Past the rattan shades are shapes of dark hills, sharp points of stars. Cigar smoke trickles down from the deck, where my father, Humphries and Lewis sit smoking. The tips of their cigars light the dark.
Later, when the women come to sleep, Trung lets down her hair like night falling into the boat. In a corner, my mother struggles to remove her bra and pants under her nightgown, so we don’t see her naked in the dark.
My father, Lewis, Humphries, the crew sleep up on deck. Low voices, hushed. If I listen, I hear the names of far-off places – Ia Drang, Pleiku, Khe Sanh – wash back and forth in the creaking of the boat, the lull of the waves. ‘The worst the grunts say is when you get incoming just when you open your C-ration. You don’t want to get hit but you don’t want to fall all over your stew either.’
If I listen, I hear my father, suddenly awake, plunging off the stern, whooping in the dark of the night before he hits the sea. I breathe in the sharp smell of mould from the mattresses.
Maybe my father will stay up when the others go to bed, wait for me, Katenick. Maybe if I wake up early, he’ll be there, alone. Then I’ll put down my gun and tell him. I’ll ask him to sit cross-legged with me on the temple patio, listen to the BBC. Tell him to wrap us in woollen sweaters despite the desperate heat, decipher our fortunes. Then he’ll tell me it’s OK. It isn’t our fault. We are too small and not looked after. Then he’ll kiss Frankie and put his arm around her so she won’t have to rub legs with Humphries in the dark. We’ll watch bodies like glowworms rise up from the sea.
twenty
When Frankie tells me what happened to her in the butcher shop, she doesn’t ask about the lychees. She never mentions them again. Maybe she believes it was just a bag of fruit. She’s not the one who searches out and reads the newspaper. Maybe she thinks I don’t know and she doesn’t want to be the one to tell me.
More likely it frightens her, what I did. It threatens Frankie’s position too. Because Frankie sets herself up as warrior, fighter, heroine, victim, all combined. I’m just supposed to be Katenick, muimui, little sister, follower, sidekick.
What happens to Frankie is the important story, the one that consumes her and our family that summer. Even though no one speaks of it. Even later, we never say it out loud. The lychees, the bomb at the market become my secret. One I cannot tell.
twenty-one
The picture of my father with his camouflaged Viet Cong hat reminds me of another image I had forgotten. Many years later, when I am grown up with children of my own, I am living in the same city as Lewis and Trung. One day Lewis calls up to invite me to dinner. He’s come across some old home movie he filmed using my father’s Super-8 camera. He thought I might like to see them.
At first, I’m surprised when I see Lewis. He’s shorter than I thought, wiry, intense. He’s aged, too, ravaged. Trung is elegant, slender, composed, the way I remember her. She holds out her arms.
‘Katie-ah. How nice to see you. Such a long time.’
After dinner, Trung brings hot jasmine tea and settles herself on the sofa next to me. Lewis doesn’t rush her. He fine-tunes the projector, focuses. A square of bright light illuminates the slide screen. Then a picture, a beach with mountains.
‘Tai Long Wan,’ Big Wave Bay, Lewis says, as if I’ve forgotten.
I don’t tell him I keep maps and charts on my walls like my father. That even if I shut my eyes, I can see the long, pristine stretch of sand. Beaches spread beneath precipitous green hills, nestling between the rocky arms of jagged rhyolite peninsulas. Sai Wan, Ham Tin Wan, Tai Wan, Tung Wan, I know their names. I can run my fingers along this coast. Up lines marking streams that run down from the hillsides, washing into fetid tide pools. A bridge with rickety planks, a loose rope to hold on to, lead back into paddy fields stinking of human night soil, Volunteri’s church, to villages and mangrove swamps tangled as dreams. Perhaps there’s a cave, the water rushes in and out echoing.
‘You remember Sai Kung Peninsula, up in the Northeast New Territories?’ Lewis asks. ‘Your father liked to rent an old sailing junk and take us all along.’
The Sea Dragon. The jerky camera traces her ungainly lines from the low bow up to her high stern. Along the large wooden boom, towels and clothes hang to dry over loosely furled brown sails.
