by Linda Hogan
And so Lin wanted to learn a way to break the chain. Everything must have a weakness somewhere. She was young and she thought, What if there were no injustices, what if there were wisdom?
Lin still asked about her uncle’s address, in vain. One man in English class said, “Oh no, I believe that’s in Hanoi.” It seemed so far away.
She saved her small wages and the tips given by those whose streets she still cleaned, even as a young woman, all the while watching the world grow back and be rebuilt, hearing the sounds of it, a nail at a time, a stone. This money, too, went in a small box and when she received enough coins she changed them to bills, and after a while she needed a second box. She spent little of the money, but now and then she gave some to the children of American fathers. She did buy a goldfish for her room, but soon it ended up sitting on the counter of the little shop. She thought it would be less lonely there. It attracted customers. It reminded her of her father. She could still recall him as he walked toward her, the red goldfish in a white bowl.
For a time after the war everything had been quiet. Too quiet. There were no birds. At first there was not even a breeze, as if the wind had gone to another part of the world. And when it was most silent, Lin remembered that her father became the wind. In every breeze that touched her.
Against the old woman’s rules, Lin’s body began to curve and swell. And now, whenever she could, she also worked in an office where people went to search for their families. At first she volunteered.
Her new mother, watching her study and read, said she was too greedy for knowledge. “It is not a good thing. How will you live if you know so much? You will never be happy. You will be a poor worker. You will never be a good wife.” But unlike the baker’s wife, Lin had a hunger that wanted to consume something and what it wanted to consume wasn’t rice in a bowl but learning, knowledge. Perhaps that was better because it kept her from remembering the burning sampans, the fires at nights, the sounds, her old grandmother floating away on the river to the unknown world of night and death, while she herself was pulled and pushed away to life.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Mother, her mistress of the flower shop. “I will stay here and care for you. I will care for you and Pa when you are old.” Lin saw the relief in the woman’s eyes. She had her losses, too, this mother did, too many to talk about. Lin must constantly reassure her.
And so, some days when Lin was called to help translate in the offices, at the desk where the terrible stories were told, this mother didn’t send her out with flowers. She had a secret pride in Lin’s success and so an overly tall boy down the street delivered the flowers instead.
Lin heard the stories: One small old man sat down at the table and opened a large bag and took out the bones of his ancestors, those bones that were left, and said how he couldn’t keep them clean enough. He didn’t notice if anyone in the room was disturbed by the bones. They weren’t. They’d all seen worse. He said, “The Americans dug them up because they knew, we cared for them, and one man peed on them.” He wept. The ancestors had been loved and buried with care. The bones were wiped clean with alcohol. He wanted to take them home. He cried and his hair was almost white. Lin understood him and translated what he said. This was a problem that could be solved. He could take them back, even if the place looked as if it was gone. They could arrange such a journey. Later, a scarred woman, a cut through her face, told about her lost children and she said she last saw them by a banyan tree. Lin said nothing, but she got up and went through files of children searching for their mother because she was certain she recalled a brother and sister saying something like that, and as she did a windstorm came up. They all went to the window and saw it rippling the water outside, some papers blowing across the streets and the people outside walking leaned against it, holding their hats and skirts to their bodies.
“I think I might have a lead,” Lin said, looking at the file. “I will come to your house tomorrow.” She believed this because it was a story told by two people who said they last saw their mother at the village tree just before there was a blast in the air and men came and took their mother away. At the time, they were just children left crying. She remembered this from the file. The tree was probably long since dead, but the children were now young people. She hoped she was right. She had the best of memories. It would be so good, it was so good, the few times she had seen people reunited with one another. She wished for her own father.
She went out in the early mornings while her new family slept, and took walks to where the forest was returning. She followed new roads and looked at the places people were rebuilding. After cleaning at the flower shop, after watching the owner make arrangements, after watering carefully all the plants, one day Lin made a beautiful flower arrangement with pale lotus blossoms and, instead of ribbon, she tied it with some of the wild green grasses, braided long and light, grasses from the forest. Surprised, the boss woman said, “Oh, it’s so beautiful, it looks like angels made it.”
One night, Lin met the man who would become her husband. It was his first night at the school. He was in the corner sitting on a crooked chair at their makeshift school. In one look she saw that somehow his eyes held her world or part of it. She knew what he knew. He knew what she did. Not in the way of school and learning, but in the world, in their lives and histories. Somehow he, too, had managed to survive. She didn’t know he had been an enemy. That he had been on the other side. The necklace of skulls suddenly had another strand. She didn’t know that he had wanted to be a doctor and then was forced to be a child-warrior in a child army. All she saw was the sweat on his forehead as he struggled over the words of English and his starched-collar white shirt was damp. Starch, she thought, he must have a wife or money enough to go to the laundry. Sweat. He must be having trouble with school. But in truth it was nerves from seeing her beauty and calm, like when the wind blows and water lilies fly across the water and onto the land, and what’s on land is blown into the water. Lin said, “Doesn’t that breeze cool you?” She pointed at the window and smiled at him to show that it wasn’t an insult. She thought he needed help reading and he was struggling with the work. He thought she was reading his thoughts and knew they were all about her. He said, “No, but I like the scent of flowers.” So forward he was being, but she thought he was a poet. What he meant was something with insight into her life, and it did have depth, as he smelled the scent about her as if he were a butterfly. Later they walked together and he said, “I am going to university. What should we do?”
