The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

by Aimee Phan

  His mother brought a hand to her mouth and lightly bit the inside of her wrist. Her eyes traveled up to the ceiling and when they returned to Xuan, they narrowed slightly. She offered no indication of shame. “Okay,” she said.

  How can we determine the gravity of a mistake?

  The first time it happened, Xuan had been sleeping. Walking back to their tent from dinner, Xuan leaned heavily against his mother’s leg. He wanted her to carry him, but she said it was too far and he was too heavy. At five years old, he was no longer a baby like his cousin Lum. He was so tired that he crumpled onto their sleeping mat with his sandals on. She must have forgotten to pull them off of his feet, because when he awoke, that was the first thing he realized, feeling the bits of sand and grit between his toes and rubber sandals. And then he heard the grunting, soft but steady and unpleasant. He smelled the unfamiliar odor of another body in their tent.

  He slowly sat up, rubbing his eyes. With his hands, he patted around the bamboo mat, seeking his mother, but instead felt a thick, hairy leg beside him. Instinctively, he dug his fingers into the damp, unfamiliar limb. A large hand quickly slapped his grip away, followed by a louder grunt.

  His mother’s voice, strained but firm: “Xuan, go back to sleep.”

  He turned back on the mat, curled into a snail, but instead of closing his eyes, he stared at the corner of the tent. Though it was dark, he could make out their shadows from the moonlight. Three other Malay guards sat on the floor. When one of them caught Xuan staring, he smiled broadly, nudging the guard sitting next to him. Xuan turned again, burying his face into the mat, scraping his cheeks against the fraying bamboo.

  It was probably only several minutes, but it was also his first realization about how long time could last when he didn’t want to be somewhere. He feared breathing too loudly. When the guard finally rolled off his mother, she pointed to the door with a shaky hand, and though it wasn’t cold, Xuan pulled up the thin blanket around him, occasionally allowing one eye to peek out.

  “What about me?” one of the guards asked, the only one, Xuan eventually learned, who spoke broken Vietnamese.

  “Tomorrow,” his mother said. “My child is awake.”

  The grinning guard in the back spoke up, barking in Malay.

  The three men exchanged smiles. Then: “My friend likes your boy.”

  Xuan turned his head back to the wall, facing away from the men. He shouldn’t have looked at them. But his mother wrapped a protective arm over him, pulling the blanket more securely over his head.

  “Do whatever you want with me,” she said. “If you touch him, I will tell anyone who will listen what you’ve done to him and they will slit your throats.”

  The guard translated to his friends. Xuan couldn’t see their facial expressions, but he heard a few snickers and shuffling around. They knew she was right. A woman crying rape, the camp officers would have blamed her—certainly she had seduced them—and said that she deserved it. But the guards couldn’t claim the same about a small boy.

  Xuan chewed away at his bottom lip, his fingers rubbing between the blanket. Finally, the tent flap flipped up and the four men were gone.

  When Xuan’s mother pulled the blanket off his head, she had tears in her eyes. She smeared her fingers across Xuan’s face, combing back his ocean-salted hair.

  “Are you all right, dear one? Did those big men scare you?”

  Xuan nodded.

  “It’s fine now,” she said, still frantically raking his hair, smoothing her thumbs against his eyebrows. “You just pretend to be asleep the next time that happens, okay?” She hugged him, cooing my baby, my baby, but Xuan pulled away, his face puckering. The guards’ sweat and saliva had imprinted themselves on his mother’s skin, in her hair. She did not smell like his mother, but sour and unfamiliar.

  Was this her memory or his? He felt it was his—he could see, taste, hear, and feel the hopelessness of that night … or was it because his mother had reminded him of every detail for so many years? He supposed it didn’t matter if it was her memory or his. On certain days, when Xuan sat on the metro or walked in a city alley, he could smell the distinct, pungent perspiration of the guards and his stomach would identify it immediately, undeniably. It rendered him senseless, temporarily disorienting him, so he’d miss his stop or lose his sense of direction. A person could not invent that sort of memory.

