I did not remember asking the waiter for pencil and paper, but I must have, as I never carry such items in my pockets. The cafés used to give them out for free. So French to sell water and to give such luxuries away. The content of my letter was dull, crammed with details only my oldest brother would be interested in: my health, the cost of underwear and shoes, the price of a métro ticket, my weekly wage, the menu of my last meal, rain bouncing off the face of Notre-Dame, Paris covered by a thin sheet of snow. I had forgotten how different my language looks on paper, that its letters have so little resemblance to how they actually sound. Words, most I had not spoken for years, generously gave themselves to me. Fluency, after all, is relative. On that sheet of paper, on another side of the globe, I am fluent. The scratching of the pen, the writhing of the paper, I did not want it to stop, but I was running out of room. So I wrote it in the margin: "My Mesdames may be going home. I do not want to start all over again, scanning the help-wanteds, knocking on doors, walking away alone. I am afraid." I had meant to place a comma between "alone" and "I am afraid." But on paper, a period instead of a comma had turned a dangling token of regret into a plainly worded confession. I could have fixed it with a quick flick of lead, but then I read the sentences over again and thought, That is true as well.
The first line of my brother's response startled me, made me wonder whether he wrote it at all. "It is time for you to come home to Viêt-Nam," he declared in a breathtaking evocation of the Old Man's voice, complete with his spine-snapping ability to stifle and to control. But the lines that followed made it clear who had held the pen: "You are my brother and that is all. I do not offer you my forgiveness because you never had to apologize to me. I think of you often, especially at the Lunar New Year. I hope to see you home for the next. A good meal and a red packet await you. So do I." The letter was dated January 27, 1934. It had taken only a month for his letter to arrive at the rue de Fleurus. He offered no explanation for his delay in writing except to say that everything at home had changed. He wrote that it would have been better for me to hear it all in person. What he meant was that paper was not strong enough to bear the weight of what he had to say but that he would have to test its strength anyway.
At the edge of that sheet of paper, on the other side of the globe, my brother signed his name. And then, as if it were an afterthought, he wrote the words "safe journey" where the end should have been.
I folded my brother's letter and kept it in the pocket of my only and, therefore, my finest cold-weather suit. I wore them both to the Gare du Nord that day. The suit was neatly pressed, if a bit worn. The letter was worse off. The oils on my fingertips, the heat of my body, had altered its physical composition. The pages had grown translucent from the repeated handling, repetitive rereading. The ink had faded to purple. It was becoming difficult to read. Though in truth, my memory had already made that act obsolete.
The first photograph of the journey was taken there at the station. It shows my Mesdames sitting side by side and looking straight ahead. They are waiting for the train to Le Havre, chitchatting with the photographers, looking wide-eyed into the lens. They wear the same expression as when they put on a new pair of shoes. They never immediately get up and walk around. They prefer to sit and let their toes slowly explore where the leather gives and where it binds. A pleasurable exercise for them, I am certain, as they always share a somewhat delinquent little smile. I am over there on the bench, behind them, on the left-hand side. I am the one with my head lowered, my eyes closed. I am not asleep, just thinking, and that for me is sometimes aided by the dark. I am a man unused to choices, so the months leading up to that day at the Gare du Nord had subjected me to an agony, sharp and new, self-inflicted and self-prolonged. I had forgotten that discretion can feel this way.
I sometimes now look at this photograph and wonder whether it was taken before or after. Pure speculation at this point, I know. Though I seem to remember that once I had made up my mind, I looked up instinctually, as if someone had called out my name. If that is true, then the photograph must have been taken during the moments before, when my heart was beating a hard, syncopated rhythm, like those of the approaching trains, and all I could hear in the darkness was a simple refrain:
I do not want to start all over again.
Scanning the help-wanteds.
Knocking on doors.
Walking away alone.
And, yes, I am afraid.
2
LIVE-IN COOK
Two American ladies wish
to retain a cook —27 rue de
Fleurus. See the concierge.
