by Sandi Tan
“We just heard from the embassy in Saigon and they said the kids are all gathered at the airport over there, all hundred and fifty of them.” Myrna sounded chipper.
“Did they say anything about my little one?”
“We didn’t get specific news about any one child. But I’m sure she’s doing just fine. Listen, we’ve just been informed that the president will be at the airport tomorrow to receive the babies and—whether we like him or not—we’re thrilled about this because it means we’re finally getting the respect we deserve. The downside is security will be tight. So make sure you get there early and find us. And don’t forget your papers.”
“Does this mean I’ll have to get all dolled up?” Mary-Sue asked.
“Oh, wear anything but black pajamas!” Myrna chuckled. “Personally, I think simple and elegant is best. There’ll be a ton of photographers.”
“I’d rather not be photographed with our so-called president, if that’s possible.”
“Oh, come on, hon. Tomorrow’s not just gonna change your life, it’s gonna change history! What’s a little smile? You’re doing a good thing. You should be very proud of yourself.”
“Pride has nothing to do with it. I just want my first encounter with my daughter to be private. Not some fucking baby-kissing photo op.”
A pause at the other end of the line.
“Well, listen, Mary-Sue, I have to go now. Plenty of calls to make tonight. We’ll see you at the airport tomorrow, alrighty?”
Mary-Sue pulled out her squarest-looking outfit, the sedate black dress she’d worn to her father’s funeral, resenting that she was being coerced into wearing mourning clothes to greet her new daughter. She had originally planned to wear her favorite sweatshirt and blue jeans to the airport, but goddamn the president of the United States. She stood outside her second bedroom, which had been painted pink and turned into Kate’s room, trying to picture what her life would be like in twenty-four hours. No more lonely nights. Saturdays and Sundays staring out into nothingness—those were luxuries she could afford to miss. Trips to the toy store, the park, the dentist, errands that would give her no choice but to get herself organized. A little voice calling her “Mommy” might finally force her to give a shit.
Sometime close to dawn, the phone rang. She damn near jumped out of her skin. Cursing like a trucker, she picked up the receiver and croaked: “Yeah?”
It was Myrna LaBoeuf, weeping:
“There was a crash.”
Mary-Sue sat up. She gazed at her clock. It was 5:07. Her blood froze.
“What? When?”
“About . . . six hours ago.”
“Six hours ago? Why the hell didn’t you call me then?”
“We only just heard ourselves . . . The army . . . it’s classified, hon . . . The plane crashed right after takeoff, nobody knows what happened . . . Some are saying it mighta been sabotage . . .”
Mary-Sue took a deep breath.
“Were there survivors?”
“Yes . . . but . . .”
“Did my Katie make it?”
“I don’t know, hon. I really don’t know anything at this point . . . They said . . . They said there are tiny little bodies . . .” her voice broke, “strewn all over the Mekong Delta . . . Oh God, Mary-Sue, I am so sorry . . . I am so sorry . . .”
The C-5A Galaxy was the largest cargo plane of its day but it was still just a cargo plane, which meant that it came with no seats and none of the safety provisions found on a basic passenger jet. Moreover, many of the babies were so small that seats were of no use to them anyhow—they were placed in boxes with only faith and fate holding them down. The nurses and attendants were outnumbered. Soon after takeoff from Saigon, one of the Galaxy’s doors popped open, and the pressure inside the cabin plummeted. Witnesses said they saw infants and babies being sucked out of the plane like rag dolls. The pilots managed to turn the plane back toward Saigon but it missed the runway, crashing into rice paddies near the Mekong River and breaking into four parts. Mary-Sue never saw the worst pictures, nor did any American without top-level clearance—almost all the photos were destroyed by the US Army. The ones released showed only the survivors.
Mary-Sue waited anxiously by the phone. She never left the apartment, chipping away at the Mickey Mouse cake bite by bite. She listened a little to a military expert on the radio gassing on about how the plane was built by Lockheed, and how that model had a history of malfunction. Some help this was now. She didn’t dare turn on the TV in case she saw footage of the crash. Though she had no idea what her Katie looked like, she was convinced that if she even glimpsed her face—or mangled body—she’d recognize her in an instant and lose her mind.
