by Dana Sachs
But they hadn’t. Once, when I urged a friend to drive more carefully on her motorbike, she had assured me that because her fate was to die by water, she didn’t need to worry while she was out on the road.
“Then why not drive three hundred kilometers an hour?” I’d asked. “Why show any caution at all?”
“Because you never know,” my friend had explained. “I’m going to die by water, but I could still die on a motorbike. I could be hit by a truck hauling water. Or I could have an accident when I cross a bridge.”
Still, I thought Phai’s explanation oversimplified the complexity of the war.
“What about responsibility?” I asked.
“Responsibility is something different.”
“Why?”
Phai tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. After a moment, he said, “Okay. If I lock my bike and it gets stolen, that’s my destiny.”
“And if you forget to lock it?”
“Then losing it is my responsibility.”
I still didn’t get the connection to the war. “What does that have to do with Mr. Long?” I asked.
“Mr. Long did what he could to protect himself, but his family died anyway. That’s destiny.”
Phai was looking at me as if, now that he’d explained his logic in detail, it should make perfect sense. But when I’d spoken of responsibility, I hadn’t been thinking of Mr. Long. I’d been thinking of the Americans, the ones who’d dropped the bomb on his family. According to Phai’s volcano model, primary responsibility lay in people’s duty to protect themselves: with the person who locked the bike, not the person who stole it. In my admittedly Western view, the blame for what had happened in Vietnam fell on many shoulders: French colonialists too greedy to give up a prime piece of real estate; Americans too eager to define a civil war in terms of superpower politics; Vietnamese leaders too intent on consolidating their power. Every one of those groups had been willing to destroy Vietnam in order to save it. But the people themselves—it was hard for me to assign them blame or to see how destiny had dictated their losses. Through generations of Buddhism or generations of war—or both—the Vietnamese had developed an acute ability not only to endure the worst, but also to accept the worst as fate and move on. I had to admit that it was a good defense.
“Hey, Phai,” Tung yelled into the kitchen. “Do you have a cigarette?” Phai looked at me and smiled, then walked back into the living room.
Outside, the rain had begun to fall in thick sheets, and the trees were whipping in the wind. Dream Street was deserted, but the thunder sounded like dozens of invisible army trucks rattling down the road. The air had grown chilly. I sat down on the couch and knotted my scarf more tightly around my neck, clamping my fingers around the warm sides of my glass. Phai sat down next to me, pulled a pack of 555s out of his shirt pocket, and offered one to Tung. A Vietnamese documentary was demonstrating the modern production line of a provincial pencil factory. Tung lit his cigarette, then leaned back in his chair. Despite his ardent desire to participate in the affairs of Mr. Huey, on most days he was still pretty idle. Sometimes, he rushed off to rent a car when Mr. Huey had to make a trip out of town, or he arranged an interpreter when Mr. Tuan was away in Saigon, but for the most part Tung’s days weren’t any busier than before. I couldn’t see how Mr. Huey had that much to offer anyway. Despite his promises of big deals “about to happen” and the phone calls at all hours from Hong Kong and Taipei, I never saw any sign of actual commerce. Every move in this business revolved around elaborate plans for the future. Tung still insisted that everything would come together soon, even if I couldn’t see it.
Today, as usual, Mr. Huey was sitting upstairs, talking on the telephone, and Tung was sitting downstairs doing nothing. “Who came by so early this morning?” he asked, for want of entertainment.
I told Tung that Linh had left her husband. Tung’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “What’s wrong?” he asked. His own recent marital tiff had somehow been resolved, though I never heard the details. One night they weren’t speaking to each other. The next night, they’d appeared at my bedroom door together, all dressed up and giggling, and told me they were on their way “đi chơi,” to go out together, in this case for a night on the town. Everyone Tung and Huong knew had problems in marriage. Tung wasn’t surprised that Linh was unhappy; he was surprised that she’d actually left.
