Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  get from this war is when we are able to create—and it won’t lie in our hands, but in our minds alone.” He smiled sadly. “Every day I am more tired. Last night we were up very late, working. As usual.” He laid his hands flat upon the desk. She noticed they were large, his fingers long and tapered.

  “Thank you, Uncle,” she said finally, understanding it was time for her to go.

  Phuong-Li did not care for politics. To her it was a futile way to expend one’s energies, and she did not understand the tension it stirred between people, the long heavy silences and sharp looks and charged nonchalance that passed now between her peers who held varying views. Phuong-Li merely wanted to play with old friends as they had when they were children, chasing each other about in the rice fields or laughing at something simple like the nickname Snake she had given one boy because he could not pronounce his words correctly and he spit when he talked fast.

  “Why do you call me that?” the boy asked her once.

  “That is my secret,” Phuong-Li teased him, and her other friends giggled.

  The boy, because he was fond of her, was flattered by her attention, no matter what the reason, so he answered to the name Snake.

  Phuong-Li liked to recall these small, clever childhood games; they gave her a sense of importance, of secret control. Years later she saw the boy she had called Snake. He was now nineteen years old and had been away at school. What kind of school she did not know exactly, for she’d never asked. School was school, that vague process a few children, usually boys, went through. And when they returned, people bowed with deeper respect to these sons, and mothers blushed with adulation if it was their own sons returning in such style, for to parents schooling meant potential wealth. To Phuong-Li, it meant very little.

  He came to her family’s house with another neighborhood friend, and when Phuong-Li’s little brothers opened the door, the friend asked for her. Snake hung back, his hands in his pockets, and he looked at his feet. When Phuong-Li came to the door, he waited to see if she would recognize him before he spoke. She did, and jumped forward to embrace him. Time and what she considered to be maturity had made her magnanimous toward all past acquaintances, close or not. He raised his face and smiled, showing warmth and something else, a certain light at seeing her again. It was in her eyes as well, though she did not realize it.

  “You’ve grown up to be so pretty,” he exclaimed.

  “And you’ve learned how to speak properly!” she teased him.

  Later, he smoked cigarettes with her older brothers while discussing politics and life in the city. She did not listen to their words, did not recognize that they were secretly probing one another with statements meant to provoke responses that would reveal their true allegiances. She did notice a tension in the air, although it only made her lament to herself: Why could they not all get along like old friends, like they used to, instead of indulging in all this tiresome talk? She admired the way Snake spoke, though, his easy mannerisms, the fierceness that lay beneath his composed veneer, showing itself only in small movements—the quick, forceful lift of his chin at a sound in the kitchen, the brusqueness with which he struck his matches. She thought he must be saying important, intelligent things, even if she did not understand them.

  No, she cared nothing for politics. After that day, all she cared about was love.

  In the spring of 1972, Tran was in her seventh week of writing daily installments. She woke early in the morning and brewed herself a cup of coffee in the apartment where she now lived with her six-year-old son. They lived alone, the two of them, because Tran had felt her sisters and religious mother could not understand the life of a writer, especially when it was a woman who sought such a life.

  Tran stood over the small stove in the far corner of the first-floor room, gazing each morning at the wall as she fried an egg for her son, her thoughts drifting to another world, of horses and hoop dresses and colored silks, of idle, well-educated, well-mannered women, servants announcing visitors in doorways of parlors. Tall, handsome, white-skinned men in waistcoats. They bowed and kissed the ladies’ hands. And from this place her thoughts would then drift into the world of Vietnam. But she was unable to conjure any images of a parallel world here, only a vague sense of longing. The world of Vietnam was too visceral and in-congruent next to the polished drama of the America in her mind. Even her imagined version of Vietnam—the bustling port town of Haiphong in 1954, the setting of her story—was humid and overcrowded and raw. (It resembled present-day Saigon, the only experience of a city from which she had to draw.) There were no equivalents here to the panoramic views of rolling green hills outside windows of estate houses, as existed in that other land. Even the war here was not so noble and deeply felt a calamity as it seemed to be there. Here the war was bogged down by the clearly unromantic facts of industry and contradicting chains of command, and it often stretched on for months without incident. And when an incident did occur it was always outside the city limits, far enough away to seem almost—though not entirely—irrelevant. As for the views outside Tran’s windows, they were of the stucco walls of neighboring buildings. The inner walls of her own apartment (which she would stare at for hours each morning as she typed) were pale blue and cracked. The only decorative architectural elements were the concrete blocks with rough-edged patterns of ellipses and curved diamonds cut into them, which fitted into the windows as screens. When the sunlight came through, it cast these patterns in shadow on the concrete floor.

  Tran slid the egg she had cooked into a bowl and set it before her son, Thien. While Thien ate, she combed his hair. Sometimes she would tell him a tidbit of what she was working on in her head. “Maybe today is the day Phuong-Li will encounter her old Uncle Minh in the market,” she would say. (Writing a serial novel was as much an adventure as reading one, she had found. She turned in her installments daily or weekly without much revision or forethought, and the pieces were published immediately, taken out of her hands, cemented in ink that quickly. It made plot seem to her a live, unpredictable factor she was stumbling blindly after, trying to keep up with it.)

