Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  If this is true (I fear) it must mean the substance of things need not be consistent with any fixed reality but is determined by other factors, such as where and how fast we enter a new environment. In the dark here with my flashlight I am writing to you, beside these shaded walls and my sleeping cousins, the boys all jumbled up like puppies, everyone touching. I feel an awful dread, as if I may not make it to tomorrow, or I might live but have no one to share my life with and no place to feel I belong to, and each continued affection for any person who passes in or out of my life will bring with it only the challenge of new pain, while the hollow in my stomach repeats, I dare you to live here, over and over.

  There is a piece of night sky peeking through a corner where the wall doesn’t meet the ceiling. It is a very soft glowing dark blue and there are actually a few faint stars visible. If it could be as simple as saying right or wrong, what Ha’s husband did—but it never is.

  June 24:

  I went into the bathroom last night because I couldn’t sleep. I squatted and peed over the toilet hole, then put my hands in the water tub. The water was cool and ripply, reflecting the sky because of the roofless bathroom. I looked past my reflection to the bottom of the tub, where there was a painted scene of two ducks floating down a river beneath some Chinese characters. My hands in the water made crisp, splashing noises.

  I woke again because of the mosquitoes. I sat up and cussed and slapped at my legs. One of my cousins woke and shook my aunt awake, and they set up the mosquito net around me. I didn’t say thank you, even though I felt bad about it. I just crawled under the net and closed my eyes and wished I could understand things better here.

  ***

  June 26:

  I’ve been writing in two notebooks, one for myself and these pages to you. This is why I didn’t write you yesterday.

  Today Vu came to Aunt Long’s when Minh came to visit Thi. Ha cooked lunch for everyone, and afterward Aunt Long sat cross-legged on the floor, one knee up, and cut fruit with a big kitchen knife. She peels apples and oranges so the skin comes off in one long spiral, just like Mom used to. Funny, now I know where Mom got it from.

  The oranges here are not actually orange, they are green—something to do with having no frost.

  After lunch, I sat on the stoop outside to read. I’ve been reading The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, one of the only books in English at the used book store, left behind by some other passing-through American, I suppose. While I was reading, Vu came and sat beside me. He said a few things in Vietnamese, I guess hoping I knew at least a little. I was truly sorry I didn’t.

  He pointed to my book and in English asked, “What is?”

  I showed it to him. He held it in his hands and stared at it as if looking hard enough would tell him what it was about. He has nice hands. (Am I really writing this to you? Should I move to my other notebook now? But you should know these things, too, about your daughters, I think.) His hands are square with long, slightly knuckly fingers; the lines of his palms are deep, coarse. His fingernails were dirty. I thought of his hands touching me; I couldn’t help wondering. They looked as if they would be gentle and probably naive but in that naivete not exactly generous, not exactly unselfish—but that isn’t the real point. The real point is that I was trying to picture in my mind a union. Maybe you thought you saw something like this, too, in her? Before the two of you had speech, a common language, to divide you?

  He handed the book back and I had an idea. I got out my traveler’s phrasebook. Unfortunately, it only has travel-related questions such as: Where is the bathroom? train station? a room with air-conditioning? How do I get to (this place)? I would like to go to (that place). And lists of foods and numbers. There were a few questions in the greetings section, though. He pointed to:

  How old are you?

  I pointed to: Twenty-three. Then I asked him.

  Twenty-four.

  What is your religion?

  I had to search for it. Not religious.

  He looked surprised. “No,” he said, with disbelief but smiling, shaking his head.

  I shrugged.

  He pointed to Buddhism. “Number one,” he said. “The best.”

  He went back to the phrasebook. What are your hobbies?

  I read the list. There weren’t any specific or interesting enough to really explain much, so I chose: Reading. Music. Hiking. He laughed a little and shook his head. He flipped to the glossary in the back and pointed to the word plant.

  “You grow?” I said.

  His eyes got this wonderful glow. His whole face did, as if he was smiling though his mouth was still. He motioned with his hands as if digging and putting something into the ground. I nodded. I can’t tell you

  Not a thought to be finished, I guess. I am content just to sit. We are under a bridge, by the river.

