by Sandi Tan
I know that as childhood buddies we have been through many ups and many downs. We have both won and lost many a game of cricket. Sometimes my lassi is sweeter than yours, but your achar is still the best even if I will never admit this to your face.
Someday, after the next monsoon, we will talk about bigger things. We will build a tidbits shop to rival that of Mr. Ali and his wife, Mrs. Ali. They are nobodies. They are brigands. They sell moldy popadams. We will do better than that.
Until then, let us dream of banana trees and hammocks. One day we will both have bungalows in the shade. They will be pink and they will be wide. Monkeys will run from us. But listen to me, Babu, you must never forget your secret powers. Do not forget, in your haste to become a world champion mango-picker, to use your special powers. Only one or two people in the whole of our beautiful province are able to mimic the cry of horses as well as you. You are the Neigh King.
When you neigh, I will come. I swear it on your turban.
Take care of the little pooris, and of yourself,
Your Test Match partner,
Apu
Meanwhile, Kate went on being a teenager of few words, eating dinner in front of the TV, slinking sullenly into her room, giving no indication that she’d actually composed that note. It was an infuriating charade. Mary-Sue folded the letter carefully and put it in the steel safe where she kept all her important documents. Then she left another little note on Kate’s pillow, crossing her fingers and toes that this new level of communication could be sustained:
My dearest Sunil,
Your note was duly noted and highly appreciated. Perhaps we could continue our discourse over lassi and tidbits at a restaurant, and speak of our plans for the future? It will be my greatest privilege to host this dinner.
Your humble confidante,
Jalil of Jalalabad
A reply appeared on the fridge the next morning:
Vishnu,
Don’t push it.
Your very distant cousin,
Kali
And that was that.
When it came time for college, the girl insisted on Pomona, a respectable liberal arts college thirty minutes from home, in the middle of the suburban nowhere. She had good enough grades for Berkeley and elsewhere, but she chose this poky school because they’d offered her a full scholarship. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to pay their own way—the inheritance from Daddy had been set aside for this. Mary-Sue was distraught: Had her frugality given Kate the false impression that they were poor? Paul had applied to colleges in New York, to get as far as he could from his parents. If Kate had done something similar, it might have broken Mary-Sue’s heart, but kids were supposed to break their parents’ hearts. Kate couldn’t justify her choice. All she would say was that she liked “the look” of Pomona. Nothing could dissuade her. In her stubbornness, she was Mary-Sue’s daughter after all.
For all her forthrightness, Mary-Sue found it harder and harder to express herself to Kate as she watched their interests diverge. Kate, on the other hand, felt that her mother’s loneliness was unbearable—all the more because Mary-Sue never complained or engaged in any kind of guilt-tripping. Going to college close to home meant that she could always come and keep her aging mother company. Mary-Sue was getting old—in ten years, she would be sixty. Kate knew that Mary-Sue liked her job fine, but how satisfying could it be for a well-read, opinionated woman to spend her days reordering Sharpies and rubber bands and keeping track of who was in or out of some lawyer’s office? She never dated, or did so only on the sly, and as far as Kate could tell, she didn’t have any relatives or close friends.
Kate could never forget watching Mary-Sue put on her bra in the morning the way a TV cop might strap a holster across his torso—a daily ritual against unsettling dangers. Mary-Sue’s body was not like the ones Kate had seen on TV. She wasn’t at all fat, but she had bumps, folds, cellulite (which Kate initially took for surgical stitches, and found terrifying), stains caused by vaccinations and bug bites. It was clear early on that she was indifferent to her body, even ashamed. They never went swimming, for instance.
Even as a child, Kate knew that it was loneliness, rather than compassion, that had led Mary-Sue to adopt a child from a war-torn country. She envied the unquestioning birthright of natural-born heirs like her friends at school, asking and getting from their parents without having to psychoanalyze every move beforehand. Not that she yearned for anything extravagant—but even the simplest request for lunch money always came tainted with guilt. She wasn’t actually Mary-Sue’s daughter, no matter what Mary-Sue thought; she was a just lodger renting space in Mary-Sue’s heart. And until she was strong enough to fend for herself, she would try to consume the minimum, to deplete Mary-Sue’s resources as little as possible.
