From what I’d heard, I pictured my father wearing a fedora because gangsters wore fedoras; my father pointing a gun toward dark fields because it wasn’t clear to me whom he would be shooting; my father disappearing down an alley, escaping his own father, like me fast and light on his feet; my father slumped in the corner of a windowless room, strung out, in a cold sweat as I had found him one day.
• • •
My young father lifting me in his arms, his smiling face moving across mine like so much sunlight. A quick kiss on my forehead before he hands me to my mother, to an aunt, to a grandparent, to a neighbor. My body swinging between one pair of arms toward another. I am on my feet again, standing, watching my father leave. I feel the heat of the dusty road rising toward my calves. It almost tickles, this heat. My father is going away somewhere and all I can remember is how a branch of a coconut tree was lifted from its trunk by a warm breeze coming from the beach that day. How this branch seemed to sigh. Once. Twice. How it seemed to wave at me.
Early memories of my father are always of his leaving. He didn’t live with us, was only, my mother would remind my older brother and me in her steady voice, visiting. He was in the South Vietnamese army and was stationed either in the city or in the country but never near our coastal town. I understood that I, even more than my brother, looked like him. The women would say, “You have his eyes, his nose, his dark skin, his silence.” When I was angry, my mother would say I had his poisonous temper. When I was good, she would laugh and say I had his charm. Some nights she would pull me to her and stare intently into my face. Then, holding me at arm’s length, my mother would turn me from side to side studying my face from one angle and then another. In this way, she tried to divine all the answers to her questions about his well-being. As though floating just beneath my own gaze was the reflection of my father, hundreds of dark miles away.
The night I left Vietnam, it was my father who carried me down to the beach and placed me on the fishing boat. During hours that must have been ones of fear, anxiety, and desperation, my only memory is of how calmly I sat waiting for him.
He’d gone back to get my mother and the rest of our family but as it was rumored that someone had alerted the police, the escape plan unraveled in chaos and he couldn’t find her anywhere. In a panic, he returned to the boat hoping she would have found her own way there, only to realize, as it pulled away from the shore, that my mother’s must have been among the many voices, each calling for help as he passed by in the water.
Years later, even after our family was reunited, my father would remember those voices as a seawall between Vietnam and America or as a kind of floating net, each voice linked to the next by a knot of grief.
In America, my father worked as a house painter and then a welder. After he’d been laid off from his welding job, he became a gardener. He sent me to the local library to check out books about plants and trees for him. Together we looked through the books and learned that the tree that closed its leaves at night was called a mimosa. There were many varieties of palm trees. Among them, the Alexandra, the Australian feather, the betel-nut, the book, the broom, the coconut, the date, the dwarf, the fern, the fishtail, the wine, and the walking stick.
My father noted that, as in southern Vietnam, bougainvillea and eucalyptus thrived in the climate of southern California. Cactuses had blooms to rival those of roses but few of his customers wanted a cactus garden. They insisted on green lawns even in the middle of summer droughts. It was his job to give them what they wanted, such as he could. He installed sprinkler systems, trimmed hedges, swept walkways, raked up fallen leaves and hauled away broken tree branches. My father and the people he worked for rarely saw each other. He would come to their homes after they’d left for work in the morning and was sure to leave before they returned in the evening. So long as he kept the grass green, there was no reason for them to meet.
At the end of the day, he stood outside the front door of our apartment and dusted the dirt off his clothes and shoes before coming inside. He would bring home bruised roses from the gardens he tended and, emptying his pockets onto the dining room table, he would announce, “Lemons! Oranges! Kumquats! For sale!”
• • •
I used to watch his eyes take in a room, insinuate their way deep into and through corners, walls. If I were sitting across from him, he would stare at a point on the wall behind me, his eyes moving like an arrow through my hair, pinning me to my place.
He would gaze beyond a person’s shoulder as though watching storm clouds gather on the horizon. Neither holding the clouds back nor inviting them on, his eyes merely took in their approach. More than once I have seen people talking with him turn around to see what was behind them.
The year I left home, my father and I would sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and pass the silence back and forth, like a smoke.
“It’s hot.”
“Yes.”
“Another fire.”
“So many lately.”
“Where was this one?”
“In a canyon.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Ate already.”
“Tired?”
“Not so tired.”
“I’m going to read.”
“Here?”
“In my room.”
“Brighter in there.”
“It’s dark out here.”
“Yes, it’s late now.”
“You want some light?”
“No.”
I’d go to my room and leave him sitting in the dusky half-light. Where he would go in his mind, I don’t know. Eventually my mother would come home from her restaurant job or from grocery shopping. She would walk around the house turning on all the lights, and my father would stand up from the kitchen table to greet her. “I lost track of the time,” he’d say as if to explain the darkness.
