The Goddess of the Sea

11

    

Thiên Hậu Temple in Saigon photo by Ajik Ulinuha, Unsplash

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here.)

I’m up early and my plan is to scout around the area to find out if I am indeed in Cholon and if the Hotel Arc en Ciel is anywhere nearby. The rain has moved on and I take to the street making sure to note landmarks and street names so I can find my way back. The street scape is intimidating. Even when the traffic lights are in my favour I’m not confident enough to attempt a suicide crossing. Waiting until an experienced local turns up, I take off beside them as they wave the revving drivers to a stop. After a few blocks, I miraculously stumble across a huge nine or ten story building on a corner (no skinny frontage here) with the words ‘Arc En Ciel’ in a neon arch over the front entrance. Pushing open the glass doors, I cross the vast marble foyer to a small reception desk and attempt to explain how I ended up in the wrong hotel.

‘Would you have a vacancy for tonight and could I inspect a room?’ I ask the immaculately groomed young woman behind the desk. Given the size of the place and the lack of guests coming and going, I’m not surprised when her reply in perfect English is, ‘ of course.’

        She summons a young bellhop who takes me in a lift to the seventh floor. He shows me a large sixties style room resplendent with pale green chenille bedspreads, mauve walls and black vinyl padded bedheads. It’s big enough to swing a few cats in, but the lingering scent of tropical damp rising from the floral carpet makes it not so inviting after all. When I ask if the rooftop restaurant is open ( I am hoping for the French-croissant-breakfast view over Cholon described in the New York Times article), he tells me it’s closed for renovations, but I can go up and have a look. I thank him and send the lift to the top floor.

The rooftop is mostly taken up with a glassed-in restaurant but I can’t see any renovations going on. On trying the door, which is definitely locked, I walk around to a spot where I can look out over the city. I don’t know what spectacular view the NY Times journalist was talking about, because it just isn’t there. I scan the horizon every which way. All I can see are rows of ugly buildings alongside rows of traffic-laden streets, not a market stall or smelly vegetable vendor in sight. I am really disappointed. I take the lift down and check with the receptionist.

         ‘This area is Cholon?’

         ‘Yes’ she replies.

          ‘Is there anything to see around here?  Do you know of Marguerite Duras? The Chinese lover?’

          She shakes her head, pulls out a brochure with a map and points to the picture of a temple.

         ‘This is a very old one, many people go here,’ she says.

         ‘Thank-you,’ I reply as I take her offering, ‘I won’t be needing the room after all.’ 

        

A slow-moving mass of cars and motor-bikes honks and beeps beside me as I try to remember how old I was when I first experienced the emotion of disappointment. That searing moment when the illusion of the inherent goodness of life is shattered by things turning bad.  But how can a child know it isn’t their fault when things go wrong, how can they know not to turn the blame inwards and use it to prepare themselves for the next misfortune?  Dampening down, staying low key, believing winning is for others not for you, acting nonchalant, cool, non-attached, standing back and letting those who want to get to the top, walk all over you. Protecting yourself from failure by not even entering the contest, giving up on certain areas of your life, like relationships, recognition, fame, or even, winning the Christmas raffle.

        I wonder if this is what Marj did after she married. Was marriage a terrible shock after her problem-free girlhood as a loved and adored only child? Was it the reason she never played the piano again? I can’t imagine how after spending all those childhood hours practising, you could just give it up, that you wouldn’t insist there would always be a piano in the house, that you wouldn’t teach your children how to play a few tunes at least, no matter how much they complained. It’s like denying a child her mother’s words whispered so tenderly at the breast. And yet despite never hearing my mother or grandmother play piano and never taking up the piano myself, music still found its way into my DNA. While Grandma Jeanie led the sing-alongs at the church fêtes and dances and Marj played all the eisteddfods in Victoria, I took my musical inheritance into the theatre, writing songs and musicals before going on to write in other areas. Although I never learned to read music and only ever played a few guitar chords (and percussion in an all girl latin Jazz band), songs always came easily to me: melody and lyrics intact.

        MD’s mother, Marie, left a different kind of legacy. All she wanted was for Marguerite to become a good scholar especially as her brothers had proven to be such hopeless failures: the older becoming an opium addict and gambler and the younger, a drifter. But while Marie had a strong personality and a fighting spirit, life had dealt her a number of unfair blows. No-one knows why in 1905 after being married for six months, she left her first husband * in France and sailed to Indochine on a teaching contract. Soon after she arrived in Saigon, she became very close with the principal of the Gia Dinh Teacher Training College, Henri Donnadieu. Henri had a wife and two children, and Marie a husband back in France, but in a strangely convenient twist of fate, their respective partners both died and in 1909 Henri and Marie were married. Their son Pierre was born eleven months later, a year later Paul arrived and finally Marguerite in 1914.  Marie kept teaching throughout motherhood, but malaria, typhoid and dysentery were rife in the colonies and Henri in particular suffered from a number of illnesses. He struggled on, taking time off in France, during which he was drafted to fight in the First World War. Too ill to be accepted into the French Army, after recovering his strength he returned to work in the colony. It was to be a brief reprise, for not long after they moved from Hanoi to Phnom Penh, he became so seriously ill that he was shipped back to France, where he died a few months later.

