The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  When Mrs. Hoa came to the New Saigon on Wednesday afternoon of the following week, I was in the wooden loft my father had hammered together above the kitchenware at the rear of the store. We stored enough long-grain rice in the loft to feed a village, stacked nearly to the ceiling in burlap sacks of ten, twenty-five, and fifty pounds. The clean carpet scent of jasmine rice permeated the air as I sat astride a dike of rice sacks, reading about Reconstruction. I had reached the part about the scalawags and carpetbaggers who had come from the North to help rebuild, or perhaps swindle, the South, when I saw Mrs. Hoa at the doorway, wearing the white outfit from her first visit.

  By the way my mother gripped the sides of the cash register as if it were a canoe rocking in the waves while Mrs. Hoa talked to her, I knew there would be trouble. I climbed down the ladder, made my way past aisles stocked with condensed milk and cellophane noodles, shrimp chips and dried cuttlefish, lychees and green mangoes, ducking my head to avoid the yellow strips of sticky flypaper dangling from the ceiling, and reached the front of the store as my mother was saying, “I’m not giving you any money.” A crack showed in her foundation, a line creasing her cheek from nose to jawbone. “I work hard for my money. What do you do? You’re nothing but a thief and an extortionist, making people think they can still fight this war.”

  I stood behind a row of customers, one of them reading the same mimeograph Mrs. Hoa gave me in church. Mrs. Hoa’s face had turned as white as her outfit, and red lipstick smeared her ochre teeth, bared in fury. She glared at the customers and said, “You heard her, didn’t you? She doesn’t support the cause. If she’s not a Communist, she’s just as bad as a Communist. If you shop here, you’re helping Communists.”

  Mrs. Hoa slammed a stack of mimeographs onto the counter by the register, and with that, she left. My mother stared at my father at the register across from her, and neither said a word as the Datsun sputtered into life outside. The customers in front of me shifted uneasily. Within an hour, they would be on their telephones, all telling their friends, who in turn would tell their friends, who then would tell more people, until everyone in the community knew. My mother turned to the customers with her face as carefully composed as the letters she sent to her relatives, showing no signs of worry, and said, “Who’s next?”

  Throughout the rest of the day, my mother made no mention of Mrs. Hoa, and I thought that she would simply ignore her, hoping she would not return. But the moment we got into the car, my mother began talking about her counterattack, and I realized that she had been simmering for hours, keeping quiet for the sake of the customers. My mother would go to Mrs. Hoa and demand an apology, for her accusation could cost my mother her reputation and her business, given the depth of anti-Communist fervor in our Vietnamese community. My mother would call Mrs. Hoa a disgrace and slap her if she refused. My mother would point out the hopelessness and self-delusion of Mrs. Hoa’s cause, reducing her to tears with logic. As my mother rehearsed her plans, my father said nothing, and neither did I. We knew better than to oppose her, and when we reached our house, he went wordlessly inside to start dinner, as instructed. My mother drove on to Mrs. Hoa’s house, taking me with her because, she said, “That woman won’t do anything crazy with you there.”

  It was eight thirty when my mother parked the car in Mrs. Hoa’s driveway, behind the Datsun. Mrs. Hoa answered the door wearing an orange tank top and a pair of shorts in a purple floral print. Her hair was pinned back in a bun and her face, bereft of mascara, lipstick, or foundation was creviced, pitted, and cracked—it belonged to a woman years older. Her small breasts were no bigger than those of Emmy Tsuchida, and a map of varicose veins on her skinny thighs and shins led south to gnarled toes, the yellowing nails spotted with red dabs of chipped polish.

  “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Hoa said.

  “I want to speak to you,” my mother said. “Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

  Mrs. Hoa hesitated and then stepped back begrudgingly. We took off our shoes and picked our way past the loafers, sneakers, pumps, and flip-flops jammed around the door. Racks on wheels, crammed with hangers for girls’ clothes, hid the window, while a pair of bunk beds ran along two walls of the living room. In the center was a long folding table, stacked with notebooks and textbooks.