I described Son’s refusal to let Linh ride the motorbike, the way he bossed her around, and how tired she was from working all the time and trying to take care of the house and the kids, too. Tung interrupted. “Bình thường,” he said. That’s normal. “What else is new?”
Actually, I wanted to change the subject anyway. I’d been waiting for a chance to talk to Tung and Phai about the man I’d met who said he’d pulled John McCain from the lake. Since that meeting, I’d thought of questions I wished I’d asked at the time. Like why would he have been walking home for lunch during the middle of a bomb attack on the city? And, if he had been a hero, and so humanitarian, why was his government reluctant to take advantage of such a great PR opportunity as a reunion between these two men?
“I met a man who saved an American pilot from drowning during the war,” I said.
“The one who fell in the lake?” Tung asked. I nodded. A stone statue stood by the edge of Truc Bach Lake, memorializing the fall of the pilot.
I recounted the story as the old man had told it. “Do you think the story’s true?” I asked.
Tung considered the question, then shrugged his shoulders. “Imagine that you were a civilian during the war,” he said. “Let’s say you worked in a factory. Suddenly the American warplanes flew over the city and dropped bombs on you. What did you do to deserve that? Whole families died that way.”
He continued. “People who didn’t know a thing about politics were suddenly buried under the rubble of their houses. Imagine that, after surviving a bombing, you saw an American pilot parachuting toward you.”
He paused and lit himself a cigarette. “I’m not saying the old man’s lying,” he said. “How would I know? But if he’s telling the truth, he’s an unusual man. Maybe he’s a great one. Most Vietnamese hated those pilots. Sitting in those bomb shelters makes you crazy. I remember being nauseated. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I’d die. And I was just a kid. What did I know? An adult would feel rage. The police had to race to get to those pilots every time one of them landed in the city. If civilians got there first, they’d try to kill those guys.” He looked over at Phai. “Is what I’m saying true?”
Phai nodded, looking down at the floor.
Tung took a long drag and looked out at the rain. “I never saw a pilot myself, but I might have done the same thing.” He glanced at me, curious to see how I’d react, but I wasn’t upset. What he said made more sense to me than Phai’s ideas about destiny and locking your bike.
Lightning sent a flash across the sky. The living room, already fluorescent bright, got brighter. And then the thunder crashed. The bombing campaigns were two campaigns, really, taking place in two separate, parallel universes, the universe of the earth and the universe of the sky. Down on the ground, loudspeakers blared out the danger, sirens screamed, citizens jumped into bomb shelters and covered their heads. Up in the air, million-dollar machines clicked into gear. Above and below, people took deep breaths, maybe their last, and mumbled prayers. And then two separate universes would briefly collide, with a flash of a bomb, the explosion of a plane, or maybe a parachute slowly descending, a human being pulled by gravity from one universe down into the other.
The rain outside gradually slowed to a stop, delivering the eerie silence that follows a storm. Tung went upstairs to check on some papers he was going to deliver for Mr. Huey. Outside, the trucks and motorbikes reappeared. Grandmother Nhi hurried past the front door to reopen her tea stall. Phai’s cigarette had burned out. He lit another one. I collected my keys off the floor.
“Duyen,” Phai spoke softly.
; I looked at him.
“We didn’t all hate the pilots,” he said. “When I was a kid, I lived near the prison where they kept the Americans. Sometimes, they were brought outside and taken for a jog around the building. We children liked to stand there and wave to them. Sometimes, we gave them cigarettes. It was exciting. They were so big. We’d never seen Americans before. We’d never seen skin so white.” He added, “Once, when the pilots were jogging by, one of them reached over and patted me on the head.”
I took a sip of water, cringing as it slid down my troubled throat. I wanted to believe that story, too. But I’d never heard of prisoners going out for jogs on the Hanoi streets.
By evening, I couldn’t speak at all. I was sitting up in bed with the covers pulled to my shoulders and a large scarf wrapped around my neck.
