by Ho Anh Thai
Thế had been in Paris since the beginning, and had done nothing to her to make her scream so tragically.
My sister-in-law still hadn’t finished when a squadron of American planes appeared. Everyone jumped into a shelter beneath a wooden screen. Only my sister-in-law and the midwife remained above—just the two of them, face to face with the pirates of the sky. Everyone jumped as the roaring of a bomb erupted all around us and the surface of the earth trembled and shook as if it were in the throes of febrile convulsions. Above our heads my sister-in-law, who had continued her screaming, was suddenly quiet. The always-daring Phũ couldn’t handle staying inside anymore and finally emerged from his mother, thanks in part to a bomb’s exploding so close by that people soiled their pants. Then the squadron of planes left, as if the sole mission of that wave of attacks had been to help her give birth.
My old auntie and two other women rushed out of the shelter to help the midwife. I sat there with a handful of my auntie’s children. The whole group of youngsters was sitting with eyes glued to the pairs of ladies’ legs clad in black pants and running back and forth above our heads. From the edge of the wooden platform, drops of red blood began to drip like rivulets of rainwater.
In this manner, Phũ came into the world: a purple-faced kid weighing 4.9 kilos, stubbornly determined not to cry. The midwife put him aside in order to save his mother, who had fainted and was showing signs of dangerous complications. She placed him into a flat basket in front of the awning and turned to his mother. Just then the temple-destroying village vice deputy rushed in, screaming for more laborers to go fill in the craters left in the fields by the American rockets. He saw the pitiful child lying in the basket, surrounded by flies, and—feeling sorry for this uncommonly chubby little baby—grabbed him by his ankles and held him upside down as if he were holding a puppy. Then he slapped his bottom over and over, saying, “Young master, today is the first day of the month! A son born on the first day of the lunar month should be as big and strong as a robber,1 but you just lie there and let the ants crawl over you!” It was the kind of exhortation that could have driven two otherwise self-respecting young men to pick up knives and stab each other, let alone a little baby that had been about to die a moment ago. The baby suddenly pulled back, contorted his body, snorted snot from his nose and drool from his mouth, and burst out crying. A robust and hearty cry. In the end he had conquered fate, thanks to the help of an atheistic cadre.
Following the advice of the midwife, my sister-in-law went to get a horoscope reading for her baby. The horoscope reader furtively gave readings to all the good people of the village, except the temple-destroying deputy chairman, the widow that he called a total prostitute, and a handful of drifters. The reader reported that Phũ had a predetermined fate: he could be killed easily by the earth.
Who doesn’t die from the earth? The earth destroys everyone—noble or vile, rich or poor, virtuous or sinful. Phũ, it was warned, would have a period of hardship during his twenty-fourth year during which he could even die. But if he could get through it, he would become extremely wealthy. He was a son of the first day of the lunar month and would rise to the top and take charge anywhere he went, able to defeat any opponent. My sister-in-law decided to go to the fortuneteller, even though scientific cadres risked tarnishing their reputations during this arrogantly self-assured era of state subsidies, when many believed that fortunetelling was just a way of taking advantage of the illiterate masses, who were willing to go to ridiculous lengths to learn their futures. By the time the market economy era arrived, by the time they spent the money on building the hotel—in short, by the time they were moving from a condition of non-productivity to a condition of private ownership—it seemed as if she had all but forgotten about Phũ’s horoscope. Property has the effect of turning its owners into people who continuously worry about losing it, and are always anxious about the possibility of having less. They worry so much that they become superstitious, until finally they’re praying to the four and the eight directions, and they’re worshiping, prophesying, abstaining, and curing. They worry so much that they can’t sit still for a minute without worrying more; they have to rush around here and there praying to fate, praying to prophets, trying to calm themselves down. And the female mediums and male spiritualists gain more and more prestige, servicing bulging pockets and purses that want to swell even more, great loves trying to find greater loves, everywhere people frantically searching for evidence they will be okay through prophecies and fortunetelling.
