Front matter
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged Memoir, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war, writing
Leave a comment
When telling a story
There’s a hole at the centre, my wife says of the novel she’s reading. The main character, the man to which the novel’s title alludes, has no voice.
She doesn’t seem bothered by it. It’s as it should be, she pronounces; the way the author designed it. How else, my clever wife asks, could she write in such a compelling manner about a type of person she could not possibly have ever met or known?
Besides, she continues as if she is only still talking about the book, his story would be too complicated. There would be too many lies, too many shades of grey. It would have spoilt the plot. When telling a story you need to know where you want it to go. Tell only the facts essential to getting there. If necessary, make the needed omissions to fashion a good round whole.
My wife is a descendant of Hue courtiers. Her uncles fought over Vietnam across the Paris negotiating table. Her father was press attaché at the old embassy in Washington. More like them than she knows she too speaks in layers of meaning.
I should heed her warning. But, I won’t. As all engineers learn, nature abhors a vacuum. Some stories must be told just as they are – their messiness intact, conflicted and unresolved. Because, after all is said and done, only everything can make the sum of a life.
I: BEGINNINGS
Kite singing fills his sleep. In his dream, he sees the kite turn into a golden bird struggling in the aqua air above his head. But it can’t escape – he’s tethered it to the wooden bed post against his head. He smiles and nestles closer to his mother, rubbing his cheeks against her soft breasts. In the morning, he will tame it.
Like the mangoes that sometimes fell at his feet on the way to school, fate had given him the kite. It was after the evening meal. His father had been absent minded, bad tempered as usual; his mother silent. He’d eaten quickly, wolfing down the rice and stewed fish, before slipping out to the soccer field which divided the town from the rice paddies. As usual at this hour, a throng had gathered to take the air. Young men squatted around the edge of the field nearest the town road, waiting for the maidens to drift by after their chores. Lads slightly younger, spread out further towards the rice paddies to launch their kites into the evening breeze.
Five years old and not skilled enough yet to fashion the paper and bamboo into a kite he considered worthwhile, the child Thong sat empty handed on a stone, watching. His father was too old to help, his brother too busy with studies. He could only look covetously. For weeks now he’d hankered after one kite in particular – a beautiful yellow creature with black eyes and red streamers. This evening, its owner, a twinkly eyed newcomer of about twenty five, had abandoned it for the nightly parade of maidens walking down to the river. He’d left it vulnerable, its string looped loosely around a large can weighted with stones. At risk from the rising wind the boy judged as he saw the kite rear against its stone-weighted mooring. The can rolled towards him, the stones in it clattering. It stopped in a hollow on the ground, then bounced towards him again, string unravelling as it bounced. Finally, it came to rest at his feet, at the end of its tether.
Thong’s eyes followed the string up to the kite. If he moved his foot the can would roll all the way down into the bushes, causing the string to snag and break. Then the kite would fly away. He touched the can tentatively, afraid to be in even such distant communication with the beautiful creature. Then he tugged at the kite string. The kite responded, dancing, as if daring him to get closer. He would, he decided. Carefully, he reeled the kite down. It was unwieldy in his arms, too large for him, the tissue delicate against his face.
He carried it towards the road. The kite’s owner stood by the grass edge joking with a group of other young men, trying to draw the attention of the town girls. Thong staggered up to him, holding the enormous kite up front.
“It was escaping so I brought it down for you,” he reported to the young man.
The young man took it from him with a mock bow.
“I must thank you then,” he replied, his voice teasing.
He squatted down, looked into Thong’s face.
“So child, tell me so I can thank you properly, who are you?”
Thong told him his name.
“I’m the Superintendant’s Youngest Son,” he explained, pointing to his parent’s house across the field.
“Aaah,” the young man breathed out.
“Fate has arranged for us to meet,” he pronounced with a mysterious air Thong couldn’t decide was serious or playful. He squirmed under the stranger’s hard searching gaze, feeling better only when the young man laughed, “Well, since you rescued the kite, you should have it.”
“Here,” he handed the kite back to Thong, “remember it’s from me to you.”
“Take it home,” he said, dismissing Thong with a pat on his back.
And so, ecstatic, Thong had! And his brother Sixth had launched it into the air above the waterway behind their quarters. Later, when it grew dark, he himself had threaded its string through the wooden shutters and wound it around the bed post to secure the kite safe and sound.
But, during the night, the wind rises. Thong hears the kite pulling at its string, but cannot wake to bring it down. The string snaps. In his dreams, he sees the kite falling into the dark plantations at the edge of the delta where men with guns hide. He utters a cry to call it back, but it does not hear. Afterwards, to comfort himself, he imagines that it survives the storm and rides the wind across the ocean to an empty shore by golden mountains. But, he never quite believes himself.
______
The desert winds finally wind down. Moisture settles back into the brush. Perching on the sky bridge between his garage and the house below, Thong (call me “Tom”) V. Tran, 35, just minted M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering, new Laguna Canyon homeowner, savours the wetness. No risk of fires tonight. He’ll be able to light the lanterns, an essential part of the mid-autumn celebrations. They’ll be the first in this house with everybody coming over. It would have been sad if they couldn’t have lanterns. Now, it’s one less worry.
He looks up at the sky. Autumn moons were never so large at home, he observes. Nina, his wife, says it’s the difference in latitude and the refractory properties of cold air. Perhaps … Nina’s in a doctoral program and likes to invent theories, even when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The difference he means – that the moon isn’t just one incandescence competing among others flaring up, whistling through, or exploding; that it’s possible to breath clear air not shit scented or charcoal laden like the atmosphere of the Saigon alleys he grew up in – are differences American-born Nina has never experienced. He shrugs to himself. Whatever … it’s not a bad thing, this gap in her understanding. The clarity of the air tonight, the size of the moon here in California, he’s thankful his wife and the 2 T’s – his also American-born children Tam and Tri – will never look at it with the same wonder he does, because they don’t share the same war stained memories he has.
His children are absorbed by the staring eyes of a stray toad under a mesquite bush. Pre-schooler Tam far more aggressive and curious than any Vietnamese girl ought to be, is poking at the toad with a stick. Toddler Tri, looking on impassively, is already showing more bulk than will ever be exhibited by his Vietnamese cousins in the Kodakcolour pictures the aunts send. That’s an effect of latitude and cold that Thong can buy into…. also, the effects of the terrible steroids in the Big Macs and milk they consume too much of, if another of Nina’s theories is right. He doesn’t share his wife’s worries about the steroids. That the children can have an excess of beef and milk is, to him, just another of the wonders of living in this land of plenty!
“Thong!” he hears Nina’s high exclamation from the house.
It’s followed by the lower murmurs of his brother Sixth, his sister-in-law Huong and their children … “What a big den” … “Wow, a walk-in pantry” … “Auntie is there a jacuzzi?”
Already he knows she’s feeling besieged, their relatives quiet unspoken envy making her guilty. He needs to go in.
He shoos the toad away and shepherds the two children round the swimming pool and up to the house. The den is crowded; men and children huddled around the latest Little Saigon music video – a collection of pre ’75 singers crooning plaintively to backdrops of coconut palms and a full moon. In the kitchen, he sees Nina and the ladies setting out mooncakes and tea. Typical sexist division of labour, he’s sure she’s sneering in her head. But it’s okay. After four years of marriage, he believes she’s adjusted herself. She’s after all still a Vietnamese, more or less.
He settles onto the sofa with the other men.
“Sixth,” he greets his brother.
His more slender and greyer older brother nods back and slaps him on the arm. “Youngest, not burnt off your mountain yet?”
“Nope,” Thong smiles, he won’t hope to make the older man understand why he chooses to live miles away from the Vietnamese community up a brush canyon. Why he cherishes the quiet, the privacy, the anonymity.
“I worried a few days this summer when the Santa Ana’s were blowing non-stop. Went out and hosed down the roof. Even stopped smoking for a while in case I started a fire with a careless butt thrown off the deck.”
“Didn’t want to be burnt by my American neighbours suing me,” he laughs nervously.
“They wouldn’t bother,” chubby Sanh, a neighbour from the old Saigon days, is cynical. “You’re not rich enough.”
Thong replies with a rueful smile, “You’re probably right. Tragic isn’t it?”
“That’s not the most tragic part,” Sanh responds quickly. “The most tragic part is you’re giving up cigarettes in the mistaken belief you were rich enough for them to sue.”
He sighs theatrically, “Ask me to give up my wife and kids yes, my gambling even. But my cigarettes, no way will I let them go.”
The others laugh. Sanh changes wives like shirts and spends every spare cent after alimony on Las Vegas weekends. Six years in America and he’s still renting, his only asset a silver Cadillac Seville which doubles as a bedroom when his funds run low.
“What about back in ’76?” one of the other men asks.
“Even then I managed,” Sanh boasts.
“Black markets everywhere. I’d been working at a government laboratory before the end and managed to salvage three cartons of hypodermic needles. Do you have any idea how much they were worth?”
“So, with a fortune in needles and all the Soviet fags in the world, why’d you leave?” Sixth grins.
“You know why,” Sanh retorts, “for a good chicken dinner of course!”
“Chicken dinners?” Sixth encourages him, passing another round of beer and cigarettes. Although they’ve heard each other’s stories countless times, still they relish each retelling.
Sanh shrugs, “You know that US educated engineer they transferred over from the university laboratory for re-education. Well, he wouldn’t let up. He just went on and on about how you could buy a whole chicken, a whole damn chicken, for an hour’s wages in the US. Every damn day …”
“And….” he looks around, his smile gone for a moment, “you remember the rations doled out to us then? Three kilos of rice and half a kilo of pork a month and rau muống, swamp leaves. Not even enough of those. So, I came.”
“Besides…,” he grins, “… Marlboros taste better than that Soviet rubbish.”
“You’re right.” Thong takes a last drag on his cigarette.
“Though,” he cocks his head and looks at the butt, “to me, Marlboro’s tasted better then when we didn’t know if we’d live or die … when any one of these little buggers could be your last.”
“Now …” he pauses, flicking the butt into the ashtray, “… they don’t taste good enough to burn up a house for. Too much of anything and you don’t appreciate it.”
“Like chicken eh?” Sixth leers at Sanh, elbowing Thong’s ribs at the same time.
“Fleshy white American chickens, one after another. Tell us about it.”
Thong knows Sixth hates it when he becomes reflective. Of late, Sixth has become quicker to curb him when the moods come on. It worries Thong a little. Is he getting soft or Sixth becoming harder?
“Getting drunk brother,” he hears Sixth whisper, “get some fresh air.”
Going out to the sky bridge, Thong sees that Nina and the women have organized a lantern parade down by the pool. The children, are trooping dutifully around the pool, the pink and yellow reflections their concertina pleated lanterns playing in the water. He catches snatches of their chanting, a Southern song taunting the old liar exiled to the moon. He’d taught it to Nina their first mid-Autumn, and then to Tam a while later. It’s now Tri’s turn. A custom from the other place, kept alive here in the new country. He turns the words over in his mind, a lesson that isolation is the inevitable price of deceit. Never too early to try to inculcate values, he grunts to himself, even if the effort ends in failure more often than not.
Wandering back into the kitchen, he sees that mooncakes neatly cut into eighths and tea have been set out for the men. They won’t want them right away from what he can see of the conversation in the living room where the men are enthralled by Sanh’s animated account of his second American wife’s bedroom inclinations. Thong sees Sanh rubbing his chest in a burlesque imitation of satiation and the men laughing in spite of themselves. He smiles with nostalgia. In the old old old days, he would have blushed at such conversation.
______
The men waiting outside shout for him to hurry and finish with it. They must go or they’ll be late.
Spent, he lifts himself from the woman; the madness in him gone. He looks sideways at her. She’s still very pretty, even with her eyes red from crying, her mouth swollen because of him. It’s regrettable, what he’s had to do. But they’re at war, and her father must be taught a lesson.
He pulls on his trousers and runs outside.
“Ready,” he says to the chief, avoiding his eyes.
He hoists his French carbine across his back, elbows away from his marching companions. He doesn’t want them too close right now, rubbing against him carelessly with their sweat stained arms, their smelly bodies. He wants to be alone, to savour the memory of the woman’s body under his, the fruity smell of her hair, her tiny pearl hard teeth against his tongue.
“A little tiger,” the man in front of him jokes.
“We all heard her,” the man behind comments.
“You tamed her though didn’t you?” “Was she good in the end?” they chime in unison, their curiosity overcoming restraint.
He looks away. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Still, it’s his first time and he’s sorry for himself and for her that it has happened this way. This isn’t what his father raised him to do, even if at the end she had melted into him … sighed with completeness … given him something to take away to remember her by.
______
He bites into the mooncake. At this age he still loves the feel of them in his mouth – the thin crispy skin, the nutty richness of the filling, the sweetness and sesame oil aftertaste. The solitary tasting reminds him of ’79. Eat quietly by yourself so no one can take it away from you; swallow slowly to keep the flavours in your throat so it feels like you’ve eaten more … He shakes himself. He’s allowed the alcohol to affect him again. Not necessary now, he chides himself; lots of food to share … too much. As for those left behind over there, he can’t do more for them than what he’s doing already. He absolves himself, gulps down his tea, lets the bitterness wash away the grease.
“Too much fat,” he tells Nina later in the evening, absently stroking her pale muscled thigh.
“What!” she’s indignant.
She crosses her feet, trapping his hand between her legs.
“Fat? What fat? Feel the iron.”
He laughs.
“No, not there … too much fat in the mooncakes, in here,” he pats his stomach with his free hand.
She rolls her eyes up at the ceiling and giggles, “Oh no daddy, not again …”
“Not tonight darling, my belly aches,” she mimics his nasal Vietnamese intonated English.
“Look,” she whispers, pulling his hand onto her belly, still hard and flat despite the two children.
“There’s no food in here yet. I’m hungry.”
Her directness and appetite always shock him. He loves it. It’d been there naked the first time she looked at him when they met at JFK, four years, a lifetime, ago. She’d been a student volunteer, the child of Central Vietnamese émigrés, diplomats who represented the last regime. He’d been the group leader of a gang of boat people, the first to be sponsored by Jimmy Carter into America, someone in authority but still only a penniless refugee. Nonetheless, she’d built a bridge to him with her hunger.
He floats on her silk smooth skin. Afterwards, he lays his head on her belly. He sleeps.
______
Nights bring a different release for the Commander. In the dark, the men return with reports from all parts of the Delta – a French column attacked here, two colleagues downed there, a church steeple grenaded. In the dark, men shacked up in the dugouts all day can slip out quietly like arrows from their quivers to find the targets of his days of planning. Night and he’s survived again, to walk out of the hut’s stifling heat to the waterway, to squat by the grass edge and dip his hands into the gleaming black water to play a little with the catfishes.
The squelch of bare feet pulling against mud announces visitors. He squints down the bank. Through the banana trees he sees a villager towing a small short prowed sampan. It will be the boy he guesses. Still, ever cautious, he melts into the darkness of an elephant-ear plant. The guards move forward, French MAS-36′s ready. He hears a woman’s soft agitated voice and a child’s whimper. Moments later, they stand before him. Without stopping to greet them he walks towards the hut. The guards, the woman carrying the boy, follow.
The Commander motions the woman towards the wooden guest platform and pumps up the gas lamp. The child wakens. He’s fine boned and dark with long slanting eyes; totally unlike himself, pale and broad and tall. More like the woman, the child’s aunt, the Commander decides. More like his dead wife.
The Commander and the woman talk. All the while, the Commander notes, the child watches. His eyes rove over the room, taking in the nipa palm ceiling, the hard brushed mud floor and the Commander’s few possessions – a large cardboard map of the region dotted with red pins, a short wave radio, a carbine. The child does not look at him, the Commander observes with chagrin.
The Commander sees that the woman has aged, no longer as beautiful as she was in their youth. Then, she had been the more striking of the two sisters, but already married to his friend, clerk at the public works. He asks after her husband and life in their town, Bac Lieu. She tells him the British who’d supervised the Japanese and Viet Minh disarming are now gone. Again, the town is full of French troops. But, there’ve been advantages. Her husband has been promoted to Superintendant. More money, just in time for a year of outflows … Her only son will set off soon for high school in Saigon … Her Oldest Daughter, just qualified as a nursing aid, will marry in a few months … And, her Third Daughter has also been matched … she rattles on. Even if it means more expenses, everything as it should be, she concludes. She looks up at him then, accusing. Despite his promises, he didn’t give his wife a chance to enjoy any of this, she seems to be saying. Instead, he’d given her young sister lonely days among rough men in forgotten plantations. And then she’d died.
He lowers his eyes and comes to sit by her. He has no apologies, but still…
“See,” she says as if to forgive him, pulling the sandals off the child’s feet.
She shows him the soles, startlingly white against the brown feet, and as yet un-calloused.
“He has a red spot on each sole. Like the Buddha. Forever supported,” she whispers in wonder. “He’ll have a fortunate life.”
The Commander shakes his head. She’s after all just a woman with her superstitions, no judge. He fingers the child’s foot with his large square index finger for a moment, before the child pushes him away.
He has slim hands with long tapered fingers, the Commander notices.
“A scholar,” his aunt says, to which the Commander nods his agreement.
They fall silent. One of the guards comes in and whispers to the Commander.
“You must go now,” he says to the woman.
Immediately, she picks up the child, and follows the guard out. As if in farewell, the child reaches a hand out from behind her shoulder for the Commander to touch.
When they’ve gone, the Commander sits back on the platform to wait until the lamplight dims. Then he stands up and removes a single pin from the targets on the map. Even if he has the right to decide, spies are everywhere. He must be careful, notwithstanding that when the sun rises tomorrow it will be impossible to see the pin-prick that marked the public works quarters in the hut’s dim light.
The squelch of pulling feet against mud grows gradually softer. The sampan slides over the water. Underneath the elephant-ears, the Commander waits for his next visitor, the intelligence officer from the city.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged Growing up Vietnamese, Mekong Delta, viet kieu, viet minh, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
II: A HOUSE DIVIDED
The jungle is full of signposts. A bamboo stalk bent at a right angle to signal a turn on the trail; scratches on tree bark showing the number of steps to a hideout; branches laced loosely into a canopy indicating a nearby field station. He can always find his way. But here in his birthplace, the Commander is lost. It’s ten years since he retreated into the countryside and Bac Lieu has become unrecognizable.
As his boat nears the jetty, the Commander sees that the once tree shaded river bank is now denuded, the trees chopped down by the French to flush out the Viet Minh. The shacks of shrimp farmers escaping the fighting on the mudflats now fill the grass land which once separated the town from the rice paddies and then the river. Beyond the bank, women have set up makeshift stalls. The yellow stuccoed row of government housing he looks for at the end of the rice paddies can no longer be seen.
The hawker women by the jetty pay scant attention to him, a middle aged man in dark peasant’s clothing. Indeed, no one has heeded him since he disbanded the last of his group the previous night and boarded the sampan inland. The anonymity and every day bustle of the market place suit him. He decides to continue keeping his own company, to locate the Superintendant’s house by himself.
Using the morning sun as a guide, he walks until he sees the yellow striped flag of the new regime fluttering before the house he remembers so fondly. It’s still separated from the roadway by a monsoon ditch, protected from the market hubbub by piled up handcarts and a raggedy fence overgrown with bitter gourd, lemon grass and peppers. Behind the fence, all seems peaceful. The courtyard is empty except for a chained dog which, uncharacteristically, does not bark at the Commander’s invasion of its territory. It watches sullenly but quietly as the Commander walks up to the front porch and settles himself on the hammock near the padlocked front door.
Soon enough the Commander hears a woman’s unsteady tread across the corrugated iron ditch-crossing. It’s his Sister-in-Law, trailed by a cyclo-rider balancing a large fish wrapped in sacking. The habit of years forces him to retreat deeper into the veranda’s shade to hide. It’s only when he’s satisfied his Sister-in-Law is alone and has stepped up onto the sheltered porch to unlock the front door that he allows her to see him.
He sees her eyes light up even as her face remains composed. She greets him with a quick smile. As in the old days he allows her to settle him with a cup of warm tea on the platform of her husband’s front room before she bustles off to her always pressing household tasks. Today, it’s to return to the courtyard with a large machete to hack the fish she’s brought home into more manageable pieces. He watches her economical movements with pleasure, her hands chopping the large fish with sharp short strokes, their quick flick sideways to throw the innards to the dog, their flutter as she loads the usable pieces into a basin and the brisk unfolding of her limbs as she gets up from the ground and carries what she needs back to the rear cooking area. Such a good housewife! He envies the Superintendant, his friend.
Before the Commander’s thoughts can stray further, the Superintendant’s wife comes back from the kitchen with a small dish of dried shrimp.
“It’s a long way from the coast,” she observes obliquely as she sets the dish down by him.
“Yes, it’s good to be in a town,” he says as he crunches into a piece of shrimp. “I’ve really spent too much time in villages and plantations, I think. It would be nice to stay a while.”
She gasps, her composure disturbed at last.
He, on the other hand, remains quite calm, having long accepted that he must no longer be disturbed by her.
“Only for a short while,” he smiles.
“But no questions until my friend the Superintendant returns,” he dismisses her. “Go, cook that wonderful fish you’ve just bought. We’ll talk later.”
He watches her retreating back, held up straight with irritation, then pulls his legs up onto the platform and crosses them. From the inner waistband of his trousers he draws out a hand sized stack of papers laced together with twine into a notebook. Taking a pencil stub from behind his right ear, he begins to scribble.
In the kitchen, the Superintendant’s wife shakes her head agitatedly. As problematic as ever! So much like the charcoal she’s trying to light – unpredictable, inconsistent and, yes, even dangerous. No good can come from his being in town she tells the kitchen god in the nook above her head. She chops savagely at a clove of garlic, imagining the local militia overrunning her swept courtyard and upsetting her flower pots as they search for him. However, the familiar rhythm of scaling, salting and grinding soon calms her. Her attention turns once more to the task at hand, the consistency of the caramelizing fish sauce and the exact doneness of the fish.
When she next walks out into the front room with chopsticks to place on the square dining table, she sees that her husband the Superintendant has returned. The two men are deep in conversation, as usual her husband more loudly, the other man carefully restrained. They ignore her as she moves in and out of the room setting out the noonday meal. Her husband, excitedly waving the pipe in his hand, is tearing into the results of last October’s plebiscite. The Emperor’s ex-Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem, now the newly declared President, won by ninety eight percent! How, he asks, could this be? No one he knows voted for the man.
She wishes he wouldn’t say it so loudly. And the Commander is no help either…
Perhaps, she sees the Commander rubbing a bushy eyebrow and venturing with a smile, it’s all in Saigon. In any case he tells her husband, pointing to the flagpole in the courtyard, it’s hardly wise to make such declarations. What, she hears the Commander ask, does it imply about the Superintendant’s vote?
She winces. Bringing into the open what shouldn’t even be thought in one’s heart!
That’s how it’s always been between the two of them, the patriot and the stay at home, her husband and his best friend. One teasing the other, the more timid one egging the other to more acts of recklessness, one day bringing disaster on all of them! She walks back into the kitchen, not wanting to hear more.
“Friend,” the Superintendant barks with laughter, “my vote would weigh nothing in evidence compared to who I’m eating with.”
“Yes,” the Commander sighs, “that’s true.”
They are both quiet, weighing the risks … what should be said … what cannot.
“What the heck,” the Superintendant looks up at his friend with a smile.
“So,” the Commander nods, rising to the challenge. He lifts a chopstick from the table and, as in the plantation, begins scratching on the wooden surface. Pointing to the straight line he’s drawn across a dragon shape he’s sketched roughly, he unconsciously adopts the lecturing tone he uses for new recruits, “Here’s Vietnam cut through its middle, our South controlled by a puppet. According to Geneva, this year we’ll become one again. But there’ll be no union. The great powers don’t want it. Better a Vietnam divided and weak than one that’s united and strong. Diem has American support to back out of the elections in exchange for more colonization, another big country riding rough shod over us. We can’t allow that …”
The Commander could go on, but his old friend taps impatiently on the table to stop him. “Yes, yes, that’s the official lecture. But between us, what’s the real reason? Why’ve you come back now? And here?”
The Commander looks down on the floor.
“It hasn’t been easy lately,” he admits. “Diem’s hitting hard at us. He’s using money to spawn turn coats. Even out on the marshes we’re being caught and killed. We need to disperse temporarily, to recuperate and re-arm. Some of us are going back to towns, some across the river to the stronghold in Kien Hoa, some as far as the border to make our way up north through the Central Mountains.”
“I’ll need to go too,” he tells his friend, “but not yet.”
“I need to set up a support network for the comrades we’re leaving behind first.”
He leans across the table to whisper to the Superintendant, “Where’s the most dangerous place for me to be? So, what better place to be? I thought I should take the chance …”
“It’s well worth it I see, now that I’m here. To yarn with you again, to get to know the boy perhaps …” he smiles, his earnest expression suddenly transformed by a lopsided smile.
“After this,” his tone turns heavier, “it may be a long time before we meet again.”
He stops and flips the chopstick over so that it balances on his thumb and index finger like a rifle. Shutting one eye and aiming the chopstick at the flagpole he says very quietly, “There’ll be war soon, I think.”
His listeners are silent. The Superintendant bends to tamp out his bamboo pipe on the brick floor. His wife, standing by the dining table, clenches her fingers very tightly against the earthen pot of stewed fish but does not cry out.
It is thus Thong sees them as he steps over the threshold, hungry after school.
______
Thong decides he won’t address the Commander as Father. To avoid doing so, he speaks to the Commander only when spoken to, using only self-referencing sentences. Quite the clever one he congratulates himself, sure no one has caught on.
He’s so transparent the Commander thinks, half proud, half hurt.
“Not my son,” he murmurs to the Superintendant.
“Not yet practiced like me,” he thinks to himself.
The Superintendant’s incensed. Thong’s rudeness reflects badly on his efforts to bring up the boy properly, to fulfil his responsibilities to his friend.
The Superintendant’s wife is pleased. With the authorities the way they are, it’s much safer this way. Who knows what might happen if an envious neighbour remembers that her much younger sister married an independence-minded Public Notary’s Assistant who disappeared in 1946 … or that some years ago she left the town alone only to return weeks later with a foundling of suspect parentage? She’s bad at lies. It’s difficult enough keeping open house for her married daughters and neighbours and having to explain their “cousin” from the coast. She won’t be the one to correct Thong, she tells her husband. He is the father of the house, if he doesn’t like it, he must speak to the boy himself.
As far as the Commander’s concerned, the tension he’s generating does not exist. The boy is only a child. As for the three of them, they are all adults and so much time has passed anyway…
He immerses himself in the domestic routine; rising early for coffee with the Superintendant before spending the rest of his morning doing odd jobs on the veranda. Later when the Superintendant returns from his early morning rounds, he plays chess with his friend on the front room platform, a game he usually allows the Superintendant to win. When the Superintendant goes out again just before lunch to pay off the casual labour, the Commander lazes in the front room. While eavesdropping on the women in the kitchen, enjoying the snippets of women’s gossip drifting in, he keeps an eye out for the boy’s return from school. After lunch, when the Superintendant and his wife nap, the Commander stations himself strategically in the patch of sand by the side of the veranda hammock where the boy is consigned to an hour of rest.
Thong watches as the Commander works, scooping the sand into hillocks and making valleys with his large square hands. By the fourth afternoon, he recognizes that the Commander has built a replica of the French fortified stations described in his brother Sixth’s history books. At the bottom of a shallow depression, he’s cantered a triangular bastion pointing north-east. Within this area are five low hillocks surrounding a plain. Finally, he’s painstakingly constructed an outer fence of matchsticks and four corner cones.
“It’s Dien Bien Phu,” the Commander says, giving the southern cone a last loving pat.
The boy doesn’t reply, but he sees that the child’s hammock stops swinging.
Pointing to each side of the triangle, he names them. “Huguette, Claudine and in the north-east Dominique.”
Then the cones, “Anne-Marie, Gabrielle, Isabelle and Beatrice. Beatrice was the first to go. We brought our artillery so close we had an entire infantry division against it and they didn’t know. Five hundred died in the first hour.”
Finally, he indicates the central area, “Eliane, the heart. It fell last year, 7th May 1954.”
“It’s up in the north,” he says to the boy. “I haven’t been there, but I’ve heard enough about it to imagine what it must look like. Probably not so different from the military stations we see here in the south.”
The Commander sees the boy nod. Of course, he must know about the stations and watchtowers. He would have seen them guarding the highway on his recent bus trip with the Superintendant to send Sixth off to high school.
He goes on. “There’s something special about this particular fort though. Do you know why?”
He’s disappointed when the boy shakes his head. What other important pieces of history have the Superintendant and his wife left out of the boy’s education he wonders.
“Well let me tell you then,” he begins in his best storyteller’s voice. “This is the beginning. We broke the French here. They lost three thousand men in fifty five days. At the end of it they lost Vietnam too …”
He continues with the various attacks and counterattacks, holding the boy’s attention till the entire glorious saga is told.
“Do you understand,” he can’t help asking at the end, his eyes searching under his bushy eyebrows; this one boy is more important than the hundreds of other recruits he’s told the same tale to.
Thong nods again. He understands perfectly, he says. It’s why they teach a new song at school. And why there’s a new flag in the courtyard and why the Commander can come to stay. Not a bad thing then, killing three thousand Frenchmen. No matter what his mother might say.
“That was a good story,” he tells the Commander. “Do you have more?”
“Of course,” the Commander smiles, showing large brown teeth.
And indeed there are.
In coming afternoons, Thong hears about the sisters Trung Trac and Trung Nhi who drove the Han Chinese into the mountains but being women had no heart to hold the fort. And their opposite, Ngo Quyen the weapon-less engineer who planted wooden spikes in the Hong River to trap the Chinese fleet on the ebb tide and burn their boats to cinders.
“Always, always,” Thong feels the Commander’s voice burn into his ears, “it’s the heart first. You must have heart. After that, there’s the head. Understand yourself, understand your enemy, take heart. If you have these three, you’ll always find something at hand to help you reach your end.”
Thong takes time to think about this.
But then, he asks, why does the Superintendant and not the Commander usually win the daily chess games? They both want to win, so it’s the same amount of heart. And they’re both as clever. Is the Commander not using his head?
He sees the Commander smile.
“Perhaps … Or perhaps, it really just depends on what the end is.”
Adults like to confuse, Thong screws his face in frustration.
______
Not that the outcome of chess games matter much as the spring passes. Other events occupy the adults’ minds, Thong realizes. Through the large wooden radio on the platform comes news that there will be separate elections in the South, information which causes the Commander’s brows to furrow. Later in March, when the names of the new national assembly members are presented, it’s the turn of the Superintendant to mutter about rigged elections and new bribes to be paid to retain his position. And in May as the school year comes to an end, Thong notices it’s his mother who pales when they all learn that the summary execution of anti-government plotters is permitted.
The Commander is in danger and also jeopardizing their family, this much Thong understands. There are fewer stories from the Commander. He now leaves the house more often and stays away for longer on business that no one will tell Thong about. It is business which makes his parents nervous and causes the first quarrel Thong witnesses between the Commander and the Superintendant.
It happens on a sodden July night just as the family are preparing for sleep. The Superintendant’s wife is braiding her hair and Thong reading to his father from the Confucian Analects when the Commander appears in the front room, his clothes dripping and his eyes red and wild.
“You’ve an attack of fever,” the Superintendant’s wife gasps, rushing to the cupboard to get the Commander a towel to dry himself with.
The Commander shakes his head, spraying fine droplets into the air around his big broad body.
“No, I’m just angry,” he says as he drops onto the platform to sit by the Superintendant, “… very angry.”
It’s because the new government’s representatives have jacked taxes up by over fifty percent in some villages, he tells the three of them. Pure extortion! And in some hamlets, Diem’s brother Nhu is killing hundreds, displacing thousands. All innocent villagers, victimized in a malicious attempt to get at those who refuse to submit to his authority.
“Life will become more difficult,” he hears the Commander tell the Superintendant in an urgent voice.
“There’ll be more killing.”
“If we don’t resist now, it’ll be too late!”
Thong’s ears perk up the prospect of a war, the possibility of seeing some real fighting. He’s disappointed the Superintendant doesn’t share his enthusiasm.
All’s well in their town, Thong hears the Superintendant reasoning with the Commander. He points to the land redistribution that began in June to rectify the crazy hand-outs made by the so called revolutionaries last year.
“Our family’s gained,” the Superintendant tells his friend, referring to Third Son-in-Law’s land holdings, which have increased fourfold.
“To resist would lead to needless bloodshed, brother fighting against brother.”
Like, himself killing his brother Sixth, Thong imagines. Or the Commander with a gun pointed at a defiant Superintendant, pulling the trigger and spraying blood all over the living room just like the raindrops he’d swung from his hair. Possibilities so horrible, Thong can’t believe he’s even dared to visualize them! Perhaps, he bites his lower lip, war might not be such a good idea after all.
The Superintendant’s voice, assured and firm, breaks into his confused musings.
“It’s time you put down the gun,” he hears his father tell the Commander. “You’re forty five, you can’t carry on for much longer.”
“For that matter,” his father continues, “neither can the country.”
“How long can we bear to kill ourselves?” he asks heatedly.
“Isn’t two Vietnams accommodating each other side by side better than a million dead Vietnamese? And anyway, who are these North Vietnamese whom you say are our brothers? Do we personally know or like any of them?”
He knocks his pipe angrily on the wooden surface of the platform…
“Our lives are here, in our villages and towns, with our families. We should live for these things, not some ideas imported from somewhere else.”
“Give it up. Stay.”
Thong has never seen his father so impassioned. He’s almost persuaded, but not quite.
He turns to look at the Commander, wondering what he might say to strengthen his position. The Commander returns Thong’s look. So long as Thong can be convinced that’s all that matters, the look seems to say.
“No, it’s not enough for me,” the Commander shakes his head. ”Yes things look alright here in the town, but they always do. In the villages out there, it’s different. Diem’s men are moving in, taking a piastre here, a chicken or pig there, transporting villagers into walled camps, imprisoning populations. I can’t accept that.”
“And who’s behind Diem?” he asks as heatedly as the Superintendant, “The American CIA! It’s democracy they say, but whose democracy? When they’ve finished giving us this democracy, who can say we won’t find ourselves slaves again? Like it was with the Japanese, or the French, or the Chinese before them.”
“We’ve suffered a thousand years of the same thing. I don’t believe that’s our fate,” he cries out.
So true, Thong wants to shout along with the Commander. But before he can, his father weighs in again.
“I can’t say what our fate as a nation is,” the Superintendant replies loudly.
“But,” he continues, jabbing his pipe at the Commander, his voice rising further, “if there’s blood in the paddies again then you, friend, you’re helping to spill it.”
The Commander pauses to think about it.
“And if I don’t,” he replies finally, his voice now lower, more considered. “Then you and all your family will continue to sweat for dictators in Saigon and white lords in Washington. How many years of that can you take?”
The Superintendant doesn’t answer. The Commander stands up with a sigh and goes out to the porch. On the floor, the Superintendant’s wife continues to oil her hair while Thong sits cross-legged beside her, picking at a scab on his big toe.
A draw, Thong breathes with relief. It’s good they’ve stopped where they have. He doesn’t want to see one of them lose to the other. But without the bitter end how will he find out which position is better? What’s right? Who’s wrong? As things are, they’ve left him torn.
______
He doesn’t allow the tension in the air to get to him. Mondale vs. Reagan 1984 is already his second presidential election. The novelty of seeing the democratic process played out in excruciating detail on the television for as many hours as he cares to watch has worn thin.
Nina, who thrills to each new piece of trivia revealed on the TV, can’t understand his indifference. Bouncing on the sofa in their den during a particularly heated exchange on the box she badgers him again for his reasons.
“Why d’you pretend to be so unmoved?” she asks. “What’s so threatening about getting involved?”
“Why d’you need to know?” he replies, his face a bland mask of disinterest, his question seemingly only rhetorical.
“Just additional input for me to figure out what makes you tick?” she laughs. ”I’m a psychologist honey. You’re my first close up.”
She fusses too much about his psyche, he thinks. Some things are better left alone.
“So simple, that’s me,” he replies smoothly as he cuts up Tri’s steak.
No point arguing about it. He just cannot convince her that he’s not like her, that he chooses to live in the immediate and the tangible, not risk the depths.
She won’t let him get away so easily though, he knows.
“People like you will be responsible if he wins. He’ll nuke the world and we’ll perish,” she turns away from the TV screen to look at him sternly through her large tortoise shell spectacle frames.
But, he won’t let her intimidate him. As far as political analysis goes, he’s her equal. No matter how much he might like to, he can’t let go of his years of analyzing US politicians, especially when he knows she’s wrong.
“He won’t” he replies, adamant. “It’s just a show.”
“Remember they call it mutual assured destruction. M period, A period, D period. He’s not mad. He’ll make sure he won’t get in a situation where he kills himself and this whole country too.”
“Wait and see. Right now, they’re just being politicians, especially this guy… he’s an actor who wants another term. He’ll play whatever role they want him to, say anything to win.”
Thong stops himself from pointing out that Nina’s the US citizen in the family, born here in fact. If anything she should be the one voting, not hanging on to her declared non-partisanship! Why pick on him> He’s only got a green card.
“We’re the same really, both reluctant to choose,” he tells her. He chides her gently, “Don’t throw stones.”
But she won’t be mollified.
“We’re not at all the same,” she hits back immediately, “I’m neutral because I care. You don’t believe it matters one whit.”
He doesn’t reply. Why fight? It’s true what she says. He doesn’t care one bit. For him, the real battles have already been fought, and won, and lost somewhere else.
He wipes Tri’s mouth with a wet-one and helps him to hop off his high chair onto the floor. Tam’s fallen asleep, cheek on the dining table, steak pieces uneaten. She’s so difficult with food, he clucks to himself. Tri’s already heavier than she is. He tickles her gently to waken her; guides her, still drowsy, towards Nina.
“They need their showers,” he hands her over to Nina.
“I’ll rinse and load the washer and videotape this program for you,” he promises.
He’s tired, he thinks, as he settles onto the sofa after doing the dishes. They both are, she studying too hard, he trying to be everything he ought to be at work, at home, and at the rest of it. There’s fallout for the children too. They shouldn’t be rushed so early in the morning to day care and ferried home so late. But, how else can they live here in America? Sixth and his family are busy. All the rest of his relatives are in Vietnam. Nina’s Papa and Maman, fully engaged in the Virginia Vietnamese social circuit, can’t be expected to leave everything to come and babysit. And he doesn’t want them to in any case. There are no support structures here resembling those he grew up with. No one had briefed him about this when they let him leave for America.
“We’re on new frontiers,” he tells himself, repeating a favourite phrase from the man in the box.
“Play it by ear,” he practices as he zaps the sound off the television.
Politicians can be so deadly, he sighs. One good thing about being here in the US though, not deciding can also be a choice. In the event, he’s chosen.
He goes upstairs and into the shower, turns the water on hot and strong and lets the hard pricks of the water melt away the tension in his back and shoulders. It’s precious down time before he must go out again to become husband, father and American citizen-in-training. Not that life here is bad, he counts up the balance as he rubs soap over his thighs; one – super hot running water, another – elections, a third – Nina with her quick brain, her beautiful short sighted eyes … her straightforwardness, her naiveté … her feistiness, her prying … still on balance, an unexpected gift, one that shouldn’t be treated carelessly! Not waiting to dry himself, he wraps the towel around himself and steps out of the bathroom quickly to be with her.
She’s sitting in front of the bedroom television, crying.
“What’s happened?” he asks sharply.
She gives him an embarrassed red nosed wobble of a smile.
“Nothing really,” she confesses shamefacedly. “Just that the box here’s saying we’ve re-elected the man for the next four years.”
“Ah,” he lets out an exclamation of relief. Foolishness to shed tears over such a small thing! This event will disrupt nothing, absolutely nothing, in their sheltered lives.
If you only knew what elections can do, he wants to tell her.
______
Not long after the elections, the town finds itself with a new mayor and the Superintendant has a new boss. The Saigon appointee makes his presence felt quickly, descending on the Superintendant’s courtyards with an escort of henchmen a week after his arrival.
The visitor has a loud confident voice that carries all the way from the front courtyard into the back where Thong and his mother are hanging out clothes. His mother drops a shirt.
“Why’s he here?” she asks Thong.
“A superior doesn’t call on his subordinate, unless …” she rushes into the house, leaving the shirt on the ground.
Thong follows her into the kitchen and then the living room. He remembers the sudden silence as they enter, then his mother’s too bright chatter as she pours out the tea and passes around the lotus seed candy. He remembers the water splashing in the outhouse where the Commander is bathing. It stops suddenly. He hears the clatter of a pot being shifted, or stepped on. But in the living room, no one else seems to notice. Polite chit-chat and tea continue. The escorts prowl the room nervously trying to peer beyond the kitchen partition. Finally, the Superintendant rises and invites them to tour his humble quarters. They see everything and find nothing. At a quarter to the noon hour, after complimenting the Superintendant ominously on a wife who seems to manage so well on mere government stipends, the Saigon man leaves.
They must move, Thong overhears the adults agreeing. In September, the Superintendant makes arrangements to retire. They sell Third Son-in-Law’s windfall to buy a house and some tenements in the more anonymous provincial capital Can Tho, where a newly married daughter lives. At year end, when the rains stop, they go. On the road inland Thong wonders if anyone has left word of their destination for the Commander.
______
There’s a celebration. A Republican President means another four good years for aerospace and defence. There’s free flow lunchtime beer and pizza at the local. The whole R&D division goes. All the Mexicans from the shop floor too.
“Wanna bet none of them voted,” one of the whites says to Thong. “They’re just here for the free booze, the pissing frauds!”
“Yeah everyone … all pissing frauds … pissing drunk.” Thong nods in agreement. He included, although he doesn’t say this out loud of course. Why start a fight when he doesn’t need to? Still, by three, a fight does break out between the blacks and the Mexicans and they’re all thrown out.
Thong calls Nina to pick him up. He’s in no condition to drive.
As usual, it’s gridlock down the San Diego Freeway from Orange County to Laguna. But, they’re home with the children before five, two hours earlier than usual. And Thong has sobered up in the car.
“Home cooked food tonight,” Nina sings as they ease into the driveway.
“Fish stew?” Thong asks hopefully.
“French fries,” Tam interrupts, “I want French fries.”
“A popsicle,” Jonny adds.
French fries and fish stew, Nina decides, and afterwards popsicles. It’s a rare occasion.
Almost stolen, Thong muses later as he puts the guard bars up on Tri’s cot and goes over to Tam’s room to drop a light kiss on her brown cheek. He hesitates in the hallway, willing them to sleep through and not waken to the dark. It’s his nightly ritual.
“Such cruelty leaving them alone,” he’d once said to Nina. “They’re so young. If they wake up, how will they know to find us?”
______
Of course, in his own time and way, the Commander does find them again,
Their new home outside the Can Tho city limits meanders over three courtyards, providing more than enough space for all the generations of the Superintendant’s family. Third Sister and Brother-in-Law, whose government given land paid for the property, rightly occupy the centre courtyard. The front, with its enormous black wood divan, French desk and radio belongs to the Superintendant. The Superintendant’s wife rules over the back stoop, near the kitchen where the womenfolk and children congregate. Thong sleeps alone in the attic looking down into the adjoining ancestral hall.
Life is self-contained. After the incident in Bac Lieu, the Superintendant is wary of attracting attention from the local authorities. With books and the first opportunity for leisure after thirty five years of work his short temper cools. He is content. So is his wife, occupied by the daily nurturing of the household. Thong too, studying intensively to catch up with the city school, has little time to be lonely. Perhaps only Third Son-in-Law, plucked from his rice fields and fruit trees to become a provincial city landlord, feels something missing. But he’s too dutiful a man to question why, and too gentle to beat his wife for what seems a passing discontent. So they pass the year, then another and another.
The Commander’s arrival, un-announced as usual, breaks the surface calm. He comes at night, stepping out from behind the darkness of the cooking shed. The household is asleep. Only the Superintendant’s wife, scrubbing out a pot badly blackened by a careless maid, is about.
She sits by the well, bent over the pot, quietly singing to herself. His footfalls on the coconut twigs cause her to look up. She recognizes his tall wide frame immediately.
“You’re here,” she states, standing up to hand him her stool before squatting down again to work on the pot.
“We thought they’d ferretted you out and killed you,” she can confess now that she sees her fears were only imagined.
“But you must have gone up to the mountains,” more a question than a statement.
“For a few months yes. Then, here … there … travelling about,” he replies.
He does not tell her he’s gone all the way beyond the partition line and then come back again. In the calm of this back courtyard his last six months climbing mountains and hacking his way through jungle vines, struggling up and down uncountable hills and through freezing streams seems like a far off hallucination, just another of his malaria induced nightmares.
He takes the pot and brush from her and continues with the task.
“It wasn’t too hard. People like me, we come and go easily. We just blend in and disappear.”
She appraises him in the half dark. Perhaps, if one were not really looking, if he bent over a little, sank into his hips and covered his pale easily sun-reddened skin in worn peasant clothing, perhaps. She, however, will always know him. Despite the war and time passing, he’s really changed very little. Although he’s greyed, age has not yet bent his back. His broad spare shoulders are square still. Only his too silent walk belies his years of hiding. And yes, perhaps his eyes too, more readily sliding away from one’s direct gaze with the years.
Face averted, eyes on his task, he allows her to examine him. She’d examined him in the same steady searching manner then, when the Superintendant brought him home, recast from best friend to prospective groom for her youngest and recently orphaned sister. It was so long ago, during the time of the Japanese … before the persecution … before the Americans, but he remembers it like yesterday. They’d sat around a wooden table, the Superintendant, the Superintendant’s wife, himself. He was a younger man then but still an old groom for the fifteen year old girl. His future wife had served the tea and then gone to stand silently, appropriately, in the background. The Superintendant’s wife had spoken very little to him. Despite his weekly visits to play chess with the Superintendant, conversation between the two of them had all but ceased after her marriage to his best friend. Still, all the time while looking sideways at his future bride, he’d felt the older sister’s scrutiny and finally a grudging letting go and agreement. It was no small triumph. She’d been an ally from then; all through the years of his brief marriage until she came out from his wife’s birthing room, blood stained hands holding his son, her long eyes narrowed.
“Is the boy well?” he asks, looking up from the pot at last.
She starts, recalled from her own thoughts.
“He’s settling now. In the first few months he fretted tremendously. He pestered his father every day for more than a month to be allowed to ride the bus back and leave word of our new address with the neighbour. When my husband lost his temper and shouted it was impossible, he threatened to run away to the liberation forces to find you.” She shakes her head at the fool-hardiness of the child.
“He’s hot headed that child. Not like you …”
She laughs, interrupting herself, “More like my husband really!”
“Fortunately,” she tells him happily, “Sixth came home for the weekend and talked him out of that nonsense.”
“Nonsense?” the Commander raises an eyebrow.
He sees her nod, her eyes challenging him from beneath hooded lids.
They were smooth once, he remembers, under straight black brows. Now, the brows are less black. The lids have thickened, creased with tiny wrinkles, especially near her once very straight fine nose. Each line seems to demand an accounting from the Commander. Unable to provide it, he lowers his eyes again.
He concentrates on getting the last of the burnt rice off the bottom of the pot as she tells him about arrangements for the boy’s schooling in Saigon.
Saigon … he doesn’t like the idea. The way things stand in the war effort though, he’s not in a position to take the boy away with him just yet.
“And the money to pay for it?” is all he can ask.
“There’ll be enough,” she tells him, her tone quietly confident the way she always is with household matters.
“Although,” and now she’s less certain, “it’ll not be for another year, and who know what the world will bring us then.”
Peace, the Commander would like to tell her, but it isn’t something he can give. .
“A clean pot, if nothing else,” is what he actually says as he hands it to her, almost as good as new.
They stand up together. The Commander, looking down at her from his full height, notices she’s shrinking. As all old women must.
She tilts her head to catch his eye and sees for the first time that night his dust- streaked face and soiled clothing.
“Ahh, you’re tired, and here I’ve been talking with no food and no drink prepared for you. What a welcome!” She rubs her nose, ashamed.
“You must wash,” she instructs. “The bath house is down there, on the other side of the courtyard. Leave your dirty clothes on the line outside. I’ll bring a towel and something of my husband’s for you to change into and put it on the water drum by the door. And when you’re ready, there’ll be some food waiting.”
He watches from the well as she hurries away for the towel and spare clothes. He waits until she’s lighted the kitchen before picking up the kerosene lamp she’s left for him, and crosses the courtyard. The wash house door swings open silently. He lifts the lamp, swinging it into the corners of the little hut to check for grass vipers. There are none. Assured, he removes his sandals, hangs the lamp up on the huts cross beam and begins to undress.
By the time he’s washed and dressed, she’s started a pot of soup boiling and the kitchen is filled with the smell of tamarind.
“Leftover sour soup and fried rice,” she says, handing him a pair of chopsticks and a large blue and white bowl filled with fragrant grains.
He takes them and sits down at the sturdy kitchen table, watching as she unhooks a large coconut husk ladle from the wall to scoop out hot liquid from the pot into another bowl which she places in front of him.
“Eat please,” she invites.
He obeys, trying not to show his hunger. He hasn’t eaten a sour soup cooked with as much care as hers for many many months.
She stands aside, looking at him shovel the rice and soup into his mouth with surreptitious satisfaction. For all that he’s a man who brings trouble with him she can’t help but be thankful he’s still alive. Because he’s still family, she tells herself, still her husband’s greatest friend.
When he’s finished and she’s rinsed out the few pieces of crockery, she takes him through the kitchen and across the courtyard to the cavernous ancestral hall next door. She leads him up the narrow wooden staircase that hugs one of the walls, into the attap thatched side loft. Thong is sleeping there on a wooden platform shrouded by mosquito netting, his feet and hands thrown across the black wood’s cool surface.
“You can sleep here tonight,” she whispers. “Tomorrow, I’ll make a cane bed up for you in the front with my husband.”
He hesitates for a few seconds (years have accustomed him to sleeping alone), then lifts the edge of the mosquito netting and settles himself uncomfortably against Thong’s frame. He feels strangely comforted when the woman shakes her head at his discomfort and reaches in through the gauze to re-arrange the boy’s limbs so there is more room.
“That’s better,” he hears her murmur as she deftly tucks the edges of the net back under the edges of the bed.
He’s almost forgotten the existence of these small comforts of home and family, he reflects dreamily as his eyes close.
______
Thong wakes cramped, smelling musty breath in his nostrils. He’s pushed against the wall by the Commander, who is sleeping close in at his side. The old man is lying bamboo straight, arms across his chest, one square hand holding on to a circular metal talisman tied against his bare chest. His feet are neatly folded at the ankles. His head is turned towards Thong, mouth ajar. Thong opens his eyes to his slack lips and yellowed teeth and sits up abruptly. The Commander, watchful even in sleep, is roused instantly. He opens an eye and winks at the boy.
“Oh it’s you!” Thong exclaims, with excitement. “How did you get up here?”
He rushes on, “Hmm, let me guess … You picked the lock of the kitchen and crossed over then up the stairs.”
“Almost totally correct,” the Commander nods sitting up himself and hugging his crossed legs to his chest. “How else would an old man like me get up except through the kitchen, across the courtyard and up the steps?”
“But,” he pauses, “I didn’t pick any locks. Your mother had the keys and let me in most helpfully.”
“Still,” Thong says undaunted, “almost right … not too bad for logic.”
He casts around for something else to say that might establish how well he’s done despite the Commander’s absence these few years.
“I’m taking my exams you know, before the summer,” he offers. “Logic is one of the subjects.”
The Commander gives him an unbelieving half smile. :
“They’ve advanced the subjects a lot then, since I went to school,” he says mildly.
Caught in the exaggeration, Thong’s brown cheeks turn slightly ruddier.
“Well, it’s sort of logic. Logic is what my brother Sixth studies at the high school…. but he says it’s the same. You carry out the same process when you get an algebra or geometry problem and work out step by step what you have to do. Just like being a soldier or tactician like you. Logic is important there too isn’t it?”
“Among other things,” the Commander agrees, absently slapping a mosquito which has penetrated the gauze and settled on his upper arm. “Things like reflexes, and a good nose to smell danger with, and sense to know when the cards are stacked and quick feet to run away.”
He rubs the dead mosquito on his singlet, staining its white cotton.
“And…” he swings his legs down to the floor, feet groping for his grass sandals, “smelling out the chamber pot when you wake up.”
“There isn’t one,” the boy informs him. “Ma says I’m too old now. It’s out the back in the outhouse for me. That way, she gets me up and about early, you see. Like Sixth says, no way to go back to sleep then.”
“Your mother trains her children well,” the Commander observes standing and stretching his arms.
“Old men like me will have to be up and about early too then. Otherwise, we’ll be rushing down the stairs and breaking our bones,” he grumbles, pushing his feet into his sandals and making for the staircase.
“Are you staying then?” Thong asks as he scrambles out of the mosquito netting after the Commander, frantically tying up the cords on his pyjama pants as he follows.
The Commander nods distractedly as he makes his way downstairs.
“Perhaps.”
______
As it is, he leaves that same morning. Thereafter he comes to the house only under cover of darkness. But on and off, Thong glimpses his large lean frame around the town — sometimes being poled across the river in a sampan with a group of other peasant garbed men, sometimes leaning aimlessly on the jetty fishing, and once cradling a fighting rooster in his arms behind the local army quarters. Thong never thinks to call out to him on those occasions. He seems a different man then than the genial teller of the bedtime stories Thong loves…
Even within the Superintendant’s courtyards, the Commander seems driven. Many evenings, rushing home from his tutor in the early tropical darkness, Thong finds the Commander seated in the back courtyard over a chess game with the Superintendant, Third Son-in-Law in the background. The game is now no longer important, serving only as background for intense discussion about the country’s future. The Commander plays with absent-minded skill, simultaneously setting up attack positions with his elephants and canyons while parrying the Superintendant’s objections to Communism and weaving visions of a new, united and uncorrupted nation. Thong notices as the weeks pass that the Commander is more often the winner, and Third the more active conversation partner. The Superintendant, worn down by the Commander’s eloquence, is now usually silent.
“If they can’t get money for their rice, why would farmers till their land?” Third asks one evening.
“To feed themselves…” the Commander replies, “… to feed the people.”
“Themselves, but not others. Who’ll work for nothing?” Third counters.
“But the farmers do get something. If they share their rice, they’ll get services in return – the mechanic to repair the tractor … the barber to cut hair… Everyone would volunteer to provide protection and security. In peak season, everyone would go to sow and weed the rice fields instead of just family members. That way everyone would have enough, not some more and some less.”
“It seems to me that we get all that with the present system. Work and get paid, pay and get what you want,” Third muses. “Besides, some people work harder, they should get more, and those who are lazy, they should get less.”
“But what about those who can’t work, or the weak, or children?” the Commander counters.
“That’s a point,” Thong see’s Third concede. “Yes. I suppose, like a tree, we need to take care of the diseased and weak branches too.”
“Or else the whole plant becomes infected,” the Commander completes the thought for Third.
Closing the matter, he turns back to the chess board, where the Superintendant has him in check with cannon. He moves his counsellor to block the attack.
“And the king falls because of a foot soldier!” the Superintendant laughs as he strikes with a pawn.
“A mistake my friend,” he gloats. “You missed that little fellow, otherwise you wouldn’t have moved out the counsellor and opened that left flank.”
“A mistake?” the Commander asks, pale calloused hand picking up the offending pawn and offering it to Third.
“Obviously,” the Superintendant replies.
He’s a little peeved. It’s his first win in many days, and with such a clever move. Yet neither his friend nor his Son-in-Law is giving him any credit for it. He stands up from the platform grumpily, and sees Thong by the courtyard entrance.
“Come son, we’ll eat now,” he beckons.
They walk together into the dining room, leaving the Commander and Third still contemplating the pawn in Third’s hand.
______
“He’s putting ideas into Third’s head,” the Superintendant’s wife complains to her husband. “Before we know it, he’ll be off across the river in peasant clothes and our daughter as good as a widow. Or the militia will be crawling all over us again.”
The Superintendant, sitting on his sleeping platform, listens with eyes closed. Thong has just gone up to his attic after finishing the night’s compulsory reading, a paragraph from the Sutras. She’s preparing the room for sleep as the Superintendant smokes his last pipe. In earlier times, he would have watched as she combed out her bun and then helped her re-plait her hair loosely for the night. Now, he merely sits, listening as she moves about setting the room to rights, recounting the day’s concerns as she works. Still it’s a half hour ritual she knows he enjoys, the only time they share alone during the day. She wouldn’t normally spoil this time bringing up such unpleasant matters but for the consequences if she didn’t …
“And then there’s Youngest,” she blurts out. “Tactics, war history, fighting, sense, nonsense … He’ll have Youngest hiding in marshes too when he grows up.”
“As if enticing my sister to go in there hasn’t satisfied him,” she mutters, fluffing out the mosquito netting around her husband with more than her usual strength.
Through the gauze, the Superintendant sees his wife crouch down and blow sharply to kindle the flames of the mosquito repellent coils on the floor. Sandalwood and tobacco scents slowly mingle in the shuttered room. She sits back on her haunches, waiting for his response.
“Youngest will be alright,” he answers. They’ve nurtured and taught him so carefully. How could he not be anything but tall and true like his name?
But the Superintendant keeps these thoughts to himself. To say them outright would be boasting and tempting fate. He wouldn’t do that, even if it’s just between husband and wife.
They remain quiet, waiting for the other to say something first. As usual, the Superintendant’s wife manages to outlast him. It is he who asks, “Is Third unhappy?”
“No one’s said anything, if that’s what you mean …” she’s sarcastic. As if anyone would need to be told when the matter is so obvious, the tone of her voice implying.
But a thing said is a reality, a thing perceived only a possibility.
“Leave it be then,” he decides, “Third’s old enough.”
“So is Brother-in-Law,” she snaps at him, “and look at what he’s still doing.”
She’d recognized that fatal foolishness then; the reason she never encouraged him, so handsome and so eligible, on those occasions when they met at the office of the notaire about her mother’s affairs. Why, despite her husband’s urging, she hesitated about giving him her sister when he asked. But, the Japanese had just entered Saigon and her sister was so young, so vulnerable… There was no other way to protect her. It’s unfortunate she hadn’t noticed that same foolishness in Third.