Left to bring up three young children on her own, Marie tried various forms of moneymaking ventures to supplement her meagre teacher’s wage. When she heard about a scheme subsidized by the French government where civil servants could purchase cheap land for agriculture, she applied. It wasn’t until a couple of years later when they were living in Sadec that her allotment came through, only the land she was given was over five hundred miles away in Cambodia. She took six months off teaching, borrowed money at ridiculously high interest rates from Indian loan sharks, and with the two younger kids and fifty hired workers went to establish rice fields on an allotment situated between the Gulf of Siam and the Elephant Mountains.

Despite all their hard work, before the first crop of rice could be harvested, high sea tides flooded the paddies scorching the plants and rendering them useless. Believing her farm would make their fortune, Marie fought back, employing more workers to build walls of mud and bamboo to keep the sea out. It was a clever plan until crabs burrowed into the walls and the sea flooded in once more. Following these defeats MD’s mother would take to her bed for days on end, telling her children she wished she would die. The workers, fearing they wouldn’t be paid would all be on the verge of quitting, when suddenly Marie would come back from the dead with a plan to borrow more money to build something bigger and better. Despair, despondency, defeat; these struggles carried on for years and became a recurring theme in Duras’ writing.

        My mother used to take to her bed too but it wasn’t because she was battling the sea tides. It was a habit that may have started early in her adult life. In the 50s and 60s Australian housewives had a perfectly acceptable ritual for taking time out with ‘ a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down’. Bex powders contained aspirin, caffeine and an addictive pain killer called phenacetin. They were easily dissolved in a cup of tea and some women took several doses a day.

           A precursor to Bex, Vincent’s APC, a pink powder or pill was available as early as 1928 and was still on sale until the 70s when phenacetin was banned because of its links to kidney cancer. I remember seeing the pink powder spilling out of a packet on the kitchen table when I was quite young. Was it my imagination or did it have a lolly-pink scent? During our childhood Marj would often have a lie down after school. We didn’t question it, were not alarmed by it. Dad went to the pub and Marj had a rest.

        I once had an idea for a play about a woman who takes to her bed in a darkened room. Who, when someone brings a meal on a tray with a cup of tea with a sprig of sweet smelling herbs from the garden, sits up and smiles like a small child. But aftertaking a few bites and a few sips and pronouncing it to be delicious, lies back down again, buries herself under the blankets and returns her face to the wall.

      As a performance it would be slow moving and repetitive. Perhaps there would be soundtracks of childhood memories playing, some film footage of scenes from the woman’s life projected on the bed and the walls around her. Maybe also quotes from MD’s writing about her mother’s despair.

        The bed would feel like a safe place, a place of dreams and memory. The woman would occasionally get up and go to the bathroom, her tiny thin body dressed in a pale pink full-length nightgown. The only other person to come would be a daughter bringing meals, and the cleaner who would vacuum all around and under the bed while she was still in it. Dusting and polishing, the cleaner would throw the curtains open, letting the sunlight in through the French doors for a moment or two then close them again. Perhaps the grocery boy might come with a delivery but we wouldn’t see him, only hear him calling out the list. Maybe also a plumber, the lawn mowing man, the postie…

          When I originally conceived this idea, I wondered if I should experience it myself, turn it into a durational performance-art event where I would dress in a pink nightie, lie in a bed and stare at the walls for several weeks on end. I realised I wouldn’t have the stamina.

        The performance ends when after some time without reason the woman just gets up, gets dressed, throws the curtains open and walks through the windows into her garden to pick daisies and violets, fresh mint, lemon balm, blood oranges and juicy grapefruit, bringing them back to her room to make a still life arrangement.  There she takes out her easel, paints and canvas and begins to paint.

