When the War Was Over (65 page)

The border between Cambodia and Vietnam is one of the cultural divides of Asia. It marks the frontiers of Asia's two great cultures, China and India. On one side is Vietnam, the most southerly expression of the world once ruled by China. On the other side is Cambodia, one of the most successful countries permeated by the Indian culture. If one were to use metaphors from Europe, the Cambodians would represent the artistic Latin culture, the Vietnamese the industrious northern temperament. Their common border, like the border between Latin France and northern Germany, has been the scene of more battles than nearly any other in Asia. The European and American powers did not initiate the battle for control of the Mekong River.

The cultural differences between Vietnam and Cambodia are apparent at once. It is a question of different values, goals, traditions, temperaments. They do not speak the same language. Once similar, the Khmer and Vietnamese languages evolved dramatically so that Khmer now is far more understandable to Thai than to Vietnamese. Their dress, another classic marker of identity, also reflected their cultural differences. Khmers wear sarongs—both men and women. The Vietnamese men and women both dress in loose pants. The Khmers eat with their hands or spoons, the Vietnamese with chopsticks. The Khmers build their houses on stilts, the Vietnamese build them flat on the ground. The Khmers use bright colors and bold designs in their creations, the Vietnamese use subdued colors and understated design.

Nothing better exemplifies the difference than dance. Cambodia's is a culture of dance. Dancing enlivened village life, city parties, and the classic culture through ballet. Few Cambodian gatherings are complete without dance, the
ram vong.
Cambodians dance in lines, using their arms and hands as much as their legs. They use their hips slowly, they hold their heads high, their faces are relaxed, their expression is in their hands. They entertain through dance as they dance to be admired, and they flirt through dance. Like their sculpture, Khmer dance is sensual but not erotic. Their art is in their dance. At one time they spoke to the gods through dance.

Dance came to Cambodia over 1,000 years ago, from India, and reached a peak during the Angkor period. The classical dance of that era was the Khmer ballet, which interpreted the great myths, particularly the
Ramayana.
Only women danced in the ballet, taking the roles of Prince Rama as well as his wife, Sita, the evil demon Ravana, and the monkey king Hanuman. They danced to re-create a divine epic on earth, to mirror heaven and bring to the king and his people divine blessing. When the ballet was performed it was thought that harmony finally reigned between the gods and humanity on earth.

The ballet dancers were considered earthly
apsaras
or angels, messengers to the divine. They performed the exquisite hand, wrist, and arm gestures that defy description, bending back their fingers, hands, wrists, and elbows as if they had no bones. And they were protected as a separate part of the king's harem; only the semidivine
deva-raj
could touch these angels. To this day the
apsara
is second only to the Angkor towers as a symbol of Cambodia.

These
apsaras,
wrapped in gleaming silks and bejeweled from their intricate crowns to their ankle bracelets, became legendary, even outside Cambodia. When Siam began its first raids into the country, the ballet corps was one of the targets for war booty. The victorious Siamese army finally did take Cambodian ballet dancers back to the court of Siam, where they instructed a Siamese dance troupe.

The decline of Angkor brought the decline of Khmer ballet in its own country. The dance thrived largely through the patronage of the Siamese court. When the French colonialists sought to revive Khmer ballet in the twentieth century, they imported dancers from the royal Siamese dance corps. Only Khmer folk dance had survived the upheavals inside Cambodia. Dance had become a more integral part of Khmer village cultural life as the central political power of the king became distant and artistic patronage evaporated. Khmer folk dance inspired dance in neighboring Laos, and the Lao returned the favor, according to legend, by introducing Cambodians to a dance they call
ram lao
—the dance of Laos.

Dance was shared—or stolen—among the Khmer, Lao, and Siamese. But not the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese, as most Cambodians will tell you, do not dance. Some believe the Vietnamese are incapable of understanding or feeling dance, that they cannot “move” properly from birth and that their souls are too stiff or cold to allow them to dance. When they speak like this, Cambodians sound like Spaniards describing the English.

