The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  The year she and Tung moved into their own home, Nu was able to stop peddling soup in the market and, instead, open a noodle soup stall. She rented space on the southeast corner of the intersection on Route 1. The southeast locations were the most desirable, as the wide right turning there onto the secondary road afforded ample room for vehicles to park. On one side of her stall was a lemon meringue pie and coffee stall, on the other, a newspaper vendor. The sign she raised above her shop said “Chao Long Thanh Tung,” which combined, in a way pleasant to the ear, her husband’s name Tung (Thanh signifies male) with the local specialty soup, chao long. This—rice congee made from a stock of pork hock, liver and heart and flavored with gelled pork blood, which turns it a rich reddish-brown—was fare that was available up and down the strip. However, Nu’s other fare, in particular, the soft thinness of her banh canh served in a soup delicately fragrant, and the transparency of her banh trang offered with the freshest lettuce, leanest pork and finest julienned vegetables, showed both a respect for the healthy eating that epitomized the luxury of the south and a sensuous regard for color, taste and texture. Not once did Nu have to burn a paper figure to chase the evil spirits that keep away business.

  Profits accumulated. Nu traded in the low bamboo stools that sat inches off the ground for regular stools and tables. She expanded into an adjacent stall. Grandmother Tao helped with shopping and trimming vegetables—she stopped short of cooking meat on account of her vegetarianism. Nu’s youngest sister, Auntie Be, did the heavy chores of cleaning and carrying water from the well. Nu expected her children, upon reaching seven or eight years of age, to run errands at the market before and after school, and eventually, to help serve customers. Occasionally, Tung helped serve or worked the cash, but generally he avoided the shop, disliking the noise and commotion.

  After seven years, in 1960, Nu was able to buy the space. In 1962, with the arrival in Vietnam of the Americans, business abounded and profits soared. The massive infusion of American military aid doubled and tripled wages, turning southerners overnight into consumers with a frenzy for spending. Nu expanded her shop into a ten-table, eighty-stool establishment. It took on an air of permanence: where once the floor was packed earth, now it was redone in smooth cement; gone were the bamboo stools and tables, and in their place were carved matching ones of wood. The cooking, once done on a charcoal brazier, was now done in commercial-sized cast-iron pots, and customers ate from porcelain dishes rimmed in gold, the pots and dishes bought from Cambodian traders. On her busiest days, Nu served as many as four hundred bowls of soup and one thousand rice-paper wraps.

  Making banh canh delivered its ultimate reward in 1967. By then, Tung and Nu had six children, three girls and three boys, who doubled up in hammocks that hung everywhere. Nu had made profits enough to realize every peasant’s ambition and dream: to build a worthy house that would honor the family’s past and secure its future. The couple decided to build their new house nearby, to stay near the family. Three of Nu’s four sisters, along with Grandfather Kiem and Grandmother Tao, lived as if within a family compound. The first sister, Auntie Tiem, had moved upon her marriage to the town of Tay Ninh. The second, Auntie Anh, and her husband had built an unassuming house next door to her parents, as Tung and Nu had done. The fourth sister, Auntie Be, deemed unmarriageable because she was afflicted with seizures, lived at home. Grandfather Kiem and Grandmother Tao presided as patriarch and matriarch to more than kin. In his generosity, Grandfather Kiem invited Caodai families driven from their homes by the bombing in Tay Ninh province to squat on his lands. At any given time, he hosted ten or twelve peasant families, each having put up the typical peasant’s hut: framed in palm fronds and filled in with mud, with a floor of pounded earth and a roof of thatch, two doorways and no windows. When the families moved on, new ones would take their place.

  Tung and Nu purchased two and a half acres several minutes farther down the footpath. Tung enclosed their new property with a high iron fence. The family watched as their new house took shape. Constructed in the modern way, with masonry walls and a roof of ceramic tile, it would not be vulnerable to fire like their old wood-and-brick house or the typical peasant’s mud-and-thatch house, which also heated up during the day and leaked during heavy rains. But its ornate roof lines, fine woodworking in the doors and wrought-iron grilles over the windows would also honor traditional design.

