by Dao Strom
Ha studied me for a long moment. Her face softened and she smiled and patted my leg as if to comfort me, which irritated me slightly, since I didn’t think I needed it. “When you here now, I take care of you,” she said, “like when you a baby here, I always protect you.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said. I tried to explain this further, and again Ha said that she would protect me.
Then another cousin asked, “You have boyfriend?” When I said no, they looked at each other and giggled. Ha spoke in an eager tone to Aunt Long and they laughed more.
I wanted to know what they were saying.
“We are just make funny.” Ha patted my leg again. “Joke. Okay?” Even the boys looked up and covered their mouths. I didn’t say anything, but Ha must’ve noticed my face. “Why you look so sad?”
“I’m not sad," I said.
There was something almost critical in her gaze, or was it hurt? Her large, bright eyes turn down at the corners even when she smiles. She wears her black hair in a loose bun. “It so long since I speak English. I am sorry,” she said. “More than fifteen year since I speak English.” She tilted her head away for a second, searching. “Why your mom no teach you your language?”
And that’s the only question they’ve asked so far about Mom. And you know the answer to that.
“Well, my father’s American” is what I said.
I asked if they knew who my birth father was. They showed me pictures of another man, in military uniform, the one who died shortly after I was born, but who I know for a fact was not my father, because Mom said my real father wasn’t in the military. He worked for a newspaper. I didn’t press, though—I may know his story but I’ve never known his name. Besides, I’d like to think I already know who my father is. (I mean you.)
I am just joking around.
Do you know, sometimes back home when I meet people for the first time and they ask “What are you?” (the question I hate), I tell them, “My father is American,” or “My father is white,” or, if I want to be more specific, “My father is from Denmark.” It’s not a lie, because you are the father who raised me. It’s a test for me, in a way, to see if I feel strongly enough about a person to go the extra distance and clarify. And often I simply don’t.
But really. What kind of answer do you expect from a question like that, What are you? Not a straight one, surely. What are you?
June 21:
This afternoon they have taken me to a karaoke bar in what seems to be somebody’s living room. I can’t tell what is a home or what is a store here. I could hear voices from other rooms, though, and the sounds of cooking. There’s an open window with bars on it behind the sweltering vinyl couch. The walls are cracked and dirty. The floor, bare concrete. Other things to note: a large-screen TV (if you want to talk about lack of modern technology, you’ll be glad to see they’ve not missed out on what matters); a couple of plastic sitting stools, kid-size; a disco ball hanging from a hook on the ceiling in the corner.
I didn’t want to go but Ha insisted. “We do many things together, we make the good memories for you when you to go away.” She says, “In Vietnam, the man, they are addict. To karaoke. Like when you no want to stop drink the beer? But here, no go home to wife—sing, sing, sing instead!” And she laughs.
The images on the screen are of men and women walking together under palm trees; a man singing with a pained expression and clenching his fist in front of his chest; silhouettes against a backdrop of the ocean. The verses of the song are in Vietnamese, but the chorus is in English. “Thank you, America, no more do we roam, thank you, Democracy, for our new home,” or something crazy like that. This music was recorded by Vietnamese singers in Canada or France or the States, then imported back into Vietnam.
“They want to make present for you,” says Ha.
The youngest boy kneels on the floor, wailing off-key into the microphone. He keeps glancing toward me and cracking up, and so do the others. I’m not sure if they’re laughing at me for some reason or at themselves for trying to imitate the singer on TV, so I just keep politely smiling. The music makes the room seem bigger than it is. They hold the microphone out to me. I say I don’t want to. They keep insisting and I keep refusing.
“We just try to have good time, make funny,” says Ha.
“I can’t sing.”
Thi places her hand on my leg. “It is easy,” she says in a soft, careful voice.
“I don’t like this music,” I say.
Another song comes on and Thi reaches for the microphone.
“This is the song she give to her father for when he is away.” Ha sits back against the couch, tired. “Her father, ten year ago, he go away to America.” The melody is familiar, though the words running across the screen are Vietnamese. I realize then: it is an American song re-done by a Vietnamese singer. I have to laugh.
“Why you laugh?” Ha asks, surprised.
“In America,” I try to explain, “Richard Marx, this singer? He’s bad. This is a bad song.” I don’t know how else to say it.
Ha looks confused.
“Not good,” I say. But I want to explain more clearly what I mean by “bad.” I want to tell her how sometimes someone might say a thing that’s meant to be sincere and true, but they say it in such a generic way the truth is taken out of it. I want to explain to her about both the irony and pain of this, how it’s a distressing fact of commercial society, how it is both so upsetting and so ridiculous, how my even trying to explain it is also ridiculous and demeaning and untrustworthy of whatever the truth of the experience is, and how sometimes all you can do about that finally is—laugh. That is all I mean. Really.
Ha doesn’t quite get it, of course. She says, “He is not good?” and shakes her head. “Wow.” But it’s me she’s looking at in disbelief.
