In addition to his tenured position at Saigon University, my father taught at private night schools—those classes that prepared the young men of South Vietnam for their college entrance examinations, which they had to pass to avoid the draft. My father’s moonlighting, I was told, was his effort to earn extra money to pay for my private French school. So, despite the hardship of life in Saigon, I continued having my ears filled with lyrical French, my eyes filled with pictures of French countryside, and my thoughts inundated with details about the daily lives of French boys and girls described in the beautiful prose of the best of French writers, like Alphonse Daudet and Anatole France. The French education did little to change my Vietnamese soul. I still preferred crushed rice and fried tofu dipped in peanut sauce over fancy filet mignon and the “laughing cow” cheese, la vache qui rit, which my mother forced me to eat to gain weight.
Mi Chau, on the other hand, suffered a different fate. Citing patriotic reasons, my father withdrew her from the French curriculum and put her in public Vietnamese school instead. Behind his back, my mother would whisper to me that the real reason for Mi Chau’s Vietnamese schooling was the lack of money. She taught me to be frugal that way.
To return to sleepy Hue under the protection of Grandma Que was my mother’s dream. One day we would all be returning to the old colonial house, where her children would be raised among tropical flowers and accompanied by the musical sound of jingling chimes. She never accepted our departure from Hue as a one-way trip. She had a special suitcase, packed with sweaters and fine clothing; Hue is colder than Saigon, and the suitcase would be for that day when she would finally return to Grandma Que’s villa.
Yet, just before the Lunar New Year of 1968, the Year of the Monkey, my father reminded us that we would not return to Hue and that Saigon would be our permanent home. My mother’s eyebrows came together over her red, sullen eyes. As usual, she did not protest the decision. The special suitcase, however, was never unpacked. She kept it under my bed. Only I knew where it was.
9. THE TET OFFENSIVE—MADAME CINNAMON AND THE COMMUNIST SPY
Time passed. My mother had not even returned to Hue for a visit when the next catastrophe arrived. As it turned out, my father’s decision to leave Hue was a good one. The celebration of the Lunar New Year, Tet Mau Than, in February of 1968, entered history as a tragic event.
The Tet Offensive. The massacre of Hue.
As a thirteen-year-old, I was mature enough to grasp the tragedies of the Tet Offensive as my personal tragedy as well. First, Grandma Que was in Hue with the Vietcong. Growing up in non-Communist South Vietnam, I was conditioned to think of the Vietcong as boogeymen and enemies, a mean and dangerous species like snakes, tigers, or cannibals. On the day the radio announced Hue had been seized by the Vietcong, I wrapped myself in a blanket, thinking of Mey Mai’s words from the past—there would be another massacre in the City of Hue, from which I would escape. It was happening. The Spirit of the Perfume River was correct. I thought of Grandma Que living alone in the old colonial house. Would the magnolia tree protect her against flying rockets? Or would she likely die buried under white magnolia blooms?
Second, the Violet City—representing memories of that guardian angel of mine, the Mystique Concubine—became a celebrated battlefield. American marines were helicoptered into battle to help recover the imperial city. TV broadcasts of scenes from Hue were available for Saigon inhabitants to view what had happened to their beloved city of romance. The mourning of Hue citizens filled the evening news. It was reported that before the Vietcong withdrew their troops, thousands of civilians were buried alive or executed.
My mother, Mi Chau, and I prayed to the compassionate Buddha every night while the fighting for the imperial city continued. We all cried together watching television; corpses of soldiers were shipped out of the Citadel surrounding the Violet City: from the skinny Vietcong guerilla fighters in their black pajamas, to the equally skinny South Vietnamese soldiers, in their green army uniforms, to the American marines, the gigantic men of the West.