  Instead of the usual two entrances, it had seven. Instead of one room, three: a front reception room; a cavernous back room, which was the family’s private living quarters, where partitions would enclose four sleeping areas; and a third room behind that for the hearth. A few steps out the back was a cement outbuilding housing a French squatting toilet and a cistern for washing and showering. Separating the front room from the back was a breezeway with a floor of smooth cement that extended into a patio around the entire outside. The old house would have fit several times over into the new.

  The interior of the house was finished and furnished to reflect a family nourished by success. The floor was of red tiles. Carved beams crisscrossed the vaulted ceilings. Columns, formed out of single trees, fluted and hand-painted, stood four across in the reception room, and in the back room, four across and three deep. In the old home, the bamboo furniture had to be replaced every few years. The new house was to have furniture of wood. The only item the family could afford to have made of teak, a wood from the north that becomes darker and shinier with each generation of use, was the new van, the centerpiece of every home, which was by night a bed and by day a divan, and during festivities, a platform for a feasting table. The new ancestral altar was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the bench before it was carved and embossed with fans. A local furniture-maker was engaged to make beds, armoires, mirror frames and benches of cam lai, the sturdy, blond wood that was the choice of the nouveaux riches of the south, which Tung and Nu had to travel one province over to buy. There would be other modern touches, such as cushions on the benches. Tung also purchased a generator to power a pump to bring water from the well into the house. It would also run the new refrigerator and television. Finally, Tung and Nu had a ham dug inside the house, lined with thick cement, the entrance to which was a hole in the back wall of the family’s living quarters. Though the ham was designed to be a bomb shelter, they never expected to use it for its intended purpose; they built it in deference to the fad among the wealthy home-builders in the south.

  By his calculation, Tung had ascended to the position of Trang Bang’s third-richest peasant. The other two, who lived nearer the business district, were herbalists who made their money dispensing Chinese herbal medicines and patent medicines from Saigon. Both had fine houses. Both owned cars—one had three—while Tung had only just purchased the family’s first motorscooter. Regardless, all three would only ever be farmers; there was no other station in hamlet life. The difference was that the well-off farmer and his descendants might never again have to work in the fields. And so, it gave neither Tung and Nu nor their children discomfort to recall the familiar child’s taunt to decry another’s humble standing: “Your mother is nothing but a noodle soup maker!” Much had been built on the profits of Nu’s cooking.

  TUNG AND NU CHOSE WHAT THEY BELIEVED to be an auspicious day to move from their old home to the new: Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, when the ancestral spirits return from heaven for their annual three-day visit with the family. In the Western calendar, the eve of Tet in 1968 corresponded to January 30. By then Tung and Nu were ready for the festivities. The new house was resplendent. The four pillars on the raised veranda were festooned with garlands of fragrant flowers. Ornamental peach blossoms in polychrome pots had been coaxed to blossom for the holiday. A riot of pomelos, mangos and bananas spilled from a multitude of baskets. To welcome the ancestral spirits, the double-louvered doors of the three front entrances were fastened back. Paper charms hung from the lintels to ward off errant evil spirits who might bring bad luck.

  For days, Great Uncle had been di
recting all hands, including the children, to decorating, inside and out, top to bottom. Tung had adorned the ancestral altar and dusted off the photographs of the dead there. For the past week, Nu had been at the hearth, preparing the traditional glutinous rice cakes, sweet soups and candied fruits.

  In the front reception room, Tung and Nu, Great Uncle and the couple’s six children, ranging in age from two years old to fifteen, awaited the midnight hour. When the clock struck, Tung, as the male head of the household, would greet the spirits arriving from heaven by placing the rice cakes and soybean soup on the ancestral altar, beside the lighted incense and beneath the photographs there. He would offer prayers to the spirits of ancestors, and they would bless the celebrations, and the feasting could begin. This Tet, might not the spirits render a favorable verdict on the conduct of the family over the past year, so that their good luck could continue?

