Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “I know you are upset, bébé. It was hard. But many others are in worse position than you.”

  “That’s not it.” I managed to push him away in quiet resignation.

  “I know you lost your scholarship, your plans, going to the university of your choice.”

  “You don’t understand! I am not Dominique, but everyone in Saigon said I was beautiful. I had nothing else to go by.”

  He held my hands together. “For all these years since you left Paris,” he said, “I haven’t been able to sleep well. My marriage is over.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Don’t worry, my parents don’t know what happened in Paris. No one blamed you.”

  “But I’m ready to tell your parents. Si, all this happened for a reason. We can be together, even get married.”

  White flakes had begun to fall from the sky. All I see here is snow, white like death, I told myself. “I want to be left alone,” I stuttered in the wind, my teeth clapping together. “I can’t marry you, André. You abandoned me in the final days. You were in Paris with Dominique.”

  He let go of me. Silence ensued. The flakes were falling over my hair. I did not have shoes on, so my feet were trembling. So he picked me up and walked, as on that day on the streets of Roma. He stopped at a streetlight next to a tall pecan tree. He sat down, leaning against the light pole, and I was in his lap. Snowflakes were all over his brown hair and pale face.

  “You’ve grown up, and you don’t like me anymore, Si?”

  Oh, how could I not like him? All the time in the Continental Hotel I kept thinking of him. America and Gerald Ford had saved some 150,000 South Vietnamese by airlift. I was among those lucky ones, but somehow they had not saved me.

  “D’accord. You don’t have to like me,” he said. “We won’t get married then. But come with me to France. For a better future. Here, you are in the middle of nowhere. It’s the rural Midwest. People don’t understand your culture here. Your father doesn’t have a real job. His fellowship at the university hardly pays enough and it will expire soon. Your fragile mother works in a factory.”

  “I can’t go with you,” I said, exhausted.

  “In Paris, you can have your own friends. I won’t touch you. You’ll meet some boy your age. You can sing.”

  “There won’t be any boys. André, il y a quelque chose que je dois te raconter. Avril 1975…”

  The nausea that once struck me down on the beach of Guam returned to me temporarily, and I heard again the voice of the kindhearted Red Cross nurse who had found me and brought me to the infirmary. “You’ve hurt yourself, miss,” she said. “You stabbed yourself with a mess hall fork, and that could hurt your baby. You can’t be self-destructive, miss. Remember, you are pregnant, miss. Where is the father of your baby? Is he still in Saigon, miss?

  Too many questions asked of Miss. After all the things Miss had done to get her family out of the country, Miss was by herself, knowing not whether her family had safely escaped. Her grandmother had refused to leave, and the father of the unwanted baby stayed on to cover the end of the war. Miss was to board the last helicopter alone. Then the nausea came, and Miss wanted to die. Why couldn’t you leave her alone to die, Madame Red Cross? So I told the nurse I had no husband and wanted no baby.

  My stomach must have been dancing with the snow of Diamondale when I bent over André’s arm, like a piece of silk over a wire. In all that snow I kept hearing the words of the Red Cross nurse about the baby I had lost.

  The kind Red Cross nurse must have stayed with me all throughout my nightmare. “You will have more babies later,” she said, “later, when you are ready.” She had stroked my hair. Despite her soothing voice, her green eyes remained blank, with no real sign of empathy, and I went on with my monologue. “I’m a Buddhist who went to a French Catholic school, dear Madame Red Cross Nurse. For me, a Buddhist girl, life begins at conception and sins begin with thoughts, not action.”

  I wiped the snow off my face and blurted out to André strings of words, without breaths in between. I went on and on. But his face was blank, like that Red Cross nurse’s. He had not understood a word. I spoke in a marathon. Completely in Vietnamese.

  “Slow down, bébé. Tell me, in English, in French, please; my Vietnamese isn’t good enough anymore.”

  He picked me up and walked toward the house. It was snowing heavily and we would have died together in the cold if I had continued telling him my secret. He was carrying me like a small child, just like the old days in Rome. When I looked up, I could see the black sky and thousands of whirling flakes.

