This video presents 'Vi' by Kim Thuy, a novel exploring the Vietnamese refugee experience during the Vietnam War. The story follows Vi, the youngest daughter of a wealthy family, whose life is dramatically altered when her father remains in Vietnam while her family flees to Canada. The narrative weaves together themes of colonial education systems, cultural identity, family dynamics, and the challenges of displacement. Through Vi's journey from Saigon to Montreal, the novel illustrates how refugees navigate new societies while preserving their cultural heritage, ultimately finding belonging and purpose in their adopted homeland.
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Vi by Kim ThuyAdded:
V by Kimui, translated from the French by Sheila Fishman.
I was 8 years old when our house was plunged into silence. Under the fan fixed to the ivory wall of the dining room, a large bright red sheet of rigid cardboard held a block of 365 sheets of paper. On each was marked the month, the day of the week, and two dates, one according to the solar calendar, the other according to the lunar calendar.
As soon as I was able to climb onto a chair, the task of tearing off a page was reserved for me when I woke up. I was the guardian of time.
That privilege was taken away from me when my older brothers L and L turned 17. Beginning on that birthday, which we didn't celebrate, my mother cried every morning in front of the calendar. It seemed to me that she was being torn apart each time she ripped off that day's page. The tick- tock of the clock that usually put us to sleep at afternoon nap time suddenly sounded like a bomb waiting to explode.
I was the baby of the family, the only sister of my three big brothers, the one everyone protected like precious bottles of perfume behind clin doors.
Even though my young age meant I was somewhat sheltered from my family's concerns, I knew that the two older boys would have to leave for the battlefield on the day they turned 18. Whether they were sent to Cambodia to fight Paulot or to the frontier with China, both destinations reserved for them the same fate, the same death.
My paternal grandfather had graduated from the faculty of law at the University of Hanoi where he was identified as indigenous.
France took charge of educating its subjects but did not accord the same value to diplomas awarded in its colonies. It may have been right to do so because the realities of life in Indochina had nothing in common with those of France. On the other hand, course requirements and exam questions were the same. My grandfather often told us that after the written examinations came a series of orals that led to the balorate.
For the French course, he'd had to translate in front of his teachers a Vietnamese poem into French and another in the opposite direction. Mathematics problems also had to be solved orally.
The final test was to contend with the hostility of those who would decide on his future while still keeping his composure.
The teachers intrigence didn't surprise the students because in the social hierarchy, intellectuals occupied the top of the pyramid. They sat there as wise men and would be addressed as professor by their students all their lives. It was unthinkable to question what they said because they possessed the universal truth. That is why my grandfather had never protested when his teachers gave him a French name. From lack of knowledge or as an act of resistance, his parents had not done so.
In his classes, then from year to year, from one professor to another, he would acquire a new name.
Leang, Philip Leang, Pascal Leang.
Of all these names, he ended up retaining Atwan and transformed Leang into a family name.
Back in Saigon, diploma in Hen, my paternal grandfather became a respected judge and a fabulously wealthy landowner. He expressed his pride at having created at the same time an empire and an enviable reputation by giving his own name to each of his children Leang Jean Leang Mari Leang and my father Jean Leang.
In contrast to me, my father was the only boy in a family of six girls. Like me, my father arrived last, just as everyone had stopped, hoping for a standard bearer. His birth transformed the life of my grandmother, who until then had suffered every day from mean-spirited remarks about her inability to beget an heir. She had been torn between her own desire to be her husband's only wife and his duty to choose a second spouse.
Luckily for her, her husband was one of those who had adopted the French practice of monogamy.
Or perhaps he was quite simply in love with my grandmother, a woman known throughout Cotin, China, for her graceful beauty and her delight in the pleasures of the senses.
My paternal grandmother first met my grandfather very early one morning at the floating market in Ga, a district on one of the arms of the Meong that was half land, half water. Every day since 1732, merchants had been bringing their crops of fruits and vegetables to that part of the delta to sell to wholesalers from far away. The color of the wood mingles with the muddy brown of the water gives the impression that melons, pineapples, pomelos, cabbages, gourds are floating independently of the men who have been waiting on the wararf since dawn to snap them up at the first opportunity.
To this day, they transfer the fruits and vegetables by hand as if these crops were untrusted to them, not sold.
My grandmother was standing on the deck of the ferry, hypnotized by these repetitive and synchronized movements when my grandfather noticed her. He was at first dazzled by the sun, then astounded by the young girl with her generous curves, accented by the fault of the Vietnamese dress that tolerates no spurfluous movement, and above all, no indelicacy of intention.
Snap fasteners down the right side keep the dress closed but never really fasten it. As a result, a single broad or abrupt movement causes the tunic to open all the way. For this reason, school girls have to wear a chamisole underneath to avoid accidental indecency.
On the other hand, nothing can prevent the two long panels of the dress from replying to the breath of the wind and capturing hearts that find it hard to resist the power of beauty.
My grandfather fell into that trap.
Blinded by the gentle intermittent movement of the wings of the dress, he declared to his colleague that he would not leave Gyar without that woman. He first had to humiliate another young girl who had been promised to him and cause offense to the elders in his family before he could touch the hands of my grandmother.
Some believed that he was in love with her long lashed almond eyes, others with her fleshy lips, while still others were convinced that he had been seduced by her full hips.
No one had noticed the slender fingers holding a notebook against her bosom except my grandfather, who went on describing them for decades. He continued to evoke them long after age had transformed those smooth tapering fingers into a fabulous myth, or at the very most a lover's tale.
Bingo's indigenous art school was at the height of its renown when my grandparents visited it to buy the seventh piece of ceramic for their seventh child. They were hesitating between the blue fleck copper and the seladon glaze when my grandmother's waters broke.
After pushing a few times, she gave birth to my father. Miraculously, my grandfather 2 weeks earlier than predicted was presented with a boy, his only boy.
My father was carried in my grandmother's fairylike hands and also in the hands of his six older sisters and in those of the 26 nurses, cooks, maids, not counting those of the 600 women who received adoringly in their open arms, his well-formed face, his broad shoulders, his athletes legs, and his seductive smile.
He could have studied sciences or the law like his sisters, but the affection of some and the love of others drew him away from his books and in so doing atrified the gland that stimulates desire.
How to desire when all is fulfilled in advance? Before he had even opened his eyes, the nipple of a lukewarm bottle of milk would be brushing his lips up to the age of five or six. No one dared wake him for school because his mother forbade anyone to interrupt his dreams.
His nurse escorted him to his school desk where she learned to read at the same time as he did. During his piano lessons, the maid fought over who could cool the back of his neck and freshen the ambient air with the sandalwood fan.
He charmed his teacher simply by accompanying her warm-up notes with his voice. The more years passed, the larger the assembly in front of his house to hear the melodies he invented on the spot without having the least aspiration to immortalize the slightest thing.
The effort wearied him, as did the hands that kept dapping at the drops of sweat on his nose. Still he dare not refuse any of those attentions, because for him to receive meant to give of oneself.
And so my father grew up in rapture and also in a weightless void. He did not count his time in hours, but rather in the number of moves in a game of Chinese checkers, or the number of punishments his mother inflicted on a maid who let drop a ball or broom during his naps, or the number of love letters slipped anonymously into the letter box. The fruits of the Levang Empire would have easily permitted him to live on the margins of society. Fortunately, life loves to constantly alter the order of things, thus giving everyone the opportunity to follow its progress to live within it. My father was barely 20 when agrarian reform divided into the revenue and properties of the Levven empire. For the first time, farm workers were able to own the fields they plowed.
Just as these new policies were being implemented, my grandfather suffered a heart attack that diminished him by half. Without those shocks, my father would probably never have married my mother.
The girls of Dact were known for their pale complexions and their pink cheeks.
Some believe that the high cool plateaus safeguard their radiance while other attribute the softness of their gestures to the mist that covers those valleys.
My mother was an exception to this rule.
Very quickly, very early, she accepted the fact that the boys would never say, "You are my springtime." Even though her first name, Swung, meant spring. and she lived in a place called the city of eternal spring. My mother had not inherited my grandmother's fine smooth skin. Rather, she bore her father's creme genes evident in her sturdy face to which was added the ravages of acne throughout her adolescence.
In order to turn away the eyes of others and to stitch the lips of sour mouths, she chose to become a woman who was fierce, armed with a will of iron and a hard masculine vocabulary.
She had come first in her class from kindergarten right up to her final year at school. without waiting to begin her studies in management. At a very young age, she took over the reigns of the family orchid farm, diversifying and reorganizing the production and transforming it into a business that grew exponentially.
She asked her father, a highly placed bureaucrat, if she could make improvements to the villa they rented out to vacationers.
Very soon she persuaded him to buy several other villas in order to meet the high demand. There were many people who sought a destination that reminded them of Europe, far from the daily and often stifling reality of tropical temperatures and conflicted relations between the dominant and the dominated.
It was said that Dalac, as its name indicated, had the power to provide pleasure for some and cool air for others.
My mother was 15 years old when my father rented the DACA villa for the first time. My father didn't notice her because when he passed by, she had to lower her eyes in order not to betray herself. She had spied on him from a distance during this initial visit of Judge Leang's family. the following year. And from then on, she insisted on taking part in meal preparation, overseeing every detail, from the carrots delicately coughed into flowers and added to sauces, to the pieces of watermelon from which the seeds had been removed one by one with a toothpick so as not to disturb the flesh.
In the morning, the coffee had to be prepared from civid droppings to which was attributed its caramelized taste free of bitterness.
My mother brought the morning coffee herself to my father on the terrace, hoping to see him applying brilliant to his comb in order to shape his ebony hair in a manner of Clark Gable. She had to catch her breath every time she saw him twist the comb, using the handle's pointed end to let fall a small sshaped lock onto his brow. Even if she was standing just a few steps away, waiting for the coffee to seep drop by drop through the filter posed directly on one of the family's four rare bakara glasses. She remained invisible to his eyes. She prolonged the pleasure of being in his company by squeezing the filter's base, thus slowing the hot water's progress through the layer of tightly packed coffee. When it came to the last drops, she passed the back of the spoon under the filter, an act that halted the flow. Like all Vietnamese, my father took his coffee sweetened with condensed milk, except for the first sip, which he preferred black pure. It was after this first sip that he at last spoke to my mother.
Astounded by the unusual velvety taste of the coffee, he turned his eyes in my mother's direction. She revealed to him the secret, showing him a small misshapen ball dotted with seeds gathered nearby from the plantations at Bouto.
Those balls came from wild civets that excreted the seeds whole after having eaten and digested ripe coffee cherries.
And since the coolies did not have the right to avail themselves of the fruit they gathered for the owners, they had processed that excrement which revealed itself to be more delicate and above all rarer than the regular harvest.
My father became an instant convert. My mother volunteered to be his provider and the one who schooled him in the aromas added peace meal during the roasting, including the precious butter imported from France.
Every two weeks, she carefully wrapped up a bag of coffee that she or an employee placed directly in my father's hands. She continued to observe this ritual during the rainy season during the demonstrations in the Saigon streets between the arrival of the Soviets in the north and the deployment of American soldiers in the south.
When the Leang family came to Dalat, my mother continued to attend to the needs of my father from coffee at dawn to the mosquito netting tucked in between the mattress and the bed. After my paternal grandfather's heart attack, my mother's parents invited him and his family to come more often because the heir of the lot was recognized for its healing powers.
Little by little, one of the villas became the residence of my father's family, even if they didn't have the means to pay for such a prolonged stay.
My mother was delighted to see my father leaving his footprints on the earthn paths in the rose garden and to hear his voice resonate among the pines at night.
The reforms and political changes had seriously impoverished the Levang family. Despite his carefree manner, my father was concerned about the erosion of his comfort. The deafening echo of the luxurious shell being drained from inside presented him with the image of a handsome prince with no kingdom. The fear of becoming a man in decline prompted him to take hold of my mother's hand in full flight. A single word escaped from his mouth. Swung. A single word from my father was enough to elicit an eternal vow from my mother. Yes, I'll take care of everything.
My parents' marriage was the event of the season at Dalat. In order to satisfy the curiosity of the employees and residents of the town, my parents paraded in a convertible around Lake Hosung Hung before arriving at the reception. where the region's personages and dignitaries awaited them, and where all the women led bets on my mother's unhappy future. On my father's arm, accompanied by her parents and her parents-in-law, my mother welcomed the guest at every table. My father and my two grandfathers thanked each group for their good wishes, toasting and emptying their glasses along with the table's spokesman. While the men cheated by filling their glasses with tea instead of whiskey so they could complete their tour without falling down, my mother took pleasure in staring down the women who had openly called her a monkey, savage, and transvestite since her birth. to the ends of their lives. They continued to be mystified by my father's decision. My mother could make light of those insult because from now on she would walk wrapped in the aura of my father's beauty.
To be my father's wife was to erase her flattened nostrils, her drooping eyelids, her square chin. She presented herself to people as Madame Leang and demanded to be addressed as such by her employees because each time this name was uttered, she heard my father whispering that her hair cascaded like the water of the friend falls that her pupils were as round and bright as two longen pits and above all that no other woman understood him better than she did.
From the first year of their marriage, she created a throne that allowed my father to be the monarch of his kingdom by buying a warehouse in a villa in Saigon.
He became the master of this depot where merchants and buyers came to submit their orders to a staff hired by my mother and officially overseen by my father.
My mother advised their employees that he had to attend a number of social functions in the evening. Therefore, it was strictly forbidden to disturb him in the morning, at noon, during his sesta, or when he was reflecting.
All questions were to be addressed to her first, while all the decisions taken by my father were to be given priority in their execution.