Days later, Myrna called with news. Three-year-old Kate was among those who survived, and she was—miraculously—unscathed. A young South Vietnamese nurse had held on to her as the plane plunged into the rice fields. When their part of the plane caught on fire, she covered Kate with a blanket and shielded her from the flames. Kate had been one of the lucky ones. The army reported its final tally—155 out of the 328 on board were killed, 98 of them infants and babies.
“So when do I get to see her?”
“They’ve put the kids on rotation. The flights that were scheduled to leave will still do so but they’ll be putting survivors on those planes whenever they can find space for them.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Mary-Sue, be patient.”
The Operation Babylift flights continued as Saigon fell. Then on one of the final airlifts out of the city, Kate was brought to San Francisco without fanfare. The South Vietnamese nurse, who suffered 20 percent burns from the crash, was on the same plane. The skin on her face was gone, as was most of her nose; she was to go through reconstructive surgery at the UCSF Medical Center, thanks to contributions from the American people. In the weeks following the crash, she’d grown desperately attached to the little girl whose life she had saved, and at the San Francisco airport, refused to let Kate go, calling her “bé cưng.” Darling baby. Mary-Sue watched as nurses injected the woman with sedative and snatched Kate away as soon as her arms let go.
Kate was small and nondescript, but somehow eerily complete—her arms and legs worked, she could see, hear, respond. She had silky dark-brown hair that was a clue to one non-Asian parent, probably a GI. Although she wasn’t immediately adorable, something about her was very familiar. When the FCVN woman put her in front of Mary-Sue, her piercing brown eyes registered everything—and her silence was damning.
Mary-Sue was terrified of her. She held the big stuffed panda bear between them like a shield. Little Kate, after some hesitation, walked to the bear and hugged it and hugged it and hugged it. Not once afterwards did she look back at the disfigured nurse who saved her life, now slumped in her wheelchair.
Mary-Sue spent the next few years keeping Kate all to herself, teaching her how to eat, dress, potty, spell, and rub her little button nose against hers in the Eskimo fashion. Under Mary-Sue’s tutelage, Kate developed quickly into an American child, with no memory of the orphanage in the coastal village of Quy Nhon where she’d spent her first years. Or of the crash. The only time Mary-Sue received a prickly visitation from Kate’s past was when, at age five, she started crying uncontrollably as soon as she heard Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” Later, reading a Friends of the Children of Viet Nam newsletter, Mary-Sue learned that the song had been used by the US Armed Forces in Vietnam as a signal. Whenever it had come on the radio, Crosby’s warbling was accompanied by the live orchestral boom of choppers and the satanic timpani of guns and bombs.
When Kate turned seven, Mary-Sue found work as an executive assistant at a human resources company in Southern California, and they moved. She wanted her Katie to assimilate into the real America, and San Francisco, that artificial oasis of tolerance, permissiveness and multicult
uralism, was too much of a bubble for that. Not that she’d ever consider moving them back to the comatose heartland of her youth.
Mary-Sue found the homey old Craftsman houses of Alta Vista inviting—and different enough from Des Moines that she didn’t experience debilitating pangs of déjà vu. Compared to the Bay Area, a modest sum bought you a decent house with a yard in this part of the state, so she took out some of Daddy’s endowment and set down new roots. She became a suburbanite homeowner, like the rest of the people on Santa Claus Lane. The majority of her neighbors were Anglo working families who’d been there at least two generations, very square in their way but also very comforting. There was also a smattering of black folks who seemed like remnants from a different era—stragglers from the Great Migration too downtrodden to pick up their things and run north after their kin. Mary-Sue wished they would say hi but they mostly kept to themselves.
Putting down roots felt good, and right. When the holidays came round, Mary-Sue and Kate signed off on Christmas cards as “The Girls of Santa Claus Lane.”
