Up to a few months ago, Ben Suc was a prosperous village of some thirty-five hundred people. It had a recorded history going back to the late eighteenth century, when the Nguyen Dynasty, which ruled the southern part of Vietnam, fortified it and used it as a base in its campaign to subjugate the natives of the middle region of the country.
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In recent years, most of the inhabitants of Ben Suc, which lay inside a small loop of the slowly meandering Saigon River, in Binh Duong Province, about thirty miles from the city of Saigon, were engaged in tilling the exceptionally fertile paddies bordering the river and in tending the extensive orchards of mangoes, jackfruit, and an unusual strain of large grapefruit that is a famous product of the Saigon River region.
The village also supported a small group of merchants, most of them of Chinese descent, who ran shops in the marketplace, including a pharmacy that sold a few modern medicines to supplement traditional folk cures of herbs and roots; a bicycle shop that also sold second-hand motor scooters; a hairdresser’s; and a few small restaurants, which sold mainly noodles. These merchants were far wealthier than the other villagers; some of them even owned second-hand cars for their businesses.
The village had no electricity and little machinery of any kind. Most families kept pigs, chickens, ducks, one or two cows for milk, and a team of water buffaloes for labor, and harvested enough rice and vegetables to sell some in the market every year. Since Ben Suc was a rich village, the market was held daily, and it attracted farmers from neighboring villages as well as the Ben Suc farmers. Among the people of Ben Suc, Buddhists were more numerous than Confucianists, but in practice the two religions tended to resemble each other more than they differed, both conforming more to locally developed village customs practiced by everyone than to the requirements of the two doctrines.
The Confucianists prayed to Confucius as a Buddha-like god, the Buddhists regarded their ancestors as highly as any Confucianist did, and everyone celebrated roughly the same main holidays. In 1963, Christian missionary teams, including both Vietnamese and Americans, paid several visits to the village. One of these groups began its missionary work by slowly driving its car down the narrow main streets of the village, preaching through a loudspeaker mounted on the top of the car, and singing hymns accompanied by an accordion.
Then, in the center of the village, a Vietnamese minister gave a sermon. He argued for the existence of God by pointing out that Vietnamese spontaneously cry out “_Troi oi! _” (“Oh God!”) when they fall or get hurt, and told the villagers that their sins were as numerous as the particles of red dust that covered the leaves of the trees in the dry season.
(The soil around Ben Suc is of a reddish hue.) Just as only God could wash every leaf clean by sending down a rainstorm, only God could wash away their countless sins. At the end of the sermon, he asked the villagers to kneel and pray, but none did. When he asked for questions, or even for arguments against what he had said, only the old village fool stepped forward to challenge him, to the amusement of the small group of villagers who had assembled to listen.
Ordinarily, to entertain themselves, small groups of men would get together in the evening every two weeks or so to drink the local liquor—sometimes until dawn—and occasionally they would go fishing in the river and fry their catch together at night. Some of the marriages in the village were arranged and some were love matches. Although parents—particularly the girls’ parents—didn’t like it, couples often sneaked off in the evenings for secret rendezvous in the tall bamboo groves or in glades of banana trees. At times, there were stormy, jealous love affairs, and occasionally these resulted in fights between the young men. Parents complained that the younger generation was rebellious and lazy, and sometimes called their children hu gao—rice pots—who did nothing but eat.