  June 27:

  I saw a Scandinavian couple today. I could tell by their accent. They were in the market, the clothes vendors pressing the woman to buy shirts and skirts which would’ve never fit, and the woman was irritated, repeating “I don’t want, no no!” as if she were scolding a dog. Inconsideration on both sides. The Scandinavians were sweating—it’s very hot here—their faces red, their T-shirts sticking to them. The woman was wearing baggy jungle-print pants that made me think she must’ve bought them with a certain idea of Vietnam in mind. The man was handsome and blond. He was yelling, “Bao nhieu, bao nhieu?” to none of the vendors in particular and laughing, as if it meant “hello” rather than “how much.” How much? How much for everything? he seemed to be saying. And I thought of you, Dad. Of you leaving Denmark, even younger than I am now, and what kind of traveler you might’ve been then. I thought you must have traveled with much more at stake than this couple, Scandinavian though you all may be. You must’ve appeared leaner, less obvious, warier of yourself and where you called home. There must’ve been something dissatisfied in you to drive you to live for years as you did, migrating steadily from one foreign place to the next. Unwilling to depend upon anyone but yourself, for you were refusing to partake in the world as you had so far found it—unjust. I wonder, did you walk among people and places and not speak a word, or did you talk all the time, freely, as you do now to us and have for as far back as I can remember? And did you know, then, that the farther you went, the more ruined the air would become between you and those left behind? For quite plainly, to them, you were refusing them—you were not returning by choice.

  As obviously this was not so for us.

  I picture you: your angular Aryan blondness (both natural and worthless to you), your collar turned up against the cold in some gray city at dawn, your prideful reserve, your restlessness, your injured eyes. I wish I could have known you then. I would’ve asked you questions, dealt you the future.

  I feel an attachment as deep as my resistance to you as I think these thoughts.

  From The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton:

  Calcutta is shocking because it is all of a sudden a totally different kind of madness, the reverse of that other madness, the mad rationality of affluence and overpopulation. America seems to make sense, and is hung up in its madness, now really exploding. Calcutta has the lucidity of despair, of absolute confusion, of vitality hopeless to cope with itself. Yet undefeatable, expanding without and beyond reason but with nowhere to go. An infinite crowd of men and women camping everywhere as if waiting for someone to lead them in an ultimate exodus into reasonableness, into a world that works, yet knowing already beyond contradiction that in the end nothing really works, and that life is all anicca, dukkha, anatta, that each self is the denial of the desires of all the others—and yet somehow a sign to others of some inscrutable hope.

  June 28:

  Tonight an old friend of Mom’s who heard I was in Saigon took me to dinner. Mom’s friend was the wife, My-Kim. She and her husband are in the jewelry export-import business, they seemed proud to say.

  They picked me up in their shiny black Hyundai and we drove down
the narrow street away from my cousins’ house. They had invited only me, none of my cousins, and that made me feel awkward. I sat in the backseat with their fifteen-year-old daughter, Trang. The street was too narrow for a car and so crowded with people and bicycles that we had to go two miles an hour with My-Kim’s husband leaning on the horn. That is how they drive here. We had all the windows rolled up, air-conditioner on, and a tape of the Eagles playing loud. The Eagles are big in Vietnam right now.

  We pulled onto a bigger street. Several large trucks with bundled loads rumbled by, but ours was the only passenger-size vehicle on the road trying to merge with the scooters and cyclos and bicycles and pedestrians. Occasionally scooter passengers or cyclists reached out and pressed their hands against our windows for balance, never even glancing in at us behind the tinted glass. And we couldn’t hear any of the clamor outside because we had the Eagles turned up so loud, plumbing our senses. The first time I ever heard “Hotel California,” I can remember, I was seven years old and it terrified me. I didn’t understand it. All that stuff about a place you can never leave and not being able to remember and dancing to forget, and that image of something, they never say what it is, rising up through the air—all of that spooked me when I was seven. I would plug my ears whenever that song came on the radio. (I know it’s all the same to you, you won’t even call it music, just noise.) Now, in Saigon, they are slow-dancing to it.