Those are the obvious expressions of the profound cultural differences that date back to the founding of their societies—to their separate sources of
inspiration, China and India. While the Khmers were settling the Mekong River area, gradually moving to northwestern Cambodia and establishing their capital at Angkor, the Vietnamese were establishing their culture in the Red River Delta, home of modern Hanoi in North Vietnam and on the southern border of China. The Red River culture of the Vietnamese was the antithesis of the Mekong River culture of the Khmers.

Like the Khmers, the Vietnamese claim their society is thousands of years old. While Vietnamese culture does date back to the second century B.C., the Vietnamese state has a very different history from that of the Khmers. The Vietnamese were under direct control of their powerful northern neighbor China for more than 1,000 years. What distinguishes the Vietnamese from other, now forgotten peoples bordering the Middle Kingdom was their will to survive Chinese domination.

During those 1,000 years as a Chinese colony the Vietnamese were forced to become as Chinese as foreign barbarians could. Vietnam was run as a Confucian state with a centralized government built around a king or emperor. The Vietnamese had their own mandarinate, as required, that made up the highly educated bureaucracy. Chinese was the official and scholarly language. Any Vietnamese with the slightest ambition had to master the Chinese language, Chinese characters, and Chinese mentality. The entire elite cultural milieu was Chinese—from the dress of robes, slippers, and pants to the food eaten with chopsticks and the ethics drawn from Confucianism.

While the Khmers were building their own Angkor civilization, drawing heavily on Indian influence, the Vietnamese culture was suffocating under this rich Chinese society. Only in Vietnam villages did a native culture survive. Here the Vietnamese language was spoken; here local chiefs remained aloof. Vietnamese villages became small universes unto themselves, walled against the royal Chinese culture that controlled their country.

This simultaneous emulation and rejection of China and things Chinese continued through modern times in Vietnam. The Vietnamese still admire much of Chinese culture but they had to learn to rebel if they were to survive as a people and nation. In that quest they became the best “students” of Mother China—brilliant militarists, like their Chinese rulers, and fanatics about the superiority of their own civilization—and the need to keep it independent.

Thus, at the zenith of Khmer culture, the Vietnamese were just beginning to free themselves of Chinese rule in the eleventh century. But neither the Chinese nor their Mongol successors gave up their “southern colony” easily. In the thirteenth century the Vietnamese had to fight an attempt by
the new Mongol rulers to reconquer Vietnam, and for a short period in the fifteenth century the Chinese managed to rule Vietnam. But in 1428 the Vietnamese finally won control over their Red River homeland.

Already, they had begun to expand southward. The Vietnamese showed how much they had learned from the Chinese, who were world-class conquerors. The Vietnamese felt confined in the Red River Delta. That large fertile valley opens onto the Gulf of Tonkin and is surrounded, nearly entrapped, by mountains to the north, west, and south. Hill tribes live in the rugged, forested mountains, but not the lowland Vietnamese. Their wet rice culture needed flat delta land.

Only to the south was there room, where the hills retreat and open to what becomes the vast, fertile Mekong Delta. The Vietnamese wanted that land to expand and, they believed, to protect their culture in the process. This was the home of the Chams and Khmers. It is the land Cambodians still call Kampuchea Krom.

The Vietnamese expansion had begun in the eleventh century when they won three northern provinces from the Chams in what is now central Vietnam. For the next 700 years, while establishing their independence from the Chinese, the Vietnamese also reorganized their society to support the military. They enforced various uniform taxes on villages and divided the military into separate land and sea branches. Their dynasties grew stronger and more effective in raising taxes and enforcing a common, militaristic goal for the society. They looked to China as a model, or yardstick to measure their own accomplishments, while they looked south to the Mekong River for land. That attitude survived to modern times. Whether as friend or foe, China remained the focus of Vietnamese attention, while the states of the Mekong River—whether Champa, Cambodia, or Laos—have been regarded as lesser societies and not true competitors.

