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By Allison Chisolm
 When
Thomas Gottschang returned from
Vietnam in 1971, he said he had "been through the looking glass." With no decompression
time, he went straight from the U.S. Army and the rice paddies of Binh Hoa to
the classrooms of Yale. He never imagined those two worlds might intersect. But
in 1993, they did, and he went back through
the looking glass.
It started with a phone call. In the summer of 1992,
a friend from graduate school asked Tom, by then a Holy Cross economics
professor researching Chinese economic history, if he would go to Hanoi
to teach Vietnamese economics professors about market economies. Funded
by the Ford Foundation, the Committee on Economics Education and Research
in Vietnam (CEERV) had established a program at the National Economics
University in Hanoi to prepare economists for Vietnam's shift from central
planning to market reforms, or doi moi.
Gottschang agreed. After an orientation session in Washington, D.C., later that
summer, he flew to Hanoi in February 1993 with Professor Daniel Westbrook of
Georgetown University, for a four-month stay. As an American veteran of
the Vietnam War, Gottschang was nervous about his first trip to Hanoi, former
capital of North Vietnam and target
of thousands of American bombs. "I wasn't going back. I was going for the first
time," he says. "I'd never been to Hanoi before. I would have felt differently
going into Saigon." Once in Hanoi, however, his identity was that of economics
professor, not former soldier.
"I was there to teach," he says.
Econ 101 for Marxists
He had his work cut out for him. His students had never
studied the behavior of a market economy in action. They had all been trained
in Marxist economics, many in the Soviet Union or in Eastern
Europe.
A 1994 survey of program participants (prior to enrollment)
revealed they were unfamiliar with such basic economic terms as "exchange rate," "supply
and demand," or "Gross Domestic Product (GDP)." At one point, he recalls, "I
had to draw a picture of what a check looked like." Gottschang taught
in English through interpreters, but his Vietnamese, first
learned at the U.S. Army language school in Monterey, Calif.,
improved over time
with tutoring.
As a senior research fellow with Harvard's East Asian Legal Studies Program,
Karen Turner never thought her work on Chinese legal texts would lead her to
Vietnam. But, by the time she joined Tom in Hanoi in April 1993, she had developed
a plan to learn more about the legal status of women in Vietnam for a comparative
study with China. She found, however, that most people did not want to talk
about law. Instead, they wanted to discuss what women did in the "American
War." Turner began to hear North Vietnamese women's war stories. "This became
my passion," she says.
That was their first of several trips. Gottschang became the long-distance
director of the CEERV program while continuing to teach at Holy Cross. He went
back to Hanoi twice a year between 1993 and 1996, when funding for the program
ended. During that time, Turner read up on Vietnam's history of women warriors,
dating back to 40 A.D. For the program's final semester in the spring of 1996,
Gottschang volunteered to teach again. This time, Turner came for the entire
time with a focused research agenda. She planned to transform those stories
into a book.
It's a Country, Not a War.
After eight
visits to Vietnam, Gottschang feels that the still-Communist country
is struggling for a new identity in the global
marketplace. From 1993 to 1996, he says, "there was a tremendous amount
of change in Hanoi and Saigon" (now officially called Ho Chi Minh City),
but the rural areas benefited less from the new economic
changes. And yet, while still very poor, Vietnam's annual per capita
GDP is $320, ahead of other developing countries like Bangladesh
or Nepal. With a market approach, he says, Vietnam has become the third
largest
exporter
of rice
in the world.
Although the CEERV program ended in 1996, the need for training more economists
and government policy makers and analysts continues, as Gottschang noted in a
paper published shortly after
his departure. In order for Vietnam's shift to a market economy to succeed, more
people - especially those able to train others - need to understand the underlying
principles involved. One stumbling block is the need for visiting faculty. As
a committee member evaluating Fulbright applicants, Gottschang says it remains
difficult to persuade Americans to come to Vietnam.
"It's really sad," he says, "as Vietnam is far more interesting than some places
people apply to in droves. It's still
seen as 'the country we lost the war to.' Americans need to see Vietnam as a
country, not a war."
Many of Vietnam's trading partners were at one point its enemies, says Gottschang,
namely France, China, Japan, Cambodia and the United States. It seems easier
for the Vietnamese than Americans to separate what happened to individuals from
what governments have done. "Most Vietnamese are practicing
Buddhists," Gottschang comments. "They see things in a more detached way, with
a longer-term perspective."
Home in Hanoi
What
drew these two China experts to Vietnam? Beyond serendipity, says Turner,
the simplest
answer is "our love for Asia. Between
us, Tom and I have spent years in China." Both have had long-term
stays
there. "Vietnam was a logical extension of that dedication to hard living," she
says with a laugh.
They found Vietnam to be a friendly place, particularly when compared with their
experiences in China. Within two days of Gottschang's arrival in Hanoi, he was
visiting a Vietnamese home. In contrast, during 18 months in Beijing in the mid-1980s,
he was rarely invited to the homes
of Chinese friends for fear "the neighbors would complain" about politically
suspect American guests.
