My room at the Huong Giang Hotel overlooked the Perfume River. Once used as housing for the Regents of Hue University in the sixties, the formerly colonial structure had been transformed into a three-story complex that resembled a schoolhouse, rather than a first-class hotel. Yet, the hotel was still a proud display of the Socialist Republic’s economic joint venture process, where foreign capital joined forces with the state in hopes of transforming the old structure into a commercial enterprise, supposedly to the international three-or four-star standards of the hotel industry.
The hotel sat solemnly by the riverbank, grave yet modest in its washed-out peachy color: a thin shade of diluted limestone solution, brushed hurriedly upon the stucco walls by a careless artisan. The peachy structure looked vague, as though it had no real identity in the vast, picturesque scenery that surrounded it: the Perfume River sparkled underneath the grey Truong Tien bridge that imprinted itself upon the lavender sky, dreamy like a Monet landscape, tugged in a corner of this sleepy, sluggish, ancient town.
Earlier in the evening, at the front desk, I had encountered a young woman in her flowing polyester pink ao dai. She asked me whether I was a Vietkieu, the term used for a Vietnamese expatriate returning home. She glanced surreptitiously at my U.S. passport with my name printed in all caps, SIMONE M. U. SANDERS. I told her that M. U. stood for Mi Uyen, a metaphoric name that was sufficiently Hue-like in style and spirit for her to guess at my native connection to Hue. Sure enough, she immediately told me that the name Mi Uyen could not suggest the simple background of a village girl.
I pretended not to hear her. Instead, I asked her whether she was a canbo, one of those privileged Communist cadres, the ruling class of the country. She readily said no, as though she were hurrying to deny something sinful. Her coral lipstick, coquettish smile, and gentle Hue accent were all too bourgeois to fit the revolutionaries who had walked into Hue from the jungles or coastal regions of Vietnam. I had always imagined those canbos to have high cheekbones, flat faces, brown teeth, and the unique high-pitched accent that typified the rural area of North Vietnam or the coastal regions of the Gulf of Tonkin, where all r’s are pronounced as l’s, and all l’s are pronounced as n’s.
I watched her meticulously write my name down in the hotel registry. If she was not a canbo, I thought, then she must be the relative of one of those guerrilla war participants, undercover agents, or symphathizers who had made their contributions to the revolutionary cause—a contribution substantial and well remembered enough to have earned her this post.
I am on your side—her eyes sparked the unspoken message as she responded to my gaze with the knowing smile of an accomplice. She complimented me on my white T-shirt and black jeans and silver-buckled belt, and told me it must be really nice to live in America. Her gentle Hue accent and sweet manner lessened the harshness of stereotypical, class-conscious terminologies such as Vietkieu and canbo, which so far had marked my return to the ancient city of my birth.
The calm water of the Perfume River made me feel immediately at home. The hotel had kept the riverbanks well cared for; no trash accumulated there, and the water maintained its distinct shade of deep, dark bluish green, the color of sapphire mixed with imperial jade.
Only in Hue did the night have its own fragrance.
On the balcony of my hotel room, I inhaled the smell of freshwater shrimp and snails mixed with the ripeness of yellow bananas and fermented coconut milk, the richness of boiled peanuts and peanut oil, and even the musky scent of bloodlike betel juice and homegrown tobacco, which dyed and cracked the lips of those old, toothless country women who came to visit Grandma Que from the hamlet of Quynh Anh. All the scents and scenes of my childhood.
What was lacking, I whispered to the night, were the sad folk songs on the pentatonic scale of the East, vibrating through the small waves of this calming, mysterious river—the sound of that Nam Binh song, which typified the spirit of Hue: “Nuoc non ngan dam ra di, cai tinh chi, muon mau son phan, den no O Ly, xot thay vi, duong do xuan thi. Thousands of miles an exodus from home, a heart full of sorrow, O pity her, paying her debts with her spring days.”
The telephone rang inside and pulled me out of my reverie. The receptionist in the pink ao dai was on the line. “Ms. Mi Uyen,” she addressed me by my Vietnamese name, “there is someone here to see you.”
