by Thuy Da Lam
Fragments of memory emerged. Bits and pieces of a childhood with her father in Philadelphia floated to the surface, a life of incidents she had not reconciled but submerged in the sea of forgetting. As the flotsam of her family’s private lives resurfaced, she began to wonder how she was led to march to the expatriates’ drumbeat. Her love for her father, an ARVN soldier who fought for the South, moved her to participate in the continual fight for Vietnam’s freedom. The banner of democracy for all Vietnamese comforted the exiles like a security blanket in a foreign land, under which they dreamed of one day returning home.
LOVE Park
IN THE CITY of Brotherly Love, Maia’s father rode a secondhand bicycle everywhere. On icy wintry streets, in cool spring air, and muggy summer days, he pedaled. The orderly and smooth concrete streets—oh, how different from his homeland. He biked to adult English class, to the public library, to auto mechanic retraining, to the market for fruits and vegetables and pig intestines and oxtails and chicken feet.
Once, at the Italian Market on South Ninth Street, he bought a whole chicken live. His hands waved to the butcher: “No, no! Don’t cut throat!” It was a red hen to replace the rooster that had followed him everywhere in a garden from long ago. A keepsake of things past, the red hen freely roamed the upstairs.
Once on a windy, rainy autumn night, he came home from his class—excited, nervous, and proud. In a brown Acme paper bag in his bicycle front rack were two squabs, wet and scared, squawking for their mother.
His bicycle also had a rear rack for Maia. In the summer, in the morning hours when streetlamps still lit the neighborhood in a soft yellow glow, they would ride to Broad Street and Passyunk Avenue. They waited with other farm workers to bus to New Jersey’s blueberry fields.
The summer she was twelve, she became aware of her changing body. She was glad for those days of open fields and clear skies and the boys who teased her. They teased her walk as she balanced heavy blueberry crates on her shoulder. In their gazes, her tomboy swag became a swing of hips.
In those green fields—muddy from the night rain, wet and mosquito-infested at dawn, and a blazing sun at noon—she experienced the freedom of working for one’s keep. The changes went unobserved before the dresser mirror in the apartment cluttered with secondhand knickknacks and old memories. Away from the concrete inner-city neighborhood, among the open fields beneath the lofty skies, she first glimpsed a self-propelling wheel turning from within.
When she said she picked blueberries in Jersey, someone would respond, “Blueberry Hill?” and lapse into Fats Domino. “I found my thrill—on Blueberry Hill—”
She listened, but the thrill of her first kiss was at LOVE Park.
“Can I kiss you?” he had asked. They were sitting on a frozen bench, watching downtown early morning traffic. She was a high school senior, working two jobs. She had never been kissed, and he was a stranger almost twice her age, a homeless man. He was slouching on the park bench beside her. “Why look so sad?” He pulled off the hood of his tattered sweatsuit, smiling a wanna-talk?
She had felt invisible amid the concrete space of center city—its gray buildings, passing cars sealed against the frigid December air, and people in business attire. The man on the adjacent bench spoke. He patted the space next to him, and she came. She did not want to go home to the apartment, to a cave-like closet turned bedroom packed with used books, amidst which her ailing father slept, dreaming of Saigon and the wife he’d left behind. Sometimes night mares of war jolted him awake, sweating in the stillness of a wintry morning.
The man said he stayed at a place nearby. Where did she live? He was married and had an adolescent daughter. How old was she? Why look so sad?
She could not tell him about the decisions she had to make—staying home with her father or leaving for college. He would not understand. If she were awarded a scholarship, she would have enough for a one-way Greyhound fare and new running shoes. The college had beautiful cross-country trails, the brochure advertised, and a supportive all-women environment.
The park bench was cold. “What about you,” she asked, “why are you sad?”
“Me?” He took a swig from the bottle in a paper bag. “Want some?” His breath smelled of sweet minty licorice.
She shook her head.
“When I came back from ’Nam,” he paused, “my wife didn’t want to see me, didn’t want me to see our girl.”
“My father was in the war, too.”