It made it no easier on her that Mary-Sue did things like buying two kinds of toilet paper: she put the good, soft kind in Kate’s bathroom and the rough, cheapo kind in her own. Kate had objected tearfully as soon as she discovered the racket but her mother refused to stop. Mary-Sue’s way was not to be messed with. She continually refused to spend any money on herself, cutting her own hair and wearing old shoes till their soles wore thin, then covering the holes up with duct tape. She insisted on going around in a broken pair of reading glasses held together at the center with a Band-Aid. In the evenings, while Kate watched TV, she sat under the bare bulb of the kitchen reading library books like War and Peace and drinking a foul-smelling tea called Fallopian Friend. The only nice thing she owned was a silver-plated picture frame holding a photo of her brother, Bobby, that she kept by her bed, but even this was in no way fancy.
When Kate was eleven, the year she hit puberty, the flashbacks started. In her perfect upstairs bedroom on Santa Claus Lane, across the hall from where her mother slept, the visions descended upon her every night she had her period. They were no less horrific for their repetition: a peaceful sort of floating, then baffling pandemonium, flying torsos, a loud bang. Suddenly she was sinking chest-deep in a warm, viscous mix of blood and mud. A woman with a charred face was trying to pull her down. As the waters rose, her eyes grew used to the dark, and she’d see the single worst image—the headless body of a little girl see-sawing, half in, half out of an airplane window.
That little girl, Kate always felt, was her. Or at least, some form of her that had died alongside the others that fateful morning.
She never told Mary-Sue about these nightmares. A woman who’d martyr herself over toilet paper would certainly flip out at the least hint of psychological misery. Nor did she tell the school counselor. She felt like enough of a misfit at school—and besides, any confession she made might go straight back to Mary-Sue.
She resolved to cure herself of these visitations, taking pointers from dusty manuals on Zen meditation and lucid dreaming that she quietly pulled off Mary-Sue’s nightstand. Inspired by Luke Skywalker’s Jedi training, she willed herself to detach her emotions from unhappy memories. Like the Buddhists, she didn’t try to eradicate unwanted thoughts, she simply pulled herself out of the fracas and became an observer—the visions became scenes out of a movie or a book. Soon, the nightmares lost their power. But unlike a Zen master whose discipline made life richer, her methods sapped from her a certain immediacy with the world. Emotions came to her secondhand, filtered. Where other people just felt things, she lived life as if it were beamed to her on tape delay.
In high school, these shortcomings went unnoticed as her best friend, too, in his own way, shunned intimacy. Paul had come to be known as Bluto, after Popeye’s nemesis, because he had unusually large biceps for a skinny kid whose most vigorous form of exercise, as far as people knew, was moving the castle across the board until it struck the queen. Together Kate and Bluto wrote comic Brechtian one-acts starring characters from The Facts of Life and made fake agitprop collages out of discarded issues of Time—a favorite featured Bill Cosby chok
ing Idi Amin with one of his hideous wool sweaters. Their moods meshed perfectly—they cooked up their own kind of cool and feasted on irony. Being teenagers became the perfect alibi for their extreme disaffection, and high school with Bluto by her side was bliss. “You’re my soul mate, man,” he even told her one day, a prelude to clammy, platonic hand-holding. Yet when it came time to pick colleges, he chose New York without a second thought.
Miserable at Pomona, Kate took a shitty job at a pizzeria to pay for her living expenses; asking Mary-Sue for help would have made her feel worse. Sometime during her junior year, pressured by professors tenured in identity politics and eager herself to seek some kind of closure, she picked up the phone.
“I’m thinking of going to Vietnam,” she told Mary-Sue.
“Why on earth would you want to do something like that, for your first trip out of the country? Why not London or Paris?”
