Our three hour cyclo tour of Ho Chi Minh City was nice, but I'll take Hanoi for a cyclo tour. Saigon is more modern, wealthier, and cleaner, but after falling in love with the grit of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City doesn't measure up (to me, others in the group told me they like Saigon better for the opposite reasons why I like Hanoi better than HCMC.) Well, unicuique sua.
(Editor: First you deliberately try to confuse readers by alternating the name of the big city in the south, and then you use a not common Latin phrase that people won't necessarily know what it means. Writer: Well, to each their own.)
We made several stops during the cyclo tour. The first one was at the memorial to the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who self-immolated in a Saigon intersection to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem on June 11, 1963.
(Sorry foreign readers, I do dates the right way -- month than date, not the other way -- even when writing about events that took place in other lands. Just because the U.S. of A is the only country to use this style doesn't mean we get it wrong. No, you get it wrong!)
I've seen write-ups that the monk torched himself to protest the Vietnam War, but that's not the case. It was because Diem favored Catholics for jobs, military promotions, land allocation, business arrangements, and even tax breaks. And that was just part of the favoritism his administration gave to Catholics at the punishment of Buddhists. Perhaps the best analogy is the way Muslims treat Christians and Jews in Muslim countries.
When Buddhists protested, government forces fired into the crowd of protesters, killing nine Buddhists. Brilliant move by Diem and his supporters in the military.
There is a large statue to the monk, with fresh flowers there. The photograph of Burning Monk was on the front page of newspapers around the world. (Younger readers, "newspapers" were once a thing. And they were trusted because they had earned trust.)
President Kennedy said that "no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one." Malcolm Browne of AP got the photo, while the UPI correspondent (yeah, UPI was once a thing) forgot his camera. The UPI newspaper in Sydney, Australia lost 5,000 subscribers who switched to the AP newspaper.
Later that year, Diem was assassinated in a coup backed by the CIA. Diem was supposed to be sent into exile, but things got out of head and South Vietnamese troops shot him to death.
Back to Quang Duc, the great writer David Halberstam covered the story for the New York Times. Here's his most memorable paragraph:
"I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think ... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him."[
Quang Duc's heart remained intact and did not burn. It was placed in a glass chalice at a pagoda and is regarded as a relic. The secret police tried to confiscate his ashes, but two monks escaped with the urn by jumping over the back fence. The secret police did confiscate his charred heart. I could not find reference to what happened to the confiscated heart.
I know this is a lot more history in depth than I usually cover in a blog post, but it's a remarkable story and worth knowing.
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