“May I pray to my mother first? Afterward, I must go and bring good New Year’s wishes to the units and the villagers.”
“Back away from there! On this altar I have ancestors from seven generations back. After that we have great-great-grandparents, grandparents from both maternal and paternal sides; then come the parents, my uncles and aunts. After that is my older brother who died young. Your mother, that is, my wife, has to wait her turn after him. The order of precedence is settled. There is no authority for a variance.”
“But I…”
“Back off,” Mr. Quang screamed. He did not say it but he knew that nobody in Quy’s family had acknowledged Miss Ngan. She had withdrawn to the kitchen on seeing the animosity on their faces.
“This is my house, not the office of the village committee. Wield your authority elsewhere; not under the roof of this house.”
His father’s determination caused Quy to step back. His wife, always hiding in some corner, reached out to pull her husband’s shirt. Quy then had no choice but to wait for Mr. Quang to bow and pray.
His prayer was a long one because he had to invite, according to proper generational sequence from high to low, the spirits of all the ancestors, from five to seven generations back down to his wife who had just died the previous spring. That length of time was hard to endure for a son who is belligerent and has real power in his hands. Chairman Quy stamped one foot then the other, as if there were a nest of red ants biting his feet so that he could not stand still. When his father had finished, he rushed forward to the altar, bowed twice, bending his back as they do in the theater, then raised his voice to cry out loud:
“Mother, Mother in heaven: if you are divine please return and open your eyes to see all the turmoil under this roof. Oh, Mother, it brings shame to us children. Why were you in a hurry to leave and let frogs jump on the table, chickens bring trash into the house, and crows build nests on the top of the grapefruit and orange trees?”
“Oh, Mother, dear Mother…”
“Dear Grandmother, where did you go? Like this you left us, Grandmother?”
No doubt having rehearsed beforehand, Quy’s wife and children raised their crying voices like the choir at a play singing along with the orchestra. Their cries resonated in the calm atmosphere of the neighborhood. At this hour, neighbors were getting their clothes ready and preparing to go out. All the words back and forth and the crying of the chairman’s family had slipped right into the ears of the neighbors on all sides who were always ready to listen in.
Mr. Quang was mortified. He was not prepared to receive this blow. To be accurate, nobody had sufficient imagination to anticipate such a thing. They worked hard all year, waiting for the new year with all its new hopes. The first day of Tet is the first day of a new block of time, of a span of life yet to come, a day that has the special, sacred meaning of an unsullied beginning. For that reason, no one would quarrel with any other on such a day; neighbors, even if they hated each other a lot, would suck down their bitterness to make sweet their greetings and wishes, because if words are not good and the meaning is not kind, then misfortune will come to both sides. Even enemies do not fight during Tet; so how could loved ones and blood relatives? That is why he was in shock when he saw his firstborn son with his family crying in front of the ancestors’ altar, turning the sacred New Year’s Day into a funeral. After a second of stunned bewilderment, he knew he had to act. Pulling out a pole leaning in a corner, something that had been at his side for twenty years while in the woods, he turned toward Quy’s face and shouted:
“Go away! Go away right now! This is the altar for my ancestors, not the personal altar for your mother. If you are filial, I allow you to take her picture back to your house to worship. Your wife and your kids, too, get out of this house. I need children and grandchildren, but not a pack of scoundrels that disturb. I will not allow such ingrates to turn this house into a market.”
“Oh heaven, you chase your child and grandchildren out of the house; oh, Grandfather…”
Quy’s wife continued to scream, while her husband stared at his father with red eyes. His breath smelled full of alcohol; for sure the son had been drinking to draw on the encouragement of alcohol before leaving to pick a fight with his old father:
“My mother lived here; you do not have the right to drive ME MYSELF out of this house.”
