day publish.

An excerpt:

In his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges says, "War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought." It is sad to think that war, which scars the land and breaks the lives of many of those who engage in it, might somehow make the world understandable. Maybe I swung to the opposite extreme tonight when I found that it was my waitress, not war, who made the world understandable. Between reading pages of my book and stopping to harness my chaotic thoughts, I paused to watch Hue. The sight of her made the tragedies of Vietnam all the more crushing. Without beauty we might never know what tragedy is, for the light of beauty incarnated directs a penetrating beam head-on into tragedy, teaching us that tragedy is not just a word but a horror -- a very real horror. Hue's red lips made the hard, heated barrel of active artillery repulsive. Her gentle touch condemned every hand that had been raised to do violence. The wholeness of her young body cried out against people left mangled and incomplete. The lively stride of her walk brought to mind the stillness of a home mourning one who will never return. And her warmth exposed the horror of death's coldness.