She said, so bold she couldn’t believe she had even spoken the words, “I think we should get married.” Embarrassed, her face was hot and now she was the one in a nervous sweat.
“Yes. I know I have seen you before, but I can’t remember where.” Perhaps it was another lifetime. All he knew was that they were meant to be together. He didn’t know she was the child, years ago, on the bloody trail, the one he had picked up that he was supposed to kill or injure and not help, that even then when he looked into her face and felt her tiny arm, he could not harm her.
But Lin returned to herself. She was a young woman who had to hide her feelings. She wasn’t a tree, she was a pond, and he would have to walk all the way around her to know her.
He was a man who would do it.
He had his back to her the next day when she came to school and she did what her father used to do. She put her hands around his head and covered his very deep eyes and said, “Guess who?”
No one had ever done that to him before. Again he was sweating. He liked her sweet manners. She liked his kindness. He had never been to war, she was certain. Not with his manners. He had lived in France at one time. He said he could help her with French. She could help him with English. Of course, they were perfect for each other. She even remembered a few curse words. “Repeat this. ‘Oh shit,’” she said, and laughed out loud, a beautiful laugh.
Lin’s ambitions now bothered her mistress, who had forgotten her own ambitions of the past, and
Lin knew it, so Lin offered the woman gifts and brought her food from Dr. Bread-baker, and called her Mother and sometimes felt bad, as if betraying her own mother, the memories, and her father’s fading photograph.
Over the years, the older woman’s face, once angry and thin, suspicious of everyone, had grown sad. Lin never knew how the older woman often stepped out the door and watched Lin go down the street to learn, thinking all the time, She will soon be gone. And later, the pain was even worse when Lin rode her bicycle to Han Son to interpret for the others. Oh, Mother was never stupid. She always knew Lin had gifts and talents beyond the art of flowers and stems. She was a girl who was good at anything and everything. That was her curse. It would lead her to all roads, like the veins of a leaf, all feeding one plant. But when Lin returned she always brought the woman something special. This time when she returned, the night of all the fretting and incense burning, it was sweet rice to make her happy, and Lin said she was already paid and was going to use some of the money to paint the counter and make it more lively and bright and she was happy and energetic and alive. She painted it the color of pale green with a hint of yellow. Lin said the color was chlorophyll and she’d just learned this word from leaves and school, and the woman who had known flowers so well loved the new word. Co-ro-f iu.
This time, too, when Lin came home she washed the woman’s hair outside in a basin of warm water, pouring it over her graying strands with a cup and noticing the thin back of her neck, the protruding bones there, the birthmark so many have in that place. A pale leaf fell into the tub of water and it seemed so much a part of them both. Lin offered the woman human comfort, the older woman who loved flowers and had spent years hating being alive, while Lin was surprised to have lived and had been thrilled when she remembered the bursts of fire and the rockets like falling stars, thrilled she survived them and proud of her abilities to live on streets, in trees, down roads, but there were other consequences and she hadn’t known what they were at first. Now she who had been without a family helped those who were helpless families find one another, and she swore upon the words of every dead and living savior that she would find her father.
Her adopted father had a calmness, too, not like a pond, or even a plant, not like Lin, but he had grown content with life. He alone noticed there were times when Lin was a restless pond underneath, not always a still one. He built things now. Especially he built birdhouses and he imagined them richly and elegantly. They were loved, pieced together by things he found thrown out on streets, pieces of cars, but somehow they always looked new and perfect. Lin loved him and remembered how he’d slipped her extra money when he could, money she used for books. He made a living room out in the back in a place that had been bare. Now they had enough, unlike before, and he grew flowers and ginger and he cared for the stone basin he kept filled with fresh water to attract the returning birds, and he even bought a TV.
“What would our ancestors think,” his wife said. “I won’t watch it. Ever.” She crossed her arms over herself the day he brought the square box home and turned it on.
She held out for three weeks and then one day she sat before it on the floor and watched so much he had to call her to her duties at work even in the daytime.
“Shh.” She waved him away with her narrow hand. “They are having a fight. She is sleeping with her doctor.”
“I had your future read by the woman who burns leaves on stones,” Mother told Lin one day.
“I heard she charges too much. Did she overcharge you?” Lin was a skeptic.
“Yes, of course she did. But I had to know.” She had a crease between her eyebrows which had disappeared. Then she kept silent, tempting Lin until her curiosity was too much for her. More silence. Until Lin couldn’t wait. “Okay, what did she say? What did you ask?”