My visitor was standing next to the elevator bank, a plump, old country woman, carrying a straw bag, dressed in black pantaloons and a polyester shirt, her gray hair pulled back, hidden under a Vietnamese cone hat.
“Mey Mai!” I cried out in shock as I recognized the old, gray-haired woman who had once danced in an incense-filled room, pivoting on one foot, her head swirling underneath a satin silk cloth. Many, many years ago, she had told me the tale of the Spirit of the Perfume River.
In a country filled with undernourished citizens, she was rather plump. In a city full of sad inhabitants perhaps still mourning the massacres of the past, she was rather cheerful, her animated eyes dashing around from the hotel cashier’s counter and the magazine stand, onto the elevator banks, where her eyes focused on the open-shut movement of the elevator door.
She stood quite a distance from me, still not recognizing me even as her eyes lingered upon my face, probing for some familiarity, and then moving on, back to the movement of the elevator door. The curiosity in her eyes revealed her fascination and awe at the luxury of the hotel.
Turn, Mey Mai! I cried to myself. Speak to me again, in the language of the Paddle Girl of the Perfume River. I am home, at last!
“Mey Mai,” I called to her again.
This time, she turned toward me and her eyes fixed upon my face, for a long time. And then she smiled broadly as she moved closer toward me, her face brightened with apparently the sign of recognition.
“Oh Heaven Buddha,” she said, “you look just like the young Madame Cinnamon, dressed in Western clothes. You are Madame Cinnamon’s granddaughter, aren’t you?” She laughed wholeheartedly. “Oh, no, I am not Mey Mai,” she went on. “I couldn’t be that old and still living. I am O-Lan. My mother, Mey Mai, would have been over one hundred years old this year, if she was still living.”
From that point on, she acted as though I were a long-lost relative. I invited her to my room so we could talk, and she became very excited.
“I have never ridden an elevator before! Will I get caught between those metal doors?” She approached the elevator on timid steps, leaning onto my arm with obvious apprehension.
I reassured her, and we slipped inside the elevator.
“All you need to do to stop the door is to touch it slightly,” I told her, illustrating my point by standing in the path of the elevator door. But the closing door did not bump lightly against me and reopen as I had expected. Instead, it closed forcefully upon me, knocking me off-balance. I struggled to push myself against it. The scene of my struggling must have looked ghastly to her, because the old peasant woman started to scream.
I was not crushed, but in the moment of embarrassment, I cursed myself, concerned that she would never trust me again. I had failed my demonstration. I had forgotten that the Huong Giang hotel was once an old schoolhouse, renovated in haste. Technology had reached Vietnam, but not in the most reliable way.
The old woman had turned pale, still screaming her heart out. A couple of young men from the hotel’s front desk rushed over to help. The old woman stood riveted inside the elevator as though she were glued to the metal wall, with the straw bag in between her black trousered legs. She refused to get out. I had to ask the two young men to block the metal door while I took her hand, pulled her through the narrow space, and led her toward the stairway. Outside the elevator, she held the straw bag against her chest, sighing with relief, telling me she would never again enter an elevator.
There was a tea tray in my hotel room, with a kettle of hot water. I poured a cup of tea for the old woman, who kept feeling the edge of my bed and commenting on the thickness of the foam mattress, i
nforming me that in the village of Quynh Anh, she slept on a bamboo bed covered with a straw mat that squeaked at night.
“Your grandmother called me O-Lan; Miss Lan, that’s what O-Lan means in the Hue style.”
Comrade Chuyen, the house manager at the villa, had sent his men out looking for her. As usual, O-Lan, a food peddler, was busy that day selling glass noodle soup from the coal-burned pot that she put in a basket. The other basket contained bowls and chopsticks, and she carried both baskets with a pole that rested on her right shoulder. She was going from door to door, village to village, the two baskets rhythmically bounding with her footsteps, when Comrade Chuyen’s errand men passed on the news to her that I had returned.
