“Enough! Leave it alone,” I pleaded.
The little girl didn’t listen. She became as wild and incensed as the beast. She lunged at it, punched its ribs, tore out its hair. The dog bit her where it could reach, but its eyes were wet and a half-growl half-whine escaped its throat. It knew it was losing and wanted mercy. The little girl too used her teeth and bit the dog’s stomach. It let out a piercing yelp.
“Stop it!” I yelled. The little girl was finally satisfied. She came toward me, still on all fours, her mouth full of dog’s hair, her arms and legs scraped in multiple places, her pupils large and glinting. The dog limped away.
“Let’s play a game,” she said, spitting out dog’s hair.
It was hot. We needed something to do. A purpose. I saw the imbalance in our friendship, seeing how it didn’t matter what I meant to the little girl because of how much I already needed her.
We hid in a bush and watched soldiers coil up their ropes. The last man climbed down the wall with surprising speed.
“They’re done,” the little girl said. I picked dry grass from my hair and followed her. By the time we got there, everyone had gone. I remembered the columns of bricks the little girl was building the first day I came to the camp.
“Where are your bricks?” I looked at the pile of bricks across the courtyard.
“They remove them every morning,” she said.
“What were you building?”
“A ship. It had just enough room for me. We can make room for you too.”
I was grateful for this offer. “Where do we start?”
“We’ll have to start from scratch,” she said.
We worked until we were both drenched in sweat. In front of my eyes, the courtyard, the trees, the jeeps blurred together. I tumbled backward. Except for a missing helm, the ship was finished. The little girl called to me from inside it.
“Look out! A lava flood is coming our way. Get in here. Now!” she yelled.
I got to my feet quickly and climbed inside, my heart thumping, my throat dried.
The brick vessel was a turning point in our friendship. My life depended on whatever imagined role the little girl gave me.
After that day, in front of my building, she would leave pieces of clues as to what I was to do that day, where I could find her. If we were to meet at the brick wall, she would leave a broken piece of red clay. For other locations, she drew pictures on paper. Her drawings consisted of single objects, like a green door, colored and shaded with such attention to detail that it came to life on the page. The real doorknob seemed to glow once I found it. I would touch it, satisfied. At first, it took me a long time to translate her pictures to the real map of the camp. Following the clues she gave, the barrack grew larger and larger in my mind, and at the same time, I came to know it better, its secret passages, real and imagined, belonging to us alone.
3
One Saturday evening—I knew it was Saturday because the soldiers had gathered outside to play cards—when the weather had cooled and there was a bit of wind, my mother and I walked along the courtyard. She talked to me about the architectural style of the buildings around us. They were predominantly French colonial—timber frame, wide porches, and thin wooden columns—built during the French occupation. Their design is considered by some to be the best in Vietnam. They were similar in style to the old quarters in Hoi An, which were often used as a prime example for art students, something to model their none on. They attracted many tourists because of their displaced nature, like finding volcanic rocks in lake water, or coal in the mouth of oysters.
“Looking at this now you wouldn’t think it was a disastrous time for our country. You would ask why we would drive away the people who gave us something so beautiful,” my mother said.
The soldiers hooted and cheered all around the quarters. There were sounds of glasses clinking, dogs barking, and droning of news reports from portable radios. My hands were cold and I wanted to grab my mother’s, but I couldn’t without calling attention to the fact that I was still a child, too young to understand her words and too insignificant compared to her world. I wanted to prolong that moment when she was speaking to me, only to me. I trailed behind her to make my form disappear or at least fade away.
“In all beauty, there is ugliness and the opposite. Like your father’s death,” she said. “I would still be a housewife if he were still alive. People ask me why I don’t focus on raising you, but they don’t understand that our fate is bound up with the fate of our nation. In working towards a better future for our country, I’m working towards a better future for you.”
“Thank you, Mother,” I barely breathed out the words.
My mother’s face radiated with a mixture of hope and conviction. My grandfather, a loyal member of the Communist Party, had saturated Mother with Marxist ideologies since she was a child. As an adult, she tried to fuse Grandfather’s lessons with her economic ambitions. Constantly she struggled against the Party’s teachings, which prohibited the selling and owning of land. After eighteen years of working for the government, she had left to open her own consulting business and eventually help build energy plants. She found many loopholes in the law—even though land couldn’t be sold, there was not yet any restriction against the selling of buildings on that land. She wrote proposals and from different corners of the world foreign investors poured in and energy plants were built. Where money multiplied quickly so did controversy. The American war was still fresh in the Vietnamese national consciousness. People asked why they should sell property to foreigners when the Vietnamese people had fought so hard to get back their land. Still, the projects she proposed found great success.
For my mother, it was a simple equation: people who were starving could now work, get paid, spend the money they earned. It was an effective way to repair the aftermath of war. She had not known a case was being built against her from all sides—elected officials, high-ranking Party members. As a reason for her arrest, she was accused of selling sensitive government information to foreign investors.
