Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  The girls cleaned her every fold and indentation. They washed behind her ears, under her arms, between her legs. They tickled the sand from her navel.

  Ái shampooed her hair and Đào soaped her body. They used the balls of their fingers to lather up the foams and their sharp nails to scrub off the dead skin. The water cleaned the stickiness of the sand, the crusty salt, and the deep briny smells of the ocean.

  They dried her and led her to a twin-sized bed with a white sheet. They bade her to lie down and rubbed her with coconut oil infused with flowers and fruits.

  “Fragrant, sweet and tart like a passion fruit,” Ái chanted.

  Đào caressed her body and studied her face. “You’re not bad looking . . . some might find you lovely—” She paused. “You’re crying. Why?”

  Maia returned to the villa on the front beach to find Na, JP, and Xuan playing chess in the common area.

  JP kissed her cheek. “Hmmm,” he murmured. “Salty.”

  Alone in the room, she ran a wide-tooth comb through her still damp hair. Hollow eyes stared back from her dark reflection. She turned from the mirror.

  Water Spirits

  MAIA STOOD ON a cliff overlooking the southeastern coastline. She waited for a boat to take her to scatter her father’s ashes where she believed her mother was at last free.

  Na and Xuan remained a few steps away.

  JP was at her side. “I heard you wrote a poem,” he said.

  “You’ll feel better,” Na said, “if you speak the words aloud.”

  No-No bounced back and forth, sniffing the air, making hoarse choking sounds.

  A seagull swooped, hovered, and then circled as it rose.

  “The drowned become spirits,” Xuan said. “Those who yearn for them turn into waterbirds that skip upon the crests.”

  She felt like a tiny pebble, standing between the sky and sea, lost in the great circle of blue. She felt JP’s hand on the small of her back. She spoke, her voice barely audible yet firm and steady above the roaring waves.

  The sea, the Eastern Sea, has stolen a body.

  Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia:

  somewhere near shore, a woman drowned,

  but the shore is waves and sand

  like the shore of the North Atlantic,

  where coconuts grow in a glass.

  She’s there—waiting.

  Thirteen, thirteen years passed.

  I’m on a fishing boat,

  fishing the Eastern Sea.

  The spirits know where she is.

  I can’t see them.

  Can you ask them

  where she is?

  For proper burial, the sea is not earth.

  In dreams, we leave to arrive.

  I will scatter you,

  but I can’t find her.

  Will you sail back to America?

  By the Pacific, I will wait

  by the coconuts that grow in a glass.

  Four

  The Reunification Express

  AUGUST REVOLUTION STREET in Ho Chi Minh City was jammed with bicycles, motorcycles, xe lam, and xích lô in the early evening. Maia sat beside the taxi driver in the front seat with her eyes closed, trying to stay calm. The taxi swerved and jerked along, the driver honking the horn intermittently.

  “Please hurry!” Na urged from the backseat.

  “Không sao, không sao.” The driver assured them that they would make it to the Hoa Hung train station before nightfall.

  Maia felt Na’s hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” Na said. “We’ll get there.”

  Maia opened her eyes, not looking at Na, but in her peripheral vision, she saw the pink heart-shaped sunglasses, and her stomach knotted.

  They were catching the overnight train to Nha Trang, whose beaches Na had gushed were “most romantic,” enticing JP to come along and Na to accompany them. Maia tried not to get sidetracked with her irritation. After all, Na and JP had helped her escape from Xuan and the Public Security Trio in Vung Tau, now more than a hundred kilometers away. But in due time, she would have to lose them too.

  JP, in khaki pants and a white L’amant T-shirt he bought in Sadec, sprawled out beside Na in the backseat. His dark hair had coppery streaks from the sun. In his lap No-No perched. Except for a swollen piko, which JP now said was an umbilical hernia, the orange cat seemed strong and jaunty—a new bell on his collar, eyes alert, and ears swiveled forward.

  Even in the hazy twilight of Saigon evening, Na’s neon pink sunglasses were perched on her face, giving her the air of a gypsy, which she was. The glasses annoyed Maia. Tacky, loud, and cheap, she thought. But she saw that Na, who had quit her job at the Winter Night Café, was living the moment.

