Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “What does a young girl know about tragic beauty?” he asked, with raised brows.

  “What happened between us, ma chérie, is tragic beauty,” he said mournfully.

  He said loving poetry meant she was about to become a young woman, bidding farewell to childhood, like young leaves maturing for fall. If growing up means good-bye, adieu, and good morning sadness—bonjour tristesse—then let me be a child forever, she said.

  He had not understood her words, no matter how simple they were. Je t’aime. Tant. Tant. Tant.

  She kicked off her shoes and tiptoed over the bed of leaves, imagining them crying under each step. Looking back, she caught his eyes gazing at her naked heels.

  “Tes pas d’enfant…mon silence…T’en souviens-tu de mes pieds nus?” Remember your childlike steps? My silence…Oh those naked heels…

  Why do I have to move from here to there, she wondered, only to destroy the fragility underneath my feet? She thought of the trip back home. Her parents had written about the national literature contest, the debate team, even a teenage beauty pageant, and national scholarships, including the choices of the Sorbonne, Australia, Japan, England, or the United States. All would be far better than the bad grades earned by a teenager who frequently skipped school in St. Germain des Prés. A plane would depart from Charles De Gaulle toward all of these splendid things awaiting her in Vietnam. And it would be just a beginning for a future so bright any young girl would have been envious.

  “O clemens; O pia; O dulcis Virgo Maria.” Oh, sweet Virgin Mary, have mercy, have pity on us. Our weakness, our vulnerability and fragility in the wretchedness of our life. Your sacredness, your beauty, your purity, in the holiness of your light.

  The music died down. The applause began and then extinguished. The black-clad men and women of the choir turned a certain way and left the stage section by section, and Constance beamed with satisfaction from the conductor stand.

  Never rush off stage. In singing, never rush anywhere, he had said.

  Rush. I’ve turned thirty-five safely in America, yet all I want to do is rush so that nothing good can be taken away from me again. Someone handed me a rose backstage, and a few choir members were talking about late-night tea in Greenwich Village or Soho.

  I said yes, yes, desperately wanting to rush, hearing again in my mind the sound of a helicopter roaring on top of a building in central Saigon decades ago.

  I heard, too, the French manager of the Continental Hotel in Saigon yelling, “Putain!” to those young Vietnamese women wearing miniskirts and platform shoes, with their mascara running down their blotted cheeks in the heat of April 1975.

  On that day, I had gone to the Continental Hotel by myself to meet a man and beg for his help. Later, I thought by starting a new American life with Christopher Sanders, I could accept and forget.

  14. REFUGEES IN DIAMONDALE—NOVEMBER 1975

  The summer of 1975 was a long, drugged sleep. I woke up one day and Vietnam had been miraculously replaced with America. I had boarded, by myself, from atop the U.S. embassy, one of the last flights out. Months later, I reunited with my family in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, one of the resettlement camps. We settled in Diamondale, a small town in Southern Illinois.

  Diamondale was no diamond, its rural sleepiness perked up only with the college football and basketball games or weekend sales at the KMart™ on Main Street. Commerce included a Steak and Ale and a Holiday Inn near the tiny airport that provided the only airway to the major metropolitan area of Chicago, and just enough shops and restaurants to serve some thirty thousand inhabitants, about twenty-five thousand of whom were college students at Southern Illinois State University.

  In the beginning, while my parents were looking for jobs, the sponsoring Lutheran Church let us live in an old house in a mixed neighborhood, on a street full of big, old pecan trees. An old colleague of my father on the political science faculty gave him an interest-free loan to buy a used car. The house, provided rent-free, was old enough to suffer all kinds of heat and air-conditioning problems. Parents and children were crammed into the little old house, but we were just thankful for a roof over our heads until we could afford our own place.

  I thought then that I had survived.

