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tale of the nausea and spasms from his dysentery, of the leeches clinging to their legs and feet,
and of the mud sucking at their feet as they struggled to keep up with the forced march. The
only apparent escape was ‘to sink into the warm red mud and stay there’. Nature itself
becomes their enemy. Even the rain nearly takes on a mineral-like nature governed by tamas,
becoming ‘so solid that we seemed to be walking under water’, but retains its rejuvenating,
dharmic quality as it flows over the three men, cleansing their dry eyes and mouths. Jim Feng,
who knew he was ready to die and becoming an animal, finds strength in Mike Langford’s
comfort, in his own thoughts of roots and identity, and in a poem whose theme is sattva:
I had no thoughts, but I kept myself going by reciting again and again some
lines that came back to me from the poem about the Herd-boy star. It was my
great comfort; I heard my father’s voice reciting it too.
Far away twinkles the Heard-boy star;
Brightly shines the Lady of the Han River …
Her bitter tears fall like streaming rain. (HW, 338)
If they had been captured by the Khmer Rouge, there would have been no chance to find relief
in the rainwater or memories of home. As with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas who forfeited their
souls or Mike Langford who forfeited his life, there is little hope of holding off the demons
once one gives himself into their hands.
10.5. Conclusion
That the world could reach the point described by Blanche d’Alpuget and Christopher J.
Koch is nothing new; history has recounted the horrifying story all too well. What the Western
sense of history fails to do is explain the causes beyond linear strings of causal relationships
leading from colonialism, to the Japanese invasion in W.W.II, to attempts to reinstate
colonialist or ersatz-colonialist regimes in the post-war period, to communist revolutions, to
spiralling increases in involvement of the Cold War adversaries in the region, and to ever-
worsening atrocities committed by all sides. Early in his presidency, Lynden Johnson declared
that the war in Vietnam would be for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, and yet
Westerners have never managed to deal very well with the Asian side of the human equation.
It is perhaps for this reason that one finds d’Alpuget and Koch bringing out novels about the
fall of Sukarno and the war in Southeast Asia so long after the fact. They serve as part of the
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