What happened during those hours when I sat in the fishing boat and waited for my father to return? Were they hours or only one hour? Or one half of one hour? It was after sundown. We were escaping so we needed darkness. But I don’t remember darkness and I don’t remember light. I was waiting in the boat, and the boat filled with people; but I remember no one other than my father. He walked slowly toward me, gently pushing everyone else aside. He picked me up and kissed my hair. He stroked my face and rocked me, even though I wasn’t crying. The boat must have cut into the water as it pulled away from the shore. But I don’t remember the sound of the water and I don’t remember the shape of the shore. Is this because of the darkness?
Or is it because we didn’t turn around once to look at the lights of our town? My father stared ahead, at the stars, and at the moon, which was half full and half vanished.
That first night at the refugee camp in Singapore, we lay in a hammock outside trying to sleep. I had closed my eyes to the moon and was listening to the sound of the crickets—a hum that would stop and start at odd intervals. Amid these darting sounds, I began to make out one other, the sound of someone crying. Soon the sound seemed so constant that I pictured a flood of tears rushing toward us. I thought that if the tears touched us, my father and I would spill out of our bodies, dissolve, and fall through the netting of the hammock.
Frightened, I opened my eyes and stared hard at my father’s back. When I touched a finger to his spine, he curled upon himself like an anemone. It was then, as he pulled away from me, that I realized the crying came from him. The hammock tilted toward the ground, the crickets went quiet, a dark cloud crossed the face of the moon, and time stopped.
Time stopped.
Then—inexplicably, incredibly—it continued.
NEIGHBORHOOD NEWS: A Vietnamese man and a young girl were seen wandering the aisles of the Safeway Supermarket on University Avenue between the hours of midnight and 1 a.m.
According to the store manager, their behavior was “strange” but not in any way threatening. When asked to clarify, the manager explained, “Everything seemed to interest them. I mean, eve
rything, from the TV dinners to the 10-pound bags of dog food.”
The man was seen picking up various items—a pack of shoelaces, a pine-tree car freshener, a box of Jell-O, a Pyrex measuring cup—and studying them. According to other customers and store employees, he would then show the items to the girl and encourage her to hold them for a minute before he carefully returned them to the shelf.
From the random way they went through the store, it was clear they were not looking for anything in particular. They made no purchases and left shortly before 1 a.m., after the child, who was perhaps his daughter, lay down in the spice aisle while the man was absorbed with the different varieties of salt available.
They were last seen walking east toward Orange Street. The man was carrying the girl who—having stayed up long past her bedtime—had fallen fast asleep.
Whenever we couldn’t sleep during those two years before Ma arrived, Ba and I would go for walks around the neighborhood and stop to look at the window displays. We stood in front of Ken’s admiring the many shining pairs of dress-up shoes, each positioned at such an angle as to suggest the wearer had floated out of them, while the shoes, too heavy to follow, had to stay behind. The desk in the window of Smith’s Stationery store had two fountain pens on it, as well as a jar of finely sharpened pencils, a memo pad with a list of things to do and a single, hard line drawn through the things that had been done. Sheets of stationery were displayed like an open fan or a hand of cards. At the top right-hand corner of the desk was a stack of envelopes of different sizes and different colors with a letter opener lying ready nearby.
What interested us most were the headless, footless, armless mannequins of Dora’s Fine Apparel. They wore shirts that stretched snuggly across their torsos and tucked neatly into their pressed pants. Leather belts cinched their waists and we could see, by the way the fabric of a trouser leg draped over their thighs or the way a flowered skirt hung from their hips, that if these mannequins were people, they would be the kind with straight white teeth and no bones, only muscles. With their puffed-up chests and crisp clothes, they exuded an air of confidence that impressed us.
• • •
After studying the window displays, we would cut down an alley behind Dora’s and walk over to the Mexican bakery. It was a French bakery but we called it the Mexican bakery because the baker was a Mexican. He was a short and stocky man with a little mustache and every night he wore the same thing: a white V-neck T-shirt and a long white apron over blue jeans. We would stand in the shadows outside the open back door and watch him work. He listened to English-language tapes and repeated aloud the sentences and phrases as he moved around the kitchen. “Hello,” he said to a bag of flour, before he lifted it off the ground and carried it to the counter. “How are you?” he asked the counter, clearing it with the palm of his hand. Of the measuring cup he asked, “Where is the train station?” Kneading the dough, he said, “Thank you very much.” And then, “You are so very welcome.” Shaping the dough into croissants, he asked, “What is the weather like in Orlando?” His voice softly rolling the r before touching down briefly on the d.
If after visiting the Mexican baker we still weren’t sleepy, we’d wander the aisles of the supermarket or ride the fluorescent-lit city bus as it rolled from our neighborhood through the darkened downtown, onto the empty highway, and out to the beach. The bus lurched like a boat at every stop and we’d sit with our faces pressed against the glass, taking in the ghost town of 3 a.m. The streets, with their closed shops, and sleeping houses, their wrecked cars and swaying palm trees, their hungry stray dogs and staggering bums, their 24-hour check-cashing windows and upended grocery carts, would all glide past us. At the end of the line, we ’d step off the bus, sniff the salt air, and then get back on the bus again.