The backyard became their haven. Together, mother and daughter harvested oranges off their own tree and ran about, year-round, on bare feet. A family of pet hamsters had their last rites read to them in rapid succession under their shady oak. Weekends, Mary-Sue took Kate for pancakes at the Good Ol’ Times cafe; for culture, they went to nearby Pasadena and took videos out of the public library. And if that wasn’t good enough, there were parks and all kinds of fun that cost no money at all.
Kate, meanwhile, had trouble at school. Teachers found her quiet and, well, spooky. Especially the way she refused to look people in the eye. She lacked the earnestness and messiness they were accustomed to. When they saw her in the hallways, they nodded at her, as one would to a colleague one passed on the street.
Struck hard on the head by a medicine ball during PE, Kate didn’t cry—she simply got up and went on. Her mental sums were flawless, and when she was awarded a prize for math, she didn’t express either pride or pleasure. She came across as unflappable, but not in a happy way—to everyone aside from Mary-Sue, she seemed incapable of feeling. She found satisfaction in homework while her classmates planned slumber parties and discussed unicorns. Her best friend, by default, was an asthmatic French Canadian boy named Paul Corot with whom she shared an aversion to other children.
Mary-Sue worried about her little girl. Where was all this drive coming from? It certainly wasn’t from her. She never pushed Kate to do anything, never volunteered incentives if she made a certain grade or threatened her with time-outs. The only unconventional thing about her child-rearing was that she spoke to Kate as if she were a full-grown person, a wholly cognizant roommate. Whether they were discussing the food pyramid or women’s lib, there was never any baby talk.
One day in the fourth grade, Kate’s teacher Mrs. Hansen took her away from the classroom while the other kids were coloring rainbows, and led her to the principal’s office. There, Mrs. Hansen, the principal and another fourth-grade teacher convened in whispers, while Kate sat like a thief awaiting judgment. After ten excruciating minutes, the adults ended their caucus. Before they could speak, Kate said, in her still, little voice: “I’ll be good.”
The principal smiled wryly. “The problem isn’t that you’re no good, Katharine,” she said. “The problem is that you’re too good. You belong elsewhere.”
“We’re all so proud of how you’ve overcome the difficulties of your history,” Mrs. Hansen said, kindly. She squeezed Kate’s tight little shoulder. “Don’t you see? You’re another one of those Vietnamese overachievers.”
Another one of those . . . Kate’s eyes welled up with rage, and for a moment, she thought the principal looked afraid. She held in her anger as the principal showed her brochures of campuses with lush green lawns and even one with an old campanile. These places all had names ending in “Academy” or “Institute” that made them sound like reform schools or asylums. And expensive ones at that. These witches, ganging up on her. She wanted to bolt.
“I’m not one of those . . .”
“Kate, your teachers mean well,” the principal said. “But they have reached their limit. They just don’t know what to do with you. We’ll have to call your mother in to have a little chat.”
This was blackmail, Kate knew. And she was too powerless to counter it. “No, no, please don’t.” She scrunched up her face like she’d seen other children do before their tears arrived. “I don’t want my mother to worry. Please, give me a chance. I’ll change.”
She kept her promise. To prevent herself from being shunted around like some Dickensian urchin—she’d been reading Oliver Twist, which was way more engaging than those vapid Ramona books—she deliberately and unhappily botched an IQ test. That was just the start. She laid down speed bumps in her brain; instead of reading the thesaurus during lunch, she steered her thoughts toward scratch ’n’ sniff stickers and Strawberry Shortcake playsets. She started stating half thoughts instead of waiting for full ones to form, aping the unfocused speech patterns of her peers. Slowness was painful at first. Then it brought new pleasures. She made friends trading stickers and sharing poetry dedicated to Han Solo. She diligently avoided Paul and his magnetic chess set. “He’s a mouth breather,” her new friends had hissed.