TWO AMERICAN LADIES "wish"? Sounds more like a proclamation than a help-wanted ad. Of course, two American ladies in Paris these days would only "wish" because to wish is to receive. To want, well, to want is just not American. I congratulate myself on this rather apt and piquant piece of social commentary. Now if only I knew how to say "apt" and "piquant" in French, I could stop congratulating myself and strike up a conversation with the beau garçon sitting three park benches away. The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though, that there are some French words that I have picked up quickly, in fact, words that I cannot remember not knowing. As if I had been born with them in my mouth, as if they were the seeds of a sour fruit that someone else ate and then ungraciously stuffed its remains into my mouth.
"Ungraciously? Ungraciously? I'll tell you who is ungracious. It's you, you ungracious, disrespectful, disappearing lout! You were taught how to say 's'il vous plaît, merci, Monsieur, Madame' so that you could work in the Governor-General's house. Your oldest brother, he started out like you. At twelve, he was the boy who picked up after Madame's 'petit chouchou when that mutt did its business in every corner of the house, warping the wood floors with its shit and urine. Now your brother is thirty and a sous chef! Wears a crisp white apron and knows more French words than the neighborhood schoolteacher. Soon he'll be..."
I have discovered very few true and constant things in my life. One is that the Old Man's anger has no respect for geography. Mountains, rivers, oceans, and seas, these things that would have otherwise kept the average man locked onto the plot of land that he calls home, these things have never kept him from homing in on me, pinpointing my location, and making me pay my respects. While his body lies deep in the ground of Saigon, his anger sojourns with a "no-good lout" on a Paris park bench. Even here, he finds me.
"Unemployed and alone," the Old Man surmises, distilling my life into two sad, stinging words.
I try to protect myself with the usual retort: Oh, you again? I thought I was dead to you, Old Man?
"No son of mine leaves a good job at the Governor-General's to be a cook! A cook on some leaky boat for sailors who don't even know how to say please' or thank you' in their own language, not to mention in French. Old whores become cooks on boats, not any son of mine," you said.
Sometimes, I cannot give enough thanks to your Catholic god that you, my dear and violent "father," are now merely cobbled together from my unwavering sense of guilt and my telescopic memories of brutalities lived long ago. Because a retort like that, a challenge like that, would have extracted from you nothing less than a slap in my face and a punch in my stomach. But now you, who art up in heaven, will disappear in the face of my calm cool smirk. Unemployed and Alone, however, obstinately refuse to retreat and demand that I address their needs before September disappears into October in this the year of your lord 1929.
"Two American ladies..." Hmm, Americans. I hope their French is not as wretched as mine. What a fine household we would make, hand movements and crude drawings to supplement our mutual use of a secondhand language. Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them. Not my own, of course, but Monsieur and Madame's. The f
irst thing I learned at the Governor-General's house was that when Monsieur and Madame were consumed by their lunatic displeasure at how the floors had been waxed, how the silver had been polished, or how the poulet had been stewed, they would berate the household staff, all fifteen of us, in French. Not in the combination of dumbed-down French coupled with atonal attempts at Vietnamese that they would normally use with us, no, this was a pure variety, reserved for dignitaries and obtuse Indochinese servants. It was as if Monsieur and Madame were wholly incapable of expressing their finely wrought rage in any other language but their own. Of course, we would all bow our heads and act repentant, just as the Catholic priest had taught us. Of course, we would all stand there, blissful in our ignorance of the nuances, wordplay, and double-entendres of that language that was seeking so desperately to assault us. Naturally, some words would slip through, but for the most part we were all rather skilled in our refusal and rejection of all but the most necessary. Minh the Sous Chef, as the Old Man had renamed him, had told us how the French never tired of debating why the Indochinese of a certain class are never able to master the difficulties, the subtleties, the winged eloquence, of the French language. I now suspect that this is a topic of discussion for the ruling class everywhere. So enamored of their differences, language and otherwise, they have lost the instinctual ability to detect the defiance of those who serve them.