She arrived at the office at 4:30 in the morning after the wholesalers market to receive the first sales report from her employees. At 7:00, she was back at the house a few streets away. Those two properties would not have been accessible to her had she not mentioned her Chinese ancestors.
Jalong was and still is the preserve of the Chinese community known for its solidarity and its commercial might dean a French viscount who was an author, adventurer and journalist had chosen to live there in 1955 in order to write a study of Chinese culture. Mr. The Bonsa suspected that the ancestral customs were better preserved in the colonies than in the mother country or at the very least for a longer period. My grandfather Leang had long conversations on that subject with Musul de Leon and also concerning Mu Ivon Petra born in Tolong and who in 1946 became the last French winner of Wimbledon a distinction that stands to this day.
That tennis player was also the last to wear long pants on the court. My grandfather was convinced that he had respected this sectoral tradition to the end in the manner of the children of Jalong, who not only adhered to millinary customs and moors, but spoke Vietnamese with a Chinese accent, even if they had never set foot in China. My father never liked Jalong. He preferred downtown Saigon with its French cafes and American bars. Above all, he liked to drink beer on the hotel Continental Terrace where the foreign journalists spend their days analyzing troop movements and the latest popular songs.
as often as he could. He reserved the table where Graham Green, a war correspondent at the beginning of the 1950s, liked to station himself to keep an eye on the city and to draw inspiration from neighboring tables for the characters in his novel, The Quiet American.
At the height of the Levang Empire, my grandfather collected twirlings situated on the Hibbachung Street of different towns through which he passed. He wanted to remind my aunts that they should be independent of mine and above all combative. Following the example of the two Chungu sisters who had driven back the Chinese army and governed 65 towns and villages for 3 years before committing suicide when they lost power.
In honor of those two heroins who remained unrivaled for 2,000 years, my grandfather offered the use of those houses to nieces, cousins, friends, and scholarship holders during their studies. Over the years, the beneficiaries transformed those temporary lodgings into permanent residences when they started their families.
My father took possession of the house on Hibbachung Street in Saigon where he hosted his mistresses and friends. They got together for games of pingpong or poker with their paramore of the day or for forbidden games as he liked to call them. Referring to the soundtrack of the famous French film and its melody that was learned by all the Vietnamese youths who tried to coax songs from their guitars. Once married, he continued to use this space for the same purposes as did many of the men in his circle. Out of discretion and in the interest of her own survival, my mother never set foot there. She just reminded the servant to always have ready a dish of fresh fruits, to prepare dried shrimp mixed with marinated wild godly cloves to accompany the rice wine, and to bring along baguettes and pate to be consumed along with the wine.
This servant was and still is my father's closest friend. They were born 3 months apart. His mother had been hired as my father's wet nurse by my maternal grandmother, who didn't know that the young woman had left her village to continue her pregnancy to term. The two boys became brothers. They played marbles together, engaged in cricket battles and sword fights. They raised fighting fish, one per jar, keeping each one hidden from the other with pieces of cardboard to save their energies for battle. Sometimes they allowed themselves to lift the cardboard and admire the deployment of their fins.
The blue one found its tail into a half moon. The white one swept the water with its skirts, as if its long wedding dress were as light as air. The orange one was less spectacular but very precious because it never gave up as much as the orange attacked. So the yellow was master of the art of evading its adversary and waiting patiently for the opportune moment to strike. The two boys spent hours discussing the personalities of their fish and fitting them mosquito larve. Their passion for the fish from the stagnant water of the rice patties never waned. Their collection grew as soon as they were able to raise females as well and knew how to pair them with a male during their fertile periods. They watched closely as the males made their nest of bubbles in preparation for the birds and chased off the females as soon as they had laid their eggs. The boys then transferred them to another jar to prevent the females from devouring their children. They raised their fish together like a family that belonged exclusively to them. They had their favorites but were deeply saddened when any one of them died.
My father and his servant were brothers who had different family names and different parents and who went to different schools. One attended the neighborhood school with its beaten earth floor while the other carried his notebooks in a bag made of elephant hide.
Everyone knew my father's school which was named for Petruski, an intellectual who had taught and popularized the Vietnamese language written with the Roman alphabet instead of Chinese characters. Even though Vietnamese is now written by sound, most of the words still carry the trace of their original images from ideoggrams.
My first name, Baui, showed my parents determination to protect the smallest one. In a literal translation, I am tiny, precious, microscopic.
As is often the case in Vietnam, I did not match the image of my own name.
Girls called bloun or snow will have very dark skin and boys called powerful or strong will be afraid of challenges.
As for me, I kept on growing far surpassing the average and at the same time projecting myself outside the norm.
Teachers put me in the back row so they would have a better overall view of the classroom. In that way, they could detect the slightest out ofplace movement, and the guilty student would end up instantly at the board, facing his 60 classmates, hand open, waiting for the blow of the wooden ruler on his knuckles or palm. Afterwards, it was extremely difficult for the pupil to hold a pen, dip it into the ink bottle, and write without trembling.
In spite of his efforts and the pink bladder held in the left hand to follow the movements of the pen and soak up excess ink, he was rarely able to follow the 2 mm horizontal lines in the ruled CS notebooks without going over the edge or staining the paper. Besides having a swollen hand, he would lose points for slloppy work. I was definitely a model student compared with the scatter brains relegated to the back of the classroom or at least the most delicate because I tried as best I could to be a v a microscopic girl invisible.
If my father had been as invisible as me at the end of the war, he would not have been arrested and sent to a reeducation camp in the region of Tuduk where he shared with the 10 comrades in his hut his daily ration of 10 peanuts.
Because my father had been born with the destiny of princes, he was freed after 2 months. His servant brother had been able to save him by demonstrating to the authorities that my father had supported him financially in his espionage work for the communist resistance. He argued that my father had indirectly helped the north to win the war against the south which had exonerated him from the status of bourgeoa capitalist.
Without the intervention of that enemy brother, he would have stayed behind digging canals, clearing minefields, digging up the ground with the other prisoners who had lost all hope of learning when they would be set free.
The only thought they allowed themselves was to hope that a grasshopper or rat would happen by and become their evening meal. because any other reflection could be interpreted as a betrayal of communist thought.
The surgeon in the next hut, who had been drying a few tiny rice cakes in the sun, was accused of preparing for his escape instead of concentrating on his reication.
An accountant had been similarly sanctioned when he confided to the other prisoners that he could hear the sound of motorcycles driving along the north side of the prison. If my father had seen other men being summoned by the gods, never to come back to the camp, he might perhaps have chosen to flee Vietnam. Perhaps he would not have abandoned us to our race towards the unknown without him. Like my mother, he would perhaps have given priority to saving his sons from military service.
Unfortunately, once again, he withdrew into the cocoon of his bachelor apartment, isolated from the uncertainties of life.
We left Vietnam with a close friend of my mother, Ha, and her parents.
Ha is much younger than my mother. At the beginning of the 1970s in Saigon, she was the perfect modern woman in the American style with her very short dresses that showed off the slanted heart-shaped birthark high up on her left thigh. I remember her irresistible platform shoes in the hallway of our house, which struck me as decadent, or at least gave me a new perspective on the world when I slipped them on. Her false eyelashes thick with mascara transformed her eyes into two spikyhaired rambutans. She was out twiggy with her apple green and turquoise eyes shadow, two colors that clashed with her coppery skin.
She was unlike most of the young girls who avoided the sun in order to set themselves apart from the peasants in the rice fields who had to roll their pants up to their knees and endured the violent bright light. Ha bar beared her skin at the swimming pool of the very exclusive Casif where she gave me swimming lessons. She preferred American freedom to the elegance of French culture which gave her the courage to participate in the first Miss Vietnam competition even though she was an English teacher.
My mother did not approve of her choices which went contrary to her status as a welleducated young woman from a good family. But she supported her by buying her the long dress and bathing suit that Ha would wear on stage. She had her practice walking in a straight line along the tiled floor, balancing a dictionary on her head, as she's seen women do in films. My mother treated her as if she were her big sister and shielded her from gossip. She allowed her to take me with her to the chic boutiques on Hukatina and to drink a lime soda with her foreign friends.
How marched along this street with its grand hotels like a proud conqueror. The city belonged to her. I wondered whether my mother envied her disease that came from the compliments raining down on her from her teachers and her American colleagues. The latter celebrated her beauty with gifts of chocolate bars, hair curlers, and Louis Armstrong records. Whereas the Vietnamese looked on her dark complexion as savage.
More than once my grandparents asked my mother to halt my swimming lessons with her. I suspect that my mother disobeyed them and kept her close to us because she hoped I would learn to be beautiful.
Unfortunately, that time with Ha in Vietnam was too short or my apprenticehip too slow.
In 1954, the 17th parallel cut Vietnam in two. In 1975, April 30th drew a line dividing before from after, between the end of a war and what followed, between power and fear. Before we heard Hal's laughter as soon as she turned off her scooter's motor, she laughed while playing hopscotch with the children in the alley. She teased the gardener for the irresistible transparency of his worn shirt. She fearlessly answered to the yapping of our guard dogs.
After Ha became the wife of a general from Vin, a northern town raised by bombings, but filled with wandering spirits, including those of his parents, whom he had not been able to visit again before they became buried beneath the ruins.
Without that general, all of Ha's family would have been sent to the uninhabitable swampy lands called new economic zones.
Becoming the wife of a general allowed Ha to continue teaching English and not have to line up to buy the monthly ration of sugar, rice, and meat. No one dared to speak badly of those who had made the same choice as her, but the stars of others wounded her as much as the general slaps to which she was resigned.
She couldn't spare her parents the noises betraying her submission since they were just on the other side of a newly installed curtain.
Rather than leap up in a rage, her parents kept silent. They played dead.
They feared that Ha might suffer the same fate as their neighbor who had put a bullet into her head after having succeeded in freeing her husband from a reeducation camp in exchange for a liaison with a highranking officer from the north.
This new partner had consented to the liberation and also to her husband's and children's flight by boat. After their departure, she pulled the trigger to achieve her own liberation.
My mother treated this new ha in her dark clothes and no longer wearing makeup with the same consideration as before.
She awaited her with cotton batten and the bottle of lotion she used to treat her every wound. According to family lore, this long infusion of rice wine and medicinal herbs had healed a cousin's neck that had been torn open by shroudnol from a bomb, prevented a neighbor's burns from becoming infected after she had been dowsed with acid by a jealous husband, and could make bruises vanish even before your tears had dried.
As much as Ha had proudly displayed her painted eyelids before her marriage to the general, so from the start of her new relationship, she hid her black eyes under the wide brim of a hat. I had the impression that she was becoming smaller and smaller, not only because of her flat plastic slippers that scraped the ground, but also because of the absence of her boisterous laughter. She climbed the steps like a shadow to blend in properly with the silence that prevailed all across the country.
Keyholes gave access to no secret conversations.
The drifting winds bore no words or music. Nothing was airborne but the government messages blaring from loudspeakers reminding us that it was the day of the great cleanup when all the neighbor residents had to bring out their brooms at the same time to clean the streets or announcing a court case to be judged by three neighbors bringing accusations against a former lawyer who had dared to site the Napoleonic code during a discussion or denouncing families who had celebrated a marriage too joyfully or who had mourned too sorrowfully the loss of a dear one. I didn't know that my mother took advantage of these public proclamations to whisper into Har's ear the address of a smuggler who would organize our departure from Vietnam.
Ha crossed the Gulf of Siam at the same time we did. She had managed to persuade the hairdresser to introduce her to her cousin who worked for someone who knew someone who could recommend an organizer.
No name and no promise had been given.
In exchange for the gold tales demanded for her passage and that of her parents, she had been told to to go to the hair salon as often as possible in order to learn the departure dates. This was how she became my mother's messenger.
We took the same bus at dawn on a morning that was supposed to seem like all others. My father still in bed and my mother in motion, nolessly performing task after task.
She put on my street clothes over two pairs of pants. I obeyed all of her instructions. I already knew that I was to ask no questions so as not to disturb her steady gaze, which served as a barrier to her tears.
I can still see her rubbing my brother's nails with charcoal, unlike all the other days when a nurse filed them while another sang to distract them. As for my mother, she was wearing the clothes of our herb seller.
During the trip from Saigon to the water, I kept my face flattened against her blouse, still impregnated with a scent of lemon balm, which refused to give way to that of coriander.
This mixture of perfumes in the bus put me to sleep, sparing me the gouts of blood from the fish that the passengers standing near us was carrying in a bag which sometimes dripped onto me when the vehicle veered to the left.
Sleep prevented me from being afraid of the policemen who asked Ha and my brother Long sitting two rows behind us for their identification papers.
Before dropping off, I saw Ha's father slip some money into the hands of the one who was reproaching my brother L for wearing his hair long the way capitalists did. A rebellious act that warranted a prison sentence.
We covered 300 kilometers in 10 hours.
Towards the end of the trip, I didn't hear the chickens anymore clocking away in unison along with the noisy gap gap gap of the ducks on the roof shut into their woven ratten cage. The first time I ever ate pick, a waiter meticulously sliced off pieces of skin that we sampled in rolls, minus the meat. And I couldn't help thinking about those ducks. I wondered if their skin also came off their flesh beneath the fiery heat of the roof like the bacon ducks like mine, so puffy after the long trip.
My feet had swollen in the dense and stagnant heat of the bus, overflowing the shoes thongs, stretching my skin to the point of transparency.
When I was small and still extremely sensitive to changes in temperature, my father, when there was a power failure, settled me into our air conditioned car to put me to sleep. He would lay me down beside him, then drive through the city.
His hand caressed my damp hair and he said, "My daughter is fermenting like yogurt as well." He compared my hands to balls of dough, the little bri that my mother and I prepared together every Sunday. According to my father, even Parisian bakers could not compete with my mother. What was more, even if he ate in the best restaurants in town, he insisted that no chef knew how to lift stuffed zucchini blossoms from the frying pan the way she did, just in time to preserve the texture of the petals.
