Things We Lost to the Water: A Novel

by Eric Nguyen

  When Vinh asked her where New Orleans East was, she said it was away from the city—part of it yet not.

  “An interesting place,” she said. “I live in Versailles. All of us are người Việt; we all came after the war.” She guessed the man must be new in town. She’d been seeing new người Việt coming to New Orleans, replacing those who left for Houston or California.

  “I don’t want anything fancy,” she added. “Something that is enough.”

  “Chị,” he said, “you need something pretty and something that lasts long. Something that can take you out of the city, out of the state, but also to work. All in style.” He patted the car, then wiped his handprint.

  “Bà Giang told me to come here and I won’t be cheated,” Hương said, “but I’m seeing that I should take my business elsewhere.”

  “Don’t say that, chị…” He took a step forward, so she took a step back.

  “Hương. Tên tôi là Hương.”

  “You can trust me, chị Hương. This runs like a dream. Would a fellow người Việt deceive you?”

  Yes, she thought, a fellow người Việt would deceive me.

  “Let me take you for a ride,” the salesman added.

  “It’s too fancy,” she said. “What’s a V8 engine? What’s that? Who needs that? I just need a car. How about another one?” She couldn’t understand why car shopping had to take so long, why someone couldn’t buy a car like they would buy an apple or a bag of rice. All this chitchat. “What else have you got?”

  She took a tissue from her purse and wiped the sweat from her forehead. After all this time working inside an air-conditioned nail salon, she was now unaccustomed to the early July heat.

  “This car is the perfect car for you, chị Hương. Why don’t you take it for a ride? A ride around the block?”

  “Does it have air-conditioning?” Hương asked.

  “It does. The best cool air in America.” He waved the keys. A small smile lit up his face.

  * * *

  —

  First, Hương drove down small neighborhood roads, then onto Claiborne.

  Vinh turned on the radio. “See, chị, this is the radio.”

  He turned on the air-conditioning. “See, chị, this is the air-conditioning.” He pressed down on the horn to show her its vitality, its strength and loudness. “For when you’re stuck in traffic,” he said.

  At one point, while he showed her the space in the glove compartment and flipped through the car manual, she veered off onto a ramp and before she knew it, most of the traffic disappeared. Hương saw a speed limit sign: sixty-five miles an hour.

  As Vinh rattled off more car specifications, the city faded from her rearview mirror. Gone were the high buildings, the glass-windowed towers, the concrete. Ten minutes more of driving, and it all disappeared.

  A sense of happiness came over Hương as she realized this was the first time in a long time she had left the city by herself. She reminded herself there was more to the world than New Orleans, more than that city. She felt she needed to celebrate as she crossed the city limits. She imagined leaving. Her boys were off at school and they would come home and wait and she would not be there! The next day they wouldn’t go to school. They would stay home all week. They would fail their classes. The schools would visit. Not finding her there, they would call. Ms. Trần, they’d say, how could you abandon your sons? Yes, abandon, and all at once she felt guilty for thinking it. How could she abandon her sons? How could she even think of doing that to them? They were all alone in the world. She was just weary; that’s what it was—tired, old, and weary.

  “Anh Vinh,” Hương said, “which way back?”

  “You’re doing just fine. Do you like the car? That sound you hear means the engine is working great—just great!”

  “Anh Vinh,” she repeated, “which way back?”

  Vinh leaned over the center console and peered into Hương’s face and saw the fear in her eyes of driving too far, too fast.

  “Chị Hương,” he said. “Would you like some longans? They don’t sell fresh longans here in the States very much, but there’s this woman…” He paused and looked out the window, watching the signs pass by. “There’s this woman in Buras. She owns an entire orchard of them, an entire orchard of longan trees.”

  Hương remembered the longan trees of her childhood. She remembered the leaves blowing in a soft breeze, the inescapable fragrance hanging in the air, the sound of rough fruit as it fell to the dirt with a muted thud. She hadn’t thought about longans in years.

