by Brian Haig
I started to climb back into my car. But she reached over and grabbed the door before I could close it. She laughed and said, "Come on. You'll like it, I promise." She grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the car. Wow. She was strong.
"I hate fish."
"So do I. Fish are disgusting. Trust me."
I was really hungry, and out of the corner of my eye, about two blocks from where we stood, was the golden arch of salvation. I started to make a dash before Bian grabbed my arm. "Come on. I know the lady who owns this place. She needs the business." She added, "I'll get you a fortune cookie."
"I thought that was Chinese food."
"All right. I'll read your palm."
The illogical red-lettered sign over the entrance read, "Happy Vietnamese Cuisine." Regarding that, I asked her, "How can the food be happy?"
"What?"
"Happy… it says happy cuisine."
"Oh, shut up."
Anyway, we crossed the parking lot and entered through a glass door with Asian letters on it, into a small, cramped restaurant; all in all, it resembled a low-scale pizzeria: plastic tables, plastic chairs, checkered tablecloths, but for those seeking a genuine Asian ambiance, on the walls were a few cheesy paintings of sampans and short people plucking rice in misty bogs. The smell was overpowering. I said to Bian, "Call the cops. There's a corpse in here."
She laughed. "It's fish sauce. A delicacy, actually, like a Vietnamese gravy. You squeeze the oils from the fish, store it in a closed vat, and let it simmer for a few weeks. The taste is very tart."
"The smell is very awful."
"Is this really the same tough guy who was too manly to use disinfectant at an indoor murder scene?"
"That was only a rotting corpse."
She stared at me. "Be nice or there'll be another corpse." Anyway, the lady who ran the place spotted Bian and trotted with bouncy, mincing steps across the floor toward us. They embraced, exchanged cheek pecks, and Bian and she began conversing together in Vietnamese. Mentally, it took a moment for me to adjust to Bian's bantering in this strange tongue, with all its gymnastic consonants and antic musical quality-like listening to a record suddenly skip from 33 to 78 rpm. I wonder how we sound to them.
After a moment, the woman led us to a table at the back, directly beneath a large painting of a thatch-roofed village on stilts populated by little people with thatched saucers on their heads. I mean, if you let your imagination roam, you could almost feel the sweat form on the back of your neck.
The woman apparently spoke little English. "You sit… you sit… you sit…" she said, looking at me.
I sat, I sat, I sat.
Bian mentioned to me, "She's the owner," then said something to her and the woman laughed. The owner was basically mid- to late sixties, wore a scarlet silk ao dai-the traditional female garb-and had at one time been what Grandpa Erasmus would call a real looker. She was still slender and very attractive, but she had hard years on her, evidenced by her tired eyes, her deeply creased face, and a pronounced stoop in her shoulders. Bian informed me, "I told her you don't like fish."
"Whatever. I hate fish."
"She called you a typical American. No taste buds."
I smiled at the older woman and informed her, "My ancestors are Irish." This, of course, excuses a wide range of human flaws and abnormalities.
Bian translated this, the woman nodded knowingly and mentioned something in reply. Bian laughed and said something back.
Bian informed me, "She said she knows about the Irish. Bloodthirsty savages, sloppy drunks, and weepy poets."
"What did you tell her?"
"You're no poet."
They exchanged more words, and Bian chuckled. The lady poured water in our glasses while Bian informed me, "She says you are very handsome in a very Caucasian way." She added, "She wonders if you have a wife."
"Oh…"
"I told her you had asked many women to marry. They all said no."
The two of them erupted in laughter. Women have a weird sense of humor.
Bian then explained something to the woman, who looked at me, and said, "Can do… can do." She then said something to Bian, who nodded. The woman rushed off and disappeared into what I presumed was the kitchen where all the poor dead fish went to be squashed into putrid oils.
I looked at Bian. "Where did you learn Vietnamese?"
"Where it's best learned."
"Berlitz?"
She smiled, sort of. "Saigon. I was born there." She shook out her napkin and placed it on her lap. "Have you been to Vietnam?"
I shook my head. "My father vacationed there. Twice. He came back with wild and not wonderful stories about people shooting at one another, mines, bombs." I added, "He returned the second time with a story about somebody who shot him."
"I see."
"How did you get here?"
"That's a long and very boring story."
"Nothing about you is boring."
She looked at me. "Is that a compliment?"
"Consider it an observation."
"Well… my father was an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. A major, in the Rangers. It was different for him than for American officers who rotated in and out on twelve-month tours. He fought the entire war. Twelve straight years."
"It was his country."
She gave me a knowing nod. "I'll bet that had something to do with it."
"You don't look old enough to remember that."
"I wasn't, and I don't. He and my mother were married in 1967. They waited and waited… they didn't want to bring a child into such a miserable existence. I was born in 1973."
"The year before the war ended."
"You mean for America it ended. Not for us. And I think he knew the final ending wasn't going to be satisfying. But I suppose he decided he'd waited long enough for a child… that… if he kept putting it off…" She played with her chopsticks. "It's a strange thought. I've always harbored the sense I was conceived as an act of fatalism."
I said nothing.