In Hanoi, he found it helped to have a Vietnamese friend act as an intermediary,
particularly when looking for housing. A friend (and later collaborator with
Turner, journalist Phan Thanh Hao) helped Tom and his colleague Dan Westbrook
find a house to rent in downtown Hanoi. When it was time to sign the contract,
his landlady entertained the two professors and an official from the Hanoi Housing
Bureau with tea and cookies. Tom and Dan signed the contract, and as required,
the landlady
gave the official half the first month's rent. After he left, Tom and Dan signed
a second contract, just between the landlady and themselves, for $200 more
per month!
Living on a residential street in central Hanoi brought
the Americans into daily contact with Vietnamese families,
merchants, and street vendors. They received an intimate
introduction to Hanoi street life along with practice in
conversational Vietnamese, since most Hanoi residents spoke
no English. By 1996, if they missed American food they could
find a Baskin Robbins ice cream parlor in downtown Hanoi,
not far
from the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison, once used for American prisoners of
war and now replaced by an actual high-rise hotel.
Gottschang's fears of being an American in former enemy territory were finally
laid to rest, he says, when he walked by an old man in a North Vietnamese army
uniform one evening in 1993.
"He was carrying his granddaughter and stopped
to ask if we were Russian," Gottschang recalls. "When I said we were American,
he replied, 'Oh, Americans - We used to be enemies, but now we are friends.
I'm so glad you are here.'"
Balancing Two Worlds
The specters of
the war haunted Turner when she returned from Vietnam. As an experienced
historian of China, however,
she recognized that the long history of conflict between
China and Vietnam
would color her colleagues' response to her new research topic. She was reluctant
to make a complete shift from her years of studying classical Chinese law to
examining the role of women in war in 20th-century Vietnam. So she chose to work
in both fields, attempting a difficult balancing act.
One week, she says, she would speak at Harvard about
early Chinese law texts. The next week would find her at Northeastern discussing
the role of Vietnamese
women in war.
"I felt a kind of missionary zeal about it," she says about her Vietnamese research.
For both Turner and Gottschang, work has always involved travel to far-flung
places, coupled with family compromises. But when Turner began her studies of
Chinese history in the early 1970s, China was still closed to foreign visitors.
That changed in 1979, when Turner joined the first contingent of American exchange
students for a year's stay in Beijing. Unlike most graduate students, however,
she left behind two teenage daughters and their stepfather, her husband, Tom
Gottschang.
"It was hard on the whole family," says Turner. "There was virtually no mail.
It would take two weeks to arrive and then it would be read by the Chinese and
blacked out. My letters were censored. We talked on the telephone only twice
all year."
To the Chinese, however, Turner's lengthy separation from her family was the
natural thing to do. In China, she explains, "The family is an economic unit,
so you do what's best for the family, and that may involve long-term travel away
from them."
For Turner, the opportunity to be one of the first Western
academics to research classical Chinese legal texts in China itself was too great
to pass up. When
she left the United States, Gottschang was in the job market, looking for a teaching
position in economics. While Karen lived in a Beijing University dormitory, he
moved the family from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to Worcester. Gottschang
started
as an instructor at Holy Cross in September 1979.
Market Forces and Changing Fields
Gottschang
and Turner first met in Yale's intensive Asian
Studies program in 1971. He had just returned from "one year
and 12 days" in Vietnam in an Army intelligence unit. Although
deeply affected by the war, he was ready to get on with his
life back home. They both labored to master the intricacies
of the Chinese language, as both planned careers in Chinese
history. But after they married in 1973, the harsh realities
of the academic job market sank in and Tom changed direction.
"I'd known since my senior year in college
that I wanted to work on China," he said. "But I knew there was no chance of
finding two Chinese history jobs near one another, so I switched from history
to economics."
"Tom was very brave to change disciplines," Turner says. "With two kids and no
money, he had to make himself more marketable." The graduate school at the University
of Michigan allowed him to work in
both economics and history. He holds a master's degree in economics, and a doctorate
in economics and history.
His Holy Cross job was ideal, as the Worcester area has many colleges where Karen
might teach when she returned. Equally
important, Gottschang said, "We both needed to be within range of good Asian
libraries to finish our dissertations." Harvard's Yenching Library
has been "a wonderful resource, and very welcoming," he said. And they both became
research associates at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research
at Harvard.
Gottschang received his doctorate in 1982, and Turner completed hers in 1983.
They spent the next 10 years expanding their knowledge of their respective disciplines.
Gottschang worked on the social and political aspects of modern Chinese economic
history, particularly migrations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Turner
continued
to explore early Chinese law ("early" in Chinese terms means fourth century B.C.
through the second century A.D.) and how ordinary people interacted with the
state.
Gottschang, who became an associate professor at Holy Cross
in 1987, was named economics department chair in 1997. Turner
joined the department of history in 1987 after directing
the Office of International Studies for the 1986-87 academic
year. By 1997, she had made many more trips to China and
was promoted to full professor. Both helped to found the
now-flourishing Asian Studies program, established at Holy
Cross in the late 1980s. Today, Holy Cross features one of
the strongest Asian studies faculties among nationally-ranked
liberal arts colleges. The program is staffed by professors
whose specialties range from the performing arts to the social
sciences, history, religious studies, and language. Housed
within the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies
(CISS), the program currently affords students the opportunity
to design their
own multidisciplinary major.
