Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  (New York City, 1990)

  Like most young girls growing up in Vietnam, I learned of the ancient country’s golden era through fables and myths. In the beginning of history, before the Hans’ arrival on the plateaus of the Red River, Vietnam was a tribal society ruled consecutively by the eighteen Hung kings. This went on for two thousand years, a long time of peace, harmony, and tranquility before border wars erupted and the Hans took over the Viet peninsula, commencing the age-old border conflict between China and Vietnam.

  Back then, as early as 4000 BC, the daughters of Hung kings were called Mi Nuong. The word mi symbolizes a Vietnamese princess from the peaceful Hung era. Grandma Que took great pains to instill in me the pride that we were descendants of Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine of the Nguyen Dynasty. Grandma Que wanted to be sure that in memory of our ancestors, all female descendants would have compound first names beginning with mi. My mother was Mi Suong, Beautiful Dew. She married a commoner, so her two daughters bore a last name that was not royal. Yet we both inherited the mi in our first name—I was named Mi Uyen, Beautiful Lovebird, and my younger sister Mi Chau, Beautiful Gem.

  Grandma Que frequently talked of the kind of inner beauty mi signified—the aesthetic of the soul that transcended the physical world. At a minimum, the first name beginning with mi would always remind us to conduct ourselves with the kind of decorum worthy of our royal past.

  As a young girl, I did not feel the need to learn the mi origin of my name. It did not help solidify my sense of aesthetics, decorum, or the business of the soul. I thought, instead, of a note on my piano. Mi-mi-mi-mi. I equated the mi sound with pure, vibrating sounds that began with the closing and opening of the lips. When the lips were gently brought together and then opened upon a breath, the air brushed slightly outward, and the sound was delivered with the softness of a caress.

  From the beginning of my existence, I was a child in love with sounds.

  In the summer of 1990, my mother called me in Manhattan to wish me happy birthday. I had turned thirty-five, and tiny lines had appeared underneath my eyes, yet my mother still thought of me as the twenty-year-old former beauty queen of Saigon’s College of Law, a maiden who once practiced singing.

  “You know I won’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you,” she said. My mother was tone-deaf. “You, on the other hand, have both Truong Chi’s colorful voice and Mi Nuong’s face,” she added ruefully.

  Mi Nuong, the daughter of the eighteenth Hung king, fell in love with the singing voice of Truong Chi, a fisherman whom the princess had never met. He lived by the river across from her palace, and sang every day at sunset. His voice mesmerized the princess, who became lovesick to the point of being bedridden. King Hung summoned the man with the beautiful singing voice to the palace, in hopes of saving his daughter. But Truong Chi was so physically ugly that upon seeing the face that trapped his beautiful voice, the princess quickly recovered.

  I thought perhaps Princess Mi Nuong never fully recovered. Disappointment and a death wish must have remained with her. One could never recover from facing the contradiction between life and dream, between ugliness and beauty, between our need to live and our dark desire to perish. The poor man’s ugly face must have mirrored certain ugly parts of the princess’s soul, and she must have lived on with that discovery. The unfulfilled love story between a Vietnamese princess and her Quasimodo always invoked in me the urge to sing.

  I thought of the soprano voice as a nightingale flying into a limitless sky, surpassing the stilted confines of a human life.

  In childhood, my voice once lingered around the high do, the C on the right hand side of my piano keyboard, and then I managed to reach the high E, the mi note, spelled like the beginning of my first name. Then, it’s beyond the mi. At some point, I was prepared to go all the way to the high A, the la. The sound traveling like a silk thread reaching the sky—the flight path of the nightingale.

  This was how I tried to reach the full soprano range.

  Yet, by my thirty-fifth birthday, I knew I would never become an opera singer, a diva, and I would never reach a perfect A, the high la. It would always be a struggle to deliver that high note with perfection. In Vietnam, I was once a young girl practicing the scale. In America, I became a lawyer instead. The nightingale I once knew had forever left.

  The nightingale came to me quite early in life when I started singing after the radio at five years of age. We were living in Hue at the time. Then, the stretching of the voice seemed so natural and effortless, and I was free to follow my nightingale when its wings lifted the heaviness from my chest and flapped air into my lungs. My mother said I sounded like a clear bell.

