(The reason he had chosen her was simple: he had to choose someone he wouldn’t mind divulging his secrets to, and it was always, he said later, better to choose a person he thought might be a potential lover.)
It began in the midst of those late nights, the pressure, the exhilaration of secrecy shared, emotions fueled not only by personal but also worldly concerns. She knew he already had a wife and children, but she didn’t worry about this or feel guilty. She didn’t hope he would leave his family, either. According to Tran’s own Buddhist-Existentialist-derived concept of Truthful Living it was the circumstances in which one lost all sense of time and consequence and reason that revealed when one was living one’s true destiny. And so she reveled in the immediacy of their suspended moments, in which she thought neither of futures or pasts, nor of fantasies or realities. She became shell, cavern, empty well: she became replete. A sensation of sheer life, of Meaningful Living (how else could she put it?) loomed over her like a great umbrella. As a lover he was gentle, compassionate and warm, appropriately woeful at the could-have-beens of their situation.
She liked the way men looked at her during this time: with energy, with challenges, with a curiosity that was intellectual and spirited—and liked how they would joke with her and tell her frank things about other women she knew they’d never shared with a woman. They trusted, even feared, her; for here was one woman who couldn’t be and didn’t need to be fooled or wooed. Concerning love, she told herself she was practicing the Buddhist paradox of “living simultaneously”: immersion and nonattachment together.
She kept busy. She was tenacious and vigilant at her work. During this period her writing sprang from her without her prescience: her fiction became more violent—sometimes this surprised her—as the calamities of war caused her characters to act out undue passions.
“School is more important than God.” One morning Tran found herself saying this to her son.
Thien had been contesting her and asking questions she couldn’t answer with tact. Questions concerning the rituals they did or did not perform, as Catholics, that might put them out of favor with God. It was his grandmother’s—Tran’s mother’s—influence; Thien had been spending his afternoons at his grandmother’s house while Tran was at the newspaper office. That morning, Thien wanted to practice his pen manship by copying out prayers, instead of doing his French vocabulary homework. Tran was at the stove fixing his breakfast.
“You won’t do well in school just because you believe in God, God is not your teacher.” This was the best way Tran could think of to emphasize the importance of keeping education and religion separate—in her mind, the former was crucial while the latter was optional. “You need to do well in school if you don’t want to end up like the kids on the street or in the countryside who can’t even spell their own names!” Thien bowed his head, and Tran asked him a question in French: “Où est le gâteau?” She meant “cake,” but he heard “boat.”
“Le bateau est à l’océan” replied Thien, glumly.
She tried to smile, teasing. “Et est-ce que tu aimes manger le bateau?”
He looked at her and frowned. Then he walked to the corner of the kitchen and sat on the floor, pulling his knees into his chest and burying his face in his arms. He yelled, “J’ai pas faim!”
She set his breakfast on the floor before him. “Let it get cold then,” she snapped in Vietnamese.
Tran had scheduled her son’s days to be full; she wanted him to become cultured. This meant art lessons, music, English, French, literature, drama—even soccer (it was the European sport of choice, as Tran understood). How could she explain to Thien that it was in these activities that he would find salvation, not in his grandmother’s sad, persistent prayers? She saw her mother as a victim of submission; her husband, Tran’s father, was a philanderer (as so many Vietnamese men were), while God constantly required her to be on her knees. She had spoiled her sons, too, and two were now dead from drink and war; the richest one was a gambler and ruthlessly selfish; and the other two were lost to her, having “died” into lives of vice. Saigon has become like Babylon, she lamented. Now the old woman lived an ascetic existence of cooking, cleaning and performing other duties with her unmarried daughters and their illegitimate children (Tran was the only one who’d acquired the means or drive to move out on her own). A houseful of unweddable women and a wayward husband. Neighbors looked on them with pity. Tran had grown up terrified of becoming like her mother or older sisters. She saved her allowances for months just to buy a book; she lied about running errands in the marketplace in order to attend forums on French literature.
“You’re only a half-woman, that’s what I hear people say,” said her son, after he had begrudgingly begun to eat the food on his plate.
Tran was at her desk, sipping her coffee. “Who says this?”
“The other ladies, when they come to Grandma’s house. Because you’re never with me, and you don’t know how to cook or clean properly. They say you walk like a rooster and smoke cigarettes and drink beer like the men, and that’s why no man wants to marry you. What man wants to marry a woman who’s like a man?”
“I walk like a rooster?” Tran was appalled and amused by this, thinking Thien must be misrepeating what he had heard.
“Yes, a rooster,” said Thien emphatically. Then he stood and demonstrated, with his hands on his hips and his elbows sticking out. From what Tran could gather, it had to do with her chest—the women were claiming she pushed it forward when she walked—and the bold uncouthness of her high-heeled boots that made her gait stiff and unfeminine and her footsteps loud, as if she meant to always announce her presence well ahead of her arrival.
“They are just jealous,” said Tran. She felt miffed but slightly triumphant, too.
