The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

by Aimee Phan

  “When was I going to do that?”

  “You know we have to file those papers soon. I wrote to my mother weeks ago.”

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” he promised, closing his eyes, suddenly aware of his aching shoulders and calves. He leaned forward, trying to stretch his cramped spine.

  She didn’t answer him. Silence gave way to the sound of the simmering soup pot, the water faucet turning on and off, and the occasional padding of Tuyet’s slippers on the linoleum kitchen floor. Sanh extended his legs in the living room, watching as Lum tried again to eat his crayon.

  “No,” Sanh firmly said, pulling the crayon away from his son’s face.

  “Carrot,” Lum said in English, pointing again to his coloring book, where an upright bunny was munching on the vegetable.

  “Yes,” Sanh replied in English. “Carrot, here. But this is a crayon. You can’t eat a crayon.”

  Only four years old and Lum’s English was catching up with his Vietnamese. His son had been attending English courses at the refugee resource center for the past month, and Sanh found his pronunciation so articulate, so precocious, he wanted to call his mother in France. Maybe Lum would take after his father and find languages more addictive than science or mathematics. But Sanh could only call France on Sundays, and even then he only had ten minutes. Overwhelmed with how much he needed to say, he often said very little, hoping, praying that his silence could somehow express how much he missed them.

  * * *

  That night, his family did their best to help Tuyet feel comfortable. At dinner, his mother asked about Tuyet’s favorite dish, and promised to pick up the ingredients from the market the next morning. Trinh and Ngoan offered some of their clothing to Tuyet until she could arrange for her belongings to arrive. Even Sanh’s father deigned a polite smile and occasional nod when they spoke of their plans for a quiet, simple wedding ceremony.

  While the women helped clean up dinner, Sanh joined his father in the alley for a cigarette. The scent of fresh magnolia flowers from his mother’s window box mingled with rotting garbage in the dumpster.

  “This should be a relief to your mother,” his father said. “Those matchmakers had branded you an eternal bachelor.”

  Sanh ignored the insinuation. His parents had hired two matchmakers, both family friends. But after four awkward dinners, with four different, but equally shallow girls who expected Sanh to look and act like his older brothers, Sanh declared that he’d tired of matchmaking.

  “She’s smarter than anyone you could have found for me,” Sanh retorted.

  “I don’t doubt that,” Hung said. “She is very, very smart.”

  Sanh glared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Hung exhaled a long drag and cocked his head. “She’s not in love with you.” He said it with such cheerfulness, such a lack of surprise, that Sanh had to look away.

  “You don’t know her,” Sanh said. “You haven’t even spoken to her.”

  “Am I wrong?” Hung asked. “You know I’m not. Why not admit it to your father, if no one else?”

  He knew his father was goading him into an argument. It was something he often did, and Sanh fell for it almost every time. Unlike Yen, who enjoyed debating and never took it personally, or Phung, whom their father usually avoided, Hung’s deliberate remarks often burrowed into Sanh’s memory, keeping him awake and brooding long after everyone in the house had fallen asleep.

  “Are you going to oppose the marriage?” Sanh asked.

  “When this could be your only shot?” Hung smiled. “No. This is your choice. Perhaps you will surprise me.”

  * * *

  There were times Sanh didn’t mind the job, especially when he, Carlos, and the other custodians sat on the basketball courts and shared a cigarette, or when he had a few minutes during the classroom sweeps to peruse the books that Lum and his younger sibling would read and learn from one day. During their weekly call from France, Sanh’s father had requested that if the second child was a boy, his name be Etienne. As for a girl, his research continued. Sanh suspected his father chose the name to remind him they should be in France. Thoughts of the new baby lifted Sanh’s spirits.

  He dreaded lunch duty most. Sanh found the students’ young, petulant voices grating, their slang and garbling of their birth language offensive. It frustrated him that some children would mock his accent when walking past him, believing their English to be superior. He hoped to teach Lum and his younger sibling to articulate, to take pride in every word they spoke. The earlier lunch hour for the lower division grades was not as irritating as the later hour with the older children, who were noisier, rowdier, and deliberately messier.

