“Your mother had been selected for the regional cultural organization. She was inferior to no one. Only good fortune made it possible for me to marry her.”
When fully grown, Ngan’s beauty was greater than that of her mother. Her father both taught and worked in the fields and he wove baskets in the evening to earn enough money for her to study up to the junior high level. He nourished an unhidden dream:
“You are more beautiful than your mother was. And you have been educated. Certainly later on you will be happier than Miss Nga from Moi Hamlet; one day you will take a plane or boat to pass beyond the seashore.”
So her future was planned in advance, like a painting that had first been carefully sketched before an artist came to apply the paint. She would be selected for the central cultural organization or the central political headquarters. She would go to places like Russia, China, and other countries as naturally as eating her daily meals—what an honor for the entire extended family!
Her parents were preoccupied about their two sons and in their minds assumed that Ngan would apply herself exactly to their plan. By sixteen, her striking beauty was seducing many in her circle, not to mention a few young teachers in the district’s junior high school. Like a light that attracts insects at night in the middle of the fields, inviting the moths to come and dance, intoxicating them, then burning them, Ngan’s fresh and smiling disposition led to punishment for many classmates, because the school forbade students to follow their affections before they had reached adulthood, which was by law eighteen years of age. After witnessing many young men fall off their horses for her, it was her turn to be thrown down—not by those naive boys her own age, but by a literature teacher, an exemplar, married, with three children: Teacher Tuong.
Nobody really knew how their affair began. Teacher Tuong lived with his wife and children in the family compound for teachers in the district school, a row of houses with tile roofs and narrow patios, divided into small lots, all similar in construction and materials, built cheaply and sloppily. In front of this housing compound there was some open land used by teachers and students for volleyball and basketball. Behind the compound was a vegetable garden that enabled the teachers to make ends meet. People often saw Teacher Tuong with a can watering the kohlrabi and cabbage in the afternoon; and his wife could be seen at dusk with her pant cuffs rolled up, briskly chasing chicken around the pen, or out around midnight with her flashlight, picking up eggs. She was a small woman, very skinny, always with an air of sadness showing on her face, which was somewhat pointed, like a bird’s head. They had lived in the commune since their marriage, Mr. Tuong having been appointed to the district school after graduating from the mid-level provincial teacher training college. His wife sold medicines in a pharmacy. They had three sons, the oldest thirteen, the middle one eleven, and the youngest, most likely unplanned, only three. Who could ever imagine a romantic, passionate love affair occurring between a young woman of sixteen, strikingly beautiful like a full moon, and a teacher close to his forties, who, when he forgot to shave, had a face dark like a closed jar, his clothes old and tattered, his teeth and fingers stained yellow by tobacco smoke? When the story broke—that is, when Ngan became pregnant—everyone was beside themselves with astonishment. They all wanted to know the reason for what was to them a totally unjustifiable romance. The story of the teacher and the student falling in love made noise everywhere, pushing forward like fire spreading or water boiling over:
“A devil’s work; definitely an evil spirit!”
“There is no evil spirit, that’s just old superstition. I think the guy’s a smooth talker. People say men fall from their eyes, women from their ears.”
“Eyes and ears, yes; still, there must be a reason. Why on earth would a young girl fall in love with an old man the same age as her father? She must be mad! If not, then this guy gave her Love Potion Number Nine. Once my cousin, a laborer in Tay Bac, had a Thai girl put a love charm on him. Each time he tried to find his way back down to the plains he turned mad, rolled his eyes, and mumbled all in Thai. The family had to let him go up and live with that woman.”
“Until now?”
“Exactly! His wife had to wait five years to ask the village to give her a divorce so that she could remarry. Their two children were sent to my aunt and uncle to be raised.”
“I don’t believe in love charms or potions.”
“I do!”
“I think this teacher has a way of enticing women and girls that we don’t know.”
“What way?”
“Maybe hypnotizing. This guy may look skinny, but when he looks at anyone, they feel as if they’ve been nailed down, no longer able to move. I think that girl’s soul was sucked out by those eyes.”
“Perhaps. But why didn’t he ever seduce others? Doesn’t every class have more than a few pretty ones?”
“True. Before this he had no affairs? If it’s a question of seduction, of promiscuity, something would have happened long before. Fifteen years have passed; there was no lack of pretty girls; why wait for Ngan?”
“Because destiny planned it. When the month and day arrive, the child comes out of the mother’s womb. Just so, when the month and day arrive, disaster also shows its face.”
“You think of it as a disaster? I believe it’s good fortune. Nothing else: sleeping with a virgin girl as beautiful as a fairy. No different than finding paradise.”
“But after paradise comes hell. I just heard that Ngan’s father aggressively sued the school, and took a knife demanding to kill Teacher Tuong, who had to flee to the city. I heard he accepted his punishment to relocate elsewhere.”
“Relocate where?”