In fact, it was only around this time that my sister-in-law began to believe in divination. She and Thế held the fate of a relatively large hotel in their hands. It was no joke. She suddenly remembered the words of the old horoscope reader about her son’s destiny. This year, counting since conception, Phũ was exactly twenty-four years old. She worried about it. She became obsessed by it. But when she tried to talk to her husband about it, he brushed her aside. That was just women’s stuff! Thế was the head of the family and he believed in the patriarchal position that as the ranking male in the family, he shouldn’t be dealing with women’s work. The famous Từ Hải had died, thanks to the woman Kiều.2 Confucius said that to be too close to women would lead to over-familiarity, which would lead to resentment. Thế rarely let his wife participate in issues that he judged important and correct. If she reacted hysterically he would silently leave the house and go off somewhere. If she did the same, he would calmly do whatever he had to do until she grew tired and came back home. It had been the same this time. Thế didn’t tell his wife anything about his decision that Phũ and I should take Bóp’s body down to Saigon. Only when we had already flown did she find out. Frightened, she repeatedly called Saigon, waiting in anxious suspense until the day the two of us were to fly back. Nobody had told her what had happened in Saigon. So when I stepped into the house, I tried to keep my face impassive. But I was still a bit pale and she caught my change of countenance. She was shaking as she asked me, “It happened to Phũ, didn’t it?” And then she passed out.
Let me return to the story of Phũ’s early days. His mom gave him the name Mạnh, but a month later she received a letter from her husband. He was adamant about changing his son’s name to Phú.3 Phú would represent, concretely, the will and determination to get rich, of a generation that during the war had eaten noodles and three-quarters rations and had slept in the dust like homeless people. During that time Thế had decided to set his mind on becoming rich. He was determined to give his child the name Phú—Tạ Đắc Phú. Later on his friends mispronounced his name as Phũ;4 it fit him better.
My relationship with Phũ was more than the usual relationship of an uncle and a nephew. We were sometimes like friends, and sometimes like brothers, but mostly we had a kind of father-son relationship. I had witnessed him coming into this world, a purple little baby full of snot and saliva. Throughout my youth I carried him around on my back. I had followed him throughout the transformations of his childhood. In his fourteenth year, Phũ invited Cốc and Bóp to come study martial arts at my house. The three young men, so impressive and so fierce, were able to thrive in the martial arts. One morning that same year, when he turned fourteen, Phũ showed me some mottled stains on underwear. “I’ve become a man, right, Uncle?”
“Not yet; you’ve just begun puberty. Becoming a man is something altogether different.” From that point on I would try to explain to him from time to time just what it meant to become a man, and what he should do during this perilous turning point in a person’s life. Sometimes I had to make use of visual aids to provide realistic explanations for him. This was exactly the type of concrete experience that Thế had transferred to me when I had begun to turn into an adult. Our family had been affected by Western teachings. Sexual education for the son was the responsibility of the father, of the uncle, or of the older brother, while the sexual education of the daughter was the responsibility of the mother. Now it was my turn to educate my nephew. I knew I had to have a fr
ank conversation with him, and not turn away from the truth of things. According to our encyclopedias, the ancient Indians believed that virtue that was maintained only by ignorance was an unstable kind of virtue.
For a time, I was away on a voyage. When I returned, Phũ had brought a pair of women’s panties to me, bragging, “I’ve become a man.” His whole class had gone on a camping trip outside Hanoi, and Phũ had managed to pull a girl away from the blazing campfire; he had just gotten her panties off when he exploded and found he was suddenly wet all over. I had to explain to him that getting off like that wasn’t the same as getting off inside of a woman, so we still couldn’t say that he’d turned into a man. Then I went off for another period, and when I came back this time, Phũ brought me a dozen panties to brag about. He was obsessed with searching out and collecting these silent trophies. The girls who couldn’t avoid his violent usurpation of their bodies also couldn’t avoid the plundering of their dainty things, and, in the end had to depart naked from the waist down. Phũ candidly told me the history of the first pair of panties, a lacy wisp that one could press neatly into the palm of his hand and stuff quickly into his trouser pocket as he said good-bye. This heavenly green pair was from his first transformation into a man. This brown pair represented an impressive set of breasts. This pink pair had pulled him in and, at the same time, had wanted to push him out. This tan pair had kept him in a daze, going at it all night, to the point that he couldn’t remember how many times he’d finished. The kind of sexual education that I’d given him from the age of fourteen was enough for Phũ to live a debauched life and never once have to face the consequences.