  Trang was looking out the window, mouthing the words. And I understood what she was probably feeling right then, seeing everything on the other side of the glass go by so quietly and smoothly, those sights enhanced by the music. She turned to me and began practicing her English.

  “Do you go to school?” she asked me.

  “Not anymore. I just graduated from college,” I said, carefully and slowly.

  “Ah”—making a show of searching for her words—“have you like this school?”

  “Sometimes I did,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yes, me, too. Sometimes I like. But most I want to travel. Like you.”

  “Where would you like to travel?”

  “Out from Vietnam,” she replied. “When I travel, I want to travel for my life.”

  A car gave her that, I thought: a car and a song.

  They took me to their apartment. My-Kim’s husband had some business to finish, they said, and also, I think they just wanted to show me the place. This is how the other half lives, I guess. It was small but new. Upholstered furniture, tile on the floor, full-size kitchen range, flush toilet, two upstairs bedrooms—they showed it all to me. Then I sat on the couch and they poured me a Pepsi even though I said I wasn’t thirsty.

  My-Kim’s husband went upstairs to use the phone. My-Kim sat on the other end of the couch with her legs crossed and her face turned toward me. Trang sat on a chair across from us. “My mother ask, you like our home, yes?”

  “It’s very nice.” I couldn’t say what I really thought.

  My-Kim spoke more and laughed, swinging her foot slightly. Trang translated, “My mother, she say she very good friend with your mother once. They both like to eat at nice restaurant and go see American movies with American boyfriend. My mother, she have very much sad but good memory of your mother.”

  “Did your mother know my real father?” I had to try. My-Kim’s reply was brief. “She not know him herself, but she hear he is good man. He die in the war, he is good soldier. Your mother have many boyfriend before she marry. Like all the pretty Saigon girl.”

  My-Kim’s husband came down the stairs, announcing something to My-Kim and Trang. Trang smiled at me and nodded. “We ready go now. We go to very nice restaurant. You will like, my father think.”

  We got back in the car and drove through the now dark streets. Scooters made herds of bobbing headlights. We drove into the Cholon district, the Chinatown of Saigon, where we passed several high-rise hotels. We stopped in front of one with lights along even the edges of its wide gold-brick steps. A gaudy monster. But just across the street—you’d think it was a canyon, so vast the leap—the usual city tent-shops, and half-naked cyclo drivers loitering on the curbs, and dusty stalls where men sat at rickety card tables, drinking beer and talking loudly.

  We got out and stood on the hotel steps while My-Kim’s husband went to park the car. And this is when it happened.

  I spotted a dirty little orange kitten in the middle of the sidewalk, meowing. I couldn’t hear it, could just see its mouth opening and closing. It was tiny and its ribs were showing and suddenly I had no appetite. Yes, perhaps my sympathies were mislaid but the feeling was still real, I mean it was a physical, palpable nausea.

  “This song, I hate this song.” Trang tilted her head to listen to the karaoke music wafting out from one of the tents. It took me a second to realize she wasn’t talking about the kitten. “It is story of two lovers, but she is to go away and she promise she return if he wait for her at this bridge. And he go, and he wait, and he still wait at end of song.” She rolled her eyes. “It is like many song, how you say, very common. Very popular music with the, do you know, country people.”

  I was still upset by the time we got to the table. (I had lingered to pet the kitten but they had called me on—“Thuy! We go eat now!”—Trang translating for her parents. And in the elevator up to the restaurant I had held back tears and stared at my feet with the worst, trapped feeling.) On the menu Pepsi was spelled “Pessi.” When it came time to order, I smiled and said, “I’ll have a Pessi.” I wanted to do something irreverent, I guess, but nobody noticed, since that is how they all pronounce Pepsi themselves. So the joke—like many—was on me and for me alone.