  Those days, my mother took delight in training me on my stage gestures. She supplied me with the handkerchief, telling me how to hold it with one hand while swaying my little body. I was to raise the other hand in midair, and then to press it against my heart. At times, I would tilt my head to one side and place my cheek on my palm while waving the handkerchief to my mother with my other hand. “Slower, slower,” she would tell me. “There you go!”

  We made a good team, combining the natural instinct of a five-year-old and the creativity of a young mother. By age five, I was already performing for my mother and her guests from Lycée Dong Khanh, where she taught literature. Everybody at her tea parties told her what a precious child I was.

  My mother was not surprised that I sang so early in life. She had always said the gene ran in the family, despite the fact that my mother could not sing. So, where did my voice come from? Everyone took it for granted. A theory was implicitly shared among my relatives and the women of Hue that the fabulous voice would reappear and that someone along the bloodline would be destined to sing. It was just a matter of time before that bell-like voice resonated again, linking the past to the present.

  Everybody in Hue knew that my great-grandmother, the legendary Paddle Girl of the River Huong who later became the renowned Mystique Concubine of the Nguyen Dynasty, had sung all her teenage life on the River Huong.

  I could not remember exactly how I first acquired the story of my great-grandmother’s death. In one version of her life story, the storytellers of Hue maintained that my great-grandmother’s fabulous voice attracted the young king of Annam, who came to her boat to hear her sing and to take her to the palace, where she was ordained a royal concubine at fifteen years of age. But the French protectorates exiled the king to Africa, and my great-grandmother—that legendary singing queen of Hue—stayed in Hue and died in loneliness. Since his exile, she was a queen without a throne, a singer who no longer sang, and a beautiful woman without a lover.

  The day my great-grandmother died in Hue, I was told, nightingales gathered all around her bedroom window. Her eyes were still cast forlornly toward the violet horizon beyond the window, in hope of her husband’s return. It was then that her heart stopped beating. The nightingales all mourned the voice they shared with her. Death forever silenced it.

  I was told, too, that on the day her spirit departed, the waves of the Perfume River awakened and sparkled into tingling sounds. Someone even said that the moon dropped tears onto those sparkling waves. The moon’s teardrops hit the surface of that Perfume River, creating a vibrating chord. In the symphony of nature, my great-grandmother’s spirit went away, but the inhabitants of Hue predicted that her spirit would return. Her voice was destined to come back one day, and one of her descendants would sing in her place.

  That descendant was supposed to be me, the wide-eyed child who sat on the steps of a miniature stage in the Tan Tan portrait studio in Hue, serene and self-composed, with a silk bow on her hair. When I turned five, to prepare for my celebrity singer status, my mother took me to Tan Tan, the best photography studio in Hue. She had me sit demurely with my hands together under my chin, or posed me in a dance, with my knees and feet together a certain dainty way so they could form the shape of leaves underneath a rosebud. I learned to stand and sit like a flower.

  The inhabit
ants of Hue claimed that at five years of age, I was already acting like a queen.

  Tales were told to me throughout my childhood in Hue, and by the time I reached my teens, I had turned into a hopelessly romantic young girl—naïve, of course, and melancholic. When I sang Vietnamese folk tunes, I thought of the moon, the waves, the Perfume River on the best nights and days, and the image of my beautiful great-grandmother lying motionless in death while nightingales gathered around the frame of her half-moon bedroom window.

  In 1960, the radio also played the Twist and rock and roll, imported to South Vietnam from America. At five years of age, I already instinctively wanted to sway to the wild music. With the help of my teenage aunt, Y-Van, my father’s younger sister who was living with us at the time, I began to perform the Twist for families in the neighborhood.

  We were living in the only apartment building in Hue, the two-story Phu Cam complex on Nguyen Truong To Street, the main thoroughfare that connected the Phu Cam Church across the Ben Ngu River to Hue University, where my father taught.