  Na had laughed off JP’s suggestion of looking for her biological father in the U.S., laughing off a ticket to America. “Sống bụi đời,” she would say of her living as the dust of life. In a country that shunned those of mixed blood, especially the offspring of Vietnamese women and American GIs, Na flaunted her black Amerasian presence and dreamed of one day crooning away whatever woes life brought her.

  “I see,” JP said but was unconvinced. He muttered to himself, as if quietly turning the phrase dust of life over and over in his head, trying to understand her.

  Though they seemed opposites, Na and JP had agreed to play the same game with the same rules of full disclosure. In each other’s company, they unveiled themselves, yet remained strangers, keeping a certain distance and insisting on their quirks and idiosyncrasies. They became ever more enigmatic, their new selves tantalizing. What puzzled Maia was their sudden silence. They had been full of chatty flirtation since the Winter Night Café, but even their teaching No-No how to meow more melodiously had stopped.

  The Hoa Hung train station was almost deserted except for a blue uniformed porter ushering the last passengers onto the Reunification Express. Passing through the colossal glass doors and crossing the spacious oil-stained tile floor under high arched ceilings, Maia wondered what the travelers had been like centuries ago. As they hurried aboard, she thought she saw the motley group, hauling the mysterious crate into the cargo compartment.

  The train blew its whistle and pulled out of the station. Maia, Na, and JP carrying No-No trailed one another through the rickety corridor, looking for their compartment. They stepped aside for vendors who hustled by with newspapers, water bottles, and hard candies softening in the heat. The vendors headed to an exit. They jumped off before the train accelerated to full speed, leaving Saigon for the South China Sea and then heading northward to the coastal city of Nha Trang.

  Na had convinced Maia to change her reservation from a private sleeper to three berths together. The only sleepers available were in a six-bunk compartment. When they stepped through the sliding metal gate into the cramped smoky compartment, the three occupants on the right stack eyed them. The three bunks in the left stack were empty.

  “Họ là người gì vậy cô?” a woman in the bottom bunk asked Maia. The woman put her Kiến Thức magazine on the wooden table between the two stacks of bunks. The man slouching on the top bunk continued to puff on a cigarette. In the middle berth, an elderly woman curled on her side with motion sickness. Her eyes were also on them.

  “Toi la nguoi My,” JP answered and climbed onto the top bunk. His atonal Vietnamese “I-am-American” seemed to bewilder them. The curled-up old woman twisted open her vial of dầu xanh and rubbed more green menthol oil across her forehead, under her nostrils, and on her throat.

  Na picked the middle bunk and Maia took the bottom. The hard sleeper had a dingy straw mat that did not cushion the wooden plank. The space between the bunks was too narrow for her to sit upright. Lying flat on her back, Maia ate stale bread and drank lukewarm water from a bottle. Above, she could hear JP opening wrappings of crackers. In the middle bunk, Na peeled banana leaves off sticks of nem chua for herself and No-No. Between bites of sour fermented pork with fresh chili pepper and garlic, Na ate raw lotus s
eeds, shelling them and dropping their round green husks onto the floor with the banana leaves.

  The wind howled through windows and down the metal corridor, purging passengers’ murmurings and odors from the train. Maia propped her head on her bag and gazed out the window into the openings of brick homes that sprang up along the tracks. From the ceiling of each slant-roof dwelling, a single naked light bulb illuminated the bare knick-knacks of a family. These windowed lives appeared like a slide show, frame after frame with different actors. She ached for the warmth from the glow of homes passing by.

  She thought of her childhood. What would have been if they had stayed back with her mother? A girl shoveled dirt to build mud houses. A kid with a tree branch slingshot fired pebbles at toads along the railway. She would have played hide-and-seek and swung from the sung tree. How could she believe that her mother was alive?

  When she drifted off to sleep, she dreamed of the sea.

  Xuan steps on the crests of waves billowing like white clouds. The dim glow of his lit cigarette flickers like nocturnal insects with the movement of his hand. He comes toward her, calling her. He lights another cigarette, then another. He smokes his hundredth. Hundreds of fireflies flash like the steady glow of a lighthouse beam that steers her to a shore and a woman building sandcastles.