“You should say something to Third,” she tries to persuade her husband.
But he merely repeats, more sharply this time, “Leave it.”
“Everyone has their own fate. We’ve ours, my friend the Commander has his. You can’t blame him for Third wanting to go. If it’s his fate, he’ll go whatever you or I say. We’ll just have to send someone else out to collect the rents.”
As if that were all, her nostrils flare; only a question of the rents. What about our daughter?… Their children?… her heart shouts. But he’s closed his eyes again.
She listens helplessly as he yawns then cracks each knuckle before stretching himself out on the platform. Parting the netting, she takes the pipe from his outstretched hand. She taps it hard, harder than usual, against the spittoon. Sometimes, she thinks, she could kill him. But she only says mildly, “If I’m gone, you’ll surely burn yourself one of these nights.”
______
In the dark of the attic, Thong lies with arms folded, his head on the Commander’s belly.
“Do you shoot people?” he asks.
“Hardly,” the Commander replies. “I’m sent to win hearts.”
______
“He says he’s going to win hearts!” Third Daughter sobs, sliding across the black wood of her mother’s divan into the familiar lap.
The Superintendant’s wife draws her close and strokes her hair. Strange, she thinks, how her daughter’s skin and hair feel no different than when she’d been a frightened child shrinking from the school yard years ago. She feels tears wet her grey silk trousers.
“It is a woman’s life,” she says. “You must bear it.”
“How? How can anyone?” her daughter cries.
“You’ll learn,” she answers.
She doesn’t explain how a heart toughens. How, after love has pulled and pushed and sometimes even wounded, the heart strings harden. She only loosens her daughter’s disarranged hair to run her fingers through its ebony thickness.
“Come,” she coaxes, “Let me plait your hair for you …”
An old comfort, offered many times before, to calm this child so often bullied by her jealous less beautiful oldest sister. And, as always, Third Daughter is comforted.
______
Thong hears her sobs subside, her breathing quietens till it is only a sigh of wind breathing through the rafters. He sleeps and dreams … of kites circling over the bloated carcasses of dead landlords.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged choices, choosing, fathers, Growing up Vietnamese, Mekong Delta, politics, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
III. CLOSE QUARTERS
“So was she upset?” Nina wants to know.
A silly question at an inconvenient time, Thong’s eyebrows crease in annoyance. He’s just come back from an inconclusive sales trip to Seattle. The installation mechanisms for the new fastening systems had tripped leading to a microscopic disturbance in airflow over the installed rivets; a setback needing another trip before the order can be confirmed. He can’t afford the delay. He’s up for promotion, the one he needs so he can get onto the really important projects. Until that happens, he has nothing but the same waffle he’s been recycling for the last five years to put into the notes he’s scheduled to write at the end of each month. And he’s behind schedule with those as well, the whisper thin blue aerogram filled with Third Brother-in-Law’s seemingly nonsensical questions reminds him.
“Real Vietnamese women born and raised in Vietnam don’t fuss,” he says hoping to divert her.
But she isn’t.
“There must’ve been a scene,” she whispers, curling into his side.
Her index finger gently teases his left earlobe. He brushes her hand away. Hell, she can be so relentless. Everything is grist for her restless curiosity. Sometimes he wonders at his own lapse in judgement, to have married her of all people. It makes everything so much harder.
What he needs is sleep, not Nina setting of on an archaeological dig triggered by the letter from Third Brother-in-Law and Third Sister. But from the set of her mouth he knows he won’t get it until he satisfied at least some of her curiosity.
He lifts himself up to sit against his pillows, lights a cigarette.
“I don’t remember when he actually left. It wasn’t sudden. He just was around the house less and less. After a while, he was staying out nights. Then, one month end, it was my Dad and I collecting the rents.”
“Didn’t the family say anything?” she wants to know.
“Not to me. They just told me to study hard and pass my high school entrance exams to Saigon. That’s all.”
“What about the old man? What did he say?”
She will corner him into giving out every little detail!
“My Blood Father? He never mentioned any plans for Third to go with them. He just came and went, slept up in my room when he stayed over, played chess and kidded around with my Dad as if he had nothing to do with Third leaving. And my Dad didn’t mention anything about it either. Maybe my Mom was mad, but … hey, it’s ancient history!”
He yawns loudly, hoping Nina will get the signal that this is enough archaeology for the night. He doesn’t have the energy to let her go further, to let her digging into the past detour to the present and to him.
“Main thing is …” he tries to change the subject, “are we going to be responsible for all of the three hundred bucks they asked for in that letter or shall we get Sixth to hand over half of it?”
Nina ignores his question.
“But what did they tell the kids?” she persists, her voice rising.
“Whatever they tell kids I guess,” he replies, stubbing out his cigarette and turning over to switch off the light.
A memory of the Commander comes to Thong’s mind. His eyes are lowered under eyebrows thick like caterpillars. He’s saying something so softly Thong almost doesn’t hear. What he says is ‘sometimes it’s better to hide the truth’. And so it is, sometimes, Thong has come to learn.
He rolls across the bed to Nina, begins to gently smooth the comforter covering her flat tummy in slow circles.
“Look sweets, it’s just too long ago okay?” he murmurs into her hair. “Third heard this war cry and he followed it. She must’ve been upset that he left, but she coped. Life went on. They still collected the rents. They paid for my tuition. Like a good kid, I listened to my mother and went to Saigon with Sixth, and got on with the things that mattered like studying and work and success and marrying you okay? End of story, goodnight.”
He continues stroking the comforter down the length of her thighs and up towards her shoulders and arms. She remains silent.
“Okay?” he peers through the dark at her face. She’s closed her eyes. Her face is wearing her stubborn won’t be trifled with expression. But, she has the most mobile face in the world. She’s persuadable. It’s a question of how. He takes her face in both his hands, kisses her gently on the lips.
She lifts up her right arm to circle his head. He feels her forearm cross and tighten against the back of his neck, drawing his face into hers. Their lips meet again. He feels a sharp pain. Damn it! She’s nipped his lower lip.
“Goodnight,” she murmurs without opening her eyes, then releases him and turns away. He probes his lip carefully with his tongue. Thank god she hasn’t drawn blood. Still, there’s no reason for such violence he wants to protest to her. But she’s already snoring gently. Unpredictable cow!
______
Nina nags and nags and out manoeuvres Thong with all the skills of her Central Vietnamese court heritage, insisting on the night out at Pham Duy’s new night club for no reason that Thong can fathom.
“You told me yourself, you can’t relate to the rhythms of Vietnamese music,” he argues.
“And as for the lyrics …,” he’s too polite to remind her that she hardly understands most of them.
But she won’t be dissuaded.
Sixth and Huong have wonderful things to say about the club, she tells Thong. And, to make up a foursome, they’ve even offered their children as babysitters.
Vietnamese music … free babysitting … what’s Thong’s problem she asks.
Thong doesn’t trust Sixth’s and Huong’s children to manage Tam the inquisitive first grader or Tri the obdurate pre-schooler. Besides, he’s ambivalent about Pham Duy. The music’s okay, he grants. But the man’s unabashedly patriotic songs make Thong uncomfortable. He, for one, cannot proclaim such pure love for the country both he and the songwriter have left behind. Not that he can say this to anyone, even Nina. There’s nothing for it but to swallow his angst and agree to go.
They wind down the canyon to dinner at Sixth’s and Huong’s in silence, Tri and Tam securely buckled up in back, Nina absently fiddling with her buttons, Thong tight-lipped and exasperated that he’s let Nina win yet another battle just so he can continue to fight the war.
_______
“They’re here…. they’re here!” Sixth’s youngest girl Thi shouts, leading her troop of siblings out to the car, the boys to stroke the BMW’s burgundy fuselage, Thi to unbuckle Tam and Tri while her older sister Kim unloads their paraphernalia from the trunk.
Thong and Nina stumble into the living room in a jumble of kids, nephews, nieces and sleepover stuff.
Huong, who’s running seams on one of her industrial sewing machines welcomes them with a nod.
“He’s in the back watching football,” she indicates to Thong with her chin.
Thong bobs his head in acknowledgement and, taking Nina with him by the hand, disappears down the corridor to greet the older man.
Nina returns seconds after, as she’s expected to. Kneeling down by Huong, she fingers the pile of pink satin collars at the older woman’s feet.
“Can I help?” she asks, a matter of form.
Huong stops her sewing a second and points to a finished garland of about fifty collars on the floor nearby.
“There’s a pair of scissors behind you. Help me cut off the threads between each one. After that you can turn them right way out with a chopstick,” she instructs.
Nina does as she’s told.
From the vantage point of her machine, Huong looks on with approval. For all that the girl’s over-educated, a bad housekeeper and speaks Vietnamese like a textbook, she does try. Perseverance, a good Hue trait, Huong thinks. She’s glad that’s the only one Nina inherited from the lot her hoity-toity family might have passed on.
“There’s maybe another two hundred,” Huong encourages Nina. “We’ll finish in about half an hour and then go help Kim and Thi in the kitchen. We’ll be ready just when the old man’s done with football. “
A look passes over Nina’s face, one Huong has seen before – a mixture of condescension and pity for what Vietnamese women have to put up with at home. “You can’t expect your brother-in-law Sixth to be the same as your husband,” Huong can’t help trying to explain, yet again, to Nina. “Youngest is very modern. That’s why he helps with the children, lets you study. Sixth is from the old world. He divides work into men’s responsibilities and women’s chores.”
“Look at this pile,” she points to the bag of sewing in the corner of the room. “There’s no way he’ll consider that his responsibility.”
“Delivery, payroll, contractors, and now, trading on the stock market, that’s his job. Everything else and the house, that’s mine.”
“But, he provides,” she justifies. “He’s responsible. And, I’ve been married to him too long to want a change.”
“So,” Huong’s voice rises, “either I lean in and put my shoulder to the plough, or there’ll be no clothes sewn and nothing to eat for dinner.”
Nina’s mortified she’s upset Huong. She hadn’t meant for her face to be so transparent.
“Well, at least now you’ve got electricity,” she teases, trying to lighten the mood. “You don’t have to work this machine on leg-power and run out back to kindle up your charcoal stove for beef fondue in between breaks. So, life gets better ….” her voice trails off aware that her foot’s in her mouth again.
“It wasn’t like that back home,” Huong says acidly, bristling at Nina’s assumptions.
“I didn’t mean it that way…” Nina begins to defend herself, but doesn’t get the last word.
Thong, sent by the two girls, comes to summon Huong to the kitchen and save the exchange from spiralling further into unnecessary unpleasantness.
______
Steam rises from the centre of the table. The hot-pot bubbles, surrounded by a platter of raw beef and fresh greens, fermented fish and shrimp sauces, a large tray of crisp golden sprout-filled pancakes and small dishes of pickles and unripe fruit. The china matches. An attentive white shirted waiter hovers in the background.
Huong’s parents are impressed. Refugees from the North who farm a small plot in a Catholic resettlement village along the Great Northern Road, they’ve never seen anything so grand. Neither have Sixth or Thong, who’ve lived quite some while in Saigon. Oldest Brother-in-Law, the appointed parental representative, has done Sixth proud with his police chief takings.
Sixth is grateful for Oldest Brother-in-Law’s efforts and pleased at the impression it’s made. Now, if only he could have a glass of cold beer…
He takes a bottle from the ice chest, offers it to his future father-in-law. “Uncle?”
“No, no,” the thrifty old Catholic demurs, wishing for a jug of good rice brew instead.
“You have it,” his wife says, pushing the bottle back at Sixth.
“No, no. Ice tea is fine” Sixth makes a mock protest, mumbling, “Never drink if I can help it.”
Huong’s mother smiles her approval. Huong’s father’s teeth flash in relief. Oldest Sister nods enthusiastically.
“Eat please, everyone,” Oldest Brother-in-Law invites, trying very hard not to snicker at the farce. The pig’s already been poked and needs to be marketed fast, why the pretence on both sides? Still, he has his responsibilities, which he won’t shirk.
He picks up a piece of the beef, dips it into the fondue and when it’s cooked, offers it to Huong’s father.
The old man accepts it in his bowl ceremoniously.
It’s done, Oldest Sister lets out a little breath of relief.
Sixth breathes a sigh of relief too.
He picks up a piece of pancake, dips it into fish sauce and tenders it to Huong.
Huong bends her head and stretches out her bowl silently to receive it, suitably decorous. Under the table she slowly inches her high heel off his sandaled foot. She offers him a slice of young starfruit, his favourite accompaniment.
He bites into its crunchiness, his lips puckering at the acidity.
______
Two months of begging it took me,” Sixth reminisces to Nina. “Also, a hole in my foot. Just to warm up her parents. And then, we had six weeks of religious education to turn me into a Catholic. That’s how long it took us to get married. What a wait! “
“But, what did he get?” Nina blurts out in a rush trying to patch up the awkwardness earlier in the evening. “A veritable gold mine. A wife who cooks, cleans and churns out collars at a hundred bucks a minute. COO, CEO and VP, of Huong and Sixth Inc …”
“It wasn’t too expensive was it?” she asks innocently.
Sixth and Huong look at each other for a long moment.
“Who can say?” Sixth says finally. He reaches out for a slice of starfruit to go with his beef.
“Pfahh, tasteless!” he grumbles, spitting it out into his hand.
“You still haven’t managed to find the right type,” he says accusingly to his wife.
Huong taps her chopsticks angrily on the table.
“This isn’t home,” she retorts. “What do you expect?”
______
No one thought the baby would arrive so soon, Oldest Sister, who officiated at the delivery, writes in no uncertain terms to her parents. But, the child seemed healthy and Huong was recovering fast. She would probably be well enough to rejoin Sixth at their militia quarters by the time the summer holidays were over.
Oldest adds that if will be a good idea if Thong goes along with Huong when he returns to the city for the next school year. She doesn’t say it will be easier on her, so Thong won’t notice her husband’s frequent absences at night and their whispered quarrels in the morning. She doesn’t want him reporting this to her parents. They have enough on their minds as it is.
“So, what do you think?” the Superintendant’s wife raises her tired eyes to her husband’s.
It is evening and they’re seated on the platform in his front room, he smoking his evening pipe, she stacking trau leaves smeared with lime paste into her areca nut tray.
He tilts his head, sucks on the pipe, then shrugs.
“There’s not much difference for Youngest. If anything, Sixth will handle him better and make sure he studies. Having such a busy job, Oldest can’t be expected to be the best supervisor. As for guiding a growing teen, we can see with Huong and the baby that despite all her medical knowledge, she hasn’t guided Sixth very well at all….”
He’s stopped by a sideward glance from his wife, which he answers with a guilty smile. She’s right. It wasn’t Oldest’s responsibility. As Sixth’s father, he should have advised Sixth properly so that none of this would have happened.
“I don’t know if Youngest will be any good around the house for Huong and the baby,” he says in a more tentative tone, “but it’s always helpful to have a male in the house, even a young one; especially in a militia housing compound. Beside’s Sixth will need some help with his expenses now.”
The Superintendant’s wife lowers her eyes. She pats his hand, agreeing. It’s water under the bridge now. Anyway, her thoughts wander to Oldest and her husband, her sister and the Commander, karma causes marriages to take all manner of paths. Her sister, she thinks again; the one who could not be protected despite their best efforts.
“To think of the stupidity,” she muses, “Sixth, an eldest son exempt from the draft. He could have been a plantation manager. Instead he leaves studying and takes up the gun in a private army, a Catholic one at that, just to get married.”
“And to hear the things they’re doing – terrorizing temples, tearing down alters, beating up monks …” She looks up at her husband, her eyes widened in outrage. That her own son may be involved in such atrocities, she can scarce credit.
“This war will corrupt all my sons and daughters’ husbands yet,” she says bitterly.
Her husband looks away. She may well be right, the Superintendant thinks. There’s nothing he can do to change the way things are, nothing he can say that will ease the fears nagging in her heart.
They sit together quietly, breathing in the faint scent of longans seeping in through the half opened windows from the tree in the courtyard. He continues to suck on his pipe, she to roll her betel nut leaves.
“Well perhaps living with all those warring men will take the warring out of Youngest,” she says, her lips curving upwards in a ragged twist.
The Superintendant touches her hand briefly.
“Hankering after a scholar son still?” he asks…
______
If only his parents knew, Thong frets, recalling his mother’s last letter. He isn’t getting much studying done at all.
Transplanted from the small upper room at Oldest Sister’s in the Checkerboard District to the Yen Do militia compound, Thong is suffocated. The old room he shared with Sixth had been high enough to be windy and had offered a view of roof gardens and a memory of the Delta. Now, he sleeps on the platform in the main room. His dreams are overseen by the gory painted crucifix Huong has hung up to blend in with their other Catholic neighbours. Sixth, Huong and their new daughter crowd into a back room, flimsily partitioned by plywood and a thin curtain. They share cooking facilities with another family across the hall. They also share the toilet down the way, a windowless room with dripping toilet pipes overhead…
Across the road from the compound is a scatter of bars to cater to the single men. Behind them, makeshift squatter huts lean haphazardly against each other, fighting for space all the way out to the canal. The bars and squatter settlement drowse quietly during the day, coming to life only at night when the prostitutes wake and emerge to line the sidewalk. Then, the bars light up and the street blasts with the throb of motorcycles and drunken singing.
The rising tempo of the night, the almost dead afternoons when the men’s wives are away working to supplement their husband’s meagre incomes, is unnatural to Thong. So is the fact that families are living piled on top of each other. Shit oozing out of pipes in the ceiling is the most unnatural of all! He eyes the brown pipes emerging from the upstairs bathrooms uneasily as he empties scoopfuls of water over his head. In Thong’s humble opinion, shit should go straight into the ground or a river.
He sighs heavily and begins to scrub the iron filings from under his nails with a small bristle brush. Saigon isn’t much fun these days. He misses his friend Sanh popping in from next door with tales of his latest escapades. He misses Sixth too, gone most of the time on missions for the President’s brother Counsellor Nhu. And Huong is unbearably weepy, just like the baby who cries unceasingly.
The noise, the crying, it’s all affecting his sleep and his studies. Machine shop classes are tiring enough even when he’s sleeping well; without sleep the new American donated machinery seems twice as heavy. Theory drags when one is sleepy. Worse, with the arrival of the Americans, Sixth has advised him to change his foreign language from French to English. It’s proving a difficult switch. Thong wonders if he’ll be able to keep his scholarship.
He’ll run away to look for his Blood Father if he fails, Thong fantasizes. Join up for a life of adventure and heroic deeds. But, he has no idea where the Commander has gone. No one has heard from him or Third, for eons. Besides, it would be unfair to put his family through another disappearance like Third Brother-in-Law’s. Irresponsible daydreams, Thong scolds himself. He dries his body roughly with his small cotton towel, then dresses and fluffs up the front of his wet hair into an Elvis Presley puff before stepping out into the afternoon light.
Thank goodness for the backyard, the one advantage of living on the ground floor. Its three meter width is overgrown with breadfruit trees, the lower branches of which are strung out with hammocks belonging to the ground floor occupants. This time of the day all are empty. Thong slides into Sixth’s.
Bliss! Shafts of sunlight filter green through the large scalloped leaves. He stares absently at the knobbly fruits. Translucent gel oozes slowly from one ripening directly above him, drying quickly into amber drops. Chickens scratch in the sand under his shadow. A fighting rooster crows from its bamboo basket. His gaze wanders to a pair of white forearms gathering in the wash from an upper floor balcony. Like bird wings, như cánh vạc bay, the songwriter Trinh Cong Son’s latest hit. Swinging idly, he imagines the hands fluttering over his hair, smoothing out the wrinkles of his shirt and then slowly undoing the plastic buttons one after another. He sings softly, letting his own voice lull him to sleep.
______
Pham Duy’s daughter is singing the last notes of her father’s “Love Song” when they arrive. The homesickness! Thong flinches at it. It hangs like a miasma over the room. But it quickly disperses as the shapely woman retreats backstage. The glass balls on the ceiling begin to turn, spreading rainbow flecks into the gloom and the band shifts to a fast moving and loud bolero.
Glad of the change, Thong takes a quick sip of beer and turns to Nina. He mouths ‘dance’, offering his hand. She takes it and stands up, swaying slightly. No tolerance for alcohol, Thong knows. Just a single beer and she tilts off equilibrium, her cheeks flushing crimson. He steadies her. Holding her hands, he helps her weave through the smoke and spindly wrought iron tables and chairs, following Sixth and Huong to the crowded dance floor.
She settles comfortably into him, pelvic points against his.
“I hate to ask you this,” she says in his ear, “but what exactly was that love song about?”
“Our language,” he answers.
It surprises him what she can be confused about sometimes!
“Loving Vietnamese, our mother tongue,” he adds, before pushing her away in a twirl.
This, he tells himself, holding her a little tighter when she swings back into his embrace, is what happens when you marry the American daughter of the French-speaking classes. Starting from tomorrow, he resolves, he will speak to the children only in Vietnamese. He can’t leave it to Nina. He must take the lead, as he does when they dance.
Thong is a good dancer. He’s been well taught. Nina is a natural, smoothly following him through the changing beat of the traditional seven dance cycle without a slip. Leading her, from the Paso Doble to Tango, to the Cha-Cha, Bolero, Be-bop, Boston and finally the Waltz, then back again, Thong forgets his irritation. She is what she is, without artifice. Someone to be grateful for.
They dance past mid-night before going come back to Sixth’s and Huong’s sleeping house, where they whisper their goodnights, wrap the two dreaming children up and carry them through the chill into the heated car.
______
He wakens to the baby wailing and the heavy smell of rubber and oil burning. Huong’s strong grip is rattling his shoulder blades.
“Youngest there’s a fire,” he hears her crisp Northern voice sharp in his ear.
He sits up and struggles out of the hammock’s cocoon.
“Where?” he stutters.
She points with her shoulder to the street. Blinking, he sees the evening sky beyond the breadfruit trees glowing red. Flickering flames show themselves through the cuts in the leaves. The squatter settlement across the road is burning and the wind is blowing it towards them! Soon, it will be across the road.
The compound is alive with frantic activity. Behind Huong, a neighbour’s toddler squalls from a pile of cloth-wrapped bundles, ignored by older siblings busy picking up more bundles flung down by their parents from the third floor. Huong’s all ready to go, the whining baby firmly strapped across her chest, a bundle in each hand and a large plastic bag on the ground. By her side, she’s firmly anchored Sixth’s motorbike with her left leg.
“The gold?” he whispers.
She pats the waistband of her trousers. He nods, takes a bundle from her and bends to pick up the bag from the ground. Straightening, he turns to give their rooms a final check.
“The windows are still open!” he exclaims. What to do?
“Leave it,” she tells him, obviously impatient to go.
Thong dithers. The wind is already carrying the heat from the fire towards them in wafts of hot licks. If they don’t leave soon, they might be engulfed. But what if the fire’s contained and they’re looted instead? Sixth is away working and he’s the man in charge. He must decide.
“You go first with the baby and one bundle on the motorbike,” he tells Huong finally. “I’ll get back in and lock up then take the bicycle to join you.”
Thank goodness Huong agrees. She pats the baby absently to stop it whining, squeezes the one skinny leg it’s stuck out from its sling. Fumbling under her blouse, she finds the house keys and hands them to Thong.
He takes them from her and rushes down the corridor.
“We meet at the intersection of the Airport road,” he turns back to shout to her. “If we don’t meet after a quarter of an hour, go ahead. We’ll see each other at Oldest’s.”
She nods her farewell, then half pushes half walks the motorcycle towards the compound gate.
Laden with the bundle and bag, Thong runs to their front door.
“Hurry, hurry,” he pants to himself, as he struggles to unlock and unchain the grill door with fingers that seem to have turned to bananas.
Once in, he scans the outer room. Huong’s put away everything. There’s just his bicycle and Sixth’s radio receiver, too heavy to take and too large to hide. It’s militia property, not theirs. It won’t matter if Sixth loses it. He leaves it where it is. He crosses the room to close and bolt down the window shutters. No time for the padlocks and chains. Moving into the inner room and climbing onto Sixth and Huong’s sleeping platform, he slams their windows shut, slides the bolts through … Damn! He’s nicked his left finger. He sucks it while he sweeps his free hand under the sleeping mat to check for anything left behind. There’s a baby’s pacifier. He tucks it into the front pocket of his pants. Anything else? Huong has forgotten to padlock the cupboard. He opens it. A tangle of clothes falls out on him. He figures Huong has taken everything of value, and leaves it. The wall clock chimes, reminding him minutes are passing. It cost a week’s pay, he remembers Sixth telling him; but no way can he take it with him. Like the radio, it’s too heavy and too big. He pulls it off the wall, and stashes it under the sleeping platform. Finished, he tells himself, wheeling his bike out to lean it against the passage wall. He locks, chains and padlocks their front door again, his fingers more nimble now he’s leaving. Faster, faster, his heart thumps as he pushes and shoves his bike through the equally panicked neighbours. He’s scared, but also elated. To finally be leaving this cess pit. His happiness almost overwhelms his fears.
On Yen-do, there’s scurrying and hurrying. Every few minutes, as if keeping time with the gusts of wind, a larger than usual “whoosh” of shouting rises from the squatter colonies. Balancing his packages on the bicycle’s cross-bar, Thong wobbles his way through cyclo drivers doing a brisk business packing in household essentials for the wealthier inhabitants of the street. Like him they’re evacuating to relatives in another part of the city. Not the rest from the squatter settlement though. They’ll be lucky to find a bit of sidewalk to stretch out on tonight and hopefully scavenge something from the debris tomorrow for rebuilding. Life! He curses absentmindedly as he swerves to avoid three street children quarrelling over a dropped suitcase. He pushes the bike harder. He can’t leave Huong and that dratted baby alone on a street corner too long. If the street thugs get to her, how can he answer to Sixth?
He needn’t worry. She’s standing about twenty meters along the Airport road, nursing the child but still with a firm grip on the motorbike and her belongings. He should have known better. To someone who trekked the whole way South during the partition of the country, going to Oldest’s would be nothing but a stroll. This is not an exodus of a million, only a squatter settlement burning.
She reaches her hand out for the bunch of keys, almost grabbing them from him. Together, they trot, then walk, following the crowd away from the conflagration. The group thins as they put the fire further and further behind them. Halfway to Oldest Sister’s it begins to drizzle gently and then to pour in a rare summer storm. They huddle by a villa wall to shelter under an overhanging branch.
“The baby will get wet,” Thong says, pulling out a plastic bag from one of the bundles to tie around the child’s body.
“She’ll be alright,” Huong replies. “If I lean forward like this and you stand next to me, then we can shield her.”
“What’s more important,” she adds with a smile, “this will stop the fire before it gets to our compound.”
She’s right. To Thong’s disappointment, there’s very little damage to the compound. But, the baby’s fever burns despite Oldest’s ministrations and Huong can only look on helplessly as she slowly weakens and then dies. Without waiting for Sixth to return from his mission they cremate the child some days later. That same afternoon, they hear on the BBC that a monk has immolated himself at the cross roads near the Cambodian Embassy to protest against President Diem’s anti-Buddhist policies. But perhaps it’s only a rumour. When they cycle past the following week to place the baby’s ashes in the Vuon Chuoi temple up the road, all signs of the holocaust have been obliterated. After, when Huong finally feels well enough to move back, the compound and the street have already resumed their diurnal rhythm. Except for Sixth coming home drunk for a few weeks and an unaccustomed quiet in the back room, it’s as if nothing has happened.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged boat people, Growing up Vietnamese, little saigon, Memoir, refugees, urban migrants, viet kieu, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
IV. SKIRMISHES
“A barbecue – that’s what she called it,” Sanh says derisively. “A monk sacrificed himself and she called it a July 4th party.”
“She was an impossible woman that Sister-in-Law of Diem’s, fuck her mother!” he curses
It’s Saturday morning and they’re eating beef noodles together in Little Saigon, a weekly affair since Nina passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams and Sanh acquired a new wife. The wife, newly arrived from a refugee clearing centre in the Philippines, is being introduced to supermarket shopping in America by Huong. While the women shop, the men breakfast on noodles, coffee, politics and polite one-upmanship.
“You never heard that in Vietnam,” Sixth remonstrates. “That’s from the documentary you saw on the Free Vietnam channel last week.”
“Ha!” Sanh exclaims, “as if you could expect to hear anything in Vietnam. Where’s your sense of reality?”
“Next,” he continues pugnaciously, “Next, you’ll say it was the Communists that burnt up that squatter tenement opposite that place you and Huong first lived in.”
“That squatter fire, it was really the Communists,” Sixth asserts.
“But,” Sanh waves his teaspoon provocatively in Sixth’s face, “I heard it was the woman’s husband, your boss. That Counsellor Nhu and his special forces did it so they could clear out the squatters and sell the land to property developers.”
What does Sixth know about that, Sanh taunts.
Sixth laughs uneasily. No hard feelings, he tells himself. Sanh is just being Sanh.
“I was away,” he excuses himself.
“Who knows?” he parries. “The Counsellor’s dead now, so no one’s the wiser. And who’s going to fly back to ask Uncle Ho’s nephews? You?”
Sanh lets it go. Touche!
Thong lets it go too. The answer, he can’t be bothered to tell them, is very simple. The Catholics, the Buddhists; the Communists, the Nationalists, however you split it, in the end, they were all Vietnamese. Ourselves, that’s who’s to blame, he’d like to say to them if they would listen. But won’t. They’re still sniping at each other.
With Sanh backed down, Sixth must have the last word… “Your trouble Sanh is you just haven’t any commitment. One minute you berate the VC for not feeding you enough, the next you’re beating up on the Diem government. I tell you, amongst all those governments coming and going, that Diem government was the most independent one we had. You’re just a butterfly taking positions for the fun of it.”
“A bee,” Sanh says, puffing out his chest a little. “A bee, flitting from flower to flower, spreading happiness all around.”
Thong wishes Sanh wouldn’t go on so much about his flitting and flying when he’s more likely to have flopped. But perhaps Sanh has forgotten that Thong is privy to his secrets? Or maybe Sanh’s stories have simply become his reality, a happy substitute for the impotent reality. Whatever, he won’t stop Sanh if Sanh wants to indulge his delusions. All he can do is pretend that he too has forgotten the sad facts.
Thong sips his soup instead, lets his attention wander to the occupants of the other plastic topped tables in the crowded restaurant. Someone to his right is whispering loudly to a companion that a certain popular singer can be had for two hundred dollars a shot. And in a table in the far corner, the very singer can be seen sitting with her girlfriends, all of whom are intently examining her newly accentuated cheekbones and Botox smoothened forehead. Merely old Saigon transported wholesale into Southern California Thong notes idly, not worth writing home about. But behind him, he suddenly catches a Northern accented voice outlining a complicated transaction involving cash exchanges in Hong Kong and cargo to Vietnam. He perks his ears, trying to decide if he’s heard the words ‘guns’ and ‘ammunition’. Can this conversation be the first indication of the Nationalists attempting to foster unrest in the conquered South? Concentrating to catch the entire drift of the exchange through the noise of the café Thong barely notices when Sanh’s and Sixth’s conversation shifts from Sanh’s erotic fantasies to their most recent coup’s on the stock exchange.
______
“Why?” Thong, in the outer room, overhears Sixth snapping at Huong. “Because we have to, that’s why!”
In response, he hears Huong cough a very small and sad cough. After a while, there is the sound of Sixth shuffling over to the sleeping platform in his house slippers. Next, Thong imagines, Sixth will pull his legs up onto the mat and lean over to embrace Huong. Then the inevitable preliminaries … Thong counts to three, listens for them.
He hears Sixth begin again, slowly and in a more conciliatory tone. “We have to move because the Americans don’t like us anymore. They think it’s our fault the monks are burning themselves up. Counsellor Nhu is too tough, they’re saying, and this trouble is all his doing. They don’t know that the temples are crawling with Communists. This last raid by the President on the temple was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People say they’ll cut our funding soon.”
“But why do we have to move to the countryside?” Huong asks tearfully.
“Because our rice bowl will be gone soon,” Sixth replies, tone slightly more irritable now. ”Better to move before they kick us out. I’m giving it another two or three months before the corps finished. Money talks. The US will get their way.”
“The way I figure …” Thong sees Sixth in his mind, head cocked, right index finger pointing at his left thumb, “…I figure I need to join an American sponsored pacification unit. They have newer weapons. And the pay’s much much better.”
“And,” his tone is cajoling now, “out in the countryside, we could live in the fresh air, have a garden with our own vegetables, and bring up fat healthy children.”
“I figure, all in all, it will be a very good deal.”
Thong turns back to his calculus. Soon, he knows, Huong will giggle, then there’ll be smothered grunting and panting. A distraction he can’t afford with the exams just three months away.
______
But, there are no exams that autumn. Through the next two months the monks preach peaceful dissidence. Soon students riot at their rallies. The city begins to hear rumours that not just monks but even high school students are being jailed. A young girl is shot down in the square fronting the Central Market. More demonstrations follow. The authorities clamp down and bring the curfew hour forward. But it does not help. The city continues to simmer.
On his way to and from school, Thong sees non-uniformed militia men positioned at the main intersections. At first, they have the recognizable faces of Sixth’s colleagues. But as the Americans become increasingly uncomfortable with President Diem’s regime, Thong sees more and more strangers dressed in regular army uniforms guarding the intersections. Tempers in the Yen Do compound rise then fall with news that the Counsellor Nhu’s forces are being disbanded and conflicting rumours that President Diem is sending all the US advisers out of the country. What’s not contested is that the men have fewer assignments and that their stipends are being trimmed. Better money can be made simply hanging around the US embassy guardhouse and USAID office to run errands for the open-handed newcomers…
Sixth’s hopes of securing an American rice-bowl in the countryside don’t materialize. But a position in a special roving corps involved in national security comes through Oldest Brother-in-Law. It’s another unsafe plain clothes militia job, their mother writes. She urges Sixth not to accept. Her letter, however, comes at the same time as one from Huong’s father inviting Sixth to Phan Thiet to help with the family plots.
Like everywhere else in the countryside, the villages outside Phan Thiet have been caught between the two sides. Running away from a VC operation straight into a government sweep, Huong’s father’s pelvis is broken during an interrogation. He’s now been incapacitated for more than a month, he writes in his letter, and their farm is suffering. Huong’s young brothers can’t manage by themselves. They need another hand badly. Without a baby Huong can lend another pair of hands, leaving his wife time to nurse him, the old man ends the letter hopefully.
There’s no contest between farming in bone dry Phan Thiet as a guest Son-in-Law and the freedom of the road as a roving militiaman. Sixth stashes his mother’s letter into a drawer and tells Huong he’s already accepted Oldest Brother-in-Law’s offer and can’t possibly back down. He leaves the following week on assignment in an undisclosed location. Huong and Thong vacate the Yen Do quarters and go back to Oldest’s.
Huong goes unwillingly. She’s enjoyed having her own home however cramped it was and doesn’t look forward to staying with Oldest again, to being a younger Sister-in-Law in someone else’s kitchen. Going home to Phan Thiet would have been infinitely better. Despite the chaos described in her father’s letter, Huong can’t accept that the countryside quiet has really gone. And even if it has, there’s still the comfort of familiar Northern accents and Catholic routines, the churches set every half a kilometre apart ringing their bells for early morning mass and the six o’clock Angelus.
She tries to negotiate a short trip away but her in-laws won’t hear of it. No, the city is much safer, her mother-in-law writes. She stays. A married woman must obey. And what could be safer than the home of a Police Chief?
But the Police Chief doesn’t feel safe. A coup is being planned he hears. Oldest must take a few days off from the Women’s Hospital where she works, he orders. And Huong should stay home from the garment factory ten kilometres away too. As for Thong, it would be wise to take a few days off from high school.
A few days can seem like forever when you’re cooped up in a house playing security guard to nervous women and children. When October turns to November, Thong decides he’s had enough. Using a trip to the pharmacy as an excuse, he cycles from the Checkerboard all the way down to the centre of the city. The traffic seems less mad than usual and he’s able to race after the passing cars to release the energy he’s pent up. By the time Thong reaches the town centre, the knots in his muscles have eased. He relaxes, peddling slowly around the Continental and Caravelle hotels to enjoy the heat of the mid-day sun, a welcome difference after the dimness of the house.
The city clocks chiming the noon hour remind him it’s time to for lunch. He rides homeward more quickly, looking forward to the meal cooked by Oldest’s newest countryside maid, a luscious girl with curves in all the right places. Going behind the Tao Dan Park and past the Presidential Palace, he notices that a cavalcade of US made Lincolns have invaded the Palace driveway. Who, he wonders idly, has come from America now to see the President and what might they be having for lunch?
______
“Gunpowder eggplants,” Nina says to Thong, showing him a jar filled with pale green marble sized pickles, cà pháo the size of gunshot pellets.
“Huong’s been fermenting them.”
“Are you sure they’re good to eat?” he asks.
Nina shrugs from behind the kitchen counter where she’s putting together a ham sandwich amidst a pile of her working papers and the children’s books.
“Huong says they’re just right,” she tells him. This isn’t her kind of food he should know. He can try it or leave it.
He takes one from the jar and bites into it, pressing the smooth hard fruit against his palate. The seeds explode against his teeth like tiny bullets.
______
“Menudos,” the Latino says, pushing the bowl of red tripe stew across the oily cafeteria table towards the German.
“No shit,” the big blonde Vietnam vet scowls, pushing the bowl back. “I’m not eating that.”
The long stringy lead man laughs his breathy Spanish inflected whinny but doesn’t move to take the bowl. He isn’t going to let no whitey intimidate him. Not even the head machinist.
“You ordered it, you eat it.”
“You made a bet,” he continues. “If my stock did better than your stock this month, you’d eat Mexican.”
“You didn’t tell me it was innards,” the German stammers. “You fucking misled me.”
“Hey! I said, Boeing wins, we eat bratwurst. McDonnell wins, it’s menudos,” his workmate counters, toothy smile still on his long face.
He says something in Spanish that neither Thong nor the other man understands, but which elicits laughter from the other Latino machinists sprawled along the nearby benches.
The head machinist’s face reddens.
“No shit,” he repeats, his chin jutting out more sharply this time.
Thong knows how stubborn the machinist can be. He has the courage of his convictions and his white skinned superiority. So what if he’s agreed on the bet with some Mexican, Nicaraguan or Cuban, it will be all the same to him. It’ll take a fight before he changes his mind, Thong knows.
“Eh, take this,” Thong says, almost shoving the burrito he’s unwrapping under the other man’s nose. “It’s ground beef and egg.”
The other man grabs it, looking grateful.
“You gook you,” he says, trying to sound nonchalant, pushing the bowl of tripe towards Thong. “You’re on the right side after all, chief.”
He lets the last out reluctantly. Who would have thought that it would be one of these skinny slant eyes he would end up reporting to. Not that the buy’s a bad sonofabitch, he grants. Stinking clever as well.
Thong cringes a little. Typical American vet, rudely using whatever terms of address he learnt in the war. He doesn’t know any better, Thong counsels himself. As the team leader he lets it pass, just hopes he’s ended it between the head machinist and the lead production man. Otherwise, the schedules on this new project they’re doing will be screwed.
But the machinist won’t let it go. Later, in the restroom, unzipping his trousers, he reaches in and holding himself, gestures pointedly at the lead man.
Thong see’s the lead man’s eyes shift away, hears him mumble ‘Nazi’.
______
At dinner, Thong helps himself to more gunpowder pickles.
“I saw a war declared today,” he tells Nina in between pops of the explosive little fruits.
“Lead prototype production man and head R&D machinist. Grown men fighting like children at lunchtime,” he grumbles.
“Over their stocks, of all things!” he’s genuinely outraged.
Nina raises her eyebrows, inviting more confidences as she fills the rice cooker pot with water, and turns on the machine. .
“You’re the psychologist,” he challenges her. “Tell me, what’s driving all this angst? Machismo? Racial competition?”
Nina smiles at him kindly. He’s so involved with the pins and tubes used as sophisticated nails to attach fuselage onto airplane frames he has no idea what’s happening in the rest of the world. She’s quite sure he’s unaware of the euphoria in the stock market. He hasn’t heard the excitement in Maman’s voice over the cash Papa is raking in from playing the market, nor is he aware that gungho Sixth has taken a second mortgage against Huong’s reservations, to leverage up his stock market bets.
“Mid-life crisis,” she offers, “plus over-excitement from participation in a classic stock market mania straight out of an economics undergraduate text.”
He frowns. So much jargon! All he’d wanted was a simple explanation that would help him bring peace to the laboratory. He pops another gunpowder pickle into his mouth.
“You mean they’re just letting the excitement from the stock markets spill over into the office?”
Nina nods. She was wrong after all; he’s not as clueless about the economy as she thought. Still, she’s glad his obsession with his job has prevented him from getting involved in a market that looks like it could crash any minute.
“You got it,” she says.
She takes the jar of gunpowder pickles away from him and hands him a stack of dishes to set out on the dining table instead.
“Enough of those,” she shakes her head, “You get truly explosive in bed when you’ve had too many.”
______
Woken from hid mid-day siesta by planes screeching overhead, Thong rushes out to the balcony to look up at the sky. The planes have already flown by. From the northwest though six more specks are coming fast towards him. He hears the thump-thump of helicopter propellers. Oldest Brother-in-Law’s coup is finally taking place! He ducks back into his room, slamming the door behind him and scrambles down the stairs to the safety of the ground floor.
Radio static fills the living room. The maid is huddled under the dining table wailing loudly for her mother and village. Huong is there too, berating the maid to come to her senses. Thong hears Oldest Sister outside, screaming after the children who have run out into the alley before the adults can stop them…
“Thong!” Oldest Sister shouts from the front porch, the three little ones in her arms. “Go after the boys and bring them back in.”
Thong pushes past her out into the alley, calling after the two older nephews.
“Uncle, uncle,” they rush up to him excitedly, “it’s war.”
“Take us to see,” the elder one pleads, tugging at his sleeve.
He cuffs them on their heads.
“Stupid!” he shouts, “don’t you know the way to stay alive is to keep inside when others are running out?”
The younger begins to sniffle. Thong ignores the crying. Holding both firmly by the wrists, he marches them back to the house.
When all are in and accounted for, they lock the front door, push the sofa and dining room chairs against it and settle down to wait. More planes fly past, but they don’t hear any gunfire. Transmission on the radio remains blocked. As the minutes wear on, the alley outside quietens. Still Oldest Sister does not settle. She flits agitatedly around the room, first to the refrigerator and cupboards to check on food supplies, then back down to the floor to hug one or other of her children, then up again to look out the window at the slightest sound suggesting that Brother-in-Law might be at the gate.
He’s still hasn’t returned when at four they hear the fighting begin in earnest. Gunshots and explosions continue for most of the afternoon. Sometime during the period, the electricity is cut off and the radio falls silent. The maid and children have long ceased whimpering, there is only the rat-a-tat of machine guns interspersed by shaking mortar explosions every two or three minutes. Thong thinks he can feel tanks rumbling past the main street outside the alley, but no one bothers to go to the window to peer out. The room darkens. Still they all sit, waiting. Finally, when there’s just the barest glimmer of daylight left Oldest Sister stands up heavily and goes to the kitchen to pump an emergency gas lamp. Huong follows her.
“Come,” she says sharply to the maid, “the children need to eat.”
The girl trails after her numbly, leaving Thong alone in the room with the five silent children. They look expectantly at him from tear streaked faces.
“Is it time for us to die now?” the eldest girl asks.
He has no answer for her.
______
No one in the house dies that night. At dawn the shelling stops and by mid-morning, Brother-in-Law, ashen faced but still alive, is home. There’s been a coup, he informs them. According to his sources, the President and the Counsellor Nhu have escaped from the palace and are now hiding in Cho Lon, the Chinese part of town. They’re waiting for an American plane out, but it hasn’t arrived yet. The outcome’s still uncertain. It’s best the family continues to stay inside and keep the doors barred. Cooped up, they spend the afternoon playing cards, waiting for the electricity and radio to come back on. Finally, in the night, the news comes over the BBC that a military junta consisting of the Big General Minh, General Kim and General Don will now rule.
A few days later, they hear that an American plane has finally come for the Diem and Nhu families. But it’s too late for the President and his brother. They’re dead, killed in a church in Chinatown sometime on the morning of the second day of November.
______
Life goes on, even though Diem is gone. The Americans take charge and everything changes to accommodate them – governments, constitutions, loyalties, neighbours, Saigon itself.
The river is crowded with ships waiting their turn to dislodge the equipment the Americans need to fight their war. Traffic runs slower in the streets, slowly choking with American civilian and army vehicles. Household help at a reasonable price disappears as everyone goes to work for the Americans instead. And, a new moneyed class begins to appear – generals, interpreters, photographers, black marketers with PX goods, pimps, prostitutes.
New bars sprout like mushrooms on the boulevards, filling up with beefy Americans – soldiers on leave from Danang, journalists, diplomats, spies. There is a rougher, rowdier atmosphere in the city as the Americans, like exuberant children, shout in their loud voices, pawing like large animals at the bar girls with their hairy tattooed hands.
It doesn’t take long for the backlash to come. People start to grumble about the soldiers loudness and lack of decorum. Monks preach against their presence. Instances of students blasting bars with Molotov cocktails surface. There’s a palpable tension in the city as it lurches towards its future, dragging along those still clinging to older traditions and folkways.
_____
It’s a city ripe for stirring, informants report to Southern Command near the Cambodian border, which reports it northward, until an instruction is sent into a main force platoon in the central mountains.
It’s time for him to go to Saigon, the Chief tells Third, now pseudonymed Ba Roi. They need him, a compatriot of the South, back there in his own backyard. It’s a promotion, because of his fine record as a soldier and a partisan. He will go with his uncle, the Commander, to set up new networks. He will be the party’s head and eyes, to guide and watch over the non-Communist hands of the Commander.
Exploit the contradictions, the Cadre tells Ba Roi.
Widen the divides, he instructs the Commander.
_____
Thong, like everyone else in Saigon, can’t escape from the encroaching American influence. It’s shoved straight into his face by his best friend Sanh.
“Hot dog,” Sanh shouts wildly, jumping down from his wall into Oldest’s front courtyard, shaking a six-inch length of ruddy coloured grilled meat in Thong’s nose.
“Dog?” Thong asks, moving his face away.
“Yup,” Sanh answers, biting into it. “That’s what my sister says is on the label – hot dog.”
“Want some?” he offers Thong a bite.
Thong looks suspiciously at the sausage-like object. It’s thinner and longer than a Vietnamese saucisson and seems to be made of chopped meat encased in skin.
“A dog meat sausage?” he asks. .
“No stupid!” Sanh laughs.
“It’s a dog’s penis.”
“Can’t you see,” Sanh peels opens the sausage for Thong to inspect.
“Really?” Thong is only half sceptical. Sometimes Sanh’s whoppers turn out to be true.
“Eat it and see,” Sanh dares.
“Nope,” Thong decides not to risk it. “You won’t catch me eating a dog’s member. I’m no wierdo dog eating Northerner, let alone a weirdo American.”
“Well, too bad,” Sanh says finishing off the sausage. “Just lost your chance to get stronger and longer!”
Sanh leans over conspiratorially. “One of my sister’s friends married one of them. I heard her telling my sister he’s at it all the time, non-stop. And you know why? Because they eat these every weekend grilled over charcoal. They even have 30 centimetre long hot dogs. Foot-long hot dogs they call them.”
Thong pushes Sanh gently on his stomach. “Go on, you’re kidding me!”
“The truth,” Sanh says, nodding his head solemnly.
Maybe, Thong thinks. After all, he’s seen them in the bars himself. “They must have huge dogs over there then,” he allows grudgingly.
“Yup,” Sanh says, satisfied he’s made his point. ”Large dogs and large men, like I’m going to be.”
“One hot dog a day,” he shouts at Thong as he climbs back over the wall to his house. “That’s the way.”
“Yankee lover!” Thong shouts to his retreating back.
No self respect that’s Sanh’s problem, in fact the problem with his whole family, Thong thinks self righteously. No way would his mother have allowed any of his sisters to work at an American PX. Not even with prices exploding upwards the way they have since the Americans started coming. Still, Thong watches Sanh go with a twinge of envy. Those are nice sneakers Sanh has. And the neighbourhood girls do like the hair gee-gaws Sanh’s sister gets so cheaply. Gee-gaws that are helping Sanh gain his experience early and profusely at sixteen, while he, Thong, is still sitting stuck at his homework, untried and frustrated.
Everyone seems to be at it and conspiring to let him know how badly off he is without – Sixth and Huong in the upper room whenever Sixth comes home on leave; Oldest and Brother-in-Law behind their curtained partition on the mid-floor when Brother-in-Law deigns to visit; even the maid and her new boyfriend out in the alley under his window. He rubs his crotch absentmindedly in self pity. It’s a good thing after all that he has no one to buy dog-dicks for him. Otherwise he’d turn into Sanh, totally unable to contain himself. Worse still, become a ravening boar like the GI’s on Tu Do Street.
The image of the GI’s at R&R is so shameful, it sickens him. He straightens out his T-shirt and tucks it back carefully into his boxers. Then he pulls a stool up to his study table and carefully takes out his English grammar from his school satchel. Too much time has been wasted these few mad months following the changes after the coup. There’s a lot of catching up to do if he wants to bring a good report home to his parents next month at Tết. No more time for Sanh and his tall stories, no more standing at the fringes listening to the student activists in school. Time to get back to work and pay attention to his ambitions.
______
More jostling and back stabbing, Thong observes, as the newspapers announce yet another new government and constitution. Mirroring the city, school-yard politics also shifts. Passing by the auditorium with Sanh and another companion after electrical shop, Thong sees that a different face now hovers over the lectern. Angrily pimpled, it’s exhorting the students to defend indigenous values. Just the other week, Thong recalls, someone else had been shouting at them. Then the message was to follow the West and embrace progress. He wonders how well the new theme will play.
“Let’s see what he has to say,” he suggests to his companions, forgetting momentarily his resolutions to avoid politics.
“Waste of time,” protests Ly, the oldest son of a family of wealthy ethnic Chinese restaurant owners.
“Let’s go find a quiet spot to review today’s physics instead.”
“Just five minutes,” Sanh, on Thong’s left, persuades.
“Just five minutes then,” Ly warns, allowing himself to be led into the back of the auditorium.
The hall is packed with anger. Since a bloody run-in with the rival Catholic boy’s school recently it’s not difficult for the new student leader to work the boys’ emotions up to fever pitch.
“Will we stand for it?” he shrieks fiercely into the bull-horn.
“No!” the boys resonate in unison.
“Will we fight back?” he urges.
“Yes!” the blue-trousered teenagers respond.
“Do I have your support?”
“Yes!”
“One hundred percent?” he eggs them on.
“Yes! Yes!” the boys shout, stamping their feet.
Then, let’s march!” he announces, raising his right arm, fist clenched.
The boys explode in applause. The student leader springs off the podium and butt sticking out, struts into the crowd. His followers, trailing behind him, slowly fan out into the audience.
“Today at 4.00 pm,” one whispers to Thong and his two companions.
“At the side gate comrade,” another comes up and says, embracing Thong by his shoulders.
Thong shrugs off the older boy’s too familiar hold.
“Let’s go,” he says to Ly and Sanh under his breath.
Shoving against their school mates, they make their way across the yard and back upstairs to their classroom.
“Comrades!” Thong scoffs, plopping into a metal chair. “I’m not their comrade. Strutting bantam cock communists talking Buddhism!”
“Ah, ignore them,” Ly advises, ever the practical one. “Come and do some work instead.”
“Work!” Sanh, the last one into the room, exclaims. “And miss all the action?”
The other two look at him in disbelief.
“You want your head broken by those cross-town Catholic fanatics?” Thong asks. “Are you mad? A fool?”
“Don’t call me a fool!” Sanh shouts back. ”You always think you know better. What’s wrong with getting a piece of the action? You’re just afraid.”
“I’m wise,” Thong shoots back.
“Now, now,” Ly, who does not like trouble, interrupts. “No need to shout.”
“Sorry,” Thong says shamefacedly.
Sanh looks down at his stomach sulkily
Ignoring Sanh’s sullenness, Ly simply takes up his text book and begins, “Pulleys — question number 26….”
Slave driver, the other two mouth at each other, letting the momentary friction between them pass. They gather around Ly to consider the exercise he’s picked. But before they can start they’re interrupted by a panting first-year, skinny legs a-scuttle, hair awry.
“They’re attacking! We need help downstairs!” he pants out before racing to the next room.
The message is repeated to the beat of his clattering feet, echoing slightly fainter each time as he runs down the line of rooms. From downstairs, the clamour of doors slamming, chairs being pushed back and tables being overturned grows louder. Someone else runs by shouting for reinforcements. They hear the student leader trumpet the school name, a call to arms. Still, though, the three boys in the room do nothing.
“Don’t get involved,” Thong hears his mother’s admonish.
Sanh’s first instinct is to run out after the messenger but the sight of Thong and Ly, still as stones, restrains him. Thong’s eyes are closed, his fists clenched. Ly, head down, appears to be studying the cracks on the cement floor under his feet.
“More stupidity …” Thong mutters.
Ly looks up, lets out a sigh. “It never stops does it?”
Sanh feels tears on his own cheeks. He’s crying. Why?
“We need to go see,” he says finally to the other two as he dries off his face with the back of his fist.
Reluctantly, they get up and follow him out to the corridor. From their vantage point on the fourth floor, they can see beyond the school walls out to the street. A fierce battle is being waged at the school gates. Boys from the rival Catholic high school, hearing about the planned attack on them, have pro-actively taken the first step. But, the new student leader has his spies too and the school’s heavy iron gates are already half shut. A substantial mound of desks and chairs are piled in the remaining gap to form a high barricade. Students are swarming on the inner side of the mound fortifying it with iron rods and sheets purloined from the metal workshops. It will be hard for the Catholics to break through. Hard also to get out and go home.
Thong resigns himself to getting it either way – a whacking from the Catholics or a screaming from Oldest. He doesn’t know which will be worse, the physical beating or the psychological assault. Probably half a dozen of one and six of the other, damn it!
“Nothing to gain from fighting,” he tells his two companions.
“Let’s go back inside and continue with our revision,” he gestures, putting a restraining hand on Sanh’s fore-arm.
“No heart,” Sanh says, turning away from Thong to stare wistfully at the action below.
Thong doesn’t ask again, merely stands looking down at the action below, torn between self preservation and a desire to do something, anything.
Finally, after a long moment, Ly looks up decisively.
“We need to find a way out and get home,” he says.
______
The trapdoor of the tunnel opens up into the empty centre of a camouflage hayrick. Shoving the dried grass aside, the liaison officer leads the Commander and Third through. They’re in a buffalo shed occupied by a sleeping beast tethered to a bamboo frame. Outside, it is moonlit, silent. Forewarned, the occupants have muzzled their dogs. The liaison officer whistles into the night, motioning for them to remain where they are. In answer, a sturdy woman about two thirds into pregnancy, emerges into the moonlight and beckons them towards her.
In no time, she has meat, hot soup and rice heating up for them in the kitchen. The meat is soft and domesticated, not monkey the Commander and Third notice with appreciation. They eat it in small bites, reluctant to stop when she motions them to help her move the heavy family alter. Still, they obediently get up and pull it aside. There is a small alcove built into the wall behind. She crawls clumsily into it and from within hands out pieces of the dismantled bicycle she always keeps ready for visitors. Finally, she hands the Commander and Sixth two sets of well washed cotton trousers and white shirts and two pairs of sandals to replace the dark clothes and rubber tire sandals they still have on.
When they’ve changed, she takes their old clothes, bundles them up carefully and takes them with her into a room behind the altar. The liaison officer goes back to the table and quickly drinks up the rest of his soup before bringing out a small map from underneath the pots and pans to show to the Commander and Third.
“Be careful of traffic coming out from the US base. It’s just a few hundred meters down the road from here. After that, you can trail them to the Route 22 turning. It’ll be half a day to Saigon if you leave at dawn,” he tells them, perfunctorily.
Then nodding to be excused, he follows the woman into the room.
Ah, that’s how it is, Third understands. He considers how his own welcome home in a few days might be. He gives the Commander, seated cross legged on the red mud floor, a rueful smile, which the old man chooses not to return.
Years on now, but both still stupidly moved by these small signs of home and hearth, the Commander thinks to himself. A young pregnant welcoming wife, a bowl of soup and his eyes are wet! How much longer does he need to harden his heart?
He looks at the parts of the bicycle neatly arranged in front of him.
“How the support network has improved since my last trip in,” he says to Third, carefully pushing the bicycle handles onto a crossbar shaft.
Before dawn, the bicycle is fully assembled and the last bolts tightened. They cycle off shortly after the roosters begin to crow, Third peddling, the Commander perched behind.
______
The Catholic school boys spot him sneaking away, his pale blue workshop shirt and dark blue technical school trousers clearly visible from the far end of Ham Nghi Boulevard. He’s much easier prey than the heavily armed defenders behind the school gate.
“Catch the fucker!”
“Beat the balls out of him!”
“Working class prick!”
They shout to each other, laughing as they bear down on him, revving their expensive Italian and French motorcycles.
Hearing their shouts, Thong begins to sprint towards the Central Market. The gates of the market are already closed for the day but he hopes to lose them amongst the food vendors setting up for the evening. He takes to the sidewalk, hoping to use the roadside trees as a barrier against the cyclists. But this time of the day the sidewalk has few pedestrians and the rich kids simply turn their motorbikes onto the pavement to follow Thong. Bouncing over the potholes and tree roots, they quickly close the gap between him and themselves.
They catch up with Thong just before he can escape into the traffic circling the square in front of the market. He feels his foot snag against a wheel frame, and stumbles onto one knee. Looking up, he sees that he’s surrounded by the front wheels of four shiny motorbikes. Their owners are leaning across the handles, their sweating faces resting on muscular well folded arms, menacing eyes staring down at him.
“Comrade Worker,” the smoothest fairest face mocks. “Aren’t you going to get up and shake my hands?”
Thong pulls himself up slowly, brushing off his trouser leg, trying to buy time. He sees feet swinging as the boys dismount. It’s his chance. Straightening up quickly as they’re half astraddle and unbalanced, he dashes through a gap in the circle of motorcycles and out into the traffic. Weaving and twisting, he makes his way through the criss-crossing honking traffic towards the market’s great gate. Something on his arm is throbbing. A foot feels curiously numb. But, he can’t worry what these signals from his body mean. He simply has to get into the crush of people unbundling their crates and baskets in front of the South Gate.