“I don’t remember exactly, but for sure somewhere up along the frontier. Up there, he was assigned to a nowhere place, teaching new recruits in a noncommissioned officers’ training school. Schools that train high-level officers are usually near big cities, but training schools for NCOs are always tucked away in areas where dogs eat stones and chickens eat gravel. There, even watercress is hard to find. All year long the only food is dried fish and shrimp paste.”
“Serves the dirty old man right! What goes around quite rightly comes around. He had enjoyed the gift of virginity, had tasted the body of a girl whose skin is like peeled cooked egg, then for the rest of his life he has to suck on dried fish, that’s fair.”
“If I were young Ngan’s father, I too would take a knife and give him a slash. That was the end of a girl’s life! A sad fate for a beauty!”
“You’d give him a slash, then you’d have to sit in jail and peel the calendar day by day. It takes two to tango; it took the two of them…why slash him?”
“You are really stupid. By law, eighteen years make you an adult. Ngan is only sixteen. To sleep with her, only the guy breaks the law. That crime is called seduction of a minor. Actually, he should have been indicted and sent to jail for at least four years. But his father’s older brother is a judge in the provincial court. For that reason he got no prison time.”
“Really, I didn’t know that.”
“You don’t read the law?”
“Where’s the time for reading law? I work two shifts, sometimes three nonstop. Six days a week. Sometimes on Sunday I must also make some sacrifices for socialism. When I get home, the only thing I want to do is sleep. I’m too tired to climb on top of my wife, so much for reading law!”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twelve.”
“You should read the law now. If you sleep, just close one eye, the other should be left open to look around. If you don’t, there might be some guy your age that would like to call you father-in-law.”
“You bastard! Why do you have such a toxic mouth? You wish me misfortune like the teacher in Khoai Hamlet, don’t you?”
“I don’t wish you any such misery as that. But if you worry about what might come from afar, you can avoid misfortunes closer at hand.”
When Miss Ngan’s fetus was just into its
fourth month, though it was already rather late, her school gave her a letter of introduction to the district clinic, asking that the fetus be removed due to an “accident of morality.” Ngan’s mother took her to the clinic at night; each covered her face with a cloth, showing only her eyes with a hat pulled down to the eyebrows. Ngan’s father announced publicly that she had been disowned and banished from the family, telling his wife, “It would have been better if she had put a knife to my heart rather than put me in this situation. From this day on, under this roof, if she is here, then I am not, and vice versa. It’s up to you to choose.”
His wife dared not choose, because both the husband and child were immediate family. After taking Ngan to the clinic to have the fetus scraped out, she turned her daughter over to her own mother. There, Ngan lived with her uncle and aunt and her maternal grandmother. A year later, Ngan’s uncle, a skilled mason, found her a job as a painter for Public Works.
When Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan decided to unite their lives, they planned to legalize their life as a couple. In her family situation, Miss Ngan did not want a lavish wedding as others do. First, she did not want to stir up waters that were settling. The wound to her father was surely not yet healed. Hamlet people still talked about the goings on when he had left his class and rice fields for a month, how he had smashed all his tools with which to harvest and fish in the river. Night after night, he walked like a madman along hamlet paths, sometimes tilting his neck and howling like a wolf calling for his pack. His uncle, the village chairman, had to pay money to bring a doctor down from the provincial capital to give him a shot. Everyone believed that, sooner or later, he would pack up a sack and enter an asylum. Thanks to the good karma coming down from his ancestors and the skill of the provincial doctor, he seemed to recover his senses, but still, once in a while, he used incomprehensible gestures or words. The daughter had indeed been the glorious dream of the father. That dream had shattered like a mirror smashed into small pieces. The hamlet teacher did not want to accept that painful reality. He found ways to erase all traces of time past, when the dream had been alive. Anything connected with Ngan, he removed to burn or throw into the river: all the beautiful photos that once hung everywhere in the house, her trunks of clothes, her sewing kit from when she had taken home economics, the cloth dolls she had made herself, all her school notebooks.
Mr. Quang had been a father. He understood how wounded pride could drive a person to one kind of hell or another. All these years of struggling here and there in so many places, pushing along so many strange roads, had taught him how to be emphatic and patient. His fortunate happiness must in the end run up against a challenge. He would be the one to carry the burden and not Miss Ngan. After much reflection, he decided to ask Ngan’s uncle to invite her mother to the construction site for a visit. On the first night, the girl’s mother heard how she had come to fall in love with a man forty-three years her elder but appearing as an ancient hero reborn to protect and save her. On the second day, Miss Ngan took her mom to town to buy for the family all those things that make people’s eyes brighten like streetlights. On the third day was the official meal between the girl’s mother and the future son-in-law, who was twenty-four years older than she. Then was discovered a coincidence that increased the awkwardness on both sides: Ngan’s father had been born in the same month and year as Mr. Quang’s oldest son, Quy; only the day of birth was different.