  I closed my eyes. All of a sudden, I realized I was in a different place.

  I wanted to start all over again in this land of wonders. The past could vanish with the name of a republic that had lost a war. I opened my eyes to look at him, deep into the brown eyes I had come to love.

  “André,” I said in English, “there has been someone else in my life. Even my parents don’t know. Five days before the fall of Saigon, I was married to an American journalist. He got most of my family out. I am indebted to him. I tried to pick up my grandmother on the way to the Embassy, but she locked herself inside the house and refused to leave, fearing she would jeopardize my chance of leaving, since she wasn’t on the list. It’s just a matter of time before I have to go to him. He’s waiting for me in New York City.”

  In the morning, my father was to give André a ride to the airport. My mother was frying eggs in the kitchen for breakfast, and my father was reading the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I had stayed in the bathroom for a long time, putting on eyeshadow to cover up my puffy eyes. Instead of my routine outfit of jeans and sweater, I put on a pullover and a long skirt. Part of me still wanted to be pretty for him.

  “What’s that stuff on your eyes?” my mother said when I came out. “You don’t need makeup. You see what America has done to her already, André?”

  “I don’t know when I will see mes amis again,” he replied, looking at me.

  “Oh, don’t be sentimental, André,” my father said, putting his newspaper down. “We just lost a country, but we are still living.”

  André looked haggard, with dark circles under his eyes and disheveled hair. “I stayed up writing a poem. I’ll leave it with Si,” he said, handing me an envelope. “It’s meant to be her birthday present.”

  “Cool,” Mi Chau said, chewing on a piece of toast.

  “It’s a temporary present, Si. The real one for your next birthday will be coming soon. What about an apartment in Paris, overlooking Champs-Élysées? It will be yours whenever you want to visit.”

  “Thank you, but I’m very busy here.” I tried to be nonchalant.

  Soon, it was time for André to go to the airport. My father had gone outside to wipe off snow from the car. André and I were alone, together, for a fleeting moment.

  “Will you practice singing again, Si?”

  I tried to smile.

  “Please, think about what I’ve said. Au revoir, mon Indochine.”

  And then he was gone.

  17. HIS BLACK ROSE

  I sat at the dining table with André’s envelope in my hand. I opened it. The poem fell out, together with a cashier’s check for twenty thousand dollars.

  I looked at the poem. It was written in French, in free verse, abstract and vague. It described a maiden who sang, hoping to achieve a mythical voice. One day in singing, she turned into a black rose.

  The black rose. Those three words struck a core of familiarity in my confused head, reviving images of the art studio on the eighth floor of number thirteen, Rue St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle. I saw the young girl sitting in a bathtub, crying. I saw André leaning against the doorframe, turning his head away. My black rose, he called her, in order to soothe the young girl’s black mood. When she calmed down, he explained that it was a type of flower that existed only in one’s imagination. There was no such thing as a black rose.

  My reverie stopped and I was brought back to Diamondale by the so
und of my mother’s voice. She wanted to know if I was all right. I pretended to sip on my coffee. I skipped blocks of stanzas in André’s poem and shifted my eyes to the last line before the piece of paper fell onto the carpeted floor. I had just caught sight of the Latin phrase.

  Nec amor, nec tussis celatur. Love is like a cough. Cannot be hidden.

  I stayed up that night and scrutinized myself in the mirror. My body had filled out in the right places. The curves had matured, and there was no more trace of the slender teenager who wandered the streets of St. Germain des Prés and asked to be carried in Rome.

  When I finally dozed off, I dreamed of André. I felt his hot breath on my skin, and then we were both swimming in a warm ocean. I was wide open and engulfed the ocean and André in me.

  When I woke up, I could still taste the saltiness of the ocean. The images and sensations of Paris in 1970 revived. His touch, his feel, the contours of his body, the fuzzy hair on his skin. My mind drifted to the fresh air of the South of France, the greenery of French country roads, and the vibrating sounds emanating from the grand churches of Roma. Finally, my wandering mind stopped upon the panoramic view of Paris with its Tour Eiffel piercing the sky, towering over the balcony of numero treize, Rue St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle. Night had fallen over the balcony of the art studio. It all first happened in Paris.

