by Yasuko Thanh
Our home lies off a wide, tree-lined boulevard, from which only a small corner of its red tile roof can be seen. Two marble lions flank the entrance, guarding us from evil spirits, and peanut vines line the path that leads to our wood-shuttered front door.
Here, in this house, is where I slept with my four children and my husband’s parents after he left. Here is where my garden ends and the rest of the world begins, at the threshold of our crumbling villa built by the French a century ago, which hides behind manioc bushes and a fence of live bamboo. I let dust mar the petals of the hibiscus, while the flowers died under flocks of hoopoes and jacanas. Behind palms corseted with growth rings, the children played under sunlight that punched down like a fist. Dancing heat waves rose from the dusty path, and in the corner of the garden, in the cooler spaces, indigo shadows sheltered my grief.
My husband’s mistress modeled for him in this house. Naked, she would pose for him in the garden, her arm slung over the back of the chair, in full view of the kitchen, where I would pretend not to see them. While they took no notice of me, I would secretly watch his hand sketch her in charcoal and touch her lines with his fingers, stroke after black stroke.
Once, I had been his model.
When I asked my husband why he needed a new model, he said, “Sen has the kind of body that catches the light.” He drew slowly from his cigarette and then pulled his hand away from his lips, gazing at the ember as it glowed. “Naturally, a model must be comfortable with her body,” my husband continued, resting his hand on the back of the chair where she would soon sit. “But it’s more than mere comfort with the body. She has the capacity for stillness.”
His words left me hollow. I felt ashamed, angry at myself for not being more than I was. What more could I give? I wanted to reach out and hold his hand, but I could tell by the way his eyes flicked away from me that I disgusted him.
Later, I lingered in the garden, refusing to give them their privacy. I stood at the cistern, scrubbing the scales off a fish we would eat for dinner, cursing the knife in my hand while the two of them sat by the pond. She was half-naked, a black silk tunic slipping from her shoulders to reveal pale skin made paler by the dark fabric.
Suddenly the peonies, the jackfruit trees, the lush beauty of the garden I had always loved became ugly.
I turned away. If there had been a room I could have fled to, a private space that would have sheltered me, I would have run there and cried. But the sorrow in my veins would have followed me, as would the image of my husband leaning intimately toward Sen as if I wasn’t there. “An artist is, above all things, entitled to the right to be free,” he said, grinning. I knew then he would refuse himself nothing, least of all for any thought of me.
Over the next few months, I would secretly take sketches out of his portfolio when my husband was at work. In this way, I followed the progress of their relationship. I made myself stare at the proof of his infidelities, as if by doing so I could eventually lessen the force with which his betrayal struck me each time. Drawings of Sen on the ground, fondling herself, her back arched, her face contorted by imminent ecstasy. My husband’s own image in the picture, a self-portrait, looming over her – and though his face was not visible, victory was written into the size of his body, the inflated space he claimed at the centre of his artwork.
Each time I put the portfolio away, I steadied myself by touching the temple pots that stood next to the altar table, as if the cool porcelain in the family shrine could drain the heat of my anger from my palms. Then I knelt and prayed to my ancestors for strength and wisdom; still, my husband grew more and more unhappy. He lifted his chopsticks as though they were leaden weights. He would slump his head when he sat at the piano to play his favourite song, “Go Schooling in the East” – as if playing a patriotic song of resistance instead of a love song could hide what he felt in his heart.
It wasn’t until much later that I would understand it was the burden of my devotion, the crushing weight of my overwhelming love for him that had pushed the two of them together. With his mistress there was no shame: she did not need him. And in not being needed, in simply being played with, he was made eager and free.
One night as I was preparing dinner, I saw my husband oiling his hair in the front hall mirror. Our lives could not continue like this: my own children had begun to eye the ghost I was becoming with suspicion and fear. So I offered my husband his freedom as a final test, to give him the chance to show me that he cared. For him, I would slip a noose slowly around my own neck and give him the chance to save me. “Go to her. Be with her, now.” But instead of giving me respect, instead of acknowledging what I had said, he continued to tuck a lock of stray hair back in its place, as if I were a mere irritation just as easily dismissed.