Once, just after I arrived in Hanoi, Phũ pulled me out after him. Through the dark city streets, the darkened coffee shops, and the equally shadowy people sitting and standing in those shops, the two of us made our way up to the third floor of a building. Miss Brothel Mistress waited—makeup, perfume, and flashy clothes unable to hide her village background. I managed to get my hands on a virgin “stray ox.”5
“Half up front,” the madam demanded. “One like this will cost you for a threesome: two chỉ.”6 Phũ didn’t care to bargain and signaled for the girl to enter the room. He pulled her shoulders forward, shoved her back, grabbed her chin to turn her face up to look into his eyes, weighing her like a set of precision scales. Then he signaled for the girl and me to undress. The three of us lay naked on the bed. The girl was held tightly in the middle, her warm body trembling now and then as if convulsing, but not daring to cry. Phũ was the first explorer, gently and calmly following the ocean shelf,7 full of potential resources yet to be exploited. A wave of tremors racked the girl. Her right hand clutched me tightly as if clinging for her life to a piece of driftwood. Phũ’s face suddenly looked doubtful. He was scraping something down there on the ocean shelf, so that I thought he was expertly checking out his protection one more time. But his doubtful face suddenly was suffused with fury. He leaped up and kicked the girl in the face multiple times, one kick after another. Referring to himself as her father, he incessantly cursed her damn mother: “Your father wants to pull your mother out to do the kind of work that I’d been planning to do with you.” I grabbed his naked leg, so he wouldn’t totally crush her with his kicks. “Tell me now!” he yelled.
“It’s been in there all week, since I’ve started,” she explained. “Every day Miss Tì makes me tell people that I’m a virgin so she can keep selling me to eager guests.” At just that moment Miss Tì pushed the door open and entered. These types of rooms usually need a back door for customers to escape, despite the paying of regular “taxes” to the police and other types of local security.
Phũ shoved the stuff on his finger into Miss Tì’s face. “This is a fish bladder!8 Try to trick your father, huh? Your father wanted to have a virgin so he would have a good yearly exam and you dared to give us a pierced basket instead, huh? Bring someone else in right now, and if you don’t have anyone else, then run out into the street and hunt down a stray ox for us. We’ll wait.”
Miss Tì, with all of her talent for grabbing young stray oxen off of the street, could not rush out to do that just at the moment. Phũ grabbed her tightly by the neck and cursed her. Suddenly he realized that that this stout, pale, middle-aged woman was the perfect consolation prize and could be had at an unexpectedly low price. He yelled at her to get up on the bed. If there were no virgin, then a middle-aged woman would do, and if not, with a wave of his hand he’d have his buddies in here to demolish this green coffee shop.9 Miss Tì had no choice but to drop the self-confident and comfortable air of a madam and climb onto the bed.
In the end Miss Tì wouldn’t accept any money, saying it was her gift for the two young men. Of course, she agreed to let Phũ take his usual souvenir, but since she didn’t have any panties on her, she had to run to her wardrobe to grab a pair.
Later, after Phũ died, I saw that in his wardrobe he had a Japanese carryall, the portable kind favored by officials—a souvenir of a life spent in diplomacy that would pass from father to son. Inside the case he had 101 pairs of women’s underwear. In his short nine years as a man, this fierce being had lived as much as 101 virtuous men who know but a single woman their entire lives.
And yet it was still clear that, like those of his two friends before him, Phũ’s casket would soon be covered by wreaths of white flowers.
