Ticket to Childhood

by Nguyen Nhat Anh

  I pounded my chest like an alpha gorilla.

  “You might just as well have plunged a dagger into my heart,” I told Hai. “So now finish the job: come over here and kill me!”

  Terrified by my bellowing, Ti kept quiet.

  At that point Hai doubled up with laughter, and now it was Tun’s turn to look stunned. She looked, in fact, as if a pigeon had just shat on her face. Her brow was furrowed with perplexity—she’d never seen anyone accused of disgracing his ancestors.

  • • •

  This was a good trick, but it only caught my friends off guard once—the first time I pulled it.

  Then, like any normal kids, my friends got into the game.

  The next day, a Sunday, Hai and Tun played the parents, Ti and I the children.

  “Where’s Little Mui?” Hai shouted.

  (Little Mui was my parents’ nickname for me. I was born in the year of the Goat, and “mui” means … well, you guessed it.)

  “I’m here,” I replied.

  “Show me your notebooks.”

  I pulled a notebook from my pocket and handed it anxiously to Hai.

  After turning a few pages, Hai’s face turned red with anger.

  “Little Mui!”

  “Yes?”

  Hai pounded on the table with his fist:

  “What kind of student do you call yourself?”

  I had barely replied when he threw my notebook through the window.

  “You worthless boy! Clean pages? No ink stains? No dog-eared corners? No smears or doodles? You keep your notebook in this condition? What does this tell your teacher about how we’ve raised you?”

  I hadn’t expected Hai to be such an excellent schoolmaster.

  “Dad, I’m sorry for my mistakes,” I said with cheerful contrition. “I’ll never again show you a tidy notebook.”

  From a corner of my eye, I saw Tun and Ti stifling their giggles the way girls do—tee-heeing behind their hands.

  “Hey, Toothless Wonder over there! What are you laughing at?” Hai glowered at Ti. “Have you finished cooking? You better have a good excuse for standing there with a stupid grin.”

  Ti replied respectfully:

  “Yes, father, the meal is ready. Would you please come and eat it?”

  “Have you lost your mind, daughter?” Hai shouted, “Only fools gather at the table when it’s time to eat, do you understand?”

  “Then what do educated people do at dinner time?” Ti replied meekly.

  “They jump in a lake, play billiards, go fishing, chase one another, get into fights. Generally speaking, they do everything possible to keep their family waiting.”

  “Your father is right,” Tun chimed in primly.

  • • •

  At first, I thought that only Hai and I loved this game, but it turned out that the girls loved it, too. Ti was the most good-natured of our gang—and the slowest—but on the third day, when it was her turn to play the mother, she really got into it.

  “Hai, what is two times four?”

  “Eight.”

  Ti didn’t shout the way Hai and I did, but she looked very stern:

  “How could it be eight, son? What a disgrace! Haven’t we sacrificed for your education?”

  “What is it, then?” Hai asked, blinking.

  “Anything but eight.”

  “But mother, the multiplication table says …”

  “Are you a parrot, son? Do you just dumbly echo multiplication tables? Or maybe all kinds of tables? What is the dining room table telling you? How about the tea cart? Don’t you have a brain?”

  Hai scratched his head remorsefully:

  “I guess I’m just a dolt. Next time, I won’t believe anything I read or hear at school.”

  Hai’s promise became our motto, ending a dark period of slavish obedience to the rules of the grownup world.

  But, as the saying goes, happiness doesn’t last forever.

  One day Hai showed up to school looking miserable.

  “What’s wrong? Did you get a beating?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Because I told my parents that only stupid children keep their school books in order.”

  Then Ti showed up, with a sullen face:

  “My father punished me for insisting that three times five wasn’t fifteen.”

  Tun added to the gloom with a stream of tears and a little sniffling.

  “I let my mother shout herself hoarse calling me home to lunch.”

  I glanced at my friends and heaved a deep sigh.

  So much for my precocious career as a revolutionary.