  “Yes,” she said, at last. “Longans. Take me to the longan trees.”

  * * *

  —

  The drive took over an hour. As she drove, her body sat stiff; she was afraid she would be caught any minute. But the farther away they got, the more relaxed she became. She drove with one hand and leaned back. After a half hour of driving, the radio became static and the two started talking.

  Hương told Vinh she was a professor’s wife. They, the Communists, called for her husband. After his time in a reeducation camp, they migrated to the countryside. Then they migrated out of the country, or at least that was the plan.

  Things got complicated after that. He got left behind as she sailed on. She tried to contact him—she still kept her letters and cassette tapes in a shoebox in her closet—but to no avail. One day, out of the blue, he did write back, telling her to give up her search. At first, she was devastated. But Bà Giang had a different perspective. She said the Communists were monitoring the letters. Yes, Hương could agree on that—but what of it? Most likely, the old woman said, they confiscated the letters and he never saw them, except for the ones he did answer. Maybe, she went on, he stopped writing because he was trying to protect himself; who knew what was going on over there across the ocean, what happened after he sent Hương his final, brief postcard? In the end, perhaps it was fate that they should never meet again. That didn’t explain, however, Công’s long silence. If he was truly trying to get to her, get to them, he would have written earlier, wouldn’t he? And then there was the night they left. He had paused, she remembered. But perhaps Bà Giang was right: the fates—or whatever force was behind the universe—must have had something else in mind for their destinies. It didn’t make it hurt any less, any of it. In fact, it made it hurt more: in the grand scheme of things they’d never stood a chance.

  Still, sometimes she wrote to him in the way a schoolgirl might write in a diary; it calmed her, imagining talking to him, giving him her innermost thoughts. Dear Công, Another day in New Orleans, she would scribble down. Your sons are growing up so fast, fast as light, fast as seconds, you wouldn’t recognize them because I don’t. They are not like you and I don’t know what to do.

  She didn’t say any of this to Vinh (he was a stranger, after all) and simply said things got complicated. Life is already complicated, she said, and when you add war to that, no one gets what they want.

  Vinh agreed. He told Hương he’d been in the South Vietnamese Army.

  “The South Vietnamese Amy,” he said, “was the best army there ever was in the world.” After the war, they sent him to a reeducation camp. “When I left Vietnam for good, I first went to Malaysia, then to Alaska, then Oregon, then Texas, and now here!” He sounded like he wanted to say more, but Hương didn’t urge him on. Besides, he told her they were almost there; just take the next exit and get on Highway 11.

  The trees on the highway gave way to flat wetlands, empty of everything except water and mud. Hương felt the need to slow down—the land was bereft, holy even—but Vinh said to keep up the speed.

  When they came to an old trailer house, Vinh motioned her to stop, so Hương parked the car and they got out.

  Vinh walked leisurely as they passed the house and into the backyard. He knew this place; he walked confidently and kn
ew where he was going. Hương tried not to slip in the mud as Vinh told her the woman who owned the orchard was from the Philippines. She wondered how Vinh and the woman knew each other.

  In the backyard, to Hương’s surprise, trees stood in rows and rows, everywhere. Her mouth opened in astonishment. There must have been hundreds of them, and each stood heavy with leaves—and longans, bunches of longans, hanging there among the leaves. She wanted to grab them all, carry them in her arms, bring them home.

  Vinh led her to a table and tent to the side of the orchard. The blue of the tent made everything inside seem underwater. There, a small, elderly, brown woman sat alone peeling longans. A radio played old jazz as she worked. The woman looked up when they approached.

  “Longans!” she said. “We have longans! So many!” Suntanned skin, wrinkle lines, and small smiling eyes—she could have been someone’s grandmother, someone’s great-grandmother, even.