Only my mother had mastered their preparation and knew how to extract their sugar beneath the crisp, light crust of rice flour.
Like other Vietnamese families, we put all the dishes out in the middle of the table at the same time, with one exception. My mother served my father separately in order to save the best for him. The soft shell crab overflowing with eggs, the perfectly shaped sticks of fried potatoes, the most tender chory leaves.
It went without saying that the 50 seeds of the sugar apple were removed and its sweet white flesh held out to him like an offering.
My father introduced us to delicacies brought back from elsewhere such as any seed from flavveni or fa or the cantaloupes that were served in certain French restaurants in Saigon. He insisted on celebrating Christmas with ulogs and welcoming friends more often with chocolate eclairs than with black sesame or banana candies. For my third birthday, the cook was ordered to prepare a three tiered cake with buttercream. Usually, I was more attracted to rice and taro puddings or two ice cream served in bri.
That day, impelled by some mysterious desire, I bit into the first tear as soon as the cake had been placed on its stand. No one could believe that I was capable of an act so decadent and spontaneous.
My father blamed the dog, which was tied up 10 m from the kitchen.
I rediscovered the same outlandish and uncontrollable craving the first time I bit into a Belgian waffle. I recognized the texture of the dough and the taste of the granular sugar described by my father, who had been seduced by the aroma of melted butter at a waffle stand in the Brussels train station. I heard his voice when I strolled past the Bruge Boutiques where he had purchased a lace shaw for my mother. At the time, my father's traveling companion preferred to offer some fabric to his wife, who immediately turned it into an Aya.
The next day, she saw a young weather reporter on television wearing the identical outfit. And yet this cloth was impossible to find in Vietnam. She tried to include my mother in her jealous rage, imagining a number of different scenarios for taking a wrathful revenge, from a confrontation to a denunciation in the newspaper.
While this woman was certainly correct in believing that my mother was the victim of similar conjugal transgressions, my mother remained in passive during her fit of anger. She only advised her not to humiliate herself by humiliating her husband's mistress. Then she draped her lace shawl as fragile as a breath of air over her aai of silk to attend a reception in honor of her father-in-law, Judge Leang.
Her ears were adorned with the pair of pearls offered by her mother-in-law on the occasion of the birth of my twin brothers. Were she to encounter another woman wearing the same shawl, she would greet her with the self asssurance that she was the mother of the four children bearing the name of my father.
One day, while I was napping in a hammock, my mother received the visit of a young woman with a child my age called G. Through the netting, I watched him shooting marbles. Bits of their conversation reached my ears, even though they were whispering. Before falling back to sleep, I saw my mother place in the young woman's palm her gold necklace and bracelet. And I heard her tell the young woman to return to Camo and to never again try to disturb my father.
Camo, known for the blackness of its swampy waters and its dense dark forest, is located at the extreme southerntherly point of Vietnam. Surrounded by three seas, it is perfectly placed for flights by boat. We hid there with my half brother G, waiting for a sign from our smuggler. His mother, she who wore my mother's chain around her neck, fed us for the two days preceding our departure. My mother offered to take Chi with us. Amid the chaos of fear, the silence, and the darkness, Gi got on a different boat than ours, with Ha, who had lost her parents in the crowd. We left Vietnam in three different boats.
Ours docked in Malaysia without having encountered any storms or pirates. Ha.
and Chi didn't have the same luck. Their boat was intercepted by pirates four times. During the last attack, Chi received an accidental machete blow from a man in an agitated state. My mother lied to his mother, saying that he was reported missing at sea along with H's parents. My father never found out that he had lost a son.
My first name did not prepare me for facing storms on the high seas, and even less for sharing a straw hut in a Malaysian refugee camp with an elderly woman who cried day and night for a month without telling us the identity of the 14 young children who accompanied her. We had to wait for the farewell meal on the eve of our departure for Canada before she suddenly related to us the details of her crossing. She had seen her son's throat being cut before her eyes because he had dared to throw himself on a pirate who was raping his pregnant wife.
This mother had fainted at the moment when her son and daughter-in-law were thrown into the sea. She didn't know what happened next. She only remembered waking up beneath bodies to the sound of tears being shed by the 14 surviving children.
When the words began to pass between the pallet lips of this woman who was more like a ghost, my mother chased me from the hut in an attempt to safeguard the innocence of my 8 years. It was a futile gesture since the walls were made from jude bags and the ceilings from canvas.
In any case, similar stories were being told around the well and the dust during our sleep everywhere in the camp. I knew that we had to avoid the two men suspected of cannibalism during their voyage and not to disturb the statue woman who waited religiously from dawn to dusk for her baby to wash up on the beach.
My mother became the de facto leader of the women with no husbands because she demanded that my brothers help other mothers by bringing them containers of water.
When we had arrived in the camp, the French and Australian delegations had just left. No one could tell us when they might return or when delegations from other countries might be passing through. It went without saying that no refugee planned to live long-term in the camp. But our daily task rooted us despite everything in this hot and hostile land. New rituals fell into place. Young boys got together at dusk around a palm tree whose trunk followed the horizontal incline of the ground to play with marbles offered by one of the Malaysian supervisors.
New lovers escaped behind the big rocks on the hill. Artists sculpted pieces of the wreckage from boats. Quite soon, dragging one's empty pel for 3 hours to reach the well became as banal as the pains from chronic disentry.
The discomfort of physical and mental proximity diminished to the rhythm of spontaneous laughter and miraculous reunions. In this isolated world, friendships were born of the simplest bond. Two classmates became two sisters.
Two natives of the same town helped each other out as if they were cousins. Two orphans formed a family.
The Canadian delegation was the first to receive us. My mother had organized a class in the camp. She taught mathematics in French to children and the French language to adults. She had the good fortune to be taken on as an interpreter by the franophhone delegations during the selection sessions. She didn't know that the Canadian delegation offered interpreters the opportunity to immigrate because we were part of the first large wave of Vietnamese immigrants allowed into Canada. We had heard no rumors about the country which we assumed was wintry for all 12 months of the year. My mother assured us that our DACA roots would help us adapt to the cold. To me, she said that Santa Claus lived at the North Pole, very near to Canada.
We arrived in the city of Quebec during a heatwave that seemed to have undressed the entire population. The men sitting on the balconies of our new doicile were all stripped to the waist with their bellies well in view like the bai. Those laughing Buddhas who promised financial success to merchants and to others joy if they robbed their roundness.
Many Vietnamese men dreamed of possessing this symbol of wealth, but few succeeded. My brother Long could not help expressing his happiness when our bus stopped in front of a row of buildings where abundance was on show many times over.
We've landed in paradise.
L got busy fighting us clothes more suited to the season because my mother had bought only warm clothing from the itinerant Malaysian pedler anticipating a cold Canada. She had been happy and proud to have found for me in the wheelbarrow boutique a pair of red fake leather boots whose gloss made you overlook the torn lining inside. The right heel worn down unevenly gave me the walk of the little girl who must have got rid of the boots after wearing them for quite a while since the zippers had been mended several times. She became my imaginary friend who urged me to put one foot in front of the other in a totally new world that frightened me with its space and its far horizons.
Like the chickens that both dwelling families raised in the hollow middle of thick lengths of bamboo, I preferred to stay motionless in our apartment much too fast compared with our small plot of earth in the refugee camp. My body had adapted itself to the shape of my brothers and my mother. I had slept surrounded by their arms, their ribs, and the unevenness of the ground. How to find oneself alone one day a top the softness of a mattress without being cocooned in the sweat of my family without being lulled by their breath.
How to suddenly lose the permanent presence of my mother. How to find one's way before an endless horizon with no barb wire, no overseers.
Given the absence of addresses in the refugee camp, we had resorted to visual aids.
The woman who lents out needles has an enamel water pail with a handle. The German interpreter sleeps under a blue clothes line mended with rags. The handdresser has a mirror nailed to a skinny tree trunk. To locate the dress maker, you have to go past the rock where the monk meditates at dawn, turn left at the well, circle the latrines, and ask neighbors and passes by where she may be found.
And so with my eyes still unaccustomed to the vastness, how could I find my way in the midst of the wide long boulevard whose trees all seemed perfectly identical.
As the eldest, my brother Long bore the burden of acting as head of the family.
He took the place of both my father and my mother. He took care of us while my mother washed dishes at the corner restaurant until midnight. He taught us our address, our telephone number, and showed us how to greet people in French.
He introduced himself to the neighbors and was friendly with them. He smiled at all the people he met without exception.
The lady on the ground floor behind her walker. The grasshopper children on the third floor. The tattooed man. The young girl in her miniskirt and high heels. He opened doors and helped people carry their grocery bags. He swept up the cigarette butts, advertising circulars and candy wrappers on the stairs. He played ball with the children.
Within a few weeks, the whole neighborhood knew his name. His years of apprenticehip in French and Saigon schools enabled him to grasp very quickly how the public transit system worked.
He made his way through the city by bus and asked the drivers with confidence and pride, "May I have a transport, please?" And he was given a coupon to present to the next driver, which would let him continue on his way to the center of town.
My hero brother persuaded the owner of a Japanese restaurant to hire him. He started as a bus boy and was soon promoted to the job of juggling utensils behind the hot plate. He transported the diners all the way to Coobe, a place where he had never set foot. His acrobatic manipulation of the ingredients lent him a Japanese identity. While his clients were realizing their dreams of exoticism, my brother Long was making his way towards the realization of dreams of his own.
Before arriving in Canada, I knew only one initialism, UNHCR.
The high commissioner collaborated with the Malaysian Red Cross to deliver water and food to more than 250,000 Vietnamese refugees found in camps scattered all across Malaysia and more particularly on the island of Pulao Bidong where nearly 60,000 people lived. Many people were deployed throughout the territory to offer us shelter from the sun, the rain, and also from the coconuts which were abandoned on the island. Despite these precautions, a woman had been struck on the head by a coconut and lapsed into a coma. She had been washing her coconut shell balls and ladles when the accident happened. A representative of the Canadian delegation had tried to transport her to the hospital, but on account of a storm, the dingy had not been able to reach the boat that would have taken them to dry land. This woman had survived the crossing of the Gulf of Sam. Deprived of water and food for several weeks, she had been spared by pirates when they found her hiding in an oil drum. Unfortunately, she lost her battle with destiny during the night.
She died with no family and no country.
Unlike the fate that befailed this woman, life guided us all the way to Canada. When we heard the news, I remember long lifting me up to do a somersault in the air. As soon as we arrived on Third Avenue in the Limalu neighborhood, he wanted to get us on the right track by enrolling us in school as quickly as possible. He met with the teachers, oversaw our homework and dream of a future for all of us. While L had the charisma of my father and the daring of our mother, his twin La and our brother Lynn preferred to stay in the background. In the beginning, L wanted them to study engineering like all the Vietnamese students who had arrived in the 1960s.
But L chose to follow the footsteps of a Quebec philanthropist who inspired him to become an alcologist.
As for Lynn, he seemed to have been born to spend his days and nights as a computer programmer. Long studied business and capitalized on his experience to become the manager of the Coobe restaurant. As soon as he got his degree, his employer put him in charge of the second and third Coobe franchises in town. Later, he would invest in the creation of an Asian restaurant chain in shopping malls.
At university, he became active in community life. It was rare to have no guests around our table as our apartment became the meeting place for Vietnamese students editing a newspaper or setting up a soccer bminton or pingpong team with a view to participating in the Vietnamese North American Olympics.
Aside from the boots in the entrance hall and the winter coats piled on the beds, we might have thought we were back in Saigon. The typical aroma of Vietnamese kitchen scented the air thanks to my mother. She immersed us in the order of chopped and roasted citronella wed to crisp fish skin or in that of young sprigs of bamboo soautayed then dipped in lime flavored fish sauce.
The complicated dishes she served us took a long time to prepare. She wanted to feed us well, but she could not have done it without the help of Hua, Long's beloved.
Hu shadowed my brother Long from their very first philosophy class in college.
She always brought along a second serving for him when he was in a meeting during lunch hour. Long had inherited from our father a beauty that attracted as many men as women. His friends wanted nothing more than to follow him around because he fulfilled their dreams. A boy who was studying science while suppressing his dream of becoming a singer was invited to organize an evening of Vietnamese songs in the space where theater classes were given. The future doctor could then experience the joy of being on stage along with his friends who would have liked to be guitarists or dancers. A girl who explored the world through drawing was invited to contribute to the newspaper since her talent had no outlet in her chemistry and physics courses. Those young people who came first in their classes were sometimes secret poets whom long allowed to sign their texts with a pseudonym. So their parents would be none the wiser.
Unlike those students who are concentrated on her courses in nursing without harboring any particular dream or talent. On the other hand, she was extremely adept and discreet in staying close to Long without getting in his way.
Her greatest asset was responding to the needs and expectations of our mother.
Long had always exceeded to her demands, even when they were unreasonable, for he knew the magnitude of what she had lost.
My mother strictly supervised the size of H's crushed ice crystals before they were added to the glasses of coffee prepared in the Vietnamese way. That is drop by drop. In Vietnam, the crushed ice was sold in narrow blocks more than a meter long. Here, Hua had to create these blocks using condensed milk cans instead of ice trays. According to my mother, the shape of the eyes influenced the taste of the coffee, just like the thickness of the shreds of roast pork when she was preparing the bee. She removed from Hua's cutting board the pieces that were more than a millimeter wide to cut them further and took the knife out of Ha's hands if she accidentally pierced a chicken's skin while deboning it. Every time the grocery stores had whole chickens on sale, the house would overflow with activity. A mother would buy at least five and spend a good part of the night deboning them completely before stuffing them through the smallest possible opening so they would not collapse.
