Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  All the good food, leisurely lifestyle, and the constant walking around the streets of Paris had done me wonders. I had sprung up wonderfully to five feet five, impressively tall for a Vietnamese girl of my generation. Paris had changed me from a skinny young girl to a beautiful lady, everyone in the District Eight neighborhood of Saigon commented. Paris had also confirmed me as a hopeless romantic, with my newly acquired repertoire of French poems, classical music, and European stars like Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Gina Lolobrigida, and Jean Paul Belmondo.

  I kept writing André and he kept writing back, but only to my parents, always referring to me as the niece or daughter he would like to have.

  I finished high school at Lycée Marie Curie, passed the Tu Tai College Entrance Examination, and was dying to return to Paris to see André and attend the Sorbonne. But my father talked to André separately and preferred for me to attend graduate school in America. To prepare for that course of life, I enrolled at the Faculty of Law in Saigon, while waiting for the right graduate scholarship to the United States.

  Sadly and bitterly, I blamed André for not wanting me to return to Paris. How else could my father get the crazy idea that I was better off at an American college?

  Constance gave a hand signal, and the music began.

  “Lacrimosa son io, perduto ho l’idol mio. I am melancholy.” I have lost my idol.

  Six months after my thirty-fifth birthday, boxed in a severe, long, black velvet dress and standing in the first row of a 140-member choir, I sang the gorgeous sound of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Somewhere in the program, a lyric soprano would be singing Schumann’s “Träumerei.”

  In moments of Träumerei, I saw the past. The sound took me back to Rome. I saw again the black-haired, skinny young girl resting her head on André’s shoulder. In Paris and Rome, she was supposed to be twelve years old, since she was not big enough for her fifteen years of life.

  “My feet are too sore for me to walk,” she had complained, so he carried her on his back, one early autumn day, down the foggy street of Rome to her first singing lesson, in the country where the great art of bel canto singing originated. He had promised to show her how the human voice could become the instrument in competition with an orchestra. The voice could stand alone in its own time and space, with all its nuances, colors, and texture.

  They went inside a grandiose old church, and he put her down and asked her to walk through a set of tall, mahogany double doors. At the other end of a corridor, a real Italian opera singer would soon confirm the girl was a lyric soprano, a real honor for a sullen Vietnamese girl who loved to sing.

  The young girl would be singing Schumann’s “Träumerei.”

  The vibrato on the last note of Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” quivered and extinguished. Constance gave another hand gesture to prepare the choir for Haydn’s “Salve Regina” in G.

  “Ad te suspiramus, Exsules filii Evae. Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle.” To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, groaning and weeping in this valley of tears.

  From the corner of my eyes, I thought I saw fog. He emerged from all that fog, a surreal figure, at the end of the music hall. His gorgeous self, in a trench coat, exactly like that day in Rome. I kept on singing and he leaned against the set of closed doors, beautiful and youthful as ever. No one saw him except me. For a moment, time seemed to hold still, until he started to speak.

  “Bonjour, c’est magnifique tout ce que tu as fait. Je t’adore, éter-nellement,” he said, one hand in his coat’s pocket. “Put your mind at rest. You made the right decision not to return to Paris with me in 1975. You have found your place in America, on your own, singing,” he said.

  We were having our private conversation across the music hall, above the heads of a bunch of New Yorkers sitting stiff and still, staring at the stage. In my mind, they froze, leaving the world to him and me alone. We silently conversed in the middle of Haydn’s choral music.

  “Ad te suspiramus,” I sang my solo line. More eyes were on me, yet my eyes were on him. No more tears. He stood so beautifully and cheerfully at the end of the corridor.

  Could you have saved me from my Fleurs du Mal? No, no, no, he shook his head.

  I stayed with the high la. Forever on the A note, which spelled his name. There was no gap between him and me on that high A. The audience was clapping, and he clapped, too.

  Brava, brava, he said, disappearing gradually, together with the fog.

  Bravo for a man, brava for a woman, he had told me that day in Rome.

