Ticket to Childhood

by Nguyen Nhat Anh

  That was what I figured out when I was about forty.

  I realized there was an intimate relationship between happiness in the dining room and in the bedroom. You may think me naïve, you may even think I am a Neanderthal, but I was as excited about this belated discovery as Newton must have been when he got conked on the head with the apple. So brace yourself for another revelation: cooking is something that can be improved!

  • • •

  If we relate my current state of enlightenment to my past decision not to marry Ti, you might be inclined to say that I was mistaken. Why? Because after many years of married life, Ti and her husband are still together, with five kids, all healthy and happy. So, I have to conclude that that they all like raw food.

  Now, let’s get back to Uncle Nhien and Linh.

  Uncle Nhien couldn’t explain why he loved Linh. But it didn’t prevent him from texting her.

  He texted her from his cellphone, and one of the reasons I looked forward to seeing him was the chance to play with it.

  But it was a two-way street, because he wanted to see me, too, since I asked him about Linh.

  Once I read a message that he sent her:

  Shall we go for a short walk this evening? I’m so very sad!

  I found this enchanting (though I wasn’t sure why), and I ran to Ti’s house at once:

  “Do you have a cellphone?”

  “Of course not, are you crazy?”

  Then I ran to Tun’s house:

  “Do you have a cell?”

  “I don’t, but my mother has one.”

  “Borrow it from her,” I said. “I will text you after lunch.”

  Tun looked very pleased. Nobody had ever texted her before.

  So after lunch, before being tethered like a cow to the sofa, which is to say, making mischief, which is to say, having my nap, I borrowed Uncle Nhien’s cellphone and texted Tun.

  It goes without saying that Tun and I went for a short walk together. We just walked around the neighborhood and stood, for a while, by the watercress pond on the side of Hai’s house to see grasshoppers jump back and forth; at times, we slapped our thighs because mosquitoes were biting us. But it was fun to do something so adult. It was a “real” date.

  A few days later, I sent Tun another text. I copied another message Uncle Nhien had sent Linh:

  Shall we have a little drink this evening? I’m so very sad!

  And that evening, we met for a little drink at Hai Dot café. I stole some money from my mother to buy Tun a bowl of sweet soup. She cost me (or my mother), but I didn’t regret it. Small things like that make life enjoyable.

  The third time I texted Tun … well, maybe you can figure out what happened before I tell you.

  Once again, I copied one of Uncle Nhien’s texts to Linh.

  Shall we get into bed together this evening? I’m so very sad!

  That evening, I stood at the gate, waiting for Tun as eagerly as before.

  A moment later, someone emerged from her doorway: Tun’s angry mother. She stormed towards my house.

  The upshot was that I got into bed by myself that night.

  I lay face down while my father gave me a good spanking you know where.

  So very sad!

  5. As one grows older

  My dear readers, some of you, by now, will have noticed a slight chronological inconsistency in the last chapter. There were no cellphones when I was eight! But authors sometimes have to adjust the facts for the sake of their drama, or their dreams, or to make a point. I also can’t be sure that there were instant noodles when I was eight. Were there? Did we have fast food in Vietnam then? I can’t remember, even though I claim they were my favorite food. But I’m telling the truth if you play my word game and replace the expression “favorite food” with “favorite comic ploy.” Instant noodles. Is there anything funnier? You just have to say, “instant noodles,” and you burst out laughing. The very sound of “instant noodles” instantly makes life less boring.

  And as for what some readers, many of them female, might consider my retrograde ideals of wifely virtue, I have to remind you that just as the Principal wasn’t really Little Mui, “I” am just a character. So any offensive opinions that “I” may express may be the views of an old goat.

  But here I must also confess that I’ve been keeping another secret from you.

  I intended to keep this a secret, even after I finished the book and it was published. But since you have been patient enough to reach this point, I can find no reason why you shouldn’t have the right to the information about the story you have paid for, and invested your time in reading.

  Now, I might as well admit that what I’m writing is not a novel. Nor is it a memoir. Nor is it a daydream that I had during one of my siestas.

  This is the draft of a paper I intended to deliver at a workshop with the title, Children as a World, organized by UNESCO Vietnam, with the participation of researchers, psychologists, journalists, educators, and writers of children’s literature.

  Of course this isn’t the text that was to have been delivered at the forum. I will tell you the reasons later.

  Or maybe I’ll just get to it right now.

  There are several reasons, each having a specific form.

  The first one has the form of Hai.

  The name “Hai” just escapes me automatically, and without any honorific, the way it used to when he was nine, my elder by a year.

  Now I must call him Mr. Hai, because Hai is eight times six plus 2—i.e. fifty years old, if we have to obey the multiplication table.

  One rainy afternoon, Hai—I’ll drop the “Mister” for now—came to see me.

  He pulled up a chair, and sank into it heavily before coming to the point of his visit:

  “I’ve heard that you’re writing something about our childhood. Is it true?”

  “Well, how do you know?”