  “We’re having dinner,” Mrs. Hoa said. Other voices rang from the dining room. An aerosol of grease clung to the air, along with the warm, wet sock odor of cooked rice. “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Yes.” If my mother was surprised at Mrs. Hoa’s politeness, she didn’t show it. “I’d like to talk in private.”

  Mrs. Hoa shrugged and led us past the dining room. At the packed table sat eight or nine people with heads turned our way, little girls with bowl cuts, a quartet of grandparents, and a man and woman around my mother’s age, the shadows under their eyes so pronounced they looked as if someone had punched them again and again. Just as crowded was Mrs. Hoa’s bedroom, the first one down the hall. An industrial steel-frame table, a sewing machine fastened to it, dominated the middle of the room, while the velvet ao dai and the white jacket and pants hung from the bunk bed, blocking the window. Mrs. Hoa sat on the only chair, behind the sewing machine, and said, “What do you want?”

  My mother glanced at the closet, doors removed to reveal hand-built pine shelves stacked with bolts of silk and cotton. One of the two clothing racks behind Mrs. Hoa was hung with everyday clothing—women’s slacks and blouses, men’s suits and dress shirts—while the other was hung with uniforms, olive-green fatigues and camouflage outfits patterned with blotches of brown, black, and green in varying shades, the same kind issued to the marines who had liberated Grenada not long ago. My mother said, “You tailor uniforms for the soldiers?”

  “American sizes are too large for Vietnamese men and the proportions aren’t right. Plus the men want their names sewn on, and their ranks and units.” Mrs. Hoa reached under the sewing table and lifted a cardboard box, and when we leaned over the table to peek inside, we saw plastic sandwich bags filled with chevrons and the colorful badges of Vietnamese units. “Some of these uniforms are for the guerrilla army in Thailand, but others are for our men here.”

  I wondered if she meant the rumored secret front, or the men my father’s age and younger that I saw at Tet festivals, veterans of the vanquished South Vietnamese army who welcomed the New Year by wearing military uniforms and checking tickets at the fairgrounds where the festivals happened.

  “Your husband’s a soldier?” my mother said.

  “He’s a commando. The CIA parachuted him into the north in 1963. I haven’t heard from him since.” Mrs. Hoa spoke without any change in inflection, clutching the box to her chest. “The Americans sent my younger son’s division to Laos in 1972. He never returned. As for my eldest son, he was in the army, too. The Communists killed him. I buried him in Bien Hoa in 1969. My daughter wrote to tell me the Communists scratched the eyes out of the picture on his grave.”

  My mother was silent, fingering a tiger-stripe camouflage jacket hanging from the rack. At last, she said, “I’m sorry to hear about your husband and your sons.”

  “Sorry for what?” Mrs. Hoa’s voice was shrill. “Whoever said my husband was dead? No one saw him die. No one saw my youngest son die, either. They’re alive, and no one like you is going to tell me otherwise.”

  I studied the patterns in the beige carpet, shapes of a frog and a tree, trapped there along with odors of garlic and sesame, sweat and moisturizer. My mother broke the silence by opening her purse and digging inside. From the crumpling of paper, I knew she was opening the envelope with the day’s cash. She extracted two hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the sewing table in front of Mrs. Hoa, smoothing the face of Benjamin Franklin on each bill, the same way she ran her palm over my hair before entering church.

  “That’s it,” my mother said. “That’s all I have.”

  I calculated the cans of soup, the po
unds of rice, and the hours of standing on her feet that made those two hundred dollars possible, and I was astonished that my mother had surrendered the money. When Mrs. Hoa looked at the cash, I thought she might demand the five hundred dollars she’d asked for, but she swept up the bills, folded them, and dropped them into the box on her lap. As she and my mother stared at each other after that, I thought about how years ago my mother had bribed a general’s wife with an ounce of gold, buying my father’s freedom from the draft. My mother had mentioned the incident one night to my father as they inspected another ounce they had just purchased, and he, glancing at me, had said, “Let’s not talk about that.” They would file this incident with Mrs. Hoa under the same category of things better left unspoken.

  “We’ll see ourselves out,” my mother said.

  “You see how the Communists weren’t satisfied with killing my son once?” Mrs. Hoa aimed her gaze at me. “They killed him twice when they desecrated his grave. They don’t respect anybody, not even the dead.”

