by Sharon Bala
“They’re more evolved than us, for sure.”
“Right. I guess. In a way.”
“They know how to survive.”
A gust of wind blew through us, tipping their empty plastic water glasses. Mine was filled with water, still, and stayed put.
“Survival of the fittest,” another one of them said.
I watched the cups fly off the table and be pushed farther out onto the beach, where a group of young men walked in flip-flops and bathing suits, laughing at the sudden surge of sand that had got into their eyes and mouths. The girls watched them walk, and the boys noticed them too. They smiled at each other, and it calmed me. The guys walked up the steps into the restaurant to speak with us. And I, the only dark head among the fair, knew my role as the exotic one to taste.
* * *
—
I followed the Yogis a while longer. “For fun,” I followed them along the narrow streets where the Thai prostitutes sit and blink and hope for johns they don’t want to fuck, and I thought, I am not like them, and again, and again, nearly every feverish night, they led me dancing with them. Again, the girls, sirens with long hair, their transformation by then for me was complete and they danced on borrowed legs, they belonged someplace deep down below the water, where they could breathe.
But it was comfortable and familiar to be surrounded by women instead of men.
“I was raped once,” one of them revealed to me one night. I told her I was so sorry. “I’m not,” she said. She smiled, so brightly, and let her hair hang loose. “We all were. That’s how I got into Yoga. That’s how I met all these girls. A support group, sort of.”
But then the shadow of the man came to us one night. We slept on hammocks inside of mosquito nets in a makeshift cabin on the beach in a different town. The girls had gotten drunk on the beach with another group of tourists, waving their oh-my-Gods like boobs at Mardi Gras.
“Teach us how you do it. I feel like everyone here wants to fuck you,” they’d begged me, sipping on warm beer, giggling and bubbling the way nice girls are taught to.
“Just don’t give a fuck. Just.” And when people start to view you as wise, you start to believe you are. “Just feel the weight of you until that becomes your power.”
Then in the ocean-loud, pulsing heat of 2 a.m., the shadow was slipping into one of their beds—the one whose body she claimed had been filled with water at birth instead of bone, the one who had reminded me of my sister that first night these raped women had saved me from a maybe-rape, and she was laughing. “What are you doing? How did you find me here?” She laughed again.
“Shhhh,” he said. “Shhh.”
I listened to them. She was quiet. He was entirely silent and I wanted to tell her never, ever trust a man who makes no sounds in bed. And I wanted to know if she was okay. But I was afraid. I think back to that night when maybe I could have been made a hero—I felt that I should have stopped it. She never fought him. I never heard a no. I never heard a condom wrapper tearing. I heard only the bones of a knee crack, the sandy floorboard as he lifted his body into the cot—the darkness that was absolute. And the breathing I heard was my own. And I thought of the sister I was never kind to. I was never kind to her, as a little girl, or teenager. And I didn’t know, had she died a virgin? Had she ever done a thing she didn’t want to do? And I hadn’t known her favourite colour when she died. She was so decisive and yet so changeable. Did she regret it, her last favourite, in her last second?
“Hello?”
The voice was not hers. She was lost, in some other, ethereal land, dark yet orange, she was blind.
It was him. The voice of my shadow-man. I tumbled out of bed and ran, I ran foot against floorboard to the wet, cool sand. Water rushed over my legs, and groups of tourists still partied farther off on in the distance. And is there any place so infinite as a dark black sky over dark black water? I saw fire in the distance, where the people danced a dance that was an omen and a sadness. My nightgown, wet, billowed around me. I was waist-deep now. I shot my neck backwards and looked straight up at all the stars, and it was the closest to outer space I’ll ever feel, the closest to God I ever got, the loneliest, the most insignificant I have ever felt. And I wondered if this is what she wished to touch on too early, too curious for her own good, my sister.
“Are you okay?” The man shouted from the edge of the beach. And to find solace in a man, I thought, like my mother, my older sister, my friends, is the worst cowardice of all.