There on the cushioned bench along the stern, my mother sits demurely, her legs folded to one side. Even in the heat, she’s careful about how she looks. Next to her, High Auntie sits reading a book by Allen Ginsberg.
The screen blinks and shows again a white stretch of beach. Flat, naked sand smoothed by the sea, unblemished except where tunnelling sand mites toss up wet pellets. It’s long enough to run until you can’t breathe and still you haven’t covered half of it. In the distance, I stoop to pick up a cowrie shell, or the chalk-soft bone of a cuttlefish, sun-bleached, tapered like a seed.
Me. Trung. High Auntie. Ah Bing squats fully clothed in the sea, her white shirt blotted wet. The camera zooms in on Ah Bing’s full, wide face. Her gold teeth flash in the sun. Ah Bing believes photographs are taken for ancestor worship so she’s pleased to be filmed, but also a little wary of the frivolous nature of gwailo picture-taking.
Suddenly the image is obstructed, broken apart by blurry hands and feet, too close for the lens’s focus. It’s Frankie. She turns a cartwheel right up to the camera, face, arms, legs twirling on the screen as if she would come right out. Gently, Trung lays her hand on my shoulder, comforting, making sure it’s all right for me to see Frankie. Lewis looks away. At night, we eat with bare hands under an open sky.
Lewis’s movie is black and white, marred by spots of mildew from being stored too long in the Far East. It jumps and shudders as it feeds through the projector. The motor clicketyclacks. I tuck my feet under me.
On the screen Trung is swimming, a graceful breast-stroke, her black hair piled like a pagoda on top of her head. She carries it carefully as if she’s rescuing it from her country. A pagoda she can unpin, letting her hair tumble down.
Another blink. Then the camera pans across the beach, aimlessly, as if Lewis has left it on by mistake. No, it’s a large hole he’s filming, surrounded by a mound of upturned sand. The camera lingers, waiting to catch something, an animal perhaps, a fugitive.
A thin figure rises, wild, unshaven, holding something in his hand. A ball of sand. It’s my father. He holds the ball away from his body as if it’s alive or dangerous, pulls an imaginary ring, and throws. His back is dark and bare. His arm swings out. It’s a grenade. It’s going to explode. It’s going to hit us. My father dives for cover and disappears.
I’m startled by how young, how thin my father is, fragile. He looks like I do now. But harder, more weathered and faraway. His hair is ruffled and unkempt. Dark stubble on his cheeks. It’s like the time he cut the branches to camouflage his hat. He’s Viet Cong again, impersonating the enemy. He’s not at Sai Kung at all but somewhere along the Indochina coast, staying low to avoid incoming. Perhaps he’s dug a whole tunnel system under the beach. We’ll never find him.
˜ ˜ ˜
Maybe it’s unfair the way I remember it. Maybe I’m too hard on my father. Maybe my memory exaggerates. Maybe he knew everything. He just couldn’t help us. Like we couldn’t help him. He hides in tunnels, behind his camera lenses, like I hide in the dark from Frankie, don’t answer her questions, pretend to be asleep.
˜ ˜ ˜
‘Lew cracked. The Embassy sent him home,’ my father says on his next leave. He says this to my mother in an offhand way as if Lewis has been dismissed from school. Given detention. Cracked isn’t what a grown-up does. Or even what a child is supposed to do. I’m eavesdropping so I can’t ask what he means. I think Frankie is cracking. I can’t ask about that either.
Maybe my father’s not really offhand. Maybe he’s just protecting himself. Pretending it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s cracking too. He’s got a photograph on the front cover of Time magazine of a Marine crouching, covering his head, mud flung up like paint as the
earth explodes around him.
‘“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,”’ he quotes the war photographer Robert Capa. Capa was blown up in Vietnam, when he stepped out of a French truck on to a land mine.
Lewis worked for the Embassy in Saigon. It was his job to keep track of military actions, the numbers of dead, the body counts, the kill ratios. To obfuscate his reports with official acronyms or military jargon: KIAs, KBAs, MIA, NVC, DMZ, R&R, ‘Enemy engagement’ when a Viet Cong sniper kills ten Americans before being shot out of his tree, ‘Enemy infrastructure’ to describe a village of straw huts. When he speaks to relatives from the US, he’s supposed to use a kindly, bereaved voice he can hardly stand.
