The Runcible Architect.: Contested Ground.

Door, Hoa Lo Prison, Hanoi.

Ok, I think I'm back in action. I could say I've been busy with looking at architecture [true], visiting tailors for some custom clothes [also true], and enjoying Vietnam's fabulously delicious cuisine [true!], but these wouldn't be the only reasons I've been a bit MIA over the last week. The true reason is that after visiting Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, I haven't been able to write a word, and barely able to draw.

Short history lesson: Hoa Lo, otherwise known as the "Hanoi Hilton," was an infamous POW prison in Hanoi that housed American pilots during the Vietnam War. Its most famous resident was John McCain, who was there for the bulk of his 5.5 years as a POW. I knew going to the museum would be rough - but hey, I've spent the better part of my reading career with my nose in one history book or another, not to mention a history degree...I've read the history, I know what happens. And as it turns out, that was my problem.

To say that the historical interpretation presented at the prison museum were one-sided would be putting it lightly. Outright lying would be more appropriate: according to the placards, being an American POW in Hoa Lo was nothing short of an enlightening cultural experience, complete with Christmas dinners, craft time, comfy clothes, language lessons, ample exercise time, and of course, adherence to the Geneva Convention. It was sickening, and horrifying, and further evidence why the work of historians, critics, writers, artists, etc is SO important. If the telling of history is left to those who want to use history for any agenda other than trying to uncover and analyze the truth, we're in big trouble.

The prison was built in 1899 by the French to house political prisoners, and was infamous for brutality before the Americans showed up. The museum was quite focused on telling that story, complete with creepy music, low lights, tons of glassy-eyed mannequins, solitary confinement cells, torture instruments, even a guillotine. Rows and rows of photographs of political pictures [many of them women] lined the walls. The placards emphasized the heroism, sacrifice, and victimization of those who were held there during the first part of the 20th century, those who gathered under an almond tree in the yard to build the consciousness of a new nation: a nation whose leader opened the new Proclamation of the Independence of Vietnam with familiar words: "All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

But during the war with the Americans, a curious spatial reversal occurred: the same space that had represented decades of colonial oppression now became the site and symbol of the oppressed retaliating against and punishing their new colonializers.The captured pilots, solitary, newly-helpless representatives of Western imperialism, whose grandfathers had written about Rights - housed in comfort and ease, while millions of North Vietnamese starved and died outside the walls? Hmm. Torture, absolved in the name of defending a homeland? Depends on your perspective, I guess. And, on who's writing the placards.

While I am certainly not proud of US involvement in Vietnam, am horrified by stories of brutality, massive casualties,or the continuing effects of Agent Orange, and feel so very, very strange that I can write these words sitting in a hotel not 50 km from My Lai, I am proud that in the US, we can engage history [however haltingly, incompletely, or otherwise unsatisfactorily] and attempt to sort it out. And, hopefully, make progress: my brother, a Marine coming home from Iraq in the mid 2000s, was never called a "baby killer:" people were learning to support the troops, even if they didn't support the war.

In contrast, the Vietnamese government, as late as 2008, has issued statements that deny all reports of torture of POWs at Hoa Lo.

Anyway, this is a minefield, certainly, and a bit of a tangent from my usual posts. I've written and rewritten this post about 17 times. It's just about blowing my mind to be here, on ground that was paid for by millions and millions of lives, while I'm standing around with a weather station and a sketchbook in my hands. I sat up all night, on the night train from Hanoi to Danang, waiting to cross the 17th parallel. When we did, just after dawn, it was mostly rice fields, but some were giant and round. Water buffalo stood in curiously regular circular ponds that dotted the landscape. The rubber plantations and palm trees have almost caught up with the bomb craters: it's getting harder and harder to see them. And as we turned toward the coast, a train full of people whose parents were trying to kill each other ooohed and ahhhed at the beaches and mountains.

And Hoa Lo? Most of it was knocked down to build condos 10-15 years ago, probably a greater testament to contemporary "progress" than a pile of history books. Anyway, someone made some money - while all the rest of us reel with trying to figure out how places like Hoa Lo could exist in the first place.