“Kora! Did you have a nightmare! Come back!” one of the girls called out. She was made shadow next to him.
I started to laugh.
“You’re supposed to sing me into the ocean, not out of it, mermaids,” I shouted. I was laughing or crying. But the waves carried the words away into dark. I swam sideways, hair matted against my head, toward the party that, when I reached it, was just smoke and a few voices speaking intensely in French. They stared up at me the way raccoons do at dawn.
I imagined making love to the shadow-man, him folding me like a sheet of clean, white paper, having a baby. I wanted to call A— and ask her why I kept fantasizing for things I did not want.
“Because you do want them,” she’d have said.
But she’s wrong.
* * *
—
In the morning, the one whose mouth slanted downwards talked about how much bigger her boobs had gotten since she was in high school. Another complained of a sunburn. All of them begged me to come.
“You can be a Master, too,” they sang.
* * *
—
What I never would have revealed to them was how much I did not want them to leave me. The following morning, the sky was the colour of jaundiced skin, and one after the other, their warm lips kissed my tired cheek while we watched the Pacific Ocean crash against our dirty feet.
“Did you know,” the darkest-eyed one said, “that apparently in the Odyssey by Homer, that whole time that Odysseus travels the seven seas, or whatever, there’s no mention of blue. It’s always grey.”
“Yeah. Blue wasn’t invented yet.”
“Are you stupid?” They laughed like bits of light falling from the sky. “Not invented! That doesn’t make any sense. You mean, we hadn’t, like, developed the idea of it yet so then we couldn’t perceive it.”
“Same thing. That’s what I meant.”
A long pause and a momentary sliver of sun escaped behind a cloud.
“Do you think the world looked like it does today every day then, to them? I mean, like, how much power do words really give a thing?”
They turned to me for wisdom but I was only twenty-nine. Their bodies crowded me.
“I don’t know,” I said. I wouldn’t cry.
“We’ll miss you,” they whispered. The one who looked and breathed like Kimia slipped a paper into my jeans pocket. Another said, “I did it last night. I did it and it was magical.”
How close to the edge is the magic of life? But the time for wisdom was finished. Instead, to each of them, like a slow, unsteady cat stretching awake, I said, “Be careful,” and thought of my mother.
“Byeeeeeeee,” their voices pierced the humid air between us as they packed into a cab and left for the airport.
I phoned my parents. This was the first time since England I had spoken to them. My mother cried. My mother called me flower in a language I hadn’t heard spoken since March. Then my father came on.
“Are you happy?” he asked. I remember so distinctly because I couldn’t remember him ever asking me before.
“Since when do you care?” He said nothing. I tried again. I said, “I mean.”
“You think this is cool? What you’re doing? I know what you’re doing,” he said.
“What am I doing?”
He did that Iranian thing with his mouth to express shock and disappointment…something about the tongue against the roof of the mouth. So much shame in one sound. I felt small and full of rage.
“Wha
t am I doing? Tell me. What am I doing?”
You know.
You know, you know.
PHILIP HUYNH
THE FORBIDDEN PURPLE CITY
I do not have any appetite for the sentimental music of a bygone era, and so I was leery of picking up the two musicians from the airport. Their youth ran counter to their reputedly stoic commitment to vong co, that form of tonal melancholy developed by a Mekong Delta composer almost a hundred years ago. The idea of these dove-cheeked throw-backs frankly smacked of disingenuousness, exploiting our audience’s emotional blind spots with old formulas. And though it was Tiet Linh who had originally booked this husband-and-wife duo for our New Year’s concert here in Vancouver, Tiet Linh was in no state to tend to the details of transportation. She left that to me.