For the return trip, we sat on the opposite side of the bus and watched as the streets were cleaned by teams of men in green jumpsuits, some of them pushing long brooms across the sidewalks as others drove the cleaning trucks that foamed soapy water at the mouth. By the time we got home, the sun would be up and little birds would be darting in and out of the bushes, screaming their heads off.
After Ma arrived, our family moved from one apartment building to another before finally settling in Linda Vista. It was there that my father made his closest friend, a Vietnamese man down the street with whom he would sit on the front steps in the evenings, and talk about the past. They agreed that the past was when they were young and in Vietnam. So young they still believed that if a beautiful girl—riding by on a bicycle—offered so much as a sidelong glance, it was reason enough to chase after her.
Sipping bottles of beer, they talked about the war and how it was their youth and how when it ended it was like waking from a long dream or a long nightmare. And now the war was in the past. Chewing on salted peanuts, they talked about how certain foods were in the past and certain smells. For example, the smoky smell of dried cuttlefish as it was being roasted over a charcoal stove. And the smell of the first rain after the dry season. They watched as cars drove by and my father remembered the rivers crowded with fishing boats and the children who sat cross-legged on the floor of those boats, mending their families’ nets. As evening approached, they talked about heat as something that was in the past, as well as certain fruits. The dragon fruit, for instance. The sky turned indigo above them, and as they stood up to wish each other goodnight, my father and his friend agreed that certain colors also seemed to have vanished. Like red. Red was in the past.
He used to walk around the house and mutter the spelling of his name in English.
“M-I-”
“M-I-N-”
“M-I-N-H”
He pronounced the H like a combination of “ache” and “ash”: “aycsh.” He would point his finger at the air, as if each letter were appearing briefly before him, suspended for a moment, as he awaited the next. But before he could spell out his whole name, the letter preceding the one to appear would often be gone. Like a blind man circling a small room, searching for but always missing the door that led to the hallway, the streets, the open air, he would repeat each letter of his name over and over again, in a tone more hushed and halting than the time before. Even when he was able to spell out his whole name, he couldn’t quite trust that this was he himself. Were these the letters? Was this his name?
Late at night, unable to sleep after having moved from his bed to the couch to four dining room chairs lined up in a row, he drives down to the beach and spins the car wheels in the wet sand, daring himself to drive into the sea. At daybreak he drives the car home, parks it at the edge of the driveway, lowers the seat, and falls asleep, exhausted.
He starts digging a trench around the base of a palm tree in the garden of one of the people he works for. He digs until his hands bleed. When he remembers that no one has asked him to do this, he packs up his equipment, pulls the lawn mower into the truck bed and drives away. Let them call. Let them curse into the answering machine. He will never go back to that house again.
Too drunk to drive from a friend’s house and too proud to be driven, he decides to walk the six blocks home. He walks with one foot on the sidewalk and the other foot on the road. It makes him feel like a crippled soldier marching far behind the troops. Every third step, he shouts out his own name and the order “Stand up straight! Stand up straight, now!”
He becomes prone to rages. He smashes televisions, VCRs, chases friends and family down the street, brandishing hammers and knives in broad daylight. Then from night until early morning he sits on the couch in the living room, his body absolutely still, his hands folded on his lap, penitent. He sits in that position for hours, graced by the darkness, straining toward things no one can see.
I grew up studying my father so closely as to suggest I was certain I saw my future in him. I would inherit his lithe figure and beautiful smile. I would build and break things with my hands. I would answer to names not my own and be ordered around like a child. I would disappear into every
manner of darkness only to awaken amid a halo of faces encircling my body. Shame would crush me. I would turn away from the people I loved. I would regard with suspicion the bare shoulders of a woman I desired. The sight of two boys shooting marbles in a dirt yard would fill me with sadness. I would drink to lies about the past. I would beg the dead to come for me. The sight of a young girl playing house, sweeping out an imaginary courtyard with a branch of eucalyptus, and the little song she sang, about a fluttering butterfly, and the way her arm described the course of its body in flight, would haunt me.
Whereas my father would disappear into himself when haunted, I would leap out of windows and run. If there were no windows, I would kick down doors. The point was to get to the street, at any cost. I would come to see running as inseparable from living. I would choose falling asleep on rooftops and on the lawns of strangers to lying in my own bed, surrounded by knots of memories I had no language with which to unravel. Yet exactly like my father, I would become suspicious of tenderness and was calmest when I had one hand quietly lying over the other, both ready to be raised in an instant, shattering to the bone whatever dared come too near to me.
One night when my father was sitting on the couch looking sad and broken, he turned and realized there was someone standing where he had thought there was only a shadow. He came for me then because I had seen him. I leapt through a window and ran from the house, but before I could make it to the street, he caught me by my hair and pulled me back inside. Gripping my head with one hand, he raised the other and demanded to know what I had seen.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For Page 8