  I remembered the Phu Cam Church by its stark orange dome and multiple spikes that combined a touch of European gothic with the ancient East Asian architecture. To my eyes in those days, at sunset, the church turned bright orange, its spikes edged against the low sky of sleepy Hue. The brown bridge that swung across the dark green Ben Ngu River resembled a pathway that flowed right into the church, which appeared still and stagnant, like a painting of primitive colors and minimal strokes. The Phu Cam complex housed Hue’s middle-class families, including officers in the South Vietnamese army and teachers at various high schools and the university. Everyone at Phu Cam was pretty much up to date on Western culture—primarily French and American, communicated to us in the popular French magazine Paris Match. All youths at Phu Cam welcomed the arrival of the Twist. Apart from the Twist, the girls also idolized beautiful Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, with her square jaw, distinctive chin, and deeply set brown eyes that were too far apart, quite often hidden behind those world-famous signature sunglasses. Auntie Y-Van trained me on the Twist, as well as on how to recognize Jackie in Paris Match.

  My Twist performances started with Aunt Y-Van’s network of boyfriends. Sixteen-year-old Y-Van loved to hang around college students and senior high school boys, and there were plenty of them at the Phu Cam complex. Somehow she managed to brag about my talent to their families, who all loved to watch the cutest little girl of the Phu Cam complex wiggling her body. A typical performance consisted of the following steps: first, Aunt Y-Van would bring me into a family’s living room, and all of the family members would sit in a circle. Then, someone in the family would put an Elvis Presley record on a turntable, and I would do the Twist. I earned money doing it, at the suggestion of Aunt Y-Van, who collected a piaster from each member of the audience. She acted as my agent, promoter, and manager. My performances were always in the afternoon, after my nursery school. Aunt Y-Van was supposed to baby-sit me until my mother got home from Lycée Dong Khanh.

  The pop culture of America reached Vietnam through the radio in the early sixties and helped establish me as a legitimate professional child performer, one who earned money as well as applause. Yet all this time, my mother thought I was only singing popular Vietnamese love ballads and the folk tunes of Hue—a testament to the reincarnation of my great-grandmother’s eternal voice.

  2. TWIST—LOVE BETWEEN GENERATIONS

  I could never forget a Vietnamese Twist song named “Love between Generations” (Tinh yeu giua hai the he). The lyrics went like this:

  When you were twenty years old,

  I was just born.

  When you turned forty,

  I reached my glorious twenties…

  Aunt Y-Van taught me the lyrics for special performances, when my childish voice took over and the turntable was closed, and I sang and danced at the same time, without accompaniment, except for Aunt Y-Van’s clapping hands and her boyfriends’ whistling and expert finger-snapping to mark the beat for me. For these special performances, my earnings for the song were increased from one piaster per audience member to two. Aunt Y-Van kept the money, promising to deposit all those bills into a clay pig so that when I grew up, I could have money for my first ao dai—that silk, fitted bodice Vietnamese tunic worn by young women, slit high on both sides such that the lank flaps seemed to hug the girl’s legs. Serious singers, Aunt Y-Van said, wore their silk ao dai over white pantaloons when they sang love songs in Saigon’s nightclubs, in contrast to Twist and rock-and-roll singers, who wore black miniskirts and stiletto shoes called escapin in French, upon which they pressed their pointed toes to the floor to do their Twist.

  Needless to say, I never saw the money. Before my sixth birthday, the precocious Aunt Y-Van was sent to a secondary boarding school in Dalat called “Couvent des Oiseaux.” It was known in Vietnam that the couvent in the Dalat highlands was the most proper place to train Vietnamese debutantes. Aunt Y-Van kissed my cheeks, shed a few tears, gave me my clay pig, and told me not to tell anyone about our Twist performances. I cracked the clay pig one day and found only a few coins inside. I saw none of those green paper piasters I had earned by yelling at the top of my lungs while swaying my hips.

  Much later, after we had moved from Hue to Saigon, I once asked Aunt Y-Van what had happened to my clay-pig money from those days in Hue, and she looked baffled, not knowing what I was referring to, although she remembered how cute I was doing the Twist in front of her neighborhood boyfriends and their families. I asked my mother, too, whether she ever discovered I was doing the Twist for money in those days, and she laughed and gave me no direct answer, saying instead that Phu Cam was a close-knit community in sleepy Hue, and people always talked about how cute and talented her daughter was. She also gently reminded me how Aunt Y-Van had been shipped immediately to a boarding school in the highlands in the summer of 1960, so that the Catholic nuns could reform her into a proper couvent girl, one who should repent for having spent little niece’s clay-pig money on silver fingernail polish. To the best of my knowledge, Aunt Y-Van never reformed. In California, the sixty-year-old Aunt Y-Van still wore silver fingernail polish even when the dotted freckles of old age had appeared on the top of her bony hands.