That afternoon she took Thien to his grandmother’s house. She was thinking she would hire a maid soon, to lessen his visits to his grandmother. Tran and her mother did not converse in either a friendly or a strained manner; they nodded and gave each other per functory information. Tran’s mother brought a plastic bag out of the bedroom and immediately set items on the floor around Thien. Wooden cars, a toy helicopter, green plastic soldiers, some items that were not toys but appeared still to hold interest for him—an empty tin can with a colorful label, an assortment of mismatched chopsticks. As she was leaving, Tran saw her mother moving toward Thien with a plate of rice cakes.
Her colleagues greeted her jovially as she entered the office. Shaking that morning’s issue, one reporter (whom Tran sensed fancied her) exclaimed, “And how does the beautiful, mysterious Trung Trinh find time to be both subversive and romantic? What a remarkable woman!”
“Ah, but does it not take one to have the other? Does each simply not lead to the other?” teased another colleague. He was the same age as Tran, a photojournalist who kept mostly to himself and exhibited a carefree nature no matter the severity of his subject matter.
“Quan the philosopher,” said the first reporter, not without admiration.
“Quan the skeptic,” said Tran coyly; then reticently, coolly, removed her jacket and seated herself at her typewriter. She had her own desk now and composed her daily installments in the office, often finishing minutes before the deadline.
Quan nodded and smiled. He shouldered his camera bag and walked away.
“So,” shouted a woman from a desk nearby. “What are the lovers up to today, Miss Tran?”
Tran glanced across the large room toward the stairs leading to the upstairs office where Giang worked. “Today I think I will put them on a boat,” she said grimly, “with a cake.”
The boy was four now, and sometimes she saw too much of his father in him. She had only married the man because it had been expected of her as it had been expected of her true beloved to marry his arranged bride. The general’s daughter. Now they worked side by side, caring equally for each other’s sons. All the men were gone. What did it matter anymore, the old rivalries among women? They all had love at stake now. Talk of fleei
ng was circulating in whispers in wash circles. The general’s daughter was secretly packing, weeping as she sorted memorabilia and made wrenching, frivolous decisions over items of sentimental value. Passions passed, Phuong-Li had learned, but true love was lasting. It did not need reciprocation, it did not require consummation, it knew nothing of time. It knew nothing of safety.
Today was the boy’s birthday, and she would take him down to the water to watch the fishing boats. The boy loved boats. He was always asking her to “watch, watch” as he did one trick or another. Phuong-Li was not particularly patient with children and tired quickly of his enthusiasm. She sat in the sand and touched her ribs. It had been four years ago—oh, how she had hated being pregnant! She remembered. Too well. She drew circles in the sand. No, it could not be happening again, not so soon, could it? Out on the water fishermen’s nets arched through the air and landed, imprinting their grids on the shifting surfaces of the waves and catching sunlight in tiny squares of silver—fleeting seconds at a time—before sinking down into the warm darkness below.
A team of government police barraged the office the following morning. Rumors had been circulating of such police action against other newspapers. Semantics of certain ordinances were being interpreted now in stricter fashion and enforced, in order to tighten censorship rules. The police stopped at Tran’s desk and ordered her to come with them. She protested, demanding to know why, and the men stood in indignation around her—the reporter who fancied her tried to lie that he was in fact Trung Trinh, a man writing under a female alias; Quan the photojournalist yelled uncharacteristic (for him) curses; other reporters said, “Take us instead. Are you so cowardly you must pick on our women staff members alone?” Only Giang kept his face down, melted into the background, left by the back door.
The police held her for interrogation. As they laid before her all the pages of the past episodes of her serial novel, they asked her to explain details of fashion and etiquette and dialogue between characters; they demanded to know what subversive messages each of these items encoded. She denied having encoded anything, but they insisted again that she “explain the codes.” In the end, they pushed her to her knees and lashed her hands with a bamboo cane, a symbolic gesture, they assured her, not meant to cripple literally (they knew it was more important to break spirit than body). Maybe next time she lifted her pen she would hesitate.
Tran sobbed into her welted hands. The baby inside her kicked.
Later that night, she did not consider where the smoke would go, or that it would have to rise. Her son was coughing when he crawled down the ladder of their sleeping loft and peeked in at her on her knees before the small metal pail in the middle of her papers on the floor. She had been burning the original manuscript pages of all her serial episodes, although she knew this, in fact, erased nothing.
“Mama? What are you doing?”
“It is only me,” said Tran, glancing up at the blur of her son through her heat-fogged eyeglasses.
III.
In the eighth month of her second pregnancy, Tran was facing a trial, the newspaper was facing shutdown, and neighbors and many other people she encountered daily were either denying or praying in the face of coming changes in the political climate. In the countryside, entire families were lynched, their heads strung from tree limbs, mouths agape. This, among a long list of horrors the approaching Communist takeover was likely to bring. At the National Cemetery, mass graves had been dug and filled as bodies were shipped in by the truckload, with no time or means for proper identification. Reporters took gruesome snapshots of bloodied bodies and bulging eyes—the dead looked stunned. Suicide in the cities increased.