Mr. Quang stood stiff for a minute as if he did not believe what he had just heard. In his family children of whatever age had no right to use such a self-promoting, personal pronoun with their father under any circumstances. His children as well as the children of his brother and sister all knew this rule and looked upon it as something that distinguished them from other families who were looser in their protocol and discipline. Such a humiliation had never happened in his family. Quy knew that full well. Now he became the first to spit on the ways of the ancestors.
Mr. Quang stood shocked for a long while. A piercing pain ran through his heart again and again as if someone were continuously stabbing a dagger through it. For the first time in his life, he realized that a father’s heart is extremely delicate and easily injured, that bitter pain can make the eyes blur and send tremors through one’s whole body like the shakings that come with malaria. He knew that the change in his son’s use of a personal pronoun to address him marked the last boundary line; that, from now on, they would never be father and son as before. Never as before. The pain kept coming nonstop. At the same time his body suddenly hardened like rock, a feeling similar to that moment when he was seventeen and had first put a house pillar on his shoulders in front of the taunting eyes of some young men from the upper section.
The father considered the face of his son, distorted by hatred and alcohol. Another second passed in silence. Then suddenly the father started laughing:
“Mr. Chairman is drunk.”
He continued to laugh but suddenly his voice turned strange, causing the son and his family to look at one another in surprise: they had never heard him talk with all of them in such a soft and formal manner.
“Mrs. Chairman, take him home now or else I will file charges. The chairman is drunk and disturbs the home of a citizen.”
“What did you say?” Chairman Quy asked, looking straight at his father. Perhaps he was drunk, or more likely he lacked the smarts to understand that his father had changed his tone, a way to mark the crossing of that final boundary line. Enunciating his words slowly, Mr. Quang replied:
“Mr. Chairman is drunk and disturbs the home of a citizen, thus doing harm to the honor of the Party and the government.”
“What are you saying?”
“Now you, mister, are no longer my child. You are the village chairman, the government’s representative. You are drunk and you take your pals around to disturb citizens.”
“I MYSELF, I am not drunk. I MYSELF am humiliated because you brought a whore back to be your wife.”
“In the old days, our elders told us: ‘You can take a whore to be a wife, but never a wife to be a whore.’ If Miss Ngan is a whore, I MYSELF haven’t gone against our ancestors’ teachings. But if my wife is not a prostitute, Mr. Chairman will be punished for defamation and insulting a citizen. Do you understand that?”
“If your wife is not a prostitute then she is a whore who was pregnant out of wedlock. You think nobody knows the story of the teacher sleeping with a student; Ngan pregnant by the teacher Tuong? You think that you can just pick up a whore at the end of an alley or off a mountain or by a river to bring back here and be able to hide everything?”
“I have always acted in full daylight; I have nothing to hide from the eyes of the world. Mr. Chairman crawls away from this house and has already forgotten—such a short memory. Correct: Miss Ngan was pregnant out of wedlock. She was pregnant by someone she loved—Teacher Tuong. It’s like thousands of other women who get pregnant with the men they choose. She was pregnant because she’s as fertile as a bantam hen. Many other women not pregnant out of wedlock are lucky
because they belong to the class with duck’s blood, not dove’s blood. Like your mother, for example; she was not pregnant out of wedlock because she belonged to the infertile group—not because she was holding tight to her virginity. Before I married your mother, for a whole year I would take her up to Golden Bamboo Mountain. Do you want me to show you the places where I took her down?”
Right then, it was the son whose mouth was open wide with surprise—like someone being struck by lightning on the ears. And when he realized clearly what his father had said, he squealed like a pig being slaughtered:
“That’s not true; you lie about my mother! I don’t believe you!”
“Your mother and I were in the prime of life. We cut lumber in the woods together all year ’round. Who could stop us? We didn’t have to deprive ourselves of our desire. Why did we have to wait for the right day and month? We were engaged; the two families had an agreement. Sooner or later we would be in bed together.”
Quy had no reply.