______
He stands at the gate below the bust of the girl martyr who died here last year. Letting his still keen eyes wander over the openness of the square, he tries to see over the heads of the motorcyclists and bike riders into Avenue Calmette. It feels good to be able to see so far after the tree-obstructed sightlines of the jungle!
He pushes back his shoulders in a stretch, puts the two bamboo cages with his newly acquired and carefully hooded fighting roosters down. He curls his toes into his new leather sandals, pushing into the hard concrete pavement below. City air – smoke and sweat, the rot of old vegetables and dried blood from the butchers – he breaths it in hungrily. Hitching up his trousers, he sits down onto his haunches to enjoy the ebb and flow of this city he hasn’t visited for years.
The traffic courses around the square in a give and take fashion, those moving clockwise giving way to those moving against in a pattern governed by an unseen regulator. He watches mesmerized, his mind settled, not observing anything in particular, not noticing peculiarities or exceptions, not making any plans, not doing as wont to.
But, a break in the flow brings him back to full attention. On his left, he sees the traffic flow break, motorcycles slow, cyclos veer out from their paths; the cause, a teenage boy stumbling awkwardly through the square. He’s a stripling, tall for his age but not fully grown. His arms are still too long for his thin body, his hands and feet too large for a head that has not quite caught up with his sprouting limbs. He’s limping, somehow injured. He’s scared. This, the man can sense immediately.
The boy is being tracked by a larger boy behind him and another to his right. Two more are carefully making their way to the island at the centre of the square.
He considers quickly – a frightened teenager … an untried rooster … an impressionable heart … He stands up, picks up the two cages, and steps onto the roadway, dodging with experience through the traffic in the direction of the boy. About a meter from the boy, just in front of a cyclo laden with caged pigeons, he suddenly stops and puts down one of the rooster cages. Lifting its door latch, he un-hoods the bird inside. The rooster struts out, head jerking aggressively, wings flapping. A sacrifice!
Pandemonium follows. The cyclo driver pulls on his brake. Its cargo of cages spills onto the roadway. Some break open. Pigeons flutter out into the faces and eyes of oncoming riders. A motorcycle collides into another. A pedestrian walks into a bicycle. A large boy knocks against the side door of a bright new Lincoln Continental.
In the confusion, Thong feels someone grabbing him painfully by the upper arm, steering him onto Ham Nghi and backing him into a doorway. It appears to be an elderly man from the countryside. Thong is about to thank him but has barely sputtered out ‘Uncle’ when he feels his rescuer push him down roughly and set an empty rooster cage before him.
“Squat behind me,” he hears his rescuer order before placing an occupied cage on top of the first one and taking a position in front of him.
Thong does as instructed. His elbow, he now realizes, is twisted. Looking down at his feet, he sees he’s lost a shoe. Damn and double damn! He peers out at the road distractedly, wondering if it’s still somewhere on the street and retrievable. But his view is blocked by his rescuer’s thin cotton clothed backside. Further up, he sees a broad large boned back, then a shock of short badly cropped white hair. The elderly man stands with an unconcerned attitude, his head turning here then there as people and traffic pass in front of him. He looks for all the world like a visiting farmer who’s simply stopped to smoke and gawk at the city.
When the cigarette is almost finished, the old gent bends down and stubs it out against the side of his sandal. He takes a small folded pack of paper out of his shirt pocket, unfolds it in his palm and places the stub carefully onto it before re-assembling everything and returning the pack where it belongs.
“Looks like it’s safe for you to go your way young one,” he says, turning his head to give Thong a shy but oddly welcoming smile, his eyes bright under bushy white eyebrows as thick as caterpillars.
Does he know ahead, the Commander, that this impressionable young man’s eyes will widen in recognition? That this untried heart will fill with a mixture of disbelief and gladness? That Thong will whisper, quite unable to stop himself this time, “Blood Father … it’s me!”
V. FIRST BLOOD
“Be quiet,” the Commander whispers, his forefinger to his lips.
It’s the first thing he says after turning himself all the way around to look Thong full in the face. He’s as surprised as Thong is. Reaching out, he pats Thong’s arms, legs and head, as if to assure himself he’s not daydreaming.
“Con, child, my child,” he mumbles to himself, to Thong, to no one in particular.
“It’s alright now,” he reassures Thong. “It’s fine, everything is fine.”
Whether it’s to tell Thong that his pursuers are gone, or that he, the Commander is back now and will take care of everything, or that all the craziness since the Commander left … since President Diem was killed … since the Americans have come… will now be put right, Thong does not know.
“I’m okay Blood Father,” Thong can only reply, stretching to show his Blood Father his still aching arm, his one unshod foot with the sock quite worn bare. “I really am.”
He stands up unsteadily, toppling the rooster’s cage as he does so.
“Let’s go home, tell them you’re back,” he tugs at the Commander’s big hand.
The Commander looks aside.
“We can’t tell them,” he says, eyes not meeting Thong’s. “They can’t know I’m here.”
He adds, “It wouldn’t be safe for them or for me.”
It’s the old story once more, Thong is a little angry, just a little. He thinks he might cry from this little bit anger though, except he will not. At sixteen, he’s too old: and certainly not in front of the Commander.
The Commander looks into Thong’s eyes, almost level with his own now. They are unchanged, his wife’s eyes, long with thick lashes.
“You and I can meet though. If you don’t let them know, I’ll arrange it,” he promises.
Thong lowers his eyes. It’s all he ever offers, promises. But he nods, “I understand Blood Father.”
He looks up at the streetlights which have now been turned on.
“I think I need to be going home then,” he says.
It’s time he heads home for dinner, before Oldest let’s him know what’s what.
The Commander points to Thong’s feet.
Thong looks down at his one unshod foot. He shrugs, “I’ll just have to walk home barefooted.”
He sits down, unlaces the other shoe, and then peels off both socks. Stands up. Says goodbye.
The Commander rubs his shoulder, gives his back a pat, sending him off. He doesn’t say when he will arrange to see Thong again and Thong doesn’t ask.
That’s the way things are, Thong tells himself. It’s a state of the world he has to accept. Just like Oldest Sister’s haranguing when she finds out she has to pay for a new pair of shoes and more …. For during his flight, somewhere in the Martyr’s Square, Thong has also lost his satchel, his text books, his drawing instruments, his tool set ….
______
Thong is still smarting from Oldest Sister’s tongue lashing when he receives the Commander’s message. He has waited weeks – first impatiently then in fear, worrying that the Commander might have chanced upon Oldest Brother-in-Law’s men and been done in. But, just as Thong begins to think he’s imagined the whole encounter with the Commander, the sticky rice vendor outside school passes on his summons.
That was yesterday, during the morning break. Today, shielded by a whispered excuse to Ly that he’s unwell and a request for him to take notes, Thong has skipped English and sneaked through the school gates to keep the appointment.
The Commander is waiting under the South Gate of the market. He’s taken on the persona of a retired provincial fonctionnaire with a beige kepi shading his head and face, a starched white short sleeved shirt, light grey pleated pants and a pipe in his hand. He sees Thong before Thong realizes he’s there and comes up behind him soundlessly. Squeezing Thong’s upper arm affectionately, he leads him, without speaking, through the maze of textile vendors and tea merchants to a quiet corner with a solitary coffee vendor.
Thong sits at the grimy tiled counter, sticky sweet coffee dripping into a porcelain cup in front of him. Next to him the Commander cradles a tall glass of dark iced coffee. Waiting for his coffee to drip all the way down, Thong steals glances at the big capable hand next to his, pinching his thigh with his other hand to make sure he’s not dreaming.
The Commander asks after Thong’s arm. Then as a matter of courtesy, enquires about his parents, his siblings, their families. He listens carefully in an accepting manner very different from his mother or sisters. When he hears about Oldest Brother-in-Law’s nights out, he merely nods. And despite being who he is, he doesn’t condemn Sixth’s new job as a roving intelligence collector. He only asks what Thong’s parents had to say.
“What Father thinks, I don’t know,” Thong replies after considering a while. “Mother, she says he’s accumulating bad karma. But Sixth says he’s not killing anybody, just keeping an eye on things and collecting information. Still mother says the information can get people into trouble and that’s bad enough.”
“She’s very clear your mother,” the Commander observes in a neutral tone.
“I suppose,” Thong answers, not particularly interested in his mother’s opinions, wanting to know the Commander’s instead. “What do you think though Blood Father? Mother believes neutrality is best, especially if taking sides involves violence. But Sixth needs to eat. Or, is it worse that he’s taking sides without conviction, only to fill his rice bowl?”
Good questions, the Commander’s glad the boy has turned out this way, serious and questioning. But, in his judgement, it’s too soon for them to have this particular conversation. He merely taps Thong on the arm and says, “Sons should always obey their mothers.”
School is a more neutral subject. He asks Thong about his studies. What subjects is he doing now? What are his favourite classes? What doesn’t he like?
This is when Thong confesses his troubles with English. He’s surprised when the Commander tells him that it’s the most important subject, more so than mathematics, statics, dynamics or mechanics.
“Why Blood Father?” Thong asks as he stirs his coffee and takes his first slow aroma laden sip. He ventures his and Ly’s opinion. “It’s just a foreign language; of no practical use to becoming an engineer.”
“You’ll see when you go on further in your education,” the Commander replies, thinking carefully how to shape his answer. “All the newer technology books will be in English. And your job after you graduate will need English. The Army, the new companies being set up – at least in the next few years, they’ll all be run or sponsored by Americans.”
“I don’t want to be sponsored by Americans,” Thong snorts derisively, a picture of Sanh’s sister walking down their alley hanging onto her GI boyfriend with her butt cheeks swinging in tight American jeans, coming to mind.
He regrets his rudeness almost before the words are out.
“I don’t like them,” he rushes to explain. “They’re crass and boorish. Mất dạy, uncouth.”
The Commander smiles a question, inviting confidences.
But Thong shrugs, not wanting to tell the Commander how their crude sexuality, displayed so openly at the bars on Tu Do, disturbs and unsettles him. It is not a subject to discuss with a parent.
“They just shouldn’t be here,” he blurts out instead. “They spoil everything.”
Thong doesn’t want to talk about the Americans or his family or his studies. What he wants to know is where this missing Blood Father of his has been and what he’s up to now.
“Retired and back to raising fighting roosters,” the Commander grins. He indicates vaguely in a north western direction, “Out in the countryside nearby,”
“Oh really,” Thong says, attempting to sound non-committal. Until today, he’s never really been interested in the sport. Cruel and barbaric, the Superintendant had commented once. That assessment has resonated with Thong until today.
He tries to appear interested.
“I didn’t know you did that before,” he says tentatively, realizing as he does the stupidity of the remark. If he thinks about it, he doesn’t know anything really about what the Commander did, or does.
______
It’s a mystery Nina can’t unravel, one that Thong and her parents persist in hiding from her. It’s why her Ph.D. dissertation is going nowhere.
They’re her subject, the men in black, their images captured for posterity in the university archives. They can’t talk. They’re merely images, bony pyjama’d bodies squatting together to keep warm, glassy eyes starring from gaunt grey faces. They’re the VC, the enemy. But they’ve lost their malignancy in the process of being transferred onto paper. Under the fluorescent lights of the UCI library, what Nina’s Asian-American eyes see are sickly men with bird bonds and sun-starved skin.
So un-dangerous, Nina muses, as she peers into their faces. It’s difficult to believe they out-strategized and out-lasted her Papa and Fourth Uncle, subtle well fed educated men from the French Lycees; that they won a whole country despite the might of US guns and machinery. It is an improbability she ponders often – the psychology behind their determination.
Thong has told her it’s a question of desperation. When you have nothing but dreams, there’s nothing to lose and only heaven to attain. But … her over analytical mind counters, there are her second and third uncles to disprove the hypothesis; the ones her mandarin grandfather disowned, the ones who crossed over to the other side. With everything to lose like their brothers, why had they gone over? Why had they thrown everything away for dreams? More intriguingly, why had they won in the end?
It’s about the power of ideals, about winning hearts, Thong is convinced She knows he believes this deeply, he who professes not to believe in anything. This is why their children are the two T’s, Bao Tam for precious heart, Bao Tri for precious mind.
But none of Thong’s pronouncements are enough for her to build a defensible and testable hypothesis about the psychology of winning against unbelievable odds. The men in the photographs can’t talk to her. What she needs for a doctoral degree in psychology is a thesis full of data. She’s not in the department of political philosophy, her advisors remind her caustically.
The advisors know very well that data on these half starved jungle bleached men is classified. Their objection is more visceral, Nina intuits. Like her parents, and Thong, none of the professors want to revisit the whys and wherefores of becoming losers.
But Nina can’t tear herself away from the mystery hidden behind those glassy eyes. A mystery that might help explain why her parents and Thong are the way they are, unravel the enigmas that they are to her.
______
“Why do you want to know,” Oldest Sister asks, brushing off Thong’s question as she and Huong rush to get two extra courses ready for dinner. Brother-in-Law is home and she has to give him his due. She has no attention to give to anyone else, least of all this youngest brother whose presence she finds increasingly distressing.
“The Commander was the guru of gà nòi. The best fighting rooster expert in the whole of the delta, Father-in-Law always told me,” Oldest Brother-in-Law, a rooster enthusiast, answers for her.
Seeing that her husband is prepared to indulge Thong’s curiosity, she decides to follow suit.
“Before the Japanese War, when he was the town’s assistant notaire, your Blood Father had a garden behind his house filled with roosters, hens, and even a hatchery. He was so famous people came from as far as Hue to buy his stags.”
She sighs. “I don’t want to say it, but it wasn’t a wise thing to do, going off like that. He had a good job, a good French government house to live in, and a never ending stream of presents from people who needed help with their documents. Don’t even count the side income from the roosters …”
She sighs again at the sheer waste of all that good fortune.
“It’s a pity I never met him,” Oldest Brother-in-law says a little petulantly, as if it’s the family’s fault they’ve never been introduced. “I would’ve liked to ask him a thing or two.”
“It’s a good thing,” Oldest Sister counters quickly, “what with him doing whatever he was doing then and probably is still doing now. You’d have to arrest him if you met him, my important police chief husband.”
“Why would I?” Oldest Brother-in-Law laughs, easily flattered as always. “I’m only an unimportant cog in the machinery controlling civil disorders. I’ve nothing to do with the military.”
He reaches across the table, and tickles his wife’s forearm with his plump white forefinger, oblivious to Huong’s and Thong’s cheeks reddening at his unseemly public familiarity. “I’d just be talking to him as another rooster hobbyist. I’d just be asking him what he does to get his cocks all riled up and ready for action. How he trains them to be big and strong. “
“All I’d want to do is to pick his brains,” he says, his fleshy lips thinning suddenly.
You can, Thong is tempted to shout just so he can stop the embarrassing dallying in front of his eyes. But, he remembers the Commander’s forefinger on his own lips as they part. Tell no one. Least of all Brother-in-Law Thong decides. Policemen cannot be trusted, everyone knows.
______
“Journalists also cannot be trusted,” the Commander warns on another day at the market. But, Thong needs an English teacher. And this is the best one he knows.
Today, they’re having lunch together. Thong has chosen not to skip any more lessons. His high school graduation exams are just a year away and he can’t afford to rely on Ly’s and Sanh’s notes. Much sketchier than the ones he would normally take, Thong finds them virtually unusable. So much so, he’s dropped to third place in class.
He doesn’t burden the Commander with these developments, concentrating instead on the sight of his Blood Father tucking into the Cambodian noodles in front of them. They’re thick and yellow, strewn with soft liver and crunchy pork fat. The type of food the Commander has almost forgotten he’s told. The Commander is slurping them in with relish. In between bites, he’s telling Thong about the English tutor he’s recommending.
“Someone whose father I worked for just before the Japanese war,” he says.
“A fighter like you?” Thong asks warily.
“No,” the Commander shakes his head. “He came for a while, the year before you were born. But he changed his mind after a few months. His father was sick, he told us. So he returned to the city where he joined the Diem regime as a customs officer. Then, somehow, he got a scholarship to study journalism in America. Now he’s back, working for the Americans. People say he has a real affinity for them.”
Thong purses his lips. Not a swamp fighter … but even dodgier, a Yankee lover!
“You don’t have to like or trust everyone you know,” the Commander says persuasively. “You can just take advantage of their talents.”
True enough, Thong agrees. But still, to sacrifice his precious free time and further risk his standing in class for English lessons with an American stooge.
“What about money …” he protests weakly
“Don’t worry about it,” the Commander waves his hand in dismissal. “He and I, we have a give and take relationship. This time, he’s just paying me back.”
“As for your Oldest Sister, just let her think you’re staying back to study with your mates like you usually do,” he continues, removing the next objection.
It looks as if it’s all settled and nothing he can say about it. Thong bites, resigned, into a chunk of crackling. It’s unthinkable to argue with a parent. While he can trot out the need for the Superintendant’s permission, there’ll be no way for him to see his Blood Father again if the Superintendant actually objects. He’s better off going along, he decides. For a while at least …
He’ll just have to find a way to get Sanh and Ly to take better notes
______
“To study English!” Sanh exclaims in disbelief. “What type of stupid reason is that?”
“He thinks you were chasing a girl,” Ly explains. “To make us take down all those notes just so you can go study more just doesn’t make sense to him.”
“But it’s not just for me,” Thong protests. “All that note taking’s going to help you guys too. You just weren’t taking everything down comprehensively before. Now, you’ll both be able to pass the university entrance exams easily. I guarantee.”
“True enough,” Ly replies. “It wasn’t me that was protesting. I’m quite happy with the arrangement.”
“Right, it’s me who’s protesting,” Sanh admits, ready to defend himself. “I mean, it’s a lot of work for us taking those notes. It has to be for a worthwhile reason. Who needs English lessons? My sisters picked it up from their boyfriends just like that! You don’t need lessons, you need an American girlfriend.”
“Why in the world would anyone want to study it as a subject?” he asks bellicosely.
______
“Because it allows you to understand them intimately and they’re fascinating,” Thong’s English tutor explains, rationalizing his own reasons for learning the language. Indeed, in his opinion a fascination with the speakers is the only valid reason for anyone to want to study a language. What’s the point, he asks, if you’re not interested in the people? What’s a language for ultimately but to know its people? Girls, for example …
Thong, who has no wish at all to know any Americans better, American girls included, tries to interrupt. There must be other reasons, he wants to say. If not, these visits will be a waste of both their time. But he isn’t given a chance. His tutor, a Mr. Trung whom he’s been asked to address as Chú Hai (Younger Second Uncle), speaks so assuredly and fluidly there’s no pause into which Thong can drop an interjection. It’s frustrating. He fidgets impatiently, the overlarge American leather armchair in which he’s trapped seeming to imbue him with an unseemly American hyperactivity.
The lecture, or conversation as Chú Hai would rather have it, is taking place in part of the servant’s quarters of a secluded villa in the expensive part of Saigon’s District Three. The room is furnished in a Western style, although a style that seems strange to Thong who’s only been acquainted with French furniture to date. The bulky leather chairs and straight edged wood tables and cabinets with metal legs and handles are curiously unadorned. It’s a style Thong later learns from Chú Hai is the height of fashion, mid-century American. The room is comfortable, with a ceiling fan and more than adequate lighting. With its back to the main house, its door and windows looking out onto a small garden, it’s cosily private. It even has its own access, a metal gate in the wall behind the garden, leading out to a back alley.
Even on his first visit, Thong understands that despite its location, this room is set aside for a respected occupant not a house servant. Chú Hai has also let drop
that the villa belongs to a government official who’s currently on sabbatical in America; which means, since he’s allowed to use the place, that he’s not just a journalist but a man of some importance to the current government. Moreover, Thong can see that it’s a room usually used for private meetings, not English classes. What Thong can’t see is why this man, obviously important, is allowing him, Thong, the nobody son of an apparently obscure retired fonctionnaire, to be here with him. Why Chú Hai is bothering to spend time teaching him English.
It’s ostensibly because Chú Hai is a rooster aficionado and an admirer of the Commander, a reputed rooster master. As for their connection, like the Commander said, he’s the son of the Commander’s previous boss, a government land surveyor in the Delta. No mention is made of any meetings that the Commander and Chú Hai might have had in a swamp training camp in the 1940′s. This in any case is the fiction that the Commander and Chú Hai wish to enact for Thong when he and Chú Hai are introduced
The Commander and Chú Hai had greeted each other in the manner of persons long acquainted. Thong had been presented and the gifts the Commander brought, a pair of perfectly matched red and black bantams carefully packed in rattan baskets, had been admired. The talk that followed centred almost exclusively on cockfighting. It was only as they were taking their leave that Chú Hai had invited Thong, almost as an afterthought, to come and practice English conversation.
Chú Hai, for his own obscure reasons is obviously committed to Thong and to the lessons. But, why, Thong asks himself, does he himself tolerate this weekly battering with English words he only half understands, about people and matters he’s not at all interested in?
If truth be told, he finds himself reluctantly fascinated by Chú Hai. He’s unlike any adult in Thong’s experience. He talks, a lot and emphatically; with his hands, his lively eyes, his whole body. He laughs too; not in restrained giggles but in guffaws, throwing his head back and slapping his hands against his knees. And his face moves unreservedly; frowning one moment, impish the next. He is, Thong decides, decidedly unrestrained. American, it comes to Thong’s mind, Chú Hai Trung is an American in a Vietnamese body.
It’s taken Thong a few weeks to grasp this essential quality of Chú Hai’s. Now that he has, he understands the method behind the madness of his tutor’s lessons. Chú Hai doesn’t use textbooks. He doesn’t teach grammar. Instead, he has Thong listen to songs, browse magazines, read out loud the labels from the PX bought American food that Thong must also sample. And he talks, incessantly. There’s no stopping him, like how there’s no stopping the Americans taking over everything in the city. Like the Americans, his tutor intends to surround Thong with the sweet richness of American sounds and images, envelop him in America’s plenty till he swallows it whole and ends up speaking the language from the inside out, just like Chú Hai.
He must protest to the Commander and seek permission to stop, Thong decides. This can’t go on. He doesn’t want to swallow America whole just to learn to speak English. But, since he and Commander came here almost a month ago carrying the pair of bantams as gifts, Thong hasn’t had a chance to meet the Commander. His only message to Thong, received through the sticky rice vendor, is that he’ll be busy with business a while. Well then, Thong decides, he’s man enough to make things clear himself, in the American way Chú Hai is so fond of.
He coughs hoarsely, interrupting Chú Hai’s discourse on American girls and how they can be melted by liquor and chocolates.
“Excuse me Chú,” he tries to be polite. “I don’t think I really need to know how to converse this way just right now.”
His tutor stops in mid sentence, surprised.
“I’m only seventeen, I don’t have enough money to court girls, let alone American girls,” Thong says bluntly.
Chú Hai is so startled by this statement, he’s struck silent.
Thong takes advantage of the gap to make his case, ”I don’t want to anyway.”
“Meet American girls, I mean,” he clarifies. “I just need to learn how to speak and listen to English as an employee, a technician or an engineer. Or, if I cannot avoid it, for being a soldier.”
“I don’t need to be an American, to speak English from the inside out like you.” he says quietly but firmly.
Chú Hai looks shocked then lowers his eyes and nods, as if Thong has hit on something deeply true. Lifting his eyes up, he looks intently at Thong, really looks at him, as if he’s suddenly seeing something new.
“I’m sorry,” Thong stutters, hoping he hasn’t crossed any un-negotiable lines.
He’s not sorry though. He has to tell his truth after all. They can’t continue the way they’re going.
“So you think I’m an American inside?” Chú Hai finally asks in Vietnamese.
His face is unreadable. It’s impossible for Thong to know if he’s pleased or offended by this observation. He shrugs to avoid answering.
Chú Hai keeps quiet for a few more breaths as if to let the compliment or insult pass. Then he nods sagely, “yes, you’re only seventeen. Too young to appreciate all these secrets I’ve been telling you.”
“Although,” he waves his palms out facing front, like a magician protesting his innocence, his mouth flashing a very toothy smile “when I was seventeen, or maybe nineteen …”
He leaves the sentence hanging briefly … as if suddenly assailed by an unpleasant memory. But the moment passes.
Clapping his hands together, to brush whatever has bothered him aside, he continues decisively, “Still, I predict that in a couple of years, you will meet and even hanker after American girls and you will be sorry you asked me to not to bother.”
Thong must look unconvinced, because Chú Hai sighs and shakes his head.
“Experience,” he pronounces, “is wasted on the young.”
He looks at Thong again, an assessing weighing look, then closes his eyes.
“Alright,” he says finally, “tell me what you want to talk about. Machines? Cars? Motorcycles? Weapons? Military strategy?”
Thong thinks a while, says, ”That’s difficult.”
“Can I choose something else,” he asks, pushing the limits further now he’s come so far.
Chú Hai smiles back. “Why not?”
“Flight,” Thong says, “projectiles, rockets, space.”
“When I was a child, I loved kites,” he explains. ”Airplanes, helicopters, space ships, they’re the same thing. They lift up, they connect to somewhere else. It’s something the Americans are good at. And, it’s not anything I’ll learn in school.”
A clever boy, Chú Hai thinks, with an eye for what can best be squeezed from a situation. Like his father, he notes to himself.
“Okay then,” he agrees. “Let me think about what you’ve said, and we’ll do something different next week.”
He looks at his watch.
“Time for you to go now,” he says briskly.
Getting up from his armchair, he escorts Thong to the back gate, taking him through the various English goodbyes as they walk – ‘Good bye’, ‘Bye’, ‘Hope to see you again’, even ‘Ciao’ which Thong is told is really Italian; all to be done with proper gestures – a handshake, a slap on the back, an enquiring tilt of the head, a smart flick of the hand; and all said with the proper pronunciation.
“And something to say farewell to a girl after the cinema?” Chú Hai teases just as they reach the gate.
Thong shakes his head, blushing. He doesn’t know where to look. These Americans and sex!
Sensing his embarrassment, Chú Hai gives him a little punch on the arm.
“See you next week,” he says in English, pressing a Hershey bar into Thong’s jacket pocket.
“Yes, thank you Chú,” Thong replies in Vietnamese, bobbing his head in thanks as he pull his bicycle over the gate’s threshold.
Chú Hai stands at the gate, watches till Thong reaches the first turn in the alley.
Once out of sight, Thong unwraps the candy bar and bites through the pea-nutty crust to savour the rich caramel filling. He’ll come back next week, he decides. It’s extraordinary that Chú Hai never took offence, never interrupted him, and didn’t tick him off. He simply took in everything Thong said as if he was absolutely right. So different, compellingly different, from any other adult Thong knows.
______
In his den, settled within his armchair, Mr. Trung (call me “Tom”), a would-be swamp fighter, former customs officer and post-office censor, currently a journalist, always a watcher, brings his eyebrows together in thought. So, despite all the theories, it’s not just a question of environmental determination. Genes pass after all. The question now is what to do with those genes.
______
He hasn’t seen as much of the boy as he’d like, the Commander thinks regretfully. It’s with a twinge of envy that he hears how well he is doing. He’d have liked a hand in the shaping of the youngster. Unfortunately, setting up this cock pit for the Air Marshal has monopolized his time. Third has been a great help with ideas and the legwork, but the Commander has still felt slightly overwhelmed by the project. He’s just not as young as he used to be.
Their eminent sponsor wants the pit to be a magnet for the best fights in the South, frequented not just by ARVN and air force regulars but also the upper echelons, the new rich from the American incursion. It’s to be a symbol of his rapidly rising influence. And as a modern man, he insists that they stage fights in the new way too, with the bird’s heels naked and spurs sharpened. To the Commander, this is at odds with the traditional way of gà nòi. By relying on the birds’ weight, throwing power and aggressive strength, it devalues the trainers’ skills. Much like how the Americans fight the war, the Commander tells Third.
But, the Commander’s and Third’s superiors are only interested in the pit as a hub for recruitment and information exchange. If the new is what will draw the crowds, the Commander must accommodate the new. He keeps his reservations to himself.
______
The boy keeps his own counsel, Mr. Trung notices. Each week, he arrives punctually to converse on the subject set the week before. His vocabulary is expanding and he’s speaking much more fluently, asking appropriate questions and giving well considered answers, particularly when they talk about aircraft or military strategy. But he’s always circumspect. Unless questioned, he doesn’t talk about himself, the Commander or the adopted siblings he lives with. When questioned, his responses are just enough to reply to the query made, never more. Mr. Trung finds this entirely satisfactory. There’s just one more test.
______
They draw the arena in the alley behind the villa. It’s a simple chalk circle slightly more than a meter wide.
“Plenty big enough for bantams,” one of the men tells the other.
“Chicken littles,” the other laughs good-naturedly. “I can’t believe you have me agreeing to play around with these toys.”
“Don’t pretend,” the first teases. “You didn’t get any in America and you’re itching for a bout. Big or small doesn’t matter to you right now. Any kind will do. I’m just scratching the itch for you.”
The second man laughs again. “You’re on then.”
They go through the gate and come back each carrying a rooster cage. The bantams are brought out. Holding each firmly in their hands, the two men prime the birds, repeatedly bringing the roosters quickly towards each other until their heads almost touch before pulling back. Unable to make contact, the frustrated roosters become increasingly aggressive, flapping their wings and crowing frantically.
Thong makes his last turn into the alley just in time to see Chú Hai and an expensively dressed gentleman throw the bantams free onto the ground. He sees the little birds, creatures he’s thought of as merely pert and pretty, rear up and fling their talons into each other. From the same egg cluster, they’re equally matched in weight and girth. But one has slightly stronger legs, jumps just a little higher and strikes a mere hint harder. His spur sinks into the other’s shoulder, deep enough for him to get a second’s grip and close his beak around the other’s comb. His opponent shakes him off, managing a peck at the stronger one’s eye before he lands. Beaks click and clash, then release. They take to the air again, feet out, talons attacking. A pectoral muscle is struck, and a wing falls slack. A bird is shoved down onto the concrete. It’s the slightly stronger one, the one whose eye was injured. Twisting his neck, he pushes his head here and there on the ground, trying to protect his good eye from the aggressive pecks rained on him.
“Time to stop?” Thong hears the other man ask.
But Chú Hai waves his hand, indicating the bout should continue.
“See it through to the end,” he says.
Surprisingly, the other man does not object despite the state of his bird.
The fallen rooster makes a last effort to rise on his strong legs, lunges for the last time. But, impaired by its injured wing, its lunge falls short. The other bird moves his head out and buries his beak into the other’s injured eye, pulling it out. Squawking in pain, the loser twists away and tries to escape. But the winner’s talons are already in his chest and he falls. The two men watch impassively as one brother jumps atop the other, pulls a whole eye loose and tears away at the wattle.
Unable to take in more of the senseless bloodshed, Thong turns his head into the wall and focuses on calming his heaving gut. He hears the winning rooster flap its wings, then crow in victory. From the side of his eyes he sees the men moving around, clearing up. A cage is opened and then clicked shut again.
“So, your luck’s not so good today Albert,” Chú Hai chuckles darkly to the other man. “You’ll need to be careful. Don’t bet on superior air power.”
“We’ll see,” the one called Albert replies as he disappears through the gate.
Thong feels Chú Hai’s arm around his shoulder.
“Come on in,” Chú Hai says.
Thong sees fine droplets of blood spattered on both sleeves of his tutor’s shirt.
______
“It wasn’t necessary,” Thong complains to the Commander when next they meet at the market.
Today the menu is beef noodles, the discussion, the cock fight at Chú Hai’s; still vivid in Thong’s mind after the passing of many weeks.
Despite Chú Hai’s readiness to discuss anything and everything Thong brings up, Thong hadn’t felt able to confront Chú Hai with this subject. And thankfully, Chú Hai hadn’t made it a topic for conversation. He’d treated it quite casually, an afternoon diversion between two adults that Thong had merely stumbled onto accidentally. Aside from mentioning that the other gentleman was their benefactor, the owner of the villa and the room they were allowed to use, Chú Hai made no further reference to the fight. He’d simply moved on to discuss the topic set for the day, the US and Soviet space race.
Now, Thong must express his outrage. And after months of Chú Hai’s tutoring in free speech, he feels no compunction about saying what he thinks. What Chú Hai, did, he tells his Blood Father, was unconscionable.
“Perhaps,” the Commander replies. “But sometimes, there’s no choice. It has to go to the end.”
“For the rooster, yes … he had to go on, finish it or die himself. But Chú Hai did have a choice. He could have stopped it earlier,” Thong shoots back.
“How do you know Chú Hai had a choice? Did you know what the stakes were?” the Commander parleys “Maybe he and his opponent were betting a sum of money that Chú Hai needed. Maybe even, someone’s life depended on the outcome …”
“It’s been known to happen out in the battle field,” he offers Thong an insight into his life in the mountains, “Prisoners have been killed or spared on the outcome of a cricket fight.”
The boy is clearly distressed. It’s the years of living with the Superintendant’s wife and her Buddhist teachings, the Commander realizes. He pauses. It’s time for that important conversation.
“Let’s not concern ourselves with whether your Chú Hai did the right thing or not. Let’s see whether we can learn something bigger from the incident,” he ventures.
“What could be bigger?” Thong takes the bait with caution, unwilling to pass over Chú Hai’s character defects just like that.
“Why were you so upset that the roosters had to fight to the end?” the Commander asks Thong instead.
Thong wrinkles up his nose to think. It’s not just because the roosters didn’t have a choice, he tells the Commander. It’s also because they were made to be proxies for other people’s battles, for whatever disagreement Chú Hai and his friend had to settle.
“Exactly,” the Commander likes where this is going.
“Now,” he expands. “Think of the battle between the two roosters as a reflection of Vietnam. Think of the two roosters as Vietnamese soldiers being made to fight against each other by masters furthering their own interests. Then, who’s Chú Hai?”
“Who does Chú Hai resemble?” he asks suggestively.
“An American …” Thong answers.
“Yes,” the Commander attacks, “he resembles an American – someone who won’t allow us, the Vietnamese brothers, to stop fighting.”
A good enough metaphor, Thong supposes. But, he knows enough to be wary of such attractive simplicity, even when it comes from his own Blood Father.
“I guess,” he grants the Commander. “Although … if you say it that way, the other side, the one that’s not controlled by anybody, can just walk away can’t it? It could leave us alone. Then, we wouldn’t have to fight them for the sake of the Americans.”
“But it can’t,” his Blood Father rushes to correct Thong. “If it does, it’ll be giving up territory to the Americans. Territory that belongs to both brothers.”
“We can’t allow that,” Thong hears the Commander’s voice begin to rise. But he catches himself immediately and continues in a softer tone, “You were probably too young to remember, but that’s what I told your Father years ago, when this started. I said, if we didn’t fight for our independence then, we’d end up at the beck and call of a foreign master again. And that’s exactly what’s happened now.”
Thong doesn’t bother to tell the Superintendant that he does remember that argument just before the Commander disappeared. He simply repeats the Superintendant’s rebuttal, “Father says, our responsibilities are to ourselves and our families. It doesn’t matter what the politicians say.”
He adds, “We’re not roosters in a cockfight no matter how it looks the same. We’re human beings with intelligence. We don’t have to just go on and on just because the politicians tell us to.”
“We should be able to stop ourselves,” he insists.”We should be able to take a stand and opt out if we want to.”
“That’s unrealistic,” the Commander counters. “Think … what if you have to go into the army? Can you stop yourself from shooting someone, if they’re pointing a gun at you? Or worse, to say no to harming someone if, like your brother Sixth, you’ve to take a job that involves torturing people during interrogations?”
“I’ll never be in that position,” Thong says with false bravado. “Father will find someone to help me get into a non-combat position.”
“Perhaps,” the Commander allows. “But, there are other young men who are being put into the ring by this American supported government, just like that rooster of your Chú Hai’s. What if they have to shoot and torture the other young men, those who’re fighting to free our country? Do you think opting out and watching the cruelty from the sidelines is right?”
“Biết người biết ta, know others and know yourself …” the Commander quotes from the Art of War. He attacks ”You complained about Chú Hai letting the fight go on, but did you look at yourself? Did you consider what you could have done about it? How you might have stepped in to stop it? And this situation in our country is not just a cockfight between two bantams, it’s the killing and wounding of hundreds of thousands. No one should stand by and let it continue. We must be involved, one way or another. To inflict such losses that the Americans run out of roosters to put into the circle. Only then will the fighting stop.”
Feeling sorry for a rooster and failing to do anything about it isn’t the same as assuming responsibility for the lives and suffering of every soldier in the nation, Thong thinks resentfully. Yet, there’s a hard truthfulness to the Commander’s depiction of the situation that Thong can’t refute. Indeed they live hostage to the dictates of at least one far off rooster master. And, there’s no message he could have sent to stop the Americans from disposing of President Diem and ending those years of peace, or to the far off Northerners to prevent the attack on the USS Maddox that sent the American troops pouring into Danang. Nor is there anything he can do to get the rotating generals to come to their senses and stop more and more Americans flooding his country, buying up everyone with their dollars, bombing the countryside to smithereens. His countryside he realizes, his fellow countrymen. Still, to be responsible personally for ending even one life … he can’t see himself doing it!
“You’re right,” Thong says reflectively, “we can’t do anything about those large matters. Still as individual human beings, surely there must be something we can do other than fighting? Surely we can do something else to stop the craziness?”
“And what would that be?” the Commander challenges.
Thong chews on a piece of beef gristle and ponders the question. To demonstrate like the students, to buy up public opinion like the propaganda officers, to burn themselves like the monks … The correct answer, he feels instinctively, will clarify everything that confuses him about the current situation. But, he cannot seem to find it and the Commander will not give it to him.
He only shrugs when Thong prods him.
“You think this through for yourself,” is all he says.
Thong is still thinking as he wends his way home on his bike. So pre-occupied is he that he doesn’t ask a question he’s been dying to since the cock fight. Indeed, it buries itself so deep he forgets he even thought about it at all until …
______
“Did you ever kill anyone?” Tam asks.
This was the question he’d meant to ask his Blood Father, he recollects with a start; the question forgotten in the mayhem after the ruling generals were deposed, while order was brutally imposed on Saigon. It all comes back to him in the warmth of the family den, isolated up Laguna Canyon, seated across from his American- Vietnamese wife, his solid fleshed son, being interrogated by his anxious striving daughter.
It’s one of Thong’s rare weeknights at home and he’s working with Tam on a family biography, an extra credit project Nina has persuaded their daughter to take on to qualify for gifted kids summer camp. Nina has volunteered Thong as the subject. Another attempt by Nina to get to him, Thong thinks, only with a younger weapon. But, he feels alright with that tonight, enjoying the cosy ordinariness of a midweek evening helping the children with their homework. Even Tam’s question does not upset him.
“Nope never killed anyone,” Thong answers, his face deadpan, quite un-rattled. “Not even a chicken.”
“Be serious,” Nina scolds from across the room where she’s helping Tri with his math.
“I am,” Thong replies. “Do you know how many chickens were killed in the war? But me, I wasn’t even responsible for one of those killings.”
“Daddy…behave!” Tam chides him, her round eyes flashing.
“Oh alright, I’ll behave” Thong compromises, breathing slowly in and out as calmly as if they’re just talking about the weather. “What do you want to know?”
“What you did in the army during the war,” she asks again, her eyes creasing with irritation the way Thong’s do. She’s almost nine, too intelligent for her age, and impatient with it.
“I did nothing in the Army,” Thong tells her. “I was only in the Army reserve in college. That just means lots of marching, polishing my boots and assembling and cleaning my weapons. That was it. We were in camp in the city the whole time. And it was only for one vacation, after 1968. The rest of the time, I just interned at a civil engineering firm. When I graduated, I went straight to work in an American linked engineering company. I was lucky, my name happened to be next to the name of an important person’s nephew. They couldn’t take just him out of the army, so they took the whole group of us. Then sometime in 1973, we were called back for a mission to mark territory. We marched from village to village, planting flags. We were supposed to kill animals for our food, but we stayed with the mountain tribes and they fed us. On day marches, we had instant noodles.”
He lets the story flow, speaking the admissible facts, omitting the rest.
“After that I got called back to work. Only this time, it wasn’t in Saigon. They made me a boss in Nha Trang. I spent the rest of the war renting out machines, mostly excavators, bulldozers and steam rollers, to clear jungles and build roads and bridges,” he concludes,
Tam screws up her face, her eyes disappearing into her plump cheeks. Obviously, his story is unsatisfactory.
“Instant noodles?” Tri notes solemnly from across the room. “How did you boil the water to make them?”
“Man,” Tam sighs, ignoring Tri’s question. “Isn’t there anything interesting that anyone in this family did?”
“Well, before he became a stock broker, Papi worked in the embassy in DC representing the Nationalists,” Nina offers. “And Daddy was a boat person.”
“Yeah, I braved the high seas, pirates, thirst and starvation to come here to marry your mother and be your dad,” Thong proclaims mock dramatically.
“Daddy, you ran away from the Communists,” Tam counters pointedly. “That’s not what I want. What I need is someone who fought with guns and grenades,” she declares. Someone with guts, like those white kids in school whose dads were in ‘Nam’.”
“None of you are any good.” she complains. “Daddy … Uncle Sixth … Papi … not one of you guys fought. How wimpy is that?”
Thong wants to tell Tam there’s nothing heroic about using guns and grenades to kill and maim but Nina interposes before he can.
“Papi was a press officer and Uncle Sixth was in a research group. They fought with ideas, with words,” Nina tries to persuade.
“That’s not real fighting,” Tam rebuts, voice getting shriller, her cheeks flushing. “How do you expect me to get an A with nothing to talk about,” she snaps at Nina.
“Baby, you work with the data you’ve got,” her mother answers implacably, ever the researcher.
It’s an answer that’s obviously not good enough for Tam, who pushes her work off the desk and trundles into her room, crying.
“Nobody understands,” she shouts to the room at large before slamming the door shut.
What have I done? Thong looks the question at Nina. In his experience, nine year old daughters do not behave this way. Should he go to comfort her? Or, should he discipline her for her rudeness?
Nina shrugs.
“Pre-pubescence,” she observes with resignation..
She’ll deal with it later. Right now, there’s Tri’s homework to attend to.
Mother and son turn their heads back to their work, continuing their number drill in low whispers.
At a loss, Thong whistles into the fraught air … how the atmosphere of a room can change in an instant.
______
The gate is open as usual. The door to Chú Hai’s room is ajar. All appears in readiness for Thong’s first lesson after the Tết holidays. Stepping over the threshold though Thong finds the room disarranged. Chú Hai’s arm chair looks like it’s been pushed back in a hurry. A cushion lies fallen on the floor. The standing lamp which Chú Hai assiduously turns off when he leaves the room is still alight, its lampshade helplessly askew. Five photographs of American fighter planes, the promised subject of this session, are spread out neatly on the coffee table. But, a glass and a coffee filter have toppled onto them and dark liquid is soaking into the black and white prints. Chú Hai is nowhere to be seen.
Chú Hai left in a hurry Thong realizes with disquiet. Whatever the reason, he should make himself scarce too. Turning off the reading light, Thong slips out into the narrow back garden. Someone has kicked over the basket housing the remaining bantam, and it’s wandering disconsolately on the stone path making soft squawking cries. He steps over it noticing as he does noises coming from the villa beyond the servant’s quarters – men shouting orders, tinkling glass and doors being knocked down. A woman screams. There are gun shots. Then the sound of boots and dragging sandals comes towards him.
He retreats back into Chú Hai’s room and hides himself between two cabinets, thankful now for their American bulk. Outside Chú Hai’s room, he hears a scuffle of feet, a body slammed against the wall, then a woman whimpering, a man grunting, then another man, then the woman begging for them to stop.
Someone shouts out. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? And to her of all people!”
Someone else, in a familiar voice calls out, “get your useless arses back here where you’re needed”.
There’s scuttling. Quiet. A woman’s soft keening. And then from somewhere to the side of Chú Hai’s room, kicks and a crack, like a piece of furniture or bone being broken. Thong peers through the gap between the cabinet and the wall. As if watching a peep show, he sees a stumbling man with his head covered by a sack pushed into the viewing aperture that is Chú Hai’s open door. He’s surrounded by three uniformed police corporals who shove and kick at him to move on and out of sight. Next to come in view is a tall plainclothes officer purposefully swinging a club. Finally, a short stout man makes his relaxed way across the door frame, one soft white hand on his holster, the other gently stroking the large beer belly hanging over the waistband of his policeman’s trousers.
“Get him down there, on the floor,” the man says in Oldest Brother-in-Law’s voice, pointing with a familiar petulant gesture.
Thong presses his face hard into the gap, to make sure he’s seen right. But the door frame is now empty, showing only the moss covered garden wall. Then, at the bottom of the door frame a small squawking bantam rooster appears. It walks into the room, looking for its owner, walking straight under the cabinet legs and towards Thong. It is crowing, each crow rising in volume as it makes its way closer and closer to Thong’s hiding place until it seems to Thong that crowing must not only fill the room but also spill out to the garden. The crowing is all Thong hears, drowning out the screaming of the man being beaten on the pathway just meters away, the final sharp bonk as the club hits his head, and then the muffled sound of a gunshot. Thong’s only concern is to catch a hold of the bantam. And put his hand over its head. And hold its beak shut. And twist its neck around. To keep it quiet, quiet, quiet.
The bird’s neck cracks and finally, the bird is still. So still Thong can hear Oldest Brother-in-Law say, quite clearly, quite recognizably, “That’s it then, let’s take him away.”
______
Month’s later, after yet another coup, when the Army has re-arranged itself and everything is under control, Thong will realize that the man whose brains were knocked out was the other man in Chú Hai’s cockfight. Many years later, he and Chú Hai will finally get around to talking about it and Chú Hai will confirm that the man was indeed the villa’s owner Albert, the one who’d gone to America and come back. Chú Hai will also tell Thong that in addition to knocking the man’s face in and tearing off his balls, they raped Albert’s sister, a nun. Somewhere in between, Thong will have found the answer to his Blood Father’s question. He will not fight, but, like the dead man he will do what one man can.
In the moment though, all that Thong knows is that no one is what they seem – neither policemen nor journalists nor villa owners. Perhaps, not even a seemingly benevolent Oldest Brother-in-Law, a much looked up to Sixth Brother or a Blood Father. And like them, he too must create shades of himself to survive.
War
True or not, it’s something my brother Sixth likes to say – he does not have blood on his hands, he’s never killed anyone. If some have died because of what he heard, the reports he made … he does not go there. So, he lives with his wife of many years, the children life has left him. It’s a good enough existence. One which will end he hopes in his bed at home. Unless a drunken California driver or karma demands more from him…
My hands have not been stained by war either. I too have never killed anybody in battle. But, as I strangled the chicken it shat into my hands, staining them indelibly. So, my life recruited me. My mother was robbed of her scholar son.
Most people do not believe me when I tell them I never saw a single corpse all those years. I did not shoot at anyone, not even with a camera. Although I was shot at, it was a mistake. I did not fight in hand to hand combat. The nearest I came to that was wrestling a drunk on a ship escaping from Cam Ranh Bay. My only physical wound was a blister on my left sole, infected because my Oldest Sister insisted on draining it with a dirty needle. Pathetic, my daughter Tam would say.
Call me a fence sitter. Call me a physical coward. As you like. But, I was not duped by someone else’s rhetoric and I managed not to lose life or sight or limb for demagogues and politicians I didn’t believe. Not so pathetic then.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged Memoir, Self justification, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
VI. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
These are the rules of engagement.
If one is to survive, a distance must be put between yourself and your enemy, yourself and your victim, yourself and your strategies. These rules apply whether one is a foot soldier or a commander, a maker of bombs or a trainer of roosters, a watcher or an actor, a journalist or the Blood Father of a son.
______
For some, the rules are simple.
With regard to time – when the enemy advances, retreat; when the enemy halts, harass; when the enemy avoids battle, attack; when the enemy retreats, follow. These are to apply at all stages.
With regard to space – be on the ground; be in society; take the airwaves; capture public opinion, especially theirs.
With regard to resources – use everything; co-opt everyone.
With regard to conduct – do whatever it takes.
Remember the goals – freedom, liberty, happiness.
______
For those they fight, the rules have been made more complex.
There he is an American soldier, only nineteen. There’s Charlie, a shadow in the forest whom he must find and destroy. They bring him in on a helicopter. He lays out his anti-personnel mines. He waits for them. It’s not for him to wonder why, having heard him arrive with so much sound and fury, they should come out of hiding to reveal themselves. Strangely, he can fire only after they do. He waits to be killed. And if he’s not, after the exchange of fire, after the body count, the helicopters come. He’s lifted out. They ask him to leave it all behind.
There he is, a USAF Major, coming in from Guam. There’s his plane, with its payload. And there below are the targets. Uninhabited shades of green someone in intelligence has designated as hostile. They’re hidden supply trails. His mission is to take them out. He can’t drop his payload anywhere else. Not in enemy territory, three more kilometres beyond. Not on the port in the North which processes the supplies. He follows the rules. He is not to wonder how supply trails can be uninhabited by mules, human or otherwise.
There he is, a Lieutenant Colonel at the Military Assistance Command. There are his lists with the weekly counts, the measuring tool crucial to determining the success of the General’s strategy. He signs off on them, the count for his side and the count for the other side. At some point, his side will kill more than ten of theirs for every one of his. Then, the war will be won and he will go home. It doesn’t happen today. He informs his Commanding General and sends the count off to Washington D.C. It’s not for him to worry about who makes up the numbers, how they died, who (if anybody) will open the front doors to receive news of their deaths.
______
Keeping it in, shutting it out – it’s easier said than done. The Lieutenant Colonel, the Air Force Major, the Private First Class, none of them leave it behind. Guilt, confusion, nightmares and more … it’s all brought home to roost at the VA mental health clinic where Nina sits; no longer a Ph.D. candidate writing a dissertation on the mysterious psyche of the Viet Cong but a trainee clinical psychologist researching post traumatic stress among Vietnam vets.
PTSS among Vietnam vets is a ‘timely’ and ‘interesting’ problem, a proper subject for investigation by a promising Ph.D. student, Nina’s dissertation advisors counsel her. Nina’s patients have problems rich with data. She can hypothecate as many theories as she likes on the factors contributing to PTSS and the effect of different treatment modalities on PTSS … the importance of pre-existing personality dysfunctions as a causal factor in the development of PTSS … whether returning support systems and attitudes contribute to recovery from PTSS. Being here, doing this, it’s how Nina has to play the game if she wants a career in academia.
______
When Nina tells Thong she’s dropping her beloved dissertation on the psychology of winning guerrilla wars to be a clinical therapist she has all the reasons nicely wrapped up for him. First, she can’t get any data. Second, she isn’t making any progress; they’re not renewing her fellowship. Third, this traineeship pays. Fourth, she’s almost guaranteed a Ph.D. and a job if she works with the vets. And finally, there’s a good staff day care centre she can send the children to.
Thong can only nod, “looks like you’ve got it all settled then.”
But, he doesn’t feel settled at all. Though what Nina says makes sense, he wonders when the rules of engagement between them changed, when their worlds drifted so far apart that Nina can make such a momentous change without his having even an inkling of it. What’s happened that she’s now willing to collect data on the losers, study the psyche of Americans?
What’s happened is the Black September Crash, which has bankrupted Sixth and Huong and left Thong with the full burden of remittances home to Vietnam. What’s happened is Nina’s Papa and Maman being less flush and needing her to repay the down payment they loaned Nina for the Laguna Canyon house. What’s happened is Tam and Tri growing up and needing after school care, Thong getting promoted into a job which involves flying all over the country and a work load that keeps him up late at night writing mysterious reports. What’s happened is life, Nina might have told Thong. But he didn’t ask.
______
Anyway, in the thick of action, Nina soon forgets the original reasons why she ends up sitting at the VA.
It’s all done while sitting, it seems to Nina. Some days it’s just Nina and the vet across from each other. Other days, there’s a huddle, a group encounter around a circle which Nina holds together. Always sitting, listening, taking notes, running intervention.
The right intervention is a question inserted at an opportune moment; it’s a buzz on the intercom and the orderly at the door with a shot to calm things down; it’s a repeat session if needed; a prescription the doctor has already prescribed, yellow pills to sleep with, red pills to wake up on, green pills for calm all day. Till they get better, if they do.
If only Nina could touch them – the ones who can’t be helped by words and medicine, the ones who’ve shuttered their senses to keep their memories at bay. Joe rocking madly in solitary, arms wrapped across his front, legs pulled pull back against his butt cheeks for his own safety; mouthing name, rank and serial number as he lifts his head up from the padded floor and knocks it down again. Thud … name. Thud … rank. Thud … serial number. Thud … Thud … Thud…. If she could only fold him in her arms and shower his face with little kisses like she holds her oversized Tam after a bad dream.
If she could pat the back of Tom, the radio operator who breaks down regularly but cannot cry, only hack tearlessly until he is hoarse. If she could burp the pain in his guts out like she used to do with her infant son Tri. Make him wail in relief.
If only the rules of professional conduct allowed. But they don’t. Nina knows she’s on dangerous ground when she thinks of her patients and her children in the same breath. She must leave it all behind she tells herself as she hangs up her white coat and crosses the parking lot to her children in the afterschool centre. She must keep her worlds separate, just as the clean square building with its reflecting glass windows keeps what’s happening inside separate from the comings and goings of the housewives in their utility vehicles zipping through the new sub-divisions that used to be the fields of the Irvine Ranch.
______
A certain researcher in a particular intelligence unit on the home team has no problems keeping his worlds separate. He settled it in his head and heart years ago, when he joined his first militia group.
At work, he’s only a man filling his rice bowl, a man just following orders, doing a job. It’s of no consequence he’s also a husband, briefly a father then not, a Sixth son of a retired fonctionnaire, an older brother to a cleverer younger brother he’s sometimes jealous of. He cannot, must not and does not allow these considerations to intrude.
He sets out on a morning or an evening, every few days or weeks. He goes to a designated place, a hamlet, a village, a provincial town. It doesn’t matter. To him, it’s just someplace where someone has decided to talk. Whether it’s voluntarily or otherwise, it makes no difference to him. It’s not part of his job description. His operating instructions are only to make his arrival and departure as un-noticeable as possible, to be so nondescript no one will remember him should he go there again.
In the holding centre, his tools are simple – a pen and paper. He doesn’t need to persuade the informant to talk or lay hands on him or her. Someone else has taken care of that. His only concern is the information that will be offered. Garrulously, reluctantly, spat out with hatred, he’s indifferent to how it’s given up. His focus is to listen; to sift out the truth from the lies, the grist from the gold; to record what’s important.
When he’s done, he returns to the office in the city. He matches the names and life stories he’s collected against the books of family trees already made. He adds information, fills in blanks, adds new branches, and sometimes redraws entire alternative trees. He makes connections. He types up his report. He goes home.
He doesn’t think about what happens after the report is received and its information added onto the six-digit lists at the National Police Headquarters. He doesn’t discuss the information with Oldest Brother-in-Law or ask him what he plans to do with it. What happens out there does not come home. He understands this. Older Brother-in-Law understands this.
______
At home.
Oldest Brother-in-Law and Oldest Sister, Sixth and Huong, are husbands, are wives. As husbands, the men must be righteous. As wives, the women must obey. Righteousness does not preclude Oldest Brother-in-Law’s outside adventures. So long as he provides, he deserves Oldest Sister’s obedience. The same holds for Sixth. He doesn’t need to tell Huong where he goes for days, whom he’s seen, what their stories are. It’s more than enough that he’s back to share conversation about the season’s mangoes, to compliment her on her porridge and chicken salad, to make love to her the first opportunity he has.
Huong accepts this as enough. And more than enough to be able hold him tight later as he tries to sleep and not dream.
______
It’s not good enough for Nina, born in the USA, driving a BMW, living in her split-level custom home up Laguna Canyon.
“Did you have a good trip,” Nina asks, kissing Thong on his nose tip.
Thong’s answer is easy for Nina to decipher.
“Not bad,” he offers, nostrils flaring.
Meaning, not good, Nina understands.
She knows not to ask what’s wrong. It’s not for public dissemination and will have something to do with flying things, some of which are attached to projectiles which kill. A part of this new high flyer’s job she doesn’t need to know about if he doesn’t want to tell her.
“If he’s doing something that he doesn’t want to share, let him carry the burden alone then,” Oldest had advised Huong during the early days of Sixth’s travelling assignments. This was when Huong was still apt to cry when Sixth left and to pry when he returned. The two sisters-in-law had been in the kitchen of the Checkerboard District house cooking another of the fancy Oldest rolled out for her husband’s increasingly rare visits home.
Now in California, once more in a rented kitchen because she hadn’t thought it proper to ask Sixth about the investments that have now bankrupted them, Huong rephrases Oldest Sister-in-Law’s words for Nina.
“If a husband doesn’t want to share his burden, why try to wrestle it from him?”
Oldest Sister had been talking about Oldest-Brother-in-Law. Huong is explaining to Nina, still digging into the war, why she knows only the faintest about Sixth’s job in Vietnam. But, now as then, the younger Sister-in-Law understands she’s receiving advice about how to live and let live. It’s in such oblique ways that elders pass on their experience.
______
Sixth and Thong are elder and younger too. As the older brother, Sixth must teach and guide Thong with gentility and courtesy, with firmness. In turn, Thong must be humble and respectful. He must listen. As the eldest son of absent parents, Sixth also stands in for his parents in the city. It’s his duty to remind Thong of the correct attitudes for a son, the behaviour appropriate to Thong as a young man in society.
Sixth is reminded how heavy this responsibility is the day he bumps into Thong and his Blood Father at the Central Market. There he is – his younger cleverer brother who has just earned university places in both the Schools of Engineering and Foreign Languages – at risk!
It’s early morning. Having just survived an overnight provincial bus ride back to the city Sixth is looking for breakfast. The market is crowded, raucous with commerce, workers elbowing each other at the food stalls near the main aisle, competing for room to fuel up before rushing off to work. Opting not to fight, Sixth makes his way to the corner coffee stall instead for a quiet cup and a pastry. He wends his way down the side aisles, between textile sellers readying their displays of slick polyester, heavy silk and crushed velvets for the day. As he brushes away a length of flowered cotton to turn into the coffee stall, Sixth is surprised to see the back of Thong’s crew cut head.
His younger brother is sitting at the dirty counter, elbows carefully pulled into his chest, listening respectfully to an old country gentleman. Sixth must look again before he recognizes the Commander, his face hidden under his beige kepi.