Ngan’s mother was a practical person. She understood that her daughter had missed her main chance and could never recover that lost opportunity. It must be her destiny that she could only find happiness with older men. No one can defy heaven’s rules and regulations. From Teacher Tuong to Mr. Quang, her life’s plan could be found drawn in the lines on the palms of her hands. Ngan’s mother sighed deeply but accepted everything she couldn’t change. Besides, for residents of Khoai Hamlet, material goods were held in very high regard. Ngan’s future husband would well provide her with the material side of life. And that was the compensation provided her by destiny.
On the fourth day, her mother returned to her hamlet with two heavy trunks. She did not say anything to her husband about her visit to their daughter; she quietly put things away and said:
“In a few days the uncle of that Ngan will bring workers here to build a house. Down there, he has saved quite a bit of money.”
“I told you: don’t ever remind me of her name to my face.”
“Oh, I forgot. From now on I only talk about her uncle. Next month he will help us fix the house.”
“Do whatever you want. This house is always under your authority,” the teacher replied slowly, and with his hand behind his back, went out.
Two weeks later, her brother brought a group of eight workers to Khoai Hamlet. With them came three truckloads of timber, bricks, cement, and other supplies. The villagers gathered to observe, just like children who run out to look at the turning shadow lamps during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Khoai Hamlet had never had a tiled roof. Throughout the hamlet there was only one style of roof: thatched with straw or leaves. Walls were made of the sides of vats, broken little ones bought from the next hamlet. The Khoai people were used to the odd looks of houses built with rejected materials. But if a wandering adventuresome guest ever stopped there, he would be startled with fright at the sight of walls that were twisted, with bumps, sometimes extended like a big belly, sometimes deflated like the inner cavity of a ball. Such houses evoke in one a fearful hesitation. With their odd forms, they look like caves for bears, horses, or tigers, but not houses intended for humans. For that reason, houses that were straight, pretty, with red roofs, was the ultimate aspiration of people there. Therefore, it is easily understood why people crowded around to see the trucks bringing all the materials and the city workers down to the hamlet, just like visitors to a museum.
The construction work went forward in haste. The uncle stayed to supervise it personally. The two-story house emerged as if from a fairy tale. It was beyond what people could imagine. After her house was finished, the teacher’s wife had the courtesy to give to the husband’s uncle, also the current village chairman, half of a truckload of leftover bricks and cement.
The day the new house was inaugurated, the teacher’s wife prepared a twenty-tray banquet for all the relatives. Even though they had been invited, people in Khoai Hamlet were mad because a fairy tale had become real. Why should it come true for an absentminded instructor and not for them? Therefore, they tried really hard to find the truth.
The investigation was not all that difficult because the eight guys who worked on the house had enough time to glance at the hamlet girls and so become smitten with their beauty. Among the workers, two were still single. These two recognized right away the beauty of the girls in a poor village, far away, at the end of a river and at the foot of a mountain. Both decided to conquer, to follow “the old man’s footsteps, the good-looking old man named Quang.” A few meals with wine in a house with some pretty ones was enough for the two guys to spill all the secrets about the love affair between “Miss Ngan and Mr. Quang.” In the end, people were reassured in finding the fairy wand, the wand that transforms all the frogs into pairs of exquisite shoes.
A couple of weeks after the finishing and inauguration of the new house, it was rumored that Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan would come back to the village to register their marriage. If that were to happen, for sure the village chairman would have to perform the procedure personally. As for witnesses, it could not have been anyone but the bride’s mother and her younger brother. Everything went quietly and extremely quickly, so no one outside the event knew anything. Moreover, the village chairman never opened his mouth to say even half a word about it. People could only speculate as they saw the new couple walk to a car waiting for them on the other side of the river to return to the city. Seeing them off were her mother and uncle. Smiling, the village chairman waved his hands together in front of his chest. Miss Ngan cried before getting into the car. She looked a
couple of times at the old hamlet, the river, the fields…her birthplace, a place of penetrating pain, a place to which she will never return.
The New Year’s Eve drinking party at Miss Vui’s went past midnight. Firecrackers exploded in all directions but the group of people who were drunk with talking still lifted their cups up and down:
“Is it midnight already? We enjoy talking so much we forget our way home.”
“Not only is nothing amiss, we are able to taste the best rice wine. We have to admit that Miss Vui’s skill deserves respect. She learned secrets from the parents of Mr. Do. The same yeast, the same glutinous rice, but the rice wine made by this family is smoother than mine.”
“Not only do we have good wine, we also have good tea and great stories, too! Hey, Miss Vui, I thought that you were only good at doing things; I had no idea you are good at talking, too. You should be in teaching.”
“I dare not, you are too kind! I just told you exactly what I heard about Mr. Quang and Miss Ngan, nothing added or subtracted.”
“Telling it as it is also requires the tongue to move into the words. There is no lack of people who understand everything quite well but who cannot make any sense when they talk.”
“Well, you guys are just complimenting a prince to his face. She is the secretary of the subcommittee; naturally she must know how to talk.”
“The subcommittee secretary only knows how to publicize formal decisions, play up accomplishments, or announce rules, how could she know how to describe the highs and lows of serious feelings and situations?”
The Zenith Page 23