“I met some other kids who were . . . placed, like me. And, well, we’re thinking of going back.”
“Back?”
“To visit. I feel like I really need to do this.”
“Who are these other kids?”
“I told you, Mom. They’re orphans, like me.”
“You’re not an orphan, Katie.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Where did you meet these people? Did they try to recruit you?”
“It’s not like a cult. Someone put up a flyer at school and I saw it.”
“It doesn’t follow that you have to respond. That’s peer pressure.”
“It’s not. I’m not. Nothing’s set in stone.”
“Those tours, I’ve read about them. They’re like caravans of grief. I would go so far as to call them traveling circuses of guilt. They’ll exploit you. They’ll use your testimony to recruit more followers, just you wait.”
“I still feel I need to do this.”
A pause.
“Well, if you really feel so strongly about it, I’ll give you the money . . .”
“I’ll pay you back. Promise.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. But, honey, I just don’t think you should go there with those types of people.”
“Who? The orphans?”
“They’re not orphans any more than you are, Katie. But yes, those people.”
“You prefer that I travel alone?”
“I’m sure you could find some friends who wouldn’t mind taking the trip with you. That way, you might go and do something fun, instead of spending the whole time visiting orphanages and feeling lousy. Maybe you could go to Thailand and, I don’t know, do some snorkeling.”
“What’s the name of that orphanage again? The one I was in?”
“I don’t know, baby. That’s ancient history.”
“You must have it somewhere.”
“I threw all that stuff away. Your life began the day I picked you up at the airport. You know that, don’t you?”
Kate took the trip to Vietnam the summer of 1993 with three friends from her Southeast Asian Studies class, none of them orphans of the war or even Asian. A professor with embassy ties helped them with entry visas and names of local contacts should they get into any kind of trouble—washed-up, ex-CIA Kurtzes, Kate reckoned.
Up in the plane, Kate saw the curvy brown snake that was the Mekong River eating its way through the verdant patchwork of rice fields. Her head throbbed and she felt nauseated, furious that she’d chosen to return to this place. What good could come of it? She forced herself not to vomit when they touched down (bump, two, three) at Tan Son Nhat airport, in what used to be Saigon but had since been renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Even that, a mouthful. When they stepped into the blazing, cloudless day, the humidity coated her skin in a way that made her edgy. It wasn’t déjà vu exactly—she felt no nostalgia or sadness, just a vague feeling of impotence and outrage. The airport was decrepit. The air seemed insolent, a silent bystander through decades of violence and poverty, deliberately doing nothing while everything fell apart. Yolanda, who’d sat next to her during the entire flight reading The Executioner’s Song, noticed her grim expression and held her hand in solidarity. One of the boys, Jules, draped his arm around her protectively and she brushed it off, but with thanks.
They spent the week at a backpacker’s inn, living like equatorial flâneurs. They woke up late, ate insanely cheap croissants, drank milky café and rented bicycles to ride around the tree-lined boulevards—the French, unlike the Americans, had left some nice things behind. The bicycles came in handy for eluding the street beggars who chased them around, trying to sell them old wartime currency. Contrary to what the guidebooks said, Wrigley’s gum wasn’t enough to send them away. Kate saw young women with missing limbs plying the streets for spare change—this could easily have been her if it hadn’t been for Operation Babylift. The thought spooked her to the core.
Crossing busy intersections on foot without the aid of traffic lights was for Kate and her friends a harrowing rite of passage. After the convulsions of hysterical laughter subsided, they were ready for anything. Two of them followed a tout outside the crumbling Hotel Continental, made famous by writers like Graham Greene, to a blind alley where an opium den flourished. The boy, Dan, got a massive headache after his five-dollar smoke while Yolanda, his girlfriend, felt only a light buzz. Then they all hired cyclos and had the riders pedal them around the city, crossing perilously into the paths of other cyclos, bikes, mopeds, buses, even trains—all the while screaming and lifting their arms in the air like they were on a theme-park ride.