  In what was left of the vibrato on my perfect high A, I closed my eyes and saw, again, scenes of Paris.

  13. REQUIEM IN THE GARDEN OF LUXEMBOURG

  It must have been in the tree-filled neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés and the Garden of Luxembourg in Paris that I first recognized, at the tender age of fifteen, the difference between Southeast Asia and Europe manifested in the colors and shapes of leaves in my two worlds.

  In Southeast Asia, tall trees produced thick, dark green leaves that shone as though waxed. Those wide leaves created rich, dark shade. Day upon day, the wide, luscious surfaces of tropical leaves drank the early morning dew and then bathed in sunshine. The trees’ huge trunks challenged the arms of children.

  I could still see the little girl running around the front yard of Grandma Que’s villa until she collapsed to rest in the enormous, cool shadow of a tall magnolia tree, or she simply circled the tree, at times stopping to throw her little arms wide in a vain attempt to embrace it. Grandma Que said the tropical climate did wonders for vegetation. In the wealth of sunshine, a tree had no other way to grow but tall and big, and leaves had no other way but to turn into wide, flat surfaces of luscious green.

  The same slender young girl was standing beneath a row of trees—not the thick and tall trees of the tropics, but slender trees with thin branches shedding red leaves that crumbled under a grayish low sky. Here in Parisian autumn, there was no need for leafy shade to protect the girl against a burning sun. Instead, leaves turned red and fell, covering the ground, and then they dried up and broke under human footsteps.

  The girl moved on beds of red leaves toward the sound of the piano. She called out, “Tata Dominique,” and the door was flung open, and the sound of Chopin pouring out in fuller force. There she was met by a tall, blond woman wearing an apron, leaning against the mahogany door, saying in a husky, melodious voice, “Berceuse, berceuse! That’s my favorite Chopin, and yours, too, Simone.”

  Inside, with the cover of the record in one hand, the blonde woman extended her other hand to turn a key and lock the door after the girl had slipped in. The girl made her way awkwardly among dark wood furniture and tiptoed upon those dark Persian rugs. Impressionistic oil canvases matched perfectly with their carved, matted gold frames hung solemnly around the wood-burning fireplace, where fresh logs melted off their sap. The rest of the wall space was jammed with photographs of strangers—men wearing tails and round spectacles slipping down the bridges of their hawked noses, almost down to their spiral whiskers, and women with perfectly coifed golden or chestnut hair, their hands folding grimly over long, bouffant skirts. The room smelled of cream, butter, beaten eggs, and burned sugar.

  “I am sorry, Tata Dominique; I skipped school,” the girl stammered in her timid voice.

  “It’s all right for now. You can learn Chopin instead. Appreciate Chopin with me. Chopin is your uncle’s favorite,” the blonde woman said.

  “And I just baked madeleines,” the woman added, speaking of her sugary cookies, the kind that invoked Marcel Proust’s lost paradise. “You should one day learn Marcel Proust, even if you are going home back to Vietnam. You should learn about the time lost, revived by a sense, a taste, or a feel. That, too, is your uncle’s favorite.”

  Oh, of course, the girl would love to learn anything, anything that is her uncle’s favorite. Chopin and Proust.


  “Thank you, Tata Dominique, for telling me,” the girl said, dreamily. She thought proudly to herself, I am his favorite. Not just you, Tata, but me, my little self.

  Outside on those Parisian streets, people hurried their steps, carrying newspapers under their arms, shapeless in their heavy coats, their breath escaping them like smoke. Inside, the girl tapped her shoe on the red rug, the braids of black hair and ebony eyes contrasting against her white chemise. When she turned around, the street sign across from the misty set of French windows met her swollen eyes, accustomed already to weeping alone at night.

  The sign said St. Germain des Prés.

  The townhouse belonged to him and Dominique, but in Paris, the little girl also had what she considered to be her own place with him. Number thirteen, Rue St. Baptiste de la Salle. Walk toward that place reserved for love! Innocent love, innocent like the young girl who strolled the streets of Paris.