On screen a pretty woman walks along a white beach. The water sparkles. The wind blows her hair off her shoulders as she hugs herself and gazes out over the sea with glossy eyes. Then her face is superimposed onto the sky. (Dear Father: it is your stoicism I’ve inherited.) But I became ashamed at that moment. Here was Thi, sitting on her stool singing her heart out, and there was my aunt crying when she first saw me, and then I thought of Mom, and I looked at Ha, who was watching her daughter sing, and Ha’s eyes, black and worried as they are. Sorrow is what is infectious here. I wish I could take back what I said about that song, but I can’t.
Here are the Vietnamese lyrics:
Even though I’ve never liked the song, the American version, it’s one I’ve heard a thousand times. In English the refrain goes: no matter this, no matter that, “I will be right here waiting for you,” or “I will be always waiting for you,” or something like that. It’s pretty corny but as you can see, it makes sense.
And there’s a story about Ha’s husband I’d forgotten until just now. Mom told it to me, the year she died.
Ha’s husband’s family had applied to go to America back before Ha and her husband were married, and it took some years for the application to be approved, as those things do. When it came through, after Ha and Cuong had married, Cuong’s family forced him to divorce Ha so he could leave with them. That is the family ethic here. Cuong went with his parents and brothers, and they settled in San Francisco. Six months later, he committed suicide by jumping off the Bay Bridge. Did Mom tell you this? I hadn’t really thought about it much when she told me. Just another sad story and there were plenty of them. But now I think I see how it must’ve been incomprehensible, to go from here to there, to be suddenly in a place where all you had previously known no longer counts and you know you cannot go back.
They haven’t asked me anything about Mom’s death. Maybe because there is nothing I can tell them about loss they don’t already know. For all I think I understand here, I take another step and the ground collapses yet again. It’s better not to believe too strongly in anything, it seems. Mom was not the last or only person to leave my cousins here.
And when you l
eft home all those years ago, Dad, I mean Denmark, I mean your first home, how did you prepare yourself? At what point did you know you would not return? Did you believe from the start that the past doesn’t matter? Or did you adopt that belief later, along the way, because it became necessary to do so?
A late lunch. Aunt Long lays out dishes on the floor in the back room where all the beds are. We each have our own bowl of rice. They hand me a fork at first because they believe I won’t know how to use chopsticks, but I do know that much at least. They seem pleased.
One of the boys, the one who sang for me, has gone now to stand in the doorway with his back to the outside. He is leaning his shoulder against the door frame, his limbs are loose and thin. His yellow T-shirt has a faded pony decal on it. I think he is watching me; I’m writing about him, this very moment. The sunlight touches the top of his head and the rest of him is under the shade of the house, so that it is like the whole dusty white-hot brightness outside is emanating from the back of his head. His face is calm and brown and shady. He turns a piece of fruit, a lychee, in his hands. I can hear the buzz of scooter engines and a dog barking and voices on the street behind him.
The lychee is golf ball-size and covered with a skin of red-orange prickles that look like giant spider legs. The boy laughs when he holds it out to me. I shrug. He shows me: he sticks his fingers through the prickles, pushes his thumbnails into the ruddy skin—it splits into two perfect halves. The fruit inside is wet-looking and pulpy and translucent white. He pops the fruit into his mouth and sucks on it. Then he spits a small, black pit into his palm. He holds it up between his thumb and forefinger. “That is everything,” he says, grinning, then tosses it outside over his shoulder through the open doorway. He hands me the two pieces of prickly skin left over.
June 22:
Last night we went to a Saigon nightclub. Girls there wore red lipstick and long sleeveless evening dresses. They were all very slim, with their black hair swept on top of their heads to show off skinny necks and arms and tiny shoulder blades. I felt certain I was bigger. The band was playing a Beatles song. Let it be, let it be, in heavy accents, making the statement sound absurd and far too heartfelt. But I am trying, is what I thought.
(Some of these girls, my cousins told me after we’d been there a little while, are actually escort girls or prostitutes; they dance with businessmen and foreigners and in some places there’re back rooms for them to go into. Not in this place, though, they assured me: “Only dance here.” My cousins spoke about this with an odd mixture of spite and plain admiration. Clearly, these girls make more money than any of my cousins do, and they are better looking and far better dressed. This is what my cousins seemed to think. “But you pretty like them,” they said to me. “You probably make many, many money if you go dance with some old men.” This soon became a joke, with them pointing to certain men, the fat ones, the uncontestably ugly ones, the old ones, and asking me, “How you like dance with him? Or him?” And they would laugh when I gave the appropriately firm refusal.)
Along with Thi, Ha’s daughter, were two more girls and three boys, all around my age or a few years younger. When I first sat down, the boys kept looking at me and nudging each other.
“They no believe you Vietnamese,” Thi told me. “They say if you Vietnamese, why no speak Vietnam? All Vietnamese speak Vietnam.”
They asked me to dance several times, but I didn’t feel like it and kept saying no. Except once. I’ll get to that, though.
When our drinks came, Thi’s boyfriend, Minh, paid even though Ha protested. When they moved onto the floor to dance, Ha told me Minh’s family is poor, like hers, and she is worried about Thi leaving her to marry Minh. “He have no money, she have no money, and I have no daughter then. I say, why?” They were all dancing in a circle and sort of swaying side to side. None of them were very good dancers.