Turner and Gottschang relish the opportunity to bring
their Asian experiences into the classroom. Among other courses, Gottschang
offers an honors seminar
on the Vietnam War, while Turner runs a comparative seminar on women and family
in China and Vietnam. Their classes often enroll Asian-American students, and
they occasionally find themselves sharing information about North Vietnam with
children of South Vietnamese
veterans (see sidebar).
Back to Vietnam
After her first visit
to Vietnam in 1993, Turner hoped that her next stay would be longer.
She got her wish: Turner spent four months
in Vietnam in 1996 as well
as the month of January 1997, recording the oral histories of women who had
played a multitude of roles during the American War. The women lived underground
for
months or years, running communications networks or guarding munitions caches.
They transformed a jungle trail into a major transport artery between North
and South Vietnam.
They shot at U.S. bombers while repairing bomb-cratered roads.
Her research subjects, she recalls, were not always
ready to talk about such sensitive memories. More than once she took a last-minute
night ride on the back
of a motorcycle to a borrowed house to meet someone who had relented and
agreed to share a personal story with her, even though she was American. Once
back in
Worcester, she worked
hard to publish those accounts quickly.
Turner's book, Even the Women Must Fight:
Memories of War from North Vietnam, was published in April 1998,
and is due out in paperback this spring. According to Gottschang, this
was
the "closest we've come to real collaboration." Particularly because his
war experience was in an intelligence section charged with identifying North
Vietnamese
units, his military knowledge helped a great deal.
"I first told Karen about the women in the
North Vietnamese army," says Gottschang. "At some point years ago I told her
about a diary I'd seen written by a member of the 'Bravo 8 slash 3,' the B8/3
female mortar platoon" named for March 8, International Women's Day. After the
members of the platoon had been killed, U.S. intelligence
received the women's papers and had them translated.
But as a veteran, Turner says, "Tom couldn't bear to go with me" to meet the
Vietnamese women veterans face-to-face. It wasn't always easy for Turner either.
After an evening spent hearing the extent of their personal
sacrifices, she says, "I'd come home so disturbed, I couldn't sleep."
Turner's research went far beyond personal histories.
She reviewed creative literature, letters, diaries, poetry,
and Party and army reports obtained by American soldiers.
She also uncovered military records kept by men on the Ho
Chi Minh Trail and memoirs of soldiers and journalists who
observed women's service. Television programs and films produced
in Vietnam in the past decade helped her develop new perspectives
on wartime experiences.
With a title taken from the proverb, "When war strikes close to home, even the
women must fight," the book chronicles
women's experiences during the war and its aftermath. After the United States
intensified its air campaign in 1965, Ho Chi Minh asked for all-out volunteer
support, including young women and previously exempt men (only sons, Catholics
and other minority group members). Nearly 200,000 joined up, and some say this
tipped the balance for North Vietnam's eventual victory. Most women came through
the Volunteer Youth Corps, limited to those 17 and older, but many girls lied
and joined up as young as 13, eager to avenge dead family members or simply to
leave home. Large numbers of young people worked in the jungle to maintain the
Ho Chi Minh Trail, a lifeline and "human conveyor belt" between the North and
South for men, munitions and
food.
"They always wanted to talk about someone
who had suffered more," Turner recalls. "They would start with the loss of their
health - the sad effects of malnutrition, Agent Orange and jungle
diseases." Malaria, a constant threat, could mean losing one's hair, hearing,
eyesight, even one's sanity.
In the tumult of reintegrating into postwar society nearly a million disabled
soldiers, the Vietnamese government overlooked
women's war labors and the toll it took on their lives. They have never been
recognized as veterans, nor has Vietnam's military bureaucracy adequately acknowledged
the contributions made by so many young female volunteers.
"These women put down their guns and went back to their
villages and were never heard from again," says Turner. "This
is more than research. It's an international issue."
Vietnamese reaction to the book, translated
into Vietnamese by Turner's official collaborator, journalist Phan Thanh Hao,
and published partially in newspapers, was mixed among women. "Some were resentful
that an American wrote their story," says Turner. "Others were happy to have
their story told at last."
According to Turner, reading the women's stories has struck a chord with many
American veterans groups, who sympathize with
their tales of post-traumatic stress.
For veteran Gottschang, however, Vietnam today is no longer a struggling enemy
nation. "We see things differently," says
Turner. "Tom sees a lot of hope and progress, while I worked with the disenfranchised
and see more pessimism."
Will Vietnam figure in their future research
projects? Turner says there is still a lot she wants to write about
Vietnam. Gottschang would enjoy the opportunity to return, but has no
immediate plans
to go there. Whatever their decision, it is likely to include some way
to help the Vietnamese people heal after years of civil unrest.
As Turner and Gottschang have found all too
clearly, "It's hard to go to Vietnam and not want to do something."
"A
Search for Self Far From Home" Sidebar >
Allison
Chisolm is a free-lance journalist living in Worcester.
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