“You are tongue-tied and cannot answer because you are used to lying. You and your wife, too, my man, yourself with your wife, didn’t you mix oil and vinegar with each other for a whole year before I managed to make enough money to pay for the wedding? What about the time you furtively took her for a curettage down in the district? You thought I was blind? The money your mother sneakily gave you was taken out of my pocket, why wouldn’t I know? It’s lucky your wife could still have kids. In many cases, a curettage of the first pregnancy leads to permanent infertility.”
Quy’s wife was looking at her father-in-law with her mouth wide open until she burst out crying from shame. The two daughters, both of an age to be married, and the son lowered their heads. All were acting their roles under the baton of the father. At this instant, the cards were turned faceup, the father and the mother were exposed, and the children dared not look up. Mr. Quang lowered his voice:
“Enough: we fought so it was a fight. You were born, but only when you were thirteen did I know what kind of person you were. I tried every which way to turn things around but could not. No one can stand against heaven’s plans. From now on, don’t ever set foot in my house. We are no longer father and son.”
“That is your will.”
“You are wrong; people don’t choose what they want or don’t want. But once we have pushed each other this far, everything must change.” Again Quy could say nothing.
“You don’t dare open your mouth because you still think of wealth. Being a person is quite difficult, Master Quy. Opening your mouth is easy; opening your hand is much more difficult. Filial piety on the lips—everyone has it. If you don’t want to, I MYSELF will continue to perform your mother’s death anniversaries as usual. She was my wife and now she is still my deceased wife. She made no mistake with me. But you are different. From this day on, I MYSELF will not have you.”
The group stood there stupidly. Perhaps what had happened went too quickly and they had no time to understand how it all had ended. Perhaps they believed that whatever they might do, Mr. Quang would never dare push them out the doors of this house, a house they believed their only son would someday own. But Mr. Quang threw the pole back to the corner of the house, looked at them, and said, lowering his voice:
“Go, go! Go away from here!”
He said this softly, almost murmuring, but within this quiet voice, everything was finished; the water had run its course, the boat had slipped its moorings.
Nothing could return to what it had been.
Quy, his wife, and their children took themselves home, the eyes of neighbors watching them from behind windows and doors, trees and stands of bamboo.
People live rather calm lives in the mountains—like the surface of the lake down the valley imprisoned on all four sides by mountain slopes. But if you throw in a stone, circles will spread without stopping. In the same way, some events, big or small—if they upset whatever is most hidden in the human soul—can start a war, a conflict between old-fashioned understandings and modern innovations. Woodcutters’ Hamlet that spring resembled a volcano squirting out lava nonstop because of what was happening in Mr. Quang’s family. Or, speaking more precisely, Woodcutters’ Hamlet that spring was like a roaring, burning stove with the person throwing charcoal briquettes onto the fire being a beautiful girl coming from a strange place, with sensual eyes, and wearing a green silk blouse.
One o’clock came on the first day of Tet; villagers flowed into the streets to go and present their wishes to their loved ones. According to the old custom, the first day of New Year is reserved for visits to close relatives. Visits on the second day are made to more distant relatives, neighbors, and friends. The third day is for hamlet officials to pay calls on one another: the chairman goes to the secretary’s house; the secretary visits the hamlet police commander, then the police commander presents his New Year’s wishes to the secretary of the Youth Committee or the secretary of the Woman’s Federation—the formal structure holding the community together. That year everything seemed to be wrong side up. Right on the evening of the first day, people rushed pell-mell to knock at Miss Vui’s door:
“Happy New Year. We wish you five, ten times more prosperity this year than last.”
“Happy New Year. We wish that you get many new things, from your head down to your toes.”
“Happy New Year. We wish Miss Vui happiness all year long, always to smile with happiness; every day to be as the first day of Tet, every month to be as the first month of the year, and each season to be as the spring.”