“Minh seems nice, though,” I said.
Ha frowned. “Vietnam men no good.” Mom used to say this was why she married a Westerner.
Ha and I sat drinking our 333 beers.
Ha raised her can. “I am too old to dance,” she declared.
“No, you’re not,” I told her, and we smiled at each other.
Later, the band played a tango and people began dancing in couples, ballroom style. Girls danced with girls and younger kids danced with older cousins or sisters or brothers. A disco ball spun red and green patterns of light over the floor. Mom loved the tango; she used to call it “mysterious.” I began to feel sad, but awake, and everything I looked at now appeared hyperreal, magnified. People moved in slow motion, and they all seemed to me very, very beautiful. Especially those sleek thin girls at the other end of the floor in their fancy dresses, their red lips, their platelike faces. I felt all at once grateful and jealous and intoxicated. I felt as if a gift was being handed me—or maybe it was just the alcohol—but this sight, these thoughts, crystallized into one benevolent moment. Then I saw a woman in a brown fur coat. She had pale skin and a smooth, fine-featured face, and she was walking in a regal, sultry manner, in a way women do not walk (unless they know they’re being watched, I think) along the edge of the dance floor, several paces in front of a man following her. She stopped, her chin up. Then she removed her coat and for one moment in the dark it looked as if there was nothing beneath that fur coat but a small, black empty space. Then I saw her leg showing through the slit in her black gown.
One of the boys returned to the table and gestured for me to dance with him. This time I said yes. He didn’t speak a word the entire time we danced, but when we looked at each other, he smiled. He was tall and took long steps. I guess he didn’t talk because he didn’t speak any English. He had a beautiful smile though, warm.
When everyone was sitting again, he sat leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, ankle on his knee, and I noticed he didn’t talk as much as the others. His lips were sort of square and permanently set in a slight smile as if he had a secret. His eyes were brown and lazy with heavy eyelids that blinked very slowly, and he smoked his cigarette in a calm, efficient way I found attractive. Through Ha, he said it was nice to meet me. His name was Vu. I said it was nice to meet him, too. He said something else and Ha translated, “He has brother in Los Angeles. Maybe one day he go to Los Angeles also.”
“Does he want to go to Los Angeles?” I asked.
Ha asked him. “He say no,” she told me.
June 23:
Tonight I sat up with Ha and she was a little drunk and ended up taking out photos her husband’s family had sent her.
“At the airport.” She showed me pictures of her and her husband, her husband and their daughter, her husband and his family.
“You look very sad,” I said, repeating what they say to me constantly, thinking it would be appropriate.
“Naturally, naturally,” Ha responded. She turned the page. “His first day in America.” A picture of the family walking down a sidewalk on a street of houses. “Where he live in America.” The husband kneeling next to a stereo and television set, posing with his hand on his leg, the carpet under his shoes white and thick. “In the first month he send to me three hundred dollars, I don’t know how,” she said with awe.
I said, “Well, that’s not too much money in America.”
“My husband at his job. He wash the dishes in China restaurant.” He is a skinny, lanky mSn wearing a white apron and his eyes are red because the photo was taken with a flash.
“Look,” she said, and turned to the photos from the funeral. “This one,” she said, “my favorite.” It was an open casket service, and she pointed to a photo of the man’s face. His eyes were closed and his thin lips smiling, but the picture was out of focus because the photographer had leaned too close. “My husband’s family, when they return to Vietnam they bring me the ashes,” said Ha. “They bring many paper, too, but I don’t know, they are in English.” She brought these out to show me—a removal permit for the ashes and a photocopy of the death certificate. Under
cause of death was a stamp which read “pending investigation.” I tried to explain.
“Oh,” said Ha. “Why do they give me these.”
“I don’t know.” I tried to say it hopefully.
“There was another man on the bridge,” said Ha, “and he hear my husband, he hear him call.”
“What did he say?”
“I do not know...” Ha looked at me, confused.
“What did he call?”
“You are thirsty?” She held up her 333 beer can.
No, no, I waved my hands no.
Ha tipped her head to drink the beer. She peered curiously at the can. “I drink the beer, I smoke the cigarette, you not know, here in Vietnam in my life now days, I live like the man. In Vietnam, Vietnam woman trap. So I live like the man. But Vietnam man no good.”
I nodded.
“You know, I wish to tell your mom, she like big sister to me, you know—if ever I see her—I am sorry. I cannot do like she tell to us. Be strong, no let man be so important. I try, but no good for me now, here, in Vietnam now days.”
I started to say, “She would’ve understood—”
“My husband, he jump. Like fish.” Ha cupped her hand around her mouth. “He call, help.”
“Yes.”
“But he already jump. Why he call help? I never to understand.” She shrugged, reached for another beer. She said, “Maybe I am just stupid drunkard.”
I can’t sleep.
I have heard—it is possible—water can become concrete. And that a body descending far enough through the air will at some point reach terminal velocity. And go no faster. Need go no faster. And still shatter all of its bones on the surface of what is at that moment, for him, rock-hard water.