“She remarried,” he said, crossing his legs at the ankles. He wore scruffy Nike sneakers.
“Do you run? Nikes are this year’s top running shoes.”
“I stopped running. Too humid, dusty, polluted even at four in the morning, couldn’t goddamn breathe, not to mention Charlie’s punji traps, toe-poppers, feces-smeared spikes.” He gulped down the bottle. “Sure wanna start again.” He wiped the greenish liquid from his mouth with the back of his hand. “The place I’m staying opens at five,” he said. “We’re on our own during the day. You can stop by.”
“I can’t. I work. From four to eleven, I work at a Japanese teppanyaki house in Bala Cynwyd. I’m a hostess. I wear a purple silk kimono from Japan. I work the graveyard shift at Dunkin’ Donuts in North Philly.”
“Can I kiss you?”
The kiss did not make her feel dizzy or weak like a heroine in a Harlequin Romance, nothing like those first kisses her classmates swooned over at lunchtime. She had kissed other lips since. She sought those who ran in full strides, who had not stumbled in war, who laughed at Charlie Brown. But she never forgot her first kiss from an American who had been in ’Nam.
A Prison Letter
THE WEEPING WILLOW draped like a curtain around Maia. She did not realize she was not alone until she heard murmuring and saw uniformed legs through the windblown branches. She quickly folded the letters and tucked them into a crevice under the roots that had grown above ground. She slipped out from beneath the canopy, over the riverbank, and into the water. Where she slid in, the lilies scattered and then slowly returned. By the time the men came and stood under the willow, the river was evenly covered again with blushing pink lotuses and expansive emerald pads from bank to bank.
As her feet hit bottom, she pulled her legs up and rolled forward. Hands clasped and then extended, she dolphin kicked beneath the water lilies and swam away from the bank. The hum of the river enveloped her. Her heart pounded with urgency as if ready to burst. She rotated onto her back and grabbed onto the rootstalks to keep from surfacing. When she lifted her mouth through a gap between the leaves to gulp in air, she saw Xuan and the Public Security Trio scanning the area. They exchanged words she could not hear. They retreated through the dragon fruit grove.
She floated in the river among the lilies, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. Her father’s letter had opened a floodgate of yearning that had been kept shut as they tried to rebuild their lives in America. When she left the river, she welcomed the warmth of the late afternoon. After some time under the sun, squeezing water from her clothes and untangling twigs and dead leaves and bugs from her hair, she settled again in the shadow of the weeping willow and retrieved the letters from the crevice. Reading several more letters from her father to her mother, Maia realized the isolation she felt while growing up in Philadelphia was in part because of her father’s sense of defeat. Escaping to America was not the beginning of a new life for him, but a coda to a life unlivable in his homeland, yet impossible elsewhere.
She came to the yellowing page torn from a notebook, her mother’s letter to her father.
I’ve been here for eight months and have written to you twice. I asked my sister to mail the letters. Have you received them?
For the past months, I was sent out to clear forests, plow fields, and plant crops. Each inmate is assigned an eighty-by-one-meter strip. In the morning when the sky is cool, the plowing isn’t bad, but in the afternoon, the heat makes it hard to breathe. Day after day, our work continues.
Recently, my dutie
s have changed. I’ve been reassigned to the kitchen. There are ten of us: head chef, assistant chef, two pig caretakers, and six cooks, of which I’m one. I get up every morning at 4:30, divide the rice portions, carry water from the well, rinse the rice, boil four pots of water, and cook six pots of rice and vegetables for the whole day. At dawn, I carry vegetables from the field to the kitchen. At noon, I carry rice from the granary to the kitchen. The work is hard, especially sifting rice and bringing water in from the well, but not as hard as working in the field under the scorching sun.
Writing to you, I’m reminded of the time when we first met and the time we were away from each other. Already it’s been more than ten years—a period that seems long and far away, yet it also seems like yesterday. I’ve been a wife and a mother, but have I completed my duties?