  I decided to order the most expensive meal on the menu and eat only two bites of it. Cowardly righteousness, I admit. But in the end I ordered only the second-most expensive item: the “biffsteak.” Eight U.S. dollars. That is the cost of a piece of luxury here. And to come all this way to eat steak, imagine. My hands would not stop shaking. I was envisioning myself running, meat in hands, out of the restaurant, down the stairs, out the hotel door, and feeding it to the skinny kitten on the sidewalk.

  But when the steak came, I ate it. Half of it.

  “You are not hungry?” Trang looked surprised when I stopped eating.

  “Eat,” urged My-Kim, one of the few words she could say.

  “I can’t eat any more,” I said.

  My-Kim took the rest of my steak and cut it into small pieces and wrapped it up in a napkin. She and her husband began exchanging words in an argumentative tone. The grease was leaking through the napkin, so she had to use a few more. She slipped the whole mess into her purse. I felt terrible after that. I felt awful for every reason.

  We drove past buildings with water- and grime-stained facades. We drove over the river, brown and bobbing with bits of trash and rusty barrels. Shanties on the far bank with fallen-in Popsicle-stick roofs. People everywhere. On rooftops, under them, moving in every direction up and down the streets. Standing barefoot on a bridge railing. Little shirtless boys with hair in their eyes, mouths open in soundless yells as we went by. I was looking out the window, too, yes.

  ***

  June 29:

  I don’t know what my name is anymore.

  Last night after dinner they dropped me off at Aunt Long’s. Everyone was still awake and Vu was there with Minh again. I was glad to see him but didn’t feel as if I could be very good company, so I took my notebook and went and sat outside on the stoop, facing the street. The houses were quiet and mostly dark. A few men walked by, and pairs of children holding hands; they glanced at me without any real acknowledgment. Way down at the end of the lane, I could just glimpse the bigger street from where a low hum of traffic and activity still came.

  Vu came out and sat beside me and offered me a piece of gum. I smiled and put it in my pocket. He sat squatting with his arms outstretched over his knees, fingers brushing the dirt. We sat for a few minutes like that. Then he looked sideways at me and put his hand on my shoulder and s
ort of gently shoved it. And he smiled; warm, dopey.

  He pointed to the cover of my notebook, where I’d been practicing writing my Vietnamese name. “Is you?”

  I nodded.

  “Thuy,” he said, pronouncing it the way they do. He shook his head, laughing slightly. He took my notebook and held it up. “Like here, no,” he said, taking the pen out of the spine. He pointed to each letter of my name: T-H-U-Y. “Is no word like here,” he said. Then he wrote it again with an accent over it so it looked like: Thuy.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, and handed it back to me.

  I looked at it and blinked and something unfolded inside me, the oddest, loneliest sensation. I could feel the strain of my hair in its ponytail like a headache. I could feel everything. Suddenly Vu was looking dumbfounded at me and trying to pat me on the back, then he jumped up and ran inside calling to the rest of them (so much for our mutual comprehension), and Ha came out and sat down and tried to comfort me.

  She said, “My English not so good, but I listen, I try, yes? Maybe I no understand all the word but I feel, yes, what you want talk about?” And she gestured between us.

  But all I could do was apologize and cry and feel guilty for confusing them. She kept asking, did I miss my mother or father, and I kept saying no, that wasn’t it, but she didn’t seem to believe me and kept asking me again. I said, “I don’t understand.” Her eyes were so concerned, I don’t think I have ever seen a person so genuinely worried. “Toi khong hieu,” I said carefully. And watched her face cloud some more. “Toi khong biet.” I don’t understand. I don’t know. The few words I have learned here.

  Then she got me up. “Sometimes, when I am sad also, I no like sleep, I like to ride, all around the city.”

  We found a cyclo driver and rode around in the cyclo for the next half hour, Ha with her arm around me the whole time. There was less traffic at night but still it was busy. Voices called back and forth between houses, kids ran back and forth, voices echoed. Saigon at night is warm and humid. I saw men leaning back in their chairs at a café, cigarettes in mouths and shirts open, exposed chests oily-looking in the lamplight. Out a window of one house a whole crowd of children was leaning, laughing and squealing and handing down something to the woman on the patio below. I saw yellow lizards dart down dusty gutters.