“What about your family?”

  “My father died when I was young, and my mother raised me and my younger sister by herself. My sister got married two years ago. My mother is a retired schoolteacher and lives alone now. I think she must miss me very much.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “I joined the army when I was eighteen and never had the chance to express my love to any girl. My unit is made up of all males, so there’s nobody for me to fall in love with.”

  “Well, when you’re on leave this time, maybe you’ll meet someone. Who knows? But anyway, it’s not a problem for men your age never to have fallen in love.” I laughed. “Sometimes love causes nothing but misery.”

  “I’m not sure how happy a person is if they’re in love. But without love, you feel very lonely. A person without love is like a statue. He wouldn’t even be able to tell if moss started growing on his face.”

  The soldier’s eyes suddenly became dark and cold. He turned to look at me, but I felt scared and turned away. Time seemed to slow down. The minutes went by very, very slowly.…

  Suddenly Ha’s young rooster crowed. Then a little while later, other roosters started crowing in the distance. The soldier stood up, hoisted his rucksack onto his back, and picked up his gun.

  “Good-bye for now, Miss Teacher,” he said. “I’ve got to catch the bus.”

  I stood up and saw him to the door. Outside, the crescent moon slipped suddenly behind a row of thick, dark clouds.

  He took my hands in his and held them tightly. His voice quivered, broken, as he said, “Miss … Miss … May I kiss you?”

  It was a natural reaction—I jerked my hands away, ran inside, and slammed the door. From the window, I watched the soldier walking away. Under the moonlight, his silhouette gradually became smaller. I wondered why he wasn’t walking in the direction of the main road but toward the woods.

  * * *

  Two months later, a gray-haired woman accompanied by two young men stopped by our school and asked for a place to spend the night. I talked with her and learned that she was looking for the grave of a fallen soldier. Her son had died in this area during the war. She told me that one night she had a dream in which her son told her, “Mom, I must find a woman to love before I can come home to you.” The gray-haired woman shared this dream with a medium, who then gave her some specific instructions:

  “Find a paper doll crafted in the image of a young and beautiful girl. Take the doll and some rice and some salt to the river near the area where your son was killed. Pray and burn everything in that spot, then throw whatever remains into the river. Hopefully, his soul will return after that.”

  The medium insisted that the woman must follow these instructions exactly if she wanted her son to return home.

  I went with the mother to the bank of the river. As I watched them set up a shrine and place the offerings on it, my body went suddenly all cold. The private in the photo placed on the shrine was the soldier who had come to our house on that night two months earlier.

  I studied the photo for a while, then watched the ashes of the paper doll float down the river. The mother placed a wreath made of white flowers in the water, and eventually this too was consumed by the river.

  The mother began to sob in the twilight.

  “My dear son. You have someone to love now. Please come back to me.… My son … Please …”

  As I left the riverbank, I felt like a sleepwalker. It was inevitable. I knew the thought would haunt me for the rest of my life: if I’d only let him kiss me that night, maybe he wouldn’t have had to return to the cold, dark woods.

  18 / OUT OF THE LAUGHING WOODS

  VO THI HAO

  Vo Thi Hao was born in 1956 in Nghe An and currently lives in exile in Germany. For nearly two decades she was a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association; in 2015 she resigned from that organization to protest the lack of freedom of expression in Vietnam. Her story “Out of the Laughing Woods” was well received when first published in 1991, and it was eventually made into a popular film. The portrayal of the group of women in the story as driven to a kind of hysteria after three years of isolated living at an army supply depot “deep in the ghostly arms of the forest” suggests the ways the war traumatized even those not involved directly in the actual fighting. The “laughing disorder” that apparently afflicts these women is likened to “the wild, cruel laughter of war.” There is no real path to recovery, no hope of finding happiness during peacetime. The women have been irrevocably changed by the war and counted now among its millions of victims.

  * * *

  It was the dark green water of the creek that caused it.

  All four of the young women charged with looking after an army supply depot deep in the Truong Son Mountains began losing their hair until every one of them was nearly bald.

  When Thao, the fifth member of the group, arrived at the depot, the other four women were glad to see her. Thao had long, silky hair, which reached all the way down to her feet. They treasured Thao like gold and made sure the forest would never destroy her beautiful hair by giving her fragrant medicinal leaves to use as shampoo.

  But the forest was too powerful. Two months after she arrived, Thao’s beautiful hair began to turn thin and clumpy. Everyone cried except for Thao, who said, “There’s no need to cry. I already have a boyfriend and he is very faithful. Even if I’m completely bald, he will still love me.”

  The other women stopped crying as they listened to Thao tell her story. Her boyfriend was a student at the University of Literature in Hanoi. His image came to Thao’s memory from some distant place, but then he appeared clearly in front of all the women as a loyal prince.

  Because the women loved Thao, all four of them also fell in love with this man, though in a strictly platonic way. This kind of love is impossible to explain in peacetime. Only those who have experienced war and utter loneliness and who have been on the precipice between life and death can understand it.