  As Sanh tied up two garbage bags, he saw Carlos on the other side of the cafeteria leaning over to pick up a milk carton from the floor. But before he straightened up, a crumpled lunch sack sailed across the room, bouncing off Carlos’s hip. When Carlos looked up, trying to determine where the bag came from, only titters came from a table full of fifth-graders. Carlos resumed picking up the stray trash, but Sanh was watching. Only a few seconds later, a boy stood at the table, a bag in his hands, his forearms creating a graceful arc, similar, Sanh recognized, to throwing a basketball. When the boy released the sack into the air, which brushed past Carlos’s elbow, Sanh had already crossed the cafeteria.

  He hadn’t really thought about what he would do or say after reaching the snickering boys, but he did feel immense satisfaction watching their faces tense in terror as he grabbed the back of the boy’s shirt.

  “What is wrong with you?” Sanh screamed, refusing to let go of the boy’s shirt collar as he attempted to squirm out of his grip. “Do you treat your brother this way? Your father?”

  Carlos would later tell him that the other boys and girls yelled at Sanh to let go, that their cries had alerted the teacher chaperones on duty, who should have been watching the brats in the first place. But what surprised Sanh was that his attempts to talk to the boy had not even been understood, that of all the languages Sanh could speak, the one he chose was Vietnamese. Gibberish to these American school kids. Ching-chong crazy talk.

  In America, the vice principal said, adults could not touch students in a threatening manner, even for disciplinary purposes. It was against the law. Because Sanh was a new refugee, because of all the hardships he and his family had endured from the war and relocation, because he clearly did not understand the rules of his new country, the school would release him from his duties quietly, without alerting the school board. They would talk to the boy’s parents and hopefully persuade them to understand. Carlos gave him a ride home after he cleaned out his personal locker and surrendered his school keys and identification card.

  “My brother works for the water company,” Carlos said. “I’ll ask him if he knows of any work.” He patted Sanh’s arm, and Sanh regretted no longer having work hours to spend with his new friend.

  When he stepped into the apartment four hours early, he braced himself for Tuyet to bark at him. Instead, he found the apartment empty, a basket of clean laundry in the middle of the living room. Sanh checked the calendar. Lum’s language preschool and Tuyet’s sewing class did not meet today. He looked inside the refrigerator: plenty of food.

  Sanh sat in the living room and turned on the television, waiting, and taking down the toll-free numbers of the technical college commercials that flashed across the screen. When Tuyet walked in two hours later, holding Lum’s hand, a man was with them, walking closely behind.

  “You remember Thao,” Tuyet said, a hand on her hip, sighing irritably, maybe from the heat, or the pregnancy. Four weeks from full term, Tuyet grew weary walking anywhere with her large belly and swollen feet. “He gave us a ride to the grocery store.”

  Lum reached his arms for Sanh, who obligingly picked him up. Lum’s hands felt sticky and he smelled like cherries.

  The former naval officer remained as unfriendly as Sanh remembered. He’d recently arrived in the States. His wife and tw
o daughters still lived in Vietnam. When Tuyet asked him to stay for dinner, he declined, saying he needed to go back to his sister’s apartment. They lived in Westminster, north of Tustin, where he said other refugees had been placed. After Thao left, Sanh wanted to know how they had run into each other again, but before he could ask, she interrogated him first.

  She could have taken it worse. No screaming or tearing off to the bedroom. No angry outburst, which made him feel even more terrible. Instead, she sank into the crooked dining room chair, the one Sanh had promised to fix days ago. Tuyet put a hand on the package of diapers she purchased that afternoon. Should she return these?

  “No,” Sanh said, letting a squirming Lum down to patter to the television. He walked over to sit next to his wife. “We need the diapers.”

  “What about my mother? What about sponsoring my family? You promised we’d take care of them now, Sanh.”

  His wife did not cry easily. She hadn’t cried when they reunited after his two years in the reeducation prison, or on their boat to Malaysia when they lost direction for three days and believed they’d starve to death. The only time he remembered his wife breaking down happened the day before their escape from Saigon, when they learned Sanh’s father could not buy enough seats to bring Tuyet’s mother and siblings with them. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother in person, even when Sanh offered to go with her. The same despondent expression colored her face now. She wiped her nose on her blouse sleeve while one of Lum’s cartoon characters happily sang from the living room.

  “I’m going to the refugee resource center tomorrow,” Sanh said. “And Carlos said his brother may know of something. I’ll find another job. We also have my mother’s jewelry. We could try to sell the pieces if we really need money.”