Please don’t worry about me. Whatever situation I’m put into, I’ll stay composed and wait for the day to see you again. I’ll be brave and look straight ahead. I’m ready to accept what’s handed to me. Your love has been enough in the past and will be enough for the days to come even if I don’t see you again.
As the missing pieces fell into place, more questions arose. Why was her mother in prison? During those years apart, her parents’ letters had never reached one another but were collected in a dead letter box. Why?
It was evening when Maia left the riverbank to find the path back to the house. Tree branches rustled and shadows of laundry drying on the line wavered in the breeze. The songs of crickets, frogs, and birds filled the night. She listened for movements but only heard the crunching of pebbles beneath her feet and the slow creak of the plank when she stepped on the platform beside the well. She pulled at the rope that hung over the edge of the well and retrieved a bucket of water. She stripped, got onto her haunches and rinsed the mud off her shirt and pants, and then hung them to dry on the line. She fetched another bucket and poured the cool water over herself, washing the river’s debris from her hair, its crusty film on her skin, the dried silt between her toes. Standing under the quarter moon, all around her was a blur. “What if Má were still alive?” she whispered. That night, she felt closer to her mother than any of those nights when she gazed at the moon on the other side of the world.
“Be brave,” Má had said. “Look at the moon and you’ll see me.”
They huddled with others by the riverbank in the dark. Her mother held her hand, her father their few belongings. They were waiting to be taken to the big boat to cross the South China Sea.
In the distance, bright paper lanterns dangled to and fro, illuminating shadows of children celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1978.
When the outlines of two small boats appeared, she grabbed onto her mother’s slender finger and they waded together into the river mouth. The women and children were led toward one boat, the men toward the other. Standing in the water, her mother passed her to her father and bade him to board with the women and children. The middlemen objected until her mother climbed into the boat with the men that never made it out to sea.
The Be River
“SOMEWHERE BEFORE THE Be River empties into Lake Waterfall Dreams,” Auntie Mao said, “you’ll find the prison. Your Má was held there after you and your Ba escaped.”
“Why weren’t the letters sent? Who kept them under the altar?”
Auntie Mao evaded Maia’s questions. “Your Má had more than a few suitors. It’s regrettable she chose your Ba.”
When the roosters crowed at dawn, Maia and Na bid goodbye to JP, who had decided to stay with the motley troupe to care for the dying camel. He wanted to explore the nearby underground tunnels he had read about. Maia sensed it was more than just an interest in history but did not ask, nor did he pry about her hasty departure and lent his motorcycle readily. Na had agreed to accompany Maia without any explanation beyond sightseeing. The two women borrowed JP’s used Minsk and returned to Ho Chi Minh City on National Highway 1. From the city, they followed the Dong Nai River northward to the Be River.
Maia and Na took turns driving. They stopped early for a breakfast of phở and iced coffee along the way and then for gas and a lunch of cơm bình dân later. They followed the Be River until late afternoon when it crossed Route 13 and continued westward toward Cambodia. When they finally stopped at a roadside diner to ask for directions, they learned that they had left the Be River a while back and were following a provincial stream. They were advised to take Route 13, which ran parallel to the Cambodian border, for about ten more kilometers to the village Loc Ninh, where they could find a place to spend the night and set out again in the morning.
The roadside diner, a long rectangle with rough concrete floor and white plastic tables and chairs, was deserted except for a group of timber truckers. The owner’s young twin daughters led the women through the diner, past the family’s cramped living quarters, to the well in the backyard to wash up. The eatery fronted the noisy and dusty thoroughfare to draw travelers. The back opened to acres and acres of lush coffee fields and a pine-fringed horizon.
On the table when they returned were stewed catfish with pork belly, bitter melon soup, and steamed white rice. At the next table a sunburnt trucker eyed them. He downed his iced draft beer and spoke loudly to his companion.
“Saigonese don’t come up this way.”
“My neighbor was traveling to the highlands last month,” his friend said, picking his teeth with a splinter, “when a group of FULRO rebels hijacked the bus and robbed everyone. The Công An News reported that they raped two passengers.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.” The first man snorted. “But if the highlands are sealed off again, that would be inconvenient for business.”
