by Sharon Bala
Ngoc passed away a year after I arrived in Vancouver. She was in fact ill before then, and knew of her fate back in Vietnam when I asked her to leave with me. Just like Anh Binh, she was a practical schemer, and she wanted to leave me with my dreams unscathed.
I still dream, of course, of the Forbidden Purple City. These days the Citadel is being restored with the expertise and funding of UNESCO and of countries as far flung as Korea, Germany, and Poland. Now they use vo bricks and traditional tiles in the reconstruction. Ironwood has returned to replace the ferro-concrete, buffalo glue is now used, and the palaces are mortared now by an authentic mixture of sugar cane molasses, lime, and local sand. I’ve been watching the progress on YouTube, how the Forbidden Purple City is rising in its vivid red splendour amongst a background of original palaces standing in dull relief. For a small price, tourists can dress like the Emperor and take photos in the palaces with a consort of actors playing eunuchs. With all the chaotic occurrences on YouTube, I can’t tell sometimes what is a documentary of the reconstruction, and what is an historical melodrama. But all together it is like the war never happened. It is like there was never any reason for us to leave the country.
* * *
—
When I arrived home from Tiet Linh’s house the danh bau player was gone. My first thought was to call the police, but he had taken nothing from me. Then I worried about his own safety, but there was nothing I could do. Tiet Linh would not answer my texts, nor my phone messages.
The next evening I walked to the site of the New Year’s concert, a high-school gymnasium not too far from where I live. As is my routine, I arrived a couple of hours before the start. I carried an uneasy feeling in my belly at the chaos that would reign in Tiet Linh’s absence. To my great relief, though, the ticket-punch girl was already there, resplendent in her ao dai and setting up her table at the entrance. Inside the gym, Ba Chau rolled in her banh mi sandwiches on trays and my trusted volunteers were tying colourful streamers. Someone had already placed a small Hoa Mai tree on the stage and hung red ribbons off its yellow-blossomed branches. Men from the light and strobe company were moving cables across the polished gym floor and put before me a clipboard with a voucher to sign. I should have known, of course, that the world would go on without the likes of Tiet Linh and me.
Soon The Aquamarines arrived, our long-standing backup band consisting of former South Vietnamese soldiers in hep-cat berets and fedoras, unpacking their drumkits and guitars. Then I heard a commotion in the back dressing room and braced my stomach again. The divas had already arrived. As I walked to their rooms, their voices echoed off the plastered brick wall of the hallway. The Cai Luong singers, the engineer-cum-balladeer, the aging New Waver: their voices were all bouncing off the walls.
And one more, one very welcome voice: Tiet Linh was among them. “We were wondering about you,” she said. They were all laughing and Tiet Linh’s eyes were puffy with dried tears. They had been talking about Anh Binh. By now Tiet Linh had already arbitrated the lineup and had taken care of all the musicians’ pastoral needs: marbles for the engineer, Styrofoam cups for the New Waver.
But there was one thing. “Where are the vong co musicians?” I asked. For this Tiet Linh had no answer. “He came back to my house last night,” said Tiet Linh, “and then the two left together. Who knows if they’ll show up?”
“The artistic temperament knows no boundaries,” I said.
“At least of decorum,” she said.
I left Tiet Linh to her musicians and tended to the details of the stage. There were too many problems to deal with in the time remaining, but when the rafter lights were lowered and the strobe lights came on, I could no longer see any imperfection. The crowd filtered in and took their seats at the long cafeteria tables, and I took my customary seat off to the side. All the generations came, from grandparents my age in suits and ties or ao dais and evening pearls, to young people who wore as much mascara and glitter on their clothes as the performers did. The old danced the cha-cha to the standards, while the young sang along to new numbers.
The evening flowed as harmoniously as any other until midway through the concert the rafter lights came back on. Most of The Aquamarines then left the stage, except for the guitarist, who replaced his instrument with a moon lute. The rafter lights dimmed again and the spotlight froze on a resplendent couple in ancient dress. Our two vong co players had come after all.
The man stood behind his danh bau, its single string untouched yet already resounding, its buffalo-horn spout rising from its gourd, its lacquered soundboard shimmering in the strobe light. The woman turned to her husband and appeared to smile before taking to the microphone. Tiet Linh joined me at the table, looking eternal in her own ao dai. The crowd cheered as soon as the first notes of “Da Co Hoai Lang” were released from the moon lute. This was the original song that started off the whole genre, written by Cao Van Lau, who was forced by his mother to dispense with his wife after three years of a barren marriage. A legend persists that the poor composer would choke up every day he brought home his catch of crustaceans, because his wife was no longer present to sort the shrimps from the crabs. Old men wiped away tears when the singer chimed in above the moon lute. For much of the song her husband stood still and considered his danh bau with a silent stroke of his finger against the spout. When finally he struck his first chord against the single string, his wife did not crack or hurl herself off the stage as I expected. Rather, she sang alongside the danh bau, whose chord stood up as its own voice against hers, in a true duet of mourning.