  Just short of midnight came rapid-fire reports from somewhere distant in the town. Somebody prematurely setting off firecrackers, family members assumed, the usual overexuberance. The crackle of small explosions grew, and then, a loud crump split the night air, followed by the sound of a shell hitting nearby treetops.

  “Phao kick!” someone screamed, recognizing the sound of mortar fire. “Hurry! Hurry! Into the ham!” The adults herded the uncomprehending children through to the back of the house and lowered them into the hole in the back wall there.

  “WAR HITS SAIGON!” BLARED THE HEADLINE of a newspaper in Washington, D.C. Americans watching the television news on the evening of January 31 saw gunfights and shelling on the streets of the capital of South Vietnam. The news showed the Communists attacking a target that was thought to be invulnerable: the American embassy. At three o’clock on the morning of Tet in Saigon, nineteen Viet Cong commandos had broken through the defenses of the compound. Not until six and a half hours later, with the bodies of five Americans and the Viet Cong invaders bloodying the ground, had American troops secured the embassy.

  In what would become known as the Tet Offensive, the Communists struck in a surprise countrywide attack. The first surprise was that they had chosen to do so during the holiday of Tet, normally a time of truce imposed by the Communists themselves. The second was that this was an urban offensive, displaying the enemy’s ability to reach from the countryside into the cities, a strength of the enemy heretofore not only unknown but unimaginable. Small teams of Viet Cong commandos attacked more than one hundred towns, including provincial capitals and district towns, across South Vietnam. It was only to the northernmost of South Vietnam’s forty-three provinces that Hanoi sent mainforce soldiers from North Vietnam. So unthinkable was it that the Viet Cong could penetrate Saigon that the Americans had left the city’s defenses to the South Vietnamese forces.

  Television newscasts of the Tet Offensive brought the once distant war into the living rooms of America. In the Communists’ attack on the embassy in Saigon, Americans saw an enemy menacing the doorstep of American power. The second day of the offensive produced one of the war’s most unforgettable and disturbing images. A cameraman with the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) and a photographer with the Associated Press (AP) news agency recorded on a Saigon street the city’s chief of police, a general, summarily executing a flinching Viet Cong suspect with a point-blank shot to the head.

  In most towns, the offensive was over in hours, or, as in Saigon, days. In Trang Bang, isolated mortar and sniper fire would continue to surprise for a few days, like leftover firecrackers. The bloodiest and longest battle of the offensive would be for the imperial city of Hue in the central highlands. American and South Vietnamese government troops would not recapture the city for twenty-six days, during which time ruthless Viet Cong teams would search house to house, rounding up and executing some three thousand civilians.

  While the Communists suffered horrifically high casualties in the Tet Offensive and failed in their objective to spur southerners into a general uprising, where the offensive succeeded was in shattering the American public’s belief in its own government’s pronouncements that the war was being won. American correspondents in Saigon had long been annoying the U.S. administration by daily documenting the war in intimate images of violence and death and loss, rather than of military bravura. However, the American public had largely been in favor of engagement at the start of the war, and continued to feel that way even as casualties mounted and Americans came home in body bags. The American media’s coverage of the offensive forced the public to begin its own agonized moralizing about the kind of war America had got itself mired in, and to rethink the nation’s involvement.

  Within two months of the Tet Offensive, President Johnson, citing the public’s divided reaction to the war, made the dramatic announcement that he was not standing for reelection. He began a process of peace talks in Paris and instituted plans to reduce American troop strength in Vietnam (1968 saw American troop strength peak at half a million). That summer would be marred by the assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy, and by antiwar protesters rioting outside the Democratic convention hall in Chicago. The American electorate sent Richard Nixon to the White House, on the strength of his campaign promising a “secret plan” to end America’s war in Vietnam.

  PHUC WOULD REMEMBER NOTHING OF THE family’s life in the old house or of the Tet Offensive. Her memories began in the new house, when she was almost five. Her family’s move there was delayed two weeks in order to repair shrapnel damage from mortar fire, replace roof tiles and patch pockmarked walls. Their first home improvement was to reinforce the ham with best-quality American steel. All manner of imported supplies, originally destined for American military warehouses in South Vietnam or for use by the South Vietnamese military, readily found their way onto local black markets.