  They had lived in the forest for three years, three rainy seasons and two dry seasons. It was now the third burning-hot dry season. Their supply depot was hidden deep in the ghostly arms of the forest. Every now and then a soldier would stop by to pick up supplies and clothes, then leave in a hurry. But they usually lingered long enough to flirt with the women. Their behavior was typical of men who had been living away from women for too long. Some of the soldiers would silently admire them as if they were queens, planting dreamy hopes that attached to the women’s minds like cobwebs. But then the men would disappear and the women would be lonely again.

  Gradually the violence of the battlefield crept closer to the remote army depot. The five women lived anxiously while the forest seemed indifferent, covering the ground with fallen leaves. The deep red color of the leaves was reflected in the bright, hot sky. The women dreamed of red at night while they slept.

  One day around noon, three soldiers came to pick up some supplies. As they got closer to the depot they heard the sound of wild laughter. They stopped for a second, confused and maybe a little frightened. But then they recalled the stories people told about these woods and the witches who lived there and liked to throw parties from time to time. They kept walking, and as they neared the depot, one of the soldiers thought he heard something—probably a white gibbon, he figured, rustling off in the bushes. But as he got closer to the bushes a hand suddenly grabbed his neck. He heard the sound of wild laughter again as he struggled to free himself. The gibbon had a firm grip on him. Then he realized, to his bewilderment, that the white gibbon was actually a naked woman with unkempt hair and a haggard face. She laughed with her mouth open and head tilted up toward the sky.

  The soldier’s voice was stuck in his throat. He was barely able to call out, “Hien! Hien!” A tall, older-looking soldier came running. Hien was both scared and slightly amused when he saw his friend immobilized in the hands of a naked woman. He had heard of a disorder women sometimes suffered, something similar to this situation. Hien moved closer and signaled to his friend to stop struggling. Instead Hien advised him to be gentle and affectionate with the woman to make her calm down.

  Then he left his friend there and ran up the steps of the watchtower to check on the other women. Hien found three women lying on the floor of the watchtower. They were writhing, crying and laughing at the same time, pulling their hair and tearing at their clothes. A woman who was younger than the others ran toward him, holding her head. She didn’t have the laughing disorder, Hien could tell, but he knew she would soon suffer from it. Hien began to tremble as he stood in front of the naked, writhing women. He had witnessed plenty of death in his life as a soldier, but this scene overwhelmed him. He felt a part of him that had been dormant for a long time suddenly awaken and begin kicking around violently. He had the urge to disappear and forget everything.

  But eventually he regained his composure. He thought he might know how to cure this laughing disorder that the women were suffering from. He vaguely remembered hearing about a particular treatment for it when he was a kid. He activated the safety on his gun, just to be sure to avoid any accidents, then brought the gun up to his shoulder and pointed it directly at the women.

  “All right, you Viet Cong women, listen up!” he shouted. “Where are the supplies? Tell me now or I’ll blow your brains out!”

  It was like magic—all of a sudden the women became sober and silent. They looked around for a moment, slightly bewildered. Then, realizing what was happening, they grabbed their own guns and aimed them at Hien, ready to pull the trigger. But fortunately Hien’s friend was watching from below.

  “Don’t shoot!” the other soldier cried out. “He’s one of us.”

  The women noticed the star on Hien’s hat and uniform and slowly lowered their guns. They looked at each other and seemed suddenly embarrassed to realize that they were naked in front of three male strangers. Terrified, they ran off into the forest, wrapping their bodies around trees and quietly sobbing. Even Thao—the only one not suffering from the laughing disorder—ran off into the woods. She really loved her comrade sisters and pitied the fact that they had never been in love. It wasn’t until dark that the five of them returned to the depot and climbed up the watchtower.

  The three male soldiers had already left. They’d scribbled a note on a page torn from a small pocket notebook: “Hello, comrades! We’ll get our supplies from a different depot and send you a doctor. You must remember, our dear comrades, that this is war. Please forgive us. Farewell!”

  A few days later, a nurse came to the depot and gave the women some white pills. But it seemed unnecessary; the laughing disorder had already passed. Now the women seemed calmer, though they looked as if they’d suddenly aged by twenty years.

  After that people started referring to this forest as the Laughing Woods. Instead of using the approved secret code for the depot, people would say, “Today I’ll go to the Laughing Woods depot to get my supplies.”

  A few months later the Laughing Woods depot was ordered to move to another location, closer to the battlefield. One day an enemy company attacked the depot. At the time, Thao was suffering from malaria fever and was unconscious. The other four women hid her under a secluded tree deep in the forest and returned to the watchtower to fight off the enemy. But this was no combat fairy tale. The women knew they couldn’t win, so they used their last bullets to take their own lives.

  Once the fever passed, Thao regained consciousness. The enemy had already withdrawn. All alone now, she buried the women painstakingly with her own hands, which were still weak from the fever. These women were heroines. Their names should have been printed on the front page of newspapers. Instead, this seemed like business as usual.