From time to time, L organized picnics, and often he chose to serve this dish to his friends, who only had to cut a slice to have an entire meal on their plate.
They did not suspect that each mouthful involved hours of work, humility, and obedience on the part of Hua.
She had to follow my mother's strict orders concerning the two stages of cooking the rice for the stuffing, the size of the Vietnamese sausage cubes once they were cooked, the proper quantity of shiakei mushrooms whose scent must enhance without being invasive.
Hua endured in silence all my mother's demands, even when I was alone with her, peeling the skins off peanuts one by one.
Patiently, she shows me how to roll an empty bottle over the nuts in order to crush them without reducing them to powder.
I wondered whether her discretion derived from the long tradition in Bakchang, her hometown, of working clay to produce fragile porcelain, or from her acceptance of being born weak.
Juan knew in advance that university would be difficult for her, if not impossible. Her only hope was that long would give her a chance to express her love. As with her profession as a nurse, she expected nothing in return, neither from her patients nor from Long, especially not a formal proposal of marriage made on her birthday.
Hua's retiring personality could also be attributed to her stay in a crowded camp in Hong Kong where simply taking a breath impinched on another's territory.
Like all the refugees, she had learned very quickly how to disappear into a bubble to be alone. The first time I heard in Quebec the expression, "You're in my bubble." I thought the person addressing me was making a declaration of friendship by permitting me to share his thoughts, his inner space, when what he in fact wanted was for me to back off, back away. Unlike in western culture which encourages expressions of feelings and opinions, the Vietnamese keep them jealously to themselves and speak of them with great reluctance because this inner space is the only one inaccessible to others.
All the rest from academic grades to salaries to sleep is in the public domain as our love affairs.
I wonder if the openness regarding personal details derives from the topical temperatures that discourage the shutting of doors, windows, and walls, the lack of space between the two or three generations living under the same roof, the dependence on family ties, or whether it's the weight of family history which must be borne out of gratitude and sometimes as a burden. The child's success belongs to his parents and ancestors. Every family member is responsible for all the others out of solidarity. The stronger support the weaker. Otherwise, any personal success would be marred by an inadequate sense of duty and honoring of the clan.
In the same way, each individual feels and displays guilt as a result of others mistakes.
I remember a man with his son and daughter who went on their knees before my mother because of a theft his wife had committed. He had brought back the two gold chains with bells attached that my mother had put around my ankles so she could hear me running in the house.
I had held out my feet to my mother, but she had knelt down to attach the jewels to the ankles of the two children still on their knees.
I never saw the nurse maid again who was guilty not only of theft but above all of the shame with which she had burdened her children.
My mother often told us that we were lucky to have parents who would never commit fraud or other unsemly acts. But sometimes even honest parents cannot resist the pressures exerted by the history of a people passed on from one generation to another.
A friend of my mother's, a former teacher, told us one winter's night that in one of her classes in Ya Changang, a young student whose father had fought with the South, and an equally young student whose father had sided with the North fell deeply in love before learning about the family history on either side because they had grown up after the reconciliation of North and South. When the two mothers heard the news, they asked to meet the teacher so that she might help them prohibit a union between enemies. The mothers also appealed to the friends of their children, hoping they might urge them to separate. One day, as the caretaker was sweeping the courtyard with the constant and repetitive sound of readaths scraping the cement, the boy's mother burst into the classroom and threw herself in front of the blackboard, crying out over and over, "He is dead."
The students tears joined her cries, the noise escaping through the windows to cross the yard and reach the other rooms. Everyone cried except for the young girl who was in love. Her eyes stayed dry and her body upright. She left school at the end of the day along with her classmates, walking steadily, her breathing regular, her body language and gestures normal.
She calmly held out the coupon to the attendant in order to retrieve her bicycle, wheeling it beside her to the exit before placing her conical hat on her head, the strap under her chin. She pulled out the rear panel of her ai, holding it in her right hand as she lowered herself onto the old leather seat with the gracefulness of youth and pedled away.
Her face betrayed no emotion, nor did the steady rhythm of her legs. From far off, she resembled all the other students whom romantics compared to white butterflies.
The adolescents knew that together they were an embellishment to the streets as they left their classes with their uniforms in movement.
The student whose heart was not broken but stopped deviated in no way from this virginal beauty.
She arrived home and greeted her mother who awaited her with a snack of guck fruit sticky rice, a square cake on which the word happiness is carved in Chinese and which newly weds offer to guests during the marriage ceremony at the altar of their ancestors.
The orange hue of the perfumed rice tinted by the flesh of the guck could get lost in the bright red abundance of the tablecloths, the decorations, and the bride's dress. But the guests always found them since the guck only ripened once a year. Out of season marriages had to bypass this fruit of paradise, as some called it. That is why her mother had been very happy to receive as a guest at a wedding this rich orange huge cake. She presented it as an offering to her daughter who thanked her politely tracing the word happiness with her finger for 15 minutes without eating it.
The teacher had followed her student to the house. Since many Vietnamese houses were completely open, with the ground floor often transformed into a commercial space during the day, she felt at the same time as her student mother that an emptiness had arrived that sucked all the air out of the room.
Suddenly, the motorcycle horns, the noise of the two rollers compressing the stalks of sugar cane at the neighbors, the chatter of the customers awaiting their glass of juice, all went silent.
It was only when the younger's body landed on the pavement that her mother and the teacher cried out. They tried to revive her by rubbing her temples and feet with tiger bomb, but were unable to bring her back to consciousness.
The teacher offered to stay with her student that night. The mother reminded her that it was useful to watch over the living, but that nothing could be done for the dead. Even if the young student had never been allowed to read Romeo and Juliet or see the film Love Story or hear of Crystal and Isol, even though her literary knowledge was restricted to the biography of Ho Chi Min and some war heroes, even if the decorations pinned to her father's uniform guaranteed her a privileged future, she had chosen to join her love. She had freed herself from the burdensome history that was the legacy of a war she had not known by walking towards the beauty of Nyachang's sublime sea.
All through my early childhood, we went to the sea almost every month for a change of wind. As my father said, the salt water miraculously healed the cracked skin on my grandmother's heels and cleared up my own frequently congested nose. The salt air helped my brothers grow and amplified our laughter around the dried cut of fish sold on the beach by itinerant merchants.
Two cut of fish perfectly flat and grilled over a few red coals fed the whole family for the whole afternoon since they were eaten strand by strand.
The taste of these elastic filaments lasted longer than a stick of juicy fruit in my mouth. Those joyous and light-hearted moments in the sand did not prevent me from fearing the sea as much for its vastness as for its depth and its beauty.
My father strung the most beautiful floats around my waist and pushed me towards the moving waters. I thought I would die every time a wave took me away from my father's breath on my neck. He turned the duck's head of my float towards the horizon, thinking that the smooth surface would calm me. He also pivoted me in the other direction so that I could see our beach umbrella and my mother hidden behind a big hat and her sunglasses with a towel on her head.
The two points of view paralyzed me.
That unhealthy fear would remain with me until the day we learned that the ocean had not swallowed up boat.
After several weeks at sea with a failed engine and with the refugees running low on food, her boat was rescued by a Danish freighter and how went directly to Copenhagen without passing through the camps and without meeting the other passengers again for fear of seeing in their eyes the reflection of her own body which had been subjected to multiple rapes.
Thanks to her knowledge of English, she was able to integrate easily. Working in hotels where she learned about massage therapy.
After taking some courses, she reinvented herself as a massage therapist. The client said that she repaired their bodies. Very quickly, her calendar filled up a month in advance.
She lengthened her working hours in order to accommodate everybody. But one day she refused to treat a man after he had filled out his health form. His name was Louie.
There was nothing special about him, but something in his look had unsettled her.
She said that she'd had to clench her fists in order to hide her fingers, which were shaking like the leaves of a palpa tree. In Denmark, she was able to concentrate on the well-being of others.
She was able to detect disappointment in the deltoid, shame in the latisimus dorsal, resignation in the glorious medius.
She sought out all the sorrows in the muscle fibers in order to alleviate them and when possible eliminate them by repeating her mother's movements, seizing the pain of her little girl's wounds in her hand and tossing it in the air to make it disappear. Her fingers had the gift not only of hypnotizing her clients but also of leaving the weight of their impressions on the skin long after the end of the session. She always refused to be massaged by her colleagues. However, she feared that the pressure of her hand on her skin would shatter her fissured body. She wouldn't know how to reassemble the pieces or to put some order into the thousand fragments that would have been spread out before her like a town after a hurricane had passed through. Her clients found her serene, gentle, even wise. While Louie had immediately sensed her extreme fragility and the chaos dormant within her, awaiting the first sign of weakness to undo everything, Louieie waited until a stormy night, until the last day of the year to approach her in a bus shelter and offer her some tea. After a long day putting bodies into balance, assuming her client's wounds, Ha felt her legs give way.
Louie caught her and loved her.
Ha followed Louie to Ottawa where he returned at the end of his mandate in Copenhagen. She found my mother by looking for the names of her relatives in all the telephone directories. Louie brought her to our door. Ha and my mother talked through that first night.
I heard them weep and sometimes go silent. During the long conversation, the word luck returned again and again as they described the experiences and the orals they had lived through. Once she found love with Louie, Ha began offering massage therapy to damaged women, women in distress and without resources and shelters. She also helped them to look at themselves in the mirror, to listen to a BG's song with her, or to choose an article of clothing in the collective wardrobe to be worn for job interviews.
It was thanks to the friendship of those women that she dared to start counting the number of slaps received, the number of pirates encountered, the number of steps that had separated her from her parents on that night of escape.
I discovered Manhattan when I was 13.
Had took me there with Louie for a weekend. She had suggested to my mother that I come to stay with her during the holidays. My mother gave her permission to look after me as if I were her daughter. Ha began by unbuttoning the collar and sleeves of my blouses. in restaurants. She demanded that I choose between the hamburger and the pizza, between vanilla and chocolate, between apple juice and a milkshake.
Then came the choice of colors for the walls of the guest bedroom, so it would become mine as of the second year of Ottawa visits. Like my brother Long, Louie and Ha entertained often and had many friends. Louie made it his mission to bring me out of the kitchen and introduce me to the guests. When they arrived, he supported me by placing his hand in the middle of my back, while at the end of the meal, he placed it on my shoulder to stop me from getting up and collecting the plates.
During the evening, he always suspended the conversation at an opportune moment, inserting a question that forced me to give an answer to be wholly present. It was with them that I learned of the existence of Burundi, Chile, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Guadaloop, and also NATO, the OECD, and the International Court of Justice.
Louie had friends from many different backgrounds, often nomads because of their diplomatic jobs. Or on the contrary, they had chosen to be diplomats in order to live everywhere in the world without ever becoming citizens without ever belonging to a single place.
My brother Long often reproached my mother for having entrusted me to her and Louie since the stable and easy path he had imagined for me in pharmarmacology or medicine had been replaced by a career that would prove unpredictable and chaotic.
While Louie was posted in Shanghai, Ha offered me an airplane ticket so I could join them during the summer holidays. I spent my winter and spring evenings studying Chinese from a book I found at the local library. It contained an analysis of a thousand characters classified according to the number of strokes in each one. To my great surprise, the character for the number one, a single horizontal stroke, was considered the most important because it illustrated the primordial unity, the fusion between sky and earth, the horizon, the beginning of the beginning.
Each character told its own story and when it was combined with one, two or three others, new stories formed transforming the initial meaning. And so in this way, I followed the series proposed by the book.
I had embarked on a race against time. I did not expect to master in 6 months the minimum of 2 to 3,000 characters required to be able to read a newspaper.
But I wanted to prepare myself as best I could to prove myself worthy of Louie and Ha's gift.
As soon as I landed in China, I felt reassured that I could read the signs at the airport for exit, baggage, immigration, and in the street the signs for restaurant, bookstore, and hospital.
I had brought along just under a thousand words that I recognized in writing, but I didn't know how to pronounce them, let alone how to put them together into sentences. The kitchen helper at Louie and H residence, AI, took me under her wing because I held my two hands out to her to receive a cup of tea with the humility of a child relating to an elder rather than with the ease of one of her employer's guests. also because I almost choked swallowing the velvety fibrous pods of adamamese and most of all because I answered her with the help of a pencil tracing characters with the skill of a 4-year-old school child.
When I wasn't in class, I followed a to the market to the cleaners and once to sujo during a three-day holiday.
Ai's parents still lived in their ancestral home along the canal. My Chinese wasn't good enough for me to ask them questions about their love story in the midst of the cultural revolution beneath images of Mahatong under the one child policy. But food brought us together, her mother and me, since I was the one who found on the ground the tooth she had broken while chewing on a ligament from chicken feet sold at the window of the house across the way. The five spice taste of the feet marinade was familiar to me, as was the checkerboard with elephants on which Ai's father played with his son-in-law next to us.
Ai's husband came to join us on his return from a trip to France where he had been an interpreter for a highly placed bureaucrat on a commercial mission. I assumed that he had studied French because he was a franophile. He politely corrected me, making it clear that he had become a franophile as a result of studying French. He had been one of the country's best students when he wrote the university entrance exam.
The authorities had assigned him to the language department, more specifically to French. He pronounced his first bonjour at the same time as his friends.
They never had to ponder nor to choose their profession and their future because the government had decided for them. If Ai's husband had been able, he would have chosen agricultural engineering, something that had always been a passion of his. But reasoning with himself, he acknowledged that in that case he would not have been one of the privileged individuals authorized and called upon to travel. He would not have slept above the clouds, smelled the conifers on the tiger, witnessed the devotion of the faithful who came to sweep their shredon boda in Rangon on their birthday.