  Come, the woman beckons. The wind screeches and roars, and waves crash and pound against the vessel. The woman has scattered the contents of her basket on the white sand—a jar of seahorses, a bottle of ocean water, a pouch of cuttings and seeds.

  Shhhhh! Her voice cracks from dehydration. Your father’s asleep. She seeds the sand in a crescent moon pattern and plants the cuttings along the wide arc. I’m growing a sea hedge, she says.

  When enormous waves threaten the sandcastle, the woman gathers her seahorses and bottled water and puts them into her basket. She reaches to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Maia’s ear, cold fingers scratching her cheek like sea coral and wet sand.

  The ocean swells up, a huge wave rolls in, sweeps far up the shore, and then recedes, returning the sandcastles and the woman to sea.

  When the Reunification Express arrived in Nha Trang at dawn, the station was crowded with taxicabs, honda-ôm motorcycles, and xích lô. Haggard, weary old men in rags and flip-flops, cigarettes tucked behind their ears or hung from their dry lips, called out to the passengers as they stepped off the train. “You! You! You! Help an old man make a living.” They pedaled their creaky pedicabs and pushed their taxi-motorbikes alongside potential customers.

  A young taxicab driver leaned against a sleek silver Toyota. He sported dark slacks, a white dress shirt, and a tie. Na beckoned and he came.

  An old man cursed, “Địt mẹ con gái điếm!”

  Another jeered, “Cái lồn có vừa con cặc thằng Tây đó không?”

  Maia felt her face redden and her heart beat fast. A guidebook advised overseas Vietnamese women traveling with foreigners to speak to the locals in English. She swung around, met the old gazes, and yelled, “You, you low class, provincial, narrow-minded, pathetic, pea-brain dirtbags!” They stared at her. Their faces puckered in puzzlement.

  JP looked perplexed. She switched to Vietnamese, “Đồ, đồ—” She broke off. She did not know any cuss words in Vietnamese.

  Na smiled at the xích lô pedalers and taxi-motorbike drivers.

  In the air-conditioned Toyota, JP asked, “What was that? What just happened?” He, Na, and the cat took the backseat. Maia sat in front with the solemn-faced driver.

  “They think she’s your girl,” Na said.

  “Maia.” JP tugged at her shirtsleeve. “Is that true?”

  She turned to him and translated. “Fuckin’ American’s whore, your cunt’s big enough for the white man’s dick?”

  JP’s face fell, and something flickered in Na’s eyes.

  Family sundry stores, service shops, and food stalls opened up along the wide boulevards where light morning traffic flowed. Poinciana trees dropped red and yellow butterflies onto the wind. The salty smell of the sea became more noticeable as they came toward Tran Phu Boulevard, where palm trees lined the median. When the glistening white sand and blue waters came into view, Maia tried to push the incident from her memory, but the ragged flip-flop existence of the old men weighed on her mind.

  She thought of the world of Suzie Wong, the quiet American’s Phuong, and Kim of Miss Saigon. Were these women her legacy? Was she another Kim, Phuong, or Suzie?

  She breathed in the damp, heavy air and gazed into the distance. She was a swimmer gliding effortlessly beneath the waves, a flying fish leaping above. She was reminded of her dream on the Reunification Express. The woman with the red basket haunted her: her cold slender hands, rough with salt crust, her tired eyes, her words, her smell full of the ocean.

  I am her daughter, Maia whispered, and aloneness washed over her—powerful, cold, and vast.

  Illegitimacy

  LEE HAKAKU BOYDEN did not tell his hānai son everything he remembered, and the one detail he kept to himself consumed him. By the time his platoon had arrived on the outskirts of the Central Highlands, the hamlet was already burned to the ground. Many believed it was the People’s Army, others blamed the ARVN, and some suspected American soldiers.

  After twenty-something years, who was directly responsible seemed to matter less. The aftermath was the same. A village had been reduced to ashes, and no one but Lee heard the crying.