  But if I wasn’t sulking, crying, or looking depressed, it didn’t mean that I wasn’t suffering. Mine was an internal pain, and it was more acute than all the unhappiness of my playmates put together. First, I hadn’t changed the world as I’d hoped to, so I immediately relapsed into boredom. Second, I had gotten my friends in trouble. And third, they had each been punished for a single error. But the day before, I had committed all three, and been beaten thrice over.

  3. Naming the world

  After taking our beatings in body and mind, we were eventually forced to accept the evidence of reality that appeared on the back of our notebooks, in the form of multiplication tables. If we wanted to rewrite them and make our own, we’d first have to become world-famous mathematicians. As we waited for that day to come (though no one held his breath), Hai, Tun, Ti, and I had to agree, albeit grudgingly, that two times four was eight.

  Humbled by our defeat, we became the well-behaved children that our parents wanted us to be. This meant that we now treated our copybooks as we did our teeth—their cleanliness was sacred—and we stopped confusing diligent students with delinquents, and vice versa.

  Life was back in its old groove, and I ran the risk of being worn down by its monotony like a vinyl record played over and over with a dull needle. My only thought was: “What should I do now?”

  The revolutionary, it turns out, had another battle plan up his sleeve. So I rallied my troops and told them, “From this day forward, we will no longer call a chicken a chicken, a notebook a notebook, or a pen a pen.”

  “What shall we call them?” asked Tun.

  “Anything else!” I replied.

  Hai blinked:

  “Call a hat an umbrella, or an arm a leg?” he asked.

  “Why not?” I snorted. “You can also call your head your ass.”

  “But why should we do that?” Ti asked.

  That year, I hadn’t yet learned the five Ws: What, Who, Where, When and Why. “Why” is always the hardest question—and the most important.

  All kids tire and embarrass their parents with “why” questions:

  Why does thunder follow lightning during a rainstorm?

  Why does hair grow from your head and not the soles of your feet?

  Why is sugar sweet and salt salty?

  Why is blood red and the sky blue?

  Why does a stork sleep on one leg?

  Why do men have nipples like women if they don’t nurse babies?

  Why does the earth go around the sun?

  All this “why-ning” starts about three or four, then progresses to harder “whys” as a child gets older, until the questions he starts asking are so tricky, so exotic, that only a scientist could answer them. As long as children have asked tough questions, parents have tried to change the subject or have said that the answer has to do with God’s will. Or they’ve gotten angry with their kids when they were really angry with themselves for the gaps in their knowledge.

  But questions like “Why was I born?” and “Why do I have to die?” stump even scientists. Here you get into philosophy. Thousands of years ago, an Indian prince named Siddhartha gave up his kingdom, and went into the forest with a begging bowl, looking for answers, hoping that they would, in turn, reveal the truths and mysteries of our human condition, and he became the most enlightened being who has ever lived: the Buddha.

  Sorry, I’m rambling. But it’s all becaus
e of Tun. She asked me “why,” and to answer her, I could only do one thing. At eight years old, without the slightest ambition for the job—to say nothing of character—I had to become a philosopher.

  “Why?” I responded. “Because we need to reject the arbitrary rules invented by grownups. Why should we call a dog a dog? Because ‘a dog is a dog?’ If the first man had called a dog a banana, we would now call it a banana. It’s just foolish conformity.”

  “Of all the bananas in the neighborhood,” Hai chimed in, “Tun’s is the most vicious. If she didn’t keep it on a leash, I would never set foot in her house even if I were her husband!”

  “I think you should close your fat foot!” Tun growled at Hai.

  Hai kicked up his foot and frowned:

  “I think Ti meant your mouth,” Ti said helpfully.

  “Ah,” Hai bowed solemnly. “From my foot to God’s ear.”

  • • •

  In those days, an outsider eavesdropping on us would have thought he had landed on an alien planet.

  I’m not kidding. Who could have made block or tackle (head or tail) of the following conversations?

  “It’s getting dark. I’m going home to fish.”

  “My mother has promised to buy me a new cloud for my birthday.”