In the end, the South Vietnamese Army and U.S. Marines declared their victory—the Vietcong were completely ousted from the imperial city. Hue belonged, once more, to the American-backed Republic of Vietnam. The broadcast news said the Violet City was badly damaged. My father sighed one evening at dinner and claimed that vestige of a culture and its past glory were almost wiped out. Excavations were conducted for Hue citizens to search for traces of their loved ones. Bodies of Hue citizens were uncovered in all shapes or forms, parts missing, limbs chained together, arms tied behind their backs. It was also reported that among the dead were Western civilians—Germans, French, Americans, British—who had come to Hue for research, medical, academic, or humanitarian services.
“Lucky André and Dominique,” my father said, “leaving just in time.”
Finally, we got a telegram from Grandma Que. The ancestral house was damaged, but she was all right, thanks to the mystical cinnamon log sitting in the altar room, she said. Apparently, the log’s magic was not powerful enough to keep our surviving relatives in Hue after the Tet Offensive. Several of them left to resettle in Saigon, and told us of what had happened to our ancestral house on Princess Huyen Tran Street. The Vietcong had chosen the villa as a place for political meetings. Hue citizens were summoned to hear propaganda talks on American crimes, and Grandma Que was chosen to preside over these meetings. The Vietcong called her Me Chien Si, Mother of Warriors.
Gathering coals and wood logs, she cooked barrels of rice to feed Vietcong troops with the same calmness as she had prepared gourmet shrimp balls on a kumquat tree for Western expatriates at the Christmas party in 1966. Later, we heard that prior to withdrawal, the Vietcong were about to loot her house and destroy her antiques. Grandma Que, twin sister of the heroine Ginseng, daughter of the Revolution, stood in front of the altar and demanded to see the political commissar.
“Take whatever you want in the house before you go back to the jungle,” she told him. “But do not touch these artifacts. They don’t belong to me. They belong to the culture of Vietnam. Destroy these, and you would be committing the same crime as the Americans. You would be guilty before the dragon and the fairy that represent the country’s roots. Even the French had to give these items back, and I am just the keeper. Uncle Ho would agree with me, I am positive. If your men insist on destroying these, I will write to Uncle Ho and General Vo Nguyen Giap myself. Or you can kill this old woman.”
I imagined the slender silhouette of Grandma Que in front of the family altar, dainty like a willow. She repeated her hair-rolling routine as she delivered her stern speech to men wearing cone hats and black pajamas, with their AK-47s pointing at her. The Spirit of the Perfume River must have been lurking behind Grandma Que, circling the altar in the smoke of incense, while the omnipresent cinnamon log emanated its mystical power to protect her.
Finally, the men in black pajamas had to lower their heads and bow, pointing their threatening AK-47s to the ground. Even the commissar had to lower his eyes, and ordered his men to leave the house. The antiques and musical instruments once belonging to the Hue Imperial Court remained intact.
Our Hue relatives added a postscript to the story. The well-known medium of the Inner Citadel, Mey Mai, had disappeared after the Tet Offensive. It was alleged she had joined Vietcong troops in their withdrawal into the jungle, back to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Mey Mai—the psychic, the prophet, the wise one, the Mystique Concubine’s loyal chambermaid, Grandma Que’s endeared nanny—had always been a Communist spy. In 1968, she served as colonel in charge of information warfare for Ho Chi Minh’s National Liberation Front and its Communist cause. The money and gifts she earned through fortune telling had always gone to the Front. She had always been one of the celebrated daughters of the Revolution, following the footsteps of my great-aunt Ginseng.
So, Mey Mai was a Vietcong! And a famous one, with a long revolutionary Communist and intelligence career. But I never thought of her a
s a bad person. She used to embrace me and hold me in her lap. And she spoke to me the words of the singing paddle girl—that powerful Spirit of the Perfume River.
We learned that when the Tet Offensive was over, Grandma Que had to repair the exterior damage the war had done to the ancestral house. In her letters, she stated what I already knew: that the Spirit of the Perfume River, the magnolia tree, and her mystical cinnamon log had protected our ancestral abode.