  Whenever asked, Lee repeated only the bare bones of what happened next. He found a scorched child curled up in the burning ruins. He dropped the things he carried, secured the child in his duffle bag, and walked away.

  He did not regret leaving his platoon. By then, he was convinced of the illegitimacy of war. But what haunted him, the one detail he had not told anyone, was what he saw in the child’s grip—a crumbled photograph of Ho Chi Minh, which he pried from the tiny fingers and let drop into the fire along with the things he carried.

  The ashes scattered in the wind, but a question remained lodged in Lee’s memory and resurfaced in Kai’s yearning. Why was Ho in the child’s death grip?

  Observing the child over the years, Lee felt as if time stood still, and he could only guess his age. It had been more than two decades, yet the child had not grown from his skeletal frame. He suspected the boy might have been older when found, perhaps a severely malnourished teen—stunted and weightless riding in his duffle bag.

  Though he had not physically changed, Kai seemed to experience an increase in being. Lee was pleased with the child’s metamorphosis from a burned block of wood, seemingly oblivious to the world, to a sponge that absorbed all there was around him. From Lee, the boy learned a confluence of people’s languages in a contact zone. From the children, he imitated the calls of the mountain. From Cook Cu, he concocted bits and pieces of the jungle for sustenance. From the passersby, he accumulated histories of dispersal: the stateless seeking asylum, the lowlanders crossing the sea, the indigenous forced from the highlands.

  Lee was a proud Pops until the boy came under the influence of Vinnie Huynh, who filled his ears with The Art of War.

  “We must assess the way of the Communist regime, its command and regulation,” Vinnie told the group. “We must anticipate our enemy’s strengths and weaknesses.”

  “How do you propose we gain such information?” a man asked.

  “Foreknowledge,” Vinnie said and then quoted the ancient manual:

  Such foreknowledge cannot be had from ghosts and spirits,

  educed by comparison with past events,

  or verified by astrological calculations.

  It must come from people—people who know the enemy’s situation.

  “And who are these people who know the enemy’s situation?”

  Vinnie and Kai exchanged furtive glances.

  “The two of you?”

  The boys nodded in unison, and Vinnie recited another passage from the manual:

  There are five kinds of spies tha
t can be employed:

  local spies, inside agents, double agents,

  expendable spies, and unexpendable spies.

  When the five kinds of spies are all active,

  and no one knows their methods of operation,

  this is called the imperceptible web.12

  “And the two of you are—?”

  “Unexpendable!” Kai could not hold still the rattling of his painted bamboo tube.

  “We’re cultivating local spies,” Vinnie whispered. “We have eyes and ears—”

  “You boys are in communication with the highlanders?”

  “With the children!”

  Kai shook the bamboo, and Vinnie whistled the sound of wind through pine trees. The two echoed the shrilled cries of the black-shanked douc, the songs of the golden-winged laughingthrush, and the hiss of the water monitor.

  Lee interrupted the duet. “Weren’t you warned to watch only from afar? Have you been seen by the children?”

  “Our purpose is to infiltrate.”

  “Looking like the two of you?” someone asked. “The Lone Ranger and Tonto?”

  “Kai blends in,” Vinnie said. “He’s in love with a girl with long hair that smells like wood and flowers.”

  “It’s just a girl.” Kai clasped the rain stick to his chest.

  “Not any girl,” Vinnie said. “Sleeping Beauty’s our eyes and ears.”

  Lee scrutinized the pair. Vinnie was all talk, and Kai was blushing. Perhaps their excursions beyond the campground’s perimeter were nothing more than youthful restlessness. Lee wanted to believe wholeheartedly that Kai’s yearning could be assuaged by his love for another—however conflicted or ideal, real-life or fairytale.

  Sunrise

  CLOUDS MOTEL IN Nha Trang was a concrete quadrangle. Two rows of single-story rooms faced a rock garden where yellow chrysanthemums grew in oblong planters. Their shared room was painted white and bare of decoration. Three single beds lined side-by-side, perpendicular to the wall. Through two large windows, the breeze swayed white curtains, making them fly like young girls’ skirts on a windy day.