  A day in the life of the “big house” began before dawn. At half past one, after about three hours’ sleep, Nu would ease herself out of the van, careful not to disturb her sleeping husband and the youngest baby there. On her way out the back door, she picked up a pair of flat baskets. She made her way by a fire lamp that Great Uncle had made by filling a yard-long piece of thick bamboo with rendered pork fat. Nu would head for the market to buy her day’s requirements of banh canh (to keep up with demand for her soup, she bought fresh noodles, but she continued to make her own banh trang, the rice-paper wraps), water chestnuts, bean sprouts, tofu, carrots, cucumbers and lemon grass, before heading for the shop back along the highway. Grandmother Tao joined her in the predawn, helping to chop and cut. The bamboo curtain was raised at five in the morning for the first customers.

  Long after the laziest roosters had woken, Phuc and her siblings rose for the day. Their father, Tung, was sometimes already about the village, doing whatever it was that men of leisure and prestige did—share strong tea, read a classic Chinese or Vietnamese folktale, gamble with cards, smoke; the latter two were pastimes for which he had a particular fondness. Tung, Nu and Great Uncle shared the outdoor chores. The family raised pigs for market. The pens in the back held one hundred sows, and roaming freely were a few chickens and ducks. And then there was the garden. The more than one hundred fruit trees on their property produced guava—to be precise, forty-two were guava trees; their crunchy, tart fruit, sprinkled with salt, was a local favorite—pomelo, jackfruit, sapota, mango, pineapple, coconuts, longan, green-skinned oranges, lemon and lime. Tung also experimented with fruits considered exotic in Vietnam, such as peaches. Only papaya and banana plants required no care; skill and patience were needed to make the other fruit trees produce. Palm fronds had to be tied around tree trunks to deter rats; worms that had bored into plants had to be removed; shade plants had to be cultivated to keep small plants from wilting.

  It fell to the old man, Great Uncle, to get the children off to school. For their breakfast, he collected eggs from the chickens and picked rau mau from the garden, a herb that went well with cooked chick embryos. All the children liked best what they chose on their ow
n, so Great Uncle gave them dong to pay the passing peddlers, whose hampers had on offer still-warm baguettes, sweet egg breads and a favorite, sticky rice mixed with grated coconut, sugar and grilled sesame seeds. When the four older siblings flew out the door, books under their arms, left behind were Phuc and the youngest, a baby.

  Phuc would wave goodbye to the old man, push open the wrought-iron gate and skip down the footpath that dodged banana plants and rose up over the bumpy roots of shade trees. A few minutes later, she’d be at Grandmother Tao’s. She and the neighborhood children and a cousin whiled away mornings in Grandfather Kiem’s pomelo grove. They played at being buyers and sellers at the market, using leaves for money. The boys saw tree branches as guns they could use in games of war. The girls left them to it, instead reenacting princess roles from Vietnamese folk legends. Mid-morning, Grandmother Tao, back from the noodle shop, would offer a treat of a cooked sweet or a dessert-drink mixed with crushed ice. Around noon, Great Uncle’s voice summoned Phuc home. She would arrive to a table already laid with rice and, typically, roasted chicken or grilled fish and fresh-picked vegetables from the garden.

  As the afternoon sun baked the day in growing idleness, play shifted indoors. The younger neighborhood children and cousins, together with those who went only mornings to school (full days started in the third grade), congregated in the big house. The old man would take the baby, along with whichever young ones wanted to nestle alongside, into a hammock and rock and sing them to sleep. Whenever the old man himself fell asleep, Phuc teased him by dropping salt onto his lips or dripping water from the hose into his belly button, so that he would chase her around the garden. The arrival of the afternoon rains announced the children’s favorite pastime: standing naked in the downpour off the roof of the breezeway so that the current of warm water sent them sliding on their backsides along the smooth cement floor. Great Uncle summoned them for a late-afternoon snack of fruit. Often, the family bought an entire pedicab’s load of fruit that they didn’t grow, such as watermelons.