Vietnam's conquest of the south proved costly, leading to reconquest by China and finally a civil war. The Chinese briefly took back control of Vietnam in 1407, when the Vietnamese were badly bloodied by Chams attacking in self-defense. But that calamity gave birth to rebellion led by one of Vietnam's more revered national heroes, Le Loi—a peasant who led the successful twenty-year revolt against China and founded the Le Dynasty

Once again, independence was translated into expansion. Under the Le Dynasty the Vietnamese made their spectacular gains in the south. They fought and brokered their way to Nha Trang, in the Mekong Delta. But this expansion had been so quick and dynamic that a feud developed within the
elite that became a deadly rivalry. And out of this feud grew the division between northern and southern Vietnam.

A member of the Nguyen family was governor of the new southern Vietnamese provinces, and in the late sixteenth century he created a separate fiefdom for himself too distant to be controlled by the Le court in the north. In retaliation the northern rulers froze out the Nguyens from court positions and accused them of holding back taxes. Fighting broke out between north and south in 1620 and continued for fifty years, ending with a divided Vietnam.

Freed from northern control, the Nguyen Dynasty completed the push south and by 1765 captured the rest of the territory that makes up modern southern Vietnam. They annexed the land over 100 years and in a fashion that has its modern variants. First the Nguyen Vietnamese used divisions within the Khmer court to win favors and territory from Cambodian rivals to the crown. Then they openly interfered with Khmer court politics, enforcing their policies on Khmer rulers. The decadent and weak Cambodian rulers encouraged this interference.

The Nguyen Vietnamese settled their newly acquired Khmer territory in a manner that, again, has echoes in modern affairs. First they allowed their least desirable elements to open the territory—vagabonds, deserters, and those banished from their villages who wanted to escape the rigors of the stratified Nguyen society. The state then selected formal settlers to farm the land and build new villages, relieving the crowded and poor provinces. Finally, demobilized soldiers were given land grants in the territory in return for their military service.

The northern dynasty decided to pacify this now large, wealthy southern Vietnamese territory and unite the two Vietnams for the first time. But after more than twenty-five years of warfare the south defeated the north and in 1802 claimed control over the enlarged state of Vietnam, stretching from the Red River Delta to the mouth of the Mekong. The new conservative emperor chose to rule from Hue, in the center of Vietnam, rather than Hanoi or Saigon. He also asked for and received formal investiture by China, to ensure legitimacy. In the process China provided the new enlarged state with its modern name—Viet-nam.

Vietnam was ruled as three regions—the north was Tonkin, the center was Annam with the city of Hue, and the south was Cochin China. Immediately this tenuous new state became embroiled in troubles afflicting neighboring Cambodia. The Khmer court was again embroiled in family squabbles, and
one rival claimant asked the Siamese to bring in their army in his support. The Vietnamese, hoping to preempt the Thais, supported the weak king and reinstated him to the throne. But in 1831 the Siamese struck back and took all of Cambodia west of the Mekong River. The Vietnamese emperor dispatched a force of 15,000 soldiers, defeated the Siamese, and in 1834 appointed a young Khmer princess to act as puppet while the Vietnamese tried to absorb what was left of Cambodia into the new Vietnamese Empire.

This Vietnamese emperor, Minh Mang, was an admirer of all things Chinese and tried to “Confucianize” Cambodia as China had Confucianized Vietnam over 1,000 years. Chinese and Vietnamese languages were taught, along with Vietnamese customs. The country was divided into new provinces attached to Cochin China's administration. Vietnamese subjects settled in Cambodia and looked to Vietnam as the source of law and authority, not the puppet Cambodian queen.

The Cambodians suffered this Chinese-inspired policy of conquest and absorption for seven years and then revolted in 1840, massacring their Vietnamese overlords. They managed to force the Vietnamese to admit they could no longer rule Cambodia directly, but they could not force a total Vietnamese troop withdrawal. There were some fifty Vietnamese forts implanted in the country. And the Vietnamese emperor would not stand for such a loss.

“Sometimes the Cambodians are loyal; at other times they betray us. We helped them . . . and lifted them out of the mud,” Minh Mang said during the fighting. “Now they are rebellious: I am so angry. . . . Hundreds of knives should be used against them, to chop them up.”