A Note from the Playwright Few situations are more dramatic than those involving life-and-death decisions by expatriate teachers and their students, especially when both are young and in love. I wrote these two plays--Circle on the Mekong and Remembering Hue--during and shortly after the Viet Nam War, to which I was witness. Thanks to a Gracious Overseer, I bumbled myself out of harm's way, but I saw friends on both sides lose their lives and their loves. These relationships seemed for a moment to rise above the fury and destruction of the terrible war that, like all wars, consumes everything in its awful path. I decided to publish these plays in two volumes because I wanted each to receive the focus I thought proper. I did not want either to acquire even a hint of the dutiful sense of inclusion that one often finds in overly thick anthologies. Also, Remembering Hue is a musical, and I am going to include the printed music in the Appendix. I did not want all of that addenda cluttering up Circle on the Mekong. Circle on the Mekong This play is set in the Delta, on a magical piece of real estate, Phoenix Island or, as in the play, “Peace Island.” “Uncle Bon” and “Monk” are names I gave to the elderly monk who loved to squeeze the juice out of the fruits and melons that make starvation nearly impossible in the southern part of Vietnam. He was based on a real person as was the character I called Phuong—intellectual, painfully humble, loyal follower and interpreter. Although they might well have done what I have them doing, they did not in fact do it. That action was an imagined fiction, involving the young but un-saintly American priest whose weakness drove them to their dramatically inevitable fate. The fantastic island did exist with catwalks and paths named after the streets of Saigon. They were part of the whimsical temple complex to which was added a sixty-foot-wide prayer circle, constructed over shallow water under the guidance of the monk, who, in his pre-monastic days, had studied engineering in France. I am given to understand that the complex is now a tourist attraction of sorts. The grainy photograph that serves as the frontispiece for this volume was taken by me and is of the monk and his followers. A word of explanation is needed. He is standing in the midst of wood that would have constituted his pyre, had the police taken one more of his followers. He is pointing with his staff to the white, ten-gallon plastic cans of gasoline which were to help things along if need be. Despite a dreadful tension, the day ended without violence. In the early afternoon, however, camera in bag, I stumbled upon this awful scene. The monk recognized me, my 35mm Konica camera, or both and requested that I take a photograph which I was to give to the press. He posed accordingly. High atop the catwalk, quite visible to the police who were shouting for me to come down, and scared to death, I took the pictures but did not get in touch with the AP, Reuter's and other agencies who usually combed through the detritus of Vietnam, hungry for such sensational topics. I thought about the young American civilian volunteer who had been roughly attached to a big tree and filled with bullets for supposed breaking a story of corruption to the visiting Ted Kennedy, then touring hospitals and such. Fear was primary in my silence. Mea Culpa. Riding a high second was my own sentiment for the bent but in no way pathetic older monk. I could not bring myself to be a possible part of the torch that might well have resulted in harm to the monk and resonated throughout much of the country. Everyone knew about the island and the monk, and I had been cautioned against having much to do with him by government officials to whom I was teaching English. As I descended the catwalk, I discreetly rewound the film and hid the roll in my bag. Of course, the police stopped me and asked for various forms of identification, including my home address in Saigon. Unfortunately, I was living in the same house as a friend of mine and his lovely young wife. Anyway, I did not want to involve them or the house near a canal, which formed more or less of an island vaguely reminiscent of “Peace Island.” To the nervous policeman, I repeatedly gave as my home address the Medical School in Cho Lon where I had taught English through contract to the American Medical Association which had been sub-contracted by the United Stated Agency for International development. Who was I working for? The Fulbright educational program which was an arm of the U.S. Government? Who was on first? Who knows? Certainly not me. I was sticking by my address, still scared to death. One hour passed. Then, in the midst of some confusion, I began digging in my nostrils for a boogie and coughing on the policeman like I had advanced tuberculosis. Disgusted, he turned away and I pretended that I thought he was done with me and slowly but with alacrity, coughingly got up and faded into the crowd. As I wrote the play, I used a situation somewhat similar to that of the pyre and the monk to fashion the last scene--no part of which transpired in reality other than as I have described. I have thought about the propriety of writing about the monk. With all he went through, I am certain that he would have correctly considered me and my apprehensions to be irrelevant, insincere, naïve, pretentious and hopelessly American. So, I write.
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