  The night before the attack had been hot and suffocating. As they sat around chatting, one of the women had asked Thao to tell them again about her boyfriend. As usual Thao blurred fact and fiction in the stories about her loyal prince, and the women were captivated. But as they prepared for bed and Thao stepped into her mosquito net, Tham, the leader of the group, caressed Thao’s face and said, “Do you think you devote too much love to him? I don’t know why, exactly, but I’m worried about you. You’re the only one among us who has ever really known happiness. When the war is over, you’ll return to the city. Make sure you don’t let men just love you out of pity.”

  Thinking back, Thao remembered that she had been upset with Tham for saying this. But now Tham and her other three comrades were dead. A bayonet had pierced Tham’s chest. Before, when they’d bathed together in the creek near the depot, Thao had secretly stared at Tham’s breasts and thought, Venus’s breasts cannot be more beautiful than hers. She had wished that she had similar breasts.

  Now Thao gently pushed the bodies of her comrades into the graves, covered them with a thick layer of leaves, then filled the graves with soil. She planted four pink crepe myrtle trees over the graves and watered them with what was left in her canteen. The arid soil sizzled as the water touched it. Steam hovered around Thao’s legs.

  * * *

  Eventually Thao was taken to a military hospital to recover. While she was there, she learned that Hien, the soldier who had saved them from the laughing disorder, had been killed in combat. The rumor was that Hien’s supervisor had commended his heroic sacrifice; the supervisor was on the verge of submitting the paperwork to Hanoi requesting that Hien be given the official honorary title of Hero when the political instructor came across the following lines from Hien’s diary:

  I’ll never forget what I saw in the Laughing Woods. Witnessing death was easier than seeing the scene in that forest, and hearing that sound—the wild, cruel laughter of war. It’s terrible when women are involved in war. I would have died twice so none of them had to be in that situation.

  I shiver now as I think of my fiancée and my sister, laughing like those women, lost deep in an endless forest.…

  The political instructor reported these lines immediately, and the military officials concluded that Hien, as it turned out, must have lacked true determination. This was typical, they said, of the petty bourgeoisie, the class from which Hien, who had been a student before the war, came. Hien’s heroism, they said, must have only been a momentary impulse. “He’s lucky we don’t issue an official reprimand,” the political instructor said.

  So it goes.

  Two years later Thao became a freshman in the Literature Department at Hanoi University. She was a different person than when she’d left for the depot in the Laughing Woods. Her eyes were like those of someone lost in a long dream, and her skin was pale because of the fevers she’d suffered when she was in the forest. Her hair, which had once been so luscious and beautiful and admired by the other women in the Laughing Woods, was now thin and falling out. When she smiled her face would finally show some spark of life. But she rarely smiled. In conversations she seemed distant and absentminded, and at night, alone in her bunk bed, she slouched over a notebook, writing entries in her diary, her thin frame weak and crumpled in on itself.

  Thao often had two kinds of dreams. One was about her childhood, scenes in which she was a little girl again, wandering the streets of Hanoi finding treasures on the ground—a lost hairpin, an unclaimed boiled duck egg. In the other kind of dream she was back at the depot in the Laughing Woods; she saw clumps of her hair falling onto Tham’s chest where the bayonet had left a scarlet wound. In the middle of this second dream she would often wake up screaming and clutching at the cold bed frame.

  One night, unable to fall asleep, Thao looked around the room at her eleven roommates sleeping in their bunks. She guessed that they must be dreaming—their faces seemed happy and flushed with color. They looked so lovely. Their dreams must be far different from her own, Thao thought. She sighed, knowing that she could never really be part of this group.

  Thao’s boyfriend, Thanh—her loyal prince whom the women in the Laughing Woods had almost considered their own boyfriend—was in his last year at the same university. They went out on dates on Saturday nights and walked the moonlit streets lined with date palm trees. Thanh kept his word; he looked after Thao, but they didn’t have much to talk about. They were often both silent, counting their steps as they walked, listening to the haunting sound of night birds flapping their wings as they returned to their nests. By nine o’clock, Thanh would dutifully bring Thao back to her dorm.

  They acted reserved around each other, as if they both felt guilty about something. Thao looked forward to these Saturday dates with Thanh, but she also felt anxious. It was clear, she felt, that he saw her differently now.

  She often thought back to the first time they’d seen each other when she returned from the Laughing Woods. Thanh was waiting for her at the station as Thao got off the train, a rucksack slung over her back. He looked astonished as he stood there looking at her again for the first time after so many years. He was speechless. Thao felt his eyes glance over her skinny body in the old military uniform, her pale lips and thinning hair. She started to cry out of self-pity. But Thanh realized he’d made a mistake and tried to comfort her and be extra affectionate. But this only saddened Thao more. She looked deep into his eyes and said,

  “You never thought I would end up like this, did you?”

  “I don’t care how you look,” Thanh said. “The most important thing is that you’re back.”

  “Today maybe you feel happy because I’m back, but tomorrow you’ll realize that loving a person like me will be a great sacrifice on your part.”