“It’s the wind,” Huong said. She sat down on the edge of the bed and peered into my mouth. “It’s very bad these days. It’s dangerous.”
Huong’s and my arguments about health always pitted my “germ theory” against her “wind theory.” She found it incomprehensible that I could ignore the strength and intensity of the spring breezes, while I made her laugh when I tried to explain that a sick person could spread disease by sharing chopsticks or a glass of water. “You can’t get sick like that,” she’d say, shaking her head. We were like two cooks with competing family recipes for chicken soup. We’d both learned a formula handed down by our ancestors, but neither of us could explain why it worked.
Still, when Huong checked my symptoms and diagnosed a “wind cold,” as opposed to a “cold cold,” I almost believed her. After all, every time I walked outside, the wind sliced at my throat like a knife across a piece of steak.
But as Huong started counting little pink pills into her palm, I objected. Vietnamese pharmacies sold everything, even the strongest antibiotics, over the counter. Many of these medications had passed their expiration dates. Others were fakes. I waved Huong away.
“You don’t want the pills?” Huong asked, her eyes narrowing to slits.
I shook my head.
“But these are from France!”
She said the word as if to offer evidence that the medication must be excellent. I didn’t even know what it was, though. I was positive that Huong didn’t either. Miserably I pointed to the bottle of honey she’d brought upstairs. That I could take.
We heard a knock on the door and Phai, his face lined with worry, came quietly into the room. “I brought you something,” he said. He sat down on the armchair across from my bed and handed me a fist-sized plastic bag of something that looked like sawdust.
“It’s ô mai,” he told me. “When I told my mother you were sick, she made you some to soothe your throat.”
I only knew one thing about Phai’s mother, that she was a big fan of Jane Fonda, the movie star Americans still called Hanoi Jane. Phai’s mother had gotten her hands on a Jane Fonda workout routine and she now followed it every day.
Phai leaned forward. “It’s made with shredded ginger and salted plums,” he said. “Just take a pinch and put it in your mouth. Suck on it for a while. Don’t swallow it.”
I unwrapped the rubber band from around the neck of the bag, pulled out a pinch, then set it like a wad of tobacco between my teeth and gums. A sour taste spread through my mouth, but it had a hint of sweetness in it, too.
Huong and Phai were both watching to see how I would react. “Do you like it?” Phai asked.
I nodded. My mouth was filling with saliva. I glanced across the coffee table, which was littered with books, an old Atlantic Monthly, the wrappers from a couple of Hershey bars, and the pages of a letter from my sister. I was looking for a place to spit.
“Now try to swallow,” Phai said.
I grimaced. Asking me to swallow was like asking me to stab my throat with a pair of scissors.
“Just try,” he said gently.
I took a deep breath, then did it. The pain that cut into my neck was so severe it made me gasp, but at the same time the sweet tang of the ô mai slid into my throat muscles like water into parched earth. Something softened and grew numb.
I smiled and looked at Huong and Phai. Expressions of relief crossed their faces. Huong stood up. “I have to cook dinner,” she said.
Phai lingered. “Do you need anything? Do you want some tea?” he asked, his face full of concern. I shook my head. Phai followed Huong down the stairs. I leaned over and pulled another pinch of the ô mai out of the bag, then lay back down against my pillows, sucking on it. I wished Phai hadn’t left so quickly. Even though I couldn’t say a word to him, I’d wanted him to stay.
I must have dozed, because then Carolyn was sitting on the bed beside me.
“How are you?” she asked, brushing the hair out of my face.
I sat up, leaned over, and picked up a pen and paper off the coffee table. “Linh?” I scrawled.
Carolyn shrugged. “No change,” she said. “I saw her a little while ago.”
I turned the paper over and jotted, “Do you think it’s possible that the Vietnamese would have taken U.S. prisoners out to jog around Hanoi during the war?”