  Yet in Diamondale, I kept recalling scenes of the Continental Hotel in downtown Saigon, the hairy arms and legs of a man I hardly knew, and the infirmaries in Guam, together with the faces of Red Cross workers, military nurses and doctors, and church volunteers. Finally, I recalled the scene of myself lying alone on the beach of Guam Island on a starry night, listening to the waves of the sea, crying to myself and blaming God. Those days I was not sure whether my family had safely fled Saigon, so I kept strolling the beaches of Guam by myself until my feet turned sore and my eyes blanked out. Only then would I lie on the hot sand and stare into the sky.

  One night in Guam, after strolling the beach in despair, I stabbed the lower part of me with a mess hall fork. My memory of what happened thereafter became spotty.

  In Diamondale, I withdrew into my own world, stopped talking to my parents and siblings, and took a waitressing job at the town’s only Chinese restaurant, where greasy chow mein and ready-made sweet-and-sour pork were considered the house’s gourmet specialties. I postponed all plans to go to college until my parents could find more permanent employment and we could save enough money for a better life.

  We had not had any snow in late November, but the roads of Diamondale were icy, and the trees had lost all their leaves, bringing back sad memories of Paris. I got home around eleven from my waitressing job that night.

  My sister, Mi Chau, opened the door, her cat eyes lit up. “Guess who’s here! Tonton André!”

  So he had come to find me, but perhaps it was all too late. Perhaps he was thinner. Perhaps he had aged some. Perhaps his thick, wavy brown hair had thinned out, making his forehead higher. Perhaps more lines had appeared around his beautiful brown eyes. My palpitating state of mind rejected all details. I saw him as I had seen him those days in Paris.

  “Oh, Si,” André said, “you have…grown so much.” He kept his arms pinned to his sides as though they longed to reach out. His eyes sparkled with unspoken messages and the surreptitiousness of an accomplice. It was the first time since the incident in Paris that he faced me in the company of my parents.

  It was an awkward moment. I spoke very little, fearful that my parents would detect my uneasiness.

  He came up to me and wanted to embrace—the French way. The verb embrasser meant a kiss as well as a hug. So I hugged him and kissed him on his cheeks. Since the time in Paris, my breasts had fully developed, and I blushed when his arms slightly brushed upon them.

  I turned away from him, coldly told my parents I was very tired from my job, and would like to go to my room. My brother Pi was dancing around André. “Tonton André, would you play pony with me?” Pi cried, beaming at him. “Would you take me to Paris?”

  I went to my room and changed into a nightshirt. I heard the door moving and pretended to bury my face into the pillow.

  “What’s wrong, Si?” My mother sat down by the bed.

  “Nothing.”

  My mother’s eyes were sad. They had been sad since our departure from Vietnam. She and I avoided talking about Grandma Que, who stayed behind.

  “André and Dominique are getting a divorce,” my mother sighed, pausing to test my reaction. “Dominique is talking to publishers now. She wants to write a book on Indochina. How ridiculous, the woman was barely there. Now that South Vietnam has fallen, everybody wants to write a book about us.”

  She stroked my hair. “André has talked to us. If you want a Christmas vacation in Paris, you can go with him.”

  “No,” I said feebly.

  “I have always known,” my mother said gravely. “Only your father is blind. Back then, I took a chance sending you to Paris because I knew how badly you wanted to go.”

  I leaned against the headboard, puzzled.

  “You are gr
own now, and he is about to be free. Go with him if you want. He is a good man, though he is twice your age.”

  I sat still. What exactly did my mother know?

  There was one thing she could not have known: the Continental Hotel. The man there was more than twice my age.

  15. THAT DAY IN APRIL

  Five days before the fall of Saigon, I stood hours in the sun before I entered the Continental Hotel. For a moment I couldn’t read the room number, 210, engraved on the door. The room of an American journalist, Christopher Sanders, a friend of my father’s. When I entered, he was in his bathrobe, dictating into a tape recorder.

  The man looked up from the desk and asked, “Room service?”

  I said no, I had come on my own.

  He asked if I was sent by the embassy. I said no.

