Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “Coffins,” she whispered, “floating coffins—so many of them, I couldn’t even count. It was my job to catch them, but there was no use. I could not reach out.”

  Listening to her and holding her in my arms, I could feel the stuffy air over the flowing river, and see the image she painted with her words: eerie coffins, all floating downward, passing by me, in utmost silence.

  I told her what seemed natural to me—the lacquer divan was causing her nightmare. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed to sleep in. Despite its huge size, it had no modern mattress, and one had to rely on plenty of pillows, cushions, blankets, and wrappings for true comfort. Further, the origin of the divan was mystical enough. Grandma Que herself believed that the wood had come from the deep jungles of Vietnam, where trees became the sanctuary of wandering spirits. I assured her that when I finished college and started working, I would buy a luxurious new house in Saigon, with plenty of bedrooms, to replace the villa in Hue, and we would donate the divan to the national museum, where it should be.

  It was a solemn promise, I told her.

  “Oh, Si, you are such a child.” She held on to my arms. “It could not be the divan. It was something else. That Face of Brutality haunted my mother for so long. It must have followed me, too. I wish my mother would come and let me see her face.”

  “What do you mean, Grandma, seeing the Mystique Concubine’s face?”

  I, too, had heard of her great beauty. Yet I had never seen any picture of her.

  “Oh, Si, she was destroyed. My beautiful mother. Why does everything beautiful have to be destroyed? I was never able to hold on to what was mine. All those beautiful things.”

  She was hanging on to me, palpitating as though in shock.

  “What do you mean, Grandma?”

  “The way she died, Si.”

  “With nightingales singing outside her window, around her bed, the symphony of music, and those stars and the moon. Crystal teardrops falling into the water—” I dreamily described the same old details of the romantic fairy tale that had been told to me a thousand times as I grew up.

  “No, no, Si, it was a lie. I lied. I couldn’t change what I saw that day, when the fire broke out. Lying was the only way I knew how to…”

  “What fire?”

  “It was a summer day, the year after the Communist farmers’ uprising, the Soviet Nghe Tinh movement, of 1930. My sister Ginseng and my brother Forest had both left home to join the Cach Mang. My mother was still very beautiful then. There were fighting and gunshots in the villages between French legionnaires and the Cach Mang, so all inhabitants had to leave the hamlet to avoid the rain of bullets, just to stay alive. A river behind the silk farm flowed through the hamlet of Quynh Anh and provided transport to the adjacent villages. So my mother sent Son La, Mey Mai, and me off on a boat, up the river to the next village where we could take refuge, while she stayed on with the silk farm and the ancestral house in Quynh Anh, waiting to meet the Cach Mang troops. She was hoping she could be reunited with my sister and brother or at least send news to them. When I turned around the last time, from the boat, I could still see her face behind the window frame. She was looking out at us, the same way she had been looking out of her window frame at night before bedtime, her eyes sad and pensive.”

  My heart raced together with Grandma Que’s panicky words. She had stopped for a moment to breathe, and I wiped off her tears. She opened her mouth for air, and I held her head up.

  “We got to the next village safely. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I sensed that something bad had happened to my mother. I felt pained in my rib cage, and my entire body was burning hot. Oh, Si, I felt like I was set on fire.”

  “I felt like that once,” I said, breaking in, recalling the séance in Hue. “I had just turned ten, and you had taken me to see Mey Mai inside the Citadel. At the end of the séance, I felt the heat around me, burning me. My soul must have flown high above the flame, since I felt that I was looking down at my own body on a burning bed of straw.”

  I held her up and wiped away her tears, but Grandma Que kept crying into my palm. She went on,

  “I couldn’t bear the anxiety, so before sunrise, as soon as the gunshots subsided, I was determined to board the boat. I was ready to paddle home. I knew I had to come back to my mother, alive or dead. Mey Mai and Son La tried to stop me. Useless! So they got on the boat with me. We traveled down the river, back to the silk farm. Oh, Si, how can I ever forget what I saw during that boat trip? Green bamboo trees once bordered the riverbanks. Yet, when our boat approached the village of Quynh Anh, toward the silk farm, the bamboo trees were all gone. It was as though the whole bamboo forest had burnt down. We began to smell that awful smell of dry heat and fire. You see, either the French or the Cach Mang had set fire to our property. The fire had spread around hamlet.

