Cocktail parties and culpability in Saigon

It seemed clear from the outset that although a large part of this book is supposedly set in Saigon, there was never going to be all that much local colour or Vietnamese culture depicted in this novel. It is very much about the American expatriates who were in Vietnam in the 1960s. The focus of this novel is about the women’s lot in this era, which was still quite conservative in its expectations of women and gender roles.

Our protagonist is Patricia, a newly wed, who is following her husband, Peter, who works for navy intelligence, and apparently a civilian advisor on the Saigon Electric Power Project. It is a life of great privilege and luxury, especially for these accompanying wives,

“There were so many cocktail parties in those days. [..] Most days, I would bathe in the morning and then stay in my housecoat until lunch, reading writing letters home […] I’d do my nails, compose the charming bread-and-butter notes we were always exchanging […] Out for a luncheon or a lecture or a visit to the crowded market, and then another bath when I woke from my afternoon nap…” (p3-4)

and then dressing up for yet another cocktail party.

Just 23 years old, Patricia has a bachelor’s degree from Marymount, and has taught kindergarten for just one year, “but my real vocation in those days, my aspiration, was to be a helpmeet for my husband” (p5). Indeed, when she marries, her widowed father who has no one else in life except this one daughter, takes her hands before walking her down the aisle, and says,

“Be a helpmeet to your husband. Be the jewel in his crown” (p5)

The novel is a period piece, which makes clear how women’s lives, roles, and expectations were circumscribed at this time.

At a garden party (a daytime cocktail party), she meets the friend who will change her time and life in Vietnam, Charlene. Patricia tells us she was shy then, unsure of herself,

“I wanted to be a helpmeet to my husband an these gatherings, cocktail parties and military people and corporate people and advisors of all kinds, were, as my husband put it, how things got done in Saigon” (p6)

Charlene is also a corporate wife, who has experience, is fluent in French, extremely confident and manipulative, and mother of 3, all the things in fact which Patricia longs to have or be, but has not yet. She is very easily dragged along in Charlene’s wake, into her ‘cabal’.

Charlene raises funds in whatever ways she can to buy treats for a hospital for local Vietnamese. Her aim, she tells Patricia, is to do whatever good she can. She even takes treats out to a leper hospital.

There are several categories of American expatriates, especially the wives, ‘American dependents’. The military wives in particular are ‘stoic and efficient’(p153) who express no preference for any place,

“The understanding among them seemed to be that their peripatetic lives were simply the inevitable result of their marriages to these particular men, their fate: part accident, part unintended consequence, all inescapable. The unpredictable fruit of any American romance. […] And while some of these women instantly embraced wherever they found themselves – studying the language, bartering in the market, going to every State Department lecture, every cultural exchange – others simply brought their stateside lives with them, packed hermetically into whatever family unit they travelled in; some even brought the family dog, the family station wagon – well contented with themselves and the utter impenetrability of their American lives” (p154)

Marilee is one of these military wives, the wife of a major, who

“absolutely hated Saigon, the food, the heat, the noise, the people” (p154)

Marilee challenges Charlene’s charity work.

“How many charitable organizations have stepped in? And still the place I a mess, and getting messier, if you ask me” (p157)

She asks Charlene and Patricia how much good the two of them think they can do, and suggests that the funds they raise can instead be used for the American school, so their own children can benefit. She professes sympathy with the Vietnamese children,

“but they aren’t going to have their lives improved by a toy or a lollipop. Let’s face it: their fates are sealed. Their fates were sealed the moment they were born in this godforsaken place. Arrange an airlift, if you really want to help, Get every newborn out of here. Get them American parents. […] Why kid yourself? Nothing else will do any good” (p159)

Charlene counters that the impulse to recoil, to turn away from suffering, is a small evil. She agrees that while there is indeed very little they can do in this place,

“But that very little good might be just the thing required to stand against that very little evil – that impulse to turn away” (p162)

Marilee drops her attack, but she had previously made a telling point, that

“There’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the helpless, only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing” (p159).