  (“Fish” meant “go to bed,” and “cloud” meant “backpack.”)

  Our parents were exasperated by our Newspeak, especially as the habit gradually got so engrained that when Ti’s father told her to turn off the fan, she turned off the TV; and when Tun’s mother asked her to buy some bananas, she walked the dog.

  At that time, we thought our game was an ingenious invention—the kind of thing that only children could think of. We wanted to rename everything in the universe as if we had just created it. We did this because we were so young, and the world was so old. It was a way of staking our claim to a new, richer dominion of our own.

  But when I grew up, I discovered that adults like this game, too, though for a very different reason. They call bribes gifts, for example, and speak of corruption as the cost of doing business. The purpose of renaming actions or concepts in this way is to muddy what is crystal clear, to use ambiguous language in place of a simple word that nobody could misunderstand. If the adult version of the game gets any more out of hand, the Swedish Academy is likely to award the Nobel Prize for Physics to someone who can exert hidden force on a stationary object to move it from one place to another without its owner being the wiser: i.e., to a pickpocket.

  In the real world, though, there is a price for changing the rules.

  Take Hai’s slip-up.

  His teacher called on him to recite a paragraph from his reader.

  Hai calmly picked up his math book.

  “You didn’t bring your reader?” the teacher asked, incredulous. “What about your notebook? Did you take notes yesterday?”

  Hai pulled out a hat tucked in his pocket and put it on the table.

  “Is this a joke?” The teacher sprang to her feet and her face went red. “Come with me to the principal’s office immediately!”

  “Please, Miss. The principal isn’t in school today. We had a fight and he is now at home moaning and groaning.”

  Of course, the principal, in Hai’s mind, was me. The day before, Hai and I had fought, and I had run a temperature in the evening, God knows why, so my mother kept me home. But Hai boasted that I had taken to my bed because he had beaten me up so badly.

  In our alternate universe, Hai was the Sheriff, Tun was a flight attendant, Ti was Snow White, and I was the Principal. We renamed ourselves according to our secret desires.

  In the days before Hai accidentally betrayed our code, our world was full of chatter like this:

  “Principal, I am going to set my banana on you if you don’t give me my cloud back.”

  “What’s stuffed in your fat foot, Sheriff? At the very least, you could share the snack.”

  “Snow White, you stink! Did you wet the bed while you were fishing last night?”

  “Flight attendant, what a cute new knitted notebook you have, there. Let me try it on!”

  And it was great calling chopsticks billiard balls, and mischief napping.

  Fortunately, after ten minutes of interrogation, the real principal understood that Hai was suffering from temporary insanity. But by the next day, a dog was a dog again, and we were forbidden to rewrite the dictionary. Could it be that the adults reimposed their language on us because they were envious?

  4. As sad as sad can be!

  Uncle Nhien loves Linh.

  I asked Uncle Nhien, “Why do you love Linh?” He didn’t reply, and I was surprised at his embarrassment.

  Later, when I fell in love for the eighth time, I began to understand that explaining why we don’t love someone is much easier than understanding why it is that we love them.

  A man, it is said, might marry a girl for her beautiful eyes, but a woman would never marry a guy just because he had great legs. Neither of these is true. Body parts may have a role to play in attraction, but they’re like an usher’s flashlight. They lead you to a seat in the theatre, but it’s the play itself that determines whether or not you stay to see it.

  Wait, what am I talking about?

  I’m talking about Uncle Nhien.

  He loves Linh.

  They’re a real couple who are getting married.

  I didn’t know whether the sheriff would marry the flight attendant when they grew up, but the principal wouldn’t be stupid enough to marry Snow White.

  Ti was not on my marriage radar simply because, in terms of cooking, she was the worst.

  And as I told you in the first chapter, I was not a picky eater. I didn’t care about nutrition. Much later, I did have to care about such things as the percentages of protein, cholesterol, glucose, and lipids in my diet. But when I was eight, I loved only three dishes: instant noodles, instant noodles, and instant noodles. If my mother saw me with a package of instant noodles on the way to the stove, she snatched it away by force, if necessary. This was an assault absolutely contrary to her sweet nature.