The state knows you better than you know yourself. He concluded singing.
In my case, it was my brothers, my mother, and her who knew me better than I knew myself.
AI confirmed that the state was beginning to know Louie and her very well indeed since one day she showed them the notebook containing the names of all visitors and the length of their stay at the house. She had to submit it to the city authorities every week.
Someone somewhere in a neon lit office knew that Ha wrote in Vietnamese in her diary when she suddenly awoke during the night. That Louie owned a Rolex watch from the 1940s that he had inherited from his father. That the couple made significant donations to Tibetan schools. On the other hand, I'm sure that he did not hear Louie often declaring at breakfast that he woke up beside the most beautiful woman in the world, nor see him savoring the pleasure he derived from caressing her ebony hair cut straight across like a Japanese dolls.
Louie would have been able to pick out Ha in a crowd just from the shape of her calves. He gazed at her lovingly every time she referred to herself in the Asiatic manner, placing her index finger on the end of her nose instead of against her chest as Westerners do. I always saw him walking with H's hand in his.
Every day he affixed a new quotation to the bathroom mirror. How would invite me to read them with her. Together we looked for unknown words in the dictionary and tried to grasp the meaning before Louie returned at the end of the day. What is your kiss? The leak of a flame by Victoria go enabled to teach me the difference between kissing with the mouth in western culture and with the news in Vietnamese. While the one tastes, the other smells, which explains the word tom perfume for requesting or offering a kiss between young Vietnamese. The quotation, "If you loved me and I loved you, how I would love you by Paul Geraldi confused tenses." Was the mood wishful or regretful? We did not continue the discussion because how reacted very strongly to the word regret. Promise me that you will never have any regrets.
Never.
And so I did not regret having pursued my studies in Quebec rather than in the United States. H pictured me spending my evenings in the library at Harvard where Louie had received his degree in international relations. He gave us a tour of the university campus with special emphasis on the library, a gift from Mrs. Widener in memory of her son who had died on the Titanic.
A 100 years later, the university still places a bouquet of fresh flowers in the room containing Harry's collection of 3,300 books according to his mother's wishes.
The library of my grandfather, Leang, probably contained the same number of books in French and Vietnamese.
As soon as the first communist tanks rolled into Saigon, my grandfather ordered us to burn any books with political content. Over the following weeks, we also tore up the history books, the novels, and the collections of poetry in order to eliminate at least one accusation of treason, possession of anti-revolutionary instruments.
In times of chaos, it's better to be a concier than a philosopher, a carpenter than a judge. The police took my grandfather away one afternoon in the middle of his chess game with L. He was released three days later, probably because, as a judge, he had been able to free his friends in the resistance. Or perhaps because the police chief had been touched by the light of the full moon that cloaked the partially paralyzed body of my grandfather, stretched out on the bench under the guava, where he had been kept captive.
After his return, the sound of his cane against the tiling underscored the absence of servants, including the one responsible for dusting the books.
If my grandfather had not left us so soon, he would have persuaded my mother to allow me to live in a college domator in the United States, even if my opinions on the compulsory course in sexuality in school frightens her. She had signed the authorization while reminding me of the importance of virginity. For a long time, I thought it was my adolescent hormones that had made me reply, "A body is not a thing, so it can't be new or used or secondhand."
Time taught me that this way of seeing things came more from her and from an article in the Reader's Digest concerning the rapes at sea suffered by boat people. When I read that, I was 15.
No boy had even noticed me at the flower table where I took their dollar in exchange for a San Valentine's carnation for the graduates fundraising campaign.
I was as transparent as the petals on the skeleton flower in the rain. Even if I was one of the best students in my school, I knew how to disappear so as not to embarrass my friend in front of her companions. Without having given each other clear signs, we knew how to avoid making eye contact when we met in the corridor or the cafeteria. No one suspected that we talked every day on the phone after school hours. I knew about her obsession with knitting and she my compulsion for covering each of my books in wrapping paper bought in secrets to preserve their status as presents all year long. Every dollar I spent on these packages of paper that were marked down markdowns as Margaritas might have said could have fed a member of my family in Vietnam for 3 or 4 days.
This was my first selfish act and also my first act of love. My books shielded me from my mother's criticism of my sister-in-law, Hua. Without them, I would perhaps never have seen the sublime in the blue eyes of Clemo seated at the back of the class with his cheeks as pink as candy apples. They also gave me the courage to refuse the offer of one of my mother's friends to introduce me to a boy who somewhat timid like me.
My mother knew nearly all the mothers since she worked with the Quebec Association of Vietnamese Women. She often cooked for the New Year's celebration that took place at Complex Deja in Montreal where all the Vietnamese living in the province converged in Vietnam. It was very important for my grandparents to see the right person cross the threshold on the first day of the new year. That person's visit foretold the success or bad fortune that would characterize the year to come. In Quebec, the Vietnamese had abandoned this tradition because the date of the new year varied from one year to another between January 21st and February 20th and never fail on a holiday. And so we celebrated Ted on the Sunday preceding the true first day of the lunar year by meeting in a space vast enough to accommodate the several thousand visitors and most of all to set up our food stands.
In contrast to most poor immigrants, we allowed ourselves to spend money with no second guessing, no feelings of guilt.
The restaurants and caterers took in a month's earnings in one day and the community organizations completed their annual fundraising.
The Association of Vietnamese Women probably came out on top because the fierce but supportive competition among those who wanted to show off their culinary prowess raised the standard of dishes on offer. And so those Sunday mornings before that, Hua and I woke very early to prepare the herbs, the thin slices of pork, the shrimp cut lengthwise in two before being wrapped in rice paper. Even if we were three people with different hands, all the rolls had to be the same size, including the 3 cm of garlic chives that proudly protruded like antenna.
The young people bought those rolls, the stuffed dumplings, the hot pies, the manor cake while the mothers circulated among the stands to eye the young unmarried girls a friend or acquaintance had recommended for their sons. It was during one of these celebrations that a woman talked to my mother about a boy who lived in Kimuski. She was of the opinion that he would make a good husband for me because our astrological signs were compatible.
He's not very handsome, but he works hard like your daughter V. My mother wanted a strong man for me, given that I seemed timid and rap. She smiled politely at the woman. Thank you. You're right. But we must not make him come from so far away, the poor boy. In the midst of the pua, I suddenly heard the word intrinsic uttered by a young man talking to his friends in the line in front of our stand. I didn't know that word, only the sister of the person who had pronounced it. She was in charge of the cash beside me. I was very intimidated by how people referred to her as the most beautiful young Vietnamese girl. To my great surprise, she approached me and complimented me on my straight, dark hair and on my lashes, thick but hidden under the fold of my eyelids. At our first break, she led me into the lady's washroom to apply mascara that would highlight the true length of my lashes, whose very existence had escaped me until this revelation.
She introduced me to her brother Tong holding my hand as if we were old friends. I stood there open mouth because Tong's word intrinsic had intrigued me and his smile stole my heart on the spot.
Tung was 8 years older than me. By pure chance, he had moved from Montreal to Quebec City for his work and became a close friend of my three brothers thanks to Bminton.
He came to the house so often that he had his own key just like the many families who had lived with us on their arrival in the country. Never mind the size of our house or of the families. My mother opened wide our doors to shelter the fobs fresh off the boats for as long as they wanted.
There was so much coming and going that once my brother L encountered a thief in the house and didn't bat an eye thinking he was someone's friend. The criminal went off with the car key, which had been left in plain view since we shared everything the same way until the police found the car. Dung politely and generously made his vehicle available and acted as chauffeur when necessary, which gave me the opportunity to spend some time alone with him. Thanks to my brother Lynn, who made a request to his employer, I was able at the age of 16 to work for the same company. I spent my evenings in a huge empty office printing insurance policies, checks, complaints, and other paperwork, which enabled me to do my homework and study in between feeding fresh sets of forms into the printer. When there were no mistakes, I finished around 10:00. But the machines and computer programs broke down at the same rhythm as the natural catastrophes or accidents that befailed the injured.
When that happened, I missed the last bus. Dung then offered to fetch me since I was the one who hempmed his new pants and ironed those that had just been washed.
Like my mother with my father, like Ha with Long, I came to love him slowly, patiently, counting, and noting the number of times per week he pronounced my name. I hung his winter coat over the radiator to keep it warm. I refilled his glass with beer so it would stay cold. I placed biscotti beside his coffee to keep alive his adolescence in Rome, the city where his father had lived as a Vietnamese foreign student and later as an Italian engineer. Tung introduced us to spaghetti cabonara and therefore to panchetta and pameo.
He struck up songs in Italian and imitated bavari. He exposed us to Ladal Chvita and all the other films with Machello Mastroyani.
He showed my mother and me the pasodoli, the tango, the chaacha. Santana's black magic woman still turns round in my head to the rhythm of his one, two chaacha.
For many of the people living in our house, these spontaneous lessons quickly turned into parties where Lynn proudly played his cassette mixtapz.
Those festive days came to an end when Tong's employer called him back to Montreal to work on a new project. His departure gave me the daring idea of following him, of applying to study translation in Montreal universities, of challenging the authority of my mother and brothers. I turned away from their disappointed and uneasy looks. For a long time, I had convinced everyone, including myself, that I would become a surgeon. Like my first friend in Quebec, she had one day led me to a school library to show me pictures of her dream to be. I had not yet acquired the power to dream. So I copied her. I appropriated her ambition to the point of immortalizing it in my graduation yearbook.
There was nothing I had to explain since it pleased everyone and satisfied their expectations.
That was why my decision to study translation unnerved my small community.
Everyone feared for the precariousness of my future while they really ought to have worried about my almost total ignorance of the English language and to a lesser degree of French.
Despite their disapproval, my three brothers slipped money into my pocket the day I moved. At the door to my room in the university residence, my mother said to me very slowly in a solemn voice, "When you see that you've made a mistake, I ask you to have the courage to admit it and to start again somewhere else.
I never had the courage. I amassed zeros alone in the halflight of my room. I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was protecting my mother from my failures by keeping my distance from her. Those repeated bad marks reminded me that I ought to continue reading about grammar in manking it around in my back all the time, even if its weight sometimes made me tip over into puddles of water in springtime and onto sheets of ice in winter. Certainly I made progress living through dictionaries. But the difficulties I had day after day persuaded me that I would never be an interpreter for the United Nations in New York as ha had hoped.
Lacking courage, I persevered through the three years of study and obtained a degree that I didn't deserve. I see myself again at that time backbent and head lowered weighed down by shame as much in the classroom and school corridor as among Tong's family.
My brothers had assigned Tong the task of looking out for me. And so at least once every two weeks he invited me for a family dinner at his parents with whom he still lived. Sometimes he entrusted me to his sisters who included me in their evenings with other Vietnamese Montrealers.
On balconies around tables, the friends of Tong and his sisters discussed their grades and the specialization they would choose after their studies in medicine, thearmacies they intended to buy, the dental clinic they would open in one neighborhood or another. Still lacking a Vietnamese presence. No one was interested in my story about a brilliant professor who had interpreted a quotation from Shakespeare by citing an equivalent one from Molè and even less my list of false friends between French and English. Does habit mean abitude in English because men often wear the same abi or suit? How did bribe become a jug of wine in French?
Is janti so mild that janti has been transformed into gentle? I bored those people with my fascination with disconcerting similarities and differences. But despite the lack of interest on either side, I turned to snag a smile from tongue to refresh my memory of the sound of his voice to snare a new movement of his hands.
I would never have obtained my degree in translation without Jasant, my classmate from Shibuamu, who became a close friend. Shassant had been touched by my naive Tay when I asked the meaning of rhetoric and the gender of the word catastrophe during an assignment in our first year. She persuaded me to continue my training even though a professor had strongly recommended I switch faculties on account of my disastrous results.
I had never before come last in a class, but I was able to survive the humiliation of my shameful grades thanks to Jasan's kindness. She dragged me to boutiques, cafes, and parks, promising to help me complete my assignments at the library on the way back to make up for lost time. She imposed dance breaks as relief from the long work sessions.
Wednesday evenings were reserved for free museum visits. Together, we learned the name of painters and I absorbed Jasan's enthusiasm.
She introduced me to her friends and acquaintances, calling me lovely V and insisted that Tong respond in the affirmative when she asked, "Isn't she lovely?" Our V. Tang nodded politely without sharing her opinion. I imagined him listening to the remarks of his mother. V is tall but so dark. Poor little thing, but at least she's polite.
That is why I would never have thought that Tong would kiss me one night in the parking lot behind the Japanese restaurant where I worked every Friday and Saturday. The orders in my hair of grilled eel and sukiyaki mixed with that of tempura made his after shave intoxicating.
He probably only brushed my thighs, but my whole body seemed to have been touched. I awaited our next meeting, reading the dictionary of synonyms and antonyms and knitting along with Jas and her roommates. When Tong finally turned up, he offered me a plastic daisy, stalling from his mother's floral arrangement instead of a real one. He didn't have to bring any desserts to our private meals in my room because I already had everything he liked in the refrigerator.
Even though I didn't drink coffee, he would find a freshly brewed cup every morning he awoke in my bed. He came when it suited him, as I had inserted my key into his key ring, even before he expressed a desire to have it.
Jasant had persuaded me to share an apartment with her on Kesh after we obtained our degrees so that we could continue studying together this time in law. Dung spent even more nights with me in the comfort of the nestant had created with its deep red wall in the living room and the canvases of her painter friends all over.
Tong's prolonged and repeated absences made his parents very angry. They summoned me for a lecture on Vietnamese customs and values, concluding with some parental advice. Think of the gratitude you owe your mother before you keep humiliating her like this.