  Irritated and impatient, he asked who I was.

  I stood on escapin high heels, in my best ao dai, made for ceremonial occasions, with its dignified high collar, and embroidered golden dragons on black satin. My father was at home sleeping, exhausted. For days he had been running around town looking for a way out. From the defense attaché’s office to various embassies. He had gone home defeated. Finally my mother said to him, “Sleep, my dear. Take a nap.” She got him a hot towel. Made him a lemon soda. I watched them. I saw despair and panic written on their faces. So I said, “Let me try; leave everything to me. After all, I am the oldest daughter and speak fluent English.”

  I introduced myself to the man in the bathrobe. Mr. Sanders. I was Hope’s oldest daughter, I told him. Hope, the nickname this man had given to my father, the American equivalent of L’Espoir, the pen name my father had taken during his college days at Sorbonne. My father, the college professor at the Faculty of Letters, University of Saigon, had become a stringer for the Associated Press—the stringer who had helped build this man’s reporting career in the country.

  The man’s face softened only slightly at the mention of my father’s nickname. “I know now,” he said. “You want a way out of Vietnam. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Mr. Sanders,” I said, “I am begging you. Those people from the North who will be coming out of the Cu Chi tunnel—they don’t like us. French-educated professor. Informer for the Americans. Bourgeois. Annamese aristocrat. We stand for what the people from the North have been trying to destroy. I won’t watch my father sent to a Communist jail. I have young siblings who need a future elsewhere. My mother is a fragile woman who loves to plant flowers and faints in times of crisis!”

  He pointed to the high window looking out at Saigon harbor. His pale face seemed worn from watching the devastation mount around him. He suggested that I try the sea merchants who were selling spaces on their boats, at ten gold taels or so per head. He must have known we didn’t have that kind of money.

  I offered him the two ivory plaques, made out of elephant tusks thousands of years old. One had belonged to nhat pham trieu dinh, hong lo tu khanh, a mandarin of the first rank of the royal court, and the other one to an admiral of the royal fleet that once watched over the Port of Thuan An. I offered him the luscious green jade phoenix, once held by a royal concubine of the Nguyen Dynasty.

  Grandma Que had removed these items from the altar and given them to me when I told her I had to go seek a way out of Vietnam, before the Communists came in. “Go, child,” she said, “Westerners like antiques.” For her to part with these items meant we were facing a matter of life and death.

  The man refused the gifts, embarrassed, as I had expected he would. Christopher Sanders told me to go home and wait with my father. Or—he pointed again to the high window from which we could see the ships afar, where transactions for a way out were also taking place—an alternative escape route that he should have known my family could not afford. He was just trying anything, anything to get me to leave him alone. So I followed his hand gesture and walked past him to approach the window just to buy some time to think. I looked out at Saigon’s waterfront, on one side, and the giant clock over the Ben Thanh market, on the other. Everything outside that window was the same—the same dock, the same clock—yet it was not the same city.

  So I made up my mind. There was only one thing I could afford to do.

  I had heard the hotel manager screaming at the throngs of desperate bar girls waiting in the lobby for their American boyfriends to get them seats on the last airlifts. They were all in bell-bottoms and miniskirts and platform shoes, with their fake eyelashes, foam enhancers inside their bras, and all that heavy makeup and broken English. “Putain!” the manager had screamed, losing his cool, waving his arms and pushing them back from the stairs.

  “At any moment,” said Mr. Sanders, “with a signal from Washington, Voice of America will play ‘White Christmas,’ and all U.S. personnel are to report immediately to the embassy. I’m supposed to be here twenty-four hours a day, around the clock, waiting for the tune of ‘White Christmas’ over the radio. I am to cover the end of the war. My nerves are raw…”

  “All you need to do is to put us on the plane,” I said, cutting him off. “Tell your boss in America I am your wife. Tell them anything, anything. Take us to America and I’ll be your maid. I’ll sweep your floor. I’ll do anything. Either I stay here with you, or I go into another room. Any room. I’ll find myself another American man and make my offer to him. A GI, perhaps.”