  In short, if I wanted instant noodles, I had to go to Ti’s house and ask her to cook them for me. I call it “cooking” to be polite. Is there any dish in the world as easy as instant noodles? You open the package, dump it into a bowl, add a pinch of salt, then pour in the boiling water. Making an omelet is like launching a spaceship by comparison. Yet even at the advanced age of eight, Ti could never do it properly.

  Sometimes, the noodles tasted like a fisherman’s rope—tough and salty. At other times, she drowned them the way you might try to drown a cockroach or an unwanted kitten. Once in a while, she got the water right, but then she forgot the salt.

  For these reasons, I fired Ti as my instant noodle chef not long after she was hired. I said in a loud voice (my “husband” voice, though we weren’t playing):

  “Step aside! I’ll do it myself!”

  • • •

  When I was nine, my mother had a baby and I got a sister.

  I bring this up because at eight—Ti’s age during the noodle debacle—my sister could cook rice and stew fish, clean the house, do the washing-up, and lots of other daily chores.

  My mother told her:

  “Girls must be able to do everything. When you are grown up, you will get married, and your husband and in-laws will judge how badly or well your mother has raised you by your housekeeping skills.”

  That is how every traditional Vietnamese mother thinks. So what was wrong with Ti’s mother?

  Death is what was wrong with her. Yes, sadly, Ti’s mother died giving birth to her. Because Ti didn’t have a mother, she learned to cook from the worst possible teacher: her father. How they survived is a good question. Probably by eating a lot of raw food.

  Of course, when I was eight, I didn’t yet have a younger sister, and my mother hadn’t had a chance to express her views on domestic virtue. But even still, I was determined not to marry Ti.
/>   My requirements for a life partner were not terribly demanding. She had to be able to cook instant noodles for me.

  As you read this, you must be thinking: “What a jerk!” Maybe you’re also thinking, “what century was he born in!” Or, “why didn’t he cook his own damn noodles?”

  But morally, it’s not that simple. For one thing, what people call “modern romance” is an illusion where men are concerned, and that’s the truth. Most men still want an old-fashioned wife i.e. a great cook and housekeeper even if they won’t admit it. That said, cooking certainly doesn’t play a big part in the first stage of romance. Thousands of romance novels are published every year, in every language, and if you go back a few centuries, there must be millions of them. But how many of their dénouements depend on the girl’s cooking? Does a boy ever desert his true love because of her soggy fritters? Romeo ignored a murderous family feud to elope with Juliet, but not because she whipped up a delicious bowl of spaghetti. (Here I have to say, however, that I believe their story is so beautiful precisely because they die before the instant noodle issue comes into play.)

  I’m getting to the point, so bear with me. How many boys in our culture get a chance to judge their fiancées’ cooking until they have married them?

  It’s not, as I’ve said, that the boys don’t care about cooking—they do; or that the girls deliberately try to conceal their ineptitude. Eating is just obviously a low priority for lovers. The heart is nobler than the stomach, no? Truong Chi, that legendary antique poet, thought so, at least, and who am I to contradict him?

  A boy in love likes to take his girl out to eat. If he has plenty of money, he takes her to a fancy restaurant. If he’s on a budget, he takes her to a café. If he’s a poor slob, they squat at plastic tables in a squalid alley eating boiled caterpillars. When his pockets are empty, he tells her that he’s “very busy with my work today.” What self-respecting Vietnamese boy would ever think of asking his girlfriend to cook for him?

  Not until the marriage veil is lifted does the benighted bridegroom give proper consideration to his dilemma—a dilemma he will face three times a day for his whole married life.

  Are you with me on this? Would you agree that a marriage can sometimes founder over a bowl of fish sauce? That a perfectly boiled instant noodle not too soft, not too firm, not too salty, not too bland—is sometimes even more important than good relations with your in-laws?