  “I don’t know who did this. You see, there were people who hated her. She was involved with the French, some say she was sleeping with the enemy, and she was also financing the Vietminh, the Cach Mang, at the same time. And yet no one protected her. All she had was me. Son La and Mai were loyal, but they were old and powerless.

  “There was nothing left when I got back home. The ancestral house in the village of Quynh Anh she built had been burned to the ground. The silk farm was severely damaged. I walked through the ruins and smelled the awful smell of burning flesh. I followed the smell and found her corpse by the dirt road leading to the riverbank. She lay there, blackened and stiff like an ill-smelling coal log. She must have run from the fire toward the river, the flames burning on her back and engulfing her as she made the last effort at life—trying to jump into the water.”

  I stroked Grandma Que’s salt-and-pepper hair to calm her down. Yet I felt rotten inside. I had to shake my head continuously to control my own emotions. I was about to cry for those nightingales singing outside Huyen Phi’s bedroom window, and for the image of Huyen Phi, beautiful in her death. The fairy tale had dominated my childhood. Yet those images were forever gone. No teardrops disturbed the surface of the Perfume River so the sparkling waves could harmonize with the twittering birds. No beautiful woman lay peacefully on the lacquer divan in her royal costumes while nightingales sang in harmony with nature and music came from a thousand directions. I silently mourned the loss of the fairy tale. The twitching muscles on Grandma Que’s face spoke of the excruciating pain she bore inside.

  “My mother’s face was gone. All that luscious, beautiful hair was gone. All the soft and pink flesh on her limbs was gone. I picked her up and wrapped her in my smock, that awful smell of burning flesh sticking to my skin. I held and rocked her as though she were my child. I inhaled into my lungs and heart that awful smell. Hysterically, I started digging a hole in the ground with my hands to bury her, but Son La and Mey Mai ripped her away from me and pushed me forward. There was no time. The fighting was still going on, and we had to move on to stay alive. We had to run along the river under gunshots. So I closed my smock around her and left her there, among all those ruins. Oh, Si, I had left my mother burned to death in that awful fire, her corpse unburied and rotten.”

  The fire did not wipe out all of Huyen Phi’s silk empire, which was scattered all over Hue and Annam, not just concentrated in the battered village of Quynh Anh. In tears, Grandma Que told me how the fighting subsided when the Cach Mang rebels withdrew back into the jungles, and French legionnaires ceased shooting into the villages. A few days later, Grandma Que and the two trusted servants returned to the village of Quynh Anh to gather the remains of her mother for cremation.

  “My mother had decomposed, you see. I saw tiny white worms, maggots, and beetles crawling out of her—or what was left of my beautiful mother. Mey Mai, Son La, and I cremated her in the back garden, and I saw those worms wiggle under all that fire. Her ashes were spread over the Perfume River, and I began concocting the tale about my mother’s death. I made Son La and Mey Mai promise they would go along with my story. Later I gave out five hundred piasters to
any villager who could repeat my beautiful tale with accuracy. I paid handsome rewards to have the tale drilled into people’s heads. So the story continued to spread, acknowledged by even those who knew about the fire or who had helped me collect the remains of Huyen Phi. I wanted her to remain the beautiful mystery she was meant to be.”

  Grandma Que buried her face into my palm, and sighed.

  “To start all over, I moved away from the village to the resort villa in Nam Giao, built by my mother at the suggestion of foreign merchants who were her trading partners. We were able to keep the lacquer divan and altar items intact, since they were kept at the Nam Giao villa. There, I set out to re-create what I had lost. I repurchased antiques and replaced those items lost in the fire. I rebuilt the silk farm and made it operational again. I was determined to produce the most beautiful silk in memory of my mother. A year after the fire, I commissioned a portrait artist to create a painting of the Mystique Concubine. But the man did not have anything to go by, so he painted onto silk a stereotypical image of an ancient Asian maiden.”