My father’s job is to take photographs. To show things the way they are. He doesn’t have to say a word if he doesn’t want to.
twenty-two
Did I tell you my father loves Saigon? He finds it enchanting: the cyclos, the sampans, the breeze coming down the river at night. He loves the smells. He loves the sweat on his own body. He’s never sweated so much before.
In Saigon, my father wears white shirts. He drinks Pernod or cassis on the open terrace at the Continental Palace Hotel with other journalists, or on the roof of the Majestic, or at the Cercle Sportif. He eats Palourdes Bolognese at a restaurant with murals of Basque fishermen painted with Vietnamese faces. Sometimes he goes to Cholon, to the Arc en Ciel or other clubs. He takes his camera with him.
This is the East he read about in Greene, and Maugham and Conrad. When a car backfires, the journalists rush out to the street just as they did in Greene’s day, he says. It might be a bomb. They carry copies of The Quiet American in their back pockets. He takes Saigon Duck for a bath.
In Saigon, my father has to push his way through gangs of children who wait at the entrance of his hotel. ‘Give money. Give money,’ the children beg. They are refugees whose older sisters work the bars along Tu Do Street. GI bars with neon names like Wild West, Rainbow, Melody, Papillon. Girls no older than me and Frankie, whose fathers look the other way because their daughters make more in a night than they can make in months. Outside the cathedral, crippled beggars hobble forward, their legs blown off by land mines. Young mothers hold up their hands for money.
Once when two children ran at my father, he believed for a moment that they were the ghosts of children he had just photographed blown up along a paddy dyke. ‘Viet Cong,’ the sergeant grunted in self-defence as he kicked at the basket the children had been carrying. The basket was full of shrapnel, bits of metal the Viet Cong use for packing bombs. The children’s chests were blown open. Their faces splattered with bits of heart and lung. A young soldier threw up in the paddy field. My father took photographs.
At times, he thinks of his own father, how he came back from World War II, drunken, abusive, remote. Never talking of the things he’d seen.
Let me tell you this. In Saigon, my father smells dead bodies in his room at the Continental. The first time it happens, he tries to wash off the smell, tries to wash the insides of his nostrils with Dial soap. He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke through his nose. After that, he just feels it coming. He’s resigned to it. He lies in bed under the mosquito net and waits for the smell. The only thing he can do is go back out to the field. Fresh bodies to make the old ones stop smelling.
˜ ˜ ˜
Did I tell you my father wears Marine fatigues in the field? All the journalists and photographers do. He wears Marine-issued fatigues, boots, a helmet. He carries a canteen covered with olive-green canvas. He accompanies Marine patrols, sleeps in Marine bunkers, catches rides in Marine helicopters, eats C-rations, boils his coffee with a pinch of C4 explosive. The only things that are his own are his cameras, his notebooks, the cigarettes he keeps tucked under the strap of his helmet and a tiny bronze Buddha in his pocket. Because of his cameras, he’s afraid the Viet Cong will mistake him for the radio man and take him out first.
In the field, he doesn’t carry a gun, though sometimes he’d like to. Not because he believes in the war but because he wants to get close. Sometimes keeping alive is the only thing that makes sense. Then he envies the grunts with their guns. Then he wants a gun, not a camera. So, I’m not the only one who wants a gun.
twenty-three
Towards the end of that summer, my parents decided to send Frankie away to boarding school. We weren’t sure why. I don’t remember our parents announcing their decision. I don’t remember any discussion, any questions, reassurances. It is just something we know one day, something that happens to girls Frankie’s age when their parents live overseas. What she needs is a better school, more structure, more sport, my mother says.
But I think the real reason is that my mother’s scared of her, and tired too. Scared of the way Frankie is: physical, close, overheated, tormenting. The way she demands a testament of unconditional love – I love you no matter what – which she never gets. The way she refuses to go along.