Then he smiled at me, meeting my gaze without a hint of shame.
Unable to control myself, I grabbed a knife from the counter and lunged at him. In his eyes I saw fear racing toward me, the very violence of my love for him. For an instant I was beyond threats, angry enough to kill. But he caught hold of my wrist and the moment passed; the passion trembled through his body and mine, and then it was gone. He looked from the point of the knife to me, and his expression told me he knew I would not hurt him. He was safe, and finally free.
I stepped back and turned the knife on myself, holding it to my wrist. He did not try to lower the blade or take it away from me. He simply turned his back and walked out the door. I let the knife fall to the ground, ashamed I had drawn no blood with the blade.
After he left, after the children had gone to bed, the house was solid with silence. I tried to sleep, my head aching with the knowledge that I filled my husband not even with a sense of duty, that he saw my sharp knees and elbows as a cage, jutting reminders of his obligation to me. I would never be what he lusted after. The pillows of her flesh made him restless while my body simply bored him.
He did not come home that evening. Wanting to numb my pain, I retrieved the one bottle of morning glory seeds I had kept in my closet and dissolved the ground seeds into a glass of cold water. The seeds were so old they had little taste. But they were still powerful.
That night, my mind empty, I watched the colours on the ceiling change from blue to red, mistaking every sound I heard in the house for my husband having come home.
As the weeks passed, my four children watched me read sutras, chant scriptures, and grow gaunt with waiting. To honour his memory, I forced myself to rise out of bed and wash my face each morning, remembered to eat even though the rice lodged in my throat like fish bones. At night, I would pretend my husband still lay next to me, and sometimes I could almost imagine his breathing. But then I would open my eyes wide to find myself staring only at blackness, and once again alone.
How long would I have to wait until he returned? The sun set. Another day gone.
I drew hope like water from a well. The nights were the worst. When I closed my eyes, scenes of the two of them making love played like a film in my mind. I would see how he caressed her, the way she responded – the girlish laugh, the uncontrollable shortness of breath. Their bodies twined, coiled and glistening like salamanders.
Days turned into weeks, and then into months.
My family and I had no means by which to survive. In the months after he left, we bartered our tables, chairs, and beds for food. We sold the ceremonial temple pots, the lions that guarded our home, and the ivory chopsticks my great-grandparents had fed each other with at their wedding. Hunger burned our stomachs. We ate the racing pigeons from my husband’s fly pen and moved through the empty house like echoes.
My sons and father-in-law went out into the city to earn money however they could. Still, we ate poor man’s fare: cabbage, sesame salt, dried shrimp, or plain boiled rice and duckweed that I purposefully prepared with too much salt so we would spoon less into our bowls. The roof tiles cracked and the rain leaked in. Yet my eldest son defended his father and wouldn’t let me speak ill of him, not even to wonder when he
would come home. My son would point his chopsticks at me accusingly and say, “It’s not your place to speak of these things. What does a woman know?” At times, I thought he might hit me. Instead, he burned off his resentment driving his cyclo through the dirty streets of Saigon, feeling the wind blowing dust into his face, until the pain in his back nailed him to his bed.
Shortly after, I began to sell wares at the market on Nguyen Hue Street. I cut my hair so that it would swing over my jaw, disguising my features. Over my newly shorn hair, I pulled a broad-brimmed hat down as low as it would go over my face. I tried to sell orchids from the garden, but after days of counting a handful of coins from an almost-empty purse, I knew I had to sell my family’s traditional medicines.