After dinner, Maia and Na were upset to find that they had a flat tire. They tried not to suspect foul play as they pushed the motorcycle from the diner, following the twins’ lead off Route 13 onto a dirt road to an open market. Among the fruit stalls, vegetable stands, and baskets of herbs and grains, they saw a shrunken old man sitting on a wooden box with an eroded air pump set before him. On the bicycle behind him hung a small cardboard sign advertising SỬA XE. He beckoned.
They left the Minsk with the repairman and wandered through the marketplace. The smell of deep-fried shrimp and mung bean patties from a bánh cuốn stall filled the air. The vendor in a lilac đồ bộ waved customers to her footstools and knee-high tables as she served plates of steamed rice rolls filled with pork mince and wood ear mushrooms, garnished with blanched bean sprouts, fresh mint leaves, and chili fish sauce.
Merchants squatting on their haunches hawked their wares in woven baskets. The two women stopped at a sundry stall where Na bargained for dust masks, sun gloves, rain ponchos, a vial of White Flower Balm, and a dozen lacy underpants in assorted sizes and styles. Na, wearing a tank top, tight-fitting jeans, and high heels, gave the impression of a well-to-do spendthrift foreigner. The vendor quoted prices much higher than what she finally settled for when she realized Na was as savvy a bargainer as any local Vietnamese.
After stopping at a dessert stand for warm banana tapioca with coconut cream, they returned to pay the repairman for the patched tire, but now the Minsk would not start. When asked what was wrong, the old man shook his head and shrugged. He packed up his tools in the wooden box, secured it to his bicycle rear rack, and pedaled away.
Na kicked the immobile cycle. “JP got a clunker!”
The women circled the heap of inert metal as if viewing the dead. They flanked the Minsk and shook it back and forth, causing gasoline to drip from its teardrop tank. The motorcycle stood nonchalantly, its headlight staring at them like an oversized glass eye.
Maia questioned her plan. After finding the prison, Na was going to return to Ho Chi Minh City on the Minsk, and Maia would catch an express shuttle to continue to the Central Highlands. But now what? The glass eye stared at her unblinkingly. How could they have gotten lost following the Be River? Where did they miss the turn?
They were just short of
wailing when a rugged darkskinned man with wavy hair approached. He offered to give them a lift to Loc Ninh. He had a large wooden boat-like cart attached to his three-wheel motorcycle, which could transport the Minsk. He had just dropped off his last delivery for the day and was shopping for food.
When the women agreed, the young man left his trike motorcycle and boat-cart with them and disappeared into the marketplace. Moments later he returned with a case of Angkor Beer, two kilograms of escargots, pig intestines, anchovies, fresh chilies, and herbs. He had ordered a block of ice that a girl would deliver around midnight on her bicycle rear rack.
“A drinking party,” he announced, adding that he lived with his mother. They had a đi văng if Maia and Na needed a place for the night.
Several hundred yards off Route 13, the cartman stopped at a longhouse nestled under coconut palms. In the front yard, an old woman was rinsing a large pot of glutinous rice beside the well. Surrounding her were woven baskets of husked split mung beans, shredded coconut, and fresh pandan leaves.
“My mother sells xôi at the market in the morning,” the man said.
The old woman glanced up at them, smiled, and continued picking out the stones and debris from the basket of dried beans.
“Chào bác,” Na said and then followed the man to find an outhouse.
Maia sat on her haunches and joined the woman in her picking, gathering the stones with her thumb and forefinger, tucking several into her palm before scattering them. Besides a creaky bicycle passing by on the dirt road or the occasional roar of a motorcycle in the distance, only the wind ruffled the stillness.
“Ở đây rất yên tĩnh,” Maia said. The old woman smiled, showing black lacquered teeth stained with red betel nut juice. Strands of white hair escaped from beneath her loose blue turban. After rinsing the mung beans, she handed Maia a basket of pandan leaves to wash. “Bác nấu xôi gì vậy?” Maia asked.