I hoped that Tong would defend me, defend us, defend himself. To my great surprise, he was also of the opinion that girls from good families did not offer themselves so completely to a man.
But out of laziness, ease, comfort, he didn't leave me.
The news had reached my mother's ears through people I had never met. After my first exam in constitutional law, she accosted me outside my apartment. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than my knees were already bent flat on the floor. She did not take off her coat because she had only two sentences to say. I failed in your education. I have just come to look my failure in the face. She left as quickly as she had come with my brother La who was waiting in the car. I later found in the mailbox an envelope filled with $100 bills and a letter from my three brothers saying, "Come to see us during your reading week if you can."
I snuffed out my mother's last spark of hope when I went to join Tong in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the wall. Dung was there for work during the two months that marked the end of an era, the end of east and west, the end of a long separation.
During his absence, I wrote him every day. I received two postcards in response to my letters. One card showed the kiss by Dwanu. He had written on the back, "A picture is worth a thousand words." I kept the two with me everywhere I went. on my desk during classes, in my purse when I was out, beside the mirror when I was brushing my teeth. My name had never appeared so precious and so well rendered as it was in Tong's handwriting.
When he called me to suggest the trip, I abandoned my family after our Christmas celebrations to fly off to meet him. In front of the Brenore gate, the wall was lower and wider, which allowed us to climb on it and watch the crowd converging from both sides.
Around us, languages from the four corners of the earth blended into one.
The French journalist who lifted us from the ground to help us scramble up offered us the floor of his hotel room if we had no place to sleep. The Portuguese banker who pulled us onto the wall offered us sweets from his bottle of liquor. A Dutch student shared a chocolate bar with us. I had been very cold when we visited East Berlin during the day, but the constant greetings and embraces between visitors that evening kept me warm until tongue pulled me out of the arms of a Libanese man twice my size who called us all habibi. And so I came down from the wall following in the grumpy footsteps of Dung. My brothers and my mother were not happy to receive the pieces of the wall I brought back.
In their eyes, they were proof of my escapade with dung, which represented a lack of respect for my ancestors, my culture, and all the struggles and sacrifices of my mother.
In order to normalize the situation and salvage what was left of our reputations, Dung's parents organized our engagement with my mother. As of the moment when I prostrated myself before the altar of the two famil family's ancestors, we had to call each other's parents ba and ma, father and mother.
It was a given that Ha and Louie would take a plane from Rio de Janeiro to attend the engagement ceremony. Ha had insisted on doing my makeup and setting the traditional headpiece on my head.
While she was taking out the rollers she had put in to make ringlets, as was the style in her day, she asked me to promise her I wouldn't marry before I turned 30. If I had not received such firm instructions from her, we would certainly have gone on to make preparations for the wedding, even as Dung had begun to react badly to my long hours at the law firm as an intern.
Jasant was employed at another big law firm nearby. There were about 20 of us recruits working very hard, but also going out to eat together, often at the end of our days around 10:00. Jassant had dozens of admirers. She quickly became known to the entire legal community. She had an overlapping K-9 tooth that gave her a remarkable smile, and her wild Amazonian hair also made her stand out in a crowd. She was one of the rare women who dared to wear fanta orange dresses, ivory pantsuits, earrings that weren't pearls. She wore low cut tops and sky-high heels with the natural grace of a woman equally feminist and feminine. At the first party we held in the apartment, so many colleagues came along with their friends that we lost count. Dung was irritated to find strangers asleep in my bed and others entertaining themselves in our bathroom. He left in the middle of the evening with a comment that marked the beginning of the end of our relationship.
You work with these people.
As of that euphoric night amidst young people whose philosophy was work hard, play harder, Dong was no longer satisfied with the stews I cooked or with the spaghettini with lemon zest or the meat pies from Jassant's parents.
One evening he was so indignant to learn that I would not attend the upcoming anniversary of his greatgrandfather's death because of a company weekend retreat that he threw in the garbage the cockmure I had prepared for him plate and all. Jasan sprang from her chair like a lioness and chased dung away. If I hadn't begged her with a frightened and shamefaced look, she probably would have slapped him in addition to shouting in her serious and powerful voice, "You don't deserve her. Get out." It took several weeks before I mustered up the courage to call Tung's parents and asked them for a brief meeting. They insisted that their son be present. I brought them the earrings and necklace they had given me when we became engaged, as well as the diamond ring that Dung in my presence had bought at the last minute from an acquaintance of his mother in full confidence and without having even looked at it. There was neither a box nor an entry nor promises. I had to consider myself privileged that Dung's parents had accepted me as a daughter-in-law despite my shortcomings.
I apologized to them for my mother's absence. But as parents, they understood that I wanted to spare her this moment of dishonor. Dung's mother concluded that my disobedience was responsible for the drama. I ought to have followed her advice and been friends only with those in Tong's circle. He shut tight the door, mumbling that he had known since the very start as soon as I had yielded to his first kiss in the automobile that I was too western.
My behavior had ruined the reputation of two perfectly respectable families. My mother had to answer questions from curious mothers and worst of all put up with their murderous remarks. Letting her live alone was a mistake. Ha had a bad influence on V. What boy will want her now?
I broke away from my mother. I broke my mother as my father had broken her.
I would have been broken myself had it not been for one of the lawyers in the office, a president of the bar who invited me to travel with her to Cambodia for a meeting with colleagues from Npan Hanoi and Lauren Praban. We discussed the writing of the civil code, the influence of French law after and without colonialism, the disappearance of the ideological frontier between east and west, between communism and capitalism, and so on.
The foreign experts in shirts and ties presented their analysis, making no reference to the bullet holes in the outside walls and sometimes even inside, such as one that could be seen below the blackboard. While we emphasized the importance of judicial independence, a 90-year-old boy who walked every day from his village an hour from non pen to a school beside our meeting room copied every page of the English creme kair English dictionary into his notebook because his village had no books and certainly no judge. If we ignored the amputes and the weapons resting on restaurant tables, it was easy to imagine the pearl of Asia that Nonpen had been with its sumptuous temples and villas.
But all it took was a visit to the temples of Simri, where you stumbled over the head of a Buddha plundered and abandoned by a looter to hear the footsteps of those marching towards death under the regime of Pbput.
The image of skulls piled up by the hundreds of children held by their feet and flunk against the trunks of trees became somewhat easier to process after my one-day visit to Simri.
In one of the anchor temples, an old woman in a son pulled me by the hand to a corner bathed in light where she delivered blows to my chest.
The echo of ancient stones spread through my rib cage and brought my life's breath back to me. Thanks to the imprint of this bony hen on my skin, I dared to sit down and offer a pink satin ribbon retrieved from the bottom of my purse to the little girl who sold water and ant eggs to the tourists.
While the sun was going down and I was wondering how to leave this young merchant to her futureless tomorrow, a group of three men passed before us. One of them was explaining in French to the other two that the city of Ankor covered a territory greater than that of Paris today and that you must not confuse the devatas who served as guardians with the abseris dancers able to seduce both men and gods. I wondered if the communist inspector who had characterized my father's two precious absera sculptures as cultural corruption knew the difference. Perhaps he had confiscated them because he was already taken with them, as I suddenly was by the third man in the group, who spent a long time trailing the ends of his fingers along the walls, following the curve of the absar smooth and provocative hands open to what lay beyond.
I flew back to Montreal the next day with a clear and indelible picture of the back of that stranger's neck and the arc of his shoulder. I never imagined that one day I would fall asleep in the hollow of that very neck.
On my return, a fellow lawyer called me into his office to talk about a long-term aid project on political reform in Vietnam. since he was known to be one of the most brilliant men in the country. I agreed unconditionally, not knowing that Vietnamese Americans who dared to travel to Vietnam sometimes saw their houses vandalized and that Vietnamese Canadians demonstrated in front of parliament against the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries. I boarded the plane totally ignorant of the highly sensitive and purely political nature of the project.
Before finding a permanent office, we established our headquarters in a small hotel where our team was launched.
During the day, our rooms became our offices and the restaurant our boardroom. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We closed our doors late in the evening at the same time.
As for me, I spend a good part of the night searching through dictionaries of English French, French English, English Vietnamese, Vietnamese English, French Vietnamese, Vietnamese French, as well as unilingual dictionaries because the word software did not exist in Vietnam during the 1970s anymore than environment or asan.
The Vietnamese language I knew was marked by exile and trapped in an antiquated reality, one that preceded the Soviet presence and a strong ties with Cuba, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania.
More than 30,000 Vietnamese live in Warsaw and in Berlin, the Vietnamese quarter is much larger than Montreal's Chinatown. The history of Vietnam and the Vietnamese endures, evolves, and grows in complexity without being written down or told.
I tried to seek out some fragments of Vietnam's 20 years behind the iron curtain by hanging around restaurant tables. Across from my hotel, there were several. One offered banme sandwiches, another sauteed vermicelli, and many served tonkanese soup of fur. I ended my days with this soup which in no way resembled that served in Montreal, Los Angeles, Sydney, or Saigon. The Hanoi version was sold with only a few slices of rare beef. While I had always eaten this dish with a dozen ingredients, including tendons, stomach, shank, Thai basil, and bean sprouts, people from the south of Vietnam love making fun of the economical and less extravagant mindset of those in the north, using the example of how many items constitute a dozen. In the north, the dozen represents 10 units. In the center north 12, in the center south 14, and in the meon 16, and sometimes 18.
At first, I found very bland the foam made by the restaurant owner cook on the sidewalk in front of my hotel. In time, I came to appreciate the simplicity that allowed me to taste the cafier lime leaf in the chicken version and the grilled ginger in the one made with beef.
Obviously, I had to beg the woman not to season my bowl with a spool of monosodium glutamate, an ingredient that was precious during the war. during the difficult years that salt was not used just to enhance flavor. It was the flavor itself. The only ingredient added to white rice. Out of habit, my restaurant owner cook continued to rely on this product to round out the flavors even though her soup now contained real chicken and even though meat was no longer rationed.
However, some old reflexes helped her to follow the rhythm of the police raids.
The duty was to temporarily chase away people illegally occupying the public thoroughfare, but only on one sidewalk at a time. That allowed my cook and her husband to ask their four or five clients to get up with their balls before they moved the table to the other side of the street. The police check lasted only a few minutes and the neighbors had enough advanced notice for the sellers to simply cross the street.
Once I finished my soup under a tree while marveling at this perfectly synchronized choreography during the first months of my posting in Hanoi. I was as fascinated by the ability of a young child to sit on her father's bicycle carrier without catching her feet in the spokes as by the drivers asleep on the seats of their motor taxis. and even more by the six versions of the word adore in Vietnamese. To adore madly, to adore to the point of going rigid as a tree, to adore giddyly, to adore to the point of losing consciousness, to the point of fatigue, to the point of losing one's grip on oneself. I wanted to see everything, learn everything.
Both out office and my apartment were situated on the peninsula in the Chukbat neighborhood that was reputed to produce the finest bells and bronze statues.
We chose the location for the discretion of both the place and its inhabitants who had inherited the austerity of the ancient prison built by an 18th century noble to incarcerate his concubines whom he suspected of criminal activity.
I was happy to be out of the way so as not to have to refuse for the 10th time in one morning a lottery ticket sold by war amputes so as not to hear the conversations between expatriots about the roughness of the talc used by the masseuse for a hand job. so as not to be enraged when the indeently luxurious cars of the new millionaires passed by the five or six-year-old shoe shine kids. Above all, I avoided the prettiest cafe in Hanoi on the shore of the lake of the restored sword because I felt personally hurt by the rude remark of a foreign client about waiter who didn't know the difference between a makiato and a capuccino.
Each time I die a little from my cowardice in not defending these young boys who properly slept in their booths after closing and most of all who didn't have the good fortune even to taste one of those coffees.
On the other hand, I felt responsible for the hugely inflated prices charged to visitors and sometimes for the rudeness the Vietnamese allowed themselves when they thought they were protected by the language barrier.
I distanced myself from these discomforts and confused feelings by concentrating on my work. It was much easier to analyze a state-owned corporation on paper than to meet the employees who lived on the company property with their families. Similarly, organizing a seminar on the subject of citizen protection in the person of an ombudsman seemed less futile when I did not see the envelopes slipped into the files of highly placed bureaucrats to contribute to their children's education.
My 68-year-old boss was the youngest man in my circle in Hanoi. He watched over me like a father and urged me to accept invitations to various events. Often the burden of my work enabled me to decline with the exception of the July 14th celebration at the French embassy as it was important for me to be there in support of the French-speaking world.
Respecting protocol, I greeted a few people who replied courtously without taking much of my time. And so it was easy for me to disappear behind the bronze sculpture of two storks at the back of the garden in order to escape the conversation about a maid who had ironed a pleated skirt, a collector's item designed by Isay Miyaki, or about the restoration of a mahogany table with a mother of pearl center that had been left out in the sun and the rain or about the list of the first state corporations selected for the imminent arrival of the stock market in Vietnam.
Vessa approached me asking if I knew the difference between stors and cranes.
STRs clack their beaks but don't sing unlike cranes who can cry very loudly while making love. We left the embassy garden when the waiters began folding the chairs. Vanson took me back on his old Chinese bicycle and I sat in front of him on the crossbar. He took the route that went past the former house of the governor of Indochina where the milkwood pines flowers perfumed the entire neighborhood.
The next day he came to fetch me for breakfast at the elegant Madame Simon Dy where crepes were served with sugar and lime juice along with homemade yogurt and croissants called buffalo horns by the waiters. At lunchtime he introduced me to peanuts roasted in fish sauce which the locals ate with rice. In the evening, I pedled at his side to Hot, where young lovers shared snails cooked in medicinal herbs. In less than 24 hours, I saw that Hanoi was much more than the 15 streets and six addresses that I frequented from day to day.