  I read André’s poem about the black rose, word by word.

  Toward the end of the poem, the black rose was destined to wilt. So before the moment of wilting, the black rose asked the poet—the narrator—to peel off all petals and preserve them inside his poetry collection. The poet agreed and began peeling. Fragrance emanated and sensations heightened at the tips of his fingers, upon his touch. Finally, the black rose disappeared. What remained of her were dried petals, nestled between pages of his poetry.

  I did not just read, I consumed and savored André’s poem. Feeling feverish alongside my inner thighs. I tossed and turned on the floor of the tiny bathroom as though a pair of brown eyes were focusing on me. I felt as though layers of my body and soul were being peeled off. Every petal of his black rose corresponded with every part of me. My hands touched and felt as the pair of eyes dictated. I reached a dimension too secretive, too private, a newness of self I had never experienced. I became the silkworm my great-grandmother had become, weaving the most beautiful fabric for Annam. I lay bare, like that silkworm hopelessly reaching for perfection while being ruthlessly removed from all those silk threads. The silkworm was the product of its own creation, acknowledging the naked truth about itself.

  I realized then that since those days in Paris, my mind had become that of a maiden. That was how I had saved a sacred place for André. That night in Diamondale, crawling on the bathroom floor, I let André’s poem dissolve the maiden’s mind-set. With André’s poem in my hands, I lay drowned in remembrance. I became drunk on the memory of the obsessive brown eyes fixed upon me outside the window in Saigon’s District Eight, when I was trying to reach high A note. I relived the moment of a once-in-a-lifetime passing, so consumed I had to lose myself. Unable to refuse. Or resist.

  But the passion of André’s words soon fell apart. The chill returned to me when memories of April 1975 crept back into my head. In the Continental Hotel, I had kept my eyes to the room’s gray marble floor all the time, feeling the icy cold of loneliness. Likewise, in the U.S military infirmary on Guam Island, I had grabbed the cold headboard of the narrow iron bed because there was no one dear to hold my hand, and even the kind Red Cross nurse would soon leave.

  In the morning, I got out of bed at around five and began to pack. Life decisions made in crisis could happen in a split second. I took out the business card bearing the emblem of the Associated Press, on which the man in the Continental Hotel had written down his address in New York City. I had carried the business card with me all through the exodus. Quietly, I planned my life. In the scheme of leaving Saigon and what happened afterward, Christopher had shared my secret. In Guam, when I rid myself of his baby, I had sinned. I hardly knew him, yet he bore my shame. He was the only witness to the use of my body in exchange for a ticket to America. I thought that somehow, now, by facing my shame head on, I could regain my peace. I thought also of the jade phoenix and the ivory plaques that belonged to Grandma Que’s ancestral altar—the essence of her life. I had turned them over to Christopher that day in April. On the deathbed of a city.

  My sister Mi Chau and I shared a bedroom, and I tiptoed around carefully so I would not wake her up. I wrote a long letter to my parents explaining everything that had happened in Saigon and in Guam, and the future I planned for myself in New York City. I put the letter inside an envelope, together with André’s cashier check, and sealed it. I went through my pockets and wallet and got all the cash together for a one-way bus ride to New York City.

  Later on, career success defined the course of my life. The achievement of my American dream. The illusion of satisfaction. Beneath that success were the seeds of resentment. But whom could I resent? Myself, Christopher, or the wheel of history turned by those war-and peacemakers whom I did not know?

  18. THE PERFECT WIDOW

  That next morning, in the winter of 1975, I took a bus ride from Diamondale, Illinois, to New York City and reunited with Christopher Sanders, much to his surprise. He had not expected to see me show up on his doorstep.