Sixth hesitates, not wishing to make an encounter that may demand a more proactive response.
“It’s not my job to arrest anyone not to report anyone to the authorities,” Sixth tells himself.
But he remembers the Superintendant’s teachings, handed down from his grandfather before him, reinforced by nights of reading at the foot of the Superintendant’s sleeping platform – Sons are descendants of endless generations. For their ancestor’s sake, they must conduct themselves such that the only anxiety their parents have regarding them relates to illnesses they might acquire, nothing more. Given the nature of his own job, Sixth can’t give his parents that comfort. However, there’s no reason why his younger brother, destined for scholarship and a desk job, should disappoint his parents. Unless he, Sixth, fails to do his duty.
He steps forward, puts his hand on Thong’s shoulder.
“Younger brother,” he greets Thong.
Both Thong and the Commander turn. Thong does so with a start, his face open with alarm. The Commander turns with a slow cautious downward tilt of the chin, his face almost total hidden by his shoulders and the brim of his hat. He peers out at the intruder through the small metal trimmed eyelets on the front of the hat rim.
“Uncle,” Sixth greets his elder respectfully, a superior man is respectful.
But, a superior man does not step back as if to go on his way. He cultivates a friendly harmony but nonetheless remains firm in his energy.
Sixth doesn’t make to move on. He remains standing where he is.
“Nephew,” the Commander looks up. He accepts the necessary.
“Come and sit,” he invites.
Sixth bows his head in acquiescence and takes his place on the other side of his brother. He orders a black coffee from the vendor and takes a pâté chaud, a meat pie, from the pile stacked in front of him.
“Is Uncle well?” he begins with the preliminaries.
The Commander replies in the affirmative. He reciprocates, “and you Nephew?”
“I am well, yes,” Sixth replies.
A generation younger, he does not now need to say more. He brings the pie up to his mouth, seeking the required permission from his uncle with a quick look before biting into it hungrily. He hasn’t eaten since the night before. The ball is in the Commander’s court.
They sit quietly. Thong watching coffee drip into the milk in his tall glass, the Commander sipping his hot black brew, Sixth efficiently dispatching the meat pie. The Commander and Sixth are experienced practitioners of such engagements. It’s Thong who breaks first. Or, honed by hours of conversation with Chú Hai, is Thong just the quickest one to find the path through the minefield of Sixth’s and the Commander’s mutual wariness?
“Blood Father was giving me advice on my university course. He thinks I should go into Engineering, not Foreign Languages,” Thong tells Sixth.
“One needs grounding in technical matters. A language is just a tool,” the Commander re-iterates, speaking directly to Thong, avoiding Sixth.
The Commander, well aware of the nature of Sixth’s job, doesn’t wish to give Sixth any excuse to include this encounter in his database.
By the same token, Sixth doesn’t comment further. He doesn’t want to add anything to the conversation which will lead inadvertently to information he must report. He will say what he needs to say to Thong later. He bites into his second pâté chaud, still warm from its maker’s oven, tilts the cap of his coffee filter up and jiggles the screw to make the coffee drip faster. He lets his attention wander back to the reports he must make – a possible niece of the elusive head of the Southern Command, a former rubber tapper belonging to a rumoured intelligence group being established North West of the city … a corrupt village headman leeching on both sides. He allows the conversation between the Commander and Thong to play only as background.
“I already understand enough about the technicals,” Thong argues. “All the jobs will be with the Americans.”
“The American’s will go home one day,” the Commander mutters. “That’s the strategy, and it will work.”
“I don’t think so, I hear they’re doing very well in the countryside.” Thong’s voice rises. “Anyway, that’s not what you told me when you made me take up English tuition!”
“I said to study English because it was a necessary skill. I didn’t say it was the only skill,” the Commander answers patiently, ignoring Thong’s rudeness. ”English is one thing, but you’ll need technical skills too to help rebuild the country after the Americans leave.”
Unlike the Commander, Sixth cannot let Thong’s rudeness go. He shakes his head at his coffee cup. How uncultivated his brother has become, disagreeing with an elder in a raised voice. He’s been remiss as an older brother. In his head he scans his appointments over the next few days, planning an appropriate time to corner Thong for a sit down and brother to brother chat.
Thong’s mention of a recognizable name sends a sudden chill through Sixth.
“He thinks differently. He says language will give me more job options, with better pay. He should know,” Sixth hears Thong say fiercely in relation to the name.
“Ah, him,” the Commander suddenly sounds cautious, Sixth’s experienced ears pick up without effort. “He’s just good for teaching you English. Don’t follow in his footsteps. He’ll come to no good in the end. He’s just an American running dog. Of no account.”
The Commander’s lying, the listener’s voice in Sixth’s head observes. That’s strange …
Sixth doesn’t wish to hear more. He wraps the remainder of his pie in his handkerchief and puts it into his trouser pocket, slurps his coffee in two gulps, cursing silently as it scalds his mouth.
“Uncle,” he says as he rises from his stool. “I must go to work now,” he excuses himself.
The Commander nods his dismissal, Sixth his good bye.
Jostling his way out of the market Sixth wonders why he heard a lie when the Commander was stating a widely known truth – that the Vietnamese journalist in question is indeed a lover of all things American. More unsettling, he wonders why his younger brother seems to be on familiar terms with the man. Even more disturbing, why does the Commander know about this association that explains Thong’s sudden prowess in English? Most troubling of all, why does no one at home have any inkling of these developments?
The questions scroll unwanted through Sixth’s head. How long has the Commander been back? Where is he located? What is he doing now? The obvious answers also present themselves, alarmingly. The Commander’s been back for some time, it’s evident from how comfortable Thong is with him. And, he must obviously be stationed nearby to meet Thong so early in the morning. It’s unclear what he’s doing, but from the mention of the journalist’s name, it must be something to do with information. And, Thong appears to be in the middle of it.
It’s time his younger brother is reined in, and hard.
______
Nina’s brilliant but sadly has no discipline regarding the nitty-gritties of living. A shortcoming Thong has come to accept.
Today, like many other days, Thong comes home on Saturday morning after a red-eye to an un-tidied house. Evidence from Nina’s and the children’s Friday video marathon is strewn all over the rumpled up den and kitchen – popcorn amidst the unfolded comforters and between the sofa cushions, pizza crusts still hiding in the half-shut boxes strewn over a ketchup streaked kitchen counter. In Vietnam, the box would’ve been filled with roaches, the ketchup ringed by an army of ants. Thank God for Nina’s cowardly streak. The house is strewn with cockroach and ant traps. Otherwise … Thong would be coming home to worse.
Still, facing the mess, Thong can’t help feeling resentful that he’s missed all the fun yet must be responsible for restoring order, for taking out the garbage and loading the dishwasher. He feels ill-used that the whole house continues to sleep as he vacuums the den and beats the stale air out of the comforters and cushions.
Gradual degeneration into chaos is what happens to a house with no head … or rotating heads as the case is in Nina’s and his house. But, the opportunity in technical sales, a job that allowed him to get up close to the major defence contractors and their latest projects, had been too good an opportunity to give away. It’s the payoff Third Brother-in-Law has been waiting impatiently for. Now, he writes Mr. Trung, he’ll be that much nearer to the army, navy and air force; have that much more insight into their strategies.
Thong is not sorry he took the job. Too much was at stake if he didn’t – the fate of the people held ransom at home if he’d continued sending back the lightweight information of the last decade. What Thong does regret is missing a good part of the children’s lives, having his resolution to speak only Vietnamese at home so the kids can learn fall by the wayside. His trips are too often packed with back to back product demonstrations and meetings for him to even call before bedtime. Travelling cross country to D.C. with stops in Houston or Florida, he’s often gone on Sunday evening and hardly ever manages to make it home Friday nights.
These are sacrifices he must make, he must accept that. His grumpiness dissipates by the time the cleaning up is finished. Sitting down to a cup of coffee, he’s almost happy to have the hour clear of wife and children to tidy up loose ends from the trip – making his expense claims, writing the trip report and even finishing one of the increasingly discursive letters he drops off to Mr. Trung at random post boxes around the country. By the time Nina emerges to give him a sleepy welcome kiss, he’s open and loving, ready to be husband and father again.
______
“It’s always better when one doesn’t have to explain,” the Commander sighs after Sixth leaves them. “But if you must, just tell him the truth. It’s simpler. Nothing is more visible than a secret trying to hide.”
“And,” the Commander smiles broadly, “there really isn’t that much to tell is there? You have only gone to meet your Blood Father whose unsavoury activities everyone in the family knows about. What he does is his affair. You haven’t done anything wrong have you?”
Thong swallows, looks away. He has told no one, not even Chú Hai, about his presence at the villa the year before. He’s simply wiped the memory of that experience away, just as he washed off and wiped away the traces of the chicken he strangled at the water faucet in the side garden. Then he’d cycled to the football pitch where Sanh and Ly were and tackled everyone so hard they wondered what had come over him. After making appointments to meet the two for revision the next day, he’d returned home and, without speaking to anyone, gone up to his room, opened his calculus text book to the most difficult section and worked at the math through the night. The next day he started on physics with Ly and Sanh, and the following day on chemistry. By the end of that school year, his head full of definitions and formulae, he’d pushed the moments at the villa deep into the recesses of his mind and reclaimed his position as top boy.
After a long but not too indecent interval following the villa incident, on the day before Thong was scheduled to leave for the summer holidays in Can Tho, Chú Hai had sent him a message. As always, the message came through a peddler, a pretty straw hatted young girl who suddenly appeared outside Oldest Sister’s lane laden with baskets of guava.
“Brother Thong,” the young girl mouthed as she weighed out three bright knobby green globes of the fruit straight from the north-western outskirts of the city, “Chú Hai wishes to meet you.”
Then she’d named the expensive city café Thong knew Chú Hai frequented.
Heart in his mouth, Thong had waited until almost the last half hour before setting out for the appointment. He found Chú Hai on the sidewalk opposite the café, walking a large foreign looking dog.
“My boy,” Chú Hai had called to him, pulling the dog to a sit with a small twitch of his wrist.
Thong dismounted from his bike, bobbed his head in greeting.
Chú Hai motioned for the doorman at the hotel adjoining the café to take Thong’s bike.
“Come lets walk,” Chú Hai had invited, motioning diagonally to the strip of green in front of the National Assembly. ”This great beast of mine needs to do his business.”
They crossed the road with the animal as Chú Hai talked non-stop about the dog’s horrifyingly leviathan excretions and Thong wondered, once again surprised, at what might possibly be excluded from Chú Hai’s list of conversational topics.
As usual with Chú Hai, the point of the conversation only came near the end, in a few throwaway lines.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our last appointment,” Chú Hai, had begun.
But Thong had already worked out a counter to that. In fact, the story had come to him unbidden the moment he stepped over the back gate and into the alley after wiping his hands dry.
“Oh, you weren’t there too?” he feigned. ”I couldn’t go that day. I was sick.”
“And then,” he had rushed on, the lying unfamiliar on his tongue, “when I went the week after, the gate was locked. And when I went out front, I saw the big gate was padlocked and there were guards.”
He’d shrugged. “I didn’t know how to contact you after that, or my Blood Father either.”
“Ahh,” Chú Hai had nodded, obviously pleased with the way events had unfolded, or perhaps just with Thong’s dissemblance. ”You’re a lucky chap you were ill that day. There was a disturbance actually …”
“That friend of mine …” he crinkled his eyes, turned his mouth downwards in a rueful smile, as if offering Thong an unwelcome gift, “… turns out some people in the present government thought he was stirring a coup.”
“Anyway,” he sighed, “it’s not longer possible to conversations there anymore.”
But, Chú Hai had concluded, the conversations were a promise he’d given the rooster master. And besides, Thong was such a good student. So, henceforth, they would meet here – Chú Hai had pointed to the hotel in front of them. He worked here now, with an American magazine. Come after hours, Chú Hai had suggested. He would let the doormen know.
Thong did not know how to refuse. He didn’t wish to see Chú Hai again, to be reminded of that strangely satisfying feeling of release when he’d killed the chicken. But, there was Chú Hai’s awful attraction, the possibility that he could unlock the secrets of those Americans spreading over the country like khaki green mould. That he could help him understand that force that could either be their enemy or their salvation. He nodded.
Their studies resumed, but with a new focus – the university entrance exams at the end of the next summer. Their sessions changed from casual far-ranging conversations to detailed analysis of the stories Chú Hai assembled for him out of the American journalists crumpled up discarded drafts; to writing draft paragraphs from ideas and information provided by Chú Hai; to translating all the material – the ones Thong wrote himself from draft Vietnamese into polished English, the American pickings from draft English into fluid Vietnamese. Thong worked at it all. Not just with Chú Hai but also alone in his rooftop hideaway in Oldest’s house. And on all the other engineering subjects as well. As if his life hung on the results. In addition to his first language numbers, Thong acquired words, his own Vietnamese seen through the mirror of the English language.
By the time he’s discovered by Sixth at the coffee stall with the Commander, Thong’s earned a four year reprieve from the army and has two potentially bright futures. Out of two thousand applicants, Thong tops the forty who are offered places in the Engineering School. Being in the top ten for Foreign Languages, with an American scholarship to boot, is no mean feat either. But, Thong is faced with a dilemma. Although neither of these futures involve killing, one is a clear deviation from the path set by his parents and supported by his Blood Father. Is Thong prepared to disobey them?
______
Sixth is determined that Thong remains a filial son. When Thong leaves for Can Tho Sixth decides they should travel together on the bus. A cramped bus seat is better for conversation.
The brothers have coffee at the market and buy their food and drink for the seven hour journey home. Since Sixth bumped into him and the Commander at the market, Thong has expected a reckoning. Now, settled side by side on the bus with the outskirts of Saigon scrolling past the windows, Thong is prepared to tell Sixth the truth he hasn’t wiped away. If he must explain himself, better sooner than later.
Sixth anxious to repair breaches in his responsibilities doesn’t want the whole truth though. He’s prepared only to deal with revelations related to his duties as Thong’s older brother and proxy parent.
“So,” Sixth says, handing Thong a leaf-wrapped rice dumpling.
Thong takes the dumpling, unwraps it slowly, taking care the gummy leaves do not stick to his hands.
“So,” he repeats, wondering how he should begin.
Sixth helps. “So …when did your Blood Father come back?”
Thong shrugs.
“We just bumped into each other accidentally, or if mother would say, fatefully.” He explains about his rescue from the Catholic School thugs. “That was about two years ago. But I don’t know how long he’d been in Saigon before that.”
Thong is open with what he knows about the Commander, still precious little he thinks regretfully.
Sixth tries not to connect the precious little – rooster rearing in the north western outskirts – to his other pieces of intelligence – the building of the new Prime Minister’s cockfighting arena in the same place, a rumoured new enemy intelligence gathering initiative there.
“I’ve seen him maybe seven or eight times,” Thong replies to another of Sixth’s questions. “About three or four times a year.”
Sixth cannot help but note that messages are sent through a sticky rice vendor outside the school, someone who’s been watched for a long time.
As for the journalist …”Blood Father introduced me to him. He asked him to teach me English.”
A distinctly odd association, the analyst in Sixth notes. Not such an odd request though if the journalist is not as pro-American as he makes out, and the Commander is the head of an intelligence network. But to use his own son! Still why not? Sixth remembers the Commander’s seduction of Third. He’s heard enough.
A good son, Sixth lectures, shouldn’t cause his parents anxiety. Sons are the descendants of endless generations. While it’s commendable Thong maintains his relationship with the Commander, he should remember what the Superintendant and his wife have sacrificed for him.
“Who’s fed you all these years? Who’s paid your school fees?” Sixth asks in the Superintendant’s stead.
“These are questions every filial son knows the answers to,” Sixth says, broaching no argument.
“As for the journalist,” he dismisses, “who’s he to you or to us? “Why’s he teaching you to disobey your parents?”
______
These are the rules of engagement.
A young man when at home should be filial, when abroad respectful to his elders. When serving his mother and father, a young man may state his opinion. But, if he sees that they disagree, he should respect their wishes and obey without complaining.
“Study engineering,” the Superintendant says, tapping his pipe on the table like the judges of old.
“We won’t take the American scholarship. It’s a bribe to get us to become more like them. We won’t be bribed. We’ll pay your way.”
Broaching no argument.
He’s serious, his usual smiling countenance pulled into a stern unmoving mask. If he allowed his face to move, he knows it would flame and melt in a dozen hideous ways, turn into the snarling maw of his birth animal, the tiger.
The Superintendant has been angry since Sixth told him everything.
“The obvious story is that Uncle is using Youngest to keep tabs on the journalist,” Sixth had whispered to him in the night, the both of them lying side by side on his divan within the shelter of the mosquito net.
The Superintendant had grunted, not replying. His old friend had given the boy to him, put his future in the Superintendant’s hands. To reclaim the boy now … worse, to put him in danger … the Superintendant’s heart began to burn. But, he’d told himself it was not the Commander’s fault, it was simply his nature.
But Sixth had continued, “the journalist may not actually be an American sympathizer. Then, what’s happening is that Uncle and the journalist are using Youngest as a line of communication.”
“And,” Sixth had executed the coup de grace, “I suspect the journalist wants to train Youngest up in the same line of work.”
The Superintendant’s anger had flared then, and burned all night. Now he’s close to exploding, a forgotten feeling he thought he’d buried for good. He holds onto his right forearm with his left hand, making sure it will not rise to hit with his outstretched palm, as it used to do too often with his wife, his other children, and even his labourers.
To show forbearance and gentleness in teaching others and not to react against unreasonable conduct, this is the energy of southern regions and the good man makes it his practice. The memory of these lessons, mesmerizingly imparted in his migrant Chinese father’s sing song voice then recited again by his sons before bed time, calms the Superintendant a little.
It’s not Sixth’s fault. He has enough on his plate – the unpalatable job, the travelling, his young wife prone to tantrums and depressions …. It’s not Youngest’s fault either. He’s still young, too inexperienced to understand the Commander’s motivations or be suspicious of his connection with the journalist. As for the Commander, lost to his dreams of utopia, the Superintendant can only hope he comes to his senses before he does more harm. In the end, the Superintendant can only be angry at himself.
Realizing this, the Superintendant’s left hand falls to his side and his right fist loosens. He’s struck by the magnitude of his failure – his own son hired out to the war, his Third Daughter a virtual widow because her husband is lost to the jungles. He flinches involuntarily as he imagines his daughter’s pain. He’s not as strong as she is. He can’t surrender Thong as stoically as she’s given up Third.
“The age of the emperor and of mandarins has passed. Science and technology will determine who leads. A man should learn what’s useful,” the Superintendent softens his tone. “A man of letters, with words but not technical knowledge, what could you do for the Americans?”
“At best, you’ll be an interpreter, at worse a spy,” he says bluntly. He trusts Thong will get the message.
“Do something better with your life,” he urges, “something that contributes to making people’s lives better.”
And, he orders, Thong should not meet the journalist again.
______
Outside the bus, the Delta bids Thong au revoir. Rice fields as flat as the eye can see, shining bright green like new jade, a balm to his eyes.
Men don’t cry. Thong sniffs into the back of his hand. He is not upset. There’s nothing to cry about. He’s wanted to be an engineer for as long as he can remember. His parents, his Blood Father, have always wanted him to be an engineer. Before Chú Hai’s jesting suggestion that he take the Language Entrance Exams, he’d never thought about language as the key to any type of career. But the American scholarship opened up a whole different destiny than that drummed into his head all his growing up years. That it came unbidden suggests to Thong it’s his rightful future.
To have lost the chance to live his destiny … Only an American would presume there’s such a thing to mourn!
______
“At best an interpreter, at worst a spy; do something better, be an engineer” one father had said.
“Do something more,” the other father might have persuaded, “be an engineer, an interpreter in the course of it. If your country needs you, also a soldier, perhaps a spy.”
Mr. Trung would have him envisage it differently.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says without the slightest hint of disappointment when he hears Thong will not be a linguist after all. “As long as you can use your essential qualities, nothing will go to waste.”
“My essential qualities?” Thong asks, suddenly hungry to know what they are.
He sees Chú Hai look at him with almost fatherly tenderness. Hears him say, “Yes, your essential qualities. The qualities you’ve got from simply being the son of endless generations, from being the son of your father.”
“But my fathers are so different!” Thong exclaims bewildered.
“If I were to use both their qualities, I’d be totally ineffective! Imagine doing my Blood Father’s work with my Father’s expressiveness. Or studying to be an engineer while trying to contain my Blood Father’s idealism … Either way, I’d end up arrested and sent to rot in Con Dao Prison with all the other revolutionaries.” Thong shakes his head at the terrible consequences of being both men in one body. ”Better to just be one person, just myself. Easier then to keep track of who I’m supposed to be, my Father’s obedient son studying to be an engineer.”
He adds with a touch of self pity, “Even if it’s a less interesting life than my Blood Father’s.”
Chú Hai shakes his head, as if disappointed with Thong for misunderstanding, or with himself for having put it so vaguely.
He changes tack. Slapping Thong on the back, he says jocularly, “Don’t’ adopt such a hang dog attitude! I’m not asking you to be both of them. I’m saying there’re parts of them in you already. You’ve just got to take the best of what they’ve given you… What’s the best thing about your Blood Father? It’s not his idealism. The best things about him is first his gift for training, not just animals but also young recruits, second his eye for seeing the opportunities in battle, third his ability to listen, to draw secrets out, to keep them. As for your adopted Father, from what I hear he’s realistic and he knows how to accept things as they are. He’s good with money, he cares about discipline and order. He has a wonderful memory for the classics. He loves his family and the land of his ancestors.”
“To some extent or other, I see you have all those qualities,” he gives Thong a congratulatory smile.
“So long as you use them, doesn’t matter what you do, you’ll do some good. Engineer, wonderful! Interpreter, the best!”
“As for being a spy … With qualities like those,” he winks at Thong, “I can see you going far.”
“People are always different, like your Father and Blood Father are. The important thing is to try to see the good sides in both of them and incorporate them into yourself,” Chú Hai pontificates.
His quicksilver mind moves on, “Just like this country. Two sides, maybe even three or four. All have their good points. How does one take sides? What’s important is to do what one can with one’s best qualities to help whenever one can.”
“But surely it’s important to take sides. Won’t one side be more right, another more wrong? And even if we don’t care about right or wrong, surely we still need to choose, so we can back the winners. Are you saying it doesn’t matter?” Thong asks.
“No matter,” Chú Hai says decisively. “No side can be completely right or wrong. As for winning and losing, depending on the circumstances, one side will be doing better, the other worse. The outcomes are for fate to determine. As a human being, you can only live your destiny. Do what you can when you are called to.”
“So don’t worry about it,” Chú Hai laughs, “Just be yourself, the son of your fathers.”
Thong shakes his head. It’s all too much for him, these metaphors for his as yet unlived future. “So simple, that’s me. I can’t think in such abstractions.”
_____
The payloads the B-52′s drops are not abstractions. They fall like gigantic dragons’ eggs on the tunnels northwest of the city, digging out craters as large as lakes.
Beneath the ground, the ramparts shudder and collapse. A pretty straw-hatted young girl, an occasional seller of guavas, opens her mouth to scream and suffocates in the mud that presses against her face.
In a rooster nursery less than ten kilometres away, under a plank bed, in their shallow bolt hole, Third and the Commander huddle together. Their heads and knees are pressed against each other, their pyjama trousers involuntarily soiled. All around them is the ringing of the explosions, the shaking ground and the high registers of the roosters crowing their fears into the impossibly lighted up sky.
This is it, the Commander thinks. He opens his eyes and reaches a hand out to touch Third’s shoulder. To lie under arms and meet death without regret — this is the energy of northern regions and the forceful make it their study. Therefore, the superior man cultivates a friendly harmony, without being weak — How firm is he in his energy!
_____
In the city, Mr. Trung hears thunder. He had told them it would happen again and soon, his message sent to the tunnels on a sheet of rice paper. He’d warned his journalist colleagues, once the pictures of the devastation came out it would only strengthen the anti-war movement in the States. He’d advised his late friend Albert’s patron, the man he himself must unfortunately also report to, the B-52′s should only be used across the border on the supply trails. Every drop inside the country would be a step back for the rural pacification program. He sighs. He’s done his best.
He lifts up his copy of the Analects, written in Nôm, the old Sino-Vietnamese characters the French all but phased out. Mouthing the words under his breath in the traditional alternating six then eight syllable cadence, he lets them soothe and comfort him … ‘The superior man stands erect in the middle, without inclining to either side — How firm is he in his energy! When good principles prevail in the government of his country, he does not alter his stand – How firm is he in his energy! When bad principles prevail in the country, he maintains his course to death without changing — How firm is he in his energy!’
Never let it be said, he thinks proudly, that “Tom” Trung is only an American lackey, only a Marxist stooge. Although he’s travelled the world and is friendly with everyone, like his own son he’s descended from his father’s line, undeniably sprouted from this ruptured land.
VII. INITIATION
An engineer … an interpreter … even a spy … anything but this! He’s riding Chú Hai’s motorbike to the Delta, at the beck and call of a green girl from America. What’s Chú Hai gotten him into?
“There’s this newly minted American journalist who wants an article on rural pacification. But I have another appointment,” Chú Hai tells Thong. “Just help me out.”
“God forbid, you’re turning me into an interpreter, just like my father said you would,” Thong protests.
But, he allows himself to take Chú Hai’s press card anyway. The fee, to be paid in US dollars is much better than what he earns from giving math tuition to dull rich boys and silly simpering girls; and much more than enough to pay for the dance lessons Sanh’s organizing next month.
Thong looks at Chú Hai’s card. The press affiliation is different than the journalist’s he points out.
“They never check,” Chú Hai assures Thong.
“What should I say if they do?” Thong asks, just in case.
Chú Hai gives him two names, one American, the other Vietnamese.
“Ask the journalist to call them and kick butt,” he advises.
Lesson number one, when with an American you may rely on him.
Assumption busted Thong learns at four o’clock the next morning when he meets the female journalist he’s to assist. Standing outside her budget hotel a good ten minutes walk away from the expensive square where most of Chú Hai’s colleagues stay is his client, a plump young woman with an un-made-up face and hair a dusty shade of brown. Nervous and biting her nails she looks like a misplaced first year school teacher about to face a new class. As green as he is, Thong realizes. Not savvy or well connected enough to get him out of trouble. More likely he’ll need Oldest Brother-in-Law to bail both of them out if anything goes wrong. In which case, he’ll be dead meat as far as Oldest Sister, Sixth and his parents are concerned. But, Chú Hai is right – for whatever deep and complicated reasons something in him wants to go on this assignment. He’s on. Ready to take whatever comes, because it’s in his nature.
“Where’s your equipment?” is the first thing she says after he introduces himself.
“Your cameras,” she enunciates, sounding out each syllable as if talking to an idiot. Then realizing something is amiss, asks more sharply, “Aren’t you the photographer? Tom said he’d arrange a photographer.”
Thong shakes his head. “I’m just the interpreter. Nobody said anything about taking pictures.”
He sees her bite her lip as she absorbs this unwelcome news. Her eyes water. Thong shuffles his feet, embarrassed for her. He looks out onto the street, the motorcycles put-putting through the cars, then at the street people, still asleep on the bare cement of the sidewalk.
“You got a camera?” he asks. He offers, “If you have, I can try.”
It’s the best he can do, he sees that she understands. She nods, runs back up into the hotel and re-emerges with a case housing a simple single lens reflex camera. Luckily Chú Hai had shown him how to load and unload it years before, during the show and tell stage of their relationship. ‘Just point and press, same as for a gun’ Thong remembers Chú Hai saying.
“Ok,” Thong tells the girl-woman, putting the machine back in its case and swinging its carry strap across his chest and left shoulder. “I’ll do my best.”
They hop onto the motorbike on loan from Chú Hai and set off; too ignorant to know any better, virgins both.
_____
The military convoy they hook up with in Saigon unloads them at the American base on the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong River. From there they hitch a ride from a pair of US rural development advisors going out to the hamlet. The journalist, perhaps because she’s a woman and a new comer, perhaps because she’s more resourceful than she looks, has managed all their transport so far. Thong has only tagged along, barely opening his mouth as she banters with the two advisors.
They turn suddenly down a dirt road and, half an hour later, arrive at a small Vietnamese army post surrounded by a bristling fence of bamboo stakes. The Vietnamese Provincial Force driver honks, aiming his jeep at the closed wooden gates of the post. The gates swing backwards to open just in time to avoid a collision. The jeep rattles through, coming to a juddering halt in the middle of the beaten clay courtyard.
“Security post of a New Life Hamlet,” the older of the two advisors announces with a flourish of his hand as the younger one helps the journalist out of the jeep.
A hastily dressed District Officer rushes out of one of the unpainted brick buildings to greet them. Thong and the journalist present their ID’s which the D.O. doesn’t bother to look at.
“Like we need it, another do-good woman writer,” he growls under his breath to Thong in Vietnamese. “We just had one last week who created no end of trouble trying to dig up human rights abuses.”
He hands both cards back to Thong. “You’re free to walk around and talk to anyone. Just make sure you interpret the right things.”
As instructed, Thong translates for the journalist, appropriately.
The journalist smiles and thanks the District Officer effusively, surprised with the unexpected leeway.
“Let’s get moving,” she hurries Thong.
They have only a couple of hours before the two advisors go back to base. She wants to see as much as she can. She leads the way out the gate and into the haphazard collection of hastily thrown together grass and corrugated iron huts which is the hamlet.
Straggling away from the small army post in two long rows, the huts look like piles of scrap newly swept in by the wind to settle against the bamboo spike walls that cut the hamlet at random intervals. The pathways, too new to be littered with accumulated debris, are criss crossed by trenches and spanned by temporary wooden planks. It’s not the American woman’s idea of an enclosed fort, but she can see that the place is built for defence. Except that there’s seems to be no one there to defend, not even old people and children. At mid-morning, the hamlet is silent and deserted.
“Maybe everyone’s out in the fields,” Thong tells her, pointing to the paddies separated from the hamlet by a small canal.
The fields are as they’ve always been just after planting – expanses of reflected sky divided into quadrangles on which tufts of newly sprouted rice seem to float; anchored here and there by rows of cone-hatted dark clothed peasants bent over weeding; the whole protected by the ancestral graves tucked neatly into corners shaded by fruit trees.
“How pretty,” the journalist gasps.
She takes her camera from Thong and clicks quickly to record the bucolic scene. Then, as contrast, she turns to take a picture of the stakes and trenches behind them.
Thong can almost hear her write the introduction in her head. Too obvious, he can hear Chú Hai saying dismissively.
What happens next is what changes the story. As they begin to balance their way across the flimsy monkey bridge of lashed coconut trunks and bamboo, they see the peasants suddenly lift their heads up in unison. Before she or Thong can hear anything, the peasants have already felt the thrum of oncoming helicopters vibrating in the ground below their bare feet. Like zombies, they straighten up and walk towards a palm thatched shelter built on a hummock where four bunds intersect. Thong and the journalist see the helicopters firing into the orchards beyond the rice fields, hear the rackety sound of the strafing tearing into the heavy mid-morning air. There’s answering fire from the trees. It pounds against their ears, throws the journalist off balance into Thong’s side. The air fills with the smell of burnt gunpowder. Suddenly, the peasants reappear through the smoke like ghosts, transfigured. They’re now in light coloured tops, their hands grey with the drying silt from the fields. They come towards the two young people, crossing the bamboo bridge in a pace strangely measured yet urgent, before filing into the hamlet and towards the army post.
The journalist and Thong watch paralyzed. Then as the helicopters circle and begin to turn towards them, the woman starts to run.
“Walk, don’t run,” Thong says, pulling hard at her elbow. He forces her to his front, holding her across her waist, and begins to nudge her across the bamboo bridge towards the safe shadows of the hamlet’s overhanging roofs.
The bridge bounces suddenly with another’s weight. Behind them, a white- haired man is pulling at the bridge’s single handrail, dragging himself onto its narrow span. His dark pyjama pants are rolled up over his knees, grey mud covers his calves and one mud stained foot is bent in unnaturally. His bony upper body is still clad in a sweat stained black top. It’s this dark shirt that’s signalling the turning helicopters. He looks at Thong, an appeal in his eyes.
Thong lets go of the journalist, hissing a sharp reminder for her to walk, not run, back to the army post. Then he turns back to the old man, unbuttoning his white city shirt as he does so. Drawing the old man to him, he throws his shirt over the both of them. Swinging the man’s arm over his shoulders, he half carries half drags the limping man across.
They duck quickly into the hamlet, the helicopters following. Thong rolls the both of them into a trench, falling on top of the old man to provide a shield. Above them, the helicopters thrum past, their mounted M60 machine guns rat-tat-tatting. Thong hears the bullets whizz above their heads, missing them.
Lesson number two, when the shooting starts don’t be surprised if an American is at the other end.
The shooting stops. The helicopters seem to have had enough for the day. The thrumming fades. Thong relaxes and slumps down, his full weight falling on the man below him. The old man, who has surprisingly strong arms, curses, pushing Thong off him to sit up.
“Dogs,” he says as he crawls to the edge of the trench and pulls himself out. “Can’t even leave a man in peace to weed his fields in broad daylight in the farmer’s clothes he’s born to wear. How do they expect us to eat?”
He throws off Thong’s white shirt, which has tangled around his neck. “Here, put this back where it belongs, on your American puppet back.”
“What’s the world coming to, expecting us peasants to have a change of white clothing ready whenever we hear a plane?” Thong hears him grumble as he walks off through the maze of huts, his left foot dragging. “What kind of safe haven do they call this?”
Resentment rises in Thong’s throat. Not a word of thanks. So much for expecting a karmic return in this life.
He brushes himself off, puts the rumpled dust streaked shirt on and makes his way back to the waiting journalist. She’s sitting in the jeep, shaking. The younger advisor has one arm around her, and is holding a hip flask to her lips. The older advisor is starting the engine up. The Vietnamese driver is nowhere to be seen.
“Good thing you came back or we would’ve left you,” the advisor tells Thong roughly.
Thong hops up without a word.
“Yes, they well might have. Without a thought,” the District Officer says to Thong in Vietnamese as he bangs his open palm against the jeep, sending it off.
The jeep snakes through the courtyard now crowded with the villagers and the district forces who’ve come in for shelter. The children, Thong realizes, have been inside the compound all this time, kept hostage there ‘at school’ so their parents will always return. So the compound will not be attacked by any relatives they might have from ‘the other side’.
Lesson number three, everything and everyone is grist to the war’s mill.
The gate is shut and the jeep rattles down the dirt road,
Lesson number four, Americans can always leave.
______
“You were quite the hero!” Chú Hai says cheerfully, when they meet next.
Thong shakes his head. He’s not been feeling anything like a hero. He’s been starting whenever a motorcycle engine fires and his nights have been unsettled, filled with unsettling dreams that leave him confused and exhausted. He feels as if he’s been running through mazes in his sleep all week. .
“Not at all,” he mumbles, “it just happened.”
“As if,” Chú Hai scoffs.
“Look at it for yourself,” he offers, waving a small black and white print temptingly at Thong.
Thong takes it gingerly from him, sees himself, eyes wide with fear, turning back to throw his shirt over the old man.
“Nice story there,” Chú Hai says.
“But the picture’s too fuzzy,” he adds nonchalantly. He hands another shot to Thong, “I persuaded her to use this instead,”
This next shot shows Thong and the old man crossing the bridge. The old man’s dragging foot is the feature. Thong’s face is hidden by the shirt thrown across both their necks.
Chú Hai tucks the rejected photo carefully into Thong’s shirt pocket.
“No use to her,” he says casually. “You keep it.”
Thong gulps in relief. Stutters his thanks to Chú Hai.
“No problem,” Chú Hai waves his gratitude away.
He grins his big wolfish grin at Thong.
“Before we buy her story, she needs to go back to get one-on-one interviews,” he tells Thong with a confiding air. “She wants you to go along with her.”
“Me?” Thong asks.
When in a minefield, stop. When cornered, retreat. Thong shrugs.
“I have another appointment,” he says, mimicking Chú Hai at their last meeting. “Can’t you help her out?”
“But she’s taken a shine to you,” Chú Hai tries to protest. “Are you sure you don’t want to revise all those sweet phrases I tried to teach you when we first started?”
Thong remembers the dangerous closeness of the woman’s fleshy thighs against his on the motorcycle ride to her hotel, her round American breasts brushing against the back of his shirt through her unbuttoned field jacket. She’s makes him feel too hot for comfort. He shakes his head.
“I’m only a novice,” he counters in a bantering tone. “One helicopter strafing is all the excitement I can take in a week.”
“I can’t use your card again either,” he argues. ”The District Officer will pay more attention if we go back a second time.”
“And really,” he wheedles, “I’m busy.”
“I’ve got a dancing class,” he blurts out defiantly, his face flushing.
_____
Arms joined, they slide through the Tango, Thong leading. In his unsettled state, Thong resonates to the seductive start-stop rhythm, and finds himself going through the motions easily. He and Sanh gossip lazily as they move, unawares, out from the crowded mass of young engineers at one end of the hall into its empty centre.
“Man, you’re getting really good,” Sanh whistles into Thong’s ear.
“Are you sure you haven’t done this before?” he grinds his hip into Thong’s.
Thong pulls back, remembering the journalist.
“Just an American girl that my English tutor introduced,” he can’t help boasting. But he corrects himself immediately, “Nothing really happened though.”
“She was a bit fat,” he confides instead, “and at least twenty five!”
“Older ones are better,” Sanh giggles, grinding his hips against Thong’s. “They’ve got more experience.”
Thong straightens up, shoves Sanh away.
“Don’t get too carried away,” he scolds.
“My turn,” Ly cuts in, tapping Sanh’s arm.
“Unh-unh,” Sanh shakes his head, hanging more tightly onto Thong’s arm.
“I’m the girl,” he corrects. He points to Thong. “You want to cut in, you tap his arm.”
“Quick,” Thong snaps to Ly. “He’s making me feel like some Latin gigolo.”
“As it should be, as it should be,” Sanh smirks at the both of them.
He breaks free from Thong and twirls away.
“Dum, da dum, da dum,” he sings, bringing his arms up into an Arabesque as a finale.
Ly laughs. “Be careful, or we’ll begin to think you’re a natural at these female parts.”
“A natural,” Sanh shouts, his voice carrying all the way to the other end of the hall, targeting the group of girls gathered there.
As hoped, there’s a response.
“Cowboys,” one of them comments in a Central accent loud enough for them to hear.
Mortified, Thong and Ly retreat towards the opposite wall, back to where the rest of the engineering class is practicing in crowded anonymity.
“Switch?” Ly pleads, “I’ve been stuck with the girl’s part all afternoon.”
Thong nods, why not? He’s been leading all afternoon. It’s only fair.
Ly takes one of Thong’s hands, tucks the other on his bicep, and counting out the steps begins to step mechanically.
Thong lets him manoeuvre, irritated and restless.
Then, from behind Ly’s shoulder, Thong sees her …
Sanh is swaggering up to her …. The most beautiful girl ever. Unlike the plump American woman, she’s someone he would welcome in a dream. Tall for a girl, she stands graceful as a willow, her slight curves moulded by a light peach coloured aó-dài. Thong watches, caught. He wills her to look back. And, miracle of miracles, just when Sanh asks her name, she does. Turning away from her friends, she flips her long pony tail of ivory black hair over her shoulder and looks straight at Thong – revealing an oval porcelain-pale face and large double-lidded eyes flashing from behind wire-rimmed glasses.
“My parents told me never to talk to strangers,” she taunts.
Thong’s heart leaps.
Ly lumbers them around, so he can see who’s talking.
“Way out of his league, that one,” he tells Thong in his usual straightforward way. “Her father’s a congressman, Mother an ex-beauty queen. She’s a piano student at the conservatory. I see them at our restaurant all the time.”
Thong sighs, leaning his chin into the crook of Ly’s neck. Such a beautiful girl, such an ugly accent, so unattainable. Nothing is ever a perfect circle. Exactly how love should be.
_____
Her name is Ai Nguyet, Ly finds out for them, Beloved Moon. They’re all smitten.
No matter that she won’t speak to them, doesn’t even acknowledge their presence. ‘The musketeers’, as Sanh renames the three of them, waste their free time attending the conservatory’s concerts; exhilarated when they catch her floating pass in a gaggle of attendants; in seventh heaven when they can watch her perform, her beautiful back swaying as she painstakingly works through the set pieces.
“She isn’t really that good,” Ly is forced to conclude after their third or fourth concert.
“Beside the point,” Sanh says.
He looks around for Thong to confirm the observation, but Thong seems to have melted away. An annoying habit Sanh notices he’s lately developed.
Thong is at the stage door waiting for Ai Nguyet to appear. He’s been doing it for weeks now. Waiting with small gifts that he gets from the PX through a friend of Chú Hai’s – a hairpin in the shape of a musical note, a bookmark illustrated with Beethoven’s head, a small brooch with the word ‘Allegra’. These are tokens he hides away from Sanh and Ly in his jacket pocket and presses into Ai Nguyet’s hand at the stage door before walking away quickly. ‘Like a man of mystery’ Chú Hai had said. More like a VC on a sneak attack, Thong had thought with amusement. But nonetheless, he’s followed Chú Hai’s instructions to the letter.
This week, the fourth, it’s time to up the ante, Chú Hai had said. He has a little box of six tiny chocolate hearts on which he’s written in English ‘Your playing is just too lovely for words…’ and, for the first time, his name.
When she appears, lissom and lovely, her pale face slightly flushed with the exertion of playing the difficult scherzo, he steps forward and puts the package in her hands.
She blotches a deep red, her pale skin momentarily ugly.
“Thank you,” she mumbles, her eyes meeting his.
Bingo! He’s done it.
Feeling quite beside himself, he mumbles in a barely audible squeak, “You’re welcome,” before hurrying off in almost a scuttle.
“Damn, damn, damn,” he swears under his breath as he stumbles on a step..
Torn, he’s self destructed!
He meant to stay, meant to make a compliment about the piece she played, introduce himself, ask her for a date. But, what would he say to Sanh and Ly if things actually went forward as he planned? How could he tell them he’s betrayed them? He’s made a fool of himself instead!
______
With Nina, he’s older and much wiser. There’s no fumbling, no guilt.
She’d laughed, a high tinkling laugh, then turned around, a big yellow card across the lower half of her face. The card said in Vietnamese ‘Group Leader Tran V. Thong, Group SGP225, Flight 7915′, his name, their group of boat people, the flight they’d just gotten off. Behind the card, he saw large double-lidded smiling eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. Above them was a high porcelain pale forehead and ebony black hair pulled into a crown topping pony tail. He saw her eyes searching their group of bone-tired flotsam, sweating in the New York summer, too warm in the new coats and jackets they’d bought to come to America in. The eyes latched on his.
“Are you Mr. Thong?” she asks in a stilted Vietnamese strongly laced with Central tones.
Overcome by déjà vu, he’s unable to reply and can only nod.
She reaches out one hand, American style, to shake his.
“I’m Nguyet Nga,” she introduces herself in her terrible accent.
“In America, no one can say it. You can call me Nina.”
“Ai is a cry of pain,” Ai Nguyet had told him once. “A full moon can only fade.”
She’d warned him but he’d ignored her. Recollecting this, he’s warned again. A girl with the same type of background, he can see immediately – the accent proclaiming her a daughter of central Vietnamese mandarins, high born like Ai Nguyet. She’s even named ‘Moon’. He’s walked that road before and knows he shouldn’t do it again. Besides he’s too old now to fall head over heels in love the way he did before.
But this is no melancholic moon like Ai Nguyet became after the Tết attacks. She looks bright and new, full of possibilities like her country. She doesn’t even want to be called by her moon maiden name. She’s someone else entirely, he tells himself. He perks up, reaches to take her hand.
“Glad to meet you Nina,” he shows off in English, “please just call me Thong.”
Which she does. And later, dear, and darling and honey. Especially honey. All said so casually, without intention, just like an American; in her high voice with its flat Americanized vowels. Carrying him along, in a drift of words. Past first base – he hears her murmur, then second base – in a whisper, and third … until she gasps – home run!
It’s his thirty-first birthday. They’re spending the Sunday afternoon watching baseball in Yankee Stadium where Nina’s adopted Boston Red Sox is losing to their New York rivals. In need of consolation, so she says, she asks him to her tiny Mid-town apartment, rented for the summer with three other Asian-American girls.
“Come and see where I live,” she ventures boldly, taking his hand in hers. “We’ll be alone. Everyone’s gone home for July 4th. I’ll cook you an American dinner for your birthday.”
She’s so forward, Thong frowns. It’s been only a fortnight since they met. Acting the way a G.I. would in the old Vietnam, so unseemly for a woman, especially an Asian one. Even the journalist, who was a real American, was more measured. But he nods, and follows her home anyway.
She makes them hot dogs, grilling them on a grubby fat encrusted grill in her postage stamp balcony. They burst out of their buns, red and swollen, slathered with acrid yellow mustard. Not even Chú Hai had managed to make him try them. Now, he shuts his eyes and bites. They’re surprisingly delicious. He smiles, amazed.
“They’re good,” he tells Nina.
She smiles back at him with her laughing eyes, wrinkles up her nose like Chú Hai would have, and bites into her own.
“That was a delicious American meal,” he turns to tell her when they’re done.
“Thank you,” she accepts with another wrinkle of her nose and a grin.
Definitely a different girl, he tells himself as they sit watching the traffic twenty five stories below, he answering her questions about the escape and the time in the camp, censoring out the violence and the assaults; she telling him about her studies in international relations and psychology, giggling as she downplays her academic achievements.
Only when the evening chill sets in does Thong realize they’ve been talking for hours and that he should leave.
“Not before you get all that mustard off your face,” she tells him as he stands up to go.
“Oh,” he exclaims, his hand reaching up to wipe his jaw.
But she’s there before him.
“Let me,” she says, bending towards him, napkin in hand ready to dab the yellow off his chin.
Her face is very near Thong’s. She’s slightly taller than he is and he can look up into her eyes, as they focus down on his mouth. They’re very dark, the pupils expanded. On her left lower lid, a single eyelash has fallen onto her perfect skin. There are little flecks of grease on her glasses, a crumb of bread on her lower lip.
This is a different woman, he tells himself again. He lets himself forget that he’s flying cross-country next week to resettle with Sixth and Huong, that there can’t possibly be a future to this.
“No, let me,” he says, catching her wrist and leaning in towards her face to pick the breadcrumb from her very soft, light pink mouth with his long fingers.
“Now that we are both quite clean …” he leaves the question hanging.
She lowers her eyes.
He kisses her.
Nina has never been kissed this way before. It’s the merest brushing of lips, followed by a deep drawn in breath against the side of her nose, as if he’s absorbing her essence; another manifestation of the exotic otherness she’s been charmed by all fortnight. Nina falls and cannot be saved.
Heftier than she is, he’s still slighter than anyone she’s known before. His hairless bronzed skin, smelling faintly of incense and the sea, is something new to her. His arms and legs are strong but lithe, what taut flesh there is barely covering his sharp bones. There’s an elegance to his movements, the careful cupping of his hands on her jaw line, the deliberate running of his lightly stubbled chin along her collarbone. She receives him like an emissary from a strange land, his otherness emphasized by the imprint of a silver circlet fastened to his thigh, pressing into hers.
For Thong, her body is a new experience. With her milk-fed bones and hard solid flesh around the hips and across her breasts, she feels entirely different from the bird-boned soft-fleshed Vietnamese women he’s known before. Nor does she feel like that ample roughed-skinned American journalist he’d slept with on and off until her assignment ended. Silk-skinned yet hard with no excess fat, she’s how he’s always imagined a fusion of East and West should be.
They fall into bed and in love deluded by their own illusions. Nina expects him to lead her home to the motherland she never knew. Thong thinks he’s finally arrived in Chú Hai‘s America.
_____
America is a vastness Thong cannot grasp from the air even as he criss-crosses it on sales trips twice a month. They will drive around it, he tells Nina. Make a summer road-trip like all Americans take once in their lives and talk about forever. It’s a rite of passage they must make if they want to consider themselves truly American.
There’s no better time. They’re both, co-incidentally, at loose ends. Nina’s just submitted the first draft of her thesis and needs to wait for her supervisors’ responses. Thong is on paid time-off until his fast-tracked citizenship application is approved and the security clearances for his next promotion come through. The children are on summer vacation and gas is cheaper than it’s ever been. Besides, there’s the pull – he’s invited to Florida for the space launch of the Navstar GPS which will be carried on a Titan rocket held together by his patented fasteners! How can they not go?
Thong plots their route, a tribute to the feats of American engineering he first discovered during readings with Chú Hai; in fact a trip almost identical to the one Chú Hai took, unbeknownst to Nina, the summer of 1960 before Chú Hai‘s masters summoned him home.
“Two whole months, the kind of vacation we’ll talk about forever,” he murmurs into Nina’s hair as they load up the ice-chest and the children’s car games into the made-in-America Dodge Peoplemover they’ve traded-in the BMW for.
“If we live through it,” Nina can’t restrain herself from retorting, rolling her eyes to heaven in mock prayer.
It’s something new to born-in-America Nina, this trip to claim America for the family. In her youth, she and Maman, never her Papa, had travelled to Virginia and Pennsylvania to visit the monuments to America’s independence and the civil war battlefields. They’d browsed museums and art galleries, her Maman giving her running commentaries on the artists. Every spring and autumn, both immaculately dressed, they went to New York for a day to buy new clothes. Once, with both parents, she’d gone to Paris, where her father assisted in the backroom with ‘the negotiations’ and she and her mother attended on numerous Tata and Great Tata in their fussy French parlours. They’d travelled on trains, and planes. They’d stayed in four star and five star hotels and embassy lodgings. They’d never driven through the country in their own car, bunked in with barely known relatives and friends, slept over in budget motels. It’s an alien experience Nina views with trepidation. She hopes it works out. That indeed, it will be the kind of vacation she, Thong, Tam and Tri will cherish the rest of their lives.
The holiday begins well. They make it across the desert and arrive at Hoover Dam in six hours easily. The children behave, mostly; squabbling only about which side of the backbench belongs to whom, entertaining themselves with silly riddles and an interminable game of “I-Spy” which takes in the straight grey ribbon of road, the sparse cacti, the pink-tinged desert mountains and the flimsy cardboard buildings spangled with advertisements of breasty showgirls. Nina breathes easy.
Hoover Dam does not disappoint. Thong is relieved.
The family walks half of its two hundred meter length to stare down another two hundred meters to the power station below.
“The concrete alone weighs five and a half million tons,” Tri reads from the guidebook, “the wall supports are drilled one hundred fifty feet into the mountain.”
Tam takes the book away from him.
“As the dam sits on a region of seismic activity, the supports were secretly reinforced in the five years after the dam was officially completed,” she reads, having found the most disconcerting bit.
“Does this mean we’re really really safe from earthquakes?” Tri, still traumatized by the shaker that ruined his sixth birthday party two years ago, worries.
Tam shrugs, making her brother more uneasy. .
Nina gives her a warning pinch to behave.
Thong nods to assure the boy. It has all been calculated and recalculated, he tells Tri.
Tri’s not reassured. Nina must stay on the surface with him as Thong and Tam take the elevator down for the power station tour. He insists on going back to the car. Where they’ll be safe if an earthquake strikes, he says.
“Silly boy,” Tam teases when they come back up. She proceeds to tell him what he missed – the enormous turbines, the wide spillways, that peculiar feeling she got walking in front of forty five thousand tons per square foot of water pressure.
“Crreepiola! I thought I saw a hairline crack,” she whispers theatrically.
Nina tells Tam to give it up. Tri sulks to hide his fear and shame. Thong ignores them. He herds them all back to the parking lot and into the Post Office, where they load up on postcards before packing back into the car to speed over the roadway onto solid ground in Arizona.
______
The blast-off is spectacular. The explosions from the boosters set the whole night aglow, tracing a bright phosphorescent trail as the rocket ascends vertically. As the first stage plume fades, the second stage fires up, lighting up the sky once more. The missile angles slightly in an uncharacteristic dog leg, seeming to swing back towards the launch pad.
“Oh,” Nina exclaims, echoing others in the room around her.
She takes a step back from the railing she’s been holding.
Although she’s ten kilometres away in the multi-ply buffered observation centre where she hears the deafening explosions only as a rumble and feels the shuddering ground only as a deep humming vibration, still the slight stumble in the rocket’s trajectory and its small turn towards her from thousands of meters up sends a tremble through her.
“Not to worry,” Thong steadies her.
“It’s only to adjust the flight path so the GPS can orbit properly over North America.”
“Giganto fireworks that’s all,” Tam crows derisively at her mother, standing fearless on tiptoes, straining against the stainless steel railing, her head craned to see over the shoulders of the much taller Americans standing on the platform below her.
On the other side of their mother, Tri is silent; his body close in to Nina’s ribcage. One fleshy fist is crunched tightly inside his father’s hand. He screws his eyes small, wills himself not to feel the floor throbbing, to believe he’s just at the movies, the noise only a soundtrack. Thong eases his long thumb into Tri’s fist, reaches in to un-tighten the clenched hand and weave his own elegant fingers through Tri’s solid ones. He rubs his thumb gently against the back of Tri’s hand. Tri will learn that fear can be mastered, Thong hopes. The secret is to look it in the face.
Applause breaks in the room as the flight controller announces the success of the turning manoeuvre. The rocket continues on, not straight up now but away. In the front of the room, from among the ranks of the more important persons, Thong’s boss turns back and gives him the thumbs up.
Thong smiles back at his boss then looks down at his son.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, you see,” Thong tells Tri softly, through the corner of his mouth, taking care that that no one else will hear, so he will not embarrass his son.
______
The Commander and Thong squat comfortably side by side in front of the motorbike Thong has bought off Ly with American dollars saved from a year of interpreting. Thong has ridden out to the hatchery from the city on his new acquisition to say goodbye to the Commander before setting off to Can Tho for Tết. Anxious to test the bike’s roadworthiness, he’s revved it as hard as he can between roadblocks all the way up Road 13. Now, hands covered in old rags, he and the Commander are carefully taking out the hot spark plugs to diagnose the state of the engine, talking quietly as they work.
Thong tells the Commander about the Superintendant’s latest letter, updating him on how the American escalation is coming closer to home.
“Rice fields are being ploughed over and hamlets being burnt,” Thong repeats from his Father’s letter. It’s become almost impossible for the Brothers-in-Law left in Bac Lieu to work regularly in the paddies or to care for the graves, he reports. Sooner or later, the graves will be bombed or razed.
The Commander nods, the story all too familiar.
”Yes, damn sweeps and bombs,” he agrees, his hands quivering.
The bombs drop here too, it comes to Thong. He hears them even in the city. What it must be like out here in the northwest, Thong can’t imagine. Perhaps, something akin to the strafing he received in the Delta but more prolonged, he asks the Commander.
“It’s like nothing you’ve experienced,” the Commander gives him a look both contemptuous and envious.
He won’t say more about it. Instead he complains how the bombs are damaging the roosters – the highly strung ones simply dropping dead from nerves, while the more resilient ones become crazed with fear.
“They become impossible to train,” he says, almost talking to himself. “They won’t go through the drills that make their legs and necks strong enough for defence. All they want to do is attack immediately, killing themselves in the process. Watching them fight is like watching suicidal maniacs. There’s no joy to it anymore.”
It’s obvious to Thong his Blood Father is depressed by the bombings. Is it just the effect on the birds that’s upsetting the Commander, or is the Commander using the roosters as a metaphor for something larger, the psychological disorientation affecting everyone in the countryside, Thong wonders. An interesting subject to explore. But it would not be right to ask…
Thong goes back to the matter at hand.
“Father decided we must exhume all the graves and bring the bones back to the ancestral hall in Can Tho so we can hold the ceremonies at the right time and look after them properly,” Thong explains as he carefully lays down a hot plug onto the ground next to him. “The only time to do it is during the Tết ceasefire. So that’s what we’ll be doing the fifteen days of Tết. Going down to Bac Lieu to exhume the bodies.”
He relays his parents’ message. “They want to recover Blood Mother’s remains too, if they can find her. Will you agree?”
At first, Thong’s question doesn’t penetrate. The Commander hasn’t thought about his dead wife for months. Not with tender longing, not with remorse, not even with regret. Not once. A sign perhaps of what the days and nights of air raids are doing to his mental and emotional balance. The Commander wonders dispassionately when he’ll break, or if he’s already broken.
“Yes, of course,” he says softly, guilty he’s neglected doing anything about that grave in the swamps for so long, in fact put it aside for years.
“You need to give us the instructions,” Thong tells him, looking down to examine the grease blackened plugs, giving his Blood Father time to recover his composure.
The Commander wipes his hands off on a rag, digs in his waistband for his scrap paper note book and pencil butt. As he writes, he talks Thong through the landmarks and the people he must find.
When he’s finished and given the little sheet to Thong, the Commander unbuttons his shirt, and pulls at a string tied securely across his chest, over one shoulder and below the other armpit. Pulling it around, he shows Thong a tubular circlet of tarnished silver, tied to lie flat against his back.
“It’s your mother’s,” he says as he loosens the fastening. He hands the silver bracelet made for a very tiny wrist to Thong. “It’s part of a pair I bought as a belated wedding gift when we visited the mountains and Dalat after the Japanese left. By rights, it should have been buried with her. But, she’d misplaced it and I only found it sometime after the funeral. I’ve been wearing it on my back ever since. It seems to have protected me.”
“But,” he shrugs, “at my age that’s not really important anymore.”
“See the cones and the pine needles etched in the body,” he points to the faded design of straight lines covering the hollow tube, like pine needles folded in on themselves, the cone like protrusions spaced regularly around the tube. “It was the first, the only, time she saw pines. She thought they were the most beautiful trees ever. That’s why she asked me to name you Thông, evergreen.”
Thong blinks. This glimpse into his own beginnings overwhelms him. Until now, he’s always thought his name was just the prefix of the compound word for ‘intelligent’, thông minh. To be instead a pine, a survivor, evergreen even in winter. It’s a different understanding of himself.
“Thank you for telling me Blood Father,” he can only stammer.
The Commander looks away past Thong’s discomfort. He picks up the plugs one by one, sniffs at them to check for sulphur burning. There’s none.
“Looks like you got a good buy,” he says, patting Thong’s forearm lightly.
He adds, casually pointing to the bracelet as if it’s merely something else Thong has gone out and bought. “When you find her, put this in the jar with the other one. She would like that I think.”
