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Searching for Binh Hoa | page 1, 2, 3
"Where are we going?" I asked him. "Problem!" he said. Ten minutes later, he pulled us to a stop at the edge of a wide, yet unremarkable beach. Restaurants and food stalls lined the street along the beachfront. "Where are we?" I asked him. "Problem. I must check the weather." "Yes, but where are we? What is this place?" "China Beach," he said. Not waiting for my reaction, Khue trotted off and disappeared into a restaurant. A few minutes later he came back out with an exaggerated look of sorrow on his face. "We can't go to Binh Hoa today," he said. "The weather is very bad." I looked up at the sky, which was perfectly clear. "The weather looks fine to me." "Yes! The China Beach weather is beautiful. But it is raining in Binh Hoa." My suspicion was starting to grow. "How do you know that it's raining in Binh Hoa? An hour ago you didn't know what Binh Hoa was." "It is raining in Quang Ngai. That is very close to Binh Hoa." "No problem," I said. "I don't mind the rain." "But that is very dangerous!" Khue said, attempting, unsuccessfully, to look horrified. "Last year many tourists died from riding in the rain!" He gestured to the beach. "Here, China Beach is very beautiful. Like on TV!" I no longer believed anything Khue was saying. "Take me to Binh Hoa," I said. "It's against the law. If the police see you riding in the rain, they will put us in jail!" "Take me to Binh Hoa, Khue." "China Beach! Very beautiful!" Figuring it my only leverage, I took a wad of Vietnamese money from my pocket. "If you don't take me to Binh Hoa," I said with a touch of menace, "you'll never see the rest of your money." Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one. "OK!" Khue exclaimed. Before I could reply, he had turned around and was happily headed back to the restaurant. Paul Theroux once wrote that the traveler is generally "ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among." In few places does this become so painfully obvious as in Vietnam. With half my money already in hand, Khue had never intended to take me past China Beach in the first place. Angered, I followed Khue into the restaurant. By the time I caught up to him, he had already flopped himself into a hammock in the kitchen, and was chatting with the cook. Since slapping Khue around (admittedly, my first impulse) was not such a good option, I tried to reason with him. Our argument was tiresome and repetitive. "The deal was to take me to Binh Hoa, and I sure as hell don't see any rain!" "China Beach! Very nice!" "I know what you're up to Khue, and I won't stand for it. Either take me to Binh Hoa or give me my money back." "China Beach is better than Binh Hoa! Very beautiful. And no rain!" After 15 minutes of this, Khue refunded 50,000 of the original 130,00 dong ("because I like you," he told me), but he refused to take me to Binh Hoa. Khue was being lazy, to be sure, but I sensed that he was not as malicious as his actions might have suggested. In Khue's mind, he was doing me a favor: He was not actually cheating me out of $10 or so, but rather saving me the $10 it would have cost me to continue down the coast. An afternoon at China Beach, he reasoned, would make my day much more enjoyable and meaningful than an hour or so in an old killing field. For Khue, it was a simple equation of convenience -- for me as much as for him. Looking back, it occurs to me that if I had really wanted to see Binh Hoa that badly, I could have ponied up $75 and gotten a legitimate tour from someone like Nguyen. Or, for that matter, I could have invested a bit more money at China Beach and hired a new moto to take me to Binh Hoa. But the fact was that I didn't want to spend more money to go to Binh Hoa. Bin Hoa had suddenly become too much trouble. As interested as I was in Binh Hoa, I realized that -- despite its ironic appeal -- it was just another tourist stop. Reprioritizing my day was a much simpler option. Perhaps this dull instinct is the very reason why people remember My Lai instead of Binh Hoa: Some human tragedies are more convenient to access than others -- in the psychic sense even more than the physical. My Lai was a sobering wake-up call for an idealistic superpower -- a stark lesson in just how cruel and brutal a wealthy and seemingly enlightened people could be. Binh Hoa, on the other hand, was more difficult to sell: a mere case of Asian-on-Asian violence -- the soldiers of one poor country (as South Korea was in 1966) brutalizing the citizens of another. The death of 502 civilians at Binh Hoa was -- in a very basic way -- not marketable; it was too ambiguous. In the end, examining the horrors of the past -- wherever we find them -- turns into a reductive ritual of human interest: a search for drama or irony or a sad story with a concise moral; something that can be wrapped up into an impulse and filed away for reference. Even my whimsical search for Binh Hoa was little more than an exercise in what I had already come to accept. Truly understanding such human horrors, on the other hand, is as difficult and complicated as understanding the self -- and each grand new solution to human misery (Human Rights 1.0, or whatever hits the market next week) carries its own latent dangers. Realizing that it was the easiest option, I left Khue in the restaurant and started walking -- wearily determined to make the most of an afternoon at China Beach.
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