Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  We stopped at a food vendor’s cart on one corner and Ha bought me a sandwich, insisted really, because I’d said I wasn’t hungry. She pointed to my necklace and told me to cover it up. “It is late,” she said. “You no want they rob, the boys.” She would worry about me as long as I was here, I realized.

  We drove around some more and I ate the sandwich. It turned out I was hungry after all.

  I checked the dictionary. Thuy is a word usually paired with another to mean something. For instance:

  thùy = boundary, border

  with the example:

  ngì lińh chiêń trâń ngòai biên-thùy

  which means:

  the soldier stands guard way out by the distant border

  And there is:

  thy = water

  which can make:

  thy-dich = aqueous humor

  thy-tai = disaster caused by water, e.g., flood

  thy-táng = burial at sea

  thy-ách = drowning

  thy-bo = amphibious

  But there’re only two that match the accent Vu wrote for me:

  thúy-uyên = abyss

  And as a single word:

  thúy = a kind of bird

  I know which name Vu gave me, but I don’t know which Mom was thinking of when she named me. Do you? I would assume not.

  A dog is passing by with a chicken in its mouth. I am sitting on the stoop, facing the street. The dog is keeping his eye on me as if he’s afraid I want to steal his chicken.

  June 30:

  I have these questions. What did the streets of Southeast Asia, of Saigon, mean to you? Did you pity them? Did you ever love them? Did the heavy air in that single, brief time you were in this part of the world make you breathe differently? Or did the sights of sallow-faced men and women crouching under grass roofs and the unfamiliar animals pulling wooden carts and the crumbling buildings scare you? In 1975 when you sat on your sofa in front of that television set or in your cubicle at work, and watched us in the news, and it began to evolve inside you that there was some key role for you to play in this unfolding drama—whom, or what, truly did you mean to rescue?

  Now that I’m here, I guess I want to know why you took this from us.

  I look around me and see how the traffic, though it appears hectic, regulates itself moment by moment in its own fashion, and how the boys hang out of the bus windows and doors, yelling freely, how accustomed to the thickness and sadness of mobility the drivers here have all grown.

  And though I may not be able to remember the facts of leaving, I realize leaving has nevertheless made me what it makes people: dissatisfied. And I think of you, my adoptive, who left his own home years ago and won’t return (the old country, you always called it), and I think it must be tenfold in you. Or something.

  I don’t know if I can actually send this to you anymore.

  June 31:

  In the morning, Ha took me to the park which used to be the cemetery where she said my father was buried. She meant the one who was in the military. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the man she meant was not my real father. I listened to the stories she told about this man, though. She even said I look like him. He was a good man, a good soldier. I guess he might as well’ve been my father. He was more father to me than the man—to be crude but precise—who actually planted the seed, as you have been more father to me than he.

  We sat on the park bench and I took a picture of Ha. She seemed not to understand why I would want to take a picture of her and gave me a doubtful look instead of smiling.

  From a drink vendor we bought Pepsis. Pessis. (If it were not so difficult for me to laugh sometimes, I guess I would laugh now.) The bottles here are smaller than in America; the label reads “Made in Thailand.”

  They are not even real Pepsis.

  We walked around the park some more. There was a zoo nearby, attached to the park, Ha told me. She was offering out of obligation, I realized, out of the thought that this was the kind of thing a visitor might want to see. I shrugged. I didn’t have the energy. She put her hand on my arm. “The zoo here,” she said frowning, “is bad.” She pointed to her own ribs. “The animals no eat.” I understood then that what she meant by “bad” was the same as “sad.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” I said.

  We have traveled worlds. Father, would you admit? Do you'remember? Once you wanted me to be a stewardess.

  August 1 (on the plane):

  They are kind, thoughtful, tactful. They are distributing pillows and blankets, coming round now to close the shades, for we are traveling too fast for the light to change at its natural pace anymore.

  Afterword

  THE SHADOW-SELLER

  The old woman under the tree is propositioning any male passersby who appear to be foreign or Viet-Kieu and in the company of local women. All morning I have observed these exchanges from the café across the street. A local girl cannot walk down the street alongside a Viet-Kieu cousin or brother without the old woman beckoning to them — it will be assumed that the girl is a prostitute, walking alone with a nonlocal man. In fact, a local girl walking alone with any man is ill regarded. I fall into that harder-to-ascertain category of being Viet-Kieu (though often enough I’m mistaken for just another foreigner, Japanese or Mexican or Italian even, go figure) and female besides. Being a female of Asian appearance in itself makes me dubious, in their eyes, and places me in an incongruous position: I may not be expected to uphold traditional virtues, but I am not exempt—asa white female would be—from judgment, either.

  A Swede or a Hollander, a big man anyway, with a mustache and something gallant and soft to his appearance beneath his big muscles, approaches my table and invites me on a boat ride. He has already rented the boat, just happens to be traveling alone, thought he would ask, would I like to join him?

  I decline.

  Would we get past the old woman? No. Besides, I have my reasons.

  The old woman is ancient and crooked, like a crone in a mythology, with one corner of her mouth perpetually grinning, one staring pallid blue eye. The deformed here, they are deformed as only they could be in a story. She is stooped, in black peasant rags, standing barefoot in the dirt beneath her tree. It is not even a large tree; I don’t know what kind it is. Maybe it bears fruit; there’re some buds and long, weepy-thin branches. She is indicating the shade of her tree to the current passing couple. They stop, a little taken aback. What is she offering them? Relief from the heat? An old woman’s concerned advice? If she is selling something they don’t understand right away, for there is no blanket or basket of goods laid out. “Five dollar,” she’s saying, “five dollar.” (I know this because I’ve heard it, have already passed by close enough to hear it.) And she is looking only at the man, an obvious visitor, the one who must be the spender here. “Five dollar,” she says, “more cheap than hotel. Very private. No police, no police.”

  It’s true it’s the only tree in sight. It’s true it’s sheltered by a building and set around the corner off the street, a very strategic location. It’s true its shade, though patchy, is tempting, inviting in this blasted heat. And did the old woman plant it there herself, years ago, I wonder, with such foresight as this when once she was still beautiful enough to earn a decent living in this manner, under trees?

  The local girl is shaking her head vigorously, covering her face, innocently horrified, while her Viet-Kieu companion speaks a harsh string of Vietnamese words at the old woman — he’s not so Americanized as I am, can retaliate competently in the mother tongue. He puts his hand protectively on the local girl’s shoulder, to draw her away, and the old woman spits at their feet.

  “No, you are wrong,” I imagine the young man will tell his parents and elder relatives when he returns to America (for they are probably all former dissidents too afraid to revisit the motherland themselves). “It’s not a Communist economy over there anymore. No, actually, it is quite capitalist now.”

 

  Dao Strom, Grass Roof, Tin Roof