  Her voice was urgent, and when she suddenly leaned forward, I was afraid she was going to reach across the sewing machine and grasp my hand. I willed myself not to back away from her fingers, two of them bandaged as if she had pricked herself with needles. I felt that I had to say something, and so I said, “I’m sorry.” I meant that I was sorry for all that had happened, not only to her but also to my mother, the accumulation of everything I could do nothing about. My apology made utterly no difference, but Mrs. Hoa nodded gravely, as if understanding my intentions. In a subdued tone, she said, “I know you are.”

  Those were her last words to me. She did not say good-bye when we left, and indeed, did not even look at us, for as my mother closed the bedroom door, Mrs. Hoa was gazing down into the box, her bent head revealing a furrow of white roots running through her scalp, where the hair’s natural color revealed itself along a receding tide of black dye. It was a trivial secret, but one I would remember as vividly as my feeling that while some people are haunted by the dead, others are haunted by the living.

  When my mother exited the freeway, she surprised me for the second time. She pulled into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven off the exit, two blocks from home, and said, “You’ve been such a good boy. Let’s get you a treat.” I didn’t know what to say. My parents did not grant me so much as an allowance. When I had asked for one in the fourth grade, my father had frowned and said, “Let me think it over.” The next night he handed me an itemized list of expenses that included my birth, feeding, education, and clothing, the sum total being $24,376. “This doesn’t include emotional aggravation, compound interest, or future expenses,” my father said. “Now when can you start paying me an allowance?”

  My mother stopped under the bright lights at the door of the 7-Eleven, pulled a crisp five-dollar bill out of her purse, and handed it to me. “Go buy,” she said in English, motioning me inside. Whenever she spoke in English, her voice took on a higher pitch, as if instead of coming from inside her, the language was outside, squeezing her by the throat. “Anything you want.”

  I left her on the sidewalk and went in, the five-dollar bill as slick as wax paper in my hand, remembering how my mother’s lips moved whenever she used the fingers of one hand to count on the fingers of her other hand. The 7-Eleven was empty except for the two Sikh men at the registers, who gave me bored looks and returned to their conversation. Disinfectant tinted the air. I ignored the bank of arcade games and the racks of comic books, even though the covers of Superman and Iron Man caught my eye and the electronic whirring of Pac-Man called to me. Past the cleaning products and canned soups was an aisle stocked with chips, cookies, and candy. I glanced down the aisle, saw the glint of gold foil on a chocolate bar, and froze. While the clerks chatted in a language I could not understand, I hesitated, yearning to take everything home but unable to choose.

  any unexpected things had happened to Arthur Arellano, and the transformation of his modest garage into a warehouse, stacked with boxes upon cardboard boxes of counterfeit goods, was far from the most surprising. Written on the boxes were names like Chanel, Versace, and Givenchy, designers of luxuries far beyond the reach of Arthur and his wife, Norma. Their presence made Arthur uneasy, and so it was that in the week after Louis Vu delivered this unforeseen wealth to the Arellanos, Arthur found himself slipping out of his rented house at odd hours, stealing down the pebbly driveway past his Chevy Nova, and opening the garage door to ponder the goods with which he was now living so intimately.

  Even under the cover of night, Arthur resisted the urge to pocket a Prada wallet or a pair of Yves Saint Laurent cuff links, even though Louis ended nearly every phone call by saying, “Help yourself.” But Arthur could not help himself, for he was troubled by a lingering sense of guilt and a fear of the law, trepidations that Louis addressed during their weekly lunch at Brodard’s, where, under Louis’s tutelage, Arthur had cultivated a keen taste for Vietnamese fare. According to Louis, Brodard’s was the finest example of such cuisine in the Little Saigon of Orange County. As Arthur ate the first course on their most recent visit, a succulent salad of rare beef sliced paper-thin and marinated in lemon and ginger grass, a cousin to the ceviche he loved, he wondered how the same dish would taste in Vietnam. Usually Louis would hold forth on how the dishes at Brodard’s were even tastier than those in the homeland itself, but as the waiter cleared away the plate, Louis chose another subject: why his business did more good than harm.

