The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars

Posted January 9, 2009

The author of The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars says he first conceived of the work as a short story about games his father played as a boy in the Vietnamese countryside. Instead, he succeeds, almost against the odds, in providing a refreshing and even revelatory perspective on the tempestuous decades that gave rise to modern, independent Vietnam.

Andrew X. Pham presents a saga of triumph, misfortune and loss told through the life of his father, an aristocratic scion turned teacher, combatant, prisoner and refugee. It’s a vivid and harrowing account that reads like a novel. The tale’s accessibility comes at the price of some authenticity: The Eaves of Heaven is the vicarious memoir of a father written by his son. Dense with recreated conversations and imagined details, it makes for a questionable project in historiography. Indeed, one can quibble about a lot in this book, from its herky-jerky chronological structure to its obsession with food.

Yet Mr. Pham, who was born in former South Vietnam and educated in the United States as an aerospace engineer, succeeds at something few other writers in English have done. Outsiders know about Vietnam’s struggle against the colonial French or the conflict the Vietnamese call the “American War” largely through accounts shaded by foreigners or by those who sided with the French or Americans. Mr. Pham, on the other hand, traces the hardships of a land-owning family from northern Vietnam that is uprooted from its ancestral home by politics and cast on to the opportunistic streets of the former South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. In doing so, he humanizes all Vietnamese, northerners and southerners alike, and lays bare the fears, hopes and sacrifices they shared in the title’s cataclysmic “three wars.”

Mr. Pham rivets the reader with his scenes of domestic panic during key episodes of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, notably the 1968 Tet Offensive, which shattered American confidence in ultimate victory, and the fall—or “liberation,” as Vietnamese Communists would have it—of Saigon seven years later. But he’s at his best depicting lesser known events and complexities of Vietnam’s history and culture. He describes, for instance, his father’s bewilderment at the bedraggled, so-called “walkers” who, in the waning years of World War II, roamed the northern countryside eating the bark off trees as a result of a famine caused by the occupying Japanese military. Mr. Pham’s father, Thong Van Pham, recalls “roadside cadavers with blackened mouths” and a famine victim’s skull, picked clean by ravens, that becomes a soccer ball for barefoot children.

The Second World War sparks a local war for Vietnamese independence from the French, who return after Japan’s defeat to try to reassert their claim to Indochina. Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Viet Minh forces gradually throttle the French, whose beleaguered troops fall back on Hanoi where the bookish Thong and his friends idle at the city’s bistros, sipping coffee and listening to Johnny Mathis songs.

The Viet Minh victory in 1954 results in the partition of Vietnam into the Communist-led North and the Western-backed South, and Thong’s family flees southward as part of a growing exodus. The author’s account is a useful reminder that much of the secular gentry—and not just anti-Communist Roman Catholics—departed from the North, and he alludes to efforts by Ho’s new government to physically stop people from emigrating, though Mr. Pham leaves the reader hungry for details. The dislocated family washes up in a sewage-choked tent village on the outskirts of Saigon. They find their feudal pedigree counts for nothing in this brash, free-wheeling city where commercial life is dominated by ethnic Chinese who favor their own kind. The author’s grandfather seeks solace in his opium pipe, but Thong gets a toehold in this new, hardscrabble world as a teacher.

One of this book’s strengths is Mr. Pham’s evocative writing, as when he describes his father’s boyhood passion for cricket fights. As children, Thong and his friends and cousins would catch crickets and keep them as pets, then risk their favorite insects in mortal combat in a jar. In the juvenile trash-talking before one such duel, Thong’s cousin Tan derides another boy’s cricket “‘as the sorriest looking bug I’ve ever seen. Its mother must have been a cockroach.’” The boy rises to the challenge, to his regret; his red cricket gets disemboweled in a fight with Thong’s “Blackie,” and Thong collects on a pre-agreed wager by giving the boy a swift kick.

Another memorable passage portrays the travails of the family’s brothel business, where a teen-age Thong cleans up after daily brawls between boozed-up French soldiers and becomes infatuated with one of the working girls, only to lose his romantic innocence when he spies on the girl through a peephole as she has sex with a Foreign Legionnaire.

Later, Mr. Pham gives a gripping account of a firefight at a southern hamlet that brings to mind North Vietnamese army veteran Bao Ninh’s superlative novel The Sorrow of War. When Mr. Pham’s father tries to flee the victorious Communists, his increasingly feral desperation—and the betrayals he suffers by like-minded friends—is almost overpowering.

The author weaves his narrative from two parallel timelines, but this is arguably one of the book’s flaws. He alternates successive chapters between northern Vietnam in 1940-54 and southern Vietnam in 1956-76. This structure can be disorienting, particularly in the early chapters before the reader can identify with the main characters and settings.

More disturbingly, Mr. Pham’s reliance on a single individual’s memory of distant events can strain his credibility. The author’s portrayal of a sadistic Algerian Legionnaire as a shirtless ogre with a long sword and “biceps thicker than a man’s thigh” is a crude, one-dimensional cartoon suited better to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Mr. Pham’s political history also is uneven; he too readily attributes all things communist to the “Viet Cong,” a disparaging partisan term for an insurgency specific to South Vietnam.

On his Web site, the author calls himself a painter of words, but his prose too often turns cloying and precious. In one scene from the book, “a pink moon” climbed “a honeyed sky,” while evening glowed and “a breeze sighed.” Such excesses mar what is otherwise fine writing in this original and compelling personal history.

Mr. Pham explores the soul of a nation trampled and corrupted by the major ideologies of the 20th century. In this century, Vietnam is still redeeming itself.

Bruce Stanley is a writer and former Wall Street Journal Asia reporter living in Hong Kong. He reported for the Associated Press in Vietnam from 1993-95 and was the first U.S. media correspondent to be based in that country since the end of the Vietnam War.