Most of the cures I sold had been prepared by my grandfather, though I had neglected both his ointments and my own, allowing them to moulder in their jars, breeding fungi like exotic mushrooms in a garden. But I sold what I had from my cart, these remedies from my family’s secret recipes, my mother-in-law helping when she could, while I carried my already-toddling daughter on my back.
At the market we were surrounded by cloth weavers, trash sweepers, and vendors of manioc, yam, and maize. The other sellers looked our way in curiosity, but I ignored them. I wanted no one to recognize me, to know I was my husband’s wife.
Across the road from us was an old woman who sold shrimp croquettes and spring rolls with her seven-year-old granddaughter, who always wore chopsticks in her hair. “Did you sleep well?” the woman called to her neighbour while she heated up a vat of oil.
“Four hours,” said the man who polished shoes. “But I’m as spry as a cock.” He flexed nonexistent muscles and chuckled. When he had finished setting up his stand, he sat down on the curb to eat his breakfast, a bowl of thin rice gruel. He saw me watching him and waved. “You there – and how are you this morning?”
I nodded and quickly turned away, disgusted by the way his soup dribbled over his gums and down his chin. He had no teeth.
For days I kept to myself.
Then one afternoon, I fell asleep. When I awoke, I was startled to find someone standing beside my cart.
“I was keeping an eye on your cart while you rested.”
“You’re the man who writes letters,” I said, squinting at his silhouette against the sun. He was charming, boyish almost, with a slim body and smooth chest, skin the colour of rice paper, and a bouncing step – it was hard to remain unfriendly. Soon I realized that every vendor working on Nguyen Hue Street had their own story of struggle to tell, and their quiet courage only highlighted my own self-pity and made me lower my gaze in shame. Looking at my feet, I remembered Lao Tse’s words, how even the longest journey must begin where you stand.
Tet had come. Everyone was anxious to get a haircut or buy new clothes to mark the Vietnamese New Year. During the week of Tet, the crowds of shoppers at the market became thicker and more frantic with each passing night, holding up traffic as they jostled each other to find the items they still needed. Vendors worked themselves to exhaustion; from across the road, I’d watch as the girl with the chopsticks in her hair would let her head fall to her chest before she caught herself, though her grandmother was always too busy deep-frying spring rolls to notice. Around us, fishmongers carried baskets on either end of the poles balanced across their shoulders, shouting, “Fish for sale.” Festive red banners celebrating the New Year sprang up on stalls, where people bought candied fruits, cone-shaped kumquats, and of course peach trees, the symbol of life and good fortune.
Vendors from the north flooded the market, with peach trees roped to their bicycle panniers, transforming the street into a river of blossoms. It reminded me of other Tet celebrations, and of how my husband and I used to pick a peach tree together and display it proudly in our home, our guests complimenting us on how well we had chosen.
The merchant beside my cart told me his peach trees had been grown in the soils of Nhat Tan. In Nhat Tan, he explained, they say only happy villagers are permitted to cultivate the peach trees that will be sold at Tet and praised by the gods, for the heavens cannot bless trees grown by quarrelling wives and husbands who have abandoned love.
“There are three species,” he said. “The red, the pink, and the white. The red tree forms a round canopy, its flowers thick with petals. The pink is better known for its fruit. Of the three species, it is the white-flowered tree that grows with the most difficulty.” He told me the most delicate task is making the blooms appear ten days before Tet. For this, the horticulturist must make an incision around the tree’s trunk and then strip off all the leaves. He must be careful, though, because a cut too deep will injure the tree, while a cut too shallow will be ineffective. “But even skill cannot graft a budding branch to the tree if both cannot be kept alive long enough for the grafting to take.”
I was about to thank the man for sharing his wisdom when the girl with the chopsticks in her hair suddenly fainted. There was nothing I could do except watch her hands shoot out like freed birds when her face fell into the vat of hot oil.
Her grandmother pulled her out of the oil and laid her on the street. Immediately the child recoiled into a fetal position – screaming, screaming – her face covered in hot fat that streamed down her neck and shoulders and chest, leaving red trails on her skin, her black hair dripping with burning oil.