In addition to their luggage, the man carried two hard, black instrument cases; one for him, I thought, and one for her. The couple looked like slick moderns, in their late twenties or early thirties, bleary-eyed from their flight, but well dressed and coiffed. Both were overcompensating with wool jackets, knitted caps, scarves, and leather gloves. In fact it rarely ever snows in Vancouver, though when I led the couple outside into the drizzle they both hugged themselves as if they had under-dressed. I admit I was touched by this gesture, perhaps more so than I ever could be by their music. I have lived in Vancouver for over thirty years now, and had forgotten just how cold those first winters were for me. I hurried them into my taxicab, the meter turned off because this was a personal errand.
In my cab we discussed our common connection with Tiet Linh. I didn’t ask them about what life is like back in the old country, not even the customary questions about the weather, for though I have not returned in over thirty years, I have gained a sufficient sense of contemporary Vietnam through the Internet. Perhaps they took my silence on that matter as an aversion to conversation in general, because for the rest of the ride they kept their chatter to themselves.
“I hope they’ll be okay. The air here is very dry,” said the man (though, as I had said, it was drizzling).
“You worry about them, and not my throat?” said the woman.
“You can take care of your own throat; they can’t.”
“You shouldn’t have brought her. You never listen.”
“She’s safer with me, even here.”
“I wish I felt the same way.”
“Don’t talk silly.”
None of this talk made sense to me at the time, but later I found out that the man was speaking about his danh bau, the single-stringed instrument that he kept in one of the cases. The other instrument was an electric moon lute. I know something of the danh bau: that when played by a master, the monochrome has the resonance of a woman’s vocal cords.
“I will not sing if you play her.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll stay in the case.”
The woman seemed to be comforted by his words, but the peace only lasted for a moment before they started arguing about some point of music theory that I could not grasp. She complained about how he always tries to lose her by playing in day kep, the key of the man. He made some fresh retort, and I heard a scratching of plastic that made me worried she was going to fling open the door, but then he said something else that seemed to soothe her.
Perhaps it was disrespectful for them to speak so openly about themselves in the company of an old man, but I didn’t mind their self-absorption. Such was their licence as artists, and, yes, I also took comfort in listening to the ebbs and flows of a young couple’s intimate dispute, as one sometimes does in a sad memory.
I dropped them off at Tiet Linh’s house. The lights of her East Vancouver duplex were off. I was so relieved when her daughter answered the door, but began to worry again when she said that Tiet Linh had retired early. Tiet Linh had become increasingly removed from our affairs ever since Anh Binh, her husband, passed away six months ago.
“Would you like me to leave her a message?” said the daughter.
“Yes, that her guests are here.”
“Guests?”
“The musicians that your mother arranged for. All the way from Vietnam. They are staying here, no?”
“Oh, dear,” said the daughter, thinking with Anh Binh’s darting eyebrows—so much her father’s daughter. “Bac Gia, leave the two with me.”
I miss Anh Binh dearly for all he has done for me over the years, but despite my mourning I am still living up to my responsibilities to ensure the success of the New Year’s celebrations. Am I selfish for wishing that Tiet Linh would do the same?
* * *
—
Tiet Linh and I work together as concert promoters, though each of us would deny being “partners” in any sense of that word. We do not share the profits from our mutual labours (there aren’t any), though Tiet Linh often jokes that we share the liabilities of each other’s company. That does not a partnership make, I say.
We’ve had our disagreements over the years as to the musicians we wanted to promote, and not only because of our own aesthetic preferences, but because such choices would bear on the composition of our audience—the very community we sought to create on these errant weekend nights. In the late 1980s we filled the stage of a neighbourhood house on Victoria Drive with old-fashioned Cai Luong singers—they were in easy supply as I recall, all those keening lungs in high-necked silk ao dai dresses—and were thusly rewarded with a lukewarm assemblage of the curious, idle elderly. In the early 1990s I took the initiative of promoting New Wave acts, and we were able to fill the gyms of various East Vancouver elementary schools with Vietnamese covers of Krisma. Tiet Linh, however, thought we had gone too far with attracting a certain segment of the floppy-haired youth with their glow sticks and marijuana cigarillos, driving everyone else out into the moonlight. After much tussling back and forth between us, we have settled on a variety-show format (perhaps redolent of the Paris by Night series) featuring a rotating dish of singers, but always with The Aquamarines as the backup band. This has worked well: You can now find all the generations at one of our concerts.