  Do ethical problems have perfect solutions? Are fairness and unfairness only conventions?

  Xuan blinked at the questions, which blurred when he first looked at them. He reread the words and realized the essay prompts were not in the cursive handwriting of his study notebook, but typewritten on official examination paper. His eyes wandered. He was surrounded by his classmates, their faces low, their shoulders hunched over as they wrote. On his right, several rows behind him, he saw Cam, wearing her reading glasses, her hair in braids, also intensely absorbed in her bac booklet.

  Hearing a throat clearing from the front of the room Xuan lifted his head. Professor Arnaud glared at him from her desk, an index finger held to the corner of her right eye. Xuan returned to gaze at the exam booklet sitting before him. These questions looked familiar. He’d seen previous versions of them in his study guides and had prepared sample answers months ago. For the ethics question, he could quote from Kant’s three critiques or Confessions of Saint Augustine, or for the fairness prompt, he could cite Auguste Comte’s philosophy of positivism.

  He checked his watch and bit his bottom lip. Two hours had passed, and not a mark written, no notes, no sentences. Xuan again discreetly tilted his head to the left, then the right, and realized most of his classmates were possibly on their fifth or sixth page of argumentation.

  The last two hours of his life had disappeared, but it was even difficult to recall the past few days and weeks. He remembered studying with Cam. He remembered coming home that night and talking to his mother. After that, he’d gone to bed. After that, the timeline became fuzzy. No images or sounds conjured in his head like they always had before, events out of order, his photographic memory suddenly broken, leaving only an empty gray space.

  A page rustle snapped in his ears. To his left, a classmate had turned to her last essay page. There was no more time. Xuan gripped his hands on the desk, planting both feet on the floor. Reminding himself he only needed to answer one, Xuan slowly reread the questions, patiently waiting for his thoughts to settle, for the sentences to follow. He felt an enormous temptation to grab his head and smash it against the desk, rebooting his memory, ending this uncharacteristic malaise. Instead, he recalled a relaxation technique his father used on his mother during panic attacks, attempting to release tension from every segment of the body, toes to head. Toes, calves, thighs, butt, stomach, chest, shoulders, neck, head. Head.

  He picked up his pencil and began to write.

  Why do we want to be free?

  Few people remained outside when Xuan, the last to turn in his exam, emerged from the classroom. Grandpère stood in the school yard, waiting for him. He held an unlit cigarette, even though today wasn’t Sunday. Cam had probably grown impatient and left ahead of them. That was fine. He didn’t need to go over the answers he probably missed.

  It was a bright, beautiful day. The season of the bac had begun and by tomorrow, the philosophy questions would make their annual appearance in the papers. Approaching his grandfather, Xuan realized the two of them now stood at near equal height.

  “Are you hungry?” Grandpère asked, offering his lighter to Xuan.

  “I’m tired,” Xuan admitted. “I only want to go home.”

  He lit the cigarette and watched his grandfather puff, then hand it to Xuan. He inhaled, exhaled, enjoying the breaths.

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

  Xua
n regarded him carefully, but his grandfather’s face looked serious, waiting for an answer.

  “Yes,” Xuan said. “I told you I was taking English.”

  “Good, good,” Grandpère said, nodding, as he took back the cigarette. “We must acclimate to the changing world, right, Xuan?”

  Xuan pushed the breath through his lips. “Yes, Grandpère.”

  At the front of their apartment house, Grandpère stopped in front of the birdbath, empty and sad-looking in winter, but this sunny afternoon it contained a shallow pool of water and one sparrow perched at the edge. Like the rest of the family, he usually passed by it with only a cursory glance, but this afternoon, he leaned over the concrete washbasin with interest, until the bird flapped away.

  “How long has this been here, Xuan? Did your father recently buy this?”

  “No Grandpère,” Xuan said. “It’s always been here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Grandpère said. “I would have noticed before.”

  Perhaps it had only been a long afternoon. Memories are hard to quantify and impossible to reason with. People forget all the time and then the past returns, unexpectedly, disturbing the present. Perhaps philosophers could afford to ask questions, to delight in the inconsistencies and contradictions. Not Xuan. The philosophy portion of the bac had ended. He had other subjects to study.

  1981

  Kim-Ly Vo

  Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

  … Both children were born at inconvenient times. Strangers gazed at me with pity, disappointment, even contempt. In Vietnam, pregnant with Lum, I was breeding another mouth to feed, robbing other children of precious food. In America, pregnant with Cherry, I was securing my American residency status, leeching off a welfare system I hadn’t contributed to.

  Their opinions did not matter. I was happy when Lum was born. Even though I had every right to be miserable—my husband was in the prison camp, and my in-laws were insufferable—all I had to do was hold my precious son and my anxieties floated away.

  I expected a similar feeling to come over me with the second child. Is it because the children have such different temperaments? I should be more understanding, since I was your third. I know what it’s like not to be first. But Lum was never such a demanding child. He hardly cried. He slept so easily next to me. Not Cherry. Nothing I do satisfies her. Even now, she is crying again. I’ve nursed her, changed her diaper. What else does she want? I can’t hold her forever.

  I now realize how correct you were about raising daughters. That is why I believe Cherry must be my last child. I can’t risk having another girl. I know how hard it was to have sisters. Cherry is lucky—a brother will always protect her. I love my sisters, but I will always regret our callous competitiveness. It’s hard enough to be a woman. I can’t wish that kind of life on her, not here. It would be too much.…

  Tuyet Truong

  Tustin, California, USA

  Chapter Six

  CHERRY

  NEWPORT LAKE, CALIFORNIA, 1994

  So Uncle Bao cheated on Auntie Tri. Again. The news had reenergized her mother on a lazy Sunday night when Cherry expected to have the first floor of the house to herself. Her mother scooted across the kitchen floor in her chenille slippers, clicking her acrylic nails along the granite kitchen counter, the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder. Though already dressed in her pajamas, she’d forgotten to remove her gold hoop earrings, and they shook with fury.

  “Who saw them?” she asked Auntie Hien.

  Duyen had seen them, she’d told Cherry so the night before, but instead of interrupting, passing on the gossip that fueled her mother’s conversations, Cherry turned the page of her American history textbook, where Burr was initiating the ill-fated duel with Hamilton.

  Typically, when Uncle Bao got caught straying, Auntie Tri packed a weekend bag and drove Linh to stay with Cherry or with Duyen’s family. Auntie Tri would circle phone numbers in the yellow pages for divorce lawyers, occasionally calling to inquire about rates. She’d complain about what a useless bastard she’d married, his lack of ambition toward any practical job, and about how his plan to return to singing was little more than pathetic chatter, since his voice had degenerated from all his drinking and smoking—and if she had to do it again, she’d marry that halitosis-plagued, yet sweet, businessman who courted her when she was still in high school. Within a few days, Uncle Bao would show up, and after several hours of tears and screaming, he’d take the family he swore he loved and respected back home. Once, he even karaoke-serenaded Auntie Tri without any sense of irony. While that overture remained a family favorite, it still recycled the same tired accusations and promises, like a bad Vietnamese soap opera, and it surprised Cherry that no one else had grown weary talking about it.

  Cherry disliked gossip, and her family was full of it. What was wrong with communication and honesty? Without other people’s problems, her family would have nothing to say to one another. And Cherry’s mother, still homesick for Little Saigon, needed to talk.

  The garage door opened and Cherry looked up. Her brother entered, cradling a tall vase of purple tulips. Lum balanced them on the kitchen counter in front of their mother, who kissed his cheek in gratitude, while continuing her conversation. Lum turned and handed his sister a single yellow gerbera daisy, Cherry’s favorite flower.