  That same year, Grandma Que went on to tell me, she began caring for the young magnolia tree her mother had planted, in the front yard of the villa at Nam Giao.

  “Oh, Si, my child, I had successfully re-created everything possible, except for the beauty of her face. All I could do was to commission a silly silk painting. Even my memory was no longer intact after that fire, and all I could remember about my mother was that blackened, ill-smelling, blistered, and puss-oozing corpse. And all those little white worms that crawled through her burned and rotten flesh.”

  She was leaning against me, her mouth gasping for air in between words.

  “And when my sister was released from Hoa Lo, I thought I could have that notion of beauty again. Perhaps I could recall my mother’s beautiful face in my beautiful sister. But my sister came home an invalid, an imbecile.”

  She calmed down and let go of my hands.

  “For years, I prayed every night that God would allow me to see again my mother’s beautiful face or to hear my sister’s laughter again in a dream, but never once could I dream of either one. Instead, I began having this recurring nightmare: those floating coffins. Floating at their own pace, like they have a life force of their own, in all that silent, hot air and on that sparkling water.”

  “But the face isn’t gone, Grandma,” I told her ardently, trying to convince both of us.

  “Look at me, Grandma, I am here, with you. You’ve told me all my life that the spirit of Huyen Phi has come back in me. It has, Grandma, I know that for sure now, because that day when you took me to the séance at Mey Mai’s house, the spirit spoke to me. That day, I knew nothing about the fire. No one had told me. Yet at the séance I saw fire, all over me. I was floating in and out of all that heat. I saw so many women, all strangers, dressed as the dancers of Champa, I guess, from the ancient temples and towers of some lost kingdom. The dancers came and gathered around me, revering and protecting me, lifting me up above that fire.

  “No, Grandma, you have not been lying at all. The images just came to you and became the story you had to tell. There were indeed nightingales, Grandma—in my voice, when I sang. I saw them. Felt them. Heard them. And petals of magnolias, too, danced around me, before I finally flew to the top of the magnolia tree you had planted. And later on, after the séance, I once dreamed of a floating coffin made out of the red brocade of her cloak. It opened like a red flower, and I saw a beautiful woman lying in it. That had to be the Mystique Concubine. Oh, Grandma, I saw everything you saw, and I felt everything you felt!”

  I talked nonstop, drunk on the images I created and remembered from my own dreams, afraid that if I slowed down, I would stop believing, and then I could no longer convince myself.

  “Feel my face.” I took her bony fingers and placed them on my cheeks. “You see? It is still here, with you all the time. No fire can ever, ever take away the face.”

  “What’s in the floating coffins, Grandma?” I asked her after a long pause.

  She turned away, obviously not wanting to share with me the rest of her nightmare. She started crying again, softly. “I couldn’t catch the coffins. I could not keep and protect what I love. And I am afraid of dying alone.”

  “No, that’s not true, Grandma. You have always protected me and made things right for me. And I will never let you die alone.”

  “If I die,” she said, “bury me in silk, a nice coffin, sealed and stuffed with fragrant cinnamon. Like your mother, I am afraid of earthworms. Put my jewelry inside my mouth and ears to keep those earthworms from crawling in.” Her bony body shivered in my arms.

  I heard a noise at the door. I turned around and Mi Chau was standing there, sobbing. She crawled onto the divan, nuzzled her head against Grandma Que. “Oh, Grandma, I love you!” Mi Chau cried. “I love you even more than Simone can ever love you. She left you to go to France. I will never do that. I’ll take care of you always. I hate coffins. I don’t like earthworms. Please don’t die!”

  After I blew out the kerosene lamp, both Mi Chau and I crawled onto the divan with Grandma Que. I dozed off into my own dream.

  I was standing by the river with her, watching floating coffins. “I promise, I promise,” I yelled across the river to the beautiful old woman who sat demurely with her head cocked to one side, her stream of salt-and-pepper hair sparkling against the afternoon sun. I glided on that gleaming body of water, approached the coffins, and kicked one of them open. I looked inside, but it was dark. I could not see what was inside.