  “You back again!” the woman said to Vinh. The woman clapped and let out a laugh. “I told you—longans really good! Good for health! Longevity!” She looked at Hương and nodded her head. “You try longans?” she asked. “Good for health! Longevity! Beauty! Here, here, here!” The old woman picked up a longan and pushed her thumb into the fruit. Once the rough exterior gave way, she began shucking the shell-like skin.

  “See?” she said when all that was left was a thick white ball. She held it up and turned it around like she was a showgirl on a game show—What a wonderful fruit! A most gorgeous fruit! This fruit could be yours! She reminded Hương of Vinh in the car lot.

  “They called ‘dragon eyes’ because the seed—the seed big, black, shiny—look like eye of dragon,” she said. She handed Hương the fruit.

  From her hand, Hương could already smell the sweetness. She remembered the subtle crunch it made when you bit into it, the feel of the seed in the mouth, rolling like a marble on the tongue when all the flesh was swallowed. Hương held it gently and bit into it slowly, wanting the flavor to last, wanting to picture herself in an orchard, so very much like this one, on the outskirts of Mỹ Tho, the hot, aching sun warming her neck, the juices of the fruit cooling and giving her relief from the heat, a time that was simpler, before war, before marriage, before the fall of a country….

  She put the rest of the longan in her mouth and chewed.

  What refreshment, she thought. What pleasure. What memory.

  Vinh handed her a cluster of longans still hanging on their branch. She felt their roughness, then his warm skin as it touched hers. She wanted to bring a whole bag home, for Tuấn, who hadn’t had these in so long, and for Bình, who never had.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, anh Vinh.”

  * * *

  —

  Hương did not buy Vinh’s car. She decided on a cheaper one from the dealership that sat across from his, but it wasn’t the last she saw of him.

  One Saturday, she drove by to see if he was in. Coincidentally, he told her, it was his lunch break, and she said she knew a sandwich place down on Magazine Street, if that wasn’t too far. She said she could drive them there in her new car.

  At Casamento’s they both ordered oyster loafs and cans of Barq’s.

  “This was the first American sandwich place I went to when I got here,” she told Vinh. “We went out on a group lunch and I didn’t know what I was getting. So imagine how surprised I was when they bring out this behemoth.” She pointed to her own sandwich, two thick cuts of white bread trying to contain a mountain of fried oysters. “It’s not the best sandwich I’ve ever had, but it brings back memories. But don’t tell anyone here that.”

  Vinh said he’d never been to any place that took food more seriously than New Orleans. He said he once made the mistake of calling a muffuletta just a sandwich, and the cashier—a petite-looking woman with a scratchy voice—refused to give him his food.

  Hương laughed. “Yes, that sounds about right.”

  “Why here? Why New Orleans? Why stay?” Vinh asked.

  “I could ask you the same question, anh Vinh,” Hương replied, and then, “We just ended up here and we never left. But you, you’re a traveler, anh Vinh. Why New Orleans?”

  “I go where the jobs are,” he said. “Simple as that.”

  There was more to that. Hương saw it in his eyes, as if he were waiting for her to ask him to tell more. But she didn’t press him. She knew everyone had their own pasts they wanted to leave behind. Not secrets, exactly, but something to be guarded just the same, with some guarding it more urgently than others. It gave her a vague feeling that they were the same type of people.

  After lunch, she drove him back.

  Every weekend, somehow, she found herself on that side of town and he was always working then, too. She drove them to her favorite places in New Orleans—“Think of it as a welcome gift,” she said—and they alternated who paid.

  It was when they were strolling along the river walk, eating ice cream cones, that she realized this had become her city, the place she lived but also a place that lived in her. She’d picked up its vocabulary, developed a taste for its foods, grown accustomed to its weather—the heat, the humidity, even the minor hurricane here and there. She remembered how scared she was when she first arrived, how she clutched her belongings (and her sons) close to her, afraid that something might happen. Nowadays, she walked freely, unafraid.

  Vinh pointed to the St. Louis Cathedral looming across the street. “It’s been forever since I’ve been to a church,” he said.