I took one of my grandfather’s jars and ran to the girl. Kneeling beside her, I untwisted the lid and then stroked back her hair. The burn was so fresh, her skin still smelled sweet. Her face had not yet blistered.
I ladled the topmost layer of fungus from the jar and spread the fermented balm over the girl’s face, wondering what my hands were doing and whether it mattered. Then I remembered what my grandfather had often said, reciting the words of Buddha: “Knowledge is power.”
The girl cried and whimpered, and by degrees grew still. Her grandmother wept.
The next day when the girl awoke, her skin was unblemished, smooth as the day she was born.
When my husband heard that I was now able to fill my porcelain bowls with not only rice but silver coins, he crawled back like an insect. He took off his shoes, wet from the rain, and stood in front of me as if he’d never left at all.
Fighting aroused his lust. He took me in his arms and though I pretended he disgusted me, I let him touch my flesh. The moment he entered me I knew I was powerful, that he could not stop now, would not pull away from me even if his life depended on it. He opened his eyes and they flashed in rage at me, the woman who no longer had any need of him.
I did not come. This was how I stayed strong and did not collapse with longing. An instinct not to be broken.
In the morning he once again sat with the family at the breakfast table. My mother- and father-in-law ate betel nuts and nodded in passive approval, or was it resignation I saw on their faces? Such friends of suffering.
Later, when we were alone, he asked for our money. I watched the shape of his mouth betray his shame, the guilt of his abandonment of us written into the thinning curve of his lips. Had he kissed his mistress with those lips and promised to return, even as he discarded her as casually as an umbrella once the sun has begun to shine?
“I am the rightful and continuing head of this family,” he said.
But I know the Mekong River. I know how to make a poultice from the powdered marrow of tiger bones or the roughest part of a bear paw, how to pound it smooth until the sinews are supple. I was the one who rubbed salve into the little girl’s burned skin and whispered, “Your face will be beautiful again, someday.” I know how the grafted branch of a peach tree tips its soul into the cut made by the gardener’s knife and spills itself into the wound, driven by the simple yearning to become part of a greater life.
HIS LOVER’S GHOST
Lucille always has an excuse for why she can’t visit Raymond, in spite of the fact that her son is dying. Vince and Raymond have had polite, frosty visits at her house, for Thanksgiving, Christmas, maybe tw
ice or three times a year, but this is the first time she’s come to them, and only because Vince called her every day. He’s sure she invents obligations for herself. Her two Persian cats, for instance: high-maintenance animals that can’t be left on their own, and now the kitten, which is still not housebroken and needs a special lotion applied to its eyes on the hour.
“And I’m working on a new project,” she says. She’s been devouring popular fiction set in the Ming dynasty, calling it research. For what kind of a project, she doesn’t say.
Raymond shifts on his bed, which they’ve pulled into the living room for her visit, and she watches him uncomfortably as he strains to grasp his leather portfolio on the end table. “I’ve started a project of my own,” Raymond tells Lucille. “It’s a family tree. It’s just … I wish I had more information.”
She takes the pile of loose leaf from his hands. Photographs culled from shoeboxes are carefully glued to the top of each sheet of paper, and underneath each picture he’s handwritten a few notes in ball point pen: Born 1932. Collected matchbooks. Played the tuba. Liked oranges.
Vince bought him the portfolio to encourage this activity, hoping Lucille might want to help with the project.
“Francie didn’t marry in ’49. It was ’48.”
Raymond props himself up on his elbow. “That’s what I mean. What I was thinking was, maybe we could look at the pages together?”
“Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm.” Lucille nods her head, shuffling the papers. Her too-heavy eyeliner overdraws the Asian slant. Her nimble fingers, her slight build, her quick jittery movements remind Vince of a little black mouse, though in the sun her dyed-black hair looks more purple than black, the colour of crushed berries.