My mother told me these things because she didn’t know how to talk to children, even her own. It took me years to realize she only understood life as grand virtues she must fulfill, like honor and sacrifice. To my smaller inquiries, like why must we cover the windows with newspapers or why are most vegetables green, she would smile blankly and say nothing. Everything ordinary bored her, including me. She would rush through the daily maintenance of life, cussing at the once-again burnt rice and skipping dinners so she could return to her laptop and papers. Her responsibility as a parent stopped at making sure that I ate and studied. I accepted her discipline head-bowed and listened to her words like a mute would, never asking questions for fear she might think me dumb and unworthy even of the little time she could spare. Sometimes when silence didn’t work and she accused me of being stubborn, I would oscillate between Thank you, Mother and I’m sorry, Mother.
We ended our walk behind a group of soldiers with their heads huddled together, engrossed in the game. They had seen their lieutenant talk to my mother, free of his usually severe composure. They politely greeted her but did not invite us to sit down and join them. My mother made a casual remark to the one with the most money chips in front of him that he would need to treat all of us to a whole roasted pig. He admitted he was getting married soon and everyone bellowed with laughter. The idea of a wedding cheered us all up.
My mother and I walked back to our residence. A large cloud was moving with us, uncovering a stretch of sky pulsing with stars. By the time I finished counting them from memory, I was in bed and falling asleep.
The next morning, I looked for my mother in the kitchen. She had gloves on, perusing a bulk of documents: news clippings, photographs, copies and photocopies of pages, contracts stamped with red and blue seals. One of the photographs showed the face of a man I would meet three years later at Ban Gioc waterfall on the northern Vie
tnam-China border. What was it that caused me to commit his face to memory? Was I beginning to develop a concept of human aesthetics and had found his features pleasing? Or was it because he resembled another man—my father? Even though he wasn’t, he could have been. Remembrances were like slivers of glass, crystal clear until you picked them up and smudged their surface with your fingerprints.
I chewed my food while reading a list of names written on a small piece of paper, thin and soft from having been folded and unfolded many times. These were the people who had faked contracts, pocketed money that was meant for energy plants. Mother planned to expose them for corruption. I tried to memorize the names because her enemies must be mine too.
My mother had forgotten about the steaming fish and cabbage soup. Her rice bowl was nearly full, resting at the edge of the dining table. I held my bowl at waist level with my back to her. I could not separate the fish meat from its skeleton, and was getting rid of my food in a tall vase in the kitchen’s corner.
“I’m finished. Can I leave?” I asked her.
“Mm,” she said, biting the end of a pen.
I walked across the corridor to the bedroom. I was in a hurry to get back to my manga book, a story about an American archaeology student who was doing research in Egypt. While excavating a rare stone, she was transported to ancient Egypt where she was immediately worshipped for her golden curls and alabaster skin. The King of Egypt fell in love with her because of her extraordinary intelligence and kindness. The King’s sister devised plans to destroy the student so she could marry her brother and take back her rightful place as Queen.
When I got to the bedroom, I couldn’t find the book. I thought I had put it on the bedside table, but it was not there. I searched everywhere, under the sofa’s seats, in my mother’s filing cabinet, in the glass armoire filled with dusty teacups. Panic was rising in me when I saw a plastic case under the bed. It looked like a small valise. I pulled it out and opened it. Inside it was a pistol, all black except for the wooden grip. I took it from its case. It was as heavy as the bricks the little girl and I used to build our ship. I knew what it was. I’d never been close enough to the shooting range to see how it worked, but I’d heard the sound of gunfire, a lot like thunder, which made you feel both scared and brave for being close to it. I thought about taking it to the kitchen and pointing it at my mother, but couldn’t predict where that might lead us. I thought instead I could bring the gun in its case to her and show her I’d found it. The result of that, in my mind, felt underwhelming. I thought about hiding it in a different spot, but that too was troubling because the effect might be too damaging if Mother needed it in the future and couldn’t find it quickly enough. In the end, I put it back under the bed. For days after, I felt like a keeper of an enormous secret. It made me exhilarated and sad, powerful and lonely.
The camp went black—for a few minutes, nothing stirred. The electricity had gone out. Even the air seemed afraid to flow through the darkness. I was at the kitchen table with Mother, a cold spoon on my tongue. I opened and closed my eyes, but saw no difference, so I kept them closed. Flies buzzed around me louder than ever, smashing their bodies against plated glass windows. Mother moved from cabinet to cabinet, opening and shutting doors and drawers. Finally, she announced, “No candles.” I volunteered to go look for my soldier, who I’d come to believe could solve any problem we might have. “That careless kid. He should have thought of it,” Mother said, “Nothing. Not even an oil lamp—go.” I ran downstairs and out the door, sensing her ballooning irritation.
I figured there were two places my soldier could be, the cafeteria or the game room. I checked the cafeteria first, but the soldiers must have already finished eating. “Hello,” I said to the empty aluminum tables and benches. The tall ceiling must have absorbed my voice so thoroughly that nothing bounced back. “Hello-o-o-o,” I said again, imitating the echoes of mountains.