Hence the title of this book, Absolution. The protagonist, at the time of recounting these events, is in her 70s. She is telling this story of her time in Vietnam to Charlene’s daughter, Rainey, whom she knew when Rainey was just a little girl with her Barbie doll, in Saigon. She is telling Rainey of Charlene’s life, now that Charlene has passed away. It is a clever device to have Patricia telling of the distant past, able to see the events all the more clearly for the passage of time, and to be able to point out intentions and regrets with the wisdom of hindsight. It is also helpful that Patricia tends to be a character who has apparently no strong convictions of her own, although she is always drawn to friendships with women of strong convictions of their own, and who treat her like a sidekick. This is how Pattricia reflects on the American presence in Vietnam as seen through the eyes of a ‘typical’ corporate wife, an American ‘dependent’, as they are called.

Part II of the book, the last quarter or so, is told in Rainey’s voice. Rainey is now married, with grown up children of her own. Her generation has an entirely different take on America’s role in Vietnam. There is a lot more guilt there, and blame and recrimination. In 1975, Rainey was home from college, after a highly rebellious school career, and she takes her mother to task for what Americans did in Vietnam, and for not caring ‘a hoot’ about the Vietnamese.

“It was the oil companies, my father’s company, that sent all those hapless kids to their death. For the sake of the Mercedes and Cadillac in our driveway. Our plush two acres of grass. My father’s portfolio. Her addiction to Chanel and St. John” (p288).

Her father orders her out of their house.

At her mother’s funeral, when her mother’s sister finds her niece and nephews not remembering their mother with much love, she tells them that their mother could have left them all when they came back from Saigon, that there was another man. At first, Rainey imagines this is just her aunt being defensive of their mother’s memory, “

Satisfied that she had, perhaps, made our mother’s life interesting” (p295)

Aunt Arlene tells them their mother stayed for their sake,

“”You have to remember how it was in those days. For women. For wives.” Children, she claimed, were a married woman’s golden handcuffs.” (p295).

A lot of this novel tries to capture and convey the extreme conservatism and modesty and even prudishness of the era, where there were many taboos for women, and many kinds of censured behaviours unthinkable for 21st century American girls.

Although the book only scrapes the surface of American culpability in Vietnam, it seems authentic in the sense that it is likely for many corporate American wives/dependents in Vietnam, their engagement with the country also only scraped the surface, and likewise, their sense of responsibility. The novel does indicate, through the figure of Patricia, that the Americans were not unaware of the discrepancy between their principles of egalitarianism, and their practise as elites and pampered expatriates in Saigon in the 1950s and 60s.  From early on in her time in Saigon, Patricia reflects:

“We were approaching my very favourite time of day in Saigon, the afternoon siesta, and despite my egalitarian disapproval of hiring household help, I was also anticipating, with great pleasure, what I know would greet me when I returned to our townhouse. Our bedroom shuttered drawn against the heat and light. The fresh coverlet turned down. The air conditioner that had been working all morning to chill the fragrant room only recently hushed. The overhead fan moving silently. My dressing gown laid out across the bed. A bottle of cool Vichy water and a shirt- clean glass on the bedside table. A fresh flower or two in a vase beside them. A lit joss stick on the dresser. Luxurious midday sleep” (p46).

The American wives and dependents are encouraged to let the servants do the work, because they are accustomed to dealing with the conditions, and to be leisured or to do volunteer work, and to support their husbands by attending socials and thus advancing his career. This was all seen as part of being patriotic Americans.

McDermott also includes some cringeworthy episodes, which we see through Patricia’s eyes. At a lunch for a few American wives, Charlene put her arm around a servant who had been serving their lunch, and introduced her to the guests,

“sang her praises […] declare the entire family ‘adored’ her, and asked us for a round of applause” (p35)

Patricia reports that they all complied ‘happily’, but she regards the servant as the ‘poor woman’, indicating she is aware of the imposition. Charlene tries to be kind, but she has no idea her values are not universal. She tries to reunite the servants with their loved ones, regardless of consequences. She tries to sell Vietnamese orphaned babies to Americans adopters, without scruple, to raise money for good causes, without considering the ethics of such transactions. Patricia finds herself embroiled in Charlene’s schemes, and but of course is eventually compelled to stop going along with her forceful friend and make her own stand on where her own ethics draw the lines. The clash of values – personal, peer, and assumed national, make for an interesting read. Overall, the novel was nowhere near as searching or telling as one could have wished about the American presence and role in Vietnam, but in its lightness and skimming the surface, it was a pleasant and undemanding read, without being trivial or belittling.

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