  “You don’t need to know how I know. You just need to say if it is true or not.”

  Hai sounded like a judge, though I knew he ran a company that had nothing to do with legal matters.

  “Well, well … yes,” I stammered.

  “So it’s true?”

  “It is just a—a conference paper,” I said, wetting my lips nervously.

  “It’s not important whether it is a conference paper. People will read it. I want to know what the hell you wrote in it.”

  “Just some trivial things about our childhood games—”

  Hai thrust his hand out.

  “Show it to me.”

  I was going to refuse, but I thought the better of it, because my refusal would only make him more belligerent, so I opened the desk drawer, and handed him the manuscript.

  “Read it! There’s nothing slanderous in there! Only wonderful childhood memories.”

  Hai turned the pages, scrutinizing every word, and I had the feeling he was scanning the document, as a computer does, for a nasty virus.

  At certain points, he sprang up, paced the room, and shouted at me:

  “Brawling and more brawling! Not acceptable!”

  Or: “This won’t do! I’m a family man! I’m a CEO! You can’t describe me like this!”

  “Like how?” I asked with fake naivete.

  Hai smacked the manuscript on the desk.

  “‘I’ll never again show you a tidy notebook.’ Aren’t you afraid your teacher will think your parents don’t know how to raise their kids? Or here”—Hai stabbed the page as if he were trying to crush a fly—“‘Only fools gather at the table when it’s time to eat!’ … You want to kill me, don’t you, Mui?” he said, gesticulating the way he used to when we played the husband and wife game.

  “This is only a story about eight-year-olds,” I said, without much conviction. “And I didn’t make things up. I just described you at nine.”

  “That was then. This is now. Children do countless stupid things. But to make them public is to mock me. What for?”

  I couldn’t counter Hai’s arg
uments, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to win him over. Little Hai was innocent and full of high spirits; Mr. Hai was cunning and narrow-minded.

  Little Hai only did what he pleased, as far as he could, while Mr. Hai only wanted to impress others. An adult’s life, in that respect, is infinitely more tedious than a child’s.

  “What do you want, then?” I said eventually.

  “Delete all those silly details,” Hai demanded.

  “No! What would become of my paper? It wouldn’t have any life.”

  “That’s none of my business,” Hai said coldly.

  I took a sip of water to calm down, and put the glass on the desk so as not to throw it against the wall.

  “Look!” I told him, “I will not delete or change anything—except the name of your character.”

  • • •

  The next day Tun—Madame Tun, to be formal—came to see me and sat on the same chair that Mr. Hai had sat on.

  “I’ve heard that you’re writing something about our childhood. Is that true?” she asked.

  I nodded mechanically:

  “Yes. And I know that as the Headmistress of a prestigious school, it is impossible that, at eight, you ever received a text message from a playmate, inviting you to ‘get into bed together this evening.’ What would your students and their parents think about you? It would be terrible, right?”

  Tun also nodded mechanically.

  “So I have decided to change the name of the character. The girl who received that indecent message will be named Hong.”

  My meeting with Tun ended sweetly.

  She didn’t ask to read the draft; nor did she wag her finger like a judge. But even if she had been a judge, she would have been pleased with the defendant, who came clean without a whimper, and promised to correct all his mistakes.

  6. I am Little Mui

  The adult Tun was even prettier than she had been at eight, although now, as then, she didn’t love me.

  After the texting incident, I had given her a severe scolding:

  “Why did you show that message to your mother?”

  “Because I didn’t understand what you were asking me to do.”

  “Do you understand it now?”

  “I still don’t.”

  “Then never try to.”

  I said so protectively, because Uncle Nhien had explained the euphemism “getting into bed.” As he did so, he laughed at my reactions: first my face turned red, then white, then blue.

  In the aftermath of that incident, my father forbade me to use Uncle Nhien’s cellphone. I lost my private channel to Tun, and with it, a secret joy. Life once again became a long, boring corridor with no windows. I came home straight from school, went from bedroom to bathroom to dining table to desk like an automaton—or like a captive planet, revolving around its sun.

  Had I been the earth, I sometimes thought, I would have found a way to change my orbit.

  But I was not the earth. I was Little Mui.

  Still, I managed to make my orbit a little more erratic. I didn’t pour water into a glass any more. I poured it into a soft-drink bottle. We had a carton of them on top of a wardrobe, waiting to be recycled. Swigging from the bottle was sort of fun.

  When Hai saw me swigging from the bottle, he ran all the way home to beg his mother for the same drink.

  She told him that sodas were just a bunch of toxic chemicals mixed with water, and only crazy people would ingest them.

  But Hai found a bottle in the recycling bin.

  The next day, he came to my house with a triumphant look.

  “Hey! I’ve been swigging water from this bottle since yesterday.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Water in a bottle tastes sweeter than water in a glass. How strange!”

  I also taught Hai other strange things. I stopped eating from a bowl. During a meal, to my parents’ surprise, I put my food into a tin wash basin, then carried it to the porch, and squatted there, watching the passing traffic. Life, briefly, was fun again.

