The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

by Aimee Phan

  His mother wasn’t with them. She hadn’t been for several years. His dad didn’t think she should attend until she felt healthier, a vague status, but his mother had easily agreed. He was right to be cautious. The last time she attended Mass, she stood up during the Eucharist and accused the priest of diluting the wine. Another reason that Mass had become discreetly relaxing for Xuan—he was free to think only of his concerns.

  After Mass, while Xuan’s father and Uncle Phung chatted with some acquaintances, and Grandmère and Aunt Ngoan nagged Cam about the sleeveless dress she had chosen to wear that morning, Xuan walked with Grandpère to their favorite bench near the fountain. Grandpère pulled out two cigarettes and handed one to Xuan.

  “I remember taking the bac,” Grandpère said, fumbling for the lighter in his other suit pocket. “Did you know I chose Spanish as my foreign language? Of course, I can’t remember any of it now … and if I’d known Sanh and his family would go to America, I would have learned English.… Are you learning English?”

  “Yes, Grandpère,” Xuan said, taking the lighter from him to prepare the cigarettes.

  “Good, good,” Grandpère said. “We must acclimate to the changing world, right, Xuan?”

  “Yes, Grandpère.”

  A year ago, on another Sunday at church, Xuan noticed Grandpère’s attention shifting to the Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac statue, on the opposite side of the altar. When his grandfather failed to recite the Our Father along with the rest of the congregation, Xuan gently nudged him on his side. Grandpère turned to him, but his eyes wouldn’t focus, his gaze arching upward to the angels sleeping on the ceiling, and Xuan realized, as everyone else kneeled to the pews, that his grandfather was having a stroke.

  The doctors diagnosed it as a minor stroke, and determined no significant consequences, beyond a slight tremor in his right arm that one had to observe closely to notice. He continued volunteering at the Vietnamese Community Center and still bickered with Grandmère. That morning, in his crocheted hat and navy blue suit, Hung Truong looked healthier and stronger than most of the elder French men in their congregation. He only allowed himself one cigarette a week since the stroke, always after Sunday Mass.

  Amid the crowd of neatly combed heads and stylish hats, Xuan recognized his father and uncle talking to the Bourdains. The four of them turned, smiling and nodding, and Xuan politely reciprocated. Though their families had ended their weekly Sunday brunches years ago after his mother’s breakdown in Lourdes, they remained on friendly terms. They hadn’t seen the Bourdains for several weeks, which meant they’d probably returned from another holiday. After shaking hands with his father and uncle, the Bourdains started walking toward the bench.

  Up close, Xuan could tell the Bourdains were aging—graying in Émilie’s hair, wrinkles around the elder Michel’s eyes and lips. Not as thin as they once were. But these were still subtler, gentler aging adjustments compared to Xuan’s parents. Xuan’s father lost more weight with each year, his bony shoulders protruding through his sweaters and dress shirts. And his mother, a woman who once regularly attracted the stares of French men on the metro, now looked older than Aunt Ngoan.

  After exchanging pleasantries with Grandpère about the weather and church service, the elder Michel turned his attention to Xuan.

  “So, young man, studying hard?”

  “I’m trying,” Xuan said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, keenly aware of his slouching posture, a habit since he was very young.

  “You know, you should really give Petit Michel a call,” Monsieur Bourdain said. “He is very busy—we hardly see him ourselves—but he must have some advice for you. And isn’t your cousin also taking the bac this year?”

  Xuan nodded, looking past Monsieur Bourdain, where a few feet away, Cam expertly avoided his gaze and turned to chat with Grandmère.

  “Fantastic,” Monsieur Bourdain said. “You children grow up too fast. I’ll have Petit Michel call you.”

  “We really should all get together again soon,” Émilie Bourdain said, a phrase the Truongs had learned in the last few years signified only politeness, nothing more. “When we return from Morocco next month, perhaps. It is so busy this time of year.”

  Several minutes after the Bourdains’ departure, the Truong women approached Grandpère’s bench. Grandmère and Aunt Ngoan had their arms linked, though it wasn’t cold.

  “You just missed the Bourdains,” Grandpère said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it into the cobblestone.

  “Isn’t that a shame?” Grandmère asked. Aunt Ngoan smiled, tugging on Grandmère’s arm.

  “Don’t be impudent,” Grandpère said. “We owe them our respect. They were our sponsors.”

  “Petit Michel is going to call us,” Xuan said, looking at Cam.

  Her face appeared stricken for a moment. “Why?” she whispered.

  “Ungrateful girl,” Grandpère said, though his tone was playful. “To tutor you and Xuan for the bac. Can’t you see how kindly the Bourdains are? Still helping us this way?”

  “Ah,” Cam said, nodding, finally meeting her cousin’s eyes. “That’s very kind.”

  Must political action be guided by the knowledge of history?

  “It’s casual,” Cam said, rubbing her eraser along the edge of her textbook. “There’s no need to involve the families.”

  “Afraid they’ll start planning the wedding?” Xuan asked.

  Cam stabbed the eraser into her cousin’s palm. They sat at a table in the east wing of the library, shoulder to shoulder, reviewing history dates in Xuan’s notebook. “Mother would kill me first, then claim it was to preserve my honor.”

  Xuan tipped his head up to the ceiling, squinting at the overhead lights, fuzzy, yellow, and swallowed a yawn. He knew he shouldn’t care. His cousin did whatever she wanted, despite Aunt Ngoan’s best efforts and Uncle Phung’s tepid gestures to make peace. (Why couldn’t you be a boy? Aunt Ngoan’s question raged through the house. A boy would never cause this much trouble.) Their occasional battles made Xuan feel better about his mother’s own disturbances in the apartment house. Noise within the family was ignored, quietly forgiven, then forgotten.

  “It could be worse,” Cam said. “You could be seeing Michel.”

  “I’m not sure my parents would notice,” Xuan said.

  Cam rubbed her eyes. They fell into another silence as they absorbed countries, wars, peace treaties, and dates. Xuan already had these memorized, but patiently waited for Cam, knowing how annoyed she became when he turned the page too quickly.

  “Nineteen fifty-four. The final withdrawal of French military from Indochine,” Cam read aloud. “And then the history of Vietnam simply ends for the French. Interesting, huh?”

  “Well, we are covering French colonial history,” Xuan said, turning the page, ready for the next decade.

  “But not even a mention of 1975?” Cam asked. “The Fall of Saigon? When their beloved colony is finally free of all foreign conquerors?”

  “We were barely a year old. Why does it matter to you now?”

  “I think I can remember it,” Cam said, her head slowly nodding, entranced by the olive-green face clock on the opposite wall of the library.

  “No,” Xuan said, biting down the side of his tongue to keep from grimacing. “I don’t think you can.”

  “You’re not the only Truong with a visual memory,” Cam said.

  “Photographic,” Xuan corrected. “And you cannot remember events from when we were that young, it’s impossible.”

  Cam turned her chair to face him, her eyes lit with fanciful delusion. “It was hot that day, really hot. The adults wouldn’t open a window. Our mothers kept us upstairs because the front door kept opening and slamming shut. It would shake the entire house. Even though the windows were locked, we could still hear people on the streets … and sirens. We weren’t sure if they were from the Communists or the South Vietnamese police … And someone shot out the kitchen window. No one got hurt, but it made Grandmère
cry—”

  “Our parents have told us this story,” Xuan said.

  “Why don’t you believe me?” Cam looked irritated, folding her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “It was an important day in our lives. This is what I can recall.”

  “I don’t think it works that way,” he said. “Like you said, I have an excellent memory and I can hardly remember any of our years in Vietnam.”

  “You’re saying you don’t remember playing soccer in the park?” Cam asked. Her arms flapped in the air as she spoke, and Xuan feared one of her erratic hands would strike him. “Or our next-door neighbors and how they turned out to be Viet Minh? Or when they took my father and Uncle Sanh away to the reeducation camps and we didn’t see them for two years? You don’t remember any of that?”

  Xuan shook his head. “I’m not trying to be a jerk,” he said. “But this happened before we could barely speak.”

  “If that’s true,” Cam said, “then I feel sorry for you. Those memories mean more than any of these ridiculous dates we’re going to be tested on. All this information will be gone the minute the bac is over. But Vietnam? That was where we began. What are you looking at?”

  Cam turned and glared back at a group of disapproving classmates at an adjacent table. During their conversation, her voice had spilled beyond their own table. Their classmates quickly reverted to their books, but exhaled dramatically. When Cam returned to face her cousin, Xuan’s eyes had refocused on the study materials, his shoulders curved toward his notebook, like a turtle. He wouldn’t look up again for several hours.

  Is being free not encountering any obstacles?

  On the day they were supposed to return to Paris, Xuan’s mother suggested they take one last walk to the grotto in the morning. Xuan’s mother promised him it wouldn’t take long. She only wanted to recite a rosary before leaving. Although Xuan would have liked to stay behind with Petit Michel and Cam, he didn’t want his mother to walk by herself.

  Other morning worshippers sat throughout the grotto. Xuan tried his best to follow each prayer with the beads on his rosary. His mother, though, appeared deep in her own meditations, her rosary tangled between her tightened knuckles. It felt much colder than the day before.

  He’d been hoping to go to an amusement park or a petting farm in the countryside. Instead, they had come to Mass for three days.

  “We can be cured, too,” his mother had whispered to him on the train ride to Lourdes. “We can be washed clean.”

  “But I just took a bath yesterday,” Xuan had said.

  “I’m talking about the soul,” she said. “We’re not pure inside. When we take our baths at Lourdes, we can have all the wretchedness of our pasts cleansed away.”

  The baths didn’t seem that special to Xuan. The water had felt cold and the volunteers appeared curt and perfunctory in their miracle-assistance. Xuan had imagined lots of candlelight and choral music, like his first communion, but it felt more like taking a rinse in a stark gray pool house, with no diving board waiting outside. Afterward, his mother said she could feel the water’s effect in her veins. Xuan had squeezed his thin arms and pretended that he could, too.

  Xuan looked up to the dark skies. Not even a hint of sun.

  During their last Hail Mary, a woman screamed from the front row. People stood. Xuan stood, too. He stepped closer to where the people gathered and saw an old man lying on the ground, wedged between the pews. Yellow vomit dotted the front of his navy coat. His body was convulsing.

  A woman cradled the old man’s head in her lap, her screams filling the normally tranquil grotto. People yelled in several languages for an ambulance. One person demanded they take the old man to the baths. His mother.

  Xuan watched as she pushed her way to the center of the turmoil. “Baths,” she said again in Vietnamese, making several gestures for washing and pointing next door to the baths. Finally, she remembered her French: “He needs to wash in the holy water!”

  A man and a woman in dark blue uniforms rushed to the grotto carrying medical equipment. Everyone stepped out of their way. Xuan pulled his mother back from the crowd, still yelling about the holy water to the paramedics.

  It started to sprinkle. As the paramedics began to take the body away, Xuan realized his mother was no longer standing next to him. He looked around the grotto, which was emptying out. His mother knelt in the front pew, her eyes and lips pressed shut.

  “They should have listened to me,” his mom said when Xuan sat next to her. When she opened her eyes, she did not look sad, but proud. “They have no one to blame but themselves.”

  Xuan stared at his mother. She seemed so much smaller kneeling in the pew, no bigger than a child. “Mom…”

  “But it’s not too late,” she said, reclasping her hands and bending her head. “We can still pray. Mary can still save him.”

  “Mommy,” Xuan tried again. “He’s dead.”

  She shook her head, refusing to listen. “No, Xuan. He needs your prayers. You can’t give up on your faith.”

  “This isn’t about faith,” Xuan cried. “This is a fact. He’s dead.”

  “You’re wrong,” Trinh said, her voice shaking. “Mary protects all her children.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Xuan yelled. “You always said that, but she never did. She didn’t protect us in Vietnam and she didn’t protect you in the camps.”

  There. He had said it. The one thing he knew could stop any conversation, what he wasn’t allowed to share with anyone, not Grandmère, not Grandpère, not his father, and before this moment, not even his mother.

  Before she could respond, Xuan turned and walked away. He couldn’t look at her face. When he heard his mother calling out to him, Xuan ignored her, his walk breaking into a run. It felt good, his small steps quickening, the breeze and slight drizzle of rain cooling his face. His mother’s voice faded but Xuan continued to soar—free, invulnerable—until a group of tourists emerging unexpectedly from a gift shop ended his flight. A misstep on wet cobblestone brought Xuan to the ground. His damp hands immediately reached for his ankle, which was throbbing already with sharp pain.

  He tried not to cry. It made his ankle feel even worse. He angrily wiped his face and put his hands on the ground to push himself up. The drizzle plumped into rain and Xuan stared at the drops on his arms. It was just water. It had no magical powers. Xuan should have known better. If the Lourdes water really had healing properties, more people would know about it. Diseases wouldn’t exist. The old man would survive. His mother would go back to normal. But none of these things would happen. If anything, Lourdes had made his mother worse.

  Is language only good for communicating?

  Xuan quietly unlocked the apartment door’s three deadbolts, unnecessary since the main building’s door was locked as well, but it made his mother feel safer. The lights were already off, his parents asleep. Xuan was accustomed to walking through their apartment in the dark. He passed through the living room to the kitchen, where a small square of Swiss chocolate glittered on the counter, his father’s favorite token of affection, a reliable welcome-home present after a late night of studying.

  Xuan allowed the treat to melt on his tongue for several seconds, then chewed away at the inlaid walnuts. He’d been having problems sleeping lately and a glass of milk before bed was often helpful. As he closed the cupboard, his mother’s face appeared where the dark space had been. Her eyes were clear and bright in the empty kitchen.

  “You look like you’re about to cry,” she said.

  “I was just startled,” Xuan said, feeling for the counter to balance himself, his ears pounding. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  His mother watched as he finished his glass of milk, then poured himself another glass. She wore her bathrobe, a bright green fuzzy robe his father had gotten for her years ago. When she was nervous, she liked to twist the sleeves of the robe. She did it now. Her hair was streaked with gray and her eyes looked heavy and yellow. She was thirty-six years o
ld.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” his mother said. “I can tell, and I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “You did nothing wrong. I’ve just been studying, that’s all. You know how important the bac is.”

  She looked doubtful. Xuan’s mother only knew how important it was because everyone kept telling her so. But she didn’t believe much that she was told. And in the last few years, she had even begun doubting Xuan.

  “Your father is putting too much pressure on you,” she said. “He and Father Truong talk about you when you are not here. The bac is only a test. You’re not required to take it.”

  “Well, if I want a good job, I do.”

  “You are the smartest boy in the world. You don’t need a test to prove that. Why do you let this family control you?”

  “I want to take the bac,” Xuan said.

  “We can leave, you know,” she said. “I couldn’t before, but you’re old enough now. We can go and live away from this family.”

  “Mother, this is our family,” he said sharply.

  “I’m your family,” she said. “Not them. Did they protect you when it was really important?”

  “Mom…” How could he stop her? He could never prevent her from talking. It happened like this every time. She needed to talk, he had to listen, and then she would collapse right in front of him, a tragic marionette, and every time, he would feel responsible, because he knew better, because he should have stopped her so many times before.

  This time she could sense his dread. The fingers on her right hand curled up on her bathrobe sleeve, released, and then curled again.

  “Don’t you realize I can only talk to you? Only you can understand. You were there.”

  She’d said these words to him before. When he was in junior high, he shattered a dinner plate on the floor to make her stop. Now, he merely gripped his milk glass so tightly he thought it could break in his hands.

  “Mom,” he said, breathing deeply to calm himself. “I think we both need to go to sleep.”