Tran moved cumbersomely through these months, continuing to believe only in the newspaper’s single-minded rebellion, the artists’ cause of freedom of speech, which aligned itself with neither the approaching forces nor the failing and corrupt current government. She had spoken to no one of her pregnancy until it had made itself plainly visible and other women had begun—without acknowledging the pregnancy directly—to bring her extra food and pull out chairs for her to sit during meetings. Giang was the only person she had told before this point, and he had shaken his head. As if it were the bearing of his own feelings about the situation—and not the bearing of the child, exactly—that would be most taxing. This had been enough to tell Tran he had no intention of supporting her. But Tran had been through this once before, and this time she figured it was best not to raise a fight or ask for compensation or even acknowledgment. She knew Giang’s reputation was more important to him than anything else. Nothing was personal that was not political here. They passed each other in the halls now with lowered eyes. Hers was not the only alias he used anymore; he had begun using it less ever since the first few visits from the police. And no one was interested in or entertained by her serial lately, either. For some reason it was not the same—with the writer so regrettably, unmentionably pregnant. Everyone, it seemed, shared a sense of chagrin and karma.
Giang’s wife began to visit the newspaper offices regularly to bring him meals. She dressed tastefully, her hair done up immaculately. (Tran would not look up from her desk or would look up only briefly as the other women called out greetings to Giang’s wife.) She was an attractive but vain woman who Tran knew from hearsay fancied herself a poet, but her poems had been published only because of her husband’s influence, and she had never shed her true desire for wealth despite her husband’s unflagging idealism. Tran also knew from hearsay that though the wife was aware of her, they did not speak of the other woman. At least he has granted us this much, Tran thought. But she wasn’t sure whom he was really protecting.
In the end she went to the courtroom alone.
What have we done wrong? I would ask God, if I believed in Him. Oh these sad, sad days. You want to understand that the world works justly, and that war with all its atrocity and catastrophe is simply part of the greater Order, the yin to the yang of prosperity and peace we had for x number of years, et cetera. You want to believe in the story of the man who lost his donkey but won a horse. You want to believe in Philosophy. But my children, my unborn and my son, there is much that is unfair and I cannot explain why to you, though I bring you into this world to face it. I feel it crucial to tell you (should I not return or be able for whatever reasons to say it to you in person): I am sorry.
“This is it?” said the managing editor. “This is your installment?” The page he held in his hand was more than half blank, more than half white.
Tran nodded.
LIVE-IN COOK
from THE BOOK OF SALT
Monique Truong
When I applied for the position as live-in cook, I did not know about the house in Bilignin. I assumed that the lives of the two American ladies and therefore mine would be centered in Paris on the rue de Fleurus. They did not inform me during the interview about their seasonal migration. Not that it would have made a difference to me then. I had been in Paris for over three years. I had interviewed with and even worked for an embarrassing number of households. In my experience, they fell into two categories. No, in fact, there were three.
The first were those who, after a catlike glimpse at my face, would issue an immediate rejection, usually nonverbal. A door slam was an uncommonly effective form of communication. No discussion, no references required, no “Will you want Sundays off?” Those, while immediately unpleasant, I preferred. Type twos were those who might or might not end up hiring me but who would, nonetheless, insist on stripping me with questions, as if performing an indelicate physical examination. Type twos behaved as if they had been authorized by the French government to ferret out and to document exactly how it was that I had come to inhabit their hallowed shores.
“In Paris, three years,” I told them.
MONIQUE TRUONG was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual proper
ty. She coedited, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose. The Book of Salt is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York
“Where were you before?”
“Marseilles.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Boat to Marseilles.”
“Boat? Well, obviously. Where did that boat sail from?”
And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly revealed the names, one by one, of the cities that had carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that formed the bulk of who I am.
“Hmmm . . . you say you’ve been in Paris for three years? Now, let’s see, if you left Indochina when you were twenty, that would make you . . .”
“Twenty-six, Madame.”
Three years unaccounted for! you could almost hear them thinking. Most Parisians could ignore and even forgive me for not having the refinement to be born amidst the ringing bells of their cathedrals, especially since I was born instead amidst the ringing bells of the replicas of their cathedrals, erected in a far-off colony to remind them of the majesty, the piety, of home. As long as Monsieur and Madame could account for my whereabouts in their city or in one of their colonies, then they could trust that the République and the Catholic Church had had their watchful eyes on me. But when I exposed myself as a subject who might have strayed, who might have lived a life unchecked, un-governed, undocumented, and unrepentant, I became, for them, suspect. Before, I was no more of a threat than a cloistered nun. Now Madame glared at me to see if she could detect the deviant sexual practices that I had surely picked up and was now, without a doubt, proliferating under the very noses of the city’s Notre-Dames. Madame now worried whether she could trust me with her little girls.
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