My name is Mai. I am a Vietnamese living in Paris. During the whole period of the Vietnamese war, I was what they usually call here "an active militant" against this war.
I tell you my personal history, an experience lived between a man and a woman during a period in which war devastated my country and a whole nation fought under napalm against Western imperialism. In which Vietnamese women who refused to submit to the law of the oppressor were tortured, raped, and killed.
I was married to a Frenchman who defined himself as a radical left intellectual. This characterization meant to me in that period, someone who is against war. All the people from the West sustaining this position were to me persons refusing "a prior" domination and oppression I meant by domination, the domination of a nation by another nation, as well as the domination of a human group by another group or the domination of an individual by another person.
If this man called himself a leftist, it was because the suffering of the oppressed echoes in his ears and his eyes could not stand the sight of torture of bodies and souls anymore. If this man confessed a leftist attitude, it was because he was looking for a different kind of relationship with others, it was because he was trying to cancel from his life relationships of injustice and cruelty, institutionalized or not; it was because he was conscious of the impossibility to impose this cruelty on the other half of the world. If this man retained a leftist political opinion it was because he intended to live his own liberation.
Proofs of my servant condition
In what way was my belonging to the Vietnamese world and my womanhood used by a leftist man?
In May 1968 Jacques Doyon came back to Le Figaro, he was writing on Vietnam. In December 1969 he left the newspaper which allowed him to write a book on Vietnam, signing a contract with Fayard Publishers. I was brought to work with him on this book on deserters of the French army during the first war in Vietnam and the position of the PCF (French Communist Party) on this problem. Thus, we can note that Jacques Doyon was concerned with the disobedience and the refusal of the system because desertion means to a PCF militant the refusal to obey an order which forces a person to kill, the refusal to obey a Party which does not accept disobedience and consequently is opposed to liberation.
The interview and the realization of the book
I participated in all the interviews with the deserters. They are for the most married to Vietnamese women. My presence or rather the presence of an Asian woman neutralizes the mistrust and reassures these women. Also my belonging to the Vietnamese world in struggle served the same goal. Upon their arrival in France, these women experienced themselves bewilderment and racism, and furthermore the humiliation and systematic rejection by the French community towards these "colonials", rejection which has pushed some of these women into a psychiatric clinic upon request of their husband's family.
Doyon also asked me to contact politicians from the PCF and "democratic" organizations. I was brought to lie, to invent false stories in order to get information. My Vietnamese female identity was used to open each and every door. But I have also spoken very often about the Vietnamese world, the suffering of a nation that underwent the cruelty of domination, the Vietnamese women fighting for their liberation: being doubly oppressed, how could we achieve our liberation?
I spoke about my childhood, about my birth while my parents were deported, about my being aware of the fact that never again the Vietnamese people were going to support slavery.
Furthermore I typed; I typed a lot and retyped texts and texts all over again, I did the housework; the cooking and the washing. I talked about my liberation without knowing that I was this male's slave, being exploited on two different levels:
- intellectually, by having ideas that belonged to me since I suffered and struggled, stolen from me;
- manually by being used as a housekeeper
After 2 years the job was finished: he signed the book and had the bad taste to dedicate the book to me: To Mai and to the land of her ancestors. It is a fine land and very fertile so that it is easy for characters like Jacques Doyon to exploit it.
He is not the only one, it is an exercise practiced by people from the right as well as from the left; those who are in power but have few ideas and who get their ideas from people who are-oppressed and without defense, just because they have the money.