         I decide to take the receptionist’s recommendation to visit the Thiên Hậu temple on Nguyen Trai St. Built in 1760, it has long been a familiar part of the Cholon landscape. I doubt MD ever visited but the Chinese lover’s rich father who built all the apartments for Chinese workers in the area, would surely have been a patron. Following the map on the brochure, I take a detour down a narrow lane lined with small market stalls selling fresh garden greens, oranges, flowers, cheap clothing —the usual Chinese fare. It is very subdued, not the least bit loud and smelly like most Chinese markets I’ve seen in other Asian cities. My hope that it will lead to a bigger market street is dashed when the lane ends in a dead end, so I retrace my steps and arrive at the large paved courtyard in front of the temple entrance.  A tall, wrought iron fence protects the courtyard from the street. A group of ageing amputee beggars in makeshift wheelchairs sit joking around as they wait for a coin. Were they child victims of the American War who have been living in poverty ever since? Despite warnings I’ve heard that such beggars work in gangs run by cruel bosses, I offer all my small notes and am rewarded with generous toothless grins. Nearby, a couple of older women in wide cone straw hats sell packets of incense at small low tables. On the terracotta temple rooftop above, dioramas of small ceramic figures depicting scenes from nineteenth century city life are guarded by two fierce dragons.

          From the outside the temple looks deceptively small, but inside there are three tall chambers housing shrines to various deities and the Goddess Mazu, the Lady of the Sea. I step into the sweet air of the outer courtyard and breathe in the sandalwood scent of dozens of large spiral coils of smoking incense hanging in rows from the ceiling. Only a few local people are going about at relaxed pace with their handfuls of incense sticks, stopping in front of a tall goddess, a ceramic tiger and a carved warrior and his horse. Red and gold lanterns sway above dark Chinese painted characters adorning carved columns, doors and giant wall panels.  I light a long thick stick of incense and carry it about, remembering how much Marj loved calligraphy. I once gave her a copy of the Paul Reps book, Zen Telegrams, filled with his calligraphic art. Like me, she found these simple renderings of perfect moments to be profound.

        Another book I picked up in the 70s when I was travelling in the USA was Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by the Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, Trungpa had escaped Chinese occupied Tibet in 1959 and was one of the first teachers to bring Tibetan Buddhism to the west. While I carried the book with me everywhere, somehow I never read it. What I loved most was the symbol on the cover, and I was really sad when I discovered I’d left it behind. I found out later the symbol was a vajra, a ritual implement used in Tantric Buddhism representing shunyata or emptiness and potentiality. A few years after my return to Australia I found another copy in a secondhand bookshop in Newcastle, where I was living with my partner and daughter and soon-to-be son. I was so happy to have it in my possession again but still didn’t read it —again it sat on the shelf gathering dust.

        One day after a rough patch in our relationship left me feeling hopeless and desperate, I took it down from the shelf.  Trungpa’s words spoke directly to me and I devoured it, cover to cover, in one sitting. Hopelessness, he said, is the essential starting point for the spiritual journey.  Learning to live with our personal pain and work with our neurotic tendencies is the seeker’s task on the Buddhist path. It was so eye-opening to hear these words, I sought out other books by Trungpa and found his approach liberating. As the daughter of a depressive parent, the idea that hopelessness could have some value as a place of ‘no ego’, from which you could begin to develop what he called ‘basic sanity’, was revelatory. According to him the hope of enlightenment itself is a symptom of spiritual materialism. There is no-one coming to save us, no one else can commit to that task but ourselves.

         Trungpa was a controversial and mercurial figure who died in 1987 before I could meet him. As luck would have it another Tibetan teacher, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu was visiting Australia the following year and in 1989 I joined his community of students and began learning meditation practices that offered respite from the endless bouncing between the dualities of happy/sad, success/failure, love/loss.

         The deities in this temple are not ones I am familiar with but when I arrive in the third chamber and stand before the altar to the protectress Mazu, * it occurs to me that perhaps MD’s writing does something similar to Trungpa’s. Without offering a panacea for our pain MD uses relentless repetition to amplify it. She turns our hopeless, helpless impossible state into a meditation on emptiness. We recognise our own feelings and (ego) self to the point of annihilation. In the end there is ‘no-thing’. ‘The story of my life doesn’t exist.’ *

The rosy glow eminating from the mountain of decorative altar lamps rests on my skin like the after-effects of a satisfying massage. I plant my incense stick in the large brazier in front of the Goddess figure. This one is for Marguerite and her mother I decide, wherever their wandering souls may be.

________________________

* This must be the most quoted MD line ever : The Lover p 11. ‘The story of my life does not exist.Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path. No line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone. But it’s not true. There was no-one.’ 

*MD and her mother used to joke about her mother’s first husband. His name was Monsieur Obscur (Mr Dark). Adler, p 12.

*Jean Vallier tells a different story, that Marie originally came to Indochine with Mr Obscur and he was repatriated to France where he died six moths later of chronic dysentery. Marguerite Duras, La Vie Comme un Roman. 2006.

* This line in The Lover always stops me in my tracks. : ‘I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t make her forget it.’ * The Lover p18.

* Thiên Hậu or Mazu and she is locally known, was a Fujianese girl who through her spiritual power saved family members from a typhoon. For centuries she has been summoned to give safe passage to generations of Chinese, sailors, fisherman, and immigrants as they sailed the waters of the South China Sea. (Wikipedia rephrased)