In the space of just a few days, Vanson had offered me the world, explaining the behavior of the female anophilus mosquito that transmitted malaria. The recent discovery of a new species of bird at the very heart of non-pan. The existence of the bulum bone in the male genital organ of almost all primates with the exception of men. I hadn't known that the discipline of ecologist ornithologist existed nor that it was possible to find undocumented birds within the territory of Vietnam. He had succeeded in persuading the government to establish protected zones after many years of concentrated and patient work, mingling with the people, learning the minority ethnic languages, amassing an intimate knowledge of the forests, some of which had begun to come back to life after the agent orange bombings, the fires, the tears of the children.
A Vietnamese mother in exile had for a long time wandered through the Norvian forest to withstand the absence of her son lost in another forest in Vietnam during their flight from guns, bombs, cataclysm.
As soon as she had been able to return to her original forest, she had continued her search. And thanks to the birthmark on his left ear, she had recognized her son who had become a chicken seller. A Cham family had found a child on the lifeless body of his father and had undone the band of clothes that had enabled the man to carry him. The baby certainly must have cried when his father fell. But how could the mother who was running through the smoke after her older daughter distinguish her son's tears in the midst of all the others? Perhaps too, the baby had awakened only after the chaos like Jasan's father, who slept in front of the television set and awoke when his wife switched it off.
Vansel knew only that the baby, now a father, asked him to explain to his biological mother that he wanted to stay near his wife and three children on the land of his adoptive parents, even if he ran the risk of being mistreated as a native.
The blood of the mountain people flowed in his veins. He owed his loyalty to the Cham culture and was determined to defend that language which was in the process of disappearing.
Vanson devoted himself to this group as much as to the populations of redheaded cranes and laughing thrushes because he had made it his profession to protect the vulnerable. When he showed me the reaction of the mimosa pudika leaves which closed up at the gentlest touch to protect themselves from predators, he convinced me that I was wrong to believe I was as invisible and common as the grass that grew between cracks in the cement without attracting the attention of anyone besides shy young girls. He compared me to the rare adumbar flowers which the Buddhists said appeared only once every 3,000 years whereas in fact they hid by the hundreds beneath the skin of their fruits. Sometimes they escaped to blossom on a leaf on a wire fence or in my entire body after our first kiss.
While I lived in a space as empty as the echo that circulated there in response to a rare noise in Venison's home, every object spoke and told its story. They came from different places, different times, different cultures, but were melded, woven together like a nest. The long cushion set on the wooden bench with the finely carved back was filled with kapok, gathered, worked, and sold by an Indonesian family with whom he had stayed. The teapot, hidden in a coconut, whose interior had been shaped to fit the curve of the ceramic pot and retain the water's heat, belonged to the monk who had lived in this hut before him.
The cutting board came from the trunk of a hundred-year-old tree fallen during combat which Vanson had helped to move.
In the garden he had hung up in the form of a cross two enormous stalks of bamboo on which he had suspended a dozen cages that had imprisoned the rare birds he had bought from collectors in order to return them to their natural habitats.
In the evening, a woman, he called his Vietnamese mother, lit candles inside the cages to illuminate the garden before going back home. I saw in her wrinkled eyes that I was not the first woman to marvel at the starf fruit, to be bewitched by the perfume of the yellowhearted white flowers of the Frenchi, and to fall in love with the rice cus color of the loose curls at the nape of Vanson's neck.
He heated water in two enormous kettles to fill a cement reservoir for gathering rain water which he had transformed into a bathtub.
It was in this bath constantly rewarmed with water from the kettles that he asked me to go with him to London for a fundraising event where he would put up for auction the naming rights for his next discovery. He knew from experience that people are prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands to immortalize their passage on Earth.
In the whispering gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral. Vasant's voice traveled across and set its stem on the 34 m of wall separating us, uttering two of the most timeborn words in the French language, but words that had never been addressed to me. Before I could reply, he had already taken my hand to run to the British Library, where he showed me the Magna Carta, the manuscript of Alice in Wonderland, and the first book ever printed. He was as at ease in a t-shirt as in a tuxedo with cufflings he wore to present before a packed hall his birds and their story. He took his audience on a journey describing the life of the forest as if every tree had its own personality and every animal a destiny and that together they lived in harmony as enemies as lovers. He ended his slideshow with the photo of a giant flower twice his height which bloomed only once every 10 years for only 72 hours. He provoked a burst of laughter and applause in concluding that men being what they are had called it Titan's fallace.
He had to hold me by the waist so as not to lose me in the crush of women who saw in him the reincarnation of Tarzan with his handsome face, his jade eyes, and his protective shoulders. Over and over, he introduced me with the same words used by Jasant. Please meet my lovely Velv during our car trip to the Cornwall coast to sleep at the mythic headland hotel at New Key. I asked him why. Why me? He said that he had seen me braiding the hair of the little girl who sold ant eggs 3 years earlier in Cambodia. He had expected to find me that evening at the Grand Hotel Dona restaurant where almost all the foreigners converged. But he had looked for me in vain. As usual, from fear, from timidity, from ignorance, I had preferred to eat alone in my hotel room with a book. Life gave us a second chance much later in Hanoi. Vans had glimpsed me through the halfopen door to the room he had just left where the first meeting between my boss and the minister of the environment took place.
He could tell that I had been settled in the capital for only a short time since in contrast to the powder blue or sky blue of Vietnamese silk, the royal blue of my dress still evoked the bold color of the French flag as well. My pink cheeks betrayed my rapid western gate and my ignorance of the slow pace of a country in the process of change.
He would have liked to reach me right after he had learned the location of my office from the assistant to the minister of the environment.
Unfortunately, along with other colleagues, he had to leave for an extended period of time to explore a recently discovered grotto. He interpreted this third chance encounter at the embassy as a sign. In the forest, amid dozens of animals of all sorts that appeared and disappeared around him, the color of a feather, the length of a beak, the form of a nest, would catch his eye and reveal to him the features of a species. As for what had captivated him about me, it was my ability to bend my legs, to curve my back, and to hunch my shoulders to match the fragility of the young merchant who was preparing portions of ant eggs with the help of small green leaves.
When we came back from England, Vanson continued his excursions into the forest. His extended absences made me doubt the true existence of the evenings spent at his side, jumping when an acrobatic rat dropped into the walk of the vander of sautayed crab vermicelli, watching a dragonfly land on his mortar's pestl while he was grinding up a mixture of spices, going to sleep under the mosquito netting whose four corners were attached with threads of different colors. is rolled around rusted nails hammered crookedly into different walls and beams.
Had I not received every morning from the hand of a messenger the photo of a bird with its description along with a photo of a part of me, I would have thought that I had dreamed my life or created a mythic character to provide me with a dream life.
Vansong reminded me not to sit side saddle on motor taxis if the drivers seemed drunk. Not to buy meat from the merchant who chased away flies by spraying his strips of pork with raid.
Not to leave anti-mosquito spirals lit while I slept. Not to exchange dollars for dongs on street corners. Not to eat the same woman's fur every night.
On the other hand, he forgot to warn me that the Red River overflowed its banks during the harvest season. The water rose in only a few hours, forcing the people living beside it to save their refrigerators on little aluminum boats built by artisans in the next neighborhood. They dove into the water to unplug the television or to lift up a piece of furniture.
Without the earthen dyke surrounding Hanoi, the city would have been submerged long ago. That dyke had survived a number of wars. But I wondered if it would support the new construction on its back for much longer. For that reason, one day the authorities cut off the houses that extended beyond the limits of the dyke, leaving a surreal landscape of open living rooms, split kitchens, amputated bedrooms with their residents continuing to live there as if on stage in a play.
I lived a few streets from the dyke. I was certain that the wooden beams blocking its openings would give way under the pressure of water and chaos.
From my balcony on the sixth floor, I made a list of the dozens of ways to die. An electrocushion easily came out on top since hundreds of tangled electrical wires were suspended in a disorderly and precarious manner all over the streets.
Lightning frightened me because I had to go out on the balcony to empty the water that flowed freely into the apartment, cascading down the six floors of steps inside the building.
That night, I would have liked to have a god to whom I could entrust vans.
I also wanted to call my mother to apologize for having always disappointed her. On my last visit, she died a little whenever I pronounced the Vietnamese words newly acquired in the north with a northern accent. Her friends lamented the fact that she had raised a daughter who had gone back to serve communism, that I had become a red princess, a traitor to the memory of the south soldiers.
If I were to be strucked by lightning, I wanted her to know that I had met mothers who had not chosen to send their sons to the front, who had not chosen their political allegiance, who had only hoped that their children would survive them just like her. But I did not call her because I would have worried her with my fear in the middle of the storm.
Vans cut short his expedition when he heard about the torrential rains. He forced me to come to him because my mattress was too damp on account of the water leaking from the roof. The 100-year-old tiles of this little house seemed to drain away water more effectively than recent constructions moldled on Soviet architecture.
I took shelter in his arms, tucking my head into the hollow of his collarbone, as if the storm were still rumbling away behind the shutters. Every time I opened my eyes that night, Vanson's gaze met mine as if he had not slept, as if I were one of his birds, which he observed with kindness and patience.
Tell me about the storm, my angel.
I told Vesson how I had transported the little refrigerator from the ground floor office to the first floor. How I had pulled the mattress in front of the balcony to block the water coming in under the door. How I had resorted to repeating the Sanskrit mantra that my Buddhist grandmother had taught me. I also told him how Mr. Lun, a highly placed official, had left his mark by licking my ear at the end of our meeting in my office. Had I not heard Ha's voice in my head, I would have frozen like a phone in the headlights instead of reflexively walking to the door and leaving. had often told me that it was not my buttons dawn up to the neck and at the wrist that would protect me, but the strength I would draw on to disengage myself.
whispering her words into the hollow of Vanson's collarbone, I realized that my mother had taught me above all to become as invisible as possible, or at least to transform myself into a shadow so that no one would attack me, to pass through walls and melt into my surroundings. She insisted that in the art of war, the first lesson consisted of mastering one's disappearance, which was at the same time the best attack and the best defense until I saw the light shining like crystals in Venance's beads of perspiration. I had always thought that my mother preferred her boys out of habit, out of love for my father.
My voice echoing in the circle of Venison's arms finally led me to understand my mother's desire to have me grow up differently, to launch myself elsewhere, to offer myself a fate different from her own. It took me two continents and an ocean to grasp that she had had to go against her nature to entrust the education of her own daughter to her, another woman far away from her and her exact opposite.
I had never been at all curious about visiting Burma before the day Vans awaited me at the Rangun airport for the weekend of the water festival and the Buddhist New Year. He had been working in that country for some time trying to convince the government of the purely scientific nature of his organization whose sole objective was to protect the environment in regions at risk. His organization functioned the way birds do, paying no heed to frontiers and migrating from one region to another, unconcerned about the political regime in power. In Burma, the military hunter imposed absolute obedience on the populace to the letter with an exception made for automobiles which were permitted to have the steering wheel on the left or on the right. The leader in power set great store by the advice of astrologers who recommended changing the direction of traffic in the streets in the name of the country's security even if the public buses opened their doors on the opposite side. The collective good had to trump the individual good where peace and order were concerned.
Fortunately, Bean seemed to have been protected from the leader mood swings.
Perhaps its 3,000 temples safeguarded it from the course of time and the uneasiness of the people seated uncomfortably on the pointed submits of the pyramids.
Vans wrapped me in the cocoon of the city where everything seemed to move to the rhythm of the wagons pulled by the daydreaming mules. To celebrate the start of the Burmese New Year, tradition decreed that people be cleansed of their sins of the past year by sprays of perfumed water. In bean, you used the palms of your hands rather than pumps and cannons with powerful jets as in Bangkok or Rangon.
We bought sarons at the market and also a length of bark from a nutmeg tree whose yellow powder protected the skin from the burning sun. Men slattered their faces with it while women drew circles on their cheeks out of simple vanity. Vanson drew dozens of patterns on me while I in turn applied this powder to his arms, his legs, and his back, writing a thousand words of love with my finger. He took hundreds of photographs of us for our future children.
Bean's slowness called to mind that of Ghan in France where Vanson's family had a second home surrounded by vineyards.
Vanson wanted to plan a visit to our respective families in Quebec and Khan one after the other during the Christmas break at the end of the year. I had told only her that I had found my Louie, that I had become the woman she had always dreamed I would be, that I now saw life from a lookout on its dizzying heights.
I was gliding on the wings of Vanson's birds. He himself had helped me to grow my own wings by calling me my angel and by orchestrating flights for me by airplane, by parachute, by hot air balloon. I no longer feared that my mother would stop speaking French to show that she disapproved of. I only wanted to share with her this sudden lust for life that I was experiencing for the first time. But circumstances didn't give me that opportunity.
She suffered a mild heart attack that confined her to a hospital bed one week before the date planned for my visit to Quebec. I stayed near her at my brother lungs during her convolescence which made it impossible for Vanson to come and for me to go to Kahhan.
Hua had given birth to the first baby in our family a year earlier. My mother would have liked her grandson to bear the complete name of her soul and eternal love. Leang an my brother had kept only the le contending that our father had forfeited this privilege the day he had allowed his wife and children to struggle on alone.
L would have liked his father to have witnessed the success of his restaurant business and his many honors for innovation and leadership and that he should feel regret for having been absent.
Long's rapid rise had frightened my mother, who remembered what her father had said when she became Dalat's major producer of orchids. Success often brings unhappiness.