______
It has been good, this first time together. But there’s so much she doesn’t know about him, this exotic stranger lying on her bed stinking up her room with a cigarette, his head on her belly, one leg bent. It’s shocking what she’s done, Nina sits up with a start. She wonders if she’ll have cause to regret it.
He looks into her eyes. What’s she thinking?
She looks away, up the length of his bent leg to his thigh where the circlet sits, tied flat against taut muscle. She caresses it with her index finger, tracing a silent question.
“One of my mother’s wedding bands,” he’s unguarded just right then.
“It’s the remaining one of a pair my father gave her as a sort of compensation for pawning away their wedding rings during the Japanese occupation,” he explains.
“Pawned the rings … why?” she asks.
“Ah, who knows?” he laughs embarrassed. “Times were hard … “
He wraps his hand around her finger with his, guides it lightly around the circlet once more, then up his inner thigh to close both their hands around himself.
“Because my father was one of those patriotic people who …” he begins once more to reply, not wishing to hide anything from this woman who’s so impetuously opened herself to him. She leans into his shoulder, waiting. He turns his head away.
“It’s a secret,” he whispers into her pillow.
______
The secret first begins to reveal itself as a tic in Chú Hai’s left eye when he and Thong read a draft detailing the discovery of a huge cache of weapons near the Cambodian border during Operation Attleboro. The eye tics more furiously when, just after Christmas, Thong and he go through a technical specification on the new chemicals being used for clearing operations in the Delta.
“It’s a mixture of benzene and gasoline for burning,” Thong deciphers as he scans the equations. “Then there’s a plastic, for stickiness. But, since that impedes ignition, they put back a small trace of a phosphate, to enhance burning.”
“Extremely hot,” he announces as he reads further down, “burns at 800 to 1,200 degrees Celsius.”
“The plastic is for sticking to the skin, for the phosphates to burn the flesh to burn to the bone …” he cannot continue.
“How do they counteract it?” Chu Hai’s fingers drum against his desk, both eyes blinking furiously now.
Thong searches the page.
“Difficult,” he replies. “It’s totally different from the old stuff the French used. It burns for up to ten minutes, even in water. Also, because of the stickiness, you can’t wash it off. It flows into trenches, so they’re no protection. Anyway, the blasts de-oxygenate the air. Even if you’re not burnt in the trench, you can suffocate.”
He reads on, shakes his head. “You’ve to stop the planes before the payload’s dropped. But anti-aircraft guns won’t work. They don’t have enough range to get to the B52′s and the Phantoms. They’ll be too high, especially if they’re going to drop the bombs by radar controlled missiles. What’s needed is surface to air missiles, or air intervention.”
“They’ve just got too much damned hardware haven’t they?” Chú Hai observes, his voice seemingly nonchalant but his elegant fingers making frantic little tears on the long edge of a piece of paper he’s randomly picked up from one of the piles on his desk.
“Flesh and bone can’t prevail. The countryside’ll be empty and we’ll all be dead if it isn’t stopped,” he concludes, allowing a note of resignation to creep into his normally light tone.
Thong, catching the change, waits. It’s not like Chú Hai to be even slightly despondent. But, the darkness passes in an instant.
Chú Hai’s hands cease their fidgeting. His eyes open wide, still and decided
“He was right,” he says to Thong. “There’s no other way to make them go except a new government. A general offensive and a people’s uprising to install a coalition government are what we need; a government that can negotiate withdrawal.”
He grins, his happy pixie self again, as if some argument he’s been having with the unknown ‘he’, perhaps the now dead coup-stirrer Albert, has finally been resolved in his mind.
In a flash, everything becomes clear to Thong too.
“You’d be much happier with that outcome wouldn’t you?” he asks tentatively.
“Although you would never say so to them,” he flicks his eyes to the editor’s desk on the other side of the room.
Chú Hai laughs.
“You’re a clever one!”
“Con …” he’s taken to addressing Thong like this lately; a sign of their growing intimacy …
“If you were me,” he hypothesizes, “wouldn’t you rather be earning good money from your own national newspaper, writing in your own language?”
He pauses, as if weighing how much to say.
“I would actually have told them,” he says at last. “Don’t you know my personal motto is ‘speak truth to power’?”
“But,” he concludes knowingly, “in all the time I’ve worked for them, they never thought to ask.”
“There are many fronts in a war,” he continues. “One does what one can.”
“It’s not so complicated really,” he allows himself to explain to Thong. “Like you, I grew up in the Delta. My father, my mother, my grandparents are buried there, in rice fields we’ve owned for generations. I’ve had to rebuild their gravestones three times. Once after the Japanese War, then again when the French came back, finally last year. After the whole village was swept by the Americans in a clearing exercise.”
“It must be a particularly unfortunate site,” he flashes Thong a crooked grin. “When it’s all over, we really must get a geomancer to see about moving it.”
VIII. COMMITMENT
It’s inauspicious to have anything to do with corpses in the New Year. Not that the dead should be disturbed in any case, exhumation is a barbaric custom only carried out by land starved Northerners. They can find no one for hire to help them. Thong and Sixth, Fourth and Fifth Brothers-in-Law from Bac Lieu, Seventh Brother-in-Law from Can Tho, they are the ones who must do the work.
To get permission for them to venture out beyond the ancestral hamlet’s safety zone and into the edges of the longan orchards, Sixth must bribe the District Officer who in turn must cajole his American advisor. To buy peace from the other side, one of the brothers-in-law sends a parcel of medicine brought back from Saigon to a relative, who sends it on. An impoverished hamlet monk, starved of a congregation, is persuaded to come along to carry out the necessary rites. The wheels oiled thus, the family – sons and daughters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law – sets out.
They go dressed in city clothes, on motorbikes, riding precariously onto the paddy bunds when the path runs out. To have walked there as they might have done before, barefooted with farm pants rolled up and sandals or rubber slippers tied and looped across their necks would only have tempted death from the air.
Bumping up and down the packed earth barriers on the back of his Fifth Brother-in-Law’s motorbike, Thong is shocked by the desolation of the fields they pass. Some are overgrown with weeds, not having been worked on for over a season. Others are just churned mud, the growing crop deliberately ploughed under to deny rice to the VC. The few fields not yet surrendered and still tended sporadically have under fertilized plants with sparsely seeded heads almost not worth the trouble harvesting. It’s sad but not enough to cause Thong’s heart to ache. It’s the graves they pass that do that. Most are damaged, some with head stones toppled over, others with coffret panels broken open, still others simply reduced to piles of rubble. As Chú Hai pointed out, it’s not enough that the living cannot find peace in this land, even the dead are not allowed to rest!
The Superintendant’s ancestors, his China born father and Delta born mother, are fortunately, still undisturbed in the location chosen for them many years ago. That they must be moved now is unfortunate, but necessary, the Superintendant whispers to the remains of his parents. He asks their pardon as he kneels before them with lighted incenses sticks while the women of the family set out food and burnt paper offerings. Around them, the men busily stick more incense sticks around the perimeter of the work area, the monk following along chanting; building the necessary protective barrier against any outsider spirits who might wish to harm them.
Then they start – first chipping away at the mortar to break apart the coffret panels, then down into the fertile dark earth. It’s hard dirty work, made easier only by their sense of purpose. Thong’s hands are blistered hours before the noon break is called. The piles of earth grow higher, but somehow, the hole in the ground remains pitiably shallow. It seems an endless task until Sixth’s bare foot crunches on a piece of white in his grandfather’s grave. He shouts for his father to come. The Superintendant nods, smiling broadly. It’s a sign of good fortune his father’s bones are first touched by the oldest grandson of the family. They work more carefully now, only Sixth and Thong in the grave, carefully dusting the dirt with hand shovels into baskets which the others haul up. Soon, Fourth Brother-in-Law, the husband of Grandmother’s favourite grandchild, finds bones in the other grave. The Superintendant asks to be lowered in with him, to help uncover his mother. They forget lunch, working till dusk before hunger and the darkening sky force them to stop, wash and eat.
As darkness falls, the Superintendant decides that only he and the monk will camp over. The next generation cannot be exposed to the possibility of air raids. But Thong, emboldened by his new sense of self after learning the true meaning of his name, or perhaps because his Blood Mother’s bracelet is tied against his belly, makes up his mind to stay.
“I think you need a younger person with you,” Thong says simply.
“Youth offers no protection against guns,” the Superintendant observes drily. “In fact, more young men die in wars than old ones.”
Thong fingers the circlet tied flat against his stomach.
“It’s alright Father,” he says. “Tonight, the ancestors will protect us.”
As if the dead have any power, except what we give them. The bombs fall around them that night anyway, as they do every night the monk tells them. The night sky flares, the air rumbles, the ground shakes. Thong grinds his teeth, unable to sleep. But, as in nights past, this particular patch is spared and continues to be spared in the days after. By the time the ceasefire officially begins, the remains of both the Superintendant’s parents and his parents-in-law have been transferred safely into four pale green urns tied up with silk cloth, ready to be carried back to Can Tho. They will begin the search for Thong’s mother’s grave on the fourth day of the New Year, the Superintendant decides. Now, it is time for the family to set their picks and hoes aside and celebrate Têt,
The festivities have barely started before they’re disrupted. Playing cards in Fourth Brother-in-Law’s house deep inside the town, the family at first mistake the approaching gunfire for a particularly furious round of fire-crackers. It’s only when the windows are rattled by a loud boom and they see the hissing streams of flares shooting up into the moonless sky that they realize there’s fighting nearby.
Drilled, the women run out through the front garden gate to gather the children in. Fifth Brother-in-Law slips down the alley to see if he can glean more information. Yet once more, Thong finds himself building a barricade, using the large pots of good luck mai bought specially for Tết to block the front gate. Sixth, Fourth, Seventh, he and the older boys are just pushing an ornamental stone into the last gap, when Fifth races back.
“They say it’s a general offensive,” he whispers to them as he squeezes through the barely opened gate.
Fourth crowds everyone into the two front rooms of the house, the ones built of solid brick with the tile roof. A count is made. There’s one missing. Their mother! The Superintendant rushes out to the back courtyard, and finds her, as always, between the kitchen and the outhouse, scrubbing a pot.
“They’ve broken the ceasefire,” he tells her urgently, pulling at her wrist for her to stand up.
“On a New Year’s Eve,” she says in disgust, brushing aside his hand.
She struggles to rise from the low kitchen stool she’s been sitting on.
“The year of the Monkey, full of all kinds of mischief,” she comments, her face only a little worried.
______
Mischief? Or the gods dispensing justice? A VC mortar falls in a house just a few doors away, dismembering its owner. His head cannot be found till three days later when, led by the flies and stench, it’s discovered wedged behind a pot hanging against the kitchen wall. In the blast, the pot had flapped out from its hook, the man’s head flown in
“He was always shooting at birds with his catapult,” Fourth Brother-in-Law remembers.
“Yes, knocking their heads off,” Fifth Brother-in-Law notes.
Karmic retribution, they both agree.
______
Mischief? Or a matter of life and death for a sticky rice vendor who, although she no longer takes messages to a certain rooster master’s son, has still been watched carefully. Who, after the infiltrating VC from the countryside have been killed or chased away, remains. Who is arrested in one of the police sweeps that follow, dragged out by her hair from a shelter beneath the smouldering ruins of Chinatown.
She’s the widow of one of the Commander’s men, mother of another two. All three have been lost in the mountains; just three among the many whose hearts the Commander won, but whose lives he could not protect. Returned to the city, she was assigned to be his courier when he came back from the jungles. In time she’s become more. Now she’ll die. The Commander realizes he can’t allow this. There’s only one way. He has names and networks. Perhaps less important than before since so many have died in the retaliatory actions; but he hopes, enough to negotiate with.
He cycles to the Checkerboard, taking the road by the race track, passing neighbourhoods razed by shelling, civilians surrounded by their salvaged belongings sitting in a daze, unable to believe the destruction around them. Nearer town, there are far fewer signs of fighting. The Presidential Palace is unharmed except for dents in the gate and gun powder marks on the sidewalk. At the US embassy, the guardhouse is boarded up but it appears otherwise intact. In the entrances of the small alleys of the Checkerboard, guards are posted, but there are no other signs that the enemy has penetrated the neighbourhood.
He cannot go in, a bleary eyed policeman at the head of the alley tells him. New rules. He must be accompanied by a resident. No accommodation is possible, not even when the Superintendant’s Oldest Son-in-Law is mentioned. Shell shocked by the attack right in the heart of the capital the policeman has discovered he’s not for sale after all.
The Commander looks around for a convenient loitering child to use as a messenger. But, unusually, there are none about. Impatient, but resigned, he squats by the policeman to wait.
“A shock then to see them up so close,” he says to the policeman conversationally.
The policeman nods, grim.
“But we’ve flushed them out,” he states with pride. “All dead or gone. We’ve totally defeated them.”
So true, the Commander agrees. He can attest to that. He feels it deep in his guts, its inevitability, and its shame. Despite his rhetoric, his proclamations never to succumb to another occupying power, here he is waiting to surrender – with his leftover names, the leftover lives he still holds – giving them all up for one uneducated unimportant woman…
… Even as another uneducated unimportant woman lies forgotten in the delta mud.
______
It is not yet the appointed time. The Superintendant’s plans to look for and exhume his Sister-in-Law’s grave are sidelined. Thong’s Blood Mother and her secrets must stay buried for almost another lifetime, before Thong’s comes back full circle to look for her again.
______
She’s still in her grave, her other silver circlet slowly blackening and twisting around her wrist, when two decades on near the end of Thong’s American cross-country trip, Thong’s Father-in-Law and his cousins once more bring up the idea of a general uprising.
It’s after dinner, a meal full of pretensions, meant to demonstrate Papa Nguyen’s and Maman Nguyen’s pedigree.
“My mother’s bánh bột lột and, my grandmother’s bánh cuốn,” Maman Nguyen points to the over-chewy shrimp and pork dumplings wrapped in banana leaves and the snowy smooth rice rolls she hand pours, accompanied by the home made saucissons she laboriously hand pounds.
“All made following the royal recipes,” she boasts for the umpteenth time.
There’s also the pièce de résistance, a perfectly executed côte de boeuf which is part of a repertoire Maman acquired in a French convent outside Paris and a year of finishing in Switzerland.
The guests, cousins of Papa Nguyen from the old diplomatic service and a royal aunt of Maman, have picked through the meal with the requisite compliments. Thong, on tenterhooks and silent amid the nest of Nationalist sympathizers, nonetheless partakes of his fair share. As does Nina, who is on her best dutiful daughter behaviour. Tam and Tri have shown true appreciation, gobbling it all up without teasing each other even once. It has been a meal without incident.
“Perfect,” Papa Nguyen concludes.
Now it’s time for the cigars and politics.
He sits back, opens the wooden box already set out to his right and passes it to his cousins.
“Cuban,” he tells them, smiling regretfully. “But still, we must have them.”
“Indeed,” the cousins say, only a little shamefaced as they help themselves to the fragrant fat brown rolls.
They clip out the tops of the rolls, light up and suck in, fed and at peace. To be here in America, living under a democratic government, not at the mercy of a totalitarian regime, is a blessing they all savour.
“Not like in China,” the youngest cousin observes as blows out a stream of fragrant smoke, referring to the latest example of abominable Communist behaviour – the Tian An Men student massacre.
“It just shows you the Communists can never change,” the older cousin says.
“Black cat or white cat, it doesn’t matter so long as it can catch a mouse. That’s what they say. But those of us who are mice should remember, the Communists are all cats, whether they allow open markets or not,” the younger cousin laughs bitterly.
“But, you can hardly characterize the US as a mouse,” Papa Nguyen comments.
“I’m not talking about the US,” the younger cousin snorts. “I’m talking about those people oppressed by the Communists whom some of us are encouraging to stage a general uprising. This event should tell us the time isn’t ripe. They’ll be killed, just like those Chinese students. We shouldn’t encourage it.”
“You mean in Vietnam?” the older cousin asks, as if he doesn’t understand what’s being alluded to.
“Of course,” is the reply. “Where else would I be referring to?”
Thong excuses himself. He needs to go up to his room for his cigarettes, he tells his father-in-law. He’ll be back down immediately.
Craziness Thong thinks; to even begin to try it nearly fifteen years after the end, with a population either half starved or dead tired from making ends meet. He remembers the months of manic planning before Chú Hai’s failed offensive – Chú Hai rushing out from their English conversations at the hotel to meet his new sidekick, a jungle pale man in too new city clothes, the two of them zipping around the town on Chú Hai’s motorbike, both of them laughing and gesticulating like madmen. He sees now how their to-ing and fro-ing and their excited nervousness fitted into the massive on-the-ground preparations the Communists were making before their incursions into the cities. Yet, for all the care taken, the action had been a terrible military defeat. It had been a resounding victory for the South; a hundred thousand VC casualties, the whole southern VC infrastructure dismantled, the cities reclaimed. How a general uprising, orchestrated from Washington D.C and Orange County might succeed if one so near the ground failed, Thong can’t imagine!
As for propaganda value, if it’s just a case of a few pro-democracy demonstrations over there, or even in D.C. and Little Saigon, what can those do? Have they forgotten how the Nationalist victory was turned to defeat by clever news making, how the tide was reversed so overwhelmingly that there’s no hope in hell the Americans are going back there to rescue anyone again, ever. How desperate and deluded can Papa Nguyen and his deluded cousins get! Thong laughs scornfully as he walks back up the stairs.
Upstairs in Nina’s old bedroom, refurbished now with a double bed, Thong sits down at her teenager’s desk and sags into the 1970′s style swivel chair. Rifling in the back of the drawer, he takes out the stack of postcards he’s accumulated from Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Using an erasable black ink pen he begins to write simple messages – ‘Having a good time’, ‘You just have to see this for yourself’, ‘Wish you were here’, – over his previous work now dried and invisible.
Thong writes the phrases Chú Hai had drilled into him those early days so many years ago, quickly, automatically. It’s brainless activity compared to the original communiquês, written in miniscule script over the last few nights as Nina and the children slept – a short sentence letting Mr. Trung know that the schematics for the GPS system and the list of suppliers are in a care package sent to Ba Roi‘s family one card; a longer review of the American response to the Tian An Men incident on another; data on the massive Japanese direct investment flows into the US and his assessment of their potential significance to the global power balance written on three cards; and a last postcard describing the trip through the South to the Space Centre with a post script about his soon-to-be patented fasteners. Snapshots of the world through wide angled American lenses. Communications that Chú Hai will find more useful than the technical material Mr. Trung’s and Ba Roi‘s masters still insist Thong provides – information that his country has no capacity to use, let alone replicate or respond to.
So different from the past, he thinks, when his engineer’s eyes and mind had been worth something; when he and Chú Hai had sat late into the night at the office and he’d interpreted the complexities of the blueprints incredibly materializing from the mess of Chú Hai’s desk. Then, it had mattered. Chú Hai had taken the information in, processed it in that multi-levelled brain of his, turned it into strategy, tactics and battle plans. Plans that in one way or another had contributed to his masters winning. And, if Thong wants to be frank about it, to Thong losing a country. But he doesn’t go there.
Thong stretches. God, what it would be like to sit down with Chú Hai again, for him to see with his own eyes how far along Thong’s gone ingesting America, turning American from the inside out. Hear his wry on-the-mark observations, the best ones thrown in at the last, as if they didn’t really matter. Of the three men who’ve shaped him, he’s the only who talked with Thong this way. The only one left who can talk as a matter of fact, now his Blood Father’s dead, and the Superintendant incapacitated with a stroke. But even Chú Hai is unreachable now, stuck behind the bamboo curtain they both helped to build.
Thong puts his pen away. Picks up another one with permanent ink and signs off with a variety of initials. Impulsively he writes a series of noughts and crosses, kisses and hugs, across one of them. He then addresses the first postcard to an apartment in Hong Kong, another two sets to post boxes in Canada, and the last set to Singapore. There – done!
He slips the postcards into the pocket of the good trousers he’s put on for Maman’s guests and goes back downstairs. Walking out into a still bright summer evening and he makes his way to the letter box at the end of the driveway. He’s never sent anything through a house letter box. He considers for a moment. They can’t still be watching Papa
Nguyen now, so long after. Anyway, he was always on their side, the risk is minimal Thong judges. Placing the cards inside the box, he lifts up the flag to indicate to the postman that there’s a pickup. Finally he stops to light a cigarette, takes a long drag and, as if at an altar making an offering with an incense stick, closes his eyes to send a wish of continued well being to the recipient of the postcards.
Still missing Chú Hai, Thong walks back to the house slowly, disconsolately kicking his uncomfortable black lace up shoes, also put on for Maman’s guests, against the gravel. The noise alerts Maman at the kitchen sink loading up the dishwasher. She sees Thong smoking and pensive, for all the world like a forlorn lover. Beyond him, she sees the letter box flag tilted up. Who is he sending letters to, she wonders.
She’s always had her suspicions about this Son-in-Law of hers. Notwithstanding her daughter’s happiness, her grandchildren’s cleverness, her son-in-law’s apparent success, she’s convinced Nina has made the wrong match. It’s been that way since Nina foolishly showed her pictures of the party Thong’s family gave to celebrate their marriage. In the absence of the bride and groom, the family had posed around the large colour photograph Thong and Nina sent back – thin tired women in glaring synthetics, gaunt men in ill-fitting white shirts, sitting at a table with mismatched crockery, in front of ancestral photos hung above a simple altar. The type of family from which the VC are recruited, she couldn’t help thinking then. A family that could marry their son off at eighteen to a countryside girl before sending him off to college, she’d worried. The background checks she made her husband commission had come out with nothing though. He’d been what he said, a brilliant engineer from a modest countryside background. But still, no matter how hard she’s tried, it’s been impossible to feel better about this marriage.
Maman reminds herself she must take a look at the letterbox after she walks her guests out to their cars later tonight.
______
“Something came up in your security clearance application,” the liver-spotted Taiwanese-American across from Thong says solemnly.
“Something came up …” Thong repeats, slowly enough to give himself time to think. It’s been months since he got his citizenship papers and signed the non-disclosure agreement for classified information. It should all be over and done with. It was only a low grade ‘confidential’ classification anyway. What could have gone wrong? He’s slipped, he realizes in the seconds that pass. Nothing had been as it should be for a routine interview – he hadn’t been able to find the interviewer’s name in the company phone book, Human Resources had arranged lunch in a restaurant not a meeting in the facility. He goes through what he can remember of his application again. He’s quite sure he didn’t miss anything. Everything that needed to be told had been told. He’d even included some of the dirty linen. It would have been suspicious if, during the war, he managed to totally avoid any forms of contamination. What could have gone wrong, he asks himself again.
He brings himself back to the present, to the man across the table from him. He brings himself back to where he is, in a nondescript Denny’s restaurant in mid-Wilshire, at a glass topped table, with a Western table setting, a bread roll in the bread plate to his left. He reaches for the bread roll, breaks it apart, and butters it, forcing himself to remain relaxed and very calm, open to whatever will come his way. He is in America, he reminds himself, a free country.
‘The only strategy for getting past the polygraph’, he hears Chú Hai’s impish voice reminding him, ‘is to be very very relaxed, as if you have nothing to fear.’ And more sharply, ‘remember, when challenged, step back so you seem less threatening’.
Which he does, pretending to fold, asking, “What happened?”
His allows his voice to tremble slightly, a genuine tremble. Exactly how it should sound coming out of an anxious engineer who needs a security clearance to keep his rice bowl. It persuades the interviewer that he’s a chump, someone who’ll soften up totally if played a bit longer.
“We’ll get to that,” the interviewer says. His eyes swivel towards the hovering waiter, to pretend a warning. “Let’s get on with the order first.”
Arsehole, Thong thinks. Two can play at that. He orders a rib eye steak.
“Rare,” he tells the waiter. He wants to add, ‘dripping with blood’, but hears Chú Hai caution – ‘remember the objective’, ‘no need to show your tail’, ‘disappear into your cover’.
He lets the interviewer say it instead. “Bloody for me.”
Having marked his boundaries, the man gets down to business.
“Now,” he rubs his large flat palms together.
“Yes,” Thong is suppliant, fully into his role.
His narrow thick lashed eyes are as wide as he can open them, he’s biting his fleshy lower lip, waiting for whatever axe the interviewer is wielding to fall. It is unexpected.
“Relax,” the interviewer laughs. “It’s only a question of a glass ceiling.”
He knows he’s thrown Thong off balance. “What did you think had gone wrong?”
“Well, I didn’t know,” Thong answers truthfully.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be so worried would I?” he asks, regaining his footing.
Enough of this, the interviewer appears to decide. It is indeed only a matter of a glass ceiling, he tells Thong. But, something Thong needs to think about. He takes out a leather folder from the brief case at his feet, and removes a sheet of paper from it, which he reads out aloud to Thong.
“Adopted by and brought up in French civil servant family, a brother and brother-in-law on the Nationalist side, but natural father ex-Viet Minh, one brother-in-law ex-VC, exempted from re-education in 1975 …” he runs through the list. He points out to Thong, “that VC connection isn’t a big problem, but it isn’t going to allow you to get any further up the security classification scale. You know that don’t you?”
“Well, I was hoping,” Thong answers, trying to sound optimistic, like every immigrant American should. “Maybe step by step. Prove my reliability eventually.”
He waits.
“You bet your sweet bippy, that isn’t going to happen,” the Taiwanese-American tells Thong.
“And, unfortunately, there’s this other thing.” He pulls out another sheet of paper from his folder. Turns it wrong side up so Thong can read it. It’s a typed extract from what appears to be an official Vietnamese press statement, announcing the appointment of a certain General Trung to the chairmanship of a state sponsored institute for the study of foreign relations in Ho Chi Minh City, a post that can only possibly be given to a trusted Party member.
“A friend of yours?” the man asks.
‘Sorry about that’ Thong can hear Chú Hai apologizing bashfully in his head, ‘never can predict what those party apparatchiks will come up with next’. ‘Careful now’ he warns.
“Yes, but…” Thong pushes the news extract back at the interviewer.
He is shocked, injured, betrayed.
“He was my English teacher,” he spills the beans, editing as he goes, and “a friend of my Sixth Brother. When I got good enough, he arranged small interpreting assignments for me, to help with my expenses.”
“Everyone thought he was pro-American,” he looks with anguish at the man opposite him, sounding like he would wail if he were not in such a public place. He argues, his eyes almost pleading, “You can’t hold that against me.”
Good cop now, the interviewer reaches out to pat Thong’s forearm, to calm him down.
“Yes, hardly your fault,” he agrees.
“Not a problem at all for the ‘Confidential’ classification you’ve already got,” he comforts. “But you can’t expect them to overlook that right, even if your bosses think you’re a great engineer and want to upgrade you? You can’t expect them to hand you secrets or top secrets can you?”
He shoves the papers back into his folder, closes it, prepares for a man to man.
“Now, if I were the employer of a smart engineer like you, I’d see that as a big problem wouldn’t I? I mean, what can I do with you in the long term if I can’t put you on the big secret and top-secret projects?” he says in the most reasonable of tones. “Good thing this is a big company and in a big company, if there’s a problem you can’t figure out, what do you do? You just send it upstairs to people who can take a broader view. Which is what happened in your case …”
He’s in fine flow and Thong doesn’t interrupt him. He merely waits for the pitch. For this, Thong realizes, is what it is – an offer of a new assignment, and definitely not a routine one.
“And, those people upstairs, my bosses, they come up with a solution,” the yellowish face smiles, the spots light up. “No problem, that’s what they say. If a man can’t work on the military side, he can still work on commercial affairs. If he can’t look at our secrets, doesn’t mean he can’t go looking at what other folks are up to, what they want to build or to buy. Especially if he’s got as good a track record in technical sales as you have …”
Thong lets himself look confused.
“You’re talking about?” he leaves it hanging.
“My team,” the man replies, “Jerry Chung’s East Asia commercial team.”
He flips open the folder again, takes out a card and hands it to Thong. He’s the CEO of a company based in Hong Kong, distributors of mechanical equipment.
“We’re a fully owned entity, by way of Bermuda. The team’s engaged in everything in the geography – market intelligence, business development, sales, servicing. Not just fasteners but the whole line, and anything else they need as well. I run the whole geography but my ground’s really Korea, Japan, Taiwan.” He doesn’t mention Hong Kong, where he’s based, or Communist China next door. “We’ve got a guy doing the Islamics, Malaysia and Indonesia, also based in Singapore. And someone in Bangkok who looks after Thailand and the Philippines plus some side work in Burma.”
“Good assignment,” Jerry sells. “It’s based in Singapore too … nice tax free overseas allowances and great private schools for kids. Not dollars and cents or KPI driven like it is over here. More like keeping your ear to the ground, making contacts, floating opportunities upwards.”
“Whaddya say?” he asks, his cadaverous frame is light now, expansive. “Indo-China, it’s yours if you want it.”
______
The cold war is over. It’s the end of history, Nina had said to him the other day from her deep funk. If she hadn’t been so strangely depressed, he would have argued with her, indulged in one of their debates. Another meaningless phrase from a slack brained political philosopher, he might have snapped. History ends when samsara’s finished, which, given the attachment, anger and delusion he sees around him, give or take a few enlightened beings, will be in another one hundred thousand lifetimes. But in the state she’s inexplicably lapsed into since their return from vacation, he couldn’t bear to bait her. He’d just said, well I better go out and resurrect it then, just so you’ll feel better. She hadn’t laughed.
He wishes now they’d argued, quarrelled. At least, it would have been a basis for him going home and telling her – you see … there will always be a need for intelligence, for watchers, for front men to move into new territory, for people like me. How’s he going to explain what’s happened now?
Thong sees the yellow faced Jerry gesticulating in front of him, his anti-mainland Chinese plumage in full display. “So, the Berlin Wall is down, so the Soviet Union is disintegrating. So what? Are the risks to the free world lower? You bet your sweet life they’re not!”
He’s exclamatory, his gestures over-broad. As if he’s put on a character too large for his long thin body. Obviously hasn’t turned American from the inside out, Thong thinks, with another pang of longing for Chú Hai the consummate chameleon.
‘You’re so bad’ he tells Jerry in his head. But, as Thong will come to know over time, Jerry’s only being himself – oldest son and heir to his family’s story of loss, exile and longing for the Chinese mainland now dyed Communist red.
“Soviets are collapsing on the military front. Japanese are collapsing on the financial front. Central Asia, Manchuria, Korea, Indo-China … they’ll be easy pickings for the Chinese … unless we’re there first. That’s why we’re expanding, that’s why we got openings. We’re getting set to win this time. No reason why we can’t is there?” Jerry is an asker of never-ending rhetorical questions, Thong begins to see.
“Take Vietnam,” Jerry continues. “It’s the biggest loser in South East Asia from the Soviet collapse. Not going to go to China if they can help it, right? And, they’re already playing around with capitalism in the South with that new life policy, dời mơí. So what’s stopping us from beating China? We’re richer, our stuff is better. We’ve won as far as ideology goes. Communism has just been one bad dream for the people there. Easy-peasy will do it. No guns, no artillery. Just some soda factories, ‘burger and fried chicken franchises, a few electronic assembly lines, sport shoe factories.”
“Peace, prosperity and co-operation,” he taps his name card, “that’s what we’re into. Business, not death and destruction, that’s the plan.”
Ha! And your mother only fucks your father?! Thong wants to shout back at him. But he disappears, as he always does, into polite decorum. He agrees that everything is changing. And yes, the chances of regaining lost ground are certainly better than they’ve ever been.
“I’m really very much obliged to the company for thinking ahead for me,” he’s quietly grateful.
“Helping me sidestep the glass ceiling as it were,” he gives a rueful grin, “before I even became aware of it.”
“But it’s a big decision,” he shrugs.
“I’ve never really done anything like this before,” he lies, and catches for the merest second, the mocking twinkle in the Taiwanese’ eyes. ”I need to think about it. Is that okay?”
“Take your time,” Jerry is easy.
He winks.
We know who we both are, he’s telling Thong. Don’t take too long.
______
It takes Mr.Trung an instant to figure it out, the consummate spin doctor that he is. True, he writes to his masters, they’ve failed on the military front and on the popular front. But, as they all know, there are many fronts to a war. On the most important front however, American public opinion, they will win big. He’s sure of it.
It’s a resounding military victory on the part of the Nationalists indeed. But a face can sink a thousand ships. Everything is lost because of the photographs – the faces of the barbarians at the gate, the VC in the heart of Saigon; the reports that go with the pictures – of Cholon burnt to ashes by American tactical air and artillery support, the return of the enemy with ten days of non-stop shelling in June. Sent to America by journalists like Chú Hai and those he influences, they change American public opinion, convincing the Americans that they cannot win, that South Vietnam isn’t worth fighting for.
McNamara resigns. Johnson says he will not run. The Americans and North Vietnamese agree to hold peace talks. Nixon campaigns for the presidency on the catchphrase ‘Peace with Honour’. Chú Hai is happy. Despite everything having failed so badly, it’s all turning out remarkably well he gloats.
______
Thong can’t agree. He’s nearly twenty one and except for the six years of suffocated calm under President Diem, war has been the constant backdrop to his life. What he wants is peace, just simple peace. He wants silent nights, filled only with dreams of Ai Nguyet’s music. He wants whole evenings to stroll the city’s boulevards with her, undisturbed by the catcalls of the American GI’s, untroubled by worries of how to get home before the impending onset of curfew. He wants a future where he needn’t have to think about Nixon’s new Vietnamization initiatives, about the draft, about dying in some stupid skirmish, somewhere, sometime, soon.
He hopes to be able to go out to the rice fields barefoot again, his farming trousers rolled up, to show Ai Nguyet his Delta; to walk into the jungle freely to look for his mother’s grave and light incense stick for her with Ai Nguyet by his side. He hopes to one day to marry Ai Nguyet and for his Blood Father to come out of hiding and put his mother’s remaining circlet on her wrist, with his new Step Mother, the Superintendent and his wife all watching. But he knows, as the Americans announce disengagement, as he’s ordered into the student corps, as President Thieu makes the greatest speech of his career, defiant against the Americans who will force him to Paris to talk a bogus peace, as Kissinger pursues talks with the North under a new American president, he knows without a doubt that he’s only crying for the moon.
“If they are going, then they should go as quickly as possible,” he tells Chú Hai. Then the killing will stop more quickly. Then the squabbling brothers will embrace and be reconciled. Chú Hai is right. There’ll be more deaths the longer the Americans stay. Thus, like Chú Hai, he too must do what he can to make them leave.
“If I can help,” he offers, on impulse.
And so, Mr. Trung thinks to himself, you win some and you lose some. The rooster master goes, but is replaced by a son. It is more than he has a right to expect. He is content.
IX. ENTANGLEMENT
You can’t get off once you get on, Thong thinks wearily as he drives back to the office after the encounter with Jerry. He should have known to stop it when he could, that second summer after Tết when the truth about his involvement had killed what was between him and Ai Nguyet. Except that he hadn’t. And now he’s in too deep.
______
Ai Nguyet came back from Hue a different person, no longer the temperamental diva Thong fell in love with. Something had broken inside her during the siege of the city. But when he tried to ask her about it, she would simply bury her head into his shoulder or raise his hand to cover her face. She couldn’t talk about it, she’d whisper.
Paradoxically however, on the days Thong failed to draw attention to her woundedness, Ai Nguyet’s old imperiousness would resurface. Then she would complain that he was the one with too many secrets, the one who kept her out of too many parts of his life.
“Where do you go with those foreigners?” she would interrogate him after an assignment.
“Why can’t you influence them so they only write good things about our government?” she’d complain.
“What do you and your creepy old man friend talk about?” she would constantly ask about Chú Hai.
She wasn’t behaving reasonably Thong suspected. He’d never seen Oldest Sister, Third Sister or Huong subject their husbands to such cross-examination. But, he told himself, she was different – more educated and cultivated, an artiste, therefore temperamental. Besides, he loved her. And she had suffered, although she would not tell him how. He tried to bear it, for love’s sake.
When things finally fell apart the year after he graduated, the same year Chú Hai asked him to work on the machine, she could not say he had not tried. Still, he supposes, he was to blame.
Thong had graduated top of the mechanical engineering class; a good enough reason to be given a plum civilian assignment instead of being sent to the army. When it turned out his name was alphabetically below that of the Minister of Works’ favourite nephew, the assignment was assured. He was sent to work at the Vietnamese engineering company spun off to take over equipment maintenance from the Americans. Going with him were the nephew and four other engineers whose names fortuitously happened to come next on the list. More luck attributable to the two red dots under his feet, and the opportunity to help along five other souls as well … the Superintendant’s wife reminded him. Chú Hai was also over the moon. The position was ideal for monitoring the Southern Army’s land clearing and road building operations. No one had anything bad to say about the new developments, except Ai Nguyet.
Ai Nguyet hated the way Thong’s new job ate into the hours they had. He no longer met her for morning coffee before she went to teach at the Conservatory. To fully exploit the job’s intelligence potential he had to be in the equipment depot earlier than his superiors. For the sake of getting ahead, Sixth’s advice, Thong checked out only after his superiors finished; in the wee hours of the morning if they were entertaining or being entertained, as they often were. His late afternoon walks with Ai Nguyet before she went home for dinner were inevitably sacrificed. And then there was the American journalist Ai Nguyet didn’t know about. Finally, to break the camel’s back, there was the machine, which gobbled up their lunch hours and weekends.
It was an automated packing machine originally used for filling toothpaste tubes.
“It needs re-jigging,” Chú Hai had said, pointing to the automobile sized assembly of oil blackened metal hidden in a warehouse on the other side of the river. “Help us out.”
“We need to put iron filings into these canisters instead,” he’d lifted up a fat plastic container with a hollow through it, the whole about the size of a roll of toilet tissue.
“And then to cap them up so they look like this,” he showed Thong the closed canister with a hollow chimney sticking out of it.
Thong took the canister and examined it carefully. He could guess what it would become when finished, but that was not his business. Handing the container back to Chú Hai, he turned his attention to the machinery.
“When do you want it ready by?” he asked.
As soon as possible, he was told. It was urgent now the cross border supply bases had been decimated by the Southern Army’s incursion into Cambodia.
A month at least, Thong bargained. It would take that long to reconfigure the feed hoppers and re-time the conveyor for the heavier loads and larger containers. And even that he couldn’t guarantee.
Thong was thinner and visibly exhausted when finally Ai Nguyet and he met for ice-cream on a Saturday afternoon after over two months of missed appointments. She, peeved, failed to notice or to commiserate. He, annoyed, thought her self-centred. Alternatively mopey and accusatory, she so distressed him with her questioning that, just to shut her up, he revealed the truth he’d been hiding even from himself.
“I was re-building a machine to assemble land mines,” he announced bluntly.
She looked down at the café table, not saying anything for a while.
When finally, she faced him again, he saw her eyes were wet.
“For them?” she asked.
He knew she wished for him to lie, to tell her no. But he and Chú Hai had talked about this already. If he chose to marry, it was best that his wife understood and accepted him as he was and was prepared to manage the family in case, unluckily, he was discovered. That Ai Nguyet could not be this suitable person, he realized, was another truth he’d been hiding from himself. So be it, he thought. He looked away. No, he would not lie to her.
“They’re not meant for killing people,” he mumbled.
She began to cry, in little sobs, which came slowly and then faster and faster.
“How could you? How could you?” she blubbered in-between catches of breath.
She moved her chair away from the table to be directly across him.
“Do you see?” she gasped, scrabbling at her shirt, and the waistband of her trousers, lifting one up and pulling the other down to reveal the flesh between her ribcage and pelvis.
All the while they’d been together, he’d never seen beyond her face, her neck, her elbows, her knees. She’d only allowed him to caress her through her clothes. Now he saw the dip of her stomach and the soft swell of her abdomen, criss-crossed with harsh brown ridges and mounds of rough red. He looked away, repulsed.
She covered herself.
“That,” she hissed, not looking at him, “that is what one of those mines that don’t mean to kill did to me the Thanh Minh I was twelve, when we went to clean our ancestral graves.”
“It’s so ugly isn’t it?” she asked unrelenting. “You looked away but they didn’t. They saw it and raped me anyway last Tết. All four of them, our own house servants. In search of a new and equal society.”
“They knew,” she is merciless. “I was a convenient victim since I can’t have children anymore. Those mines not meant for killing, they took that away too. Did you consider any of that, when you were so occupied repairing that machine?”
No he hadn’t. Indeed, had purposefully not considered any of that. Because, such distance had been necessary for him to rebuild that machine into something that that would help bring peace, the peace that would allow them to build a future together. He forced himself to meet her eyes, seeking absolution, so he could explain. But bitterness had dried her tears and she was flint-eyed and unforgiving. Everything between them seemed to shrivel in that hard eyed look. He could not speak. Wanting only to hide, he slid the unfinished dish of ice-cream they’d been sharing towards her, stood up and ran away from her. Once more.
About a year later, after the signing of the Paris Accords, Ly mentioned in passing that her father had accepted a posting to France. His family’s restaurant had catered the farewell party at their villa. Once in D.C., flipping through the Nguyen’s old photo albums, he thought he saw her face, older and fleshier, among a host of bejewelled Nguyen aunties and cousins. But, he could not be certain.
In any case, it’s all behind him now. The only thing he’s kept from that relationship is his determination to never break, never tell, not ever again. Not even to those he loves the most, especially not to them.
______
Not that Nina is ready to question Thong.
Why ask if the answer will force you to actions whose consequences you don’t want? Why face a truth you’d rather not see? Except that Maman pretty much rubbed her face into it, flapping Thong’s postcards in front of her, pointing particularly to the one for Singapore with the hugs and kisses across the bottom.
“It’s to a woman,” Maman had hissed.
Maman has a simple perspective of men and their duplicity. Nina believes the truth may be more complex. The names on the postcards were androgynous – two Vietnamese, one Chinese, one Western. Notwithstanding the hugs and kisses, the messages seemed strangely generic. As for the addresses … Why would Thong send travel postcards to commercial buildings and post boxes?
______
Nina can’t ignore the existence of the postcards. They’re data that need analysis and examination; each one hiding a tantalizing mystery whose meaning, if understood, will help her know her husband better. But who can help her unlock their secrets?
Back in Huong’s kitchen in Orange County, on a night when Thong’s travelling yet again and Sixth has taken all the children to a kong-fu movie at the new Little Saigon Picturehouse, Nina approaches her Sister-in-Law.
“I want to show you these,” Nina says to Huong, fishing the postcards that she’s carried with her everywhere after Maman forced them on her.
She lays them out on the dining table for Huong to examine, “What do you think?”
Huong picks up the cards and reads through the English slowly. She sighs and goes back to the rice paper rolls she’s been assembling. From outward appearances, it looks as if her whole focus is on the rolls as she tucks the corners in exactly and rolls the slightly sticky sheets around the filling with just enough pressure to keep everything firm but not too tight.
“Things must be done just right,” Huong says to the expectant Nina, as her nimble fingers continue to tuck and roll, tuck and roll. “Hold everything in too tight and what happens? They explode later when the dampened filling expands.”
Like how her Youngest Brother-in-Law’s secrets, kept too well hidden, have exploded now.
“What did Youngest tell you about his Blood Father?” Huong asks finally, after she’s finished with the stack of rice paper sheets in front of her.
Nina recites what she knows as she struggles to patch and re-assemble a roll she’s manhandled.
“He was a notary’s assistant with the French and a rooster master. He went with the Viet Minh and then the Viet Cong for a while. Later, he deserted and lived out his retirement with his second wife near your parents. She died in 1975 during the invasion and he went home to live with your parents-in-law in Can Tho till he died just before Thong escaped.”
There, she pats the repaired roll with relief, placing it onto the serving tray.
“Doesn’t it strike you as strange, that Youngest’s Blood Father could desert so easily, without any consequences from the Viet Cong?” Huong asks Nina gently as she transfers Nina’s roll onto the plate she reserves for the children.
“I suppose,” Nina replies, not wanting to admit that the question had never occurred to her. However, now that Huong has put the question in her head, she realizes it is indeed an oddity she should have noticed.
“Why’s it important?” she asks Huong.
Huong sighs. It’s obvious she can’t leave it to Nina to get the full story from Thong. Never having lived through the complications of the war, Nina doesn’t understand enough to know how to ask so that Thong can tell. And if Nina isn’t told, then she can imagine the misunderstandings piling up until the marriage breaks. After all, that is the American way. And Nina is, after all, an American. It is up to her to help her Youngest Sister-in-Law to the truth.
She takes away the stack of rice paper from Nina. Takes a piece from the unfolded pile, lays it out on the countertop and spritzes it with water before smoothing it out with her thread torn fingers.
“Youngest’s Blood Father was one of those people who always did what they felt was right, without any consideration for how it would affect other people,” she tells Nina, her crisp Northern tones blurring, so soft that Nina must strain to here.
Circling the core of the story, Huong recounts her own grievances first. “When he rallied, he asked Sixth if I could escort him and that woman he’d taken up with to my parents’ village in Phan Thiet. The government was still running roadblocks and checks. I was five months pregnant with Kim, and spotting. Still, he insisted I help them. When Sixth told him about my problem, he said that pregnancy would be a good cover, and looked at Sixth with a poor dog expression on his face until Sixth had to look away.”
“Selfish, that’s what he was,” Huong moves the filled up tray of rolls from the counter onto the dining table with an unnecessary thump.
“It’s only because I prayed to the Virgin of La Vang the whole way up to Phan Thiet that we didn’t lose her,” Huong points with her chin to Kim, now a full grown college senior, watching a music video from the plush sofa in the living room.
Freed by rancour, Huong continues more loudly. “Youngest’s Blood Father didn’t even care what type of danger he put his own son in. You know, in those days, if the government found out you were helping the Communists, they shot you. There were two public executions in the middle of the square, just a few hundred meters from where Youngest went to high school. Despite all that, he introduced Youngest to people he shouldn’t have, to his own Communist contacts. The only reason why those people didn’t kill him when he defected was because they thought they could hold Youngest if they let his Blood Father live.”
“The Communists? Hold Thong?” Nina cannot make head or tail of this story of Huong’s.
Huong nods. ”We don’t know exactly what Youngest was made to do for them; technical things probably, maybe information gathering. Still, all the time his Blood Father was enjoying his retirement on my parents’ farm like a buffalo put out to pasture, Youngest was being used and put in harm’s way. Once, his name even appeared on a police watch list. Thank God, Sixth saw it first and removed it before the list was sent up to headquarters.”
“Otherwise,” Huong draws a horizontal palm dramatically across her throat.
“My husband Thong, worked for the Communists?” Nina asks, her voice an unbelieving squeak.
“Things were complicated in those days,” Huong shrugs. “People worked for one side, then another.”
“Many people did things they’d rather not talk about,” she continues.
“Sixth,” she adds, as an example to help enlighten Nina, “hardly ever talked to me about his work. And, I never asked him.”
“I understood why Sixth did what he did, why I shouldn’t ask him,” Huong continues. “I don’t think you do.”
She looks straight at Nina
“You should know that the Communists were part of Youngest’s life for many years, from the time he was about sixteen or seventeen,” she tells Nina in no uncertain words. “He was able to break free only after the old man died in ’79, when he fled the country by boat. But old ties are hard to severe completely. Our Father-in-Law and Mother-in-Law are still over there. So are our Sisters-in-Law and their families. And don’t forget that Oldest Brother-in-Law has only just been released from re-education after fifteen years. Over there, it’s a police state run by people who won the war because they were always prepared to do anything and everything to get their way. You should understand that Youngest cannot refuse if they ask Third Brother-in-Law to ask for a bit of information every now and then. The less we all know about what information they ask Youngest for and how he gets it, the safer it is for all of us. If you continue to prick and prod, you may put Youngest and all of us in danger here.”
Huong stops. She has made her point. From the look on Nina’s face, this is about all that can be said to the poor girl today.
______
A holiday they will remember forever, Thong had said.
“Surely this is now the case,” Nina wants to shout at him.
And to her mother, ‘Hah! What would you say to that Maman?’
When your world turns upside down, there’s nothing to do but retreat into the familiar patterns of behaviour. Denial – ‘It can’t be true’; anger and blame – ‘See, you’ve screwed everything up again Maman!’; bargaining – ‘Please God, I’ll attend church every Sunday, even take the children with me, so long as everything turns out all right’; depression.
______
Nina attempts to re-construct her understanding of Thong; re-playing their life together, looking for clues hinting at this hidden husband she’s just been told about.
She watches him covertly from the kitchen window as he rough houses with the children down in the pool; as he gets out first to dry himself, then stands at the edge of the pool ready to envelop each of the children in turn with towels when they emerge so they won’t catch their death of cold. Notwithstanding that they’re strong as horses and old enough to take care of themselves. This is the Thong she knows, a loving, attentive, careful father.
In the CIA, Nina remembers from the research on her discarded dissertation, people like Thong are called agents; the people whom his Blood Father introduced him to are case officers. The FBI designations, she recalls now, were closer to reality. The person called case officer in the CIA is the agent – one who acts on behalf of a larger entity, a material representation of a more exalted ideal. People like Thong are informants – sneaks and tattle tales who listen in on conversations, dig in trash cans and build relationships and elicit confidences for the purpose of betraying them.
Nina tries to imagine Thong as an informant. She turns to watch him through half closed eyes as he gets up from bed in the dark and glides into the study, opening and closing the bedroom door with barely a click. She gets up, determined to go out and confront him. But she can’t go further than the doorway.
He’s sitting at his worktable, reading off his new computer and making notes onto a pad of paper. She notices, as she’s never done before, that he’s sensed her and turned around even though she’s been so quiet, that while swivelling his chair towards her, he’s managed to power down the computer monitor and flip his notepad cover over.
Thong sees that Nina has grown thinner these few weeks and months of her inexplicable sadness. Her eyes are dark circles, bruises in a pale face turned almost white. If he didn’t know how much Nina loves him, Thong would suspect she’s trying to get over a lover. Whatever it is though, it is as serious as that.
“What is it,” he asks, tenderly.
Her courage forsakes her. She shakes her head, replies, “I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“I noticed,” he answers. He goes to her and nuzzles her shoulder.
“I’ll give you a backrub,” he tells her, leading her back into the room, away from the computer, from whatever he was working on.
She pushes him away. “No I’ll be okay. I just need a glass of warm milk.”
She walks towards the staircase, past his table. There’s nothing to be seen. The screen is a blank. By the time she comes back up, the study is dim, with only the night light on. Thong is back in bed.
She looks at him, apparently asleep, his breathing quietly even. Who is he really, she wonders glumly?
In the morning, he tells her he was reading up for a new assignment, “A possible project overseas.”
She looks up from her newspaper, asks, “Classified?”
He nods.
“We’ll talk if anything more concrete comes up,” he assures her.
They exchange kisses.
“What more can come up?” she wants to ask him, but he’s already closed the front door on her; quiet as a thief, gone before she knows it.
_____
Nina retreats into a no-man’s land Thong can’t penetrate. Not knowing exactly why, still he understands that the chickens have finally come home to roost; the inevitable ending to a story he should not have started in New York those years ago.
True, they’d learnt to love each other notwithstanding; to understand each other somewhat; to live with each other as best they can. They’ve had a good enough life, Thong has always thought. Yet inexplicably, here they lie estranged in the double-mattressed super large bed Nina has always complained is too big. He’d insisted on it so he wouldn’t wake her when he got up during the night to do this or that. But no, it’s Nina who uses the bed to hide her secret pains, her straight white back turned against him, so close to the far edge he can’t even reach over to touch her.
He looks at the finger-wide space between their two mattresses, the void between her space and his. As much as the 17th Parallel, he thinks, this is a de-militarized zone, a buffer allowing Nina her boundaries even when he’s overstepped his. So that they may both keep the peace, or what passes for it. An uneasy accommodation they’re both trapped in.
_____
It is the best option for two former Viet Cong, to lie low where no one expects them to be – in a village full of anti-Communist Northern refugees from 1954. The Commander had suggested it to Sixth, the best way to protect himself and his new wife from retaliation. Not that he’d given his old comrades a reason to feel so inclined. He’d given away nothing for his new life. No names, no roles, no locations. Sixth, fortuitously the one to walk out of the alley and into him the morning of his surrender, had saved him from that. Still who knows what his men, now on the ‘other’ side, might be directed to do in this new invasionary phase of the war. The Commander doesn’t like to admit it, but each day he still wakes afraid.
Defector, traitor, a citizen returned to his senses – the Commander tries to live free of these definitions. In the buffer zone Huong has brought him to on Sixth’s orders – a place where, despite the bombs, each morning promises a beginning; despite the sweeps each night is a letting go into rest – the Commander tries each day to live free of regret, guilt, or blame. The village is told that he and the sticky rice vendor are Sixth’s uncle and aunt, retired farmers shelled out of their home in the city outskirts during the Tết offensive. With no home to live in, and no land left to farm, they’ve come to help Huong’s father in exchange for a share of the harvest. The neighbours, refugees themselves, are sympathetic. Life is hard. They live and let live, don’t dig deeper.
______
Mr. Trung wishes Thong wouldn’t take life so hard. Thong is pacing around his desk blubbering nonsense about having spoken too soon to Ai Nguyet, apologizing to him for not having handled it better. Young love. Mr. Trung’s experienced it himself and can sympathize. That the relationship has fallen apart was expected. But, Mr. Trung admits to himself, he must shoulder a good portion of the blame for its untimely collapse. He’d pulled the leash on Thong too tight too quickly. He feels a pang of regret. But it had been unavoidable, given the losses in the field. Now though, with the rebuilding from the Têt decimation on a steady footing, there’s time for the young one to recuperate.
“You need a break con,” Chú Hai is at his most fatherly. “You’ve got leave coming up haven’t you? Take a holiday to distract yourself. Go up to the mountains. Nice and cool. Pretty girls.”
______
Thong goes to Dalat because Sanh is there, because Chú Hai has told him to. But Dalat, where his parents had their brief belated honeymoon, is a terrible mistake!
Thong had hoped Sanh who’s finagled a posting as assistant laboratory supervisor at the Military Academy, would distract. Sanh tries his best. He sneaks Thong into the laboratory to see its wind tunnel, the only one in Vietnam; introduces Thong to his favourite hostess bars, one each night for the six nights Thong is in town; arranges the trysts after, more women in a week than Thong has had in his whole lifetime before the trip. But, Thong is not distracted.
Sanh’s cushy army job in the up-to-the minute laboratory, the smartly uniformed cadets around town, the honeymooning couples that the mountain city draws year round, remind Thong he could have chosen a different life – one that would eventually have seen Ai Nguyet in bed with him, not the ‘guaranteed clean’ girls Sanh has gone to so much trouble to fix.
He keeps replaying what little he knows of his parents’ story in his head – their meeting, their life, the final separation.
“I hadn’t been a dutiful son. I allowed both your grandmother and grandfather to pass on without seeing a grandchild. I thought if I kept waiting, I’d end up with the woman of my dreams. But my horoscope had forecast that if I didn’t get married before my thirty second birthday, I’d be destined to be a hungry ghost with no descendants to feed me. If that happened, then there would be no descendants to make offerings to my parents and grandparents either.” Thong hears his Blood Father saying, in his seductive story teller’s voice.
“I thought, still think, that’s a load of superstition. It’s stupidity, this need for male offspring, when the evidence is clearly in favour of daughters.” Thong sees his Blood Father smiling wryly at him. After all, he too has only the one son. “Still, there was the weight of all my aunts. I was the only son of an only son. They all insisted I had to make a match before that dreaded day, so I and my descendants could take over the sacrifices.”
“But you can’t just get married overnight. I was nearly thirty-two. All the women I’d courted were already married, staid wives and mothers. I was being introduced to flighty young girls whom I’d nothing to say to. So I asked your father to make the match.”
“But my mother was young too. Much younger in fact, only fifteen …” Thong had interrupted.
“That was fate,” the Commander had replied with a finality bordering on resignation. “My thirty-second new year had already passed. I told my aunts to give up. Then your maternal grandmother died, and your Blood Mother was left alone. The Japanese had already invaded the North. We heard terrible things about what they were doing to young girls.”
“By marrying her, I thought I could help,” he’d shared. “And she was your mother’s sister. I was acquainted with your mother from the time before she married your father, my best friend. After she married, I visited their house every week end. I saw how she managed the family, what a steady head and hand she had. Any sister of hers, I thought, would make a suitable wife.”
“And was she?” Thong had asked.
The Commander had thought a while.
“She had her sister to support her, to teach her what to do, how to manage. She became a good wife, and I was a satisfied husband,” he’d concluded. ”And, yes we were happy, especially in Dalat.”
Two weeks of happiness, that’s all Thong knows about them. Two weeks that the Commander has carried as a talisman, in the form of the circlet tied around his back, for over twenty years. Thong wonders if this is his lot after two years with Ai Nguyet, and whether the burden of memory will be heavier
Thong decides he’s sick of Dalat, of hiding his sore heart from happy-go-lucky Sanh, of the hand holding couples everywhere he turns. He’ll go to his Blood Father in Phan Thiet instead, to learn how the man has survived endings, to see what a second chance looks like. And there’s Ly there too, good sympathetic stable Ly, whose parents have cashed him out of military service and sent him to oversee their fish sauce factory a little further up the coast.
______
In Phan Thiet, Thong learns there are second chances.
His Blood Father is smoothed faced and filled out. There are no more loose buttons hanging from his pyjama tops, and the tears in his pyjama bottoms have been neatly darned. He’s well, he greets Thong with a wide smile, pulling him into their lean-to for Thong to greet his wife.
“Má hai,” Thong greets her formally for the first time, handing her his gifts of Dalat bell peppers and mountain cauliflower.
‘Second mother’ that’s his title for her, although he never knew his first one and the Superintendant’s wife has been all the mother he’s ever needed. Unaccustomed to her new position, the sticky rice vendor returns his greeting with the more distant cháu, nephew, that she’s always used for him. Perhaps after losing two sons and their father, Thong thinks, she does not want the word con on her tongue again. Still, she has made his Blood Father very happy, Thong can see. And, she herself has a roundness and softness to her that can only signify contentment.
“Come,” his Blood Father says, “I must show you what I’ve done with this place.”
He takes him out first to the watermelon field, where Huong’s father is working. Then, after a suitably polite length of conversation, to the wells they’ve just dug and the grapevines they’ve planted with American money. And finally, back to the farmyard, where under a covered shed, the Commander and Huong’s father have started a small and very profitable rooster hatchery.