‘They’re sending me away,’ Frankie complains. ‘I don’t want to go.’ We’re at our secret hideout behind the apartment, the ruined foundation overtaken by jungle. Frankie has carried up a ripe yellow pomelo, split open, from the garden. We shred its sections, popping the individual pulps between our teeth like monkeys.
‘Maybe you could tell them you want to stay. They can’t force you,’ I begin weakly.
‘She doesn’t want me,’ Frankie says.
We both heard our mother’s words. We crouched in the hall outside her closed door, listening to what she told our father. ‘She’s too wild, too unruly. She goes about half-naked. Spends all her time alone with Kate or Ah Bing, speaking pidgin. The school here’s second-rate. She’ll fall behind.’
‘Maybe she thinks you’ll like it better there,’ I say. I know it’s disingenuous. Frankie wants to stay here, in the jungle with me, lying on silk scarves, smoking cigarettes, sucking the tangy pulp of pomelo. At the end of the summer, she wants to return with me to our second-rate school, with its long verandas, mouldy classrooms, rain cascading down drains. She wants to play netball in the small cement playground where palms and elephant leaves press in against the wire fence. Spend our fifty-cent pieces on ice lollies and blackcurrant pastilles at the tuck shop. Play ‘tig’ with our British classmates. Girls in Frankie’s class who shorten their skirts, hang their arms around boys, smoke cigarettes under a bridge along Bowen Path.
The Prisoner of War School, we call it. The building was a hospital where the Japanese interned sickly POWs. Ah Bing says the Japanese tortured and killed patients there, ones who wouldn’t tell them things. People heard screaming. Just beyond the playground, she points out where the hospital incinerator and morgue once stood.
Sometimes at lunch, I go to the library. The deaf boy is there. He sits at a long wooden table, reading a book, The Ecology of the Hong Kong Seashore. Along the shelves are three crumbling volumes of Scottish history, a Young Ladies’ Guide to Dressage and Riding Etiquette. When the deaf boy looks up at me, the pages of his book flip backwards and forwards in the wake of a large, standing fan. He doesn’t notice because he can’t hear.
‘She’s scared of me,’ Frankie says. ‘I’m not like you. I don’t do what she says. She’s scared I might even get you in trouble.’
You already have, I think. It’s because of you I’m secret sister, guardian, bearer of secrets heavy as lychees. When we go out with Ah Bing, I keep a lookout for the men from Lantau. I feel nauseous when I see a policeman.
I wish I could walk over to the deaf boy, gently close his book. I’d like to touch his face, the way I would touch the burned boy’s if I could. I think these things but don’t say them.
Is it because of me they’re sending her away, to protect me? Without Frankie, who am I?
‘I don’t want you to go,’ I say.
‘They can’t force me.’
˜ ˜ ˜
It’s because they’re sending her away that Frankie becomes more reckless, more desperate.
If she gets in enough trouble, they’ll have to keep her, let her stay. Maybe they’ll realize she’s not ready to go off on her own; she needs looking after, their protection. The butcher shop was only the beginning.
My father doesn’t see us. He doesn’t come with us to the temple to hear Ah Sun chant our fortunes. That’s why Frankie flirts with my father’s friends, Humphries, Pym, and leans too close, falling against them when she giggles, sneaking sips of wine from their glasses. It’s because she has to compete. With Vietnam, pronounced nahm (not nam) with a soft, redolent ah. Vietnahm with its parrot-green fields, jungle-covered hills, its translucent caves where Buddhas swim, its children burned by napalm. Their clothes dissolve under searing jelly, their skin bubbles.
Look at me, notice me, love me, Frankie cries. No one hears. Friends laugh. This is something that happens to girls Frankie’s age. No need to worry. It’s not her country that’s under attack. It’s not her village burning. And soon she’ll be going to boarding school. In this way, my mother plans to extract her primly from the mess she’s getting herself into. The same way Humphries pries her hands off him on the junk and drops her in the sea.
‘Pig!’ Frankie splutters, her legs thrashing trails of phosphorescence. Why does she have to be so demanding, so selfish, so present?
White Ghost Girls Page 8