Some years before, our boat had been docked at Danang Harbor for four days, and I’d gone ashore to get the security paperwork. A group of sailors, drivers, laborers, petty traders, and cyclo drivers were all gathered around reading the same newspaper, the kind that wasn’t meant for reflective and weak-nerved intellectuals. One month of reading Security would keep the faint of heart cowering inside during the day, and afraid to leave their rooms to urinate at night.10 But reading about all of the thieves, murderers, and rapists was the kind of entertainment that could also serve as a source of hard-to-find information. Investigative news reports about a certain street filled with young female hairdressers, or a street corner where people sold aphrodisiacs and pleasure-enhancing rubbers, a particular highway shoulder where people sold weapons and spray bottles of anesthetic . . . this was the kind of information the paper’s readers could use.
I had practiced the art of speed-reading the newspaper, and had become a voracious reader. It took me just about half an hour to devour the contents of a forty-eight-page newspaper—that is, except for the twelve pages of ads, so actually thirty-six pages, including the letters to the editor that were run so he could protect himself. When I got to the “brief news” page, my eye caught a notice that during the night (five days before) the Hoàn Kiếm District police had captured TĐP (Tạ Đắc Phú), born in 1972, residing at —— (my brother Thê’s house), and who—during a high-performance motorcycle race around the lake—had knocked over a nineteen-year old student, breaking her right leg. The write-up ended with some formulaic statements about the phenomenon of children of high-ranking families11—newly rich families or families with influence—who were competing in these insane motorcycle races that caused heartache throughout society. I thought that canned commentary was the end of the article, but it kept going as if to provide another bit of free info: TĐP was twenty-three this year (just in case the readers couldn’t figure that out for themselves from his year of birth) and a third-year English student at the ĐHHN (an acronym left for the readers to figure out for themselves).12
I rushed over to the public telephone booth. Thế answered on the other end of the line. “Oh, hey. Đông. Don’t worry, it’s all dealt with, it’s nothing. That other little kid, huh? Her leg is in a cast already. She’s gotta stay off of it for three months; it’s nothing. Phũ is back home, both him and his bike, it’s nothing.”
It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Nothing was ever anything when Thế was dealing with it. He was able to transfer his own calmness immediately to those he was talking to, even when the family was in mourning. But though I knew he could pull the strings of
some individuals in high places, I still felt uneasy about how quickly he’d been able to deal with Phũ’s arrest for racing.
In these first years of the 1990s, a previously unimaginable phenomenon had arisen: a clique of teenagers who would drive their motorbikes insanely through narrow roads full of traffic. From one narrow street to another, it was the age of speed. When people ate, they ate instant food. When they studied or worked, they took shortcuts. For fun and entertainment, people would take the “express train.” Even love was swift, protected by individual freedom, Invincible Champion condoms, and Choice birth control pills. It was only public transportation that was slow and inefficient. That’s how it was for anyone who could manage to get his hands on a motorbike. With the throttle in their hands, young adults turned into airplanes racing through the streets as if in midair. They swerved, revved their throttles, and took over the street—smashing into other drivers who would die, right there, on the road. But it wasn’t just speed that they wanted; they needed the sensations that would shoot straight into their eardrums and eyes. They’d flash their blinding headlights, their exhaust pipes snipped short, and then loudly zoom past, the booms of their backfires echoing down the street behind them. The narrower the streets, they felt, the bigger their balls. In Saigon, the young motorbike racers’ favorite gathering spots were Lê Lợi and Đồng Khởi13 and in front of the gate of Bến Thành market. After there was a crackdown on these areas, they moved to 3-2, Nguyễn Hữu Cảnh, Trường Sơn.14 In Hanoi the road that attracted racing was the loop around Hồ Gươm. After some laps around Hồ Gươm, the racers would shoot into the intake corridor made up of Hàng Gai–Hàng Bông,15 burst out onto Điện Biên Phủ,16 speed along the historical Ba Đình District, and then finally end up at Thanh Niên, between the two big lakes.17 They would all tear off their front and back brakes, and wear a mourning band of white cloth around their heads18—as if they’d said good-bye to their mothers forever so that they could enter the competition unburdened. Teenage girls would sit behind them, their heads also encircled by white bands expressing their will and determination, like the most wildly enthusiastic fans.