“Aren’t you afraid Blood Father?” Thong is worried, Chú Hai’s tradecraft still fresh in his gut. “Surely, if they hear that there’s an excellent new strain of roosters from around here, they’ll put two and two together.”
“You can’t rest easy just because the Americans have the advantage now, just because they’ve turned all these sand dunes into orchards with their money. You know, they’ll leave eventually. They’ve already decided to. And Nixon is planning to go to China. Then, it will be the both of them against us. It’s all set. Surely you know that?”
The Commander gently strokes the stag in his large hand.
He evades the question. “One has to die anyway. It’s better to die enjoying oneself, doing what one is good at.”
“I’m too old for all the rest of it,” he gives Thong a guilty smile. “You take it up now.”
He puts the rooster into a double layered training cage. Tells Thong to take out a smaller, feistier one, from the cage by his side.
“Time for training,” he says, signalling for Thong to drop the young stag onto the ground.
They squat at the perimeter of the training circle, watching the younger rooster run around and around the larger bird, trying to reach in to bite it, slapping it back with their palms onto its circular path when it strays.
“This one has good legs,” the Commander points to the young stag’s muscular thighs. “But it tends to get distracted.”
He looks sideways at Thong. “Your Chú Hai tells me you’re on holiday to distract yourself.”
Thong unburdens himself as they both watch the chicken continue its futile circling.
It dawns on Thong, after he’s emptied himself of his confusion and sorrow, that Chú Hai must have told the Commander about his troubles.
“You still keep in touch with Chú Hai?” he’s curious how this has happened.
“Him!” the Commander shakes his head in exasperation.”I didn’t keep in touch with him. He found me!”
“Before he went to the city for his underground work, he was my bodyguard you know,” he confides, now that Thong is privy to the basis of their relationship. “He arrived one day out of the blue, just the same way he used to appear when he was my bodyguard.”
“I thought they sent him, but he said he’d come on his own, to make sure I was alright,” the Commander shrugs. “Who knows?”
“He said you’d decided to work with us,” he slips into the first-person unconsciously. “He also told me I had nothing to worry about as far as my status went. He said, I hadn’t given up any information that would harm us. As long as you’re part of the family, he said, so am I.”
“Since then, he’s sent messages every now and then. Mostly to let me know how you are. So, that’s how I know he’s very pleased with you. Except of course, now, you are a bit distracted. Which is not a good thing …” he ends lamely.
Thus, Thong learns, having been set on a path, one can’t get off. And even runaway old men can be used.
______
Perhaps when the old man died in 1979 and he was preparing to leave the country, Thong speculates, he might have managed to leave the rest behind too. But there’d been Ba Roi, hard-core and inflexible, holding onto the leash. And, there was Chú Hai to consider as well. Chú Hai when he went to say goodbye – at his most vulnerable, with his enigmatic half un-knotted story still full of tangles and loose ends. Chú Hai smiling through moist eyes as he pulled Thong into his arms in farewell but also in greeting. How could he have stopped himself then?
Yes, it always comes back to Chú Hai, Thong realizes. Because Chú Hai always welcomed him with twinkling eyes notwithstanding anything he’d done with assembly machines, mechanical drawings, chemical formulae, an American woman. Because Chú Hai, kept by him through thick and thin, gain and loss, victory and defeat. How could he have deserted Chú Hai? He of the same blood, the practitioner of deceit he’s cloned from.
That’s why it’s come to this, why he’s leaving his wife and his beloved children on a quixotic whim. Let’s not beat around the bush, Thong blows cigarette smoke from his mouth in furious little puffs. It isn’t really because his career’s hit a glass ceiling. It’s plenty good where it’s capped out. The fact is that the axes of global politics are slowly tilting, that the super-powers are re-aligning, that Vietnam is once again of strategic value to the Western powers … and son of his father that he is, he’s addicted to the game. That’s why he’s leaving hearth and home, come what may. It’s that simple.
How can he stop now? It’s the call of fatherland and blood, his country and his people still waiting to be made whole. He hasn’t discussed any of this with Nina but he knows he’s already saying goodbye to his view of the other side of the canyon, already breathing in the scent of mesquite wafting in from there on the evening breeze as if it’ll be his last. Standing out here leaning against the solid wooden handrail of the sky bridge on which he’s stood and smoked for the last seven years, Thong can see the canyon fading away, the ending scene of the movie about his life in America. Seven – Thong flicks the ash from his cigarette, it is his number for ringing in changes. And, as if confirming this, a nightjar begins to hoot from its nest in the stones below him. He pricks up his ears, hears the sound echo through the canyon … seven times.
Thong stubs out his cigarette. It’s settled.
______
There’s no good way to tell your wife you’re going back to war.
“She knew where my loyalties lay and what I was doing. Your father and your mother told her. It’s why I took so long to get married. It was the reason why I could offer her protection. It was only fair she should know and agree to it,” the Commander shares with Thong. “She married me, so she must have agreed. But she was angry anyway when I told her about my plans to go into the swamps. She wouldn’t speak to me for quite a while.”
“It was your mother who encouraged her to be obstructive. I went to speak to my friend, your father. Your father used to have a terrible temper. I heard he beat his wife to make her convince her sister. I hope not. But, after my conversation with him, your Blood Mother decided to come along.”
A beating, that’s what it takes.
______
“There’s a new assignment in Singapore,” Thong tells Nina after they’ve sent the children to bed. “In commercial. No more flogging stuff for rockets and bombs, just plain machinery. That should make you happy, no?”
Still wrapped in her mysterious blanket of grief, she merely nods.
“Okay …” she waits for more.
“They want me to start an Indo-China division.”
After the postcards, after her conversation with Huong, she’s not surprised by this. It’s the natural outcome of those messages he’s been sending to the Far East all this time.
She looks out through the picture window into the canyon, sees her own reflection gaunt as a ghost as he explains about the glass ceiling, his limited prospects going forward, the new political considerations. He tells her how this new adventure will be so good for all of them. It’s not just the tax and schooling angles. They’ll be moving to Asia. It will ground the children in their heritage. Can’t she see all the advantages?
She has no more confidence in her judgement, no basis on which to assess the rightness or wrongness, truth or fiction, of what she sees, what he says, what she hears. She’s not in a position to either argue or agree.
“When?” is all she asks.
______
She’ll stay behind she decides. Till the next summer, when the children finish their school year. She still has the final revisions of her dissertation to complete. There’s the house to rent out. He should go first, to set everything up. They’ll visit him at Christmas, and join him when he has everything ready.
It’s the best way to make the move, they tell the children.
It’s best this way for them both, Nina tells him. She also tells him about Maman and the postcards, about what Huong has told her. He doesn’t deny any of it. Nor does he confirm anything, except to ask if she still has the postcards.
“I posted them of course, after Huong told me what they were,” she retorts. She laughs a bitter un-Nina cackle. “I wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for screwing up whatever great conspiracy you were working on.”
“According to Huong, these are life and death matters for the safety of your family over there. What it means for us here, is irrelevant in her books, I guess,” she can’t help adding sarcastically. She knows this is unfair to Huong, but where else can she put blame.
His face takes on his ‘I am not here’ look, the one he uses when he does not want to argue anymore with her. But, still she goes on. She tells him that she doesn’t know who he is anymore. And, because of this, she doesn’t know herself either.
“Let’s give ourselves six months. Gain distance. Maybe I’ll be better then,” she whispers, talking more to herself than to him.
“Otherwise,” she leaves it open.
They both look off the sky bridge at the far canyon wall, green this year from the unseasonal rains. It’s almost mid-autumn.
______
Except for Sanh, who’s disappeared on a gambling binge, everyone is there to see him off at LAX.
Sixth slaps his back, “Keep well then Youngest.”
Huong rubs his forearm and smiles, “Take care.”
Their children, from Thi, now a bashful sixteen, to assured and sophisticated Kim, come up and hug him in turn.
Tam follows. She rushes into his arms, sobbing.
“I don’t know why you have to go,” she cries into his shoulder. “Why can’t you stay home, like all the other fathers in California?”
He holds her tight, his oldest, his tempestuous heart child from Nina’s and his early passion. What can he say to her? A father should not lie to his children if he can help it. And she’s too smart by half to let him get away with it. He holds her, quiet.
She pulls herself together, shakes herself away, grabs Tri who’s been patiently waiting his turn and shoves him towards her father.
“Say goodbye to Dad then dude,” she orders him.
Tri steps forward, sticks out his right hand.
“Bye Dad then,” he says, solemn and formal.
Thong takes his son’s hand in both of his and rubs it fiercely between his palms. He leans down and whispers into his son’s ear, “You take care con, okay? Be brave. And take care of your sister and mother.”
Tri nods solemnly.
Thong turns to Nina. She gives him a long hug, rubs her lips against his, sniffs the side of his nose – a Vietnamese kiss. He’s leaving her again. Then, less than two weeks after the night in her apartment, he’d not been at all sure that she would follow. But, she’d clung to him and promised fiercely that he’d see her in Los Angeles at Christmas, for sure. And true enough, there she had been at Sixth’s and Huong’s on his first Christmas in the United States.
Now, he’s flying away again, across the Pacific to where it all begins and ends for him. And once again, as Nina clings to him, he’s not at all sure she’ll follow.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged choices, choosing, Double Agent, guerrilla war, Memoir, Spy, spy uncovered, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
X. BACKTRACKING
Thong arrives in Singapore at the same terminal he left from in 1979. Then, shepherding nearly a hundred people overwhelmed by the prospect of finally going to America, worrying about himself and his story, he’d been too pre-occupied to assess his surroundings. Now he sees that the airport terminal is unimpressive, the
type of nondescript grey, white and glass building easily found in smaller airports all over the States. Thong’s spirits fall. So much for Jerry Chung’s hype about Singapore being the Manhattan of the East, Thong checks one against his new boss.
He sneezes. The smells! They’re coming from the plants clamouring out of beds lining the automatic walkways – orchids thick leaved and aggressively green, their stiff spikes of flowers scenting the air with a faint grassy perfume; succulents he doesn’t know the names of, fringed with thorns and pointed like fiery yellow and green dragons’ tongues, emanating a heavy odour of decay. He catches a trace of fermented shrimp, stolen in from a window accidentally left open somewhere. And all around him, he’s surrounded by the salt and soap aroma of citified tropical bodies. This is a different time and a different city, but it seems to Thong as he makes his way through the air-conditioned corridors that he’s within smelling distance of home.
He’s impatient in the weeks between. With Jerry, who insists on taking Thong wining and dining with his new colleagues and every other person he thinks might be useful to Thong’s new endeavour; with the government procedures that must be followed … his employment and residency pass to be processed … his driver’s license converted … his signature added to the list of signatories for the Singapore subsidiary of Jerry’s East Asian commercial operation; with the fact that time is passing and, despite the smell of home coming in from the sea through the windows of his port-facing apartment, it is still weeks away.
But, finally, all the formalities are finished, and without even a single envelope stuffed with cash hidden in the paperwork! It’s time to apply for his visa home, an application to be made in person, in Bangkok.
______
The forty-eight hours Thong spends in Bangkok are a blur. There’s entertainment with his Thai counterpart in red and gold pavilions and neon bars; girls are offered, to which he says no.
“I’m just out of America and still tied to my wife’s apron strings. Give me time,” he pleads, pasting a shamefaced grin on his face.
He has too many sins for Nina to forgive already. ‘The secret to maintaining a relationship’ he remembers Chú Hai pontificating over a cup of home-brew in the most terrible days after Liberation, ‘is never to commit the unforgivable’. An evening with the girls in a Bangkok brothel, Thong is certain, would be just that.
Escaping thankfully back to his hotel, he lies in the massive king sized bed and spends the rest of the night wakeful, fretting about what happens next after he sets foot again on Vietnamese soil.
______
Now, he’s here.
Landing, he sees that the semi-circular concrete bunkers are sitting where they always have, by the runway in the wind whipped grass. They disembark from a rickety metal staircase and walk across cracked tarmac to the terminal. The tiny building, despite being spruced up for the new economy, is sadly decrepit compared to 1974 when he’d said farewell to the American woman. The only constants are the rows of unsmiling armed personnel in khaki green. As he walks between them Thong feels the old frisson of excitement and unease … a quickening of the pulse, just in case he’s uncovered and taken. And now, the stakes are higher with Nina and the children to be accountable to.
It’s implied in his visa application that he left the country illegally although he’d actually had to seek their permission to go. If they take him … who will know which side he’s actually on? There’s Chú Hai, but Thong’s been communicating with him circuitously for so long he’s not sure anymore where Chú Hai is physically, should his intervention be needed.
Since Jerry Chung’s pitch, Thong’s been careful about communications to Vietnam. Expecting to be watched, he sent the news of his impending visit home in ordinary pale blue air-letters, one to the Delta c/o Third Sister and another to Oldest Sister in Ho Chi Minh City. He put the same message in both – ‘I’ve been offered an assignment in Singapore which I’ve decided to accept. I’ll be near home and expect that I’ll have the chance to visit, perhaps in about three months or so. I’ll let you know by telegram once everything is confirmed’. In Third Sister’s letter, he’d added a postscript for Ba Roi and Chú Hai – ‘the offer is so financially attractive and such a good opportunity for learning that I didn’t even ask my wife’s opinion’; a defiant justification why he hadn’t sought clearance for this abrupt departure from orders. He believes Chú Hai will understand his reasons, even approve. As for Ba Roi, Thong can see his thin lips tightening, his eyebrows furrowing together. Well, he will soon see if he’ll be greeted as a returning hero or a prodigal AWOL. He squares his shoulders and strides forward to the immigration officer and then through customs.
He gets through unexpectedly quickly. Out on the concourse, the thick set man with unruly hair half hidden by the large piece of red cardboard bearing Thong’s name greets him as a potential investor and possible business partner. Although he has the brusque manner and heavy accent of Northerners from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace, which leads Thong to typecast him as a dyed in the wool party member, he’s friendly enough.
“I’m Tran Van Minh, just call me Minh.” the fixer introduces himself, before steering Thong efficiently through the pressing crowd and into an old Toyota van, the man is friendly enough.
“You are Tran Van Thong,” he continues as they settle in their seats.
“Thong Minh … intelligence,” Tran Van Minh makes the common mistake everyone makes about Thong’s name.
“We shouldn’t do badly together then …” he allows, tentatively.
“I hope so too,” Thong reaches to shake his hand, not bothering to correct him about the name.
Minh is a loaner, a favour from the state tobacco company; Thong has been briefed in Bangkok. Thong is to treat him with respect, as the representative of a potential client. If possible Thong may develop him, but what this might mean Thong’s Thai counterpart doesn’t explain.
Minh will be the one who introduces Thong to the opportunity that makes his career. But at the moment Thong isn’t concerned about how their relationship might evolve. He’s more interested in everything else happening outside their leather cushioned vehicle, in his city.
It’s dusk, and the city is preparing for night. Through the van’s open windows, Thong can smell burning charcoal overlaid with roasting pork fat, fish sauce and the sweetness of rotting vegetation. From the black waters of the canals, the sharp rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulphite rises. The buildings Thong passes are faded, badly in need of new paint. The city is less crowded than he remembers, and as the van honks and toots its way through the half deserted streets, it begins to fade into the twilight and then almost disappear into darkness.
Because of oil shortages we no longer turn on the street lights, Minh explains awkwardly to Thong. The car’s headlights are the only illumination cutting a swath through the pot-holed street bisecting Tao Dan Park, where Thong and Ai Nguyet used to walk. On both the left and right of the street, the blackness is interrupted intermittently by gas lit cigarette booths where Thong surmises both the tobacco and the girls are for sale.
Although evening has only just begun, the powdered and lipsticked faces of the girls, each spot-lighted by a yellow gas lamp, are already bone tired. Haggard and hopeless, the girls seem to expect nothing from the night before them.
Even the whores have lost hope! Thong chokes. A cough wells up in his throat. It must be a piece of his heart … he thinks … but he can’t afford to lose any more of it … he tells himself in a panic. He cannot disgrace himself in front of this party functionary from the North! He swallows to push the rising fragment of emotion back down where it belongs.
His city which was dying when he left in 1979 is now well and truly dead. He has come back not to celebrate a resurrection brought about by dời mơí, but to mourn at the funeral. He feels tears prickling at his eye lashes. He needs to be alone, to bawl his eyes out.
“Please,” he mumbles to Minh the moment the van pulls up at his hotel, “will you help me with the check-in? I need to use the bathroom.”
Minh replies with an absent minded nod. Thong is not the first overseas Vietnamese he’s played liaison officer to. Indeed, when Minh himself went home to Hanoi from Moscow five years ago, this had been his own reaction. He sighs and pointing out Thong’s carry-on case to the doorman, makes for the reception desk.
It’s the same hotel where Chú Hai had his office. If Thong had eyes to see, he would notice that it’s also the same doorman, much thinner, guarding the portico. But, he can only rush unseeing through the lobby to the men’s room – which thank goodness remains in the same location – and into the plywood cubicle with the swinging half doors. Where he sits down and breaks out into ragged coughs which turn into hacking sobs pumping up salty slime from his guts into his nostrils, his eyes, his mouth and his cupped hands.
Thong does not know how long he weeps in the cubicle, or whether anyone comes in to use the bathroom, or to peek over the swing doors to check on him. But, when the tears stop, as suddenly as they started, he’s no longer the Thong who’s longed unceasingly and achingly for this city and the Delta and the burial grounds of his ancestors for over a decade. He accepts, as he never did in the years he lived here after liberation, that his homeland is a place in the past to which he can never return. This new country he’s landed in is not his. He will accept it as it is, without regret. And he will blame no one, not even himself, for what it is.
He would like to tell all this to Minh, to surrender unconditionally and clear the air of any residual animosity so they can get on with whatever business they need to do to build a future for this place. But when he emerges from the bathroom, his eyes red but dry, Minh is gone. The receptionist, a clear eyed girl in her early twenties, hands over an envelope from him instead, and a card with instructions for breakfast tomorrow morning.
“The bellman will take you to your room,” she indicates with her palm.
Thong tips the bellman too generously, ushering him out before he can earn his tip by pointing out the features of the room. He closes and locks the door to blissful privacy. Setting Minh’s envelope on the dresser to review later, he goes to the windows and wrestles close the creaky shutters and the glass paned windows, then he draws the curtains tight. He cannot bring back the room of his youth he accepts that now, but with the city’s sad darkness shut out the room now bears some semblance to the one he first slept in the year he graduated. If he is now to be homeless, he decides, the least he can do is reclaim his memories to carry away with him.
______
Turning on the hot water heater and the air-conditioner, drinking a warm beer from the small in-room refrigerator, running the bath, Thong recalls the evenings he spent with the American woman in a room like this one. He’d been callow and young when it started. She less so. But, they’d both experienced the fighting for the first time together, during the helicopter strafing in the New Life Hamlet. He’d pressed her to him as they made for safety. Later as he took her home, she’d fallen asleep with her buxom body lax against his back, leaving heated memories that re-ignited into something else later.
Except for the wet dreams she gave Thong, there was nothing between them initially. Chú Hai had discovered very quickly that she was one of those simple patriots who would never submit articles damaging to the men on the ground no matter how persuasive his arguments might be, no matter how good his evidence. He’d therefore written her off as soon as he could, handing her over to Thong as an occasional client, for Thong to earn pocket money from. So little did Thong or Chú Hai have to do with her that when she gave up journalism shortly after the Tết offensive and returned to the States, they hardly missed her.
But she’d returned eighteen months later, harder but curiously sleeker. She’d tinted her dust coloured hair auburn, and now worked in some undefined role at the Embassy; a role whose ambiguity Chú Hai found immediately intriguing. He sought her out and did his best to cultivate her trust, to have her rely on him for information, analysis and opinions. Then, in the year before Thong’s graduation, he set Thong at her.
It began innocuously enough, an envelope from Chú Hai, to be handed to her personally at the embassy. Thong didn’t want to go. He didn’t have time. It was his final year. He needed to study. And there was Ai Nguyet, so moody, so sad, so beautiful, to take care of.
“But you offered to help,” Chú Hai had wheedled.
“On your way home, just a quick stop,” he said more firmly, slapping the envelope into Thong’s hands.
He will not be denied. The boy is ready, the woman ripe.
She does not realize who Thong is till he speaks. Then her eyes light up, and she moves forward and envelopes him in a hug.
“Why, you’re all grown up,” she says, holding him affectionately against her, her round American breasts pressing into his chest.
Her breasts … the objects of his febrile teenage nightmares. He remembers them carelessly rubbing against his back when he’d worked for her, directing him from the passenger perch of Chú Hai’s motorcycle on her errands here, there, and back again; the breasts exciting and tormenting him the whole way.
He takes a step back.
“Well, a bit older,” he’s self conscious, aware that he’s grown decimetres taller and filled out across the shoulders and chest.
“Let me look at you,” she says, her arms pushed out straight, her hands holding onto his shoulders.
She likes what she sees. The lad sprung up into a lightly muscled young man, tall for a Vietnamese. He has the same pointed chin and high nose of the man he calls uncle; as handsome as the journalist, and she senses, potentially as complex. Like all Vietnamese, he looks younger than his age, although his shrouded eyes, the war-weariness around his lips, his closed defended face and tense held-in posture suggest someone more mature, with explosive reservoirs of emotion.
Suddenly, she’s shy, and drops her hands.
“Well, let’s see what he’s got for me then,” she says briskly, taking the envelope from him.
She slits it open with the unvarnished nail of her index finger, peers inside.
“Hmm-mmmm,” she murmurs, her tongue peeking through her teeth. “I need to run these upstairs immediately.”
She says goodbye quickly, holding out a lightly trembling hand for him to shake. He barely dares to touch it, he’s already so aroused. When he meets Ai Nguyet at the café a few doors away, and she stands up and leans against him lightly in greeting, he has to grit his teeth to stop himself from crushing her against him just so he can feel the swell of her tiny breasts. That night, his confused dreams of Julia Anderson begin again.
Chú Hai keeps throwing them together, sending Thong to her with messages, opinions, interpretations.
“Take her for coffee, tell her my view of the situation is that it’s untenable,” he instructs, rattling off a list of reasons that Thong should communicate.
Or, excusing himself, tells Thong, “it’s inconvenient for me to meet her, just drop in and let her know that I think they’ll be changing the strategy soon.”
Or, more simply, “just go and tell her I’ll be busy for the next two weeks. She’ll know what that means.”
Thong never figures out how Chú Hai knows what information Julia Anderson needs, and when he needs to offer it. They’re playing a deep game and keeping track of the pieces of truth and untruth they trade is beyond Thong. He’s just the messenger, he tells himself, sweltering with desire, running between the two of them with his flesh thick and throbbing against his trousers. Julia Anderson notices all this but does nothing about it. His innocent confusion is so appealing, the sexual tension between them so delicious, she tries to savour it for as long as she can.
Then one day, simply to make conversation, she asks Thong what he thinks, what his own views might be as opposed to those he’s transmitting.
“Whose side am I supposed to pretend to be on?” Thong confronts Chú Hai, later. He’s conducted himself admirably, he feels. But, a little guidance from Chú Hai is always helpful. Except that in this case, it is irritatingly confusing.
“Your own of course,” Chú Hai laughs.
This ambiguity isn’t what Thong needs or wants just then. He digs his heels in, in retaliation.
“If it’s for my own interest, then I don’t want to see her anymore,” he announces. He complains, “It’s too complicated. Keeping it all straight, not only what you want me to tell her, what she wants me to pass on to you, now having to worry about what I can or cannot say to her myself ….”
“And,” he pauses, before spilling it all out in a rush, “I can’t think around her. She confuses me. She’s just too sexy. It’s difficult for me to be careful when I’m with her …”
“Ahhh, fuck her then and get it out of your system,” Chú Hai replies kindly, unexpectedly.
“I saved her for you, you know,” he adds in the voice he uses for confidences, “so you can learn how to control what to say and not say, even while in the throes of passion.”
Thong blushes.
He stutters, “You saved her for me. You mean … She…. You ….”
Chú Hai waves both his elegant hands in front of his face in jovial denial. “Psssht, I’m an old man, forty two. What I need is a sixteen year old who knows nothing, who’ll cry out in ecstasy with a bit of probing here and there from a wet noodle. She’s twenty seven or twenty eight, at the peak of her cycle. How can I possibly satisfy her?”
“But she’s an American. She’s got a whole pack of them to choose from. Why would she want me?” Thong protests.
“She’s a romantic despite that hard shell. She’s in love with the exotic east, haven’t you understood? That’s why she came out here. She’ll take you over them anytime,” Chú Hai laughs again.
“Come,’” he beckons, pulling Thong to him, “let me tell you about what she needs.”
This time, Thong does not say he’s not interested.
He smiles at the recollection. He’s forty two now, the same age Chú Hai was then. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to worry about a wet noodle yet. His problems now are physical want and heart hunger for the woman he loves. The same needs, he realizes, that brought him up to Julia Anderson’s room in the first place.
It happens the night of his graduation. No one from his family can attend. It’s out of the question for his Blood Father. His Father and Mother can no longer endure the bone wracking bus journey up to Saigon on the pot-holed highway with its frequent security checkpoints. Oldest Brother-in-law has just moved out of the Checkerboard house to live with his mistress and Oldest Sister, playing the tragic heroine, has no time for Thong’s affairs. Sixth and his family are in Nha Trang on the central coast, where Sixth is working as head of a propaganda unit. Worst of all, Ai Nguyet has refused to attend. Still trying to keep Thong a secret from her family, knowing they’ll object to his plebeian background, she refuses to even make their relationship official among the engineers by showing up at his commencement. Of the people he’s informed, only Chú Hai comes. And Julia Anderson, because Chú Hai has invited her.
Everyone else’s family is there in full force – Sanh’s clan of coarse sisters with their crass American partners; Ly’s quietly wealthy Chinese family and his girl friend, a fundamentalist Christian who’s been forbidden to marry Ly. Only he, the top student of the year, has no girl and no family to witness his success. Thong feels ill-used, unloved despite Chú Hai’s efforts to make the occasion memorable – arm twisting a colleague to photograph Thong in the brand new graduation suit they went to make together, jollying the three of them into the hotel’s French restaurant where he’s ordered a magnificent dinner, and leading everyone up to the rooftop bar later to watch the outgoing fires and flares flaming on the horizon, as he plies the two of them with drink.
The young man and woman are both tipsy, when Mr. Trung gets up from his chair to leave.
“She’s going to need help to her room,” he whispers to Thong.
“Let him take you,” he advises Julia Anderson.
“Au revoir, my children,” he says to them both, joining his palms in an oriental salute.
And then, they are alone.
Obediently, sensing the rightness of the moment, Julia Anderson allows Thong to take her down to her fifth floor room as he’s been ordered to. What happens next is a whisky sodden grope that Thong has no clear memory of. But, in the morning, after she’s shown him how to run a hot bath, and they’ve soaked away the night’s exertions and then showered, she lets Thong see how it’s done properly in the American way. And after that, allows Thong to put into practice what Chú Hai has whispered in his ear.
This first, then second, then third time, are a relief for Thong.
“You were right,” he reports to Chú Hai the next evening, coming straight down to the office from her room. ”I feel so much better now that it’s all out of the way.”
“Hah, so … I have bad news for you,” Chú Hai grimaces, “it comes back! And then you have to do it again, and again, and again.”
“Such is the nature of man,” he guffaws.
And also the nature of women, American women anyway, as Thong foolishly thinks then. Julia Anderson invites Thong to her room again, and again, and again. Although not as often as Thong would like. She’s away from Saigon frequently. And Thong has Ai Nguyet, whom he can now love chastely without the distraction of his body, and his new job, and Chú Hai‘s machine, to occupy him. Besides, it appears that Julia Anderson’s appetite for Chú Hai’s intelligence is sated now she has Thong. And, with events developing on the front as positively as they are, Chú Hai is happy to leave it that way since there’s no misinformation that he needs to pass on to Julia Anderson and her superiors. So long as someone keeps tabs on where she’s been and where she might be going, he’s careful to remind Thong.
______
She goes to Laos and Cambodia, to the mountains where the Montagnards are, Thong informs Chú Hai.
She must be arranging Laotian and Cambodian clearance for the supposedly secret but badly concealed raids on North Vietnamese borderland positions, Chú Hai guesses.
But Thong is unable to find out when and where these raids will take place, and hence how they can be avoided or neutralized. She’s very careful, he tells Chú Hai. She comes and goes without notice. Thong only knows where she’s been because she sometimes talks in her sleep, and after her trips she often dreams in the language she last used – Laotian, Cambodian or Djarai. Unfortunately, although Thong recognizes the languages, he understands none of them.
“You’re useless,” Chú Hai grumbles. “I shall have to send her a virile young Montagnard or Lao in your place.”
“As you like,” Thong sulks.
He sets off for Dalat and does not bother to call in on Chú Hai or Julia Anderson when he returns. He’s still heart sore about Ai Nguyet and angry at Chú Hai for suggesting he’s a mere pawn, replaceable in Julia Anderson’s bed by an aboriginal stud. He resents the fact that Chú Hai is holding his Blood Father’s safety over his head to keep him loyal. Anyway, after the bacchanalia with Sanh in Dalat, he doesn’t need Julia Anderson just yet. And all is quiet on the military front, the only excitement coming from the rumours of coups and assassinations in the run up to the election, where President Thieu is the only candidate.
Thong settles back into the routine of the machine shop, happy to have nothing more complicated to think about than the maintenance of the huge Roman ploughs used for clearing jungle, and dropping off the information on the locations they’re sent to each week with the doorman at Chú Hai‘s hotel. Otherwise, he keeps his distance. Let Chú Hai come to him when he runs out of Montagnards and Laotians! And soon enough, because he’s not found suitable substitutes, or just because he cannot do without Thong, Chú Hai does come to Thong, reaching him over the telephone.
Julia Anderson is back in town, his disembodied nasal voice says, and Thong should bump into her at the hotel bar.
They take up where they left off – she, his first woman and only real American; he, her first Vietnamese. Wrestling and grappling in the big French double bed, they exchange lies – she asking him misleading questions, he passing on spurious facts; neither loving the other but each giving and taking from the other all they can. Through the rinky-dink Christmas of 1971 and the North’s and South’s preparation for another offensive, all through the changing fortunes of the Quang Tri invasion, the attack on Kontum, the siege of An Loc.
He does well by Chú Hai. He learns how to control what to say and not say, even while in the throes of passion. He keeps his cool, even as she’s confused by him.
Telling her as he traces his long fingers down her back, “he says they’re thinking of waiting till next year, when you’ve all gone,” when in fact they come in March that year.
Running his hands through her hair and whispering, “he thinks they’ll do what they always do, come from the West,” as the divisions flood in from the North as well.
Assuring her, “they’ll never take Tay Ninh,” which in fact they don’t, but leaving out the essential tit-bit about them surrounding An Loc.
Even as he pulls her down to him, opens his lips to receive her nipple like a young nestling, and lets her suffocate him with her full freckled breasts.
Yes, he did well by Chú Hai, feeding Julia Anderson exactly the same intelligence they both knew was being sent to her bosses by South Vietnamese intelligence and CIA surveillance, helping to confirm their mistaken beliefs; leading to the successful incursions which necessitated a deadly return of the B52′s. Thousands upon thousands dead, and finally the North back in Paris, to negotiate a settlement; a settlement that, despite the military beating the North took, favours them and turns the tide of the war yet again.
Yes, he did well by Chú Hai and the revolution. But at what cost, Thong now wonders. Not just to those soldiers on the ground, those civilians who were collateral damage, but to himself and to all the relationships he’s had since then? He leaves the question hanging, sets down his pen. Fleetingly, his thoughts go to Nina, and he feels a pang of guilt at what she’s had to endure married to this person that he so willingly allowed Chú Hai and Julia Anderson to create.
______
Thong uncaps another bottle of warm beer, sets aside Julia Anderson and stuffs his recollections of her into a hotel envelope, dating it. Then he turns to Minh’s message. Minh will meet him at 7.00 am tomorrow, the cover note says. It’s followed by a list of appointments, then more detailed notes about the companies and persons involved in the appointments, each note a demonstration of Minh’s exceptional work ethic. He’ll be seeing two deputy directors from the tobacco company, the chair lady of a unit with rights to import machinery, a foreign liaison officer from the oil and gas depot in the beach city of Vung Tau, and five or six smaller enterprises in desperate need of machinery if financing terms can be arranged. All are state owned enterprises except the very last entry, a bottling plant privately owned and managed by an ethnic Chinese named Hua Cong Ly. His old friend Ly!
“The itinerary’s too full. Can we cut out a few appointments?” Thong asks Minh at breakfast.
He’d like to move Ly’s meeting forward. He and Ly go way back, Thong explains. There’s a much higher likelihood that something will come out of this meeting than any of the others. Also, can they free up the back end of the week to allow for further developments with Ly? Do they really need to go off to Vung Tau to see the oil and gas guy? Must they visit all the six smaller enterprises this trip?
“I’ll be back again you know,” he jokes with Minh.
Minh’s amenable to cancelling everything except the meetings with the two deputy directors – who are his superiors, and the lady with the import license – whom Thong finds out later is his lover. They whizz through these on the first day. Then, leaving the van and driver with Thong, Minh tactfully takes his leave.
“Call me when you’re ready to fly off so I can claim the van back before this rascal steals it,” he says to Thong, patting the back of the driver’s seat.
______
The proper sequencing for the remainder of Thong’s schedule is Ly first, because it’s business that Jerry’s paying for, then family, then everything else including Chú Hai and Oldest Sister. But when Thong calls Ly’s office to shift that meeting forward, he’s told by the receptionist that Ly is away till Saturday. There’s nothing for it but to go down to the Delta first then.
The driver suggests breakfast in the city before setting off. There’s nothing decent on the road, he warns. They settle for beef noodles at the old shop on Pasteur. After that, instead of setting off right away, Thong finds himself compelled to direct the driver to two blocks down to the quiet cul-de-sac where Chú Hai lived after liberation, putting a visit to Chú Hai first instead of last. The heart has its own orderings, Thong realizes, no matter what the correct sequence might be.
He makes his way down the lane to the fifth house, unsure if it’s still Chú Hai’s home, but hopeful. The alley had been lovely before 1975. Although it grew gradually more dilapidated in the years Thong used to visit, he’d still thought it an extremely pleasant little street. Now, after over fifteen years of neglect, it’s lost all its grace. The walls hiding the small French style bungalows on their narrow lots are overgrown with moss. Some have been demolished, their bricks used to build new rooms for married sons and daughters-in-law. More add-ons – wooden lean-to’s, tarpaulin sheds, and even cardboard walls – stick to the new rooms like colonies of crusty barnacles, providing additional floor space for tenants, coffee stalls and small workshops.
The walls of number five are fortunately intact; the painted gate sheathed with iron sheets is securely closed – a good indication that the house is still occupied by an official in good standing. He peers through the spy hole, a five centimetre square cut through the metal, into a cement courtyard filled with pots of bonsai and rooster cages. Good, he’s still here, Thong breathes with happiness. He calls through the opening. A scholarly white-haired man straightens up from behind an ornamental pine and walks quickly over, lowering his head to the spy hole to see who might be at the gate.
Thong places his palm against the hole to block the view.
“Don’t you remember your training? Sheer stupidity putting an un-protected eye in a position where god knows who can poke at it?” he intones in his most school-teacherly voice, trying to suppress his laughter.
“Dammit! Up to your tricks again are you?” Chú Hai’s voice replies. He pushes his index and middle finger out through the hole, poking Thong’s palm away with the hard ends of his fingernails. “Move that hand, son. Let me have a look at you!”
A bright thick lashed eye appears in the hole for a second, there’s a rattle of keys, then the gate swings open and for the second time in his life, Thong finds himself enfolded in Chú Hai’s embrace.
It’s everything a son might wish a father’s welcome to be.
______
His meeting with his mother and father in Can Tho cannot be more poignantly different.
Sitting on a stool sewing by her front door, Third Sister shows little emotion when she sees him walk through the unlocked front gate and into the courtyard filled with sunlight now Ba Roi has chopped down the old longan tree.
A woman long accustomed to restraining her feelings, she merely acknowledges his returns, as she does every time he returns to Can Tho.
“You’re here,” she says.
He nods, replies as always with the address, “Third Sister.”
Follows up, with the question that he always asks her, “Father and mother, how are they?”
“Nothing different since I last wrote to you,” she answers. “He’s alive; she’s getting more and more …”
Putting down her needlework, she takes Thong by the hand and takes him to the middle hall so he can see for himself. The Superintendant, paralyzed, is lying on his platform, propped on his side by pillows, breathing heavily. His wife, eyes closed, is swinging in a hammock strung beside his platform.
“Ba, má,” Thong calls out to them.
His mother sits up, looks around blankly. He steps forward, kneels down on the floor between them, his face level with theirs.
“I’m back,” he says to them both.
He thinks he sees his father blink, a light come into his eyes as if in recognition, and his lower lip curl to try to articulate something. On his mother’s face, however, there’s only confusion.
“It’s me, Youngest,” he says to the Superintendant’s wife, taking her hands in his, letting her touch his face, his shoulders, his hair.
The Superintendant’s wife peers at Thong, but her nearly blind eyes register only a shape. Running her hands over his face, she feels fine wrinkles around his eyes, a softening around his jaw.
“No Sir,” she says, drawing away her hands quickly, “don’t tease me just because I’m an old woman who can’t see.”
She reaches out once more to draw her fingers around Thong’s eyes and across his chin to illustrate her point, to show him she’s not as senile as everyone fears she’s become. “You have my Youngest’s voice for sure, but my son is a young man and you’re not.”
Bending forward, she sniffs at his hair, his nose and mouth. “I never allowed my son to smoke or to drink. You, Sir, stink of cigarettes and beer like a playboy.”
She turns away from him, folds her legs back up into the hammock, and closes her eyes. “No, you’re not my son. I won’t let you trick me.”
On hearing this, a loud gurgle erupts from the Superintendant and then he begins to cough in great gasps which turn his face a violent purple.
At a loss what to do, Thong turns around to his Third Sister who’s been watching the whole exchange. She pushes Thong aside and bends over her father. With a strength Thong does not expect she lifts the helpless body to a sitting position. Then, wrapping her arms under the armpits and around the wasted chest, she squeezes and loosens, pushing air into his failing lungs. Behind her, Thong looks into his father’s face flopping loosely on his sister’s left shoulder. The Superintendant’s eyes are wide open and tears are streaming down his cheeks.
______
The Superintendant continues to cry wordlessly as smitten by amoebic dysentery, Thong slips in and out of consciousness in the attic that was once his bedroom for many more days.
It was something in the water, or in the vegetables, or just a weakened stomach after the years in America, his sisters who’d prepared his welcome feast speculate guiltily as they hover over him.
The grim-faced Ba Roi shoos them off. He’ll take care of the patient, he orders. They leave him to it. Thong’s his to watch over assiduously, as he might a valuable prisoner of war. He drips water from fresh coconuts down Thong’s throat through the stems of water-swamp plants to keep him hydrated, tries to kill the infection with chewed up ginger and jungle leaves spat directly from his mouth into Thong’s. With his own hands, he wipes Thong clean after every eruption of his bowels using water he’s personally drawn and filtered from the well, brought up the steps to the attic and boiled over a charcoal stove in the room. He changes and carries away the soiled banana leaves Thong lies on. And, as Thong burns and mutters with delirium, sponges down Thong’s hot body and hums revolutionary marching songs to rally him on.
In Thong’s lucid moments Ba Roi assails Thong with questions on how and what would be done if Thong had been in an American hospital instead. He takes out Thong’s old letters, saved through the years, and asks Thong for clarifications and clarifications and explanations of the machines and events Thong has written about.
In a startling confession, Ba Roi confides that Thong letters have turned him around.
“I suspected as much, and now you’ve just confirmed it. If we’d let the Americans win the war, we’d all have been better off,” he says sourly.
He points to the banana leaves lining the surface of Thong’s wooden bed.
“Look at this, fifteen years after the revolution and we’re still lying on leaves!”
“The same bed sheets I had in the jungle hospital,” he laughs harshly.
Thong is too debilitated to try to salve Ba Roi’s guilt.
“It’s alright, they’re coming back,” he murmurs.
“I’m here,” he taps Third’s hand, “they sent me …”
Then he drifts off, again.
Thong is almost healed and he and Ba Roi have mended their tense relationship by the time the driver from the tobacco company comes back from the city carrying Oldest and her sulphurs and antibiotics. But Oldest Sister cannot be denied her opportunity to be of help. She must be allowed to apply the knowledge she learnt from the French.
Oldest Sister barges up the stairs to the attic, impatient to get at Thong, to run her hands over him to check his temperature and his muscle tone, tsk-ing tsk-ing at the condition he’s allowed himself to get into.
She chastises him as she works. Not even a word sent by a messenger to inform her he’s in the country, she complains. She can see the car that came for her when he really needed her, surely he could have sent the same around the corner to let her know he was in town. She would have made an effort then to come to the hotel to see him, her own brother. She could have come down to the Delta with him then too. She hasn’t seen their parents in an age. Doesn’t he know how difficult it is now to scrap the money together for a trip down?
It hadn’t crossed Thong’s mind she might be looking forward to a free ride. He’s lived too long in America, taken for granted the ubiquity of automobiles, forgotten how hard life has always been here in this hard-scrabble country where Ba Roi has only been able to treat him with jungle herbs and coconut water administered by the most primitive means.
In truth, he’d conveniently pushed a visit to Oldest to the back of his mind. Despite living in her house most of his teenage years and young adulthood, he’s always felt she housed and fed him on sufferance; even when his contributions to the household became essential supplements to her nurse’s salary after Brother-in-Law left. And despite being the sole breadwinner for the family in the first year of liberation, she’d continued to treat him like a boarder, hounding him for the giant’s share of his monthly pay like it was overdue rent.
“I didn’t know if Oldest Brother-in-Law would welcome me,” he assumes a listless air, then closes his eyes.
It’s a lie. He’s only just learnt from Ba Roi that Oldest Brother-in-Law is even more anti-Communist now than before. After fifteen years at the mercy of the victors in a re-education camp, Ba Roi tells Thong, Oldest Brother-in-Law cannot bear to be near anyone connected to the other side. Nor is his wife allowed to have them in his house. He’s included in this embargo his Father-in-Law and Mother-in-Law, traitors because they live under the roof of the retired North Vietnamese Army colonel Ba Roi.
“It should be all water under the bridge now,” Ba Roi shares with Thong. “But, he remains angry. He continues to haul it around like a sack of stones on his back, hurting himself. He should forgive, forget …”
Third has always been a bit naïve, Thong thinks. Somewhat blind, like his Blood Father, to how much pain might be inflicted in the name of ideals. Still, it’s a convenient excuse for Oldest Sister. One, she cannot argue against.
“Ah yes, your Brother-in-Law,” she puffs her cheeks out. She assures him, “he’ll get over it.”
She rushes on, anxious not to create ruptures in a relationship which has been extremely important to her family’s financial survival so far, “whatever you might have done before the war, he should understand it was because of your Blood Father. And after that, when none of us could work because of his background, he should be thankful that your contributions to them allowed you to keep your job. It’s because of you that we could keep body and soul together during that terrible time.”
“Yes …” Thong mumbles very faintly, keeping his eyes closed, pretending to snore gently.
His mental health will surely take a turn for the worse if he allows Oldest Sister to stay around him talking no-stop for any significant amount of time. She used to do that only to Brother-in-Law. Now, she’s doing it indiscriminately to everyone. He hears her downstairs, ordering Third Sister about, telling their mother a long story about her oldest son’s problems finding work, still the lead actress in the drama of her life. No wonder the poor man left her!
Thong’s nervous too of what Oldest might inflict on his body. Compared to Ba Roi, who’s tested all his remedies on himself, Oldest Sister is an unsympathetic administrator of barbaric solutions fished out from dated French textbooks. He still remembers what she did to the blister on his left foot. He must try to escape Oldest as quickly as he can.
Besides, he’s had possession of the tobacco company’s car and driver for far too long. Although Minh has sent a note telling him to take his time, he can’t overstep the boundaries. He already owes Minh big time, and it’s just his first trip.
And there’s Nina, whom he hasn’t communicated with for more than a week.
He must get back to the city and to an international telephone line as soon as possible.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged First time, Going home, Growing up Vietnamese, Home coming, Memoir, Spy, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war, You can't go home
Leave a comment
XI. CUTTING LOOSE
With Thong gone, Nina is left to dig in the crevices and cubby holes of their abandoned American life to resolve for herself the dilemmas of the war, the mystery of the VC hearts, and the reasons for her husband’s treachery.
She begins with Thong’s desk, but it divulges no secrets. Thong has emptied it. The only clue is the desk itself, a solid-wood reproduction of a Mid-American classic he’d insisted on having over the sleek Scandinavian table she’d preferred. A curious choice she’d thought then.
“A dear friend had one just like this,” she remembers him murmuring to her, as he caressed its surface after Sixth and his boys had brought it up the canyon in their pickup and huffed and puffed it up the stairs to the study.
She hadn’t wondered then whom he knew who might have had such a grand desk in the pre-1975 days. Now she does.
She moves on to the computer. The hard drive contains only their joint accounting files, the floppy disk holder by the side of the desk backups of the same. She’s heard one can recover deleted files, but even if she knows how, she has a feeling Thong may never have saved anything incriminating anywhere. An insight she didn’t have before. She files it away.
She walks into their closet … fingers his Korean-made suits which he’s asked her to sort and send on. She hates them, cut tackily in polyester mix, always in strange shades of metallic grey with a sick blue tinge. They feel like uniforms, she thinks, remembering the wool and silk smoothness of her Papa’s suits, custom made in England.
“Go to Sears or Penneys if you must be cheap,” she’d urged him. “At least they’ll be all wool.”
“The American cut is too big,” she remembers him explaining, adding enigmatically, “perhaps when I’ve eaten enough and turned American from the inside out, like he did.”
She wonders who ‘he’ is. She makes a note in her head to find out from Huong, whom she’s sure will know.
She goes next to the garage where his tools are arranged in stacked plastic baskets. Screwdrivers, wrenches, two electric hand drills; nails, nuts, bolts, sorted into neat piles according to length and size. Everything is obsessively ordered, evidence of his need to compartmentalize, something that has irritated her for years. Another fact she hadn’t paid sufficient attention to, she saves that away too,
She doesn’t see the silver circlet anywhere. He must have taken it with him on his body, as he did when he left Vietnam. Carrying his parents’ history on him like a burden. Another reason, she realizes, why he is what he is.
______
Thong’s absence fills up the empty canyon house, occupies Nina’s days.
He’s not there when Tri, finished with an experiment on lava lamps, pours wax into the sink pipe and leaves it to cool into a solid plug.
“Stupido!” Tam screams at him when she discovers the clogged up wash-basin.
Tri huddles. Whimpers, “the teacher said not to put it in the waste basket.”
Tam lunges at him.
Nina separates them and calls Sixth, who comes by on the weekend to make everything alright.
“Good as new,” he grunts in satisfaction, before leaving for his manicure and pedicure saloon in Los Angeles, Huong’s and his latest scheme to earn back a house of their own.
“But it’s not the same as Dad doing it is it?” Tri can’t help telling Tam when they both go in to examine the repair.
“Don’t even start, just don’t go there,” Tam warns, pushing her fist into her brother’s mouth.
“Tam! Tri!” Nina sends them to their rooms, one for manhandling her sibling, the other for mishandling everything.
Nina goes through her check lists of behavioural signs and symptoms again. Both children are still in the range of normality, albeit near the ends of the single standard deviation. Nothing to worry about, she hears Thong’s voice re-assuring her for the umpteenth time. She hopes he’s right, she prays.
She looks at her watch – it’s noon here, three in the morning the next day in Asia – she’ll have to wait to speak to Thong. She’s sorry she told him she’d stay behind, if only for half a year.
______
When Nina finally gets Thong on the phone, he’s short and wastes their minutes grumbling about the cost of the call.
He’s fine he tells her. He wants to speak to the children. They’re already sleeping, she tells him. Why couldn’t she have kept them up a bit longer, he grumbles. Because he should well know, they go to church tomorrow morning, she retorts. He snorts. She knows he has no use for that, but it’s not up to him is it? Now that he’s gone …
The minutes tick by as they both wait each other out.
“How are you?” he finally asks grudgingly.
She begins to tell him about the clogged sink pipe, about her dissertation which will be approved once she changes its title and adds two more tables and six citations. She has no idea why the new title is better than the older one or how the six citations will improve anything … She rambles …
“Darling, it’s expensive, don’t waste money” he cuts her off.
Is there anything else important she wants to tell him, he asks. As for the rest, write it all down in a letter. He’ll enjoy it slowly then, he pacifies her.
Just before hanging up he tells her he’s going to Bangkok on Sunday night to get his visa for Vietnam. He’ll call her the week after when he gets back.
He whispers, “Love you.”
She replies, “Miss you.”
And then, she’s left hanging.
Just like that, she huffs to herself. One of the most important journeys of his life, his first return home, and all he wants to say about it is compressed into two sentences. How can she miss him so much, this husband who leaves only question marks and holes to mark his presence?
______
Nina doesn’t hear from him again for more than a week. When she does, it’s in the form of telegram, assuring Nina her all is well and not to worry. He’s still in Vietnam but only because he’s been spending time with his family. He’ll call her in a few days.
Nina tears up the telegram when she receives it and flushes the pieces down the toilet. She’s been worried sick imagining him embroiled in cloak and dagger situations threatening his limbs and life and this is how he chooses to relieve her of her misery!
Well, then if he insists on saving money on phone calls …. Nina picks up the phone and dials the phone company, requests a new number, to be installed before the week is out. She will never speak to him again, she resolves. She goes to her address book and whites out the phone numbers of his Singapore office and apartment, numbers she hasn’t yet memorized. Just to make sure the line to him is totally broken, she deletes the numbers from the answering machine as well. Then she crawls into bed and cries till she falls asleep.
The next morning, she expects to wake up looking a wreck. But her tears have refreshed her, and her face in the mirror looks rested and bright. As if to confirm her recovery, there’s a letter from her supervisory board informing her they’ve approved the dissertation – ‘The war for minds and hearts: links between individual susceptibility to enemy propaganda and the onset of post traumatic stress’. She thinks to call Thong and tell him the good news. But didn’t she decide she won’t reach out to him? She gets dressed and goes to wake the children instead. Then, she makes for the university library where she scans the journals for post-doctoral positions in academia.
No more veterans and no more counselling, she vows. She’s done with picking up after the human consequences of war, any war. She’s done with shrouded eyes, defended faces and retreats into walls of silence. She’ll try to be done with her husband Thong too.
______
A Vietnamese family cannot simply be jettisoned by changing phone numbers.
When Sixth turns up at Nina’s front door at 6.30 am with his nineteen and eighteen year old sons flanking him as backup because Thong can’t get her on the phone and neither can Sixth, Nina can’t tell him she’s in the middle of cutting her ties with her husband. Her abrupt change of the phone number seems shamefully juvenile when she learns Thong hasn’t called because he’s nearly died from amoebic dysentery. While she’s still angry – Thong could have told her instead of his brother, she thinks angrily – she is persuaded to call Thong back in Bangkok immediately and tell him all is well, to stage a family phone call with Tri and Tam for Sixth and his sons, to demonstrate that all is well. For the moment.
______
A born-in-America Vietnamese woman can’t stop trying to unravel the mystery that’s made her who she is just because her husband’s flown the coop.
Nina compulsively continues to drag her children to Saturday beef noodles with Sixth and Huong. Even if Thong is a turd, she still loves his brother, his brother’s wife and their family. Breakfast with them in Little Saigon is a familiar comfort, allowing Nina to feel she’s part of a Vietnamese community, if only by marriage.
The group has dwindled since Thong’s departure. Kim, the oldest, has transferred to Stanford to be with her Jewish boyfriend. Sanh has also dropped out. Nina asks if it’s because he’s feeling hang dog after losing his wife, the fourth one from the Filipino refugee camp. Huong tells Nina no. He’s not having anything more to do with them because he feels betrayed by Thong’s new job. Travelling to Vietnam, trying to bring American money in to invest there, is tantamount to supporting the new regime. Unacceptable to someone who’s made the sacrifices he has. They’re all traitors now as far as he’s concerned,
Nina raises her eyebrows. Sanh used to be so happy-go-lucky, so proud of his ability to make fun of both sides. When did this change?
“There’re a lot of people around here with those ideas now,” Huong says under her breath into Nina’s ear, indicating the newer type of refugee crowding the beef noodle restaurant with a sideways shift of her eyes. “They’ve infected him.”
Looking around her Nina sees that indeed, the restaurant is filled with refugees of the ‘new’ kind, haunted men with tense bodies, their shoulders held into their chests as if expecting to be kicked or beaten at any time. Fascinating men, Nina can’t help thinking; migrants on the Orderly Departure Program, released from the re-education camps to come to the US as part of America’s last mopping up operation. They’re the ones who spilled blood for one side then suffered the horrors of ideological cleansing by the conquerors. Ideal subjects for a post-doctoral research paper on post traumatic stress, Nina finds herself planning before she can help it. She cuts herself off. No more victims, no more delving into her parents’ and husband’s war. She’s done with all of that.
Nina shakes her head as if to get the men out of it, turns her attention to fishing out the beef innards she inadvertently ordered from her bowl of soup onto Huong’s side plate.
“Can you please,” she begs. “You know I don’t eat these.”
Huong slides the plate back towards Nina.
“You should learn to appreciate insides,” she chides like a mother. “They’ make you strong.”
______
And indeed, it’s the insides one must turn if one wants to make any headway uncovering the mysteries within; one’s own insides in particular. Major major oversight! An error a trained psychologist and clinical therapist like Nina shouldn’t have made. She won’t get any clearer about the mystery within herself by digging at Thong or her parents. How many times has she heard in training – you can’t give what you don’t have. How many times has she tried to convey to couples in therapy – you can’t find what’s missing in yourself in someone else. And she’s missed it all along!
Nina thanks Huong for the insight as she drives eastward through the Canyon towards her hillside home. The late morning sun, hanging low in the autumn sky, shines through the windscreen and warms away the dawn chill. She feels the depression that has covered her like a pall lift. She will heal.
_____
It’s no longer a question of cutting herself loose because she’s angry at Thong for failing to communicate while he was in Vietnam. It’s not even a question of not being able to forgive him for the far greater duplicity of hiding at least half his true-self throughout their relationship. She needs to be away from Thong, Nina realizes, to learn to be herself. She’s been externalizing all her adult life, worrying about the conundrums posed by her parents and Thong, when really she’d been worried about her own identity.
Time now to look inside, Nina decides. She thanks the universe for providing the opportunity for her to do so – Thong absconding back to Vietnam. Their separation is an act of god, something that must take place before their relationship goes to its next stage! They’ll come back together when she knows who she is. Perhaps, there’ll be time also for her to get to know the person he really is. Although, the psychologist in her wonders how much of this can happen, given Thong’s habits of more than half a life time. Regardless, it’s become a fait accompli, this separation, before it’s even been discussed. All it needs is communication, at the right time and in the right way. Meanwhile, she’ll practice deceit. Just a little, she excuses herself, with a laugh.
______
Nina spends the autumn sending out job applications. On impulse, she writes in for a position as a therapist in a New York hospital that includes post-doctoral training at the Institute for Individuation in New York City. No more walking dead, no more war stories, Nina had said to herself. Instead, individuation … healing, making the disparate parts of the self into a whole complete entity … a seductive word that imprints itself onto Nina in the same way the circlet on Thong’s thigh had. Notwithstanding that she will have to move across the country, that New York is a dangerous high maintenance city for a single woman and two pre-teens, she sends the letter off without a second thought.
______
Nina flies back East to her parents for Thanksgiving. As Thong in Singapore counts off the days to her Christmas visit with the children, she hops over to New York City for her job interview. She returns to Orange County with a job offer and a place to train at the Institute, to start in the summer of the next year. Now, she will have to break the news to Thong. She’ll find the right time to tell him when they meet at Christmas, in the right way.
She looks forward to the conversation with excitement, anticipation, fear. Yes, she will reclaim herself with this move. But, she could lose it too. She can’t know how the stranger that Thong is will react to her ultimatum. Still she must risk it.
______
Thong, unaware that Nina’s preparing to fly away from him, anticipates her arrival with barely contained excitement. He exercises madly, trying to keep at bay the effects of the enormous meals and alcohol accompanying every business trip he takes, working on the definition of his pectorals, trying to create a six-pack down his abdomen to impress Nina with. As he flies to and from Singapore to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, he writes in his journal, a replacement for the envelopes which have now filled up his smallest suitcase. Travelling to build networks like Julia Anderson had, unearthing experiences he’s buried deep in his memory, reclaiming his life as he determined to do his first night in Ho Chi Minh City, Thong is happy.
______
When December comes around and Nina and the children emerge into the spanking new second terminal of the Singapore airport, Thong is very glad he’s made an effort to keep himself trim. Nina has recovered from her depression! She’s tall, straight and beautiful. Her upper arm muscles are firm and the skin on her legs, arms and neck shining with good health. Her face is relaxed and at peace, her eyes smile the same way they had when she’d welcomed him in New York the first meeting. She’s in good humour, her lips curved upwards at something Tam has said. She must have forgiven him.
Nina hugs Thong lightly after the children are done with their greetings. She professes to be impressed by everything, the airport, the flowers, Thong’s new haircut and weekend polo shirt and khakis. A new image she says with approval. But the chauffeur driven company Mercedes, which impresses Tam and Tri hugely, elicits only a moue and a raised eyebrow.
There’s something new about Nina Thong realizes; a freshness, a control. She’s cut away her long black hair too!
“I wanted to look more like a Ph.D., grown up,” she explains, tilting her head forward to show off an elegant white nape. “How could you not have noticed immediately?”
“I thought you’d be more observant,” she comments, referring to his hidden occupation.
Possibly, he thinks uncomfortably, she hasn’t forgiven or forgotten everything.
But that spark of acidity is the only sign she gives during the holiday of anything wrong between them. They have the best time ever. The tension that used to hang over everything they planned – parties, picnics, vacations – is mysteriously absent. Nina, having abandoned the pursuit of perfection in their relationship, is no longer distressed at every mistake that happens. While Thong himself remains gripped by the need for absolute harmony and order, without Nina reflecting his every disappointment, his petty bursts of temper can only dissipate.