  “I wasn’t raised with religion” was all Hương said. “Though everyone in Versailles seems pretty religious. They even built their own church with everything in Vietnamese—services, Bibles, pamphlets. But I don’t understand.” If war had taught her one thing, it was that ideology—how you believed the world should be, what you would die to uphold—was always flawed, and though innocent on its own, it could lead to tragedy.

  “For me it’s always been a private matter,” Vinh said as if feeling Hương’s uneasiness.

  “That’s all I ask,” she said. They had been quiet for a while when she said, “They give tours. We can go.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Vinh replied.

  “If you want.”

  “No, truly,” he said and took her hand.

  Together they walked back to the car.

  What kind of man are you, anh Vinh? Hương thought along the way but didn’t ask.

  Ben

  1990

  Ben grew suspicious when his mother told him to call the man Uncle Vinh and said he was going stay with them for a week. He was going through bad times because he’d lost his job, she said. Uncle Vinh wasn’t family, but they should treat him as if he were.

  Vinh came in during the first heat wave in years, and the temperatures were over one hundred degrees. A fan blew in the living room because the AC was out. Vinh told them, Ben and Tuấn, he came from Galveston and Coos Bay and Homer—Texas, Oregon, Alaska.

  Ben questioned his story like Ben questioned everything else. “How can you be from so many places?” he asked. “You can’t be from two places, let alone three.” Vinh looked at him as if he didn’t understand his words, so Ben said instead, “You’re lying.”

  “I never lie,” Vinh said. To prove it, he showed them his tattoos, his travel marks: the head of a longhorn with smoke puffing out its nostrils on his right arm; a majestic red salmon flying above the water on his left; on his chest, a bear, huffing and puffing, its eyes red, its teeth showing like it was hungry and ready to gorge. Watching Vinh, Ben saw how different they were. There were bumps and grooves of muscle instead of flatland flesh and xylophone rib bones, and most of his skin, exposed to the sun, was tanned to a darkness. But underneath his shirt, Vinh’s color was the same as Ben’s, a pale caramel, like they, the both of them, were made of the same clay. He wanted to stand closer to Vi
nh, but Tuấn took a step forward and poked a finger at the bear.

  “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “What you gonna get while you’re here, a stork? A Louisiana stork?”

  “It’s a pelican,” Ben interrupted. “The state bird is a pelican, stupid.”

  Tuấn continued, “That’s not a tattoo. It’s a teddy bear.” He stopped laughing when Vinh grabbed him by the shoulder. Ben saw his fingers making craters on his brother’s skin.

  “Respect your elders, child,” Vinh said.

  For a second it looked like Tuấn was in pain. Then it looked like he was annoyed. With a push, Vinh let go and pulled his shirt back on.

  “What do you kids know, anyway?” Vinh mumbled.

  Their mom walked in from the kitchen, chopsticks in hand. It was one of her days off. She pointed the sticks at her sons.

  “There won’t be any fighting in my house,” she said. The scent of sizzling fish and chili peppers wafted into the living room. “Pretend Uncle Vinh is family. Pretend this for your poor old mother. Tuấn, don’t push Uncle Vinh.”

  “I didn’t push him. He pushed me.”

  “Just do this one thing for your mother. Làm ơn!”

  * * *

  —

  Ben carried Vinh’s suitcase down the hall and showed him the room he and his brother shared. With one foot, he slid over a pile of books from the library. Unlike elementary school, the middle school let you check out as many books as you wanted; he’d stuff his backpack with mystery novels, sci-fi stories, and Choose Your Own Adventures until he couldn’t fit any more in.

  Ben set the suitcase down. It wasn’t heavy, at least not in the way he expected for someone who’d packed up his life and moved across the country. He must have left in a hurry or he didn’t have many things. Ben let go of the handle, hoping the suitcase would drop and fall over, the flimsy locks opening to reveal the contents; but it didn’t.