"My family is Catholic. Worse, my mother's family were rich, decadent landowners. By physical necessity and political conviction, they were staunchly anticommunist, and they knew what defeat would mean. My father fought until the very end, until 1975."
"Then he left?"
"That… No, that proved impossible."
"Why not? A lot of Vietnamese came here. Go to San Diego. They're thinking of renaming it Nha Diego."
"Those were the lucky ones."
"What happened to the unlucky ones?"
"The northerners had a lot of time to prepare for their conquest. During the war years, with the help of their southern spies, they compiled long lists of South Vietnamese officers and politicians who were, in their view, corrupted. My father was on a list of people who would benefit from… the phrase was 'reform and reeducation.' Two days after the surrender, he was taken to a camp to be taught how to think in the new Vietnam."
"I'm sorry."
A little too offhandedly, she replied, "Don't worry about it. This all happened a long time ago."
"Do you know the definition of a long time ago?" She appeared not to know, so I told her, "In somebody else's lifetime."
She did not acknowledge this, but coolly sipped from her water. Eventually she said, "Well… my mother remained in Saigon for the next three years. Waiting. As the wife of a traitor, she wasn't employable with the new state, nor did anybody want to get on the wrong side of the new government by hiring her. Don't ask about the things she had to do to get by."
We looked at each other a moment.
She said, "Understand that nobody knew initially what these camps were, how they operated… We were told these weren't penal colonies, they were humane facilities to help the Vietnamese build one society, a brave new nation. It sounded so stupidly communist, for a while, everybody believed it."
"Did you hear from your father?"
"External contact was forbidden-we were told it would taint his reeducation effo
rt."
"And you were how old? Three… four?"
"Three, the year my father went into the camp. Six when an army comrade of my father's came to Saigon and found us. He had just been released from the same camp. He told us my father had been dead for two years. To inspire other recalcitrant prisoners, he volunteered to be publicly beaten to death."
"I see."
"So we left. We arrived with the last big wave of boat people," she said as though this were the end of the story rather than the beginning.
I didn't know how to respond to this. Like nearly all Americans, I had no frame of reference for what Bian had experienced, for how she had suffered. The closest I came were my own pop's years away at war, the first of which occurred in the early sixties, when I was too young to be frightened for him, or what his loss might mean for little Sean.
His second tour was in 1971-I was ten, friends had lost their fathers, other fathers had returned home missing body parts, and others came back mentally and emotionally different. So I knew. I will never forget the day we dropped Pop at Dulles International Airport for his flight to San Francisco, where he would catch the Southeast Asia express, the strained look on Mom's face, or how hard Pop squeezed me before he uttered his deeply felt parting advice-"Be good, do everything Mom says, or I'll come back and kill you."
What followed was the year of long days and forever nights. Every night I offered the same shopworn deal as so many other kids in my shoes: Dear God, bring Pop home healthy, and I will never commit another sin.
Well, as I mentioned, Pop came back alive, albeit on a stretcher. Boy, was I ever relieved I had stipulated healthy-had I stupidly gone for the more exclusive "alive" or "in one piece," I would've lost the best part of my teenage years.
The point is, as Americans, we send our fathers off to war, they are away for a finite period, and while they are gone, we, their families, live in constant dread but also relative tranquillity. Except that they may never come back, they might as well be on an extended business trip.
"What about your mother?" I asked her.
"Still alive. Our boat was picked up about a hundred miles from the Philippines. The voyage was not… well, it wasn't pleasant." She looked away a moment. "We spent a few weeks in a hospital, then a settlement camp outside Manila before the American embassy arranged visas and flights to America. A lot of Vietnamese had come before us, mainly to Southern California, Louisiana, and here, around D.C. The State Department made our choice for us. This was where we ended up."
The old woman emerged from the kitchen trailed by a skinny Vietnamese teenage boy with purple hair, nose ring, punk clothes, and wobbly arms hauling a large tray. His parents probably had a tale somewhat like Bian's, joining in the diaspora, fleeing a nightmare and coming here to provide this boy a better life, a good education, promising opportunities. Seeing him now, I'll bet they were having second thoughts.
He set the tray down on a folding stand, and he and the lady began laying out plates on our table. It was mostly boiled vegetables and starchy rice, with two plates filled with stuff that looked scaly and smelled awful. I gave Bian an accusing look. "You said you hated fish."
"I lied." She laughed. "I'm Vietnamese. Of course I love fish."
At least the rice looked somewhat edible and smelled okay.
The owner mentioned something to Bian, who said something back. Bian said to me, "She says there is no beer on the menu because she doesn't have a liquor license. But she keeps a hidden stock for favored customers in her fridge in the back. She'll bring it out in a moment."
Things were looking up.
I smiled at the woman, then at Bian. "Please thank her from the bottom of my heart for her hospitality. Tell her she is most gracious."
Bian translated this, and the woman bowed. I added, "Also, please tell her she has a lovely and very deceitful daughter."
Bian looked away for a moment. Then she looked back at me. "You're very observant."
"And you have your mother's beauty."
"Well… thank you."