Nina’s more relaxed attitude seems to release the children, who spontaneously thank Thong for the pleasure of the most mundane experiences – brain freezes from their first taste of shaved ice balls and eaten under the fierce equatorial sun; a geriatric passage through a twenty-nine step Tai-Chi sequence with a group of grandfathers and grandmothers at the Botanic Gardens; an afternoon at a children’s arcade where they both go crazy knocking at sprouting Mr. Potato Heads with gigantic inflatable hammers.
When night falls, Nina allows him to make love to her passionately in the hotel-like luxury of the service apartment’s master bedroom with a disengagement that drives Thong wild. He’s able to pour out all the pent-up desire from the months they’ve been apart with no compunction, before falling into dreamless sleep. If he has any uneasiness about Nina’s new state of being, he’s pacified when, decorating the plastic tree they’ve gone to a supermarket to find, she produces the crystal star she’s brought all the way from California, and taking his hand in hers, hangs it on the tree together with him. All his residual angst disappears when during a midnight Christmas service, in full view of a mostly Asian congregation, she pulls his face against hers and kisses him full on the lips to wish him a Happy Christmas with an open-mouthed American kiss.
It seems to Thong that she wants their idyll to continue forever, even after they’ve sent the children home to spend New Year with Papa and Maman Nguyen in Washington D.C. Let’s delay it, she tells him when he suggests they call the realtor to check out houses for them to move into after the summer. She pulls him back to bed on the only morning they’re able to visit the American school, the first day school re-opens and the last day of her time in Singapore. Sitting in a coffee shop at the airport hours before she’s due to fly, Thong realizes they haven’t resolved anything about the family’s move in the summer.
As she intends, Nina drops the bomb on Thong. She’ll not be coming back, she tells him, not to stay anyway.
“While you were ill in your parent’s home, I decided that I need to be without you for a while, a long while,” she confesses now.
“It’s not that I’ve stopped loving you and I don’t have anyone else,” she forestalls him before he can ask. “I just need some time to myself. I’ve spent all these years trying to understand you, and it didn’t turn out to even by you at all. I realize, I should have spent that time trying to figure out myself. Who I am, why this whole thing about Vietnam and the war is such an issue with me? I’m going to take that time now.”
“I can’t be around you to do that. You just confuse me now,” she raises her hand, then puts it down again in a gesture of helplessness. “I see you in front of me doing all the things you usually do, being the person I know. Then suddenly, in the same look you’ve always had in your eyes, in the same thing you always say, I realize it’s Thong the communist saying this, or Thong the spy thinking that. And I realize, it’s impossible for me to pin you down…”
“I need distance,” she pleads, “to see the both of us clearly.”
“And full disclosure from you,” she concludes.
What she wants is his blessing for him to let her go, he realizes. What he wants is to tell her that she shouldn’t run away; that if she practices diligently, if she’s willing to let her heart be torn raw living with him every day, one day she’ll be able to see through his duplicities, and know what’s good, what’s bad, what’s true in him, even in the throes of passion. But to do that, he’ll have to tell her about Julia Anderson, Chú Hai and the rest of the life stored in his suitcase and as yet unwritten in his journal. And if he does, how can he be sure that she’ll still love him?
”Are you asking me for a divorce,” he wants to know.
”I won’t give you one,” he says, as if what he wants or doesn’t want matter in California. But he says it anyway, “I’ll never let you go.”
She shakes her head, no she doesn’t want a divorce. She just wants some time to herself, she repeats. And she wants to move to New York City. They may need to sell the house, if he’ll agree.
”Alright,” he nods. He asks, “And you’ll visit?”
”The children, yes,” she replies, “me …. I don’t know.”
”But, my door’s always open,” she concedes, “I’m not writing us off yet.”
”Full disclosure, that’s what I need. Not immediately, but over time.” She’s firm although her lips quiver. “You can write it down, in letters. It might be easier that way,”
Thong can’t believe, even as it’s happening, that they’re so calmly agreeing on separation and the arrangements that will follow. It’s as if everything is already discussed and settled when the matter has only come to a head just now, a few minutes ago.
”Are you sure?” he queries, unwilling to accept the inevitable. “What about this morning, last night, all the other nights this week…”
She smiles the saddest smile, leans across the tiny coffee table between them and brushes her lips against his. “But … you, of all people, should know how easy it is to sleep with the enemy; the difficulty is living with a stranger.”
She doesn’t mean to hurt, and he accepts her statement as she’s meant, a bitter truth. Raising his hand to the unaccustomed coolness of her bare nape, he pulls her face against his and breathes the smell of her flesh in as deeply as he can, a Vietnamese kiss … taking her essence in to remember her by.
”Yes, but I won’t remain a stranger,” he replies, “I promise you.”
He’s too old to run away, he tells himself with determination. He doesn’t know what full disclosure entails, whether he has the capacity to reveal everything. He doesn’t know what the Nina his wife is intending to discover will be. But going forward, he decides, he’ll try to share what he can to whoever she turns out to be. It’s the only way he can hold on to her he thinks, as he releases her from his kiss and walks her to the departure gate.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged breaking up, choices, choosing, Memoir, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Vietnamization, war
Leave a comment
XII. GIVING AND TAKING
“You asked for full disclosure, let’s start with this …’ the letter begins without a salutation, as if writing down her name might make it impossible to set down the rest. In truth, it’s a long way from full disclosure, merely a description of Thong’s week ‘being a wheeler and dealer, trying to arrange protection for a Chinese financier who’s grown too big for his own good …’ But it begins to open the door to a Thong Nina hasn’t seen before, the other side of the careful tense perfectionist she knows only in his domestic guise. Nina turns the pages with her heart thumping.
______
Thong is at his first business meeting with his friend Ly. Since their last chance meeting under cover of darkness on a Mekong tributary, waiting in futility to board a non-existent boat out of the country, Ly has ballooned from an average sized young man to a middle aged one of enormous proportions. It’s a size reflective of the great fortune he’s built, a miracle during this period of the country’s scarcity, Thong writes. He lists the businesses Ly runs now – the traditional fish sauce manufacturing inherited from his parents which exports now throughout South East Asia, a soap manufacturing operation that supplies Central Asia and Russian republics, and a start-up soft drinks factory in Ho Chi Minh City. All positive cash-flow businesses earning Ly much needed foreign currency in a country where this is a scarce commodity.
Thong is humbled by the scope of Ly’s enterprises, he shares with Nina. That he’s managed to build it while the authorities were at their most doctrinal, when the country was at war with Cambodia and foreign exchange was almost no-existent, is a feat speaking volumes about Ly’s character. In the same circumstances, he, Thong, had grown discouraged and left the country. The information he sent back to Chú Hai to purportedly help the country, he acknowledges to Nina for the first time, is nothing in comparison to the livelihoods that Ly is providing for hundreds. He, the brilliant student, the more graceful dancer, the better looking man, feels by far the lesser.
Yet, despite his success, Thong underlines this part, Ly’s the same stable, down to earth Chinese businessman he was when they last met. Someone who’ll take advantage of any loophole and shortcut he sees yet remains basically honest. He’s still the same reliable old friend Thong has always been able to depend on. And, he writes, it’s because of this that Thong’s decided to help Ly pursue his pipe dream. To help him put together the ultimate insurance plan.
Thong doesn’t say what the ultimate plan is, Nina notices. But, it’s a good start, she gives Thong his due as she folds the letter up and put’s it into the box of papers she’s already started packing up in preparation for New York.
______
How Ly got too rich is a long tale that Thong’s told in Ly’s car on the way to his soap factory in Ben Tre and later on the way back to dinner at his home in Chinatown.
After Ly’s failed attempt to escape by boat, his fourth, he’d decided to stay in Vietnam and make the best of it. He’d gone back to Saigon, converted to Christianity, and married his long time girlfriend. When his parents in America found out, they were so furious they almost disowned him. To redeem himself, he decided he had to resuscitate the fish sauce factories they’d left behind, and make them into roaring successes.
“To keep my parents’ name going and to look after all the old employees on their behalf,” he said modestly.
“It isn’t a hard business,” he observes. He grins, “after all, Communists or not, we all eat fish sauce. And the poorer we became, the more barley we were forced to eat in place of rice, the more fish sauce we needed to help swallow it down.
“Besides, I have a skill for making money … it’s in the genes,” he chuckles happily, his round face beaming.
He lowers his voice now to tell Thong about how he grew the business.
The Phu Quoc factory supplied fish sauce to the navy base there. For an appropriate discount on the sauce they consumed, he persuaded them to load some of his products on their vessels and run them into Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia where a train of Chinese contacts sent them on to Thailand. He did the same for the Phan Thiet plant, but running the sauce up through Laos into China instead. On arrival, he received payment in valuable foreign currency into a Bangkok account and a Hong Kong account, held for his benefit by two overseas Chinese cousins.
He became the go-to person for state owned companies who needed money for machinery imports. This he explains is how he came to meet Minh’s lover and then Minh. Settling the bills of the state owned companies offshore, he took his payment back home in kind – in premium priced fish sauce contracts for government enterprises still obliged to provide a daily meal for their employees, in scrap from abandoned American built factories that could no longer be operated, in falling down houses and old machinery.
“It’s profitable when you have access to something that people in a closed market don’t have,” Ly says dispassionately.
He usually stripped the factories and sold the scrap abroad in Thailand or China, earning himself even more foreign currency. Once though, they let him have an abandoned coconut plantation with a primitive soap making factory.
“My big break, he whispers.
He revived the soap making operations with second hand machinery from Russia, bought through Minh’s contacts and brought into the country by Minh’s lover. The oil, which he filtered through imported bleaching clays and scented with foreign fragrances, came from the coconuts in the plantation. His better smelling soap with less oil sold far better than the standard government issues donated by the Soviet Union. Then in a clever feat of marketing, Ly decided to give away an extra bar of his soup for every bar bought if people would turn in a slab of the Russian issue at the same time.
“Russian soap has about four times more oil than mine. Even after adding in the cost of filtration material and the fragrances, I was actually making my soap for free!” he laughs at his own ingenuity.
“Soap is more universal than fish sauce,” he states the obvious.
Sent to Hanoi, it was picked up by Vietnamese labourers exported to the Soviet republics to work off the nation’s debt there, and sold like hot cakes.
“Till today,” he says with satisfaction, “we’re the market leader in Central Asia. Only of course now, we do it legally, selling through our licensed distributors over there. All of whom, incidentally, are Vietnamese who decided to stay on after they finished their contracts.”
“But then I was left with a different problem, or rather an opportunity.” he continues, “I had surplus coconuts.”
“My wife had the idea of bottling the water, adding some flavouring and gas and then selling it as a 7-Up substitute. It sells very well, and at three times the price of unadulterated coconut water.”
Ly sighs, as if the telling has made him as tired as all the doing. They sit in comfortable silence, arriving at Ben Tre just before lunch. Ly insists on eating with his plant managers, all ethnic Chinese men from Ly’s parents Trieu Chau clan. They adjourn to a dining pavilion built beside a man-made pond, and spend the next two hours working through an enormous meal of river fish, country pork, and sour soup. Then, they take a short siesta in hammocks strung up by the side of the pavilion.
When they wake, Thong is taken on an upstairs downstairs tour of the facility, a huge rusted fortress of clanking machinery and steaming boilers. It’s manned by nearly a hundred sweating bare bodied men, sinewy and underfed, all apparently very grateful for the work available. In the front of the factory, under coconut thatched sheds, young women sit on the floor in rows, their deft fingers wrapping up the finished soap bars in bright pink packaging printed by another of Ly’s businesses up the road.
On the journey home, Thong expects Ly to pick up the rest of his story. Instead, Ly he steers the conversation towards Thong and what he’s been up to in the years abroad.
Being Ly, his question is direct and to the point.
“Whom do you work for now? Who actually asked you to come back?” he interrupts halfway through Thong’s story about Nina, his marriage, his work in the narrow and extremely specialized field of aerospace fasteners, his climb up the ranks of the aerospace industry.
Thong tries to answer as best as he can.
“It’s the Americans who sent me back. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they think Vietnam will eventually welcome them, allow them to be a counterweight to China. I’m supposed to be paving the way.”
“They’re throwing money around, as usual,” he grimaces. “But this time they want to use their money for machinery and factories, not guns.”
He shrugs his shoulders.
“The Americans are paying me. But, I don’t take any sides except my own these days.” He has finally understood the lesson Chú Hai threw at him. “If I can help my family, my friends and put some rice into someone’s rice bowl, that’s enough for me.”
It’s a good enough answer for Ly. The type of attitude he himself has. After those years of foolishness dallying with the Communists, it appears that his old friend Thong, always too full of emotions, has finally seen sense. He leans over and whispers to Thong what he’s thinking of doing and how he needs Thong to help.
______
Jerry Chung, impatient with the lateness of Thong’s first report, is waiting in the lobby of the Bangkok hotel when Thong gets in from the airport.
He pounces on Thong, “I heard that the first two persons you went to see after your official meetings were a newly promoted NVA general and a retired NVA colonel. And after that, one of the biggest unofficial financiers for the state owned companies.”
He’s elated.
“Are you on a roll or not guy?” he compliments Thong.
______
Indeed Thong is on a roll. And he works feverishly while this luck lasts, to put flesh on the bones of Ly’s proposal and bring it to reality.
What Ly had whispered in Thong’s ear was the name of an American beverage company, the world leader. Ly wanted a joint venture with them. Ly’s reasons, as reported by Thong to Jerry were – first, simple ambition; second, a desire to help his country by creating jobs and importing new machinery and methods; and third, his need to have a powerful foreign investor to shield him from his domestic partners.
Thong lets Jerry decide which of the reasons weighs most heavily in Ly’s mind. In his own mind though, Thong knows why he’s working so hard for Ly.
Ly had told Thong, “a three legged stool is more stable than something with two legs, especially for the very large man I’ve become,”
Ly’s partners have become too dependent on him. While he’s been very careful not to make his partners feel insecure, he fears the day when his empire might be appropriated and divided amongst other less clever businessmen; when his partners will neutralize him and take control of the asset base that makes it all possible.
“Divide and rule, that’s the inclination. Doesn’t matter which type of regime,” he says to Thong ruefully. “My mistake was to go full steam ahead, forgetting those political constraints. My father would never have let this happen if he were still in Vietnam. Don’t ever stand in front, he would’ve told me. I was too arrogant.”
His brands are so well known, the companies so large, they can only be appropriated totally if he’s found guilty of grave crimes, for which the only sentence will be death.
“With a proper joint venture contract with foreign board representation and international accounting, it would be difficult to accuse me of the types of crimes that would see me dead.”
Ly wants the particular partner he’s named because it’s global, powerful and quintessentially American. As for why he’s offering the much smaller soft drink factory and not the soap operation? Because the soap operation is already shared, and unfortunately the third leg there is from Russia, a country whose influence in the right circles is fast fading.”
“It’s the same strategy the old kings used to protect themselves from their neighbours, sending their daughters off to new allies when the old ones got weak. Now I need an American, and the soft drinks plant is the only one that’s marriageable.”
He isn’t worried about losing his wealth. He philosophizes, “we don’t come with anything, and we can’t take anything away with us.”
But he doesn’t want to die just yet. “My children are young, and I am still very fond of my wife.”
______
Thong remembers the sandbags built up into a U-shaped wall in the Martyr’s Square just five-hundred meters from his high school. They would be set up the evening before a public execution. If he saw them there, he avoided that route to school the next day. But one early morning, summoned by his Blood Father for coffee, he’d had to cycle past the site just as a convoy of green trucks pulled up. Hoping that noise and distance would shelter him from the sight and sound of the impending slaughter, he’d rushed into the market and made his way to the far end where the coffee stall was. Nonetheless, he’d heard quite clearly above the market’s hubbub, the boots of the soldiers, the shouting of the mob, and the fusillade of carbines as they discharged their bullets. The market fell silent, and then two piercing screams came through the great door and echoed through the hall. They were from the wives of the incredibly wealthy Chinese businessman who’d just been shot dead for profiteering.
The memory, which Thong had buried until Ly’s audacious idea, commits Thong full-heartedly to Ly’s pursuit of the soft drinks joint venture. He shuttles back and forth with Jerry to Hong Kong and Singapore in rounds of strategy meetings. Between these, he goes to Ho Chi Minh City to confer with Ly and to play interminable rounds of tennis with the directors of an obscure state body which Ly has nominated as the government partner. He makes each trip laden with presents, liquor and international cigarettes for the future business partners and his brothers-in-law, medicine and Chinese herbal medicine for his father and sisters, a walking frame for his mother; and slipped in the lining of his suit case, English magazines for Chú Hai.
After a few weeks, he becomes inured to the wrenching transitions that he experiences between the glitz and bustle of Hong Kong, the self satisfied efficiency of Singapore and the wretchedness of Vietnam. These are just externalities. On purpose again, working towards the peak of his game, Thong feels he has recovered his identity. He has become most himself.
______
Thong’s letters to Nina, arriving regularly every week, walk her through this purpose filled life. She walks with Thong through the negotiations to get Ly a joint venture with one of the world’s biggest soft drink companies, seeing how he must balance precariously between maintaining the trust Ly has put in him, Jerry’s interests and the demands of the officials who represent the government partners. She’s allowed to look in on private meetings with Ly’s Trieu Chau intermediaries in Bangkok and Hong Kong. Thong explains the arcane financial arrangements that Ly devises so everyone gets both their on-shore and off-shore pieces of action, all done without breaking a single international regulation. And then, she joins him on the search for a suitable South East Asian proxy who’ll stand in for the international one until the trade embargo limiting Vietnam’s dealings with the developed world can be lifted.
______
Just before Easter, Thong reports a hitch with Ly’s project – political difficulties in Thailand mean that the Bangkok proxies can no longer sign the bottling agreement. Jerry is courting a party in the Philippines, but these are not people Ly knows. Trust must be built first, and that may take a while. Thong stops himself from adding … just as I too must build trust between us. Instead, he tells Nina that in the meantime, to keep him busy, Jerry’s sending him on a cross-country tour to develop new business opportunities.
______
Jerry wants him to go to Dalat, to scout for a location to build a golf course.
“How’s that consistent with a machinery import-export business?” Thong asks.
“Amazing amount of equipment you can put into a building if you’re the contractor,” Jerry twinkles. ”A mountain’s also a wonderful place to intercept signals, if you can get the right uninterrupted location, the correct equipment. And … golf courses are great gathering places for elites.”
Like his Blood Father’s cock fighting pit! Thong gets it now. He nods.
“But you don’t play golf do you?” Jerry asks Thong, suddenly taking a different tack.
Thong shakes his head, wondering what will come next.
“You have no idea how much you can lose when making bets with your partner on a golf course do you?” another rhetorical Jerry question, but one Thong doesn’t immediately know the answer to.
“All cash, unrecorded,” Jerry tells him. He rubs his index finger and thumb together, adds, “You’ll figure, you’re a smart guy.”
Thong should take up golfing lessons, he says.
______
In a small act of disclosure, Thong reports this conversation to Nina. Nina writes back a simple ‘be careful’ before going on to report that she and the children are well and acknowledging the arrival of his company’s monthly dependants’ allowance check, wired into their Orange County bank account. Much as she wants to, she doesn’t tell him that more than once she’s thought of giving up the whole idea of New York City and the pursuit of individuation, felt the unbearable urge to simply pack everyone up and fly to him.
Instead, she encloses a comparison of housing prices in New York City and California and analyses of what might happen if they rent and if they sell. The broker he’s recommended, a referral by Ly’s family, is showing her new developments in Flushing, New York City’s emerging Asiatown. Papa and Maman on the other hand, believe the West Side of Manhattan, near Columbia University, is a more salubrious location. Can he come to New York to make the decision with her? He’s so much better than she at these things.
______
Thong arrives in California in the early summer. They go to Washington D.C. first, so he can pay his respects to Papa and Mama.
They both give him the cold shoulder.
Maman hasn’t forgiven Thong for presenting them the heavily weighted choice of a pregnant unmarried daughter or a willing but unpedigreed Son-in-Law. Not to mention those strange postcards, which she still thinks were sent to some woman in Asia. Now this … she cannot point her finger at exactly what ‘this’ is, she sobs in bed to Papa. It’s just the whole catastrophe!!!
Papa on the other hand is simply angry that Thong appears to be deserting Nina, and not only that, supporting her decision to move to a dangerous city where his only child and only grandchildren will have to fend for themselves.
“It’s only a train ride away,” Thong says implacably. “Very convenient for you both to visit. And the grandchildren can come to you easily too.”
He looks at Papa firmly, and repeats what he said to Ly, “I’ve to do what I can. If this is how I can help my family and friends, and put rice in someone’s rice bowl, then I should.”
“We must all make sacrifices if we want to grow,” Nina adds, her hand at Thong’s elbow.
They’re much too pre-occupied manoeuvring the awkwardness of their first face to face encounter after the tentative disclosures in his letters to spoil their re-union battling her parents’ hostility. A new tenderness has arisen between them. They make love tentatively in her childhood bedroom, exploring each other’s bodies and reactions as if they are teenagers learning the act for the first time. Who are you… who are you… the refrain runs through Nina’s head as they kiss, and sigh, and he traces his fingers down her body, and she receives him, still a stranger but not quite.
The children, stand offish at first, soon forgive him for his long absence and welcome him back as referee and inconstant ally in the constant squabble that’s their relationship.
They want to know about Vietnam and what their forthcoming visit will be like. He tells them it’s beautiful, but without the modern conveniences they may be accustomed to. It’ll be fun, he assures them, so long as they lower their expectations about cleanliness and efficiency.
“By how much,” Tri, ever exact, wants to know.
“By a huge whopping amount,” Tam the creator of nightmares says before Thong can offer a comforting estimate. “Expect toilets that pong like elephant poop, swarms of flies the size of MiG squadrons, a grandmother so wizen she looks like a thousand year old witch.”
“I won’t go then,” Tri decides.
Thong gives Tam an admonitory tap on her forearm with his index finger.
“Come,” he says to them both, digging in his suitcase.
He comes up with a stack of photographs meant for Nina.
“Look,” he shows them.
______
Nina finds the two of them in the living room poring over the pictures later, when Thong has gone for his after dinner run. There’s one of luminous green rice fields with a young boy standing on a padi bund, his piss painting a shining arc against the evening sun; another of a mountain peak shrouded in morning mist and a long golden finger lake surrounded by neat patches of vegetable fields. Then a third, of a man in his forties in a bonsai filled courtyard with his arm flung loosely over a younger man in a suit with his face hidden in shadow; and then one of a different man laughing behind a caged rooster. Finally, there’s a landscape of a turquoise coloured bay surrounded by a crescent of shining white sand fringed by a forest of beach pines.
“Toilet arrangements in the Delta” Tri informs Nina.
“No smells Dad says. Also, it’s very good for the rice plants because piss is full of nitrogen.” He nods with satisfaction at the thought of his contribution to the ecosystem.
“Lang Bian Peak in Dalat,” Tam points to the mountain, “surrounded by impenetrable jungle full of evil nasty tribesmen who can paralyze you with a single puff on their blow pipe. At the bottom is the golden valley, where you roll into and drown after they’ve paralyzed you.”
“How can you roll down impenetrable jungle?” Nina asks Tam.
“She doesn’t make sense does she?” she says to Tri. She adds, knowing how he hangs on to an idea once it’s been put in his head, “Don’t worry. If you don’t want to go up the mountains, you don’t have to leave your Third Aunt’s when you sister and Dad go. You can always stay back.”
______
“I always knew I’d leave,” Thong confesses to Nina that night when they look at the picture of the rice fields again.
“All because of a kite,” he says. He tells her about the kite he got from a young man with sparkling eyes, how it lost itself. “I imagined it flying over unknown lands, across the ocean. And after that, I knew I had to go where it might have gone, see what it might have seen.”
He wonders if Nina of the mandarin ancestors and D.C. upbringing will understand how far the outside world seemed to a young boy from the rice fields of Bac Lieu. How impossible his longing to see the other side would appear. Perhaps not, he concludes.
He moves on to the next photo, Dalat where his parents went on honeymoon. He relates their story, as much as he knows. How his Blood Father, under pressure from his family to beat the deadline of a childless fate, married his young bride out of duty and compassion. How he knows for sure they had two weeks of happiness in Dalat, the rest a big question mark. But it was happiness enough for them to give him his name, he says. He tells her its true meaning for the first time, wondering as he does, why he’d kept this small thing unspoken between them. He hears her repeating it. She’s making the same sound as before, but does she now see a different person? … Someone who bends to endure? … Someone resilient enough to remain himself through the twists and turns of life? … Someone who’ll wait for her to turn around? Perhaps … He feels her lean over, her mouth kissing him. He brings her hand to his chest, where the circlet now hangs on a new black leather string. Caressing it with her, smoothing away the years, he falls asleep in her arms.
The next night, he shows her the picture of himself and Chú Hai in the garden of the hotel.
“What do you see?” he asks her.
“Two men in a garden. I’d guess from the face that the older man is your Blood Father. I can’t really see the other face but obviously it’s you,” she replies.
“Yes, that’s me the day of my commencement,” Thong tells her. The photo was taken in the courtyard of the hotel where the ceremony was held. “We see what we expect to see. I had that photo for years and never saw what you just saw, until …”
He passes the picture of the man with the roosters to her.
“That,” he says, “is my Blood Father, the rooster master.”
“This,” he points back to the older man in the courtyard, “is Chú Hai, my English tutor for many years. Nowadays, in Ho Chi Minh City, he’s better known as General Trung, Chairman of the Institute for the Study of Foreign Relations. He used to be a journalist for an American magazine. Now he’s a high party official.”
“He was my boss, you might say …”.
Nina peers at the picture more closely. It’s an open face. A little pensive. Not what she would expect of a spymaster who becomes a high-ranking party member. But, this isn’t really the point of Thong showing her the two photographs. It’s the uncanny physical resemblance between the tutor and Thong that he wants her to notice. In the photograph, she sees that they both have the tanned skin of South Vietnamese from the Delta, the same slim muscular build. The older man’s stance is more relaxed, his hands open on the belt of his trousers, while both of Thong’s fists are clenched close against his belt buckle, pulling his suit jacket together. Thong’s face is hidden, but the tutor’s is not. She sees that the tutor’s eyes are different from the ones she knows so well. They’re softer and more open, not shrouded like Thong’s; his expression is thoughtful, without Thong’s sullenness.
She turns to the picture of the fair skinned broad shouldered man squatting with his roosters. His wide mouth opened in laughter, reveals large cigarette stained teeth. He’s good looking in a soldierly way very different from Thong’s and the tutor’s fine boned scholar’s features. He has a square jaw, very thick eyebrows, large eyes with wrinkles at both the outer and inner corners, as if he’s spent a lot of time squinting to see out to a horizon beyond. His hands, stroking the rooster, are large, the fingers solid with square tips.
Nina looks again at the picture of Thong and the tutor. She examines the tutor’s face carefully. She sees the widow’s peak that begins slightly off-centre of his forehead. His salt and pepper hair standing stiff and wild as if an impatient hand has run through it. She puts her finger on Thong’s forehead, at the point slightly to the left where his hair line dips down to meet skin. She runs her fingers through his rough hair, now streaked grey, and cups both hands around Thong’s pointed chin.
“But how?” she asks.
Thong laughs. “It was when I went to say goodbye to him, before escaping that I saw the similarity. I asked him the same thing you asked, how…”
He pauses here and reaches absently for a cigarette to help him through the rest of the telling before remembering he’s given up smoking.
“You give up one cigarette for every day I don’t smoke,” he’d bargained with Chú Hai, in an attempt to make him cut down, contain the quickening deterioration to his lungs.
Surprisingly Chú Hai had agreed. Now Thong realizes, he’s been tricked by the old geezer. Half in and half out of Vietnam, how could he check whether Chú Hai was cheating or not?
Thong smiles at how easily taken in he was.
“You know,” he tells Nina, “Chú Hai has been playing double games and triple games for so long, he probably can’t tell anything straight even if he wants to.”
“”He told me he’d been my parents’ bodyguard during his military training with the Viet Minh, before he went to the city to do intelligence work. He looked after them for slightly less than a year and sometime during this period, he said rather ambiguously, they realized she was pregnant. This was her first pregnancy and she was depressed and had been bleeding,. So my Blood Father had her moved to a temporary camp near the river, where they could more easily get her to town and a hospital if they needed. He sent two bodyguards and a maid with her. The maid, it turns out, was my Step Mother, her husband one of the bodyguards. Chú Hai was the other bodyguard.”
“So, what he said to me was … ‘you know the old wives say that if you spend all your time looking at something while you’re pregnant, then your child will resemble that thing. Well, there was only me, your Step Mother and a very ugly Cambodian to look at. So I guess she was lucky that she spent more time with me than the other two’ … and hen he laughed.”
“After that, he just moved on and started talking about politics, about how he’d heard from Ba Roi that I was to send reports back. And how I needn’t put myself in danger unnecessarily doing it, because he was quite sure the country wouldn’t be able to use any of it.”
“I almost felt as if I’d dreamt the whole conversation. The only other thing is, when I got up to leave, he hugged me for a very long time. And, he called me con trai, son.”
Thong opens his hands, as if that is all there is to the story.
“I visit him every time I go to Vietnam. But, he has never mentioned this matter again. We always have a good time together. I feel a great deal of affection for him, and he for me. There is the physical evidence, but how he became my father, if he really is … I don’t know”
“So, this is our problem. How is someone who can’t even tell you for sure who his father is, tell you who he is?”
Nina doesn’t reply. She squeezes his hand, which she finds to her surprise, has somehow found its way into hers.
“We’ll do it together,” she replies. ”Find the pieces bit by bit.”
______
They go to New York the next day, the story about Nha Trang still untold. Perhaps, because she’s frightened that this new tide of intimacy will sweep her into Thong’s arms too quickly as it did in the beginning Nina begins a quarrel about the realtor Ly’s family recommended.
“Flushing,” she says, unconsciously reproducing Maman’s most snobbish voice, “it sounds like you know … bathrooms.”
Nina sees Thong tighten his lips, deciding he won’t respond. His eyes narrow, as if he’s concentrating tapping out the Chinese realtor’s number. Ever careful, unwilling to risk a fight unless it’s worth it, she knows he’ll only answer her after he’s seen everything for himself.
“I think Flushing’s ideal,” Thong tells her the next day, after they’ve visited a confusing number of co-ops and single family houses. He reels out the reasons, “Like Ly’s family’s advised, it’s a hidden gem with lots of price upside. There’s also the magnet school, and a good ethnic mix with lots of Asians.”
It’s an opinion Nina doesn’t want to hear. She snaps, “Since when, have you been enamoured of living in close proximity to our own kind?”
She can’t stop the quarrel from escalating into one of their cold silent fights, the ones that make Tri retreat into wooden stupidity and forces even motor mouth Tam to watch her words.
He’s late to meet the Jewish realtor who’ll show them apartment buildings on the West Side, and is so intentionally ‘fresh of the boat’ Nina’s sure that the realtor has second thoughts about how acceptable they might be to the co-op committees of the better buildings.
“I know the game you’re playing at,” she hisses at him when he burps into the realtor’s ear as they walk past the august doorman of a West 70th Street pre-war.
He ignores her, whistling loudly as he saunters through the wood panelled lobby.
In the end, the children sort it out for them. For once, not squabbling, they both fall in love with the upper two stories of a brownstone near the United Nations Plaza, not five minutes’ walk from the International School whose fees Jerry has promised to pay, and 39th Street where the C.G. Jung Institute is.
The children see the ‘for sale’ sign when they and Thong are left for an hour to wander the neighbourhood while Nina stops in at the Institute. The white painted door of the brownstone has been accidentally left open, revealing a bright yellow tiled landing, and a rainbow coloured staircase.
“It pops,” Tam says to Tri.
He nods.
They’re both pleased to see this burst of whimsy in no-nonsense, on-the-go black-red-and-grey New York City.
“Can we go see please?” they both ask Thong, disappearing into the lobby and up the staircase before he can reply.
The children walk up the yellow, orange, red, violet, indigo, blue and green steps and find an empty apartment, stark white with a disappointingly normal arrangement of living spaces. But, at one corner of the living room is another rainbow coloured staircase, this time a spiral. They scramble up it to find a vast open attic with a wooden floor that steps gently upwards at one end in gradually deepening blue. At the top end of this floor/wall is a moon hatch opening into a terrace just big enough for a built-in metal bench curved like a crescent. And from there, the children see, between the rooftops, a section of the United Nations’ Plaza and its flag poles. On that day, from a certain angle, what they both glimpse is the red Vietnamese flag with its yellow star. A sign, they smile at each other.
Bumping down the wooden floor/wall on their bottoms, they run to the spiral staircase and through the apartment, brushing past a caretaker just locking up the front door. They rush up to their father.
“We must live here!” they shout in unison.
They explain about the colours, the floor/wall, the moon hatch, the roof terrace and the flag, especially the flag.
“Not Papi’s and Memé’s flag with the three red strips, but the one with the star,” Tam’s words tumble out.
“The alive flag,” Tri says, as usual getting the emotional essence of other people’s feelings exactly right, “where you are.”
“As long as we can see that flag,” Tam promises Thong, “we’ll always be together, the four of us.”
To which Tri nods solemnly, “cross my heart and swear to die.”
When they go to view it, Nina discovers a mezzanine under the attic’s sloping floor which will be ideal for her study. The neighbours, two respectably retired gay men, are around most of the day and will provide security in lieu of a doorman, she tries to convince Thong. Who, strangely enough, doesn’t argue with her despite the brownstone’s hefty price tag.
So, the decision is sealed. The apartment on the top two floors of the brownstone is bought.
Thong grumbles as he signs over the check for the deposit – he doesn’t know what the world is coming to when he has to give up a custom built split level with ten-thousand square feet of land and a swimming pool for two floors in an eighty year old building. But that’s the only time he complains. And in the late summer, when he brings the children back there thinner and browner from their Vietnamese holiday, and climbs up to the roof terrace with them, he does indeed see the yellow star of the Vietnamese flag from a certain angle. This is the essential thing, the thing well worth the sacrifice of ten-thousand square feet and the swimming pool. A daily promise to his children that he will always come back, that one day they’ll be together again.
______
The 2 T’s settle into a New York routine little changed from that in Orange County. Every morning their mother takes them to school before going off to work. As in Orange County, they stay on in after-school care until six, when she comes again for them after she’s done at the hospital. They don’t notice the city and its hectic business. There are only small differences – fall is much colder; instead of being driven long distances they walk around the five blocks that’s their world of school and home; their cousin Kim, who used to sit them when their mother went to see her dissertation supervisors, comes now on a Monday night instead of a Wednesday; and instead of being a college student and living at home, she’s now looking to do something at a bank and living with someone called Jake whom they are not to tell their Uncle and Auntie Sixth about. Also, their father doesn’t come home from his business trips at the end of the week as he used to do … but that’s been happening for almost a year already. They wait for Christmas to see him, when they’ll go to Asia with their mother, just like they did the year before.
At Christmas, Thong doesn’t invite Nina nor does she ask to visit Vietnam. The family spends December on an island facing the Andaman Sea where in the mornings, they walk the beaches and snorkel; and in the afternoons, Thong sends the children to attend wind-surfing lessons while he and Nina are massaged by sturdy Thai women. After dinner, Thong takes the children to fish for squid on a jetty over an ink-black sea, and later when the children sleep, makes love to Nina deep into the night. He does not ask her when she will come back. He does not discuss when he might end this assignment he’s on. He’s simply glad that the children, seemingly wiser than their years, accept this outwardly dormant stage of his and Nina’s relationship and do not ask for his return into the family fold.
Thong sees the years going on this way, indefinitely … a most unsatisfying future. But, his being here, doing what he does, feels as essentially right as Nina tells him her being in New York City feels as she explores her own psyche and that of others, helps her clients, heals herself. He sends the family off.
Thong continues reclaiming his life, musing over what he will write on the walk alone, always alone, up to his apartment or hotel room after evenings of dining … drinking … karaoke. Each line he sets down is a revelation, written with trepidation, accompanied by the always present ache of longing in his loins, a soreness much worse than the pain inflicted by Oldest on his big toe. As Thong folds up the papers filled with lines, some to sent to Nina, others to put away until he’s ready to share them, he wonders with a touch of resentment how Nina expects him to continue like this, to live for months on end without her, without a woman.
______
One evening, in Ho Chi Minh City, sitting over a cup of tea in Chú Hai’s courtyard before he sets out for a night with Ly and the potential partners from the Philippines, he raises this indirectly with Chú Hai, who’s never married.
“Do you remember Julia Anderson?” he asks, looking into the amber liquid in his cup, not meeting the other man’s eyes.
General Trung nods. He wonders if he should mention that Julia Anderson’s recently called on him at the Institute in her new capacity as cultural attaché at the US Information Services Office in Japan. That she’s brought along the dust-coloured high-nosed son she said she’d adopted in the Middle East, a university student majoring in International Relations, to introduce to him.
No, not useful, he decides. He bends his head down close to Thong’s, so they cannot but see eye-to-eye.
“Doesn’t matter if I remember her, the important thing, con, is that you still do,”
he tells Thong kindly. “It’s alright you know. You always remember the first time. Or you should anyway. Even if you might want to forget it because it didn’t happen the way your heart would have wished. What you should remember with Julia Anderson is that the heart wasn’t an issue then. It was first of all business, important business.”
“What you should remember now, in these days of peace, is not to let your body run away from you for anything less important than love. What you should remember is that there are some sacrifices worth making if you’re lucky enough to meet your heart’s companion,” he says sternly, tapping his index and middle fingers on Thong’s thigh.
Thong smiles. How well Chú Hai knows him.
“So, why did you tell me, that time when you introduced me to Julia Anderson, that when I got to this age, what I’d need would be sixteen year olds for my wet noodle?” he teases.
“Don’t misquote me,” Chú Hai protests with mock anger. “You think I’ve forgotten the exact words I said then? I said I needed sixteen year olds, not you. You’re the same age now, but first, you’ve had the benefit of an American diet for ten years so I’m sure you don’t have a problem with a wet noodle. Second, you’re married to what I understand is a beautiful understanding woman whom you love dearly. I was free as a bird then, still am. The love of my life died years ago. Almost as long ago as you’ve been alive…” Thong hears Chú Hai stutter to a stop.
A confirmation of the other thing, perhaps. Thong stores it away in his heart. He leaves it at that. Bids his farewell. And grins and tries to contain his reactions when the little birds so essential to Ly’s entertainments flock about him, and run their light fingers over his chest and legs. And tears himself away from them, at an appropriately polite time.
______
An engineer, an interpreter, a spy … a dealmaker! Thong wonders what the Superintendant and Commander would think about his activities since his return – intermediating a state-owned company’s joint venture here, arranging international financing to import factory equipment there, smoothing Oldest Brother-in-Law’s pending migration to America, securing a soft drinks distributorship for Seventh Sister, placing this or that sister’s tribe of sons and daughters in a factory job here, an office job there. He’s helping family and friends, filling rice bowls where he can; Thong thinks the Superintendant would approve … but the Commander?
Thong doesn’t wonder what Chú Hai thinks. Chú Hai, never enamoured of money, views Thong’s activities with amused detachment. Thong’s business affairs interest him only because at this point in the millennium, factories and machinery are the new channels for diplomacy. When they meet, it’s no longer to argue politics or dissect history but simply to have a cup of tea and update each other on their latest activities, how Thong’s children are, what Nina’s latest state of mind is. As a father and son would talk.
Chú Hai remains committed to the country. He pours all his professional energy into the Institute of Foreign Relations – training successive intakes of party members, hosting international visitors, and re-visioning the perception of the war and the downfall of the South. Still the propagandist, Thong sometimes mocks in jest, but they don’t quarrel.
Their relationship meanders slow and broad like the maturing Mekong that nourishes their Delta. On the tide of this gentle flow, it seems to Thong that the day when he and Nina will come back together will also eventually arrive, although when he does not know. His letters fill with more detail and he steadies himself to finally send her the envelopes and files fat with the memories he still cannot bear to relate to her directly, the sum of his other life.
XIII. REAPING
The two red spots on Thong’s soles continue to cast their protective magic even as the Superintendant’s wife, increasingly blind and senile, forgets their existence altogether.
Thong is rewarded for his labours on Ly’s behalf. The shares Ly offers him in the soft-drink joint venture, a bank Ly starts, a mobile communications network across the Delta they both facilitate, a consumer goods distribution network in Can Tho they set up, produce earnings which compound slowly but inexorably in proxy accounts both in Vietnam and off-shore. Aside from dealings with Ly, Thong acquires other partners, Minh’s friends and associates who’ve heard by word of mouth that he’s a discreet man with access to foreign partners and foreign money. They are years of fat for Thong. He is happy. If he had Nina and the children with him, he would be ecstatic.
______
“He’s selfish,” Maman Nguyen complains to Papa, leaving Nina and the children to pursue some quixotic adventure abroad.
“She is too,” Papa reminds her objectively. “The boy’s making good money. She’s finished her training. There’s no good reason for her to stay in New York to set up a counselling practice of her own and deprive her children of a full time father.”
Maman nods.
They both sigh. Young people nowadays!
______
Nina tells Papa and Maman, she and Thong
are both fine with things the way they are. She doesn’t tell them that of course, things would be better if Thong came home to New York to stay. It is not to be and they must both make do.
Thong has his intrigues, which he now tells her about; at least as much as is professionally feasible. She has her patients, who engage her quite as much as Thong’s intrigues engage him. Professional ethics doesn’t allow her to tell him about them. But he can patently see she’s extremely successful with them. There’s always someone in her waiting room in the ground floor apartment bought over from the widowed gay owner downstairs. Her appointments are so full she’s stopped accepting new patients. She’s making a good living, she’s helping people, just as Thong is. How can they want more?
Like all Jungian therapists, she herself continues to go to therapy. But the search for herself now seems less urgent. She is who she is. Her confusion about her beginnings, her inability to understand the logic of the war that caused her parents and Thong to lose a country albeit being on different sides, are just facts of her existence. Wholeness is as much about self acceptance as it is about clarity she’s learnt.
_____
So, the letters between Nina and Thong, the trans-Pacific flights, the tender re-unions and phlegmatic partings, continue. Through the ups and downs of Saddam Hussein’s increasing isolation in Iraq, a ground breaking for a golf resort in the mountains, Nina’s appointment to the Management Committee of the Institute, the children’s year-in year-out presence on the International School’s honour roll, through public upheavals and private triumphs.
But their fat bank balances, Nina’s psychological balance, even the two red dots on Thong’s soles that keep his fate in balance, can’t shield them from karma. In 1992, again a year of the Monkey full of mischief, just as Thong oversees the completion of the Dalat golf course Jerry wants so badly, as he’s tilting into the sea at 100 kilometres per hour on the frame shaking mountain road from Dalat to Nha Trang, a jury in Los Angeles hands out an extra-ordinary verdict. Los Angeles is engulfed in flames.
In New York City, Nina and Kim watch horrified at the TV images of black men and women beating up Hispanics on the corner of Normandie and Florence. They hold their breath as the mob runs up the broad Los Angeles roadways towards Koreatown and then is repulsed by Korean vigilantes with hand guns and flamethrowers at the Olympic intersection. Their guts wrench as they see the tide turn towards South Central and the one storey shop fronts lining the boulevard. The crowd smashes windows, stops and topples cars, drags the drivers out to beat them, torches the buildings by the road side. The TV shows the smoke rising thick and black in the dark wake of the crowd all the way from Koreatown to the Santa Monica Freeway.
“The nail salon!” Kim exclaims, rushing for the telephone.
______
They go on the earliest available flight, leaving Tam and Tri with Papa and Maman, who’ve driven up to watch them. Flying into Orange County Airport to avoid the riot-stricken areas around Los Angeles International, they meet Thong just off his trans-Pacific flight. It’s the third day after the riots, there’s still isolated violence up in Los Angeles. Although they’re a good twenty five miles from there, Thong drives with extreme courtesy so as not to incite anyone whose anger may still be simmering, who may want to force Thong’s vehicle onto a road shoulder, push his angry face against Thong’s car window and shoot Thong’s brains out.
The apartment is full of friends and relatives, but Sixth and Thi are not there. Sixth is at the Torrance Burn Centre, where Thi was taken after her rescue from the burning nail salon. He’s been there for the last three days. First, to watch over his youngest as she was wheeled into emergency, then to hover outside the ICU watching her strangely unfamiliar mummy-wrapped body struggle for breath, and finally today, her last, trying to arrange transportation to Orange County for her body. It isn’t till Sunday, the fifth day, that Sixth can bring his youngest daughter home. They bury her on Monday after a service attended by more people than they can count.
She’s in a closed casket. Her burnt face had been too awful for Sixth to contemplate for more than a few seconds and he refuses to let Huong have a last look at it.
“Better to remember her the way she always looked,” he says to her firmly, barring her entry into the mortician’s room until they’ve closed the white gilded casket and put the screws in the cover.
______
It was to be just a moment, a quick run from the alley through the back door into her mother’s office to pick up her term paper. But in that moment, the Molotov cocktail flung from the dusty street finds a way pass the iron-bars and goes through the front glass window. And in seconds, all the acetones, the polishes, the removers and the polyester carpet are burning. The glass partition separating Huong’s back office from the salon is no barrier to the fire. The pressure from the heat is so intense Thi can’t pull the door open from the inside nor can Sixth hammer the door in from the alley to pull her out. The sprinklers turn on as they’re supposed to; the fire-trucks come almost immediately after. Still it’s too late. Even though they evacuate her by helicopter to the best burn unit in the Southland and work on her skin and her lungs and her face through the night.
“It’s karma,” Sixth tells Thong.
It’s retribution. Payback for everything he and Thong and Oldest Brother-in-Law and uncountable Vietnamese men of their generation did and never acknowledged or asked pardon for.
“Karma,” he repeats letting himself fall into Thong’s arms, no longer the shining hero of his younger brother’s childhood.
He shakes, tearlessly, against Thong’s shoulders and chest.
Thong holds Sixth steady against the storm of emotion, the self blame.
“Every month,” he promises Sixth, “I’ll have fifty kilograms of rice distributed to the temples and churches in Nha Trang, to give to the poor.”
_____
Jerry’s and Ly’s needs be damned! The 2 T’s are more precious to Thong than anything now. He swaps his trans-Pacific ticket for one to New York City.
“I need to see them,” he says simply to Nina.
On the plane he tells Nina, “Sixth is right. We men, we’re marked by karma after everything we did in the war. Even if Sixth and I only harmed people because of things we didn’t do, still there were consequences to our inaction. This is why ….” even after a week, he still cannot speak directly of Thi, acknowledge with his own lips that she is dead.
He sighs and leans his head into the seat in front of him.
______
It was in Nha Trang that the boy was burnt to death, the end result of a chain of events he and Sixth started. It wasn’t what they intended. They hadn’t even been aware of what each other was up to. But, in the end … Eyes closed against the other passengers in the plane, against Nina’s hovering presence ready to offer comfort, eyes closed to block out his own grief and fear, Thong remembers.
Sixth had already been in Nha Trang as a propaganda officer for a few years when Thong arrived after his army posting. Thong had been sent to take over the management of the machinery supply depot and quarry. At twenty five, the enormity of the responsibility overawed him. He was in charge of the Rome plough rentals and maintenance, the quarry itself, the rock crushing plant, the gravel plants and over a hundred men.
It was a golden time, Thong remembers with nostalgia. Everything glittered, the city with its shining beaches, the girls, the money pouring in. He was the plant manager, unmarried, with a company pick-up truck. He lived in a company bungalow. In a city where the American’s were leaving, he was easily the best catch around for the girls left to fend for themselves. And, he’d been so puppy dog eager to let them get at him. Just as he’d been so eager to let everything else come at him, including the bribes and the double dealing.
Thong thought of them as commissions, the white envelopes stuffed with cash from the private contractors given a chance to lease the Roman ploughs to clear jungle for the government. Arriving on his desk after every completed tender, Thong knew they were meant as an incentive for him to give the successful contractor’s next bid the same priority. Since he assessed the bids according to a checklist left behind by the Americans and awarded the tenders to the most qualified bidder, he didn’t feel bad about appropriating the envelopes. The amount stuffed into them never figured as a consideration in his decisions. It was just that sometimes Thong did junk the American checklist. This would happen when one or other of Chú Hai’s ‘friends’, bidders who would never have qualified using the checklist, needed access to a plough. It amused Thong that this seeming randomness in the awards confused the larger contractors, who simplistically assumed he was willing to do anything for enough money and so stuffed more bills into his envelopes.
Money ran into his life like a spring tide. The irony didn’t escape Thong that he was lending the “other” side government owned ploughs so they could clear jungle for the Northern Army’s tanks to move in, and at the same time was getting richer by the month doing it. It was a win-win situation for him, a lose-lose one for the government. No wonder, he thinks now on the plane headed towards New York, the war’s outcome.
Carrying out the second part of his responsibilities to Chú Hai was just as easy. He had to provide Chú Hai‘s friends with the ploughing schedules and locations, so the Northern units already in-country could move out of the way and remain hidden until they were ready to attack. All Thong did was leave the next week’s schedule on his desk before leaving for lunch or a coffee break. When he got back, he knew, it would have been read and memorized, and he would put it back into his drawer and lock it up again. It was that simple.
To be able provide equipment and intelligence useful to a force build-up he’d believed in, to not have blood on his hands and be able to sleep through the night guilt free, Thong realizes now what a rare privilege that was. He circles his shoulder blades against the narrow airplane seat as he remembers that wonderful wrinkle in time.
It didn’t last. One Friday, he came back from an afternoon meeting to find a slim envelope on top of the ploughing schedules he’d left out as usual. Inside there was a note requesting that he leave the keys to the fuelling station out. Given the sky high prices of fuel at the time and the fact that he’d just awarded a contract for one of the next week’s ploughs to a friend of Chú Hai’s Thong assumed ‘they’ needed to tap some fuel from his tanks. He left the keys out as instructed, without a second thought, and hopped onto his pick-up to drive to Sixth’s and Huong’s for dinner.
Thong had made a mental note to come in early on Monday to adjust the fuel readings back to their previous levels if needed. But he hadn’t thought ahead and asked the duty guard at the station to take the night off. This is how it came about that a young boy from a small hamlet west of Nha Trang was still at the station sprawled asleep in front of the key rack, when the sappers crept in. He was a very good guard, the boy’s colleagues told Thong later, a light sleeper. But, he’d no chance against the half a dozen men who overpowered him, knocked him unconscious, and then set the station on fire.
While barbecuing cuttle fish to go with their beer, Thong and Sixth heard the explosion from the massive fuel tanks all the way across town. By the time Thong rushed back to the depot, everything was up in flames, including the boy.
It was 1974. The Communists had just sabotaged the oil storage depot in Nha Be near Saigon, burning up fourteen million litres of gasoline. World oil prices were at an all time high, and the Americans had just cut aid again. It made sense to Thong that the neighbourhood guerrillas execute a copycat action as a statement, as part of a strategy of attrition. But, if he’d been less careless, if he’d taken the young guard off duty, the boy would not have died. Thong sees this clearly in his mind’s eye – one notch for karma, one notch against himself.
As for Sixth’s part … It began with a series of thefts. 1974 was a hard year. Morale had plunged as the number of Americans in-country dwindled. There were new VAT taxes and a tripling of prices that Tết. Sixth himself couldn’t make his salary last more than half a month. It was much worse for his men. Sixth had no choice but to divert some of the rice issued to the propaganda units for poor hamlets to himself and his own men. He had three squads, twenty four families, plus another four or five families of widows and children, almost a village in all. To feed them, he cut off supplies from hamlets he thought were unfriendly. Why support the Northern army at the expense of his own people? Better to starve them into submission.
The Communists didn’t go down without a fight. The headman from one of the starved hamlets went to the authorities, accusing Sixth of misappropriation. To prove that the hamlet was an enemy sanctuary and so clear himself, Sixth got a friend from the local army unit to carry out a sweep. They netted a whole squad of Northern sappers. After the sweep, the villagers found the headman’s body in a stream, strangle marks still black around his water bloated neck.
In a twist of karma, it turns out that Sixth’s friend had an only son, the boy on duty the night Thong’s fuel station was blown up. Thong doesn’t know if his and Sixth’s part in the boy’s death is part of some grand karmic link they have, or if it’s just a retaliatory lesson for Sixth’s friend.
Thong says to Nina, “Everything connects, although it’s never clear how until it actually happens.” What he knows is that karma’s now exacted its due from Sixth for his part in that boy’s death. But, what about Thong’s own dues though? When will he be asked to pay back and how?
Nina sees Thong shake his head as he tries to figure out the chains of causation and retribution, his stiff hair brushing against the fabric of the plane seat. She reaches over and strokes his ear, willing him back to the present to her.
He opens his eyes, asks her, “Did I ever tell you about the neighbour from Bac Lieu who lost his head in 1968? The one who shot off birds’ heads as a kid, then lost his own in the Tết offensive?”
He doesn’t wait for Nina to answer but continues, “In a war, we all end up killing, one way or another. It’s difficult not to, even when you don’t take sides. Once you take sides, it’s impossible.” he says almost to himself.
His eyes are tortured, Nina sees.
“Even here, in America, karma can catch up. Terrible things can happen. Like those riots in LA.”
“You shouldn’t do this to me Nina,” he pleads, “send me back alone there, worrying about what might happen to the children and to you. It’s time, come back with me.”
Nina shakes her head.
“Anything can happen anywhere,” she whispers to him.
“What you need to do is to forgive yourself,” she counsels him in the same way she does her clients. “You did the best you could, in the circumstances. There was nothing else you could do better, nothing.”
“And I love you,” she concludes.
Love is what will level the scales, Nina the returned to her roots Catholic, the believer in redemption, the one who has faith that love can wash away all sins, hopes and prays.
______
Nina isn’t as selfish as Papa Nguyen judges. She’s affected by Thong’s distress. Still it is five years before she gives herself and her patients a break and joins the children and Thong in Vietnam for a summer. She might have waited longer, but the Superintendant is dying. Nina must go to meet him. If she waits another year it will be too late, Thong tells her with such firmness she knows she must go.
They make a family trip of it; Sixth, Huong, Kim and the three boys going along, their first return since leaving in 1975. From the airport, they go straight to the Delta, bypassing Saigon. Outside the city, Vietnam is exactly as Nina imagines. The rice fields and wayside towns and villages are life-sized versions of the descriptions Nina read in her textbooks. The skinny brown children in T-shirts and baseball caps modern re-incarnations of the street urchins she’d seen in the 1970 magazine articles. Thong’s relatives, when Nina meets them, also fit Nina’s ideas of what war-hardened Vietnamese should be. The reticent Ba Roi, tall and brown and stringy is how she would expect an old jungle fighter to look. Angry-eyed Oldest Brother-in-Law, soon to leave for California, is identical to the anti-Communist ODP arrivals flooding into Orange County. Oldest Sister is Thong’s acidly described prima donna brought to life and his Can Tho and Bac Lieu sisters and other brothers-in-law are the Vietnamese farmers and farm wives of her imagination.
But reality is not a stage set. After the kind greetings and platitudes, Nina finds she has nothing to say to anyone of them. The women’s soft welcoming caresses on her hands and forearms, the way they draw her in close to their sides to exchange this or that confidence, their pats of admiration on her white smooth skin are too familiar, too soon. She wants to pull violently away, keep these kin who are still strangers to her at a safe New Yorker’s arm’s length.
After her first audience there, Nina avoids the middle hall of the family house where her dying Father-in-Law, the main purpose of her visit, is gasping his last breaths. She’s traumatized by his painful dying, so different from the familiar morphine cushioned passing of patients in the US.
“Why isn’t anyone giving him anything?” she asks Thong furiously in the attic which Thong gutted out entirely to make a new air-conditioned bedroom for the children’s first and subsequent summer visits, and which they’re now occupying.
“He needs to be aware of what he’s going through,” Thong explains, again, patiently. The Superintendant must be mentally present to hear the chanting, so that he can be guided through the various stages of the bardo, to achieve a good rebirth. It’ll all be thrown away if he’s drugged.
“He’s meditated all his life to prepare for this,” Thong assures Nina.
“We can’t take it away from him,” he argues.
“Barbarians!” Nina mutters under her breath. She gets up and goes downstairs, crosses the ancestral hall and the courtyard to the new house next door, the one Thong has built for his parents but which the Superintendant never moved to. She sits down beside her Mother-in-Law who’s swinging in her hammock, staring sightless up at the ceiling. She’s telling a wandering disjointed story about a rape, and a baby, a murder and a stolen bracelet to the disconsolate maid who’s attending her. It’s a story with no head, and no tale, but the details are tantalizing. Nina settles herself down to listen, to piece it together into a coherent whole.
On the third or fourth replay, just when Nina thinks she’s got it all, a wail rises from the house next door. The Superintendant is finally gone.
______
The family home fills with visitors – regional party members who want to show respect to Ba Roi the retired colonel; the large Southern families of the other brothers-in-law who consider themselves kin; Thong’s associates; curious neighbours and distant relatives who want a look at Sixth, Huong and their sons, back after nearly twenty years away. They stream past Sixth and Thong, who stand stoic in traditional sack cloth, looking like the well fed overseas Vietnamese they are beside the magnificent three-prowed hardwood casket their American dollars have bought.
Nina wonders at Sixth’s and Thong’s endurance in the stifling heat. They’re still Vietnamese at the core after all the years abroad, she realizes. Not like herself, milk fed and winterized, her flesh and bones too dense to withstand the onslaught, her body and elbows too long to squeeze into the appropriate space assigned for a Youngest Daughter-in-Law.
She goes to the kitchen to help. But the women, labouring at the endless rounds of meals for the visitors, have no time to tell her what to do, not even her American ally Huong and her American niece Kim. The funeral hall, with its smell of incense seeping sickly and nauseating into the tropical air, is not for her. It is the men’s domain. She has no place to go but up into the attic, Thong’s old hideaway.
But even up there, the gongs resonating low and mournful through the attic’s wooden floor on the hour, remind Nina that she’s at a family funeral, that she has duties to perform. Why can’t she find a place for herself like Huong’s boys, Tam and Tri. A generation removed from these Delta roots, they’re behaving better than she is – the boys and Tam mingling in the courtyards below, serving food and refreshments, chatting with their cousins; Tri sitting behind his grandmother’s casket in meditation with the monks, chanting when they chant. She should do better so she doesn’t shame her husband and call into question Papa‘s and Maman’s upbringing, Nina tells herself.
