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Healing Families, Curing Ourselves By Rebecca Linder-Hintze Quang began to read my son’s pulses. Something made me avert my eyes from Quang’s face. Set during the French and American wars in South Vietnam, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is the true story of an orphan, Quang Van Nguyen, adopted by a sixty-four-year-old monk, Thau, who carries great responsibility for his people as a barefoot doctor. Thau manages against all odds to raise his son to follow in his footsteps and in doing so saves him, as well as a part of Vietnam’s esoteric knowledge, from the Vietnam holocaust. As wise and resourceful as Thau is, he meets his match in his mischievous son, Quang, who is more interested in learning Cambodian sorcery and martial arts than in developing his skills and wisdom according to his father’s plan. Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is an odyssey of a single-father folk hero and his foundling son in a land ravaged by the atrocities of war. It is a classic story complete with humor, tragedy, and insight, from a country where ghosts and magic are real. My husband has a special relationship with ginseng. Sometimes when we hike in the woods he’ll hover in one spot like a dowsing rod and say, “I know it’s right here somewhere.” He’ll usually find it. He is a self-appointed guardian of ginseng. Every fall he’ll visit about half a dozen ginseng patches to make sure the scarlet berries are safely planted under the leaf cover before the birds can devour them. We live in the rolling green hills of southeastern Vermont. It was because of my husband’s reputation as the steward of ginseng that Quang Van Nguyen was brought by a friend to our house, to go on a ginseng walk. I watched as Quang climbed out of the car and stood awkwardly in the driveway. I left the others and walked around to the other side of the car to meet him. He was very slight of build and, apart from his Adam’s apple, looked more like a boy than a man. I had never seen an adult whose eyes were as clear and tender as a child’s. You had to be practically telepathic to understand Quang’s attempt at speaking English. He told me that he was a doctor in Vietnam and that he practiced herbal medicine and acupuncture. During the walk, he stopped to see, smell, and taste many plants. He was eager to see the plants growing on the top of the mountain because, he explained, plants that can withstand low temperatures are the most powerful. My husband dug out a large and beautiful ginseng root and presented it to Quang. Then Quang took out of his pocket a red cloth bundle and carefully unwrapped it. Inside were three ginseng roots. They were dried and preserved, but they were not wrinkled and did not appear to be dehydrated. He took out a pocketknife and cut a few slices for us to try. The roots had a translucent quality and tasted fresh even though they were bone dry. Then something happened in which all at once I understood our friend’s excitement about introducing us to Quang. We had reached the top of the mountain and Quang started talking about tigers. He was asking us what Americans do when we come across a tiger. He was instructing us, I thought he was saying, “You take off your shirt and take several steps backward. Never turn your back on a tiger.” He honestly didn’t know there weren’t any tigers in Vermont. That was the moment when I had my first inkling of how immensely different our spectrums of reality were. Three weeks after our first meeting, our son Jovi was not well. A pain that he had been complaining about in his right hip had now become excruciating. I took him to every kind of doctor, but none were successful in diagnosing or treating him. I decided to take him to Quang, who was working at the time washing laundry in a nursing home in Bennington, Vermont, about an hour’s drive away. Quang took our coats and then sat down behind a card table and waited for my son to sit opposite him. On the table was what appeared to be a paperback book covered up in a little red cloth pillowcase. Quang placed Jovi’s hand, palm up, on the cloth-covered book. He then traced an invisible line on his skin before placing his own three fingers on my son’s upturned wrist. Quang began to read my son’s pulses. Something made me avert my eyes from Quang’s face. He was concentrating so hard on what he was dong that he was vulnerable to my scrutiny. To this day I never look at Quang’s face when he is reading pulses. It was then that he made the diagnosis that my medical team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York had missed entirely, a life-threatening infection inside the joint capsule of his hip. The hospital doctors had used the most advanced medical technology available. Exploratory surgery was performed and a biopsy was taken, but the culture came out negative. Basing their diagnosis on the results of the culture, the hospital diagnosed Jovi as having degenerative autoimmune arthritis. It was because of Quang that I doubted the hospital’s diagnosis. Quang sent us to the western doctors to get “pharmacy medicine” because he said it would work much faster than herbal medicine in this case, but our doctors were not interested in exploring further. Meanwhile, in Rio de Janeiro, Jovi’s Uncle Henrique heard of the standoff at Mount Sinai. His partner at work had a son with a similar-sounding problem. Henrique arranged for the doctor of the Brazilian boy to send a case history to our doctors in New York. Jovi tested positive for tuberculosis of the bone. It was just a matter of time before the germs would enter the bone marrow, and by then it would be too late. Thanks to Quang we caught it in time. I