  On one of those lonely walks, she heard the voice of someone who sounded so familiar speaking to her so endearingly. In a séance. From the pink and mauve lotuses that filled up the horizon in a city that was all violet. In all those shades of subdued and tender colors, the matriarch of Hue opened her restful eyes, as well as her bright red cloak that spelled fire, to show the girl a radiant jade phoenix. The fierce green of jade against the luscious red fabric became the focal point among all that pastel shades of lotuses and mosses.

  “I, too, fell in love at the tender age of fifteen, with someone older who did not share my race. He’s Vietnamese, and I am Cham. I was just a child, but he was also the State of Annam.” The matriarch spoke of her sorrow, a tear lurking underneath her beautiful lashes.

  “What do you hope to find on those streets of a faraway place called Paris?” The matriarch smiled to the child, raising her perfectly shaped brows. The lurking tear had turned into the sapphire blue of the Perfume River behind the silver-ebony curtain of her eyelashes.

  “Independence, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all made possible by love,” perhaps the girl might have replied solemnly. All those clichés. “After all, this is Paris, the city that has received and housed all the misfits. It’s the city of dreams,” the girl explained.

  “Oh, yes, all of those beautiful concepts worthy of the best of dreams.” The matriarch sighed and closed her eyes, shutting off the blue of her Perfume River with her sparkling eyelashes. “But, my dear, if misplaced, the pursuit of independence, liberty, and happiness, no matter how beautiful, can be just as deadly as infantile love—the kind of love that bears no responsibility because it is just a notion of perfection in a dream, never to be materialized fully in the real world!” Her final words blurred away.

  Fall had begun, and sunbathing Parisians had all headed home from their vacations on the southern coast. Toward November Paris was chilly and gray. Somewhere near the St.

  Germain townhouse that was not hers, outside that white-shuttered window from which Chopin was heard, perhaps the church of St. Germain was tolling its Sunday bell. On the other side of town, on Rue St. Baptiste, she was awakened to an apartment full of the pleasant scent of freshly baked baguettes and brewing coffee. She could happily call this place her own.

  A pair of dark brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses was looking down into her sleepy eyes. “Get up, ma petite chérie.”

  This was her own world with him. No sign of Tata Dominique or her sugary madeleines.

  The girl’s eyes followed the mass of dark, curly hair and the bluish-gray sweater that shaped the torso of the man. Her very own André. He had moved toward the window and was pensively looking out, the porcelain coffee cup going back and forth between the table and his tight lips. She did not like seeing him like that. Tense and sad, with those lips so tight, as though they were holding in complex emotions she never quite understood.

  Those days, the girl had become used to life in Paris, and her eyes were no longer weepy at night. Le Monde was in the man’s other hand, and he was about to swing it across the room to the sofa. She whispered to him, “Je t’aime.” Of course, he acted as though he did not hear her words.

  She tumbled from the bed over to the table, reached for the jar of honey, and dipped one finger into the sticky golden liquid. She wrote “Je t’aime” across the table with her honeyed finger. He could not have read her words since he was looking outside the window, but she rejoiced in writing the words anyway. It made her feel like an adult in love. What else could it be to explain the powerful and intense affection she felt for him?

  He turned around from the window, frowned, and for a moment she could see the blackness of his coffee almost spilling, as though his hand were trembling. His unhappiness did not concern her too much, for she had made up her mind to hold on to him, having been amused by the secret they shared. She was glad the tata had left for the coast, and thought of all the places she wanted to go with him: the castles of Loire, the forests of Fontainebleau, the vineyards of Beaune, all those fishermen’s villages between Marseille and Cassis. She imagined all those wild rabbits running across potato fields and grape leaves stretching to the horizon. The Parisians regarded her slender frame as that of a twelve-year-old, and she might as well benefit from that misleading notion. She could remain a playful child. She rubbed her honeyed finger onto her front teeth, and he caught her wrist, complaining about her lack of manners. She smeared honey onto his lips, ignoring his frown as he awkwardly turned away. She grabbed his chin and forced him to face her.

