Free Just As I Thought by Grace Paley

the floor of blast and carnage. We saw rosy, rouged theater groups playing to the thin, pale people, making some kind of cheeriness in those caves and underground households. Since then, I never see an Asian woman wearing lots of makeup without thinking, Ah! an actress! A theater person.
    Naturally I wanted to speak to my neighbor; she had the window seat and there was no reason for her to turn toward me. When we were about twenty-five minutes from Minneapolis, I said, Excuse me, but where are you from? She looked at me out of a half minute’s silence. I’m Vietnamese, she said. Then I asked her the following questions all at once, in rapid, nervous order: What city are you from? What province? Do you have children? Where do you live now? When did you come here—to this country?
    She answered in a friendly but factual way. I am from Saigon. I have two children. I am here six months. My children are in the Sisters School in Maryland, the nuns that helped us get here. My husband is dead. He is an American. German. I live with his family in Wisconsin.
    Then I asked her: Was your husband a soldier? Were you born in Saigon?
    No. No, he was a businessman. He was much older than I. He was very rich; real estate was only one of his businesses. He was in Saigon from the late fifties. He died of a long illness. Oh, we have lost over $200,000 in the rush to get here on time. No, I was not born in Saigon. I was born in Hanoi.
    We drank our pre-landing orange juice for a while. I had to make a decision. Should I tell her that I had been in Hanoi, that I had gone with others as a political antiwar woman to record the devastation of American war and bring back (at the North Vietnamese initiative) three American prisoners of war? I thought, No. Better not. God knows, she could become angry and attack me with the sorrow of her exile. Then I thought (since opposing thoughts often succeed one another), Yes, I will tell her. Otherwise this air talk will remain just another chitchat, nothing moved further, no knowledge gained on either side. So I told her I had been to Hanoi a few years earlier. I had been a guest of the North Vietnamese and I had worked against the war. With all my strength, I added.
    You were in Hanoi? she asked, turning to me, probably to see my eyes which had seen her home. What was it like? How were the people? And the streets?
    I told her I had walked every morning along the Lake of the Restored Sword. I had lived in the Hotel of Reunification.
    What’s that? she said with a little irritation. Then: What else?
    I told her there were trolley tracks along the park and the cars were packed with people, stuffed, their heads and legs and arms stuck out of doors and windows. I told her I saw a military parade, but the lines were not straight, and children and women joined the march and then went off. I walked up and down streets of French Mediterranean houses.
    She said, Most people think Saigon is much handsomer than Hanoi. They think Hanoi is gray. Was it much damaged?
    I told her about the individual shelters sunk along the streets like big garbage cans for individuals caught in sudden bombing. In 1969 it had seemed a poor, bike-riding city. But the trees were wonderful, plane trees, and what was it—eucalyptus.
    Yes, it’s green; it is green.
    Why did you leave? I asked.
    Oh, long ago, she said. In ’54, when the French left us, we were taken south, tens of thousands of schoolchildren, by the sisters—in trains and vans and buses. So that we should not grow up to become Communists and forget our Jesus. My father was already dead, but my mother—I never saw my dear mother again. I remember I looked back, she said, and in my mind it has remained always a mist of greenness.
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    In ’69, my friends and I flew into Hanoi, from Phnom Penh, a big busy city, stinking of bad automobiles and, streaming among them, the Cambodian ricksha runners hauling upper blue-collar workers from office to lunch to home. We