Her mother said something to her, and Bian patted her arm and said something in reply. Her mother looked at me a moment, then returned to the kitchen.
"What was that about?"
"Because she thinks you are a good man, she says she has a special surprise for you." She added, smiling, "I told her she's a terrible judge of men. She should poison your food."
Bian's mother returned a moment later, carrying a dish upon which sat two Big Macs, still hot and steaming in their boxes. She set the plate in front of me, and two cans of holy water blessed by Pope Budweiser.
I stood and hugged her. She giggled, saying something to her daughter that probably translated as, "Tell this round-eyed idiot to let go of me before I knee him in the nuts."
I sat, and Bian's mother left us. Bian sliced off a piece of fish and, holding it up on her fork, said, "Try a little of this. It's very good."
"No… thank you."
"You're sure? It's a freshwater fish. It tastes different."
"Did it swim in scotch?"
She laughed.
We ate in silence for a few moments. She asked, "How much do you remember about Vietnam? Not the country, the war."
"For me, it was a TV war. You know what I mean, right?"
"No. Tell me about that."
"It was the first war piped into America's living rooms. Somebody described that as like seeing a hologram of a war. But for one year of my life-the year of my father's second tour-I was glued to it. I wanted to see him on TV, but I really didn't. You know?"
"I don't know. All I had to do was step out in the backyard and watch the artillery flashes."
"I had a friend who was watching CBS news one night. He actually saw his own father get shot."
"Dead?"
"Wounded. They were in the middle of dinner, though. His mother actually vomited. But for most Americans it was-just as this war is- that moment on the evening news between the trial of the month and the weather forecast."
"Did TV and the media make it unpopular?"
"Wars are never popular."
"You know what I'm talking about. I read in a history book that Walter Cronkite did more damage in one night than the entire Tet offensive."
"I think the media and TV exposed a truth-an unwelcome truth, an unhappy one, but an important one. They were biased and irresponsible in many ways… but I also think they did more good than harm, told more truth than lies. On the big truth, they nailed it."
"What big truth?"
"We had become involved in a war we didn't intend to win. Like sex with neither partner able to orgasm-eventually, somebody has to call it quits."
"That's a very… unique explanation."
"I'm thinking of writing a political science textbook."
"They come wrapped in brown paper?" She took a bite of her fish, then reached across the table, grabbed my beer, and took a long swig.
"I can get you your own beer," I told her. "The owner has a big crush on me."
She laughed. And then we found ourselves staring into each other's eyes.
I broke eye contact first-somebody had to before this turned complicated.
Obviously, she and I, somehow, were becoming intimate. There was a natural sensuality to this woman, an unconscious sexuality that I was very conscious of.
The Army, unique institution that it is, has managed, through bureaucratic dictates and brute legal force, to quell or repress nearly all of the flawed human compulsions and quirks, from social inequalities, to racial and religious intolerance, to the inbred American inclinations toward indiscipline, laziness, and disobedience. Send us your bigots, your snobs, your slovenly punks; we will unkink their screwed-up heads and return to you a model citizen, an individual of tolerance, good citizenship, and self-discipline-or a fairly convincing fake.
Yet the attraction between the sexes has eluded even the Army's most Orwellian programs and mind games. Here we are, some thirty years after the congre
ssional order imposing the integration of the sexes, and there still is rutting within the ranks, affairs between married officers and their spouses, sexual favoritism, sexual blackmail, voyeurism, rape, and every other imaginative act two or more horny people can conceive of. The modern battle dress uniform, baggy and shapeless as it is, is as aphrodisiacal as a knee in the groin; yet the fevered male imagination fills in the blanks and primitive impulses take over.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I knew I was attracted to her; for some reason, I think she found me attractive as well. Of course, I don't like to make a move on somebody else's lady. Relationships are hard enough without complications. That's not an ironclad thing, though.
I draw the line, however, when her beau is serving our country, in uniform, overseas, battling our enemies in a theater of war. I do this as a patriotic gesture. After all, the least the home front can do is keep our hands out of their ladies' undies. Also, the fiance has a gun, and knows how to use it.
Apparently Bian also recognized we were on thin ice, because she immediately shifted the conversation back to safer ground. She broke eye contact for a moment, then said, "Why did America lose the will to keep fighting in Vietnam? Fifty-eight thousand Americans dead. Hundreds of thousands horribly wounded."
"Because somebody finally asked, why make it fifty-nine thousand dead?"
"Still… that's a large down payment. How could you walk away from it?"
"That's a question we're still trying to answer. I think you know that."
"The answer is important."
"For you, maybe. For most of us, the war ended thirty years ago. The dead are mourned and buried, and the survivors have their monument." I added, "For most Americans, it's a brief and confusing chapter in a long history book."
"That's a shallow answer."
"Good. I'm a shallow person."
She put down her fork and stared at me. "You are not. I've known you only one day, but… you're deeper and more perceptive than you act."
"Eat your fish."
She smiled. "Hey, I didn't call you sensitive."
"That's why you're still alive."
She finished off my beer. I popped the second can.
She said, "I was on the other end of that decision. It cost my father his life. It nearly killed my mother. Look around you-see what it meant for her future."