  Je t’aime. Tant. Tant. Tant. I love you, far, far too much!

  Just a few days before, the Catholic sisters at the conservatory of St. Germain des Prés had all been all shocked when she’d locked herself in the water closet. The nuns called upon Madame Foucault, who had left for the coast. So Monsieur Foucault rushed to school in his trench coat, kneeling down before the locked door and talked in a language the nuns could not understand to the young girl curling up on the other side of the door. She felt so sorry for herself. She told him for the first time how bad it had been for her in Paris. The Foucault couple had fought all the time, books and plates flying across the room, leaving the young Vietnamese girl tiptoeing alone around the living room packed with French Renaissance paintings and eighteenth-century antiques. She missed the dusty alley of District Eight in Saigon and did not want to go back to the luxurious townhouse in St. Germain des Prés.

  Monsieur Foucault wrapped his trench coat around the girl and took her home, a different home, an art studio converted into an apartment on Rue St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, where he had lived before he got married. There, away from his wife, he had his books, manuscripts, typewriter, records, even the philosophy papers from Sorbonne and pictures of old girlfriends, together with all artifacts he had brought home from his various trips to Vietnam. The apartment was his hideout away from his troubled marital life. Outside the apartment’s window, one could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower.

  At Rue St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, the girl calmed down. He prepared her bath, and she sat in the tub for a long time, lonely and upset.

  The apartment had two bedrooms, and the girl stayed in the guest room, on a carved Chinese poster bed the man had brought back from the Orient, among piles of ornately embroidered pillows and blankets—traces of her Orient. In the middle of the night, the girl got up, crying, and crawled into the man’s bed, where the mattress was plush and warm. She hung on to his side, placed one leg over his belly, and cried onto his chest. She spread her legs and climbed on top of him and pressed her face onto his heart. She was terribly lonely. In a trance, she wanted to repeat the pony ride of childhood. She took his arms and wrapped them around her like a security blanket.

  And then she was frightened. She felt the tense muscle, and he moaned and shook, and as the Parisian moon from the window hit his face, she saw him grimace in pain, and he was grabbing her rib cage. She thought she had hurt him irreparably. She could see nothing in the dark.

  He lay still, panting, and then broke out crying. She
felt the man’s face, and it was soaked with tears.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, panicked. “I was a bad girl to make you cry!”

  He rolled over to cover his tearful eyes. “God knows in my heart I must have known this was no accident, and I must have wanted it this way,” he anguished between sobs.

  For the first time he spoke to her of death. This did not scare her. She was excited about other things.

  She knew they had shared a secret. She knew, too, that she now had a hold on him. She had turned fifteen, and the game was far too exciting. She was more than ready to discover adulthood. Yet he kept crying for days and said he wanted to die for betraying her family’s trust and spoiling her innocence such that she should be sent home. Her real home, much earlier than he had planned.

  He wanted to flee from her, heading down south to join his wife, leaving her with the housekeeper who prepared for her to cross the ocean.

  Before his departure, he took her back to the St. Germain des Prés townhouse and then to Le Jardin de Luxembourg. There, she found so many chestnut trees that shed their brown nuts onto the damp ground. They shared the same color with his eyes and hair.

  No more pony rides. They strolled the garden, sat on a bench among the pigeons and falling leaves and statues whose names she could hardly remember from French history books. He recited contemporary poems by Jacques Prevert.

  Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle…

  Toi, qui m’aimais…

  Moi, qui t’aimais…

  The poem spoke of love. She stood barely below his chest, light like a bird. At the Luxembourg garden, inside the black and gold iron gate that separated nature from the bubbling streets of fashionable Paris, she began to understand the fate of falling leaves, just like those who left their home. Leaves descending from treetops, only to reach uncertainty and then to be crushed by the callous steps of humans. She told him falling autumn leaves in Paris meant tragic beauty.