She had been waiting all these years for my return, she claimed, so when she heard the news, she immediately carried her baskets to the Huong Giang Hotel. She had left the baskets outside the entrance with the cyclo drivers who congregated in front of the hotel, leisurely waiting for the next tourist to emerge from the hotel lobby—and then the fierce competition would begin. The tourist was up for grabs by the luckiest and most persistent cyclo driver, who would follow his prospect, pouring out his pleading words, refusing to leave, until the potential client felt guilty or exasperated enough to step on the cyclo’s sedan chair.
“Comrade Chuyen is a nice man,” she said. “Too nice to be a comrade.”
“I never knew Mey Mai had a daughter,” I said.
“A bastard.” She gulped down her tea, slipping from the edge of the bed to the floor, where she comfortably squatted. A faint smell of cut onion emanated from the flap of her blouse. She had at last overcome her shock about the elevator and appeared to feel at ease to talk, “My mother had me when she was already in her forties. A shameful thing for an old maid. It was because of me that your grandmother sent my mother away. To give birth somewhere else, away from the community gossip, and to look for my father. I was born in the foothills of the Truong Son range, which later became the Ho Chi Minh trail.”
O-Lan talked about her life emotionlessly, as though she were describing someone else’s life, from an opera, or a book, having nothing to do with her.
“I’ve lived in the village all my life. Used to take care of the silk farm. I raised the worms and took care of the threads. The farm continued to generate silk until the cadres from the North took over in 1975 and ran it to the ground. Now it is a deserted place—just the four walls, and no life.
“All these years before liberation, your grandmother helped support me. I was hidden away, since it wasn’t a good thing for people to know that my mother, a virginal medium, had an illegitimate child. After the Tet Offensive, my mother disappeared, and your grandmother brought me to her villa. I lived in your house, taking care of the altar, making trips back and forth to the Quynh Anh village to attend to the silk farm. But you know, after the Tet Offensive, business was no longer good. From Saigon, your grandmother still sent me money every month, and the farm was still running moderately. After liberation, the cadres took over the silk farm, kicked me out of the house in Nam Giao, and I returned to the village.”
“So it wasn’t the 1945 famine or the Japanese occupation that caused Nanny Mai’s departure,” I said. “My grandmother never mentioned you to us, O-Lan. There were too many things hidden in my grandmother’s heart. For example, my mother never knew her father. All she knew was a black-and-white photograph of an Annamese mandarin wearing an ao dai imprinted with embroidered Chinese characters.”
I was talking more to myself than to her at this point.
“Ms. Que’s husband supposedly passed away young during the Indochinese War. At least your mother had a photograph of her father. I have none. I might as well believe I’ve fallen out of the sky,” O-Lan said, and finished her tea.
“What happened to Mey Mai?” I asked.
“I assumed my mother died on her retreat into the jungle, when she went with the withdrawing troops of the Vietcong after the Tet Offensive.” She mentioned the death of her mother with the same nonchalant attitude she exhibited when recounting her life story.
“Why are you, daughter of a famous revolutionary, selling noodles on the street?” I asked ruefully. “Where is the government’s reward for Mey Mai’s contribution to the revolution?”
“Oh, miss, where have you been?” She had raised her voice, exhibiting an outward expression of emotion for the first time. I could not decipher whether it was sarcasm, irony, anger, or disappointment. “I don’t know what my mother was—revolutionary or medium. But I know she was not from the North. And the revolution, how the hell do I know what it was supposed to do? I just got poorer and poorer. Even the cadres from the north got on a boat and fled to America after liberation. North or South, winner or loser, the whole country had nothing to eat.
“And your grandmother—my supporter, owner of that silk farm and that beautiful villa—starved herself to death. All during her illness, I fed her spoons of bobo—the grains they fed to horses, given to us by the Russians, so I heard. We had no rice to eat, the healthy and the sick alike. So she died, miss, without a coffin to be buried in.”
8. HUE RECITAVO
My face felt hot. I promised you a nice coffin. Satin inside. Cinnamon scented. Properly sealed so no insect could invade and disturb you in your journey to the other world. I would make sure all your antique jewelry and artifacts would be placed in the coffin with you. Those things you guarded all those years—including what had been returned to you by the Foucault family and presented to you by young André—would accompany you on that journey. But I have failed you.
