VANESSA SPENDS the next morning at the clinic helping women construct vaginas from colored paper and cotton balls. One woman forms a massive replica out of poster board and cuts a hole in the center through which another woman with spiky black hair pokes her head, as if she is posing in a wooden cut-out of Mickey Mouse. Some of the women are in their early twenties, some late fifties. They are sex workers or partners of injection drug users, or both. None of the women have received an adequate sex or anatomy class. Their knowledge is based on myths and hysteria, perpetuated by stigma and silence.
Stand, up after intercourse to prevent pregnancy.
An abortion is when the doctor chops up the fetus with tiny knives and sucks the remains out with a vacuum.
AIDS is transmittable by kissing.
The term "sex worker" sounded odd to me and didn't have the same connotations as prostitute, hooker, or "ho," as my father would say. I pictured naked women in hard hats with tool belts full of dildos, carrying their lunches in red and white Playmate coolers. But after listening to Vanessa describe the women's lives, stories of incest and rape, how many of the women were seen as "damaged goods" and exiled from their families, the hours they spent servicing ten or twenty men a day, their sweaty and dusty commute from village to city, "sex worker" seemed most appropriate. Sex is the job, and they tried not to bring their work home.
I spend my days sitting in cafés or in one of the large wooden chairs in the hotel lobby, flipping through Let the Good Times Roll, a collection of oral histories of Asian female prostitutes living near U.S. military bases. I had read the books written by American GIs and Vietnamese soldiers, and the few written by U.S. Army wives and Vietnamese women, but these books gave no voice to Vietnamese sex workers. I could recite Matthew Modine's complete monologues from Full Metal Jacket, but I only knew three words spoken by a Vietnamese prostitute in the film: Me so horny.
Before our trip, I had searched for recent oral histories of Vietnamese women, but found nothing. Instead, each time I typed "Vietnam" and "prostitution" into a search engine, I was offered opportunities to meet "exotic" and "eager" women. After giving my contact information to hotels in Vietnam, I started getting e-mails with subjects like, ARE YOU CURIOUS? or ones that were not so subtle: FUCK A GOOK TONIGHT! The body of these e-mails were written in a tone that assumed I had been searching desperately for these women, that I should look no further, that they were waiting and willing. Here for the taking.
The women in Let the Good Times Roll are from the Philippines, Okinawa, and South Korea. They speak about growing up too poor to attend school. Their elderly parents couldn't maintain the rice fields or coconut trees on their own, so the young girls had to stay home and help bring in the harvest. The girls were often raped by relatives or local villagers. If the man was a relative, the rape was kept a secret, so as not to disgrace the family.
If the girl was raped by a man who was not a relative, the woman's family and tradition dictated that the two must marry because no other man would want her. Nan Hee, a thirty-three-year-old Korean woman who worked as a "bar girl" near Camp Casey, a U.S. base in Uijongbu in South Korea, spoke about her husband: "I lived with him half because I loved him and half because he raped me and I had no choice."
I flip back and forth between Let the Good Times Roll and Richard Bernstein's The East, the West, and Sex, a four-hundred-year history of Western exploitation of the East. In the late 1800s, British soldiers stationed in India—many married, devout Christians—relayed their sexual conquests to comrades in Britain: tales of "nut-brown" women fulfilling every desire, detailing the coveted world of harems in a land where the restrictive moral and religious codes of home seemed not to apply. Reverberations of these tales can be heard in the French's colonization of Indochina in the early 1900s. The French followed Britain's lead and developed their own form of "regulated prostitution," in which sex workers were routinely tested for venereal disease and could not perform sexual labor for any French soldiers until they were "cleared."
Soldiers were not subject to the same testing. If a soldier showed symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease, their supervisors questioned them about recent sexual activity. The woman suspected of spreading the disease to the soldier was apprehended, tested and, if she was indeed infected, forced to undergo treatment at her own expense before returning to work. The soldier was ordered to remain on base, where he received free health care. While prostitution was illegal in France, the laws were not enforced in the colonies.
I take out my tape recorder and listen to my father recount his own stories of an exotic, seemingly lawless place where he balanced boredom with sex. He took R&R in Vung Tau, a fishing village on the southern coast, the town Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now claims has the best surfing in Vietnam. My father lived in a hotel on the beach where women nodded at his words and he at theirs. Accepting his proposals, his promises. His toasters. His televisions.