She will go sit with her Mother-in-Law. They could use the maid’s extra hands down in the kitchen while she sits and rocks the old lady. She stands up, and smiles to herself. A daughter of Hue will always find a way to maintain her self respect if she must.
______
Nina the daughter of Hue finds Saigon, the rundown third world city filled with beggars and overhung with the stench of rotting fruit and sewage, a disappointment when finally Thong takes her there after the funeral. Still dirt poor in 1997 despite more than ten years of dời mơí and three years after the lifting of the US trade embargo, it’s much worse than she expects. Her reactions shame her – all she feels is pity for the inhabitants and relief that by virtue of her parent’s status she managed to escape living there.
The only time she feels at ease in the city is when Thong takes her to visit the slightly stooped white-haired man he calls Second Uncle.
The children know him well having spent most of their time in Ho Chi Minh City with him. He greets them as if they’re his grandchildren, with more affection than her Papa and Maman welcome them, Nina observes.
“Brains and beauty,” he teases, complimenting Tam at what a sophisticated young woman she’s becoming. “I’ll bet all the boys are competing to be that special one.”
“Unless,” he includes Tri, “they’re frightened of this broad and tall brother of yours?”
They both laugh. He’s said exactly what they need to hear from an adult.
“We missed you,” Tam hugs him fiercely, before slipping a short story she’s written into his hands.
“We did,” Tri says, handing over a complex drawing of a mandala he’s made on the plane journey over.
He accepts their gifts with appreciation then sends them into the kitchen to bring out the refreshments his sister’s prepared.
“Not right,” he reminds Tam, “to allow great aunt to serve you children.”
“We know, we know,” Tam rolls her eyes up.
“Tsk, tsk,” he reprimands her, flicking his index finger at her shoulder to send her off.
Now it’s time for the most important one, his large black eyes seem to say, as they turn to Nina. He takes both her hands in his, in palms that have the same feeling against the back of her hands as Thong’s; and smiles at her with his eyes.
“Ah yes, the great love of my boy’s life,” is the first thing he says.
“I’ve waited a long time to meet you,” are his next words, with just a hint of gentle recrimination, as if time is running short for him and he would have enjoyed a longer future with her.
A warm welcome but not too familiar, Nina thinks. Just right.
Just as his farewell is when they come to take their leave to go to Hue, a kiss on both her cheeks in the old French style, a whisper in her ear, “Don’t take too long before you come back again my dear.”
Then releasing her, a more public statement, “And give my regards to your uncles.”
“What a charmer he is,” she concedes to Thong. “Little wonder you’ve been under his spell all these years.”
______
There is less to charm Nina in Hue. Her uncles in the flesh, the ones who chose the other side, are not the bony determined Communist generals of her childhood playtimes. The two urbane fleshy seventy year olds who now do business with Thong and his associates look like clones of her Papa and American uncles. There is nothing ancient about the family temple her father talked so much about. Restored with the two generals’ business takings and contributions from France and America, it is spanking new and blatantly bright. The generals’ children, who supervised the rebuilding, have not been able to resist showing off, even in discreet and snobbish Hue. But, the toilets at the back of the memorial hall stink and, Nina notices termite droppings gathering at the bottom of the red-painted wooden pillars. How much of the money given for reconstruction has gone into her cousins’ pockets she wonders. As the thought crosses her mind, she realizes with a jolt, she’s only been in Vietnam a month and she’s gotten as cynical as Thong!
______
No, Vietnam cannot be a good idea if it can make her cynical so quickly, Nina says to Thong at the end of the summer.
“They probably had lined their pockets with the other relatives’ contributions. You were only being realistic,” he tells her impatiently. “It’s better than being deluded isn’t it?”
“But to live in a place where you’ve to constantly doubt everyone’s trustworthiness…” Nina protests.
______
She can’t, she writes as she sits alone in the quiet of her study in the brownstone, longing for Thong, missing the children still with him in Vietnam. This much she’s discovered in the years of self-analysis. As for full disclosure, she no longer needs the rest of the story. What he’s shared so far is more than enough. All she wants is him, sharing a life with her in New York. Asia’s in the midst of an economic crisis and all the deals have dried up. Isn’t’ this best time for him to take a sabbatical? To see if he can learn to live in New York? She’s tried this past summer in Vietnam. It’s his turn now.
______
In reply, Thong sends Nina a sheaf of papers with a cover note.
On the cover note, he’d written, ‘If you can’t live in a country where reality forces you to doubt everyone’s trustworthiness, can you live with someone who does this?’
The excerpts, seemingly torn out of a journal, begin with the sentence ”I said goodbye to Julia Anderson in July 1974. There is no introduction as to who the woman is or what she means to Thong.
Nina continues reading.
‘Although we spoke occasionally over the phone, I’d not seen her for nearly six months. During that time she’d been busy establishing a support network of American advisors meant to remain after the US withdrawal. Like everything else she set up, it would be undercover, contravening the Paris Accords.’
‘Everyone knew the end game was near, so I too was busy – shipping out more gravel and balancing the rising demand for ploughs from both sides, one for keeping the sides of the roads clear to prevent attacks, the other to clear away jungle so that they could attack.”‘
‘During a week when I’d ‘lost’ one of the ploughs so it could be used in Ban Me Thuot to open a path down the mountain for the Northern tanks, Julia Anderson phoned me up from Saigon. Julia Anderson was leaving and she wanted to say goodbye to me in person, she told me. I was flattered. As she requested, I made arrangements to meet her in Saigon for the weekend. I had some overdue leave and wanted to see Chú Hai to catch up in any case.’
‘I’d just turned twenty six and I felt like I was truly a man, an adult with success under my belt. No doubt the money earned from commissions stowed under my bed and Julia Anderson’s need to see me had something to do with it. I went by plane, my first time; paying for the ticket with some of my commissions.’
‘When I arrived, I went to see Chú Hai at his office in the hotel, then proceeded up to the fifth floor to meet Julia as we’d arranged. She was packing. She hugged me like she always did but, unusually, she didn’t tease me about how well I was looking. Perhaps, like her, I too appeared older and sadder. Certainly I was more street smart, more full of sin. Her hugs didn’t arouse me as they used to, but I did feel a wave of affection. I was happy to see her again. We went down to the bar for a drink, then dinner. After that, we spent the night together.’ ‘
Here Nina sees that Thong has written in newer ink, ‘If you want full disclosure, then I unfortunately will have to tell about the kisses’ adding a small circle of a face with two ink smudges for blushing cheeks and a downward ‘u’ mouth.
Silly man, Nina thinks with irritation, even as she reads uncomfortably on; Thong’s English script, plain and square unlike his graceful Vietnamese script, jump out at her, uncovering the complexity of his relationship with Julia Anderson.
‘In the morning she told me what was in her head. Or perhaps, I should say, in her heart. She asked if I wanted her to get me out of Vietnam as well!’
‘I didn’t know how to respond for quite some time. Then I asked her why she might want to do that? It was the least she could do she said, now that we were going to be overrun. Didn’t I know that anyone involved in any way with the Americans would be dead meat then? She told me Chú Hai would be alright because he worked for the magazine. But, she was worried about me. I didn’t have any official affiliation with the Americans although I’d done so much for people like her. She didn’t want to leave me to suffer the consequences, she said.’
‘I was touched that she cared enough to worry about me. But, I was also ashamed how successfully Chú Hai and I had managed to pull the wool over her eyes. Yes, I told her, I understood that things were getting desperate. But, Nixon would never let us down would he? He’d promised to send the B52′s if we ever needed them. The country would come through, I told her. I would be safe I was quite sure, I told her. I didn’t tell her why I was so confident about my safety. It wasn’t a lie, just an omission.’
‘She became very angry and shook me by the shoulders, calling me a stupid stupid boy. Nixon was a good man, she said, a staunch ally of South Vietnam. But the Supreme Court had ordered him to produce all of the Watergate tapes. Soon, he would be impeached or be forced to resign. Then, what would his promises be worth? Would the next President care that Thieu had helped Nixon win his first term? She didn’t think so. Congress had cut the Vietnamese aid budget again. Priorities were shifting very fast. From being at the front of the line for aid, Vietnam was now at the very back. Vietnam’s aid for the whole year was now only one fifth of what Israel received for the three week Yom Kippur war? All the attention was shifting to the Middle East.”
‘We’re not coming back, she said to me. We’ve abandoned you guys. You should get out before it’s too late. She was very insistent. Then, she began to say sorry, for her country, for having to leave herself, for letting a young boy like me get involved in the first place. I kept telling her it wasn’t her fault, that I wasn’t really so young anymore, that I knew what I was doing. Things happened, that was all. But she didn’t seem to want to be comforted, and she began to cry. I didn’t know what to do. It would be cruel to tell her the truth; that I was impatient for the invasion which Chú Hai and I thought would begin soon, that I was waiting for the inevitable rout of the Southern army by the 1976 dry season. I reached over and did what I usually did with her. It seemed to help. She calmed down.’
‘Later though, she asked me to let her help me leave again. She said she would get my name in on one of the employee lists or failing that as a relation, as her husband! I was flabbergasted. It began to dawn on me that perhaps what had passed between us since we first met when I was eighteen, meant more to her than I’d assumed. I held her very tight, and told her I was more grateful than I could ever say. Inside, I felt like a double headed snake.’
‘We spent the rest of that day riding around Saigon. The next day, she asked me to take her to My Tho, where we’d gone together on our first assignment. There were beggars everywhere we went; many more than before. Around the central market we saw one-legged men, one-armed men, men with no legs … Those without legs sat on pieces of cardboard attached to their necks with a rope. They dragged themselves along with their hands in the filth. It was really pitiful to see. In the delta the beggars were children, light haired with sharp faces or dark skinned with African features, the offspring of American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Even then, before the war’s end, they were being treated very badly. I saw people cuffing and kicking them. A shopkeeper threw one, a tiny dust coloured girl, bodily, out into the street like a sack of rubbish.’
‘You see? She looked at me; her eyes were swollen and red. You see what happens to the children of Americans. What will the Communist do to the lovers of spies?’
‘People, especially in the countryside, did look at us in an unfriendly way. But I didn’t worry. I knew I wouldn’t be assaulted or attacked when the war was over. Then, it would be known that I was a hero of the resistance, or so I believed. I shook my head. I told her that this was my country. I could be myself here. How would I live in a place where I constantly had to explain myself? I thanked her yet again, and then I said no again.’
‘I must have thanked her a hundred times that weekend. During those two days, I felt closer to her and more at ease than at any other time in the eight years we’d known each other. Aside from covering up my true loyalties, there was no misinformation I had to convey to her, nothing I needed to pry from her. We were simply a Vietnamese man and an American woman, riding around on a motorbike.’
‘When it came time for me to fly back to Nha Trang, I felt quite sad. I’d discovered a deep feeling for her I hadn’t been aware of all those years. It wasn’t love exactly. But I knew when I said goodbye to her at the airport I was saying goodbye to someone who was part of me, although perhaps more the lying deceitful part than the innocent idealistic part. I hugged her very hard. I kissed her, out in the public gallery in front of gawking Vietnamese and Americans who looked aside. I lied and told her that my heart would be with her and that I would think about what she said.’
Nina sees that Thong has scratched the new few lines over, that others have been smeared by wet. The next legible part starts with Thong returning to Nha Trang.
‘Things seemed far worse than when I left, although I was away only two nights. Perhaps I was in a heightened state of sensitivity. Perhaps what I saw in Saigon and My Tho and Julia Anderson’s warnings made me more aware of how much the people were suffering. For the first time, I began to feel dread at the prospect of the oncoming invasion and the inevitable killings and repercussions that would follow.’
‘I went to see Sixth and Huong shortly after. Sixth’s morale was at a real low. His budgets were being cut yet again and the rice distribution program was being scaled back. With the suppliers creaming off their share, there wouldn’t even be enough rice now to give to his men. Rice wasn’t the most important thing on his mind though. What concerned him was his fate once we were overrun. All his working life, he’d been on what would now be the losing side. No one can protect me then, he said to me. But, if you can manage it, please try to take care of Huong and the children when I’m gone.’
‘I told him not to be so pessimistic. When I left his house that evening, I wrote to Julia Anderson, telling her I’d changed my mind and would now be very happy to do what she suggested. I gave her all my personal details. Then I sent the letter to Chú Hai to forward to her at the US embassy in Israel. Already, I feared, it might be too late for her to help. But I had to try. She called me a month later from Tel Aviv! Over the line, she told me how pleased she was that I’d agreed. She’d managed to put me on the evacuation list for American associates. I should expect someone from the embassy to contact me through Chú Hai when the time came. I thanked her, yet again. I would forever be in her debt, I told her truthfully. Then, I told her that I missed her, which was a lie.’
‘After the call, I went to Sixth and explained the plan to him. I gave him my identity papers, for him to commission some fakes with his photographs on them. Then I briefed him on the story he should tell when the embassy called. I impressed on him it was the only way, and I swore to him that I’d make sure that Huong and the children could follow.’
The story ended there. On the next page, a plain sheet of A4, Thong had written in new ink, ‘Two years ago, I met Julia Anderson again at an American Chamber of Commerce cocktail party in Tokyo. She was whispering intimately to a man, a very young man. Aside from that, only her voice was the same. She’d gained weight, dyed her hair a dignified dark brown and done something to her face. As for me, she thought at first that I was Chú Hai because I looked so much like her memory of him – a middle aged man! She told me that after I didn’t turn up among the evacuees, she’d wondered what happened. I let her know that I only left in 1979, leaving the impression that I’d been left behind by a hitch. Perhaps she suspected. Near the end of our conversation she asked me if I’d sold the place she got for me on the lists to someone else. I told her no, which was the truth. She let it go. We promised each other we’d catch up, but of course we didn’t. And, I did not tell you about the meeting either. The habit of leaving out facts, especially when the telling is not to my advantage, is one I haven’t been able to give up easily.’
‘You see my aversion to the daylight, even now,’ Thong’s note continues. ‘You say you don’t need more revelations but I wonder if you really understand the kind of opportunist I was, ever ready to use anyone if it was to my advantage. Looking at how good I’m at my work for Jerry, I am probably still the same person, the kind you must always suspect of being untrustworthy. As I said before, that’s the reality about this country. Can you accept this reality about me?’
There, his letter ended.
______
Nina scribbles a quick reply – ‘I guess I must, we’re at endgame … we don’t have other options’ – and runs down to the post-box to send it off.
XIV. ENDGAME
1974 was the year of the Tiger, a year of hunger. When everyone finally began to feel the truth of the American withdrawal – in the bars and markets, in the falling number of bullets and grenades the men were given. It was the year when rice barrels and oil storage tanks seemed to run out faster than they were filled, in part because many, like Thong, were turning a blind eye to the theft of fuel from their storage tanks and spare parts from their stores, hoping this would count as credit, in the event … It was the year when the Northern Army surrounded Phuoc Long, a mere one hundred and twenty kilometres from Saigon, and the B 52′s did not come. When hope drained like water from a broken bucket. When Thong and Chú Hai waited with hope rising. In anticipation.
______
Sixth looks forward to seeing the back of the year; to greeting the year of the Cat and its more manageable troubles – a new baby, a transfer home to Saigon where Kim can start grade school at a proper city institution.
However, in a sign to Sixth that the Tiger does not wish to go, Thi is born at the cusp of the year, on a night when Sixth is away on duty and not there to welcome her with his father’s protection.
Thi slips into the world as quickly as she leaves later. After five births, the first dead girl, Kim who nearly didn’t make it and the three bouncing boys, tiny Thi’s birth is a nothing for Huong.
“A mere fart,” she laughs into Sixth’s face when she hands the kitten of a girl to him on his return from the field.
The baby is no longer than Sixth’s forearm. Less than two kilos of twig arms and legs attached to a small ruddy coloured tea caddy of body. She mewls, her little lips turning to look for the nipple.
Sixth wonders, as the midwife had on the night of her birth, “is she a cat child? A tiger girl?”
No one can say for sure. The clock in the hall had stopped the night of her birth.
The baby mewls a little louder into Sixth’s biceps, hungry for her milk. Sixth hands her back to Huong, thanking the heavens that the girl’s reached full term after this year of stretched rations. When despite her pregnancy, Huong has sacrificed her own rice and fish for the three hungry boys. Grown pale and green with the carrying of the year and its burdens.
Sixth decides to register Thi’s birth time as one in the morning, to keep her safely in the year of the Cat. Tí Thi, a little poem, the one he cherishes most because she is the last happiness from his marriage, his last happy memory of Vietnam.
______
But a Tiger will not be denied. If it’s not to be given a child, then it will take a country …
Things break up more quickly than anticipated. Quang Tri is taken. Ban Me Thuot is attacked. Thua Thien Province penetrated, the old capital of Hue in jeopardy. Then Quang Tri is retaken.
But there’s no resolve, Chú Hai himself tells Thong in a phone call from Saigon the next day.
“It’s rumoured they had a meeting at the Presidential Palace and decided to abandon everything near the De-Militarized Zone. Only Hue, Danang and Chu Lai will be defended.”
“If MR1 is abandoned, MR2 cannot hold. It will be very soon,” he’s quietly ecstatic.
Still, he does not forget that if there are winners, there will be losers.
“If you’re still planning to get your brother out, you need to start now,” he instructs.
“I have the papers,” he refers to Julia Anderson’s papers for Thong, “and I’ll be waiting in the office to hand them to him.”
But Sixth has been sent out into the field. The army needs reinforcement and his team’s been seconded. Thong can’t contact him to send him to safety.
In Ban Me Thuot, less than two hundred kilometres away from Nha Trang it’s touch and go. A contractor who rents ploughs from Thong returns from the city distraught. The operations centre in the centre of the town is now rubble he reports to Thong; the result of a deliberate misdirection to a bomber pilot by a mole in Southern Air Support. Communications from Ban Me Thuot to Kontum and Pleiku are now down.
Sanh phones in the final alert to Thong from the military school in Dalat, where he’s been re-posted as a civilian since his de-mobilization.
“We’re moving the students,” he whispers over the line. “Orders are to pack up what we can, destroy what we can’t. Don’t go by road. Use the sea.”
“Right, I know what to do,” Thong thanks him and hangs up.
This is the finale he and Chú Hai have been working towards. Thong doesn’t need to run. But some in his family do – his Blood Father, who’d fought for this almost all his life but who may now suffer if the dream comes true; Oldest Brother-in-Law and Sixth certainly. So Sanh’s alert is welcome even if it means that now Thong owes him another. As if the burden of the dismemberment he’d let Sanh suffer isn’t enough.
Thong leaves that worry for another day. Now, he must take action. First, he calls a pre-arranged contact in Cam Ranh Bay for entry permits for himself and his group. Next he calls the Phan Thiet office to tell the manager there the news, and to ask his help in getting his Blood Father and Huong’s parents to Saigon. He’ll guarantee two strips of gold for them, he promises, payable when next they meet. Then, he gathers his men; pays them their last month’s salary for what it’s worth and releases them to do what they will. Finally, it’s into the pickup truck to go home for a spare set of clothes and what he can carry from the gold leaves hidden under his mattress before he sets out to take Huong and the children to safety.
The children are on the dirt path leading to the house. The boys are playing at VC and ARVN forces while Kim, squatting under a bush with another little girl, is rolling mud pies. Huong is making lunch. Despite his messages to her over the last few days, she’s done nothing about evacuating. The washing is still hanging on the line outside. Trying to go on as if it’s just another day, Huong is squatted down on the kitchen steps, chopping lemon grass and grinding black pepper corns while the rice pot steams. The new baby lies in a sling across her chest, nursing fretfully.
“He’s not back,” Huong tells Thong.
“Still, we must go now,” Thong says to her brusquely.
Huong doesn’t answer her Youngest Brother-in-Law. Instead she continues with her chopping, bouncing the baby on her haunches every now and then to keep her quiet. Barely six weeks and her milk is drying up already, she worries. How can the baby survive the long trek to Saigon? She remembers the bumpy bus ride up from Saigon to Phan Thiet – she fearful of losing the baby she was carrying then, Kim who survived; the Commander and his new wife terrified of repercussions from the Communists and infecting her with their fear. There was the other flight south in 1954 when she was barely ten years old, her father carrying her little brothers in baskets hung from a pole across his shoulder, one of them dying along the way. She remembers her mother becoming slightly less alive after that. He was the third child she lost in that war. Unlike her mother, Huong knows she won’t be able to recover if she loses this baby, just one child more. She won’t go. She can’t.
Thong leaves Huong to her ruminations. He moves around the kitchen, looking for baskets, a sack, anything to carry their things with. Going outside, he grabs all the clothes off the line and wraps them in one of Sixth’s pyjama tops. Back in the kitchen, he picks up the kettle full of boiled water, checks that the rice is ready and puts the whole pot into a basket together with a few old china bowls and chopsticks. Calling Kim, he tells her to gather the boys into the bed of the pickup. Then, he walks to the front door to scribble a message for Sixth with the last of the fancy red markers the Americans left in the depot.
On the kitchen steps, Huong is still at her mortar grinding intently although the black pepper has already turned to dust. Thong squats down in front of her. Takes the pestle from her hand.
“Sixth Sister, where’s the gold?” he asks her.
She laughs bitterly, “What gold? Long gone and nothing more saved up, unless Sixth hid some away that I don’t know about. Every month, his pay comes in and then it goes out. To rice, to firewood, to feeding them,” she looks at her children, now jumping up and down on the back of the pickup.
Thong sighs. He puts the pestle down on the floor beside him.
“Come,” he says pulling her up to stand and leading her into the kitchen.
There, he unbuttons his shirt, and unwraps the piece of cloth wound around his waist.
“Here,” he hands her a third of the gold he’s hidden on himself. “Just in case we’re separated.”
She takes it and turning away from him, stuffs the thin leaves into Thi’s sling, next to her breasts. Only a very cruel person, she hopes, would pull a suckling child away from its mother to steal what’s underneath.
Thong takes her by the hand.
“We’re leaving now,” he says in a voice that will not be disobeyed.
She follows him out clutching Thi to her, too numb to feel anything at all as she leaves the home she and Sixth have built from nothing.
______
The two lane highway to Cam Ranh is jammed with seven lanes of traffic fighting to go south. Instead of an hour, it takes them a day going no faster than the refugees plodding along on foot. The convoy consists of cone-hatted men and women carrying children and baskets, setting one foot forward after another with eyes down, nothing to look forward to. Better dressed city people wheel bicycles piled with suitcases. A man who looks like a teacher is pushing a large barrow of books! Luckier ones like Thong, his driver and the driver’s girlfriend, are in the cabs of their pickups; or like Huong, her children and the driver’s family, dozing under plastic tarps in the flatbeds of their trucks. The even wealthier are looking out from their motorcars, inscrutable behind their sunglasses; in the car in front of them, Thong sees parents passing around packaged imported biscuits to fat children.
It’s a determined flight, everyone driven by fear. Their exodus is fuelled by rumours of the routs in far off Quang Tri and Hue, the televised image of the general overseeing those northernmost regions landing in Danang seasick and dishevelled, the almost absolute news silence on local TV thereafter. They flee driven by sights they imagine, fed by BBC accounts that the yellow starred flag is being hoisted once again over the Hue citadel; that Montagnard platoons have rebelled on the retreat from Kontum, killing Vietnamese civilians and engulfing the highlands in a tribal uprising.
The stories, the rumours, fly up and down the road, from family to family, from car to truck, from hamlet to village to town, the horror and savagery of the events multiplying as the convoy inches forward. Overhead in the clouded sky planes roar and helicopters thrum on their way to relieve the fighting. But on the road itself there’s no need for defence. No mortars fire. No anti-aircraft missiles whistle upwards towards the airborne machines to bring them down burning onto the human train. There are no soldiers waiting to fall on them, nor to surround them with protection. Everything that matters is happening somewhere else, to someone else. A brother, an uncle, a father, a son, a husband …
Sixth! Huong’s mind keeps returning to him, wondering where he can possibly be, what he might be doing. He’s never told her and she’s never asked what he got up to on his missions. Now ignorance fuels her distress. Two women walking beside the pickup, a tarp’s thickness from her ear, are discussing the Montagnard uprising … ‘They got hold of a young girl and took turns with her. When they were done, she was ripped apart’ … ‘My husband said they attacked the relief forces we sent up from Nha Trang. Poor things, not soldiers at all.’ …’They fell on them, cut out their livers later.’ … ‘Yes, I hear they eat them raw’. Huong turns her head into the baby’s, rubbing her ear against the new born fuzz. She prays to the Virgin of La Vang that Sixth will make it home safe. No matter his anger when he finds them gone and only Youngest’s message on the door. As long as he gets home safe, with his liver and heart intact.
______
Sixth arrives home wet and shivering as Thong is sneaking Huong and the children through a back gate onto the wharfs of Cam Ranh Bay. The white shirt and dark blue trousers he exchanged his uniform for are salt drenched and vomit stained. He’d been in Tuy Hoa the night before with his squads, purportedly part of a defence brigade, when the first of the refugees from Kontum and Pleiku began to gather. Travel worn and battle scarred, they brought with them disheartening tales of washed away bridges, forward platoons accidentally shelled by their own side, commanders who’d simply folded and lost all will to lead. Sure there’d been heroes, especially the ranger battalion who broke through enemy roadblock after roadblock to get the refugees to safety. But, when Sixth heard that less than half of that battalion had made it to town, he knew it was all over. He’d turned away from the story tellers, gathered his men together and in a whisper, gave the orders to disband.
Along with a handful of his men, Sixth barters his M-16 and ammunition for a place on a fishing boat so over laden with runaways its hull is almost totally in the water. They head out to sea at dawn, under threatening clouds. Halfway around the Ninh Van peninsula, twenty kilometres from Nha Trang, the long delayed monsoon breaks. They’re driven to shore in a nerve-wracking, gut-heaving up and down nightmare through waves that threaten to swamp and over-turn them but do not. Instead, they run aground on one of the sandbars across the mouth of the Nha Trang River. Sixth never admits to Huong that he whispers a broken Hail Mary right then, before scrambling off to find his way home.
The house is empty. Damn Huong! She was constantly threatening to leave if he didn’t change his job and stop going on missions. Finally she has. His front door is broken, the house ransacked, everything of value already looted. She’d promised him she wouldn’t leave, just before he was sent out the last time on defensive duty. Taking baby Thi from his arms, she’d said she would wait for him to come back, no matter what. All he had to promise was to come back.
Holding on to her words, he runs through the house, into each of the bedrooms, and then out through the back. They are definitely gone. The only things left are bedclothes and sleeping mats, a few old clothes and the garish crucifix Huong insisted on taking from the Yen Do compound. Angry and betrayed, he circles around outside once more to the front, pointing his flashlight helplessly here and there, into the chicken coop now empty, and under her lemon grass and chilli plants. At the front door, the flashlight reveals the message he’d missed in the dark.
Of course, in his heart of hearts, he’d known her promise was just to give him hope, to force him to keep himself safe. That when the crunch came, she would have gone to safety with Thong. Thong would have seen to it because dutiful younger brother that he was, these were Sixth’s orders to him. But illogically he’d hoped for love’s sake that Huong might have argued against Youngest’s good sense and not abandoned him so easily. Not in the same way he’s going to abandon her now, he thinks guiltily. Leave her and the children in Thong’s hands, and make his way to Saigon to the address that Thong has written on the door.
He goes round the house to the back of the garden and slips into the outhouse. Reaching up into the rain water cistern bolted above a cross bar in the roof, he gropes till his hands find the tightly wrapped plastic package he’s hidden above the tank. Unwrapping the carefully sealed layers of plastic, he takes out the forged documents Thong had him make. Gingerly, he fingers the two taels of gold that are also in the package; gold he’d picked up a few months ago from the body of a suspected informer he shot, an ethnic Chinese shop keeper. At the time he’d felt squeamish taking them from the dead man’s trousers, slipping them into his own pocket. But now, he thanks fortune he has them to help speed his journey southward.
He’s chosen to live, he tells himself. Now, he must run for it, kill for it if necessary, to make it to Saigon on time for the flight out. Not that anyone on his side is looking to stop him. The ones in charge have begun to run too. It’s the Northern Army flooding in from the DMZ and the West he needs to dodge. And he will. He’s determined to. He steps out quietly resolute onto the road, and begins to make his way to Saigon and to America.
______
Thong uses up six strips of gold, to secure places for all of them on the re-deploying Navy ship meant for high level officers and their dependants. The officers and dependents have hidden themselves below deck and inside the cabins. Thong, Huong, the children and everyone else not meant to be there are given passage above deck, in the rain. No one complains. They all know the heads are already rotten and falling lose. The rest will not survive for long. Better to be going south out on deck at the mercy of the monsoon, than left in the city to be cannon fodder when the hordes descend.
Thong finds a space amongst the crowd in a nook under the life-boats. He rigs a small tent for Huong and the children with the tarp they bring along, then goes to look for access into the bolted down insides of the ship. They’ve eaten and drunk everything he packed earlier in the day. He must get to food and water.
The children are nestled around each other, asleep with their mouths open like little birds, when he returns from the bridge. He brings bread, half a boiled saucisson, an opened can of condensed milk and a plastic container of water. It’s all he can get for three strips of gold. He can’t afford more, he shares with Huong, he doesn’t know how long it’ll be before they get home. The crew member he bought these from says they won’t be allowed to enter Vung Tau or Saigon and will likely have to dock further away.
“You’ve done what you think best,” Huong whispers, squeezing his hands gratefully.
She lets him put all the food, except for the condensed milk and water, into the basket far inside the shelter of the tarp where no one can get at it. Taking a bowl, she mixes some milk with the water. She sips a mouthful and brings the baby’s mouth to her own. The baby rocks its head from side to side looking for the teat and making small whines of frustration against the fleshy knob made by her mother’s lips. Then, realizing there is sustenance coming out from this unfamiliar source, opens her mouth wider and begins to gulp hungrily. Satisfied that all will now be well until their next meal, Thong lowers his head against the huddle of the three boys’ backs and closes his eyes. Huong continues feeding Thi slowly until the baby turns her cheek away, full. She burps, scrabbles with her tiny hands for the breast. Huong feels the little mouth latching on to her, and lets her suckle herself on the empty nipple until it sleeps.
In deep night, the darkened ship powers it way through the heaving waves. The rain stops. Beneath the tarp, the boys sleep under the protective enclosure of Thong’s body. Behind them, Kim huddles by the food basket. Outside the safety of the tarp Huong, giddy and nauseous, paces the decks. She walks carefully, stepping over the little pools of vomit beginning to collect on the metal deck, trying not to breathe in the smell of half-digested rice, porridge, cookies and fish sauce already fermenting in the humid air. She has the baby at her breast, to comfort it and to comfort herself. Others too stir in the dark – some hungry and harmless, some crazed, still others on fire with the anger and shame of defeat, and then some who’ve just taken advantage of the chaos to break out of their prisons and walk free. It is Huong’s fate that one of these escapees happens to see her walking by sipping from a rice bowl, her thin blouse and trousers still damp against her body, the child’s tiny hand stroking an exposed breast.
Huong screams just once, before a hard rough hand is clamped on her mouth. The bowl she’s holding falls, breaking against the metal deck. Thong wakes.
_____
As Huong remembers it, even though she tries very hard not to, the escaped prisoner was hungry. When he came up to her and clamped his hand on her mouth, he’d only wanted what was in her bowl. But, because she’d dropped the bowl in fright and spilt all the milk, he’d had to take a hold of her and push the baby aside to suckle at her breasts. When he found out that she’d hardly any milk left, he’d become madly angry and that was when he’d pushed her onto the floor and pulled down his trouser and hers.
In the recurring nightmare that still haunts her, Huong sees herself trying to struggle. But, she has only one arm with which to push him away. She’s holding Thi away with the other, protecting her from being suffocated by the man’s chest banging into her body. It’s because of Thi that she does what she does next.
“Please …” she pleads with the escapee “…stop a moment, let my untie the baby. It’ll be better for us that way,” she remembers telling him.
The worse part of the nightmare is when the man clambers back on top of her, after she’s untied the baby and placed her on the deck by her head, with the gold still carefully hidden under her bottom. This is when Huong feels her sleeping body responding once again, to the escapee’s nibbles on her ears and strokes on her shoulders and breasts, his licking of her nipples, and the scratch of his shaved head against her neck and chin; feels her sleeping middle-aged body opening out to the man pushing himself into her and welcoming his weight above her, hungry for her, rocking into her.
Huong is willing to give herself a dispensation for what happened then; given the circumstances, the chaos and runaway emotions she was experiencing during the escape. She hadn’t actually gone out looking for a man. If she’d experience some pleasure, well the fact was that she and Sixth hadn’t had much of a sex life. He would insist they go without once he knew she was pregnant. Since she got pregnant so easily, almost every time he stuck it in, it meant going without most of their early marriage. She’d often wondered if he actually went without when she was under sentence. Men could get it so easily then. It had been a cause of resentment. Yes, Huong can give herself a dispensation for that one incident.
But, to allow the memory of that brief pleasure to haunt her for the next twenty years, to even enjoy it while Sixth is sleeping beside her in their marriage bed. This is something Huong can’t forgive. It’s a sin of thought so heinous she can’t bear to even bring it up at weekly confession, a burden of guilt that won’t fall off, no matter how hard she prays.
______
Thong pulls the man off Huong, exposing her nakedness. The prisoner pounces on him. They grapple with each other, rolling on the deck at her feet. The prisoner gets the better of Thong, managing to straddle him and pin his arms down against the metal flooring of the ship. He bends his face down towards Thong’s neck, ready to bite through to the jugular.
Huong must save Thong. She reaches for the gold under the baby’s bottom and throws it over the man’s shaved head, to the far end of the gangway.
“Five taels,” she gasps out, “‘go and get it!”.
The escapee gets off Thong before she even finishes talking, picks everything up and runs off into the dark.
Thong pushes himself up from the deck, and disentangles himself from the baby’s sling, which has gotten caught on his body during the fight. He solemnly hands Huong the baby sling, then picks the baby up in his arms and walks back to their shelter, leaving her to follow.
Huong doesn’t know what Thong saw, but her eyes do not meet his when she comes back under the tarp to take Thi from him. He too keeps his distance, and does not speak to her until they dock in Phu Quoc on the other coast of Vietnam the next day.
“I’m sorry,” he says, still not looking directly at her. “Forgive me.”
Glancing at him sideways, Huong sees that Thong is looking into his hands, examining them, as if they’d attacked her.
“I don’t know what to tell Sixth,” she hears his usually evenly cadenced voice, tremble.
“Nothing,” she stops him short.
“He doesn’t need to know anything,” she has decided on this before daybreak. “You came in time to stop anything more … nothing happened.”
Huong doesn’t know to this day that when Thong pulled the prisoner away from her by the hips, he’d felt the man’s penis against his forearm, slick from penetrating her.
She just sees him look away, as if considering the coast line.
“Alright then,” he says.
He doesn’t mention anything about her throwing away five taels of his gold.
_____
They arrive in Phu Quoc in the middle of the morning but aren’t allowed to disembark until all the officers and their families alight.
From up on the ship Thong and Huong see the crowd pushing and shoving, until a contingent of officers march through the crowd and form two lines for the people to pass between. The first people to be led through are a group of men tied together in a file. They’re led by two MP’s and followed by a crowd of shouting and cursing passengers.
A woman from a neighbouring group tells Huong that the bound men were robbers and extortionists, the shouting group their accusers.
“If you’ve lost anything,” she says, “all you have to do is report it to the officers down there and they’ll arrest the person responsible and get your things back for you.”
Huong doesn’t acknowledge the woman or the hint. Even if there are eyes in the dark that’ve seen something, she’ll continue to pretend nothing has happened, so nothing can ever be said about it later. Her future life with Sixth depends on that. Otherwise, nothing can be the same between them. That future is worth more than the five princely taels of gold she’s thrown at the deserter. She’ll do nothing to try to get the money back.
But Huong finds out, she can do a lot worse to keep the matter quiet forever. When Thong, she and her children are filing between the two ranks of military police towards the dock gates, she feels someone’s eyes on the back of her neck. Turning around, she sees it’s her attacker looking at her with wolf’s eyes. Just then someone edges into Kim, forcing Huong to step to her right and against a young MP. She looks into his tired, innocent face. She looks back at the rapist, who smiles at her and wipes his tongue around his lips lewdly. His fate is sealed.
Huong leans into the young MP and whispers, “That man with the shaved head stole five taels of gold from me. He probably still has it on him.”
Then she lets the crowd move her and her children on, melting into anonymity.
That evening Huong goes to the beach after leaving the children with Thong. She needs a good wash, she tells him, and there’s only drinking water in their refugee camp.
Thong nods. It’s natural that a woman who’s just been violated should need some degree of privacy, some time for reflection. But, there’s a twist in Huong’s lips that bothers Thong, a set to her chin. He climbs onto the top of a truck and follows the path she takes until it disappears around a knoll and into a thicket of trees. The path to the beach, he notes to himself.
At the beach, Huong hides behind a thick grove of beach pines and waits. Just before sunset when the tide is highest, the MP’s come out dragging along a line of bound men. Her attacker is among them. They’re all made to splash ankle deep into the waterline, pushed down onto their knees and blindfolded. The MP’s moved backward, towards the trees. Then they open fire.
They shoot from right to left, and the men fall against each other in the same direction, like dominoes. When the last man has toppled over, some of the younger MP’s are ordered to untie the bodies, and float them off into the outgoing tide. .
The young MP Huong gave the tip-off to is among those in the disposal squad. When he’s done, she sees him come up from the water, go up to a tree and bend over to retch. In the hip pocket of his white pants wet with sea water she sees clearly a stack of gold leaves at least five thick outlined against his skinny buttocks.
Born and bred in the war, Huong like Thong, had never seen anyone killed outright. Until this day. Because of something she’s done. She begins to cry.
______
Thong comes looking for Huong at the beach when she doesn’t return after dark. The moon’s only a small sliver, but still he sights her head, just a bump above the water line, a distance from the shore. He shouts to her but she doesn’t respond. He must undress down to his boxers to go and get her.
It’s low tide and Thong must walk a long way before he gets to where Huong is, standing neck deep in water, totally naked, desperately scrubbing herself. Her skin is wrinkled and water logged. She must have been in the water for hours. But Thong can’t make sense of why she’s there and what’s happened, her story a garble. He takes her by the hand and leads her up to the shore, wipes her dry with his undershirt. Then he dresses her like a child, threading her feet through his trousers and pulling them up her legs before tying them tight around her waist. He puts her arms through his shirt and buttons it up. And then he combs her hair dry with his fingers and plaits it for her. The last thing he does is throw her clothes, the ones she had on when the escapee attacked her, into the sea.
“See, there’s nothing left from last night’s incident,” Thong tells Huong. “You’re all washed now, totally clean.”
She doesn’t seem to hear him.
He bends forward in front of her, and heaves her onto his back. She allows him to carry her, piggy back, all the way back to the camp, she in his dry outer clothes, he still in his dripping boxers. On the way, he sings her a lullaby about the new moon, and how everything under it starts again brand new.
Thong never mentions that night again, not while they’re in Phu Quoc, not after.
He bribes their way off the island and buys their journey back to Can Tho, where he purloins a boat from his company’s shipyard, abandoned in the confusion by the provincial manager. It is a river boat, but strong enough to go out to sea, good enough to put Huong and the children on so he can fulfil his promise to Sixth. He finds a pilot for it, puts Huong and the children in the care of a colleague who is also escaping, and sends them away. His promise to Sixth fulfilled, Thong feels noticeably lighter. It’s not his responsibility what happens to Sixth and Huong after. How that one small incident on a ship escaping from Nha Trang reverberates through the rest of his brother’s marriage.
______
Thong leaves Can Tho for Saigon, returning eagerly to a city on tenterhooks. He’d set off right away after seeing Huong and the children off. The northward journey against the flow of fleeing people and cars is slow, but not difficult. Most of the military checkpoints set up to delay the movement of Communists into the city are abandoned. The ones manned are operated by the very young, who simply look at him with pity when he tells them he’s going back to Saigon to report in to his head office. Despite his good clothes and leather shoes, his mission seems such a fool’s errand no one even bothers to hit him for a bribe.
He drops into the office to check if there’s any news from Phan Thiet. The manager’s disappeared, he’s told, but hasn’t turned up In Saigon. Thong’s left none the wiser about the whereabouts of his Blood Father or Huong’s parents.
He goes to the Checkerboard house next, for a shower and change of clothes. He can’t bear to stay longer. Oldest Sister is starring in yet another of her domestic dramas and latches on to him as captive audience the moment he steps into the house.
“A police driver came with a message,” she confides to Thong in a stage whisper the neighbours can hear. “I was told to expect a phone call from the Americans and then do as they said.”
“The driver said everything in the country was still okay,” Thong is not sure if she’s embellishing, “but still your Brother-in-Law wanted us to go right away just to be sure. The driver said, he was ordering me to do it, for the children’s sake, especially the boys.”
“Well,” she concludes triumphantly, “the Americans did call this morning. I’ve to go over to his friend the Colonel’s house at nine tonight to wait for the bus to the airport.”
“Good news,” he replies, brushing past her to go up to his room, “wonderful!”
Indeed! Another problem resolved. He won’t have to worry how to plead Oldest Brother-in-Law’s case when the Northern troops haul him up. It’s settled.
But when he comes back downstairs whistling, a towel and a fresh change of clothes in his arms, he finds Oldest crying. She’s sitting with her head hidden in folded arms at the dining table, square in the middle of his path to the bathroom in the back.
Now what?! He stops and touches her. Her head comes up immediately. Too fast, a part of Thong can’t help observing.
“He doesn’t want me to wait for him. He’ll make his way out separately, later, if indeed the country falls, he asked the driver to tell me,” she complains to Thong.
“You know where the driver was before he came to our place? He’d just dropped your Brother-in-Law at his mistress’ house!” she can’t bear the shame of it. “He’s not staying because of the country. He’s sending me off unaccompanied to face who knows what kind of risks and dangers because he wants to hangs around to play with that woman for one extra day. That Communist whore who’s corrupted him …”
She bursts into a fit of tearless wailing.
Thong pats her shoulder absentmindedly.
“I’m sure it’s because of work. They’re trying their best to get it all back together.” Not that they can, Thong knows for sure. But, if Oldest wants a play, the least he can do is supply the proper words.
He’d like to add … ‘and she’s not a Communist whore either’ but that would embroil him in a more complicated exchange. Chú Hai has the full background on his Brother-in-Law’s mistress, a singer of anti-war ballads, her true love a bohemian poet. Like everyone else, she just happens to need money. More than most it’s true, because of her habit. But a true nationalist as far as Thong’s concerned.
He mumbles instead, as he edges around the table and into the kitchen, “I need a shower.”
She’s there in the kitchen when he comes out.
“I’m not going,” she announces, her arms folded across her chest. “He’ll see who the better woman is when all this unravels. Her, that singer, she’ll have run off to save her own skin. Me, I’ll still be here waiting for him. And if they take him off to prison, it’ll be my face he sees every week visiting. My food parcels he’ll be getting. He’ll see.”
She has no idea how right she turns out to be. What she will end up doing to keep that man alive. For the moment though, the image of her feeding morsels to a plump white Oldest Brother-in-Law squatting in a communist tiger cage no more than a cubic meter in volume is so preposterous that Thong bursts out laughing in hysterical whoops. Oldest, her great performance interrupted, returns to reality. Thong sees the heroic self-sacrificing wife deflating before his eyes back to the tired forty year old woman whom life has not treated well.
“I’m sorry,” he stutters, horrified at his own rudeness.
She doesn’t seem to hear him. Looking out to someone behind his head, she says, “I’m just so confused. What would you do if you were me?
A concrete question he can answer.
“Huong’s already left,” Thong tells her. “I think you should go too.”
He escapes into the living room before she slips into another role or decides to shoot one more volley of grievances at him. One of the nephews has borrowed his motorbike. He hurries out into the alley and hails a cyclo to take him to the hotel.
Chú Hai, his one constant, is there as usual. He’s working on a story, his fingers flying over the typewriter, a cigarette dangling from between his lips. He swivels around in his chair when the door clicks open and stands up to grab Thong by the hands.
“Ah, you’re here at last to see it happen. At last …”
Thong nods. They look into each other’s eyes. They don’t need to say more.
Except for Chú Hai, the office is empty. Thong assumes that everyone who’s sensible has left. As for the crazies, they must be out there trying to cover the story of their life, the last moments. Little do they know, it’s only the beginning, he thinks to himself. He sits down in the armchair near the editor’s desk, a huge overstuffed monstrosity like those Chú Hai had in the backrooms of Albert’s villa. When was that, he thinks drowsily. So long ago, he can’t remember.
It’s night when Chú Hai shakes him awake. Outside, Thong hears the thrumming of helicopters, and underlying that a dull roar, as if the whole city is gathered beneath the hotel’s windows muttering.
“This is the last night, I can feel it in my bones,” Chú Hai tells him.
“Let’s go outside, take a walk to see it all with our own eyes. So we’ll never be fooled by what this or that newspaper reports later. By anything I might have edited out over there,” he points to his type-writer.
Chú Hai never lies in his reports. But, he does edit with his audience in mind. The story of the Nationalist soldiers Thong and he meet stripping in an alley before melting into darkness goes into the photo-essay on the last days that the magazine publishes, as does the one about the children fighting over a pile of guns and ammunition left under a tree. Thong remembers the images, carefully Xeroxed by Nina for her dissertation, the originals clear in his mind’s eye, etched there on the night of 29th April 1975 during his walk with the man closest to his heart.
There are other images and sound bites. They don’t make the cut. But still they remain in Thong’s memories. He remembers the transvestite in the barber shop famous for its blow jobs. Oblivious to any observers, she’s transforming herself back into a boy, her hip long hair falling in dark clumps onto the floor as she snips, snips, snips. He remembers her mascara’d eyes and her swollen lipstick smudged lips when she turns for a second to look out into the dark, right at them.
He remembers that he can’t stop himself from shouting a warning through the broken shop window, “Remember to wipe all your makeup off comrade!”
There’s the conversation he and Chú Hai overhear in the crowd that stretches three streets down from the American embassy – ‘You’ll come with us’ the father’s voice is raised … ‘I can’t, I love her’ the son replies, a shouted declaration. Thong sees the father loosening his grasp on the son’s wrist and turning away, the young man stumbling towards them, away from the embassy and the helicopters that will take him to safety.
Thong remembers turning to Chú Hai, “If that was me and you were the father what would you do?”
Chú Hai looks abashed for a minute.
“Ah, but I’m not am I?” he asks back, and offers Thong a cigarette.
“What a question!” he says with a nervous laugh.
Indeed, what could have possessed him to ask it, Thong wonders. He coughs as he sucks on the American filter tip. He is twenty seven, and this is his first cigarette, he realizes to his great surprise.
They walk away from the city, under an unusually dark sky. No flares shooting anywhere, no sudden explosions of light to indicate that a missile has found its target. It’s very quiet. No gunfire, no mortars, just the whump-whump of the increasingly distant helicopters over the American embassy. Walking into Chinatown, they’re surprised by how empty it is. The throngs of pleasure seekers, hawkers, traders, thieves and pickpockets have melted away. The whizzing red and yellow neon signs are switched off. There are no solicitors in front of the gambling halls and restaurants. The shop fronts are either shuttered, or shattered.
“Where’s everyone?” Thong asks.
“Outside the embassy or cowering at home,” Chú Hai answers.
“Or here….” he points to the small thatched houseboats bobbing in front of them.
They’ve wandered off the main street and deep down an alley to the river, where the water people live, where the opium joints are.
“Come,” Chú Hai takes Thong by the hand, pulling him onto one of the wooden vessels.
“There’s a first time for everything, a cigarette, a pipe. After tonight, you’ll never have another chance at it. Our masters will make sure of that,” he says almost sadly.
Chú Hai’s sudden mood change confuses Thong. Why this shadow of regret? It should be a night for celebration. Or perhaps, this is how Chú Hai, who is single,
celebrates. Just once, Thong tells himself before following Chú Hai down into the den, such as it is.
There’s already someone else on the boat, lying in the back, lost in dreaming. Thong backs out; he doesn’t want to lose himself to the drug in the presence of a stranger. He hasn’t kept himself alive up to this night to lose it in an accident or a drug fuelled scuffle.
“That man,” he murmurs.
But Chú Hai, who has his hand tight around Thong’s wrist, only says, “Docile as puppies. No danger at all. In seventh heaven.”
“Just like we’ll be,” he chuckles with expectation.
The proprietress, a woman made so pale and delicate by her habit she seems to be constructed entirely of paper and bamboo twigs, greets Chú Hai with a slight bow. He grunts and hands her some notes, which she refuses.
“No more of that,” she shakes her head, “gold now; black if you have it to share, yellow if not.”
“Would you take dollars instead,” he teases, to which she only shakes her head once more.
She has the infinite patience of one who’s smoked so many pipes time has no meaning except to measure intervals between more pipes. Having just smoked, she has all the time in the world to wait.
“Hah, even those who dream know none of this will be any good tomorrow,” Chú Hai’ grumbles as he put the piastres back into his wallet and digs out a strip of gold instead.
Tucking the strip under her blouse, she beckons the two of them to lie down on the benches nearest her, and from a rack above her head takes out two long stemmed pipes on which are attached small ceramic bowls in the bud shape of a small boy’s member. She puts these on a tray, on which is already set a small lamp and a square lacquer box.
“Give it to him first,” Chú Hai’ indicates. He laughs, “Be kind. He’s a virgin.”
The woman comes to kneel by Thong with the tray. She lights the lamp, then from the lacquer box scrapes out a tiny black pellet with a needle and begins to heat it over the flame.
“For you this will be more than enough,” she says to Thong, as if afraid he will complain about the little she’s giving him.
Thong watches in fascination as she heats the little pellet over the flame and sniffs at its pungent perfume, then rolls it onto the edge of the pipe bowl, and finally plunges it in. She hands the pipe to Thong, helping him to steady it over the flame.
“Once slowly but deeply,” Thong hears Chú Hai’s voice from behind the woman, “and then again, a little stronger.”
He does as he’s told, and chokes. He tries again, more slowly this time. The pellet is all gone after his third in-breath. And he’s vaporized along with it.
“I can smell the stars,” he hears himself saying to Chú Hai with great solemnity. It seems quite obvious that stars should have a scent to them, like every other living burning thing in the universe.
“Smelling them is just a matter of breathing hard enough,” he says. “Because they’re so far away.”
Chú Hai says something in reply. But, Thong can’t hear him from where he is, up there with the stars. He’s looking down on the river and the city and the helicopters. Just north of the helicopters he sees the tanks gathering at Tan Son Nhut airport, readying themselves for tomorrow’s entry into the city. Further out, at sea, are the American aircraft carriers filling with more and more and more runaways. Or, is this what he read off the report Chú Hai was typing? Does it matter? This is what will be seen by the world, the stars. So why not by him now, down here in this lightly rocking boat. It will be reality remembered, in the way Chú Hai set it down. Because Chú Hai knows … he always knows … how does he know? He must ask Chú Hai later when he comes back down, he tells himself. It’s an existential question. Can a liar lead someone to the truth? The most important question, as far as Thong is concerned. Otherwise, after following in Chú Hai’s footsteps these many years, where will he find himself when this dream’s over?
Thong’s ecstatic he’s discovered this question, the most important question in the whole wide world, the key to opening all his confusions. He’s found it! From where he is up in the sky, he shouts it down to Chú Hai. He thinks he hears Chú Hai’s voice answering, but realizes that he’s speaking to the man in the back of the boat. Two men Thong now sees. The man, his companion and Chú Hai are having a convoluted conversation about wisdom and honour, courage and treachery. They don’t seem to be agreeing. Foolish human beings, Thong thinks. Why not live and let live.
“Who cares now?” he hears one of them say to the other. “It’s time. Let’s go.”
They get up to leave through the back end of the boat. Thong sees them silhouetted against the early dawn sky, heroic in their Southern generals’ uniforms with their peaked caps on, the stars glinting on their square shoulders. They fart, just two little pops. And then they’re gone over the edge.
Thong giggles to himself. Generals fart in the same way lesser mortals do! How undignified, how uncontrolled … Or perhaps, his face screws up in distress uncontrollably, they did it purposely to show their contempt for Chú Hai‘s assertions about the wonderful new order that will soon be coming. Wonderful and new, he hears himself blubbering, so wonderful no one should argue against it.
“It’s so futile,” he announces to Chú Hai, “they shouldn’t have done that.”
“You should’ve stopped them … stopped them …” he’s sobbing uncontrollably.
“Coming down,” he hears Chú Hai saying to the woman.
She murmurs something unintelligible. She’s on her dawn pipe, drifting off. Chú Hai’s worries belong to him. They are none of her business. She’s paid to provide dreams, not resolve problems.
Thong feels Chú Hai’s arms around him, Chú Hai whispering meaningless words to soothe him. He feels his own tears, wetting Chú Hai’s shirt.
“A new birth always comes with pain … just like you came … with pain, into pain …” Chú Hai is telling him, “but you’re living, breathing, with a whole life before you… con, child, that’s what matters… that’s what’s important.”
Thong walks out into the melancholy early morning, his head against Chú Hai’s shoulder. The sunshine hurts his eyes. He’s incredibly thirsty. Chú Hai looks for a street side coffee vendor to get a pick me up but all the inhabitants of Chinatown seem to have gone into hiding. At the entrance to the Martyr’s Square, they see a group of children in khaki uniforms. Bereft of its usual traffic, the roundabout is enormous even to Thong’s citified eyes. To most of these members of the Northern Army, recruited from villages and hamlets in the Central Mountains, such an expanse is a new conception. As for the six arterial roads radiating from it, these are more roads converging in a single place than all but one of them has seen in their lifetime. They are clearly disoriented.
Thong and Chú Hai watch them circle the square once, then again. A small advance squad is sent up the side road beside the market’s South Gate to explore, but comes back shaking their heads.
“There’s nothing but a big wall there!” Thong hears one of them shout in an almost unintelligible accent.
So, Thong blinks, this is the conquering army – a group of lost children barely one and a half meters tall!
Chú Hai calls out to them from the corner where he and Thong are standing, “Comrades… Comrades…”
As one, they swivel around, guns raised. No children these after all, but a seasoned fighting force.
“Stop,” Thong hears a voice shout to the group.
“Come forward,” it says to Chú Hai, who walks out towards them, his arms at his side, his palms open.
“Where do you want to go Comrades?” he asks respectfully.
“The Presidential Palace,” the leader, indistinguishable from his companions in age and dress but with a crisp Hanoi accent, informs Chú Hai. “Do you know the way Uncle?”
“It’s just beyond the wall where your men just went,” Chú Hai replies. He volunteers, “I’ll show you.”
Thong and Chú Hai’s final memories of Saigon that day are seen through the eyes of the teenagers from a Scout Platoon of the 324th Division. Their devastated city becomes once again a place of plenty; the object of a dream carried all the way south through the rain, the jungle, through years and years of sacrifice.
“”We raided a warehouse last night. It was full of medicine and machines I never saw before,” a stocky brown boy confides to Thong in heavy Nghe An tones.
“We ate instant noodles from the supplies,” his friend contributes. “There were boxes of them stacked to the roof, in different flavours. All we had to do was pour hot water over them and they were ready!”
“Look at all this,” the first boy points to the nearly hundred year old trees fronting the boulevard to the Palace, the black tarmac’d road they are walking on. “You have so much, why didn’t you fight harder to defend it?”
“We wanted peace,” Thong replied.
For the sake of peace, we handed it to them on a platter, Thong will say with true regret to Nina’s father many years later when he’s seeking her hand in marriage. On that morning though, all he feels is a shade of uncertainty. Perhaps, yes, it should not have been this easy – the Nationalist Army turning into the guerrillas of old, melting away without even the slightest resistance at the Northern Army’s approach.
Posted in My blood father's son, Works in Progress
Tagged escape from cam ranh bay, fall of vietnam, Memoir, opium den, Vietnam, Vietnam War, war
Leave a comment
With the sex scandals in the newspare the last month, conversation at a lot of my lunches has centered around the delicious terrible depravity that’s crazed some people whome… whisper … whisper … we might know! BUT, It’s not depravity that drives me crazy; it’s the small pieces of apathy, its how we allow ourselves to allow the world to slip-slide into awfulness.
In the countryside around here, where village girls barely budded are allowed to be used and thrown away like tissue paper; then picked up and recycled over and over and over in the city we have learnt to be indifferent. To do only what we can.
Take the case of the girl Jade on one of our scholarship programs. She was fourteen and only in fourth grade, the child of illiterate parents. They’re casual day laborers who for a time lived in a shed against a grandmother’s house. Later, the hamlet officials built them a charity shelter. It’s funny how people can be illiterate but still know how to count enough to play cards. The mother started a successful gambling operation. One thing led to another. One day, Jade’s mum let in a lodger. He had full access to the premises, including Jade – a thirty year old man already married with children!
When we went to see Jade last summer she was pale and listless. An abortion, the co-ordinator told us later spilling the rest of the beans. I was furious. Why hadn’t we informed the people’s committee? The police? I was told we shouldn’t rock the rest of our program. The co-ordinator didn’t want a knife stuck in her back on the way from one house visit to another. So long as she’s going to school, I was told. And I allowed myself to be persuaded.
In the New Year, Jade told the co-ordinator she didn’t want to go to school anymore. She wanted to learn sewing. We thought it was a good idea. It would give her the ability to earn a living if she found herself saddled with a child at fifteen, if she wanted to run away. Otherwise, all we could envisage for her, half educated as she was, was more recycling in the city. We went to the hamlet to let her know that we’d found her an apprenticeship. But, she was already gone to the city we were told! Her mother’s youngest sister was taking her there to introduce her …
What if… what if… what if … The regret and guilt were so heavy I couldn’t sleep for days. But slowly, apathy slipped in again. You can’t win them all, I said. We’ve done what we can.
Still there are miracles worthy of the name! Three weeks later, we were told that Ngoc was back in school. The co-ordinator went to see her grandmother. She’s going to be apprenticed to a tailor in another town, away from the lodger, the gambling den, her mother.
Who knows what will happen to this young woman. We can only hope. And pray, that we know what we can change, accept what we can’t, have the wisdom to know the difference and the courage to do something about it … instead of allowing apathy to slip-slide us into awfulness.