The Underground Village
After Landscape Suspended (dir. Naghmeh Abbasi, 2022)
A few years ago, before I knew enough to ask the right questions, I met one of the tunnellers
of Vịnh Mốc. I was in a minibus travelling from Vinh to Nha Trang, a long drive down the
coast, past five star resorts and abandoned military outposts. The old fellow had gotten on
just before the Bến Hải river, in what had once been the demilitarised zone. I had the
impression that he had emerged, all of a sudden, from among the eucalyptus trees planted to
rehabilitate the napalm-scarred landscape. True or not, we had certainly come to an abrupt
stop, as if the driver had realised almost too late that we were being flagged down. Ignoring
he empty seat behind the driver, the man had made his way to the back of the minibus, finally
squeezing himself between me and an aunty nursing a large banana-leafed package on her lap.
As we crossed the river the aunty unwrapped the package and passed each of us a handful of
yellow sticky rice. Between small bites the former tunneller began speaking. He said that
the Americans had given them no choice. What else could one do when death came from the sky,
when they burned the very earth and all that lived upon it? We had to dig, said the old man.
We had to go underground. In a way, we were lucky—we live on a bed of limestone. Limestone
is soft, he said. Easy to dig through by hand. But it's also strong, it holds its shape. This
is important if you are going to live thirty metres underground. And not live like an animal,
either. We had kitchens, wells, a Central Committee meeting room, a maternity ward. Our
tunnels ran out to the sea. At this, the three of us turned to look out at the water to our
left, grey and inscrutable. I thought about a report I had just read, on the underground
tunnels below the Gaza Strip. There, too, the substrate is all limestone, a rock with just
the right balance of give and steadfastness, allowing the mujahideen to dig tunnels like
roots in the belly of the earth. Or, as they say of the tunnels of Vịnh Mốc, like an ancient
castle that hid so many strange things of the people. We were like the water, said the old
fellow, still chewing on his sticky rice. We found the paths in the rock, paths that had
been waiting for the water to carve it. We followed those paths, shelters biding their time
until they could accept us. Everywhere it's the same, he said. The land keeps us safe from
the imperialists and their hateful bombs. Before us, it was the Beni Add caves in Algeria.
Look it up, he said, pointing at the phone that lay blank in my hand. The limestone hid the
FLN before it hid us. And after us, the limestone hid the Palestinians, the Kurds. Perhaps
it is all connected, he said, a worldwide network of tunnels. A great underground city.
André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist.