“Who are you?” I said.
“I bought her a similar dress from a vintage shop. To think of it—the one you’re wearing even has the same tear at the neckline. Where—”
“You must be Lilah’s sister,” I said, steadying myself. “She gave me this.” I pinched the fabric together where the tear was.
She straightened her posture. “Ah,” she said. “I know who you are.”
I said nothing.
She continued, “Lilah’s mentioned she had met someone. Over the years, she’d made up so many affairs that I didn’t think you were real. I just felt bad for Jon.”
“Do you have a minute? I—”
“Do you want to get some food? There’s a diner nearby.”
Elijah was younger than Lilah, closer to my age. At the restaurant, she got a coffee and I got blueberry pancakes. She said that she had traveled from Connecticut and gone to Lilah’s home out of a longing similar to mine, to be in the same air Lilah had breathed, to feel what was left of her presence. Elijah asked many questions about my background: what time was I born, at what age I started to walk, who was my best friend, when did I lose my virginity, how I ended up in New York. Her easy yet slightly aggressive manner made me reveal more about myself than I’d intended. The waitress came over to pour more coffee in Elijah’s cup.
“So you lost your only friend when you left Vietnam as a kid, and now you did it again?” she said.
“I didn’t intentionally lose Lilah,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to lose my mom either, but she killed herself anyway. Don’t you think incrementally, we somehow failed to save them?”
“It was an accident, Elijah.”
“What about your little friend? She got burnt too, didn’t she, when you scorched the sugarcane field?” she said.
“She was saved.”
“Right after our mother died, I was always on my toes. I thought Lilah might follow her. They were very similar. It sounds crazy, but for years I’d been preparing to lose her. I’ve imagined the scene over and over in my mind. Cynthia told me Lilah was in the driver’s seat when they found them.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s bizarre that the truck driver just suddenly swerved and there was no time for Lilah to have seen him coming?” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“We were on our way back from a vacation. We were happy,” I said, less convinced in my own words. “There was so much to look forward to.”
After the meeting with Elijah, I went home and slumped down on the floor.
It was the first time I allowed myself to relive the night before I left Vietnam, to recreate in my mind the details I’d willed myself to forget. Her tightly pinched lips had looked like a smirk, like they were mocking my cowardice. Pulling Lilah’s dress up slightly, I touched the shin of my right leg. The burnt mark ran from my ankle to below my knee, a long and narrow shape. It’d had a long time to heal and was smoothed out enough to feel like the rest of my leg. The fire had been a way out for the little girl and I, an escape from the camp for good. I’d had the choice of being with her till the end, until we would both be reduced to ashes, our spirits soaring up and away from our bodies. Instead, I’d turned my back on her and trapped us there forever.
I didn’t want to believe what Elijah said about Lilah. Yet the more I contemplated Elijah’s implication, the stranger the vacation seemed. Perhaps it was more for Lilah’s sake than mine, visiting a good memory for the last time. Lilah was right in choosing Jon. I wouldn’t have had the courage to join her.
PART THREE
1
When my daughter walked, she looked like a confused tornado. She spun slowly until she fell on her knees, then stood up and continued spinning. After she picked up speed, she ran toward me and dove her head into my lap, lifting herself to sneak a look at my face before burrowing down again.
“Where did QQ go? Did the storm take my baby away?” I said, looking around.
In response she squealed with great joy. She also liked to be invisible, transform into animals, pretend our apartment was a desert or battlefield. Though she wasn’t talkative and often communicated using only monosyllables, she had a powerful roar. She leapt up from my lap, crawled on all fours, and shook her head so that her hair was a tangled net in front of her face.
“Lion,” she said after a fifteen-second roar.
“Maybe more like a dinosaur?” I said.
“Linaur?”
“Sure.” I picked her up and kissed her. Her feet kicked in protest. “My linosaur.” When I released her, she spun away again, making the whooshing sound of wind.
Having QQ helped me slip into a routine. In the morning, I dropped her off at daycare and went to work. I’d started to work full time as a paralegal. At night, I cherished the little time we had together. There were few chances for Lilah to enter my thoughts. When she did, she took the essential and left me standing in the street, wondering if the shadow of a woman on the brick wall might be her, the colorless fallen feather of a heron. I found her always in nature, especially in things closer to the sky.
Some nights I woke up, startled from a dream, turned over and wept into my daughter’s hair. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I would say. Loss, I thought, was a fuller experience than love. You couldn’t always feel that you were loved, but loss asserted its presence, demanded a bodily response as it carved its way through, leaving you with enough to feel the emptiness. I kept the prosthetic eye Lilah painted on the nightstand. Had she known then she wasn’t painting my eye, but QQ’s? For a moment I wished she could have lived a little longer to meet the daughter she’d so longed for, but these types of thoughts led nowhere, so I stopped myself.
Now that QQ was old enough to travel, my neighbor and I argued over whether or not I should bring her to Vietnam with me. All of his earlier philosophy about leaving children to the elements so they could toughen had vanished when it came to her. He thought she was too young to follow me on such a trip, especially because I didn’t have a clue of what my exact destinations would be once I got to Vietnam.
“Wait till she’s six or seven,” my neighbor said.
“That’s too late. I want her to have Vietnam as part of her childhood memories,” I said.
“What is she going to eat there? You haven’t been back in ages. You won’t know what’s safe.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
“Leave her with me. I’ll bring her to my office every day.”
“I know you can take good care of her. It isn’t about that,” I said.
“Fine. Then let me give you the contact info of an old high school friend. He’ll be happy to show you around or at least take you to the house of your childhood friend.” He sat down on the floor and QQ crawled over and sat stoically next to him. QQ was serious and calm with him. My neighbor didn’t talk to her like she was a child or participate like I did in her imagined world. When she pulled a book off the shelf and asked him what it was, he explained thoroughly, using the same words he would with adults.
“This is a scientific journal. It gives us new studies about things we care about like chronic illnesses, music, money, and art. The study could pair one of these topics with another, for example, the effect of music on patients with brain cancer or how architecture can facilitate learning,” my neighbor said while my daughter turned the pages of the magazine. When she found a picture of a gorilla, she slapped it repeatedly.
“We watched a video of gorillas yesterday,” I explained to my neighbor. Later she fell asleep with her cheek on the page and her drool smearing the ink of the words.
I wanted to let my mother know I was coming. On my computer, I typed and retyped my e-mail. I worried she would find my Vietnamese wretched, lacking style and grace. I wasn’t sure how much to say about my own life and about why I had decided to come back. I hesitated and ev
entually decided not to tell her about QQ because I didn’t want that to influence her decision whether or not to see me. After several deliberations, I sent her a brief e-mail, making sure that I didn’t express any particular need to see her. I know you are busy, I added. It was in part to incite some sort of reassurance from her, to hear her say that she wanted to see me.
At around 5 p.m. in New York, which is about 3 a.m. in Vietnam, I received her response. It was polite and brief: she was glad I was coming. She was very busy and would do her best to see me. She reminded me to use my American passport, forgetting that she’d directed me to get rid of my Vietnamese one years ago, and to speak English past the arrival checkpoint. Though she didn’t offer an explanation, I understood that if anyone found out she had a daughter, it would inconvenience her plan to run for office again. Vietnam still expected its women to put motherhood above all else. My mother’s success and ambitions had been accepted because people thought she was a barren widow. Her misfortunes afforded her the right to devote her life entirely to public work. I understood that to maintain success, it was more important to show others what was to be pitied, rather than envied.
2
Ho Chi Minh International airport was a place where newcomers felt like celebrities. Right outside the international arrival gate, people who had been waiting waved and cheered. Many people were waiting for a relative from abroad, someone they hadn’t seen for five, or thirty years. People hugged each other and tried to hide their tears. Children ran here and there while their parents yelled, the elderly sat on the floor fanning their sweaty faces. My daughter clung to me as we walked past a line of curious faces. Around us, people laughed and cried. Because Vietnamese people were not of a hugging culture, arms were patted, hair pet, cheeks pulled.
“Are we in Vietnam?” my daughter asked. She pronounced the country’s name in a curiously precise accent.
“This is where I lived until I was twelve,” I said.
“How old am I?” she said.
“You’re almost four.”
We got in the cab and I handed the driver the address my neighbor had written down. After we passed two traffic lights, the driver asked in Vietnamese how long had I been abroad. I told him. He complimented my Vietnamese, impressed that I had not forgotten it. His praises felt more painful than flattering so I was silent.
“I know kids who only live abroad for a few years and come back speaking Vietnamese with an accent. It’s trendy to be foreign here. Anyway, Vietnamese is a language easy to erase.” He shared that his nephew lived in California and asked if he could give me his nephew’s number. “He just moved there last month for college. He doesn’t know anybody,” the driver said.
“I’m sure he’ll make friends at school,” I said.
“Yeah but it’s not the same, it’s not family.”
I wrote down the number that the driver recited from memory.
“After he finishes his studies, he’ll come back,” the driver said. “His father needs him here. I know life is better over there, but he should come back.”
I nodded. His was a common sentiment amongst people with children abroad. In reality, Vietnamese children rarely ever came back.
“I haven’t seen my mother in twelve years,” I said.
“Better late than never,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure she wants to see me. What will we even say to each other?”
“She wants to see you. She might be scared, so you should take the initiative if she doesn’t.”
“Scared of what?”
“It’s hard to go on denying all the years she’s missed if you’re right in front of her. My son lives in Hanoi and he rarely visits me. To you kids, time simply passes, but not to us aging parents. Every day we don’t see you is another day we lost.”
“My mother is different,” I said. “But I’ll think more about what you said.”
“Good,” he said.
He dropped us off before the street became too narrow. When we got out, my daughter immediately pointed to a street vendor with a colorful display.