But my father had a different story to tell. He said it had to be Mey Mai, the Communist spy, who secured Grandma Que’s safety and protected our property. Even a dangerous, deceiving Communist spy had loyalty and a heart. Further, the old villa, isolated underneath rows of tall trees and sitting on the slope of hilly Nam Giao, was not situated on the Vietcong’s incoming or exiting route. The location made the villa strategically safe from the war. And no, my father continued, Grandma Que would never have written Uncle Ho or General Giap about the matter of preserving her antiques. If she had, the letters would have been ignored. They could have gotten her into trouble with the South Vietnamese government. Imagine a South Vietnamese writing to Uncle Ho and General Giap in the North?
I did not believe my father. When Grandma Que said she would do something, she meant it. The Spirit of the Perfume River, the magnolia tree, and the cinnamon log would never allow Grandma Que to be harmed in any way.
In the summer of 1968, my mother wrote to Grandma Que, begging her to leave Hue for Saigon, for fear there might be another Tet Offensive. Mey Mai had disappeared and, if another Tet Offensive were to occur, there would be no one to protect Grandma Que against the Vietcong, who condemned members of the royal family and descendants of the Nguyen Dynasty.
Grandma Que refused. She had decided to live and die as the keeper of memories.
That summer, when life got back to normal, we also received a telegram from André in Côte d’Azur: “Heard of Tet Offensive. Please telegram. Anxiously waiting. André.”
So, André had not forgotten me, in spite of Dominique.
The inhabitants of Vietnam learned to insulate themselves from bad memories. The Tet Offensive was soon forgotten, and the war could seem deceptively far away. In many ways our lives before and after the Tet Offensive remained unaffected.
By the beginning of 1969, I had auditioned for and enrolled at the National Institute of Music and Drama. That same year, I began taking private singing lessons from Madame Misticelli at her villa on Rue Tu Duc, a small, tree-filled street representing the best neighborhood of Saigon, with rows of red-brick French villas and yellow and grey stucco estate houses. For regular academic work, I attended Lycée Marie Curie, an all-girl secondary school in the heart of Saigon.
After the Tet Offensive, my mother stopped talking about returning to her ancestral house in Hue. She still wanted to resume her hobby in tropical horticulture, but the townhouse in District Eight had no spare land. In the beginning, my mother remained quiet and sad. Then she became more and more irritated, until the silence broke and she began complaining to my father incessantly about her need to have flowers around her.
My father finally gave in. Since the townhouse had no front or back yard, he had to knock down a bedroom, open the roof, and build a patio for potted plants and flowers.
In the patio, my father had built a small fountain made out of cement, grayish and dull, to catch rainwater. My mother would never again have an old man to assist her and to remove earthworms, nor the green grass of a circling yard, but she eventually made peace with potting plants and arranged her flowerpots and crawling ferns and vines around the ugly cement structure. She also put lawn chairs around it. When she was finished, the gray cement fountain appeared bright and cheerful, and the townhome was no longer barren.
By the time my mother’s flowerpots all blossomed, we got another telegram from Paris. André and Dominique were returning to Vietnam to live!
“Call me crazy, mon professeur,” the telegram said, “especially after the Tet Offensive, but I just can’t stay away from L’Indochine. My bride will have to understand.”
My Sunday afternoon routines with André were resumed that same year, in a different form. André no longer came to our house alone. Dominique drove a Deux Chevaux, dropped him off at our house, came in for the courtesy formality, and then left. She would come back to pick him up a couple of hours later. Every Sunday afternoon, I looked out from the living room window and saw them together in the Deux Chevaux, approaching our house and stopping by the curb. Husband and wife sat quietly and separately from each other, staring ahead. I asked my mother whether they were mad at each other. She said I was too young to inquire into such a thing.
Dominique was a lofty and aloof white lily lost in the tropics, her blue eyes and straight blonde hair cool and sophisticated, her flowery Western dresses, silk scarf, and sling sandals all making a striking fashion statement in the dust of Saigon among the polyester-clad and cone-hatted street vendors. She would kiss me on my cheeks but would never smile. I could hardly feel the contact with her thin lips. I was told she taught French and English at Lycée Marie Curie, and when I was old enough to attend the tenth grade, La Seconde, she would become my English teacher. I dreaded the day.
