Volume 11, Number 1 · July 11, 1968
North Vietnam: Language
By Mary McCarthy
Communication was no problem with the North Vietnamese. Though only a few interpreters spoke English, some officials read it, and everybody I met of middle-class origin over the age of forty—ministers, poets, critics, museum workers, doctors, specialists in information, the head of the Supreme Court—spoke French fluently. Even those who had no second language, a factory manager, for instance, were remarkably well informed about the United States. Coming from the West, eagerly bearing news of American political developments, we found they knew it all already: the New Hampshire primary, the dollar crisis, the latest editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Nor were they dependent on 'peace' sources; I kept seeing old copies of US News and World Report. They were familiar with the voting records of Congressmen whose names I had barely heard of. The head of the Writers' Union referred to Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics and helped me out while I was groping for the author of 'Nihil humanum mihi alienum puto'—Terence. You did not have to explain to them what a primary election was, a just-about hopeless job with French political intellectuals, nor sit squirming as I had done recently at a Paris press conference on the draft-resistance movement while speakers invoked 'Samuel Bellow' and 'William Thoreau.' The events that happened during my stay in Hanoi—the reassignment of Westmoreland and Admiral Sharp, Johnson's April 1 speech, the Wisconsin primary, the murder of Martin Luther King—were instantly known in the Thong Nhat hotel; I heard Johnson, live, on the Voice of America, and our friends from the Peace Committee came to tell us, with a delicate sympathy—'Perhaps it may not be true'—of the death of King. As I established when I got home (my husband had saved the French and American and English papers), no important happening in the West had missed us in Hanoi or been distorted in the reporting. The only gap was in news from the East: Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Feature, 6375 words
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