They bought conical rice-planter hats from street vendors and wore them around town, bumping their wide rims into the throng at the Ben Thanh market. This was the central market housed in a French colonial building that Jules said reminded him of run-down train stations in Prague and Budapest. There Kate saw an Amerasian around her age wearing an ao dai—the Vietnamese national dress—on her haunches, skinning frogs under a running faucet; this, too, could have been her if she hadn’t been airlifted to America. When the girl looked up and met her eyes, Kate felt nauseated. They could have been sisters. Not just metaphorically.
In a fit of romanticism, Jules traded in his perfectly good Teva sandals for a pair of rubber flip-flops that fell apart the moment he stepped out of the market. He went back to the stall but the vendor would only return his Tevas for “ten dollah.” An altercation was averted when Kate produced the money and grabbed the sandals, handing them back to Jules. They ate a ton of twenty-cent chocolate éclairs at the next stall to forget about the whole thing.
On the fourth sultry day, Jules and Kate split away from the others and headed for French-style glacés at the celebrated Fanny ice-cream stand in the center of town. The ice cream was nothing special by North American standards, and it liquefied as soon as they stepped out of the shade. As they walked back to their hostel, licking their cones, a scrawny, barefoot boy in a faded Bart Simpson T-shirt leapt out from behind a tree across the street and sped toward them like a brown torpedo, crying: “Gra-gree! Kwai-Meri-Can! Gra-gree!”
“Fuck! Three o’clock!” Kate said, without turning. “Wanna make a run for it?”
Jules, surfer blond and California friendly, turned instinctively to look.
“No! Don’t make eye contact with him!” whispered Kate.
But it was too late; the boy knew that he’d hooked Jules, and started trailing him, tugging at the back of his T-shirt, yelling, “Gra-gree! Gra-gree!”
Jules looked at Kate and shrugged. He offered two sticks of gum to the little boy. Up close, they saw that his Bart Simpson shirt was a crappy knock-off with the eyes drawn too far apart. The boy took the gum but continued to walk close to them, his voice getting more cracked and demanding.
“Gra-gree! Kwai-Meri-Can!” He plucked at the pale hairs on Jules’s arm.
“Oww!” But it made him giggle all the same. “That hurt, little
man!”
The boy grinned at the laughter he provoked. He tried it again.
“What’s he want, you think?” Jules looked at Kate.
“How should I know? I don’t speak Vietnamese. Just watch your pockets.”
“Gra-gree . . .” the boy pleaded pathetically and pulled out of his shorts a thick pamphlet in clear plastic. He showed it to them but gripped it tight with his rough, chapped hands as if Jules or Kate might try to run off with the valuable document. They looked at it. It was a murky photocopy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, two paperback pages smeared across each sheet, the whole thing stapled together crudely.
“Oh, I see now . . . Kwai Meri-Can . . .” Kate tugged at Jules’s arm. “Let’s go. Come on. Now.”
The kid grabbed Jules’s other arm, glaring at Kate. “Five dollah!”
“You gotta be kidding!” Kate said to the boy. She tugged at Jules to leave, walking on ahead of him.
“Five’s way too much, dude,” Jules said helplessly. “No five.”
“Jules! Don’t even talk to him . . . Come on!”
“What about one dollar?” Jules asked the kid. He pulled out a crisp dollar bill and dangled it in front of the kid. The kid lunged for it. Jules let him.
“Three dollah!” the kid said while pocketing the buck.
“Jules, you idiot! I can’t believe you’re entertaining him!”
Kate ran back.
“Keep your stupid book,” she told the kid. “He already gave you a dollar . . . Now, please, get lost!” Kate pushed the boy away from Jules, but his feet held the ground. He grabbed ahold of Jules’s arm like a barnacle.
Together Jules and Kate tried to pluck the boy’s fingers off Jules’s arm one by one. When they succeeded in freeing his arm, the boy wrapped his legs around Jules’s knee. Then the skinny tentacles came back with a vengeance, locking themselves in the crook of Jules’s arm.