  Thien would respond appropriately, because he had been following along; all the names of persons his mother spoke of he accepted in the same way, whether they were fictional or real. “Will Uncle Minh punish her for how she ran away last week?”

  “But she knows Uncle Minh’s secret, that he married his wife for her money, because she has met her Uncle Minh’s other daughter, remember? The one no one is supposed to know about.”

  “Uncle Minh is a bad man,” Thien might say, and often Tran was proud of his astute judgments.

  After breakfast each morning she walked her son to the end of the alley where it met an avenue. There he joined several other boys, and Tran watched as they raced across the avenue and through the gates to their school. Then she walked—smiling but not speaking to anyone she passed—back to the apartment. And once inside, she would sit down to write.

  II.

  They came to her apartment in the middle of the night and woke her. With Giang were two men, young reporters she had seen around the newspaper office. One waited, smoking, behind the wheel of Giang’s car while the other stood outside her door. Giang waited, halfway down the alley, pacing in the predawn light.

  “He says you must come with us. He’s heard a rumor. It’s important we investigate this,” said the man at her door.

  Tran did not hesitate to wake her son and take him over to the woman next door. Tran had been asked before to accompany reporters on their outings—they knew she would be interested in the outings as research, or sometimes they just wanted an extra eye along—but this was the first time Giang (whom she knew by reputation to be one of the more esteemed senior reporters) had singled her out. The woman next door, herself a mother of five and familiar with Tran’s erratic schedule, welcomed Thien.

  Tran fumbled for her camera and notebooks and left with the men. The road out of the city was narrow and bumpy. As it was still the
dry season, dust rose in their wake. Once, they stopped and the two younger men got out of the car to urinate by the side of the road, their cigarettes still poking from their lips, while Giang and Tran waited. The unwoken world outside the car’s dirty windows was cool and blue and silent, and this made Tran aware of the silence between her and Giang. But she did not think much of it. She told herself he was just treating her as one of the men and there was no need between men to fill silences. Secretly she felt flattered; she felt her inclusion in this excursion to be significant. Proof that her insights or opinions had been heard by him and others, and noted. Especially in this time when men disregarded women’s minds. She had done all she could not to appear a typical woman: she wore her hair short and spoke casually about sex, passionately about existentialism. She wanted to show them her mind was sharp. She could handle as much as they could.

  The men got back in the car and they resumed driving. The city disappeared behind them into a crooked, cramped, hazy line on the horizon. Clumps of listing, bamboo-roofed shacks appeared at intervals alongside the road. They drove past swamps and groves of tall, reedy trees and a few early travelers on the road toting straw baskets of rice or produce or prodding along their pigs and cows. The reporters arrived near the village of Ha-Kan just after dawn, where they stopped at the edge of a rice field. Giang cut the car’s engine and they listened to the rustling of the rice stalks, the twittering of birds, the whirring of crickets.

  “This hamlet was raided early this morning by the VC. Some of the village children fled to the jungle. They were then chased back out of the jungle by certain members of the South Vietnamese army and shot while trying to hide in a herd of water buffalo. These children will probably end up tallied among the VC dead, my source tells me. But I want to record some evidence of the truth before then. Do you have your cameras ready?” Giang turned to the young reporters.

  They went on foot by a small path through the trees, across a narrow arm of the river. The sky’s faint colors changed and deepened above them like the images in a photograph developing, slowly. The fog uncurled from where it lay, low, around their knees; it seemed sentient, damaged, angry even, as if it did not want them to walk through. Then something solid came into the morning. They began to see purple water buffalo carcasses on the road, matching the pale purple swath of sky still lingering above the wet fields like a bruise.

  Once there, the four walked among the bloated purple-black bellies that were like mounds of dark earth, Tran and the two reporters wondering why they had been brought to look at dead animals and daring not to express disappointment for fear of appearing callous to the cause. Brown-black blood ran out of each wide nostril. The animals’ coats were mangy and smelled faintly like iron. Tran knelt to look more closely at a hoof. The last time she had stood this close to a water buffalo was as a child—when her family still lived in the far northern countryside where the air was so crisp it woke your skin in the morning. Tran found herself looking at the buffalo now with affection. Yet she knew it was not the death of animals they were here to mourn.

  When she glanced up, Giang was watching her (his mouth slightly open, he seemed to be searching for something), and in that fleeting look she recognized something, if for only a flash. The depth with which he was watching her watch the dead buffalo—it was as if their faint understanding of whatever this incident might mean was profoundly the same. She saw it surprised him, but it did not surprise her. She knew then that some form of a romance would occur between them.