Her mother worried anew. One day Kate was reading Moby Dick and the next she was tuning in to Who’s the Boss and asking for candy bracelets. She’d wanted Kate to reap the full benefits of American freedom and become a true individual. Instead, quite overnight, Kate had turned into liberty’s lazy spawn, the conformist. The girl had been such a delight to raise—a pal, really—but after puberty, it was as if she’d been replaced by a stranger in pink blush and bubblegum lip gloss. Everything was either “Ew!” or “Gross!” Mary-Sue didn’t know how to articulate her disappointment to Kate without sounding cruel—and they used to be able to discuss everything, everything.
Finally, Mary-Sue blackmailed her into joining the chess club (“or no Walkman for you!”). That move turned out to be a winner. Because of chess, Kate again spent more time hanging out with Paul, who Mary-Sue deemed a positive influence.
Paul had greasy hair, wore Izod shirts in pastel hues and was an impassioned member of Greenpeace—an eccentric package that Mary-Sue, much more than Kate, found enchanting. A quiet boy, he lived in a room above his parents’ garage on nearby Mount Curve. Like Mary-Sue, Paul’s folks were displaced cosmopolitans, but unlike her, they were fuddy-duddy foreigners, completely oblivious to youth culture. Paul’s pink Izod shirts were his mother’s idea; his Quebecois father wore cravats to dinner! From time to time, Mary-Sue would leave anonymous parcels outside the boy’s door containing albums by bands like The Doors, The Who and Joy Division, and videotapes of movies like A Clockwork Orange and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, hoping that once he developed a taste for them, it might find its way back to Kate.
Both her daughter and Paul had blossomed from strange little grim-faced children into demure and altogether good-looking teenagers whose beauty was evident to all but themselves. Kate had grown lanky, and at fourteen, was taller than Mary-Sue, with long, lustrous almost-black hair that turned brown in the summer. She had fleshy rose lips, unlike Mary-Sue’s increasingly thin and pale “fish lips,” and high cheekbones that made her elusive smiles radiant. There was something in Kate’s look—the set of the mouth, especially—that made Mary-Sue think of her brother, Bobby, though she didn’t dare let herself entertain the possibility that he might have been her father. Paul conquered his asthma with conscientious lap-swimming and emerged a muscular jock, physically if not psychologically. He had dark, wavy hair that he grew to collar-length—out of indifference, not vanity—like some Romantic poet. Mary-Sue found herself fantasizing about Kate and Paul becoming lovers, sharing the kind of sexy, intense partnership she’d never had with anyone. She didn’t have a clue whether they harbored any erotic feeling for each other—Kate never tol
d her anything anymore—and the pair of them seemed blithely virginal, like the stranded innocents played by Brooke Shields and Chris Atkins in The Blue Lagoon.
One day, Mary-Sue succumbed to temptation and left a copy of a tantric sex manual at Paul’s door. It had a whole chapter on female ejaculation that had stumped even her. Whether these secret dispatches worked or not, she never knew for sure. Her beloved Katie spoke to her less and less as the days went by, locked into teenage solipsism and an acculturated inability to talk to “parental units.” Again, Kate was never bitchy about it, but polite and impenetrable as a lodger, which actually hurt more.
On Kate’s sixteenth birthday, Mary-Sue gave her one hundred dollars to spend on whatever she wanted. She enclosed the cash in a birthday card and left it on Kate’s pillow. Inspired by the Indian takeout she’d had for lunch, she wrote this on the card:
Dear Ranjit,
I know that life is hard but as my late lamented father Poori used to say,
The fun is in finding a clean river to shit in.
May you find your river, my darling!
Happy 46th! Chooti Hooti Hay!
With love and kisses from your sad old maiden aunt,
Chitrajeet
To her pleasant surprise, Kate returned with a note, written on rough, recycled paper. She left it on the fridge door for her mother to find, under a Hamburglar magnet:
Dear Gurmit,
I hope this finds you well. Thank you for the generous bag of rice. I heard you have sprained your back in an unfortunate mango-picking accident, and I hope that your injuries are healing quickly. I have been enjoying the rose water and aromatic lime chutney that I almost sent to you for your speedy recovery.