She still blamed herself for having worked too hard and above all for having loved too intensely. If she had denied her husband his escapades. If she had allowed him to come to her instead of constantly anticipating his desires, if she had wept to his face and not in hiding, perhaps he would have been able to assume his role as head of the family. She had tried to compensate by strengthening Hua's ability to offer Long a haven of absolute calm and serenity after his turbulent days of meetings and of women who took too much interest in him. On the other hand, she often insisted on taking the baby so Hua could go to the hairdresser regularly, exercise every day, and accompany Long to social events. Living in one of the two parts of the bi-generational house designed by Long, she could easily withdraw and involved herself according to what was required. She monitored L's homecomings if he arrived too late too often. She prepared his favorite dishes.
She called him at work without making demands, without mentioning that a family was waiting for him, without reminding him that he should resist his desires.
She simply brought the dishes to Hua and hoped to hear a laugh or two through the walls.
As for L, my mother rarely visited him.
He had stayed to work at Princeton after his post-doctorate in oncology.
She could not resist noting with sadness that his American wife fed him mostly frozen food. La cooked better and much more often than Cheryl did. My mother understood that they took pleasure in discussing molecules and collaborating on one article or another. To her mind, their conjugal partnership enhanced their professional relationship and vice versa. But she kept her opinions to herself out of respect and largely because of a lack of understanding. She contented herself with filling the trunk of lost car with prepared dishes preserved in coolers. Out of love, La carried it all off and at the border lied when the customs agent asked him if he had any food.
Cheryl turned out to be a perfect daughter-in-law compared with Lynn's Taiwanese wife. May who is so pretty that the Chinese restaurants in Montreal always placed her at their entrances as a hostess. Lynn fell in love with her the first time they met and moved to Montreal as soon as he could. They seemed to be living a perfect love, even if May finished working in the early morning hours, long after the restaurant closed. Lynn never complained about waiting for her to come home at night since he used the time to work on his consultant contracts in addition to his daytime job. At the wedding, I had heard guests sharing under their breath the Vietnamese saying, "A beautiful wife belongs to others." In Lynn's case, his wife was swallowed up by gambling. Lynn was replaced by the casino.
In only a few years, she lost her youthful heir, her innocence, and the house they owned. Despite his well-paying jobs, Lynn had to give up on the marriage.
My mother had never allowed herself to lament her break with my father, but she surrendered to Lynn's sadness. Perhaps Lynn's pain stretched her fighting spirit to the breaking point. When I saw her facial muscles sag after what happened, the image that came to my mind was the English expression, the straw that broke the camel's back. Since then, I have looked for an equivalent in French. I am often advised that it's the drop that makes the ball overflow.
But that expression does not do justice to my mother's collapse. She withdrew and turned in on herself as if she had been broken. Fortunately, her grandson was born, which gave her a reason to pull herself together.
My mother made me return to Hanoi, promising me hollowly that she would come to visit me as soon as Long completed the acquisition of a new franchise. Hua took me to the airport and comforted me with the news that they were expecting a second child. That will put her back on her feet, don't worry.
As usual, I had boarded the plane with a suitcase full of books. At the time, only photocopies of photocopies of the lover by Margaritas, of the quiet American, and some lonely planet guides were being sold in the street by illiterate youngsters in rags. Sometimes two or three Hanoi bookstores offered copies of college books left behind by expatriots.
Overwhelmed as I was by all aspects of the project I was working on, I tried to read what was available so I would be able to participate without being too anxious in meetings with the directors of state corporations, farmers, the national assembly's committee on social affairs. Those readings also enabled me not to count Vanson's days of absence minuteby minute.
After the Christmas holidays, Vanson landed in Hanoi 2 days after me. I prepared us a Vietnamese fondue that evening with a clear buon in which we cooked slices of chicken, beef, and pork as well as clams and shrimp. Vasson's favorite part was the basket of greens that accompanied the meats. His Vietnamese mother had helped me to find the water lily risomes, the young bamboo shoots, the water spinach, the banana flowers, the squash blossoms, the okra, the straw mushrooms, and a kind of shy mimosa with a taste and texture he particularly liked. This dish was tastier if it was eaten in a group because the buon was richer when a large quantity of ingredients was involved.
And so even though I would have preferred to keep Vanson all to myself, I shared him with our friends who were in Hanoi. The ephemeral but intense friendship with expatriots made for a very special family. Since movies, theater, and any other cultural activity did not exist in foreign languages, we had to provide our own entertainment.
Sundays we would spend three or four hours at a huge brunch at the Sopetel Hotel which offered an oasis of food not to be found on the local market. Ross, deon, knuckle of ham, blancet, devu, brios, grafflax, g brulee, oysters, cassule, cocoa, babaum, sauteed for longines, parib breast, tartatan, a platter with a thousand cheeses. On other days of the week, we often circulated from one home to another to treat our friends to our discoveries.
Drew, an Australian who divided his time between India and Vietnam, introduced us to Indian spices. Antoan, who was Libanese and a true gourmet, knew how to grill fish to perfection. Marian, a Brazilian from Rio, prepared more cocktails than food. Philipe, a German, was always prompt, even in a country where time was an elastic concept.
Nicola, our big polar bear, did everything with love. Around the table, we often matched the number of member nations of the United Nations Security Council, representing many different disciplines and with hundreds of stories to tell.
The night of the fondue, Vanson politely shued away our guest earlier than usual because he wanted us to open our Christmas presents alone together. For several months, he had been growing winter heather in the mountains because he had heard me comment at length on the thicket of heather in a photo of their house rather than marveling at their ancestral dwelling at Oolon in the background.
After several attempts, he succeeded in filling a jadin that fit perfectly on the window sill. My second present was a bag of white fleshed cherries, a fruit that was out of season, but as delicious as the red ones of autumn. During my childhood in Vietnam, we all drew cherries in the same way, attached by their stalks, even though none of us had ever seen, let alone tasted one. There was a kind of fruit with the same name, Suri, but it didn't have anything like the same features. One was big, the other little, one sweet, the other acid.
The most remarkable difference concerned the pit. The Vietnamese suri contained three soft pits, whereas the other possessed only one hard one. Vesson's cherry enabled me to keep for myself the half containing the pit when we bit into it at the same time. But immediately he put his index finger on my lips while kissing my temple. I was astonished that he noticed because I don't think my father ever knew that my mother took the seeds out of his bananas and cucumber slices before serving them to him.
Similarly, Dung certainly thought that his wallet attracted his keys thanks to an invisible magnet just as his jackets automatically took their places on their hangers. Despite the coffee that dripped through the filter while he was taking his shower, and the carefully shined shoes that awaited him beside the door, he was blinded by the gray sky, the cry of a neighbor's alarm clock, the hike in in contacts and sals.
I could have cut off 10 cm of my hair and tongue wouldn't have noticed.
whereas the least sign of a burn immediately attracted the attention and care of Fenson. He had had V tattooed above his right hip at the level of his belt, a mark that presented my third present, a ring adorned with a square sapphire and diamond chips on all four sides.
It had belonged to his grandmother, who had taken it straight from her little finger the day after their Christmas Eve celebration.
Vans had shown her photos of me from her large collection of jewels she had chosen to leave her favorite grandson this first ring given her long ago by her jeweler husband.
Vesson's sapphire touched and overwhelmed me as I had lost my four grandparents and had not tried to see my father again since my return to Vietnam.
My story had been cut short, reinvented.
No object of my mother's or mine spoke of the generations unlike the altar of ancestors that bore witness to all marriages, anniversaries of deaths, or New Year's ceremonies going back at least a hundred years. Had this piece of furniture become the focal point of another family since it had been taken away from us? Had the souls of my ancestors followed it, or had they stayed with my father? Or had they also fled along with us in order to bring us to safe harbor?
The sapphire ring that I wore on my finger bound me to Vanson's love. But most of all, it included me in the long history of his great family, even if that history was too unknown to me and remains so.
I was responsible for a mission to Singapore with a group of Vietnamese advisers when Vanson received the news about his grandmother's serious condition after a banal fall. He got the first plane out to join his entire family and to be with the woman who had taught him to play his first notes on the piano to recite his first poem to knot his first bow tie. In his alactory memory, no perfume was as sweet and comforting as that of the jam made from melons gorging with honey that she served warm with bria savar cheese melting in the afternoon sun. The photos of bouquets of lavender hanging from the beam over her kitchen helped me imagine the young vans carrying a weaker basket and following his grandmother into the fields. He adored the woman who had provided him with his French roots despite a life as the son of a diplomat changing countries and friends to the rhythm of elections and living in borrowed shells like a hermit crab.
We had no way to communicate during my mission to Singapore because of the six time zones that separated us and my heavy schedule. When I returned, Manson called me, his voice muffled by sadness and fatigue. During his second telephone call, he was more optimistic as his grandmother had begun to eat a few mouthfuls of applesauce. The danger was over, which allowed him to anticipate returning to Hanoi.
And then nothing.
No more news other than a note I received two weeks after his last call.
My love, I miss you. Vesson's Vietnamese mother was also in the dark with no news from him. But she was used to his absences and his unpredictable returns.
She continued to take care of the house, gathering up yellow leaves and faded petals, dusting the shutters in his bicycle, replacing the fruits in the basket in case he returned during the night. I asked her not to change the sheets or wash clothes which I slept with. She consoled me with kanji and ginger tea. No one had any news, not even his colleagues. His organization's headquarters in London had no contact information other than that for Vietnam since he had already been living there for 7 years.
I moved into Vesson's little house. His Vietnamese mother and I did our best to move nothing around, to alter nothing. I saved every one of his hairs found in the dust, in the matting, in a hammock's mesh. His sandals and slippers I wrapped in tissue paper so the imprints of his feet would remain intact. I bought the same candles, the same detergent, the same shampoo. In that way, when I arrived at the house, I plunged into the same ambient sense. I did not keep the same circle of friends, though, because it became hard to avoid discussing theories regarding his disappearance.
In any case, those people change cities and countries frequently depending on their postings and contracts, always of uncertain duration.
My two constant ones, Ha and Jasant, took turns coming to visit me. Jasant brought me photos of my mother and her grandchildren. Ha gave me one of the diamond earrings my mother had received at the time of her wedding. She had swallowed both of them to pass through the anti- capitalist body search in Saigon and had found only one 3 days later. During her flight in the boat, she had hidden it in the seam of her pants waistband.
Once she arrived in Quebec, she preferred to work uncountable hours to satisfy our needs rather than sell the diamond that bore witness to her status as wife to my father, Madame Leangang.
I begged Ha and Jasant not to tell her about the existence and disappearance of Vanson. She would be shattered to learn that her daughter was living the same fate, the same story, the same abandonment as herself.
I went to see Alen, a longtime friend of Vans, who for 10 years or so had been running an orphanage at UK, about 20 kilometers from Hanoi. This Swiss woman had been a young traveler when one night she had heard a baby crying in the alleyway behind her little hotel in the backpacker's neighborhood. She had responded to the tears which had cast a spell on her and kept her in Vietnam ever since. Alen told me that the orphanage received and would continue to receive an automatic and generous contribution from Vanson every month.
The money was deposited directly into its account without any formality. She also reminded me that Vessa had often gone off with no return date. I should not be concerned.
I took refuge in the orphanage during all my free time because there was always a wall to paint, a meal to prepare, a bandage to change, a child to console, a wheelchair to push, a back to rub, a pale to carry, a lullaby to sing.
One night, while we were washing the dishes together, Han, a volunteer at the orphanage, recognized my family name.
Han adored my father so much that her description seemed to me to be the antithesis of that provided by my brothers, my mother, and all those who had known him. During our second conversation, Han admitted that she had recognized me because of the photographs of my brothers and myself that covered the walls of my father's room.
Some had been sent by her, others by my mother.
Han lowered her eyes to hide her tears when she told me that my father had made several attempts to escape. Nine and all. Out of pride, he wanted to leave on his own, not sponsored by my mother and certainly not by my brother Long. To experience a passage was essential to him. He had first sold everything he possessed to pay for the early voyages.
Later he had taught English, worked as a waiter in restaurants and under a psudonm translated a book offered him discreetly by an Australian client.
Against all expectations, the thorn birds became a bestseller, enabling him to try to escape once more.
Unfortunately, he had missed the wave of boat people. Even refugees who had already arrived and settled in camps were being sent back to Vietnam.
My father considered that life was fair and rewarding my mother with our presence and in punishing him with our absence.
He knows you working in Vietnam, concluded Han. She had the delicacy never again to talk to me about my father. Perhaps she understood that I needed silence in order to hear his voice again and to find a path back to him.
The seasons jostle each other and returned with the same music except on this first day of spring when Alen Han and I can have tea coatless at the cafe near the lake of the restored sword.
We are celebrating the admission of one of the orphan children to a neighborhood school.
There are many customers, double the usual number. The easy smiles and spontaneous laughter of the people strolling by give the longas of the weeping willows a festive air.
But in all the faces around me, I realize that none of them know Vesson.
Vessel's Hanoi no longer exists.
I hesitate to announce to Adin and Han the end of my post in Hanoi.
I hesitate to follow my urge to retreat to nowhere, Oklahoma.
I hesitate to escape Vietnam a second time. I hesitate to ask Han for my father's address.
I hesitate to leave Vessel's faded sheets to abandon my hammock weakened from its torn stitching. to throw away the pens whose ink has dried to take down the mosquito netting mended every 10 cm.
I hesitate to leave myself to abandon the V of Vanson.
I hesitate because I intend to leave without saying anything, taking away nothing except for Vanson's long blue scarf.
As I am hesitating, H decides for me.
Your father is in Hanoi at the orphanage. He'll be living there for the next month. We'll take care of him until he's better. At Alen before me, the crowd surges towards the other end of the lake. The shell of the 100-year-old tortoise has just reappeared, bringing good tidings, according to belief.
We hope you have enjoyed this unabrid by Kim Twi.
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