From the day she had come into life with a cry, never had Miss Vui enjoyed as many New Year’s good wishes worded so beautifully, like flowers and brocade; never had she enjoyed such respect from the villagers. That year maybe heaven had turned its eyes on her, or maybe her devoted father in heaven had come to her aid. Her fortune seemed to change. While opening wide her doors, Miss Vui invited the guests in, smiling:
“Happy New Year, I wish each of you everything you are waiting for.”
People poured into the house, not waiting for a second invitation. All intuitively felt that Act Two of the Ngan-Quang soap opera would be performed here.
As for Miss Vui, after sleeping straight through for more than nine hours, she was full of strength; her spirits were soaring. She lit incense at her father’s altar, changed the water in the vase of peach blossoms, then sat down and ate two pork rolls and one large sticky rice cake. When the villagers came to her house, she was in a wonderful frame of mind, one of satisfaction and happiness—the most important conditions for generous hospitality. The hostess boiled water to make tea; she put out all kinds of cakes and candies that she had bought down in the town. Meanwhile, more and more guests came in; not only elders but also groups of young men and women from the village committee along with teenagers who liked playing games with tiny firecrackers and fighting cocks, or chess. Thus two rooms of the house were filled to the walls with people as happens only when there are meetings over allocation of work points and distribution of rice. Miss Vui had readily at hand a contingent of soldiers to help serve tea, cakes, and candies to everyone. She sat imposingly at the head table, next to the village mucky-mucks and the heads of the wealthiest families.
“I heard somewhere that it has happened. Thus the husbands who don’t play second fiddle to their wives have won the bet. I ask to open a bottle of Lua Moi whiskey to congratulate them.”
So spoke Miss Vui to open that evening’s gathering. Then she took a bottle of Lua Moi from the altar, along with a packet of fragrant roasted peanuts, half sweet, half savory, which she had bought in town.
“Anyone who wants rice cake or pork roll to snack on while drinking, let me know.”
“No.”
The most patriarchal of all the husbands replied, “Today is the first day of the New Year, so nobody has enough space left in the stomach to hold your rice cake and pork rolls, mistress. But to have fragrant roasted peanuts with Lua Moi whiskey is exquisite. Who can complain?”<
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“Townsfolk are real specialists. Just ordinary peanuts, but after they roast them, they taste so sweet to the tongue. No matter how much wine you drink, they still taste good. After eating a handful of peanuts roasted in our homes, our throats choke up.”
“They have a secret recipe. Many times I have bought some hung liu spice in the hamlet market. I mix it with sugar and salt to marinate the peanuts for six hours, then dry them first before I roast them. So I use all the right methods but at the end they are awful, with that smoky, burned flavor.”
“My goodness, if listening alone could make us skillful, then who could make a living as a cook or running a restaurant? They have to keep their secrets. It is said that in Hanoi, some become wealthy just by roasting peanuts, or selling steamed and grilled sugarcane soaked in grapefruit flowers, or cooking green mung bean soup with tangerine peels, calling it in Chinese luc tao xa. Each pot of luc tao xa can feed seven or eight mouths and build a three-story house.”
“With little land and too many people, they must struggle fiercely to make a living, so they are smarter than us rural folk.”
“As you said, from the point of view of Mr. Quang and his wife, wasn’t it smart of him to tell off Quy and his family this noon? Like it or not, he is the most ‘citified’ person in this village.”
“I knew it right away.”
The very patriarchal husband laughed out loud: “Your seat is hardly warm and yet you bring up Mr. Quang’s family saga. You’re too hot-blooded. Can’t you wait for us to finish the first round of drinking?”
His voice was full of provocation and arrogance. The very bitchy lady could not stand it and said, “Everyone has given in to you but that’s still not enough? Your ego is not just as big as a basket, it is more like a mountain.”
“Stop, stop! You two are just opposites, like water and fire. Good thing you never married!”
“Stop, stop. Turn down your fire, little lady.”
The Zenith Page 25