Minh the Sous Chef used to be just Anh Minh, my oldest brother and the only brother who today can make me long for home. No one would have enjoyed this park bench and the shade of these forlorn chestnut trees more than he. Anh Minh believed absolutely and passionately that the French language would save us, would welcome us into the fold, would reward us with kisses on both cheeks. His was not an abstract belief. It was grounded in the kitchen of the Governor-General's house. He insisted that after Monsieur and Madame tasted his omelette à la bourbonnaise, his coupe ambassadrice, his crème marquise, they would have no need to send for a French chef de cuisine to replace old Claude Chaboux. The Old Man, like a soothsayer, declared that soon there would be the first Vietnamese chef de cuisine in the Governor-General's house. So while the rest of us in the household staff stood there dumbly experiencing the balletic surges of Monsieur and Madame's tirade, Anh Minh alone stood in agony, lashed and betrayed by all those French words he had adopted and kept close to his heart, wounded. Minh the Wounded, I began calling him in my prayers.
Old Chaboux died, and a young Jean Blériot arrived from France to don the coveted title. Now only an act of god, a bout of malaria, or a lustful look at Madame would hasten the departure of Chef Blériot, as he insisted on being called. May 11, 1923, began his reign. Anh Minh stayed on in the kitchen of the Governor-General's to serve under yet another French chef, to cover for him once he began to reek of rum, to clean up after him once he could no longer find the rim of the pot, handfuls of shallot and dashes of oil seasoning the tile floor.
And, me, what was I supposed to do? Twenty years old and still a garde-manger, sculpting potatoes into perfect little spheres, carving chunks of turnips into swans, the arc of their necks as delicate as Blériot's fingers, fingers that I wanted to taste. Equipped with skills and desires that no man would admit to having, what was I supposed to do?
"Two American ladies wish to retain a cook—27 rue de Fleurus." Prosperous enough area of town, and two American ladies must have enough to pay a nice wage. One of the skills—it is more like a sleight of hand—that I have acquired since coming to this city is an acumen for its streets. I know where they reside, where they dissolve discreetly into one another, where they inexplicably choose to rear their unmarked heads. A skill born from the lack of other skills, really. When each day is mapped for me by a wanton display of street names congesting the pages of the help-wanteds, when I am accompanied by the stench of the unemployable, I am forced into an avid, adoring courtship with the boulevards of this city. I must admit that in truly desperate times, my intimate knowledge of the city has saved me. Paris is a Madame with a heart.
"Name any street. Go ahead, any street. I'll tell you where it is, Left Bank or Right Bank, exact locale even. Rue de Fleurus? It's a little street off of the boulevard Raspail, near the Jardin du Luxembourg." I have earned several dozen glasses of marc that way. Frenchmen, drunk men, love a challenge. The listeners, if any, often will ask me to repeat myself. It seems that my accented French is hard even on the ears of laborers. But once it is clear to them that I am there for their amusement, the rest is an enthralling performance. Fortunately for me, I have no idea how to say "enthralling" in French because otherwise I would be compelled to brag and ruin the surprise. And they are always surprised. And they always try again. They will name the street where their great-aunt Sylvie lives, where their butcher is located, where they last got lost, and, when truly desperate, they will name a street on one of the islands that cleave this city. By then I am gone because too often their surprise deviates into anger: "How can this little Indochinese, who can't even speak proper French, who can't even say more than a simple sentence, who can't even understand enough to get angry over the jokes that we're making at his expense, how can this Indochinese know this city better than we?" All I need is a little monkey dressed in a suit more expensive than my own, and I could join the ranks of the circus freaks. "Come one, come all. See the Half-Man-Half-Woman Sword Swallower, the Bearded Lady, and, now, introducing the Little Indochinese Who Knows This City Better Than Any Parisian!" But this is hardly a skill to impress a potential Monsieur and Madame.
