A Mixed Farewell To Indochina

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 29, 2005

Reviewed by Cathy Peake, a Sydney writer.

Hanoi, Adieu

By Mandaley Perkins

Fourth Estate, 323pp, $29.95

In September 1936, Michel L'Herpiniere set sail for Indochina with his family in the steamer Andre le Bon. Hanoi, Adieu, written by his stepdaughter Mandaley, is L'Herpiniere's story of growing up in Hanoi and his life as a soldier and a businessman in a colonial society already beginning to fray at the edges.

By the time Michel leaves for Australia in 1951 with his French wife and two sons, bankrupt and overwhelmed by the feeling that his presence there is deeply unwelcome, that society has been entirely destroyed.

He was a child of the French Empire whose father had joined the French Colonial Army in 1926; "home" before these memoirs start had been wherever his father's career had dictated - Madagascar, France or Morocco. But it is at age 16 in Hanoi when that feeling of always being in transition begins to evaporate.

He had never seen his parents so happy and animated. His father builds a horse-racing complex. His first flirtation takes place by the racetrack, he tops the entrance exam for the Officer Training School, he loses his virginity and enthusiastically looks forward to a life in Indochina.

Looking back, he realises: "I did not know then how a country that one did not belong to could break a man's spirit. But then, for a long time I couldn't see that I didn't belong to Indochina ... We were two cultures combined effortlessly on the streets of Hanoi in an enchanting melange of East and West. At least, that was how I saw it."

Hanoi, Adieu is a testament to the disruption of those rosy adolescent dreams. It begins in tragedy. When L'Herpiniere is on his first posting as a lieutenant at the frontier of Lang Son, his senior officer calls him into his office to ask him if he recalls the procedure for a firing squad. He is dispatched to supervise the execution of four men accused of being communist spies and "enemies of France". After the firing squad has done its job, as the officer in charge he is to deliver the coup de grace to the bodies - "a shot to the temple of each, just to make sure".

It is not until he reaches the disused limestone quarry that he realises his only real friend at Lang Son, Nguyen Nga, is one of the accused. This abrupt, gut-wrenching awakening to the realities of his adopted country is set down for us in chapter one and its appalling reverberations give an anguished, "hair shirt" quality to his subsequent observationsof Vietnamese history.

As the memoir sweeps further across the French response to the nationalist movement, the Japanese occupation and World War II, the rise of the Vietminh, the refusal of the United States to help "a colonial regime" and the chaos and tragedy of the postwar years, L'Herpiniere's incomprehension of the complexities of Indochinese politics moves on and off centre stage.

His personal narrative, with its lingering nostalgia and wishful thinking, sits oddly with this brutal history. It is often distanced and restrained. The perspective of his memories alters frequently and the long passages devoted to Indochinese history and politics often flow quite independently of the story of his "growing up".

Despite the author's and L'Herpiniere's sustained and emotional efforts to the contrary, when you put down this memoir it is hard to escape the feeling that the real life of his adopted country was taking place elsewhere.

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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