“She said you would go a long ways. You would marry a man who was somehow an enemy, but the fights are over. You will grow even taller. How can you? I don’t know. She says you will always come home to flowers even if you go to school. You are meant for co-ro-fiu.”
Lin smiled without laughing. “And what about you?” She knew the woman would never ask only about the girl.
“Oh, I will live a long, long life and my hands will still be beautiful,” but she shook her head as if she had sad news she didn’t wish to tell. That was her way.
Lin wanted to go to a university. She didn’t need school, though. She already was finding her share of work. And she studied maps. The teacher, Dr. Thieu, over the years watched her with love that grew as Lin grew. Now he watched her grow into love with the young man who would become her husband.
Once, the two young people went to the park and, despite the others, they sang together. They knew all the same songs. Another time, they danced to the band that was playing there, a few men with instruments, a singing woman in a tight dress who lifted her arms like in a movie and sang in English. “You’re stiff,” he said, stepping back, looking at her gently.
“I’m nervous.” She felt embarrassed and again she was the one sweating.
It was a French dance. The air smelled of peach blossoms.
The streets were busy, but many had come to the dance and sat around on folding chairs or squatted on their own legs. Some of Lin’s people were there, the Ugly People, the tribes. No longer do we have or love nature, Lin thought when she saw those from places like her own. Now we just try to get by, like everyone, or to make money and build. After the reconciliation, comrades were forgotten, and everyone strove in new ways to survive. Some left to work on oil rigs in Thailand. Some worked for peace. Some built businesses. Some lost them.
When Lin and Tran married, they stepped on the pathway of flowers. All was flowers because Lin’s adopted mother insisted. It was a day of still ponds and plants. It was a day of baked food and a night of sweetness, even in the rains that fell.
Now, beneath the full moon, as she watches the bats, she is a young woman and she has done well with her life. She tells herself that she has made for herself a fortunate life. And it is true; this life was not given her, the girl who was once shoeless even though her mother had been a shoemaker. Now, she thinks, it is time to find her father.
RED FISH: HUMAN
Lin still remembers her father. How he’d made yellow paper into something that flew on a string and looked like the birds that once lived there. She held the string and ran with the kite down the hill toward the now-murky water and he’d say, “Not too high,” afraid of attracting attention. She remembers laughing at his monkey imitation, although she had only seen a monkey once and it had stolen her grandmother’s pearl hair comb. The soldiers had seen to it that no monkeys were left.
Mostly she recalls the day he walked up from the floating market and the houses on stilts with the red fish in a white bowl. He carried it proudly. He had earned the money for it himself, paid by Old Grandfather Uncle for his labor. And he brought a lotus flower for her mother that same day, sweet-smelling and with white petals, slowly opening. But she remembers only pieces. She calls them fractures, the way her life has been fractured. And some pieces have fallen away like the petals of a flower. She knows that her father, the American who didn’t look like one, was one of their many secrets. Her people had nothing but secrets. Now, as a woman, she understands the careful line they walked to remain alive, between alliances, enemies, politicians of low order, and boys with a desire to kill. She’d heard all the words and, even young, she asked, “Are we Minh? Are we allies? Are we communists? Did we help the Americans?” Her grandmother, golden-skinned, tall then and not yet broken, said, “You are too young for these things. Anyway, now it is the past. We live for tomorrow.” Lin could tell by her eyes, a closed look, her hair back in a twist, that she would never tell. The past had to be put in its place. Not so for young Lin.
Behind her grandmother she could see the fields of rice, the water almost invisible, hidden like everything waiting both for rain and the next wave of history. A sudden wind blew the rice and the fiel
d bent and glistened as the last of the sunlight moved like waves of water. The sunset over the fields glowed red.
Everyone was convinced that he’d never return. “Huh! The Americans would never let him.” She lit an oil lamp. The old woman knew. She knew the Americans. “They could do anything. It’s worse than the raw nerve in my broken tooth to think of these things,” her grandmother said. And so it had to be enough that he loved her, her mother, the village. Her grandmother kissed her forehead. “You are alive because of him. That is good enough, my girl.” Moist with the humidity, her shadow falling on the wall, she rearranged the comb in her silver-black hair, this comb unlike the one with pearl made of carved bone. Lin heard that she once searched the jungle for the one the monkey stole until her husband put a stop to it. “You’ll get killed over a hair comb.”
Later Lin understood about her grandmother not wanting to think about the past. Auntie, Grandmother’s sister, told Lin how the old woman had been raped and left for dead, cut at the neck. Auntie said she found her, the woman’s long hair red with blood all about her neck and shoulders. Auntie grabbed her and lifted her. “You! Sister, wake up! You are breathing!” Auntie yelled. By some miracle, the artery was not cut, even though Grandmother thought she was dead, wished she was, and lay back weak and limp, but she was yelled into life by a woman almost too thin to have a voice.
Auntie squeezed the skin together, using sticky sap to hold it, the very same sap Lin’s mother once used on shoes. “Okay, now, let’s go,” she told her sister, wrapping her neck with a sleeve from her blouse. “Hurry!”