  During the first year of our cohabitation, I kept seeing myself standing before the Vietnamese judge in Saigon. The judge had looked at me with pleading eyes, telling me again and again that if he signed the marriage certificate without questioning, somehow he would want me to procure a way for him and his family to go to America, too. Being a judge in the South Vietnamese government, he would surely be persecuted by the Communists. The taxi driver who took Christopher and me to the precinct for the hasty marriage ceremony waited for us outside, and he, too, had pleaded for me to help him leave the country. That day in Saigon, I got sick during the ceremony, and Christopher had to hold me up when we exited the judge’s office. I covered my face until I entered the taxi, citing the harsh sunshine as an excuse. In fact, I thought that seeing me with Christopher that day in April outside the precinct, all Saigonese must have known what went on in the Continental Hotel—what I had to do to secure the ticket out of the country.

  In New York, as Mrs. Sanders, I never had to take another a waitress job. A strange, unexplained bond developed between us, despite my deliberate avoidance of communication. In so many ways, Christopher became my accomplice, my security blanket, my husband of convenience, and the bridge to my American dream. As Mrs. Sanders, I escaped my Vietnamese identity, in which the haunting memory of my childhood and André always existed.

  Despite my denial, part of me always wanted to follow André’s footsteps, so I made my best efforts to be admitted to Columbia University. I succeeded, and did not stop there. After graduating from Columbia with a business degree, I went on law school. I passed the New York Bar and became the first Vietnamese refugee hired by a Wall Street law firm, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. I remained Christopher’s wife until he succumbed to cancer in 1985, in the middle of our contemplation of divorce. So I moved back into our condominium to care for him. When Christopher’s cancer put us permanently in separate bedrooms, part of me had silently celebrated. Yet I nursed him through long days in the hospital with the dedication of a devoted wife, frequently bringing my work to the hospital to read, watching nurses sedate him with morphine, and staying with him at the hospices during the final hours. My dedication won me the approval of his family members, who, prior to his death, had never accepted me as Christopher’s Vietnamese “mail-order bride.”

  Christopher died at age fifty-five. I was then only thirty years of age, bearing the clammed heart of a young widow unaffected by the loss of her husband, because she was not in love. That “mail order bride” attended her husband’s funeral with a tearless and stoic countenance. After the funeral, I did not eat for days, consumed
with guilt for not having loved him, yet part of me felt free.

  Despite the sense of freedom, Christopher’s death added little to the emotional void that already existed in my heart. In the first year after his death, I made it a habit to bring flowers to his grave and talk to him. In one of these gravesite monologues, I finally told Christopher about our baby whom I had killed, and asked both father and child for forgiveness. At some point during the following year, the flower habit and visits stopped altogether. My late thirties became the debut for a new, superficial life. I dated business acquaintances and other lawyers, all good-looking, healthy, cheerful, and successful men. Many were Christopher’s age. A few were younger than I. No one looked like André or reminded me of him. One by one, they came and went. I went to dinners with them, lay down with them, took off my clothes, smelled toothpaste or coffee or cognac on their lustful breath, and let them push themselves onto me. I gave them the language of ardor but never of love, passion, or romance, always conscious of the division between my heart and my flesh, painfully realizing that for years I had been holding on to the same maiden’s mindset. My mind and heart were always locked away with memory of André, no matter how many casual relationships I had had. Those years in New York City, I just gave that same maiden’s mindset a different kind of manifestation. I called this new manifestation the perfect Americanization of a woman without a soul.

  In addition to casual dating, I also let America brainwash me with its pop culture, the yuppie lifestyle of the eighties, New York City’s fashion, business hype, and fast-paced materialism. To insulate myself from the memory of my years with Christopher and his illness, I purchased a suburban house in New Jersey in addition to keeping a Manhattan apartment for work.

  There were also purchases of a new luxury car for the commute, as well as antique furniture, artwork, crystal, and china for the new house. There were all kinds of trips to make for business and pleasure, although I always consciously stayed away from Paris. There were also Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fourth of July, and other American holidays. Superficial friendships and business networking. Power lunches and breakfasts and shopping sprees at Saks, Bloomingdale’s, and Bergdorf. The corporate ladder to climb, the partnership track to grab, clients to please, and money to be made in the practice.