  Eating from that basin made me look like a pig at its trough, but Hai was intrigued.

  The next day, he came to see me.

  “I just ate out of a basin,” he bragged. “Food in a basin tastes delicious—much more so than food in a bowl. How strange!”

  I didn’t find it strange—I had foreseen it, but I had no idea why the switch worked.

  Now, of course, I understand that our sense of taste is partly based on our expectations—it’s psychological, in other words. A change of circumstances leads to a change of feelings.

  Why do declarations of love sound more romantic beside a pearly river glowing in the sunset than they do at noon in a crowded marketplace?

  Why do couples take “second honeymoons” in faraway places to recover the freshness of their first love?

  We need renewal, that’s why. New surroundings inspire new perceptions.

  And some adults go to extreme measures for the sake of novelty—like quitting a good job, or replacing a spouse. But they don’t acknowledge the same needs in their children.

  Okay, so Hai and I drank water from a bottle and ate rice from a wash basin, and it didn’t change the world. Old wars ended and new ones began. Children still went to bed hungry. Coups deposed this president or that dictator. The Israelis and the Palestinians still fought over their turf.

  But from our parents’ reactions, you would think that our eccentric new eating habits were something earth-shattering.

  “What, are you crazy?” my mother asked. “Everyone drinks water from a glass.”

  I liked to drink water from a bottle precisely because everyone drank it from a glass. The reason was that simple, but I didn’t dare tell her.

  My father harrumphed:

  “Glasses are used to drink water, bottles are used to hold water, bowls are used to eat rice, and basins are for washing. Don’t you know anything, you rascal?”

  When my father called me a “rascal,” he was really angry.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh you do? Why these whims, then?”

  I couldn’t explain it all to him, either.

  Much later, when I became a real father, not the “father” of Hai and Tun, I found out that kids, as they say, “do the darndest things.”

  Some don’t want to walk normally. They jump or hop or tiptoe, and they prefer teetering on a high wall to planting one foot after the other on solid ground.

  Others like to wear their caps backwards.

  Still others use their pens as swords, or make boats out of paper, rather than using it for writing letters.

  And I’m sure there are kids who drink water from a shell, or even from a shoe, and eat rice from a piece of newspaper, folded into a cone.

  And they’re very creative, too! They’re just making their lives less boring.

  Yet adults bristle at any signs of “silliness.”

  Here is how they see things: you run when you’re being chased; you jump when you want to clear a puddle; the brim of a cap is made to protect your face, so it’s stupid to wear it backwards. A pen is not a sword—stop waving it around, or you’ll put out someone’s eye. And good paper is expensive, thank you! You might as well fold up fifty thousand dong notes and launch them on a pond.

  The objects in an adult’s world are defined by their function. Consult a dictionary if you want to know the meaning of adult life. Clothes cover our nakedness; chairs are things to sit on; you eat at a table, and you sleep in a bed. Teeth chew things, and we taste with our tongue.

  That’s why I don’t blame my father for insisting on the “real” function of bowls or glasses.

  But kids possess an invaluable treasure—their power to imagine the world differently, and to assign strange functions to familiar things.

  For Hai’s mother, a broom was a useful construction of wood and straw that she used to sweep her floors. But if I saw Hai standing undecided in front of a broom, I would guess he was thinking about throwing it like a
spear, or riding it like a horse, or casting a spell that would make it airborne, like the broom in a fairy tale.

  Of course, not all kids resist conformity. They just want to belong. And naturally, adults applaud them for it.

  Not that they are wrong to. Standing out in a crowd has always been a risky choice. Just ask the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. (Inquisitions come in many forms.) Like Giordano Bruno—the Roman astronomer burned at the stake for heresy, in 1600, because he believed, contrary to Church teaching, that the earth revolved around the sun.

  Hai and I were not burned at the stake.

  But we both had to admit that the function of children, as adults see it, is to outgrow their childishness.

  7. How long can I be a good boy?

  So, next question: What else, besides soul-crushing conformity, do adults expect from kids?

  Or more specifically, what did my parents expect from me?

  I had to wonder, after a series of major setbacks in attitude adjustment.

  I didn’t think it was all that hard to please them. The real question was: did I want to?

  Okay, let’s try.

  Take One: Humid afternoon; our boring old living room. I get up from the sofa while my father is still snoring away, and I immediately sit down at my desk to study, without waiting for my mother to remind me to, in her habitual tone of timid pleading mixed with commanding urgency.

  In Vietnamese villages, most people make their living by farming, husbandry, fishing, and handicrafts. Gardens usually surround the houses; there are coops for poultry and enclosures for animals. These rural settlements are ringed by sparsely trafficked dirt paths. In urban areas, most people work in offices, shops, or factories. Houses are crowded together, and streets teem with pedestrians and vehicles.

  Those simple unembellished sentences describe a reality I have seen for myself, and you’d think I could commit them to memory.

  But I was a boy with a short attention span. I was always distracted by something else.