Whenever Anh Binh saw us arguing, he would smile with the masked equanimity of a dentist (he was, in fact, a dentist) and shake his head. Arguments over whether, for instance, the reds and yellows of the old South Vietnamese flag should always appear somewhere on the grandstand. Or whether, as master of ceremonies, I should stop wearing the same brown suit and bespoke tie (I believed my trademark attire was important for brand recognition, while Tiet Linh thought it begged more the mood of Sunday church). Although Anh Binh often played the mediator, to him our fights were at once absurdly quotidian and impracticably philosophical.
I knew that Anh Binh was dying when Tiet Linh and I stopped arguing—when she started nodding at whatever I said, looking for ghosts.
* * *
—
We were all young together in Hue, the old imperial capital in central Vietnam. During the war, in that awful year of 1968, when Hue was held captive by the Communists for a month (how awful we thought that month was, but how little did we know what was ahead), I was living with my wife in my family’s home, and Tiet Linh was living with Anh Binh in his. We were all in the same neighbourhood just south of the Perfume River, near the university, where Tiet Linh and I studied literature and art history, respectively, and Anh Binh was studying to be a dentist.
My wife, meanwhile, was already making a living as a nurse and bone-setter (a trade passed on by her father to his only child). My wife’s name is Ngoc, meaning jewel, and her mind was as sharp as one; she was a practical jewel: a diamond, not an emerald—not only beautiful, but able to drill.
The Communists came during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. The noise that in my memories could be heard above the firecrackers was the teeth of the old women chatter-chiming from door to door of our neighbourhood, like electricity running down a live wire, for it was the old women who felt the advance of the Viet Cong deep inside them—all those angry sons coming home to roost
upon their mothers’ ringing bones. The Communists were looking for people like Tiet Linh and me, the intellectuals and the Catholics. We escaped through the back while the cadres knocked on our front doors.
We scrambled on foot down dusty roads flooded with a humanity that was equal parts panic and resignation, as the Communists took over the Citadel north of the Perfume River, and then the south bank. The Communists had planted their flag high behind the stone walls of the Ngo Mon gate, and we always made sure our backs were to it. We made it out of the city to a farmhouse in Anh Binh’s ancestral village, all four of us crowding in with Anh Binh’s aunts, uncles, grandparents, and assorted nephews and cousins.
During the month that it took the Americans and the South Vietnamese to retake Hue, both Anh Binh and Ngoc worked in the village hospital, where they tended to the overflowing civilian casualties. Anh Binh even conducted rudimentary surgeries. A doctor was a doctor, even if he was a dentist. It was no time to make fine discernments.
Meanwhile Tiet Linh and I hid on the farm. During our first days we helped with the rice planting, though neither of us were trained to work on our haunches in the flooded paddies, and we both took turns falling head-first in the mud, imprinting our bodies with the crushed stalks of newly transplanted seedlings. Mostly we read while waiting like children for our spouses to return from work. While we argued the finer points of Sartre or whether the French treated the Vietnamese worse than the Vietnamese treated their Cham minority, our spouses cut into bone or swept away entrails. They always came home late and too tired to talk, often with traces of blood on their clothes to mark their day. How could two such soft-spoken and practical people be married to the likes of Tiet Linh and me? Anh Binh would retire with his wife in the main house, while Ngoc and I slept on the packed-dirt floor of the kitchen, where Ngoc would stare at the thatched roof in darkened amazement. She was a city girl and wondered where the chimney was for the stove that we rested our feet against, with its feel of cool metal.