“No, no coffin,” O-Lan went on. “We were all too poor. I was too poor to buy a coffin for your grandmother. We did not have a bed to sleep on, let alone a coffin to bury her in. So, I wrapped her in a straw mat and buried her in the wet rice paddy.”
“What happened to all those antiques and jewelry?” I despaired.
“I don’t know anything about antiques or jewelry. Don’t suspect me of taking them! If I had, I would not have been a peddler selling noodles for all these years. Perhaps you should ask the government. Comrade Chuyen and his men.
“I was with your grandmother till the last minute, about a year after liberation. That was the hardest year. I am getting old and can’t remember anymore.” O-Lan frowned in an effort to remember details, her fingers fumbling with the hard edge of the straw bag.
“Your grandmother wanted to save this for her granddaughter to remember her by.” She put her hand inside the bag. “I knew you would be coming back.”
O-Lan pulled out from the straw bag a long salt-and-pepper wig. The stream of hair swept against O-Lan’s hand, cascading down, defiantly alive, like an animal. I saw Grandma Que standing, removing her ivory comb and the velvety net that held the stream of hair in place. Set free, the stream of hair danced its way down her flank.
“I cut off your grandmother’s hair and made it into a wig and saved it for you, as she wanted me to.” She placed the wig in my hand.
That night, in her monotonous voice, O-Lan told me what happened to Grandma Que after my family had left for Tan Son Nhat airport.
Communist North Vietnam celebrated its victory by tightening its iron hand on the South, cutting off the country’s ties to the West, sending South Vietnamese to “reeducation camps” and newly created economic zones. The winner of the war nationalized the assets of private citizens, especially those who had fled the country. Grandma Que joined the rest of South Vietnamese in that fate. The neighborhood sentries called the ba muoi—a nickname for these temporary rulers of Saigon, meaning “Products of the 30th Day [of April]”—and kicked her out of the townhome in District Eight. Grandma Que packed a couple of suitcases and bought a one-way bus ticket back to Hue, only to learn her French villa and what was left of her silk farm had been nationalized. So she returned to the village of Quynh Anh. Poverty plagued Vietnam and changed victory and liberation into a joke. Two decades of warfare resulted in a starved country.
/> Back in the village of Quynh Anh, Grandma Que and O-Lan moved into a hut and sold off Grandma Que’s belongings to survive. One day Grandma Que did not feel well and went to the infirmary in the outskirts of Hue. The health care cadres told her something very bad had happened to her internal organs, but there was no firm diagnosis by any trained doctors, nor was any medicine available. O-Lan thought Grandma Que’s internal organs had become rotten from too much sorrow. Maybe a bad seed had grown into a tumor and caused her pain. “Rau thui ruot,” she said—too much sorrow and suffering could rot the gut of a warrior, let alone a fragile woman like Grandma Que.
The health cadres at the infirmary told her she might need an operation to remove the rotten part from her gut. The infirmary had no anesthesia. If she wanted to have an operation, she would have to travel to the big cities, perhaps back to Saigon, and even then there was no guarantee. She said she already knew what was wrong with her gut. “Rau thui ruot,” she told O-Lan. She needed no medical diagnosis.
She no longer wished to live.
So she went home to the hut in the village of Quynh Anh and lay down on the straw mat. She never got up again. O-Lan fed her bobo, the foodstuff for horses, holding her nose, forcing her to swallow to keep up her strength. Grandma Que persisted for months and then stopped eating altogether, the bobo grains foaming around her blistered lips. All during those months, she never mourned. Never spoke. Never cried. She just wilted away. When the last moment was near, O-Lan turned her over to wash her and found her back full of puss-oozing open wounds and nasty broken blisters, developed from lying too much, too long, under unsanitary conditions.
O-Lan was still talking about the village, the country, the revolution, her mother, my grandmother, and all the things that made up the decades to which I was not privy. I no longer had the capacity to listen. As she spoke, I fell into a trance.
Daughters of the River Huong Page 29