Carolyn read what I’d written and laughed. “Does this relate to Linh?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Carolyn considered the question for a moment. “You know,” she finally said, “it sounds strange, but I guess it’s possible. What were they going to do, run away? This whole city was a prison. The whole country. They didn’t need any walls.”
I nodded. The prisoners would not have had anywhere to go. They might have jogged.
I put a bit more ô mai in my mouth and leaned back against my pillows.
“I’ve been thinking about the old man,” Carolyn said. “When I get back to San Francisco, I’m going to call Senator McCain’s office in Washington. I want to find out if, the next time he’s in Hanoi, he’d be willing to meet with him.”
“Get some rest,” she said, then went downstairs. For a long time, I lay there unable to sleep, watching the sky outside grow dark with dusk.
It didn’t take us long to get our answer from Senator John McCain. A few weeks after Carolyn returned to the States, I received a letter from her saying that she had telephoned Washington and relayed the old man’s story to one of the senator’s aides. The official was not surprised to hear the tale, nor did he deny it. Rather, he told Carolyn that Senator McCain wasn’t interested in meeting anyone connected with his capture in Vietnam. As the aide explained it, “That was one of the worst days in the senator’s life,” and he didn’t want to relive it.
Months later, I learned a bit more on the subject. My friend Norma Cline, an American writer who lived in Hanoi, showed me a response to a letter she’d written to John McCain, also about a Vietnamese who claimed to have saved him from drowning. “Dear Norma,” he wrote,
Thank you for your letter regarding Nguyen Ngoc Huan and the circumstances surrounding my capture by the North Vietnamese.
Over the years, numerous people have contacted me to inform me that they participated in pulling me from the Western Lake. I appreciate your interest and, of course, I am grateful to anyone who may have been motivated by humanitarian concerns to help pull me from the lake.
In any event the war is behind us and it serves no purpose to revisit the circumstances surrounding my capture. I’m sure you will agree, what’s important now is to improve relations between the two countries, and to focus our efforts on building a future that is worthy of the many people who paid the ultimate sacrifice for freedom and democracy.
Again, thank you for your letter. With regards.
Sincerely,
John McCain
United States Senator
I didn’t know how to tell the old man the bad news, so I put off contacting him. Son never brought it up either.
7. Liberation Days
ONE MORNING, ABOUT A MONTH after Carolyn’s departure, I woke up and the world had changed. As soon as I stepped outside, Dre
am Street flashed before me in a burst of color. The commuters whizzed past on their Hondas and Chalys, their bright clothes trailing pink, orange, purple, and green across the blue-black asphalt of the road. Children, scattered in chattering pairs and trios along the sidewalks, appeared in their elementary school uniforms like moving blocks of white and navy blue. Even the drab concrete sidewalk sparkled, as if dusted by diamonds. Up until now, had I been director of Hanoi: The Movie, I would have cast the film in a muted black and white. Something miraculous had happened, though. Today, the city shined in Technicolor.
I walked across the street to where the sticky-rice vendor squatted on the sidewalk behind two shallow baskets full of steaming rice. Every morning for two or three hours, she set up a food stand in this exact same spot and served sticky rice. She arrived on foot, everything she needed dangling from the long wooden balancing pole she carried across her shoulders. She set three or four tiny wooden stools down on the sidewalk, pulled the burlap cover off her rice, and opened for business. This morning, the motorbike washers perched on the little stools, carefully scanning the morning papers. The office workers loomed above, tottering on their high heels, and the children stood shyly to the side, exact change wadded between their fingers.
The sticky-rice lady looked up at me. She was a sturdy woman with skin as mottled as a bar of Vietnamese soap. “You want yours as usual?” she hesitantly asked. Even though I frequented her stand, the sight of a Westerner always unnerved her.
I nodded. Her sticky rice came two ways, either with green bean cake shaved on top or with large grains of butter-colored corn mixed into it. I liked a combination of the two, topped by a handful of crisp fried onions. Hold the dried pork. Hold the extra splash of oil. Wrapped to go in a banana leaf.