  However: Love was not roses or white towers or any such nonsense. Rather, it was a call from some darker well of the heart possessing no regard for the rules of life, for the ideals of human sacraments, even. What love required of its participants would occur heedless of violence and happiness alike (she would write this into her story somehow later).

  Breaking the spell, Giang said, with what seemed like a levity both concentrated and painful, “It must be the season for children to turn into buffalo.”

  That evening, she followed him at a distance as he walked into the city’s quarter of poorhouses, a place she had never been before and knew no virtuous woman should go, and soon her curiosity turned to ire. “What kind of man is he? For what unspeakable intention can he be skulking about among such dwellings?” Her thoughts churned viciously. “Who is she? What does she have that I don’t have?” He was leading her down an alley with foul-smelling gutters. She lifted her skirts, remembering herself in front of the mirror that very morning, turning this way and that, trying on dress after dress in anticipation of seeing him and thinking desperately, “It will not do, it will not do.”

  Now she thought, “This is what I have dressed for.”

  She followed him into a narrow alley behind a row of houses, and when he stopped at a door, she hid, flattening herself against the cool stone wall. He rapped three times on the door, paused, then rapped three more times in a deliberate rhythm.

  The door opened, a shaft of yellow light fell upon his face—he was so handsome still!—and he stepped inside, and the door closed. She did not see the face of the person who had admitted him.

  How long would she wait? And for what, should she find out? Would the truth about him only disgust and force her to see plainly that he inhabited worlds in which she had no place? She wished that she were older, her life less sheltered—she wished she’d known more hardship. Maybe then she would have acquired some of that roughness, that bitterness, that would have made her a woman for whom he would risk shame. Anything, she thought, anything but to be the one spying and desperate and lonely—oh so!—in the shadows of “real” life.

  They drove back to the city with their notes and film, and once home set about writing what they believed to be the truth about the alleged massacre that had occurred in Ha-Kan. During a discussion in Giang’s office, Tran tried to interject some of her own ideas, but in their eagerness the reporters talked over her. After making a few attempts she retreated, consoling herself in her head: You don’t even care about politics. You’re a fiction writer. You’re writing a love story, more valuable in its own way.

  Once, Giang gave her a small, patient smile; he had caught her eyes wandering. She was no longer confident about why she’d been invited to come along on the investigation in the first place.

  The next day the story ran. When Tran arrived at the newspaper office in the afternoon as usual to turn in her daily installment, which she had spent the morning writing, she was surprised at being greeted with nods and cheers from other staff members. She—it appeared—had written the story, with the field help of the two young reporters; there was no mention of Giang. Photographs of the raided, burning hamlet ran next to an exposé on an allegedly corrupt general’s career and crimes. Beneath his photograph ran a long list of names—other government and military officials and their illegal activities. Bewildered, Tran read the story and stared at her name in print above it. When she asked, no one knew where the two young reporters were.

  “In and out as usual, those boys,” said one clerk.

  “I underestimated you,” said another, coming forward to shake her hand.

  This was how it began. In the following months Tran’s popularity grew—her notoriety, in fact—as more articles were printed under her name. Articles of a slyly observant, condemnatory, apolitical bent—never siding with any of the official parties, only pointing out their contradictions. Colleagues said about Tran’s pen name (which she had chosen rather naïvely at the beginning of her work for the paper, as she’d noticed most writers used pen names) that now it made sense. “Trung Trinh, master of the woman’s style of attack,” they said, joking that they’d previously not understood why a romance fiction writer would choose a pen name that made reference to the Trung sisters—Vietnam’s legendary women warriors who had risen up in rebellion against their Chinese overlords in the first century A.D.

  Tran was surprised to find that even when she said little or nothing, her character was meritoriously assessed:
people took her silence as knowing. They deferred to her in discussion, even when she made only vague comments. Giang had explained she need only nod and say she was “still thinking about it” if anyone asked a question she couldn’t answer; in private, he briefed her on the subjects of the articles. Gradually, she felt her confidence grow, her own writing develop irony. She learned how to absorb necessary information quickly; she appropriated gumption. Though she saw herself becoming somewhat a pawn in this game of his, she also couldn’t deny her new freedom. Her wit was sharper, as she now knew the inner workings of the paper. Sentiments, false hopes, the old yens of her former romanticism, could no longer sway her. And though she knew her new skepticism threatened to desensitize her to the actual issues about which they were writing, she could not fathom going back. Her previous position seemed now unconnected and vulnerable and embarrassingly innocent.

  They worked late many nights. They worked with their heads bent over documents or photographs, and Tran slowly became more knowledgeable—and even on occasion contributed to—these stories attributed to her. Giang made it clear she was doing him a favor—he was grateful, solicitous, charismatic. They were great friends, he would say, each helping the other by doing the very thing each wished to do most, and was this not the philosophy of self-fulfillment unfolding as ideally as it should? Was this not Equality, that beautiful, modern, Western thought? He wrote his stories, she wrote hers. The romantic nature of her fiction protected him—the censors were slow to examine political articles written by a woman romance writer. And yet the people knew.