The lights stayed low when the song was finished, and a small girl came up to give pink flowers to both the wife and the husband. I looked over at Tiet Linh and her lips were crisply sealed with a look of endurance. How far we have made it, she seemed to say. I thought about how I had not had a chance to properly comfort her in the months since her husband and my good friend had passed away. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to be alone. I wanted to say what I would have wanted to hear when my own wife passed away. I opened my mouth, but no words came, just a trembling of my lips.
“You don’t have to say anything,” said Tiet Linh.
I knew this was an act of kindness on her part.
I thought of our lives together, both on this and the other shore. I looked down at the table. “I can’t see Ngoc’s face anymore,” I said. “I’ve tried everything I can, but I can’t find her in my memory. It’s been so long now.”
Tiet Linh held my hand to still it. Then she touched my chin and tilted it up toward the stage as the next singer took the microphone, as the drummer lifted his drumsticks.
JESS TAYLOR
TWO SEX ADDICTS FALL IN LOVE
A Sex Addict meets another Sex Addict and falls in love. Sex Addict 1 needs sex all the time, but it can be with the same person as long as
It’s interesting
The person smells good
They both come at least once almost every time
It is done in many new ways and with a sense of adventure
Sex Addict 1 knows she loves Sex Addict 2 forever.
Sex Addict 2 needs sex all the time, but hopefully
With as many people as possible
In as many different ways as possible
In unexpected circumstances
Without needing to worry about anyone’s feelings
Sex Addict 2 cares about Sex Addict 1’s feelings and is constantly thinking about the lists. Sex Addict 2 also isn’t sure he believes in love—he’s never seen it at least, despite feeling the way he does with Sex Addict 1. Also, how can love exist when the lists also exist?
When a Sex Addict dreams of the perfect person to love them, that person is always a Sex Addict. And, of course, at first it is perfect. Sex Addict 2 finally feels that lying does not have to be part of his addiction, that he can have sex regularly with someone he cares about and still be able to nurture his urges and have someone who will try new things, explore his fantasies, an
d understand his needs. Sex Addict 1 feels that sexual compatibility is probably the way to true intimacy, that the fact that she finally has someone she finds attractive, interesting, good smelling, and funny to have sex with multiple times a day must mean that they are soulmates.
One night when they are out for dinner, Sex Addict 1 congratulates Sex Addict 2 on how decent he is when they disagree—that he never yells or swears at her or even seems to get too angry. Usually, when he becomes angry or upset, he’ll verbalize his feelings instead of acting out. “I’m feeling angry,” he’ll say. “I’m hurt by what you said.” Or sometimes he’ll even break down his feelings further: “I’m not angry with you. I’m just annoyed. I’m frustrated.” Coming from a family of yelling and cursing and emotions that never seemed to go away, Sex Addict 1 finds this trait endearing in Sex Addict 2, and it makes her love grow. Sex Addict 2 says, “Well, I don’t know what we’d really have to fight about. We seem to agree on everything.”
That night they get into a fight. It is the same version of a fight that they will continue to have and that previously was a “discussion” about the fate of their relationship. Each fight comes closer to the inevitable truth: they have different items on their lists. Somehow, in deciding they are perfect for each other, Sex Addict 1 and Sex Addict 2 have fallen back into their old patterns and have been lying.
In fact, if Sex Addict 1 is honest, it isn’t sex that draws her in, or even the intimacy—it’s feeling like her whole body is being erased. She needs to be hugged, she needs to be held, she needs to be surrounded, she needs to smell parts of another human’s body. She might not even be a sex addict at all—sometimes it’s easy for her to think about other things, to let ideas be what hold her, envelop her. Sometimes she dances around the kitchen and that feels almost as good. But if her connection with Sex Addict 2 finds its basis in their mutual sex addiction, then she can never renounce her identity as a sex addict or even be more specific about what it actually is.
* * *
—
It is unclear if we can really frame the situation Sex Addicts 1 and 2 find themselves in as being “A sex addict meets another sex addict and falls in love.” This is because if Sex Addict 2 doubts the very existence of love (or at least his own ability to love actively in a way that makes everyone involved feel good), it is doubtful that he has ever allowed himself to exist in the state of “being in love” or that, if he has, he has not allowed himself to recognize this state as being in love, or allowed himself to exist within it before rushing off to pursue his addiction.
If Sex Addict 2 has never “been in love” with Sex Addict 1, then it is doubtful that Sex Addict 1 has ever “been in love” with Sex Addict 2. Sex Addict 1 tries to figure this situation out with her friends the way she tries to figure everything out, by speaking. She tells them about the lists. She describes the different positions she and Sex Addict 2 have used. She describes her fear of being alone and her desire to be completely encased. She gives examples of Sex Addict 2’s behaviour and asks for interpretation. She gets almost the same answer, with no different diction, depending on the friend: “He doesn’t seem to be a very self-aware person, whereas you seem to be! I’m amazed by your awareness.” Sex Addict 1 appreciates compliments during times like this, although from the details provided about Sex Addicts 1 and 2, it’s easy to see that this assessment is false.