  I woke up from the darkness inside the coffin I had kicked open, to be greeted by the morning sun spreading its gleam across the room. The day had begun. Mi Chau and I were alone on the divan, inside the white mosquito net. I heard Grandma Que in the kitchen and then out on the porch, chatting with the neighborhood women about the wet market, in the same calm voice that commanded respect. I got up and watched with amazement as she continued the routine of her day. She prepared my breakfast, never once mentioning what had happened the previous night.

  I had just spent the whole night on that same divan after a nineteen-year absence. I had dozed off intermittently, and when I woke, an unbearable sorrow nibbled at me as I realized that, for all my years in America, I had never been able to dream of Grandma Que.

  That morning, I offered Cafre Minh another healthy sum to purchase the divan, pleading to him that I needed to hold on to what was left of my family history. He readily accepted the idea, yet continued to haggle over the price. He called it “fair negotiation,” citing the years he had spent taking care of it. He kept raising the figure.

  I finally gave up. “Best of luck with a divan that invokes bad dreams for whoever lies on it!”

  I pretended to walk away. I badly wanted the divan but did not know how to get it within my means. I was on the verge of tears when Minh called out to me, announcing that, out of kindness, he would be ready to return the precious divan to the descendant of its owner. We reached an agreement and finalized the details. He talked constantly about emotional values while counting the dollar bills.

  There was the problem of shipping the divan out of Vietnam, since Vietnamese law prohibited the export of antiques. Minh emphatically reminded me: my problem alone, not his.

  I decided to go see Mai Anh.

  6. MAI ANH

  My childhood buddy at Lycée Marie Curie of the former Saigon, a beautiful girl named Mai Anh, daughter of a former South Vietnamese colonel, had transformed herself into a carefully made-up woman in her late thirties. She was still a sensual beauty with her almond-shaped eyes, swollen lips, and delicate arms and legs. Yet her coarse, uneven skin, yellow teeth, and those dark circles under eyes bordered thickly with what looked like blue crayon belied a former beauty queen who had stayed up too many nights, smoked too many cigarettes, drunk too much hard liquor, and made love to too many wrong men. Her complexion, once fair and pale, showed the creases of early wrinkles and too much oil from bad makeup. Her f
ingernails and toenails were painted orange. She bragged to me that all her makeup, skin care, clothes, and shoes were imported.

  She greeted me with the warmth and ardor of a long-lost best friend, holding and squeezing my hand the whole time we spoke. Unlike the typical poor Saigonese receiving his or her relatives or friends from America, she expected no financial help, accepting only the Lancôme makeup kit I had purchased for her at the Changi Airport in Singapore. She didn’t complain about her life in Saigon or the hardships she had had to endure in its dark days, right after the Russian tanks rolled in and the comrades of the north began to nationalize property and industries. She told me, however, that many families associated with the former regime were moved to economic zones near the jungles, mountainous areas, or on undeveloped deltas.

  All for the good of the reconstruction of the country, she said. I could not tell whether it was an ironic statement.

  She revealed that her father had died in a concentration camp and that her mother had died, too, at sea when they tried to escape in 1977. Mai Anh survived the shipwreck but was arrested and jailed. She emerged from jail as a new woman, she said. From that point on, she set out to master the ropes of the new regime.

  Mai Anh hired a car and a chauffeur and treated me to an outing at sea and a fresh seafood feast at the port town of Vung Tau, the former Cap St. Jacques of colonial days. When we got back to Saigon after the day trip, she took me to a karaoke bar and showed me how the young girls of Saigon interacted with wealthy Asian businessmen while Hong Kong music played in the dark. She told me of extravagant banquets held in exclusive restaurants in Saigon, where potent Chinese dishes like shark fins, bird’s nest soups, and tiger bone marrows were served, and young and beautiful Vietnamese hostesses spoon-fed foreign businessmen all throughout the meal. Mai Anh was determined to show me a glimpse of what her life was like and what my life could have been had I not entered the Continental Hotel that day in April. The message she gave was clear: in the poverty-stricken, transitional Vietnam of the early nineties, Mai Anh had become a rich and savvy woman who knew the trade of femininity.