  “Who was it this time?” Cherry asked, tucking the daisy into her textbook as a bookmark.

  “Former fiancée,” Lum said. “She asked me to tell him she’s changing her phone number.”

  Cherry’s brother worked part-time as a delivery boy for a flower shop in Little Saigon, and often brought home the rejected orders at the end of the day. Ex-girlfriends, former wives, and even pissed-off mothers, refused to sign for the most exquisite flower arrangements; their consistent anger and resentment kept the otherwise sterile house fragrant and beautiful. Their mother could count on several fresh floral arrangements a week.

  Lum walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a dinner their mother had set aside. He popped it in the microwave and took a seat next to Cherry. She edged away, and he deliberately moved closer.

  “We’re meeting at Quynh’s to watch a movie,” he said. “Wanna come?”

  It was tempting. She’d been cooped up in the house all day, listening to their parents bicker. Their only day off together in the week and they spent it arguing.

  “I have school tomorrow.”

  “So what?” he said. “Haven’t you been good enough all weekend?”

  “But it’s already eight o’clock.”

  “I’ll get you back early.” Lum stood to retrieve his dish from the microwave.

  “Promise?”

  He smiled as he pulled the plastic wrap from the bowl, the steam rushing to his face. “Whenever you want.”

  While their mother only nodded when she saw them leaving, their father stepped in front of Lum’s car before he could pull out of the driveway. A pile of shrubs and branches that he’d been gathering from the front yard all afternoon lay by the side of the house.

  “You said you were going to help me this evening,” their father said to Lum. “Trash pickup is tomorrow.”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” Lum said. “Just leave it. I’ll do it in the morning.”

  Their father shook his head. “You won’t wake up in time. You never do.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Lum said, tapping his foot on the brake so the car jerked forward a little. “Do you want me to do it now?”

  Their father waved his hand, turning to his pile of greenery. The back of his T-shirt was dark with perspiration. “Never mind. Go play with your friends.”

  They turned off the cul-de-sac, passing neighbors who likewise were collecting the week’s garbage, garden waste, and recyclables. The subdivision wasn’t even a year old, so the houses and landscaping still felt brochure-quality fresh, with artfully arranged trees dividing the roads, the smoothly paved sidewalks retaining their sparkly grains. The week they moved in, Lum deliberat
ely spit his gum on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway and ground it in with his heel. The next morning, they couldn’t find his gum stain. Cherry was pretty sure their mother had scraped it off. Cherry looked over at Lum. He was still scowling.

  “So what movie are we watching?” she asked, once they’d merged onto the freeway.

  “He knows I just got back from work,” Lum said. “Why isn’t that enough for him?”

  “You did say you’d help him,” Cherry reminded him. All afternoon, while Cherry finished an essay for her English class, she watched their father bend over the flower beds and strain for the too-tall tree branches. They hardly saw their dad during the week since his promotion at the plant as a shift manager, and when he was around on weekends, he seemed equally stressed with all the chores required to maintain the new house.

  “Did he ask you to help him?” Lum asked.

  “I tried,” she said. “He kept telling me to go study.”

  “Well, he never says that to me.”

  “That’s because he knows better.” She tried to say this jokingly, but she’d never been good at teasing. Last May, after graduating from high school, Lum had been denied admission to every UC and Cal State school he had applied to. Their cousin Dat had received a Regents Scholarship to UC Irvine the previous year. Lum’s girlfriend, Quynh, had the option of either attending UC Irvine or Riverside with generous financial aid. Even Linh, who only aspired to work at the family’s salon because she could work any hours she wanted, had been accepted to Cal State Fullerton.

  Lum promised their mother he wouldn’t give up, that he’d study hard in community college and transfer to a Cal State. But instead of enrolling in the college with the high transfer rate down the street from their new house, he enrolled in the same junior college that his friends were going to. Plus, instead of reducing his hours at the florist shop, he took on more after their father refused to pay for a life-drawing class.