My world in Saigon those days centered around the smiling and plump voice teacher, Madame Misticelli; the schoolgirls and professors at Lycée Marie Curie; the practice room at the National Institute of Music and Dramatic Arts; our indoor patio where my mother spent her leisure time; occasional outings for ice cream at the Pôle Nord; and my Sunday visits with André. The Sunday meetings continued, but the pony games between us belonged exclusively to my memory of my mother’s garden in Hue, those butterflies fluttering their wings over violet petals in the yellow twilight of a dying summer day.
The Vietnamese language lessons André received from my father in Saigon gradually advanced to discussions of Vietnamese literature, which included Vietnamese modern poetry modeled after French literary romanticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the images and sentiments of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Apollinaire. I doubted if André’s Vietnamese had really improved, because during these literary sessions, my father did most of the talking.
Days rolled by and I became a slender teenager, attached to André still, yet afraid of Dominique. André told my parents he would like to be my play uncle. According to him, Dominique did not object to the concept of becoming my French play aunt.
10. YELLOW ROSES AND BAUDELAIRE
In 1969, I turned fourteen. In a moment of teenage moodiness, I had told my mother I absolutely did not want a birthday party with friends my age. I requested that my siblings, Mi Chau and Pi, be sent away for the day.
It had rained all afternoon, and when the rain stopped, I sat by the window looking onto the cement alley, fresh, clean, and wet from the recent tropical shower. André’s Deux Chevaux appeared and parked at the curb. Obviously he was coming for his Vietnamese lessons with my father. This time he was driving the Deux Chevaux himself, and Dominique was not accompanying him. The norm was broken and I rushed out to the door.
André was carrying a bouquet of yellow tea roses in his hand, and he bent over to kiss me on my cheek. “Surprise!”
My mother entered the living room from the kitchen, carrying a cake with thick, white buttercream frosting and fourteen candles on its surface. She announced there would be no Vietnamese lessons that day, as Uncle André would be celebrating my fourteenth birthday with us on the patio.
André produced a vase, announcing solemnly that the best of roses should always be presented in French crystal. He also had a wrapped present with him, claiming it was from Aunt Dominique. I tore off the gold wrapping and glistening matching bow and ran my fingers over the fine silk of a colorful scarf bearing the signature of Christian Dior. I had never had anything that beautiful in my schoolgirl’s wardrobe, yet I folded the scarf nonchalantly and placed it back inside the bundle of wrinkled and torn wrapping paper, feeling no real emotio
n. It looked too much like something Dominique would wear. My attention was on the bouquet of yellow roses.
André said the flowers, twenty-four buds, had been ordered especially from the highlands, the resort city of Dalat, where the fresh and cool air of a milder climate produced better roses. I filled the crystal vase with rainwater from the patio’s fountain, and sprinkled it on the rosebuds.
It was a quiet, adultlike birthday party, just as I had wanted it. My mother had honored my wish and sent both Mi Chau and Pi to the beach in Vung Tau. Before sunset, I blew out the fourteen candles on the cream cake, banh bong lan, and we sat in lounge chairs, listening to André recite Baudelaire:
Mon enfant, ma sœur,
Sa douce langue natale…
Aimer à loisir
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble
I wanted to sing those words.
My child, my sister,
Your sweet native tongue…
Loving in leisure
Loving and dying
In the country resembling you.
I felt a vague sense of sadness. Why did loving have to go with dying? When I looked at André, he met my eyes. His thick lashes moved, and I saw again the nocturnal butterflies of Hue.
It was then that André began talking about himself. I had never seen him in such an agitated, passionate state. His eyebrows pulled together over those beautiful brown eyes, his cheek muscles tensed, and an expression of pain swept over his face. He told us how he had always been a lover of Baudelaire. He had studied comparative literature at Yale and then Sorbonne and had wanted to become a writer. But the Foucault family objected, and he became a solicitor instead.
Daughters of the River Huong Page 17