  “It’s like beautiful people and ugly people,” Louis said. “Beautiful people can’t let on that they need ugly people. But without the ugly, the beautiful wouldn’t look half so good. Am I right? Tell me I’m right.”

  Arthur eyed the next course the waiter was slipping onto their table, six roasted squab fetchingly arrayed on a bed of romaine lettuce. “I suppose you’re right,” said Arthur, whose grasp of capitalism was tenuous at best. “Those look delicious.”

  “The moral of the story is this,” Louis said, choosing a bird for himself. “The more fakes there are, the more that people who can’t buy the real things want them. And the more people buy the fakes, the more the real things are worth. Everybody wins.”

  “That’s the way you see things,” said Arthur, lifting a squab by its slender little leg. “But don’t you think you’re just telling yourself what you want to hear?”

  “Of course I’m telling myself what I want to hear!” Louis shook his head in mock exasperation, his eyes wide behind his sculptural Dolce & Gabbana eyeglasses. “We all tell ourselves what we want to hear. The point, Arthur, is this: Do you want to hear what I’m telling myself?”

  Arthur had indeed wanted to hear the many rhetorical questions posed by Louis over the past few months. For example, Louis had said, consider his eyeglasses, manufactured in the same factory that produced the real D & G frames, but after hours, with ghost workers whose shadow labor resulted in a product that cost two hundred dollars less. For those with limited income, didn’t the right to own some Italian style trump any possible losses to Dolce & Gabbana? Or, Louis went on, think about Montblanc. Arthur had never thought about Montblanc and did not know it was a pen company until Louis told him. Did it suffer more than its workers in Wengang, China, Louis asked, if those workers could not make their replicas of the very expensive originals? Although Arthur had no idea what Wengang looked like, he could conjure up a blurry image of the faraway Chinese, dark haired, tight eyed, and nimble, somewhat like Louis himself.

  “I’m hearing what you’re telling me,” Arthur said, watching Louis eat his squab with the bird perched between thumbs and index fingers, his pinkies pointed upward and outward. “Otherwise your things wouldn’t be in our garage.”

  “Hopefully you’ve been listening and not just hearing,” said Louis. “Money’s to be made, Arthur. Good money.”

  But for all of Louis’s talk of profits, Arthur and Norma had refused the ten percent commission Louis had offered. Lending Louis th
eir garage was an act of sympathy stirred by the sight of his apartment, a one-bedroom cave doubling as a warehouse. The loan was also a way of paying back Louis’s father, who had saved Arthur’s life last year, however inadvertently. As Louis nibbled on the squab, Arthur was moved once more by the memory of Men Vu, a man he had never met.

  “Keep those boxes in our garage,” Arthur said. “Like I told you, it’s our gift.”

  Before Louis could respond, Arthur’s cell phone buzzed. The text message was from Norma: pick up dry cleaning. After Louis leaned over to read the message, he poked Arthur in the shoulder and said, “You should pick up some flowers for Norma as well.” Arthur meant to ask what kind of flowers he should get for his wife along with her clothing, but the arrival of the bananas flambé, Arthur’s favorite dessert, distracted him from doing so. Even though he had the nagging sense throughout the afternoon of there being something he needed to do, what that was he could not remember. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the waiter lighting the thimble-size pitcher of rum and pouring the flaming liquor over the bananas, a spectacle that never ceased to seduce him.

  The most unexpected thing to happen to Arthur Arellano, and the fateful event that brought him together with Louis Vu, was the failure of his liver, an organ to which Arthur had given much less thought than his nose, or his big toe, or even his right hand, all of which he could have lived without, however uncomfortably. Thus, when his liver began dying a premature death some eighteen months ago, Arthur was unprepared in every way except for having health insurance, courtesy of his younger brother and employer, Martín. The insurance covered his visit to Dr. P. K. Viswanathan, who explained that Arthur’s liver was the unwitting victim of a disease Arthur understood only in its parts: auto, immune, hepatitis. Swiveling in his seat as he talked, the doctor said, “Autoimmune hepatitis means that your body no longer recognizes your liver as a part of itself. When this happens, your body rejects your liver.”