Sex Addict 1 has not selected her friends according to the trend of picking people whom you admire professionally or want to be in some capacity, who dedicate their conversational power to the discussion of their ambitions and interests and reveal very little of their inner lives.
Sex Addict 1, while admiring her friends for their talents and abilities, has chosen her friends for their compassion, creativity, and what she (as much as she can tell, being a generally poor judge of character) thinks is their good hearts. She enjoys the long hours they spend tolerating her as she talks about herself, love, and sex. But since these are fully developed people, they would also enjoy speaking about
Their interests
Outer space
Animals
The existence of ghosts
New scientific discoveries
The upcoming election
Pipelines
A new job they may get
A movie they just saw
Their families
The war in Syria
Their health
A plane that went missing
An upcoming event that they have to go to but really don’t want to go to
Netflix
and get frustrated by the limited nature of Sex Addict 1’s focus. On some level, Sex Addict 1 also acknowledges that the crumbling partnership between her and Sex Addict 2 was always fairly shallow. “It’s only about attraction and pain. Why did I ever think those things are deep? They aren’t about the world, they aren’t about goals, dreams, secret desires, they aren’t about life or death. They aren’t even about the person, not really.” Her friends nod along and try to change the subject. Sex Addict 1 has exhausted her lines of support.
* * *
—
It’s hard to say what will become of Sex Addict 2. Some of their mutual friends say they see him going for walks around the city. Some say he’s learning how to be on his own. Some say he thinks about love sometimes, wonders if he’s wrong, thinks that maybe he can do it. He’s always been surprised by the way time moves around him, and maybe it’s a new season now—it’s getting colder. He blows on his hands and pushes them deeper into his pockets.
* * *
—
The world is also changing around Sex Addict 1. Perhaps this is because she is no longer seeing everything through the lens of sex. She always thought she was a pretty decent human being except when it came to sex, and then sometimes she did things that she didn’t quite mean to do. For instance, when she first met Sex Addict 2, she informed him that he was in love with her and then tried to grab his dick through his pants underneath the table, even though they were at the bar surrounded by people and he had a girlfriend. Sex Addict 1 had also been drinking, which of course didn’t help any of that behaviour, but feeling sexual like that felt like being drunk anyway, somehow uninhibited, somehow operating on instinct.
Whenever Sex Addict 1 thinks about this behaviour in isolation, she thinks that this must be the behaviour of a bad person, that it’s the addiction, but then when she turns it around and looks at it another way, it seems like most every person is at least a little like that.
Other times, it’s as if she’s separate from herself in those moments and that there is a real split in herself and that the her who needs sex is there to destroy the her who needs tenderness, the one who needs to be shielded, hugged, cared for. Sex Addict 1 has never understood why she can’t occupy both these spaces at once and thinks something must be wrong with her.
In the early morning, Sex Addict 1 goes for a run. She is trying to replace a hunger for sex with taking care of herself. Sometimes when she misses Sex Addict 2, she uses a vibrator. These sessions can last hours, and Sex Addict 1 finds that she’s able to merge sex with tenderness or at least blur the lines slightly. Not that she tries to fantasize about tenderness, but she recognizes that the very act of pleasuring herself in this way is an act of tenderness, especially if it means she’s not opening herself up to Sex Addict 2 again.
As she runs in the morning she feels the same thing—the borders of her physicality break up so that the heart that has always been a little too sore in her is released and beating and her brain is quiet and sun is staining the sky all over in pink and purple and orange.
IRYN TUSHABE
A SEPARATION
On the evening before I leave for university in Canada, I sit on the terrace of my childhood home watching Kaaka, my grandmother, make lemongrass tea. She pounds cubes of sugarcane with a weathered pestle. She empties the pulp into a large pot and tops it up with rainwater from a jerry can the same olive-green as her A-shaped t
unic.
I step down from my bamboo chair and stride over to her. I lift the heavy pot and set it on a charcoal stove smouldering with red-hot embers.
“Webare kahara kangye.” Kaaka thanks me in singsong Rukiga, the language of our birth. She comes from a generation of Bakiga who sing to people instead of talking because words, unlike music, can get lost.
I smile and sit back down in my creaky bamboo chair to read a copy of National Geographic that a British photographer sent me. His photograph of a troop of gorillas in my father’s wildlife sanctuary is on the cover of the magazine, and the accompanying article quotes me blaming the Ugandan government for refusing to support our conservation efforts.
“I hope I don’t get in trouble for this,” I say.
Kaaka laughs the sound of tumbling water. “You flatter yourself if you think the fierce leaders of our republic have time to read foreign magazines.”
She chops fresh lemongrass leaves on a tree stump, sniffing the bits in her hands before tossing them into the pan. The simmering infusion is already turning the light yellow colour of honey and will taste just as sweet. As the herb steeps, a citrusy fragrance curls into the evening like an offering. Kaaka fans the steam toward her nose and inhales noisily, closing her eyes to savour the aroma.