  Later on, in America, at alumni parties, Auntie Y-Van always talked proudly of her brief stint at Dalat’s Couvent des Oiseaux, how she played tricks on those devoted, stern-faced French nuns dedicated to the reform of wild, rosy-cheeked Vietnamese girls. For example, Aunt Y-Van once put a Paris Match clipping inside the Bible and placed it on the desk of La Mère Superieure. The clipping was of a voluptuous and topless Brigitte Bardot appearing in Paris Match, covering her breasts with her crossed arms and puffy hair. “Et Dieu créa La Femme” (And God created Woman)—the precocious Vietnamese teenager wrote the name of Bardot’s film across the chest of the sensuous French star.

  3. THE FRENCH VILLA ON NAM GIAO SLOPE

  After my aunt Y-Van was gone, my father—the bookworm professor of Hue University—decided to divert his attention from his books to his parental role and my education. He enrolled me in a French Catholic school, the Jeanne d’Arc Institute. At Jeanne d’Arc, I was given the name Simone. The nickname “Si” (my parents’ way of shortening Simone) came with weekly piano lessons given by an old French nun called Sœur (Sister) Josephine. When I was left alone in a practicing room, my mind often wandered away from the scores of my music book, La Methode Rose. My fingers went from songs such as “Au Clair de la Lune” and “La Valse de Venice” to the popular love songs of Vietnam in the sixties, which I heard from the radio and learned to play by ear.

  That same year, I turned six, and we moved from the Phu Cam complex to Grandma Que’s old villa in Nam Giao, a suburb of Hue.

  My earliest memory of Grandma Que was of her dark eyes, her heart-shaped lips painted with deep red lipstick, and the quiet silhouette of a slender woman, with long hair rolled up into a bun. She dressed in black silk and satin and walked around on velvet slippers withou
t making a sound, as though she simply glided among muslin curtains, carved wood pillars, delicate bamboo screens, rosewood chairs and divans, and the bowls of cut lotuses floating in water that graced the top of her shining lacquer tables and cabinets.

  The highlight of Grandma Que’s altar room was her huge, dark brown cinnamon log, sitting in a porcelain pot and emanating the spicy and pungent scent that characterized, according to her, the forests of central Vietnam. The hunters from the Quynh Anh hamlet, where she had been raised, had given the cinnamon log to her as a gift of longevity, since her given name, Que, meant cinnamon. The hunters had searched out the oldest cinnamon tree in the deep jungle of the Quang Tri province. The tree was supposed to be hundreds of years old, paralleling the development of the region. Grandma Que believed that magic originated in the deepest part of the jungle, where old trees took on holy and powerful spirits.

  Nam Giao was a hilly area glutted with green. The villa, located on Princess Huyen Tran Street, had a front yard with beautiful trees, the tallest of which was an old magnolia tree giving off white flowers. The front yard merged with the luscious green grass surrounding the villa. The open green area, studded with flowers and fruit trees, circled the white colonial structure, keeping it in shade. There was a river across the street—not as large as the Perfume River, more like a stream—a body of calming, dark mossy green water that sparkled under the moon and stars at night.

  Immediately after we moved into the ancestral house, my mother began to landscape our front and back yards. Grandma Que said my mother had loved gardening ever since she was a child my age; the shovel had always been her best friend. My mother read books on horticulture late at night, and I often hopped onto her lap, peeping at colorful pictures of flowers, leaves, and plants on those glossy pages. On the weekends, I was used to seeing my mother’s slender back and her cotton hat rising and moving among those beds of soil she had built with her shovel. She hired an old man to assist her, and he usually followed her as she moved along the soil beds. She wore rubber gloves and stopped whenever she saw earthworms. Those poor creatures wiggled, fighting desperately for life against the remorseless shovel that stabbed them. The old man would stoop between the flower beds to remove them. I often sat by my bedroom window to watch my mother and the old man until my eyes grew tired and then my head would drop on the table. Quite often when I got up and rubbed my eyes, the two of them were still moving around in the garden while the sun slowly died out, its rays turning yellow-brown on my mother’s slender back.