wanted to do something for Quang in return to show my deep gratitude to him for the part he played in my son’s complete recovery. I learned that his wife was still in Vietnam. Her name was on a waiting list at the Vietnamese embassy overseas for the past four years. Quang had been sending a monthly “fee” to the embassy of three hundred dollars “to keep her on the list.” He understood that three hundred dollars was practically a year’s salary going into someone’s pocket every month. He had all but given up hope of seeing his wife again. (From the book, during Quang’s escape from Vietnam) We didn’t see any police. We walked through a market, and I bought a new shirt and put it on. Then I put some things inside my old shirt and tied it into a bundle. “Will you take this to my wife?” I asked Tam. He said he would. In Vietnam, men call their wives em, which means “little sister.” I had written a note for Mai. It said, “Em, I went to the mountain, and then I escaped to Thailand. I was in a hurry and didn’t have enough time to let you know. Please forgive me. When I get to a free country I will send for you. Don’t worry. — Quang.” I also put some other things inside the shirt: my watch, my last gold ring, and a new plastic zipper that I had found lying in the street. I knew Mai liked to sew. ... Our boat rode waves that were so steep and high that it seemed at times that our boat was standing on end. The rain was so heavy that it was difficult to see what was happening. We tried not to fall out of the boat while we were bailing out the water. At one point during the storm I looked over the boat and saw a woman standing in the water, as if the ocean were only chest deep. She was bare-breasted and had long wet hair. She motioned with her hand for me to come with her. I thought we were going to die, because she must have been a spirit coming to help our souls find our way to heaven. I promised Quang I would get his wife out of Vietnam. It took four years and the unrelenting support of Vermont’s senators, James Jeffords, and Patrick Leahy, and our congressman, Bernie Sanders. It was during those four years as Quang’s legal advocate that I learned about his life, his culture, and about his education. He told me he was adopted as an infant by a sixty-four-year-old monk named Thau who used traditional medicine and Buddhist magic to heal and protect people during the French and American Wars. Thau’s intention was to raise Quang to follow in his footsteps but Quang told me he gave his father no end of trouble. It was because our cultures were so different that I found his anecdotes to be utterly unpredictable and spellbinding. I had also been actively trying to understand the extent of Quang’s medical knowledge. I had the privilege of conferring with Dr. Leon Hammer, an internationally renowned authority on pulse diagnosis and President of Dragon Rises College of Oriental Medicine, in Gainesville, Florida. Dr. Hammer came to Vermont to meet Quang and confirmed my hopes that he was indeed a master physician who possessed medical knowledge and spiritual experience that had been phased out during the communist-led cultural revolutions in China and Vietnam. Dr. Hammer has been promoting Fourth Uncle in the Mountain, and has expressed interest in collaborating with Quang in the future. When Mai finally arrived and was reunited with her husband after eleven years of separation, I felt justified in asking Quang to accept me as an apprentice. He refused. When I asked him at a later date if we could write a book together he agreed, though he really didn’t know what he was agreeing to. He had never even read a book (they didn’t have books where he grew up, aside from textbooks, poetry books, and prayer books). I began interviewing Quang, asking him countless questions to jog his memory. I recorded and transcribed twenty-two ninety minute cassettes. Quang was like a person waking up from amnesia, the more I probed, the more he started to remember his former life in Vietnam. I wrote several chapters but the writing was boring and flat. I decided to give the transcript to a published author and act as an editor, but when I read what she had written I took the material back because she filled the pages with thoughts and emotions that Quang would never express. I tried a different author with the same bad result. I had no choice but to abandon the project. Five years later, I watched a French film called Himalaya by Eric Vallé in which Nepalese villagers played themselves in a fictional story that was filmed in their own timeless mountain village. That night when I returned home, I started to visualize certain episodes of Quang’s story and I began again to write. I submitted a chapter to a random (and wonderful) literary agent in New York who called me three days later to say she was sending us contract. We found ourselves in a whirlwind. We were soon under contract with a prestigious press, and we were now under a deadline. We began meeting once a week to put the whole story in order and fill in the gaps. The writing process we invented is another story unto itself; we pantomimed and drew a lot of pictures. We used our author’s advance to travel to the Mekong Delta, where Quang brought me to meet some of the people and to see many of the places in the book. Today, Quang works out of a tiny office on the side of his small house. He is devoted to his many patients who come to see him from as far away as Texas. Quang Van Nguyen and Marjorie Pivar are the authors of Fourth Uncle in the Mountain: A Memoir of a Barefoot Doctor in Vietnam. Published by St. Martin’s Press, it is available at retail and online bookstores.
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