Mother had warned me once to never step foot into the soldiers’ game room. A bunch of young men hooting, smoking, spitting tobacco was inappropriate for a young girl like me. I traced my fingers on the building’s wall as I came closer to the entrance. The plaque on the door said Museum. I leaned the side of my arms against the wooden doors; they gave in easier than I’d expected. Unlike in the dining hall, every sound here had its own mirrored image. On the walls hung a few crooked paintings, though I couldn’t make out their details. I walked slowly, going deeper into the museum’s maze, following the sounds of dragging slippers and using floating candle flames as my guide without making myself known. I walked by a group of people, huddled on the floor around a pile of cards and crumpled money. They didn’t look up or seem to notice me. I listened to the sounds of glass bottles clinking on tiles, men coughing and clearing their throats, mumbled curses, but conversations were sparse, as if everything said in the dark would inevitably be a secret. I crouched down against a column, where on the other side, a group of men—the only group of men—whispered urgently.
“Don’t be so damn cheap—get me this round man,” someone said.
“Fuck that. No offense, buddy, but you’re a losing bet.” I recognized my soldier’s voice and turned to look, but it was impossible to tell. The little bit of light from a few candle flames was positioned so only their hands and the cards they were holding were lit. The men’s faces were in the shadow.
“So, tell me, that woman and her daughter—Momma’s a hottie, eh? How’s her pussy?” the man laughed. “Or maybe you prefer the daughter.”
Someone chuckled and I knew it was my soldier. The sound of his laughter was unmistakable. My face burned.
“You’re disgusting,” my soldier said.
“What? You’re telling me you’ve never fancied—”
“I don’t really think of her mother that way. She’s beautiful, sure, like an antique vase is beautiful, but—”
More laughter. “You fancy some vases man? You shoot your cum in a flower pot?”
“What exactly are you doing for them? What are you protecting them from?” someone else said.
“Does it matter? They could be hiding from anything, a big boss, an ideology. The point is she crossed a line and now she’s in trouble. You’re not supposed to smudge the lines, not even supposed to go near them. Someone I knew, we used to be close in high school actually, wrote some lyrics and performed them to an audience of thirty people, not even. His father said the cops raided their house, took all of his son’s books, and letters, his guitar too. Guess where the musician is now? Dead. Hung himself in jail supposedly. All he did was sing a song.”
“Whose side are you on man? We’re part of the machine here . . . ”
“Not all the parts are loyal to the design, I guess. I’m just doing my job. I don’t care if it malfunctions and blows the hell up in my face. Our people are too meek—it’s pathetic. You too, with your loud mouth—”
“Watch it, asshole. I can turn you in for this shit.”
“You don’t have the guts.” Bodies shuffled. “Go ahead. Who would you even go to? Report to the wrong authority and it’s you with a noose around your neck.”
I hugged my knees tighter to my chest.
“Ignore the boy, man. He’s in love with an antique vase.” The laughter resumed.
I scooted away from the column, my eyes now adjusted to the darkness. When I could see the wooden doors, I stood up, grabbed a candle by someone’s knees and ran.
“Hey!” a voice called after me.
I didn’t stop. I ran and ran, with the flame pressed to my chest.
As a present for my eighth birthday, Mother allowed me to keep the hen she was supposed to kill for lunch as a pet. The hen was grateful to me, the reason she was spared, so she followed me everywhere. When I went out with the other children and left her behind, she would caw incessantly. And when I sat on a high stool to do my reading, she would flap her wings and shred her feathers all about until I b
rought her onto my lap. She became quiet then, light, golden, and soft.
Years later, I had to let her go. I remembered when I put her down and watched her strut away to her more genetically similar friends; she bobbed her head and pecked at the smattering of kernels just as energetically as the other chickens. She didn’t follow me again after that. Soon, I could no longer pick her out amongst the flock of birds.
On my birthday, the other boys who I hadn’t seen again since my first day at the camp suddenly appeared on our building’s veranda. The little girl was there too. They must have seen my birthday cake through the opened door because immediately they queued up in a manner not unlike soldiers, arms stiff and pressed against their sides, backs as straight as rulers. My soldier gave them each a slice of cake on paper plates. The little girl ran away, carrying her plate, and the boys swarmed after her like a band of young coyotes. I wondered if they were going to a secret spot the little girl and I had found under the barracks—a gap about one meter tall, one meter wide, and two meters long, used by the French during the war to imprison Vietnamese soldiers whose lives were beneficial enough to keep for ransom. There was no use for it now.
I hesitated at the front door, wishing that they weren’t so happy with my birthday cake, wishing all the more that I didn’t have one because I knew none of them had ever had a birthday party, let alone a cake. As they pushed past one another out the door, my soldier came in with two other men. One was middle-aged and had on a gray fedora hat, which was similar to my grandfather’s, so much so that I started to cry for reasons I had no access to. The other was older, perhaps in his sixties, and had a cane that he didn’t use. He leaned it against the wall before sitting down.
“It’s a perilous time. Every move is more crucial than ever,” he said.
“How much longer?” my mother asked.
“If you leave, there’s no guarantee.”
If I Had Two Lives Page 3