  Mr. Sanders looked down at the floor. “No please, don’t do that,” he said quietly.

  The floor was gray marble, cold even in the April heat. His eyes traveled back up to my face, lingering along the curves of the gold dragons around my waist.

  Numbly, I took off my escapin shoes, held them in my hands, and walked barefoot over the marble to where he was sitting, behind his desk. The cold spread up my legs through the tendons in my ankles. I knelt in front of him and put my shoes down on the marble floor. I began to unbutton my ao dai.

  “You make it very difficult for me, mademoiselle,” he said. “You are exquisite.”

  16. WINTER IN DIAMONDALE—NOVEMBER 1975

  I lay down for at least half an hour in the bedroom I shared with Mi Chau, trying to sort out my confused head. I could hear Mi Chau trying to practice French with Uncle André outside. In emotional exhaustion, I dozed off.

  I could not have gone to sleep for too long, because when I woke up, it was still dark outside, and I still heard my father’s voice from the living room. Finally, I had to come out. The old house had no separate dining room, and we used an old, chipped dining set as living room furniture. André and my father were sitting at the table. I stood behind the door to the den and listened. André’s voice was like a taut wire.

  “Keep this check, for Si’s college education.”

  “My daughters are smart,” my father said. “They can get scholarships.”

  “What’s wrong with getting a little more?”

  “I work, and my wife works. We are not used to charity.”

  “It isn’t charity. It’s my responsibility.”

  “Your responsibility? If you meant the Foucault–Thuan Thanh saga and family feud, it’s stale.”

  “Then take it from a friend. Or a former student. You were once my tutor.”

  “Maybe your money should go to my in-laws in Vietnam. My mother-in-law, Ms. Que.”

  “I can have a separate sum set up for that. But the money can’t get to them now. My contacts said they can’t find Ms. Que, either in Hue or Saigon.”

  “I fully intend for Si to go to college, no matter what,” my father continued. “She’ll graduate, on fast track, hopefully to get a job and help us.”

  “I think she ought to sing,” André said.

  “Don’t be a bad influence, André. Don’t talk to her about singing. It’s all over now. The country fell. What she must have is a college education that leads to a job.”

  “What if I take her to France? She’ll go to the Sorbonne or do whatever she wants to do, whether marketable or not. You won’t have to worry about her for the re
st of her life. I’ll take care of everything.”

  I looked around the door into the dining area. My father was sipping a cup of tea, that same habit from the garden of the old days. André was staring nervously at his own hands.

  “Si is no longer a child, André,” my father said. “She is a young woman now, resourceful, courageous, and she can take care of herself. She brought us out of Vietnam.”

  “What?” The frown on André’s face deepened.

  “While we were still trying to contact you in Paris for help to leave Saigon, she went out and secured a list from the American defense attaché’s office from some friend of hers at the College of Law. She refused to tell us who. The list had the names of our whole immediate family and secured our access to Tan Son Nhat airport. A grandmother was not considered part of the immediate family, so the list did not include my mother-in-law. So Si stayed on in Saigon to get her grandmother. But Ms. Que refused to leave, and Si left on one of the last helicopters.”

  “C’est…extraordinaire,” André said, twisting his fingers together.

  “Stop talking about me! There’s nothing extraordinary about what I did!” I yelled, jumped out of my hiding space, and ran outside.

  “Si, stop!” André ran after me.

  I heard my mother’s voice. “André, here is a coat for her.”

  My father yelled, “Ignore her; she’s out of line!”

  I leaned against one of the tall pecan trees that bordered the street. It was freezing cold, and I was wearing only a nightshirt and socks.

  A pair of arms took me in, put a coat over me. André turned me around and I found the same shoulders and chest, smelled the same familiar musky smell from the man I had long desired.

  “I wish you would go away,” I stammered.