“Mama.”
“Hermit crabs. Their shells are painted to make them look pretty.” I could tell she wanted one badly so I added, “We won’t stay here long enough to keep one. How about I get you cotton candy instead?”
My neighbor had told me that once I got to the right neighborhood, I should ask around for Minh’s house. People nearby would know who he was. I asked the man working inside a shoe store for directions. He directed us to go down the narrow street until it split in three directions.
“Take the one to the left all the way to the end and you should be at the right place,” he said. As I was leaving, he asked, “Are you a relative?”
“A friend of a friend,” I said.
Minh’s house was hidden behind a weeping willow, which looked older and more morose than their type usually did because of its sparseness. The thick branches that swept the ground had twisted into braids of white hair. Minh and his wife lived with Minh’s father, who had not gotten out of bed since a heart attack last summer. Minh said at this stage in life, the only thing that kept his father alive was a strong will and a sense of humor. When I came in, Minh’s wife was setting lunch on a wooden daybed so we could eat together. I watched her glossy black hair, small breasts, lithe body move as if the daybed was a stage and she an actress. She divided the chopsticks and put white rice into four small bowls. She talked to my daughter in Vietnamese without hesitation, as though it was the only language that existed. Quoc-Anh listened attentively and figured out what she meant using a child’s intuition.
“Does she know Vietnamese?” Minh asked.
“A few words,” I said.
“You should teach her while she’s young. It’ll only get harder.”
I nodded. “I’m not qualified. My vocabulary is less than a fifth grader’s.”
“That’s a lot of words,” he said. “And I understand you fine. While you’re here, my wife could teach her some basics. She’s a kindergarten teacher.”
I thanked him and took out a few bottles of vitamins I’d brought from New York, “We’re grateful you’re letting us stay.”
Minh’s wife picked up and looked at the labels of each bottle, “Thank you. So you know how hard it is to get good medicine here. We never know what else they might put in it.” There was a mumble of agreement from the bed in the corner where Minh’s father lay.
“He said nobody else can touch them. They’re his,” Minh explained. “All yours, dad.”
After the food was cleared, Minh’s wife, my daughter and I lay together on the daybed.
“I’m glad you came on a Saturday so I have a chance to greet you properly,” she said to me while dozing off.
Minh sat at the foot of his father’s bed and answered my questions about the general welfare of the Vietnamese people. He said for the past ten years the country had remained a great place to vacation, but not to live. Work was fine as long as you followed the rules and didn’t do anything subversive. He thought that in all fields, be it the arts, science, or business, in order to be great, you inevitably had to step outside of the boundary. There was no room for a breakthrough, a great discovery. Talented men and women reached the top of a mountain and camped there instead of taking up in flight.
“Everything’s fine. Everything’s good enough. That’s the problem,” he concluded. “How do you know our mutual friend? He and I met at an underground Party meeting. We were so young then.”
“So you didn’t go to school together?” I said.
He chuckled, “Is that what he told you? We were boys, but we already worked for the Party. All of us had nicknames. In fact, nobody has called me Minh for a long time. I don’t even know his real name. In 1970, he heard that room for two more people had opened up on a boat to the United States. He tried to convince me to g
o. It was after his adopted sister died.” Minh swallowed and rubbed his father’s leg absently. “It was a huge betrayal to our Party, our country, our friendship. At least I used to think so. I didn’t think he would have the guts to go alone. We haven’t spoken in almost forty years and he still told you to come here as if nothing has changed. That’s just like him.” He looked around at the wooden daybed, his father’s metal bed cramped in the corner, his wife murmuring in her sleep beside me. “I met her after my first wife died. At first, I avoided her because I feared she would soon end up being my nurse. But—how is he?”
“I can see why he considers you a close friend. He’s helped my daughter and me so much—I don’t know what we would do without him,” I said.
“He did the right thing in leaving.”
I said nothing. How could I begin to tell Minh that though my neighbor had escaped war and poverty, he still couldn’t let go of the guilt of having left? His life was a battle of contradictions. He fought for those he believed have the right to stay in the United States, to find there the opportunities their birthplace didn’t give them. He also didn’t want them to become like him, to work hard for the sake of the family while the idea of family waned away in the noise of their new life. He didn’t want them to not be able to go home again.
In the evening, I told them that I needed to go attend to some personal matters.
“Of course,” Minh said. “You’ve been away for so long. I imagine you have many people to visit.”
Minh’s wife took out a variety of loose pages from a large binder. They had hand drawn pictures of animals and objects on one side and the words on the other.
“You can leave Quoc-Anh here. By the time you get back, she’ll be fluent in Vietnamese,” she said.
“I hope I’m not gone for that long. Thanks for looking after her.”
In that moment, I imagined I saw a gleam of her regret. She was a mother without a child, possibly because Minh thought himself too old to raise one. I told my daughter I would be back in time to put her to bed.
If I Had Two Lives Page 20