Interviewer: Could you describe your life as a child in a poor peasant family? What was it like? What did you eat? What happened to your mother and father?
Do Thi Bay: During the repressive period of the past, I was from a poor and landless family.
Do Thi Bay: The landlords had usurped all our land.
Do Thi Bay: As a result, we became really miserable.
Do Thi Bay: We did not have rice to eat and clothes to wear.
Do Thi Bay: We had to eat banana roots, greens and grass.
Do Thi Bay: Therefore, my mother was extremely weakened and died in childbirth.
Do Thi Bay: So I never got to know my mother.
Do Thi Bay: This was what people told me.
Do Thi Bay: In 1945, my father was also very hungry.
Do Thi Bay: We only had a very small thatched hut.
Do Thi Bay: We had to look for our next meal every day.
Do Thi Bay: As a result, my father got ill.
Do Thi Bay: There was no gruel, no food and no medicine, and so he died eventually.
Do Thi Bay: My older brother, who is now in Chau Quy and is being entrusted with a fairly important job there, followed the revolution very early.
Do Thi Bay: As for me, because of poverty of my family and my realization that we had to endure a lot of suffering and hardship because of exploitation and oppression, I followed the revolution when I was still a young girl.
Interviewer: Can you describe your role as a courier for the Viet Minh in 1946?
Do Thi Bay: Although the enemy put me under constant observation, I was nevertheless able to act as a courier, carrying letters, documents and books and pamphlets from one village to another.
Do Thi Bay: Sometimes I had to disguise myself as an excrement collector, as a person who irrigated the paddyfields and as a harrower, wearing tattered clothes, rolling my pants up and leading a cow or a buffalo along.
Do Thi Bay: Secret messages had to be passed on by word of mouth.
Do Thi Bay: In that event, I had to use a code name and not my real name.
Do Thi Bay: Although the French had many military posts around the area and although these posts were full of white Frenchmen and black Frenchmen, our cadres always managed to get into the village and carried out their activities.
Do Thi Bay: This was because the village inhabitants protected them.
Do Thi Bay: Sometimes, when the cadres could not come back into the village, we had to bring riceballs to tell in the fields.
Do Thi Bay: They were hiding in the tunnels or in the bushes.
Do Thi Bay: Besides transmitting messages of the Party and passing on books and pamphlets, I also working on those people who followed the French and killed their own compatriots to make them come back to the fold, to help defend the country.
Do Thi Bay: Whenever our people got exposed, the French came by immediately and burnt down their houses, chopped off their heads and then hanged these heads up on bamboo stakes in the middle of the road and at intersections in order to intimidate the passers by.
Do Thi Bay: But we were unyielding, and we went ahead with our activities.
Interviewer: Could you describe the time the French African troops broke into your house and searched your house?
Interviewer: Could you describe the time the French African troops broke into the house and searched the house?
Do Thi Bay: They sniffed us out that time.
Do Thi Bay: They suspected that I was a courier and that I brought our cadres back to the village to do political work.
Do Thi Bay: So they came and searched the house, prying up every little brick.
Do Thi Bay: They took the chickens and pigs belonging to my neighbors.
Do Thi Bay: I did not have any chicken or pig myself.
Do Thi Bay: They searched everywhere and interrogated people.
Do Thi Bay: Mr. Du’s father, or my father in law, was taken to the post and severely roughed up.
Do Thi Bay: After that, they sent him home to make sweet rice and sweet soup for them.
Do Thi Bay: I could not destroy the documents and the pamphlets in time, so I pushed them under the ash in the kitchen.
Do Thi Bay: Finally, when they could not find anything at all in spite of the careful search they kicked me several times on my behind and slapped me several times on the face and then left.