I have been in this city for over three years now. I have interviewed with and even worked for an embarrassing number of households. In my experience, they fall into two categories. No, in fact, there are three. The first are those who, after a catlike glimpse at my face, will issue an immediate rejection, usually nonverbal. A door slam is an uncommonly effective form of communication. No discussion, no references required, no "Will you want Sundays off?" Those, while immediately unpleasant, I prefer. Type twos are those who may or may not end up hiring me but who will, nonetheless, insist on stripping me with questions, as if performing an indelicate physical examination. Type twos behave as if they have been authorized by the French government to ferret out and to document exactly how it is that I have come to inhabit their hallowed shores.
"In Paris, three years," I tell them.
"Where were you before?"
"Marseilles."
"Where were you before that?"
"Boat to Marseilles."
"Boat? Well, obviously. Where did that boat sail from?"
And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am.
"Hmmm ... you say you've been in Paris for three years? Now, let's see, if you left Indochina when you were twenty, that would make you..."
"Twenty-six, Madame."
Three years unaccounted for! you could almost hear them thinking. Most Parisians can ignore and even forgive me for not having the refinement to be born amidst the ringing bells of their cathedrals, especially since I was born instead amidst the ringing bells of the replicas of their cathedrals, erected in a far-off colony to remind them of the majesty, the piety, of home. As long as Monsieur and Madame can account for my whereabouts in their city or in one of their colonies, then they can trust that the République and the Catholic Church have had their watchful eyes on me. But when I expose myself as a subject who may have strayed, who may have lived a life unchecked, ungoverned, undocumented, and unrepentant, I become, for them, suspect. Before, I was no more of a threat than a cloistered nun. Now Madame glares at me to see if she can detect the deviant sexual practices that I have surely picked up and am now, without a doubt, proliferating under the very noses of the city's Notre-Dames. Madame now worries whether she can trust me with her little girls.
Madame, you have nothing to worry about. I have no int
erest in your little girls. Your boys ... well, that is their choice, she should hear me thinking.
The odds are stacked against me with this second type, I know. But I find myself again and again shamefully submitting. All those questions, I deceive myself each time, all those questions must mean that I have a chance. And so I stay on, eventually serving myself forth like a scrawny roast pig, only to be told, "Thank you, but no thank you."
Thank you? Thank you? Madame, you should applaud! A standing ovation would not be inappropriate, I think each time. I have just given you a story filled with exotic locales, travel on the open seas, family secrets, un-Christian vices. Thank you will not suffice.
My self-righteous rage burns until I am forced to concede that I, in fact, have told them nothing. This language that I dip into like a dry inkwell has failed me. It has made me take flight with weak wings and watched me plummet into silence. I am unable to tell them anything but a list of cities, some they have been to and others a mere dot on a globe, places they will only touch with the tips of their fingers and never the soles of their feet. I am forced to admit that I am, to them, nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between.
Thank you, but no thank you.
The third type, I call the collectors. They are always good for several weeks' and sometimes even several months' worth of work. The interviews they conduct are professional, even mechanical. Before I can offer the usual inarticulate boast about my "good omelets," I am hired. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner to be prepared six days a week. Sundays off. Some immediately delegate the marketing to me. Others insist on accompanying me for the first few days to make sure that I know the difference between a poularde and a poulette. I rarely fail them. Of course, I have never been able to memorize or keep an accurate tally of the obsessive assortment of words that the French have devised for this animal that is the center, the stewed, fricasseed, sautéed, stuffed heart, of every Frenchman's home. Fat chickens, young chickens, newly hatched chickens, old wiry chickens, all are awarded their very own name, a noble title of sorts in this language that can afford to be so drunk and extravagant toward what lies on the dinner table. "A chicken" and "not this chicken," these are the only words I need to navigate the poultry markets of this city. Communicating in the negative is not the quickest and certainly not the most esteemed form of expression, but for those of us with few words to spare it is the magic spell, the incantation, that opens up an otherwise inaccessible treasure trove. Wielding my words like a rusty kitchen knife, I can ask for, reject, and ultimately locate that precise specimen that will grace tonight's pot.
The Book of Salt Page 2