Quang Ngai

<strong>Quang Ngaistrong><br />TEXT OF LORENZO MAZZONI<br />PHOTOGRAPHS OF TOMMY GRAZIANI<br /><br />The couple pain<br />our humanity<br />Ho Chi Minh<br /><br />The Reunification of Espresso, the train which links Ho Chi Minh Ville in Hanoi, enters the station in <strong>Quang Ngaistrong> to four in the morning after nine hours of travel. Only we descend. We rested, as foreign (indeed we have not seen anybody on our convoy) is granted the privilege to travel in first class. In Vietnam, the first class consists of comfortable berths which unfortunately are unable to eliminate the agony of the move from hot nailed to the ceiling fan.<br />We have left behind us the coastal city of Nha Trang, the first shy and sad of Western attempt to appropriate the tourism potential of Vietnam: drug grass, special massage, beach bar run by Australian tan.

 

Outside the train station the Honda om (motorbike-taxi drivers &quot;do you&quot; present in every anthropized Vietnam) are not used to seeing foreigners, do not speak English or French to communicate with gestures. Come loaded with two thin and quiet motor that lead us through the dark streets, in front of a damper lowered. Five minutes after the owner raise, showing his complete theory of Marxism-Leninism, the bust of Uncle Ho and, finally, our room. Discarding the few luggage, take a nap for four hours and begin to store the first clear images of the city from the window we see a pair of elderly practicing thai chi under the trees. Students in ao dai, pass, laughing. Front of a restaurant, the workers do breakfast with the ph?, The delicious noodles in soup, dish key Vietnamese diet. The traffic of main street wakes up but can not overcome the high choir of crickets, in their thousands on the trees.
<strong>Quang Ngaistrong> (sometimes abbreviated as Quangai or crippled in Quang Nghia) is the capital of the homonymous province. Cut in half by the state 1, which here is called &208; Quang Trung, was built on the south bank of the Tra Khuc River, known throughout the central and southern Vietnam for its gigantic hydraulic turbines. <strong>Quang Ngaistrong> is also famous for the local delicacy, the Com Ga (chicken cooked with yellow rice and garnish soup with eggs, coriander, mint leaves and onion), which you can eat in canteens and popular restaurants in all of the city.

The province of <strong>Quang Ngaistrong> is one of the most populated nation with its hinterland mostly flat, which has made her goal, sometimes looked forced at times, an internal exodus of farmers. The villages have sprung up everywhere, forming a network of self-sufficient settlements but strongly linked to each other, showing a typical elongated, thickened with houses along the roads and waterways. B&236;nh S? N, B&236;nh Ch&226;u, Sa K?: Clusters of huts in which scorazzano wild pigs and buffalos. While we cross them on board a Honda Dream prestatoci by the owner of the hotel, small rooms see batter in blue on the open road: the private onto the public. Salute a barber who, with the help of a mirror attached to the trunk of a tree, cut her hair to a young customer. In the dusty streets with the children divided the school crowds happy. Not far away from the beach of Khe Bien K?, A long expanse of white pine deck, the inhabitants of Son My breed prawns.
The villages are the socio-economic foundations of the Vietnamese. With these, Vietnam took its historic base. For centuries the Vietnamese have made in building a flexible and dynamic one village after another, a rice field after another, with its dams and its canals. They built a socioeconomic system that requires a well-defined in each. The Vietnamese way of life is reflected nell'immane collective effort to transform a landscape of forests in a miniature crop area. The social and political organization from which constitute the Vietnamese peasant a strong identity, capable of becoming the very meaning of his life. The village provides him with a family atmosphere, emotional and cultural, it builds the hardening. In this unit, in this cohesion, the people of Vietnam has found the strength, for ever, to resist the aggressors: Chinese, Japanese, French, Americans.

In 1962 the U.S. government wire Diem chose the province of <strong>Quang Ngaistrong> as a place to implement the program of agrovilles, call after Villages Strategy. The inhabitants of rural areas were taken by force by the military and, with the complicity of the first U.S. officials (such as humanitarian Ladejinsky Wolf), &quot;moved&quot; in fenced villages, under control. These first acts of violence, of social obligation, these aggressive uprooting of entire communities, finally brought the people of the province by the National Liberation Front, or more vulgarly, the viet cong. The consequences were terrible, the attachment to the cause of independence was paid a heavy price.
A 13 km from <strong>Quang Ngaistrong>, there XOM Lang, where, amid the greenery and the silence has been erected the memorial to victims of the massacre known as the massacre of My Lai. In truth My Lai was only one of the four villages where the marines to vent their blind violence against civilians. The memorial was built at Lang XOM because there were more brutal massacres. In the house museum, is impressive to note that in the book of signatures of visitors do not American names. It seems strange that no one feels obliged to come and see. Maybe they do not know? None of them had walked the area where Captain Ernest Medina and his soldiers, Lieutenant Wiliam Calley (who became a celebrity), Lieutenant Jeffrey Cross, and the Lieutenant Stephen Brooks, unleash their troops. That day of the'68 Ragazzoni Uncle Sam came and quartered in the villages, raped, shot after shot maybe two hundred, maybe three hundred people. The number remains unknown because when placed end to the slaughter, the killers pushed hand grenades on the bodies to conceal the slaughter. The hold Calley, the only accused to trial farce put in place in the United States, apologized, saying that it was not easy to distinguish a baby in swaddling clothes by a guerrilla viet cong. Gave him a life sentence after he was released four years with impunity. There is a photo of the house museum XOM Lang has a face unpleasant and snobbish.

Outside the fenced area of the museum two children play, running back. Hanging from trees are written on wooden boards the names of persons who have been massacred. The family Khoi, the largest was 16 years, the smallest 3 years; Mr. Chinh, 91 years, certainly a subversive, and the Loy family, father, mother, children, grandchildren: 84 years, 78 years, 32 years, 12 years, 6 years, 4 years, two months ... two months. Puts chills.
Leaving the barracks look on the roadside, in rice fields of the farmers are working: it seems that the collectivization was successful. The gap with the pleasures of the city is obvious but there are no social differences that exist within large urban areas of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh Ville, Da Nang, due to the first openings losers on the international market. In the villages there are no poor children in the street. All cultivated land, but they have little to live on, have a strong sense of community, after all, have everything. The miracle of Vietnam and rural collective lives on, perhaps through quell'orrore, witnessed by the monument behind me, that the attackers were brought to western groped to impose their &quot;freedom&quot; and their &quot;democracy.&quot;
I look at thousands of shades of green in the fall and yellow ocher yellow. I look at the palms and the clear dark red granite of the roads.
Buffalo.
By the way, slowly, a farmer on a bike overtakes us and continues to the sea. The usual, proud, proud conical hat fell on the face.

Lorenzo Mazzoni
Born in Ferrara on 20.12.1974
DAMS degree in Cinema.
Currently graduating in Contemporary History.
Occupation: mask poorly remunerated in a futuristic movie.

Tommy Graziani
Born in Ferrara on 26.3.1975
Graduating without a time limit in Foreign Languages
Resident in London for several years
Occupation: bartender mal paid retro in a restaurant in Portobello Road

tompagutt@hotmail.com