I replay my father's description of the woman who was murdered in Long Binh: She was one of the daily hires. Cleaned the hooches, policed up the area, scrubbed the head, shit like that. Then she'd walk by goin' "Short-time? Short-time?" Banged the entire engineer battalion and the next time I saw her, the MPs were draggin' her out the dumpster. Loud German breaks through my father's voice and I look out the window of the hotel lobby to see two men stumbling out of LePub across the street. A cyclo driver slowly pedals by, ringing his bell. After bartering in a bastardized sign language, the two German men cram into the cyclo and are peddled away like babies in a big stainless steel carriage.
By the time my father arrived in Saigon, the bars and pool halls—leftovers from the French occupation—were revamped. Owners erected new signs like Pussycat Café or USA Rock Club. An explosion of Americana: vanity license plates; red, white and blue beer steins shaped like breasts; posters of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Sinatra, Jim Morrison, Steve McQueen. Much like the inside of my father's hooch or my college dorm room. Vietnam was my father's version of college. It was the first time he lived away from home. He worked a low-wage job for beer money or to buy a gift to impress a girl. There are photographs of my father and Waller in Long Binh, leaning over a table made from plywood and milk crates. They both wear white undershirts and are holding records, trading them like baseball cards. If it weren't for the caption on the back, these photos look like they could have been taken in a record shop near my grandparent's house in New York.
Cyclos carried soldiers to and from the hottest clubs, each driver claiming to know the quickest route. Outside the clubs, Vietnamese teenagers, as if at a concert or sporting event, hawked t-shirts, stickers, patches, pins and coffee mugs with phrases printed in bold, capital letters:
MY LOVE FOR YOU IS RUNNING DOWN YOUR LEG.
ALL RIGHT, I LOVE YOU, NOW SHUT UP AND BUY YOUR OWN DRINK!
YOU WON'T GO DOWN IN HISTORY, SO MIGHT AS WELL GO DOWN ON ME.
Other items the teenagers sold were a bit tamer: Shit Happens inscribed on Zippo lighters; simple plastic American flags; or pins the bar girls wore that shouted: MONEY TALKS!
Inside the clubs, Janis Joplin offered another piece of her heart. My father leaned close to the sounds coming from a woman's lips, until she was quiet. She pressed her ear to the notes and vibrations in his mouth, his throat. He bought her several "lady drinks," expensive beverages on which she received a small commission. After she met her quota, the papasan allowed my father to pay her "bar fine," the bulk of which covered the room she rented above the club. Her room had to be furnished: a bed, a dresser, a fan, a sound system and a television. To pay for these required items, she took a loan from the owner at five, sometimes ten percent interest. The woman and my father ascended the stairs to her eight-by-eight room. Maybe he hummed along to Janis or maybe she, having heard the song over and over, mimicked the lyrics: Didn't I make you feel like you were the only man?
I meet Vanessa after she gets off work at the clinic. I place the recorder on the table, stick the right earpiece into my ear and give her the left one.
She leans over the table and presses her finger into her open ear. I hit Play.
"What's that clinking sound?" she asks.
"He kept flipping his silver dollar. He was kinda fidgety."
I had listened to the recording so many times I could recite it from memory. The din of the cafe seeped in through my left ear: the chatter of porcelain tea cups and saucers, motorbikes idling at the curb, the horrible Muzak that followed us everywhere, each song the synthesized sister of a familiar tune.
Eight weeks into Basic in South Carolina. Run run run. All day. Hit a few of the bars. All the locals knew you were military and the girls kinda stayed away from you. They could tell by your haircut or whatever and it was just like anything else. You hittin' on 'em, and they know. If you live in a base or around a base, it's the same crap. Guys come and go and they be hittin' on the girls and they ain't lookin' for romance or to go out and buy furniture. They just wanna pop ya.
There was a few places that the sergeant warned us about before we went into town the first time. Any hotels of, uh, ill-repute. Bordellos. If you gotta go—and I'll never forget him sayin' this—if you gotta go, go to the Hotel de Soto. Best one in town. And the cleanest.
The hiss of dead air. Vanessa looks down at the table and slowly spins the salt shaker. My voice breaks the silence: "So did you guys go there?" My father speaks through a yawn:
Nah, we were still stateside. Wasn't necessary yet.
Vanessa looks up. "What does that mean? 'Necessary?'"
I open my mouth, but my voice on the tape speaks for me: "Right, it's not like you were on the other side of the world yet."