  “I wish my mother was here,” Tuyet said, her lower lip jutting out.

  “What would she know that we don’t? This country will be new to her, too.”

  She shook her head, half-smiling in that secretive manner of hers. “You don’t know. My mother knows how to find money.”

  “I can take care of us,” he said. “I will.”

  * * *

  Sanh and Tuyet’s two-month wedding anniversary marked the start of monsoon season. And the Communists infiltrating the south. As high-ranking government officials fled for Thailand or Taiwan, Sanh spent his last days at the ministry with his coworkers shredding documents. Phung returned home with dispiriting reports of South Vietnamese soldiers dropping their weapons and fleeing. Refugees from the countryside already blotted the streets, setting up tents and camps on every available meter of sidewalk. Sanh’s mother and the servants stockpiled water and rice. No one knew how long the electricity and water would stay on after the Communists entered the city.

  Rocket attacks, so terrifying on the first night, quickly integrated into the city chorus of thunder from the monsoon season. Abiding by the twenty-four-hour curfew, the family remained inside, Hung compulsively locking and relocking all their doors and windows. The children stayed upstairs with their grandmother.

  As Phung was adjusting the radio to listen for news reports, a bullet shattered the kitchen window, spraying glass across the wooden dining table and floor. Trinh and Ngoan screamed, running up the stairs to the children. After waiting a few minutes to make sure no additional gunshots followed, Sanh crept into the kitchen, and peered out the window. The alley was empty, but a few other windows down the street had been blown out as well.

  Phung had promised to deliver a message to a fellow officer’s family, and Sanh agreed to go to Tuyet’s family’s home to make sure everyone was safe. Hoa didn’t want them to leave, but Phung was determined to honor his friend’s last request. Tuyet gave Sanh a small envelope to give to her mother. “This goes only to her,” she said. “Don’t let anyone else in the family take it from you.”

  Sanh and Phung accessed alleys to cross the city. Phung led, compulsively changing their route according to the changes in the steady thumping of gunshots and mortar fire. So distracted by the chaos around them—like the small boy rooting through the purse of a mangled bargirl on the sidewalk—Sanh probably would have walked right into a sniper’s line of fire.

  Many of the house numbers had been hidden or destroyed, but finally Sanh found the Vos’ address. Though the exterior had been vandalized with spray paint and the garden was littered with trash, its former grandeur was evident. While Phung walked across the street, trying to find his friend’s house, Sanh walked up the broken brick path to his wife’s former home.

  After he knocked on the front door several times, a faint voice inside asked who he was.

  “I’m Sanh Truong,” he said. “Tuyet’s husband.”

  The door cracked opened. A tall, thin man with a mustache and longish hair peered out. From Tuyet’s photographs, Sanh recognized Thang, Tuyet’s older brother, the one who ran the family drug business. The man looked him up and down. “So you’re the fool,” he said.

  “Your brother-in-law,” Sanh said.

  The man shrugged. Such a casual gesture, yet it made Sanh want to strike him in the face.

  “Tuyet wanted to make sure you were all right,” Sanh said, suddenly incensed that he wasted all this time battling the crowds across the city, risking injury, for this ingrate.

  “Oh, you can tell dear sister we are doing just fine,” Thang said. “She shouldn’t concern herself with us anymore.”

  “I’ll let her know,” Sanh said. As he angrily turned to leave, he remembered Tuyet’s letter in his pocket. When he looked back at the door, he saw that Thang was still watching him, an unsettling smirk on his face, until an M-16 spraying bullets nearby startled both of them. But when Sanh took a step toward the house, Thang shut the door. Sanh ran down the block and found Phung on the next street.

  A few blocks ahead, a crowd had swarmed and was looting a row of stores. A mother and daughter dragged a twin mattress down the street. As he followed Phung, Sanh tore open the envelope. Tuyet’s letter was short and barely legible, unlike the clean handwriting he remembered when she transcribed notes at the ministry.

  Phung stopped in front of a deserted grocery store where a naked toddler wept beside a burning garbage can. Kneeling at the boy’s side, Phung asked where his family was, but the boy only continued to sob. Sanh held the letter up to his face.

  Please accept my humblest apologies for my betrayal and deceit. I made a grave mistake marrying against your wishes. You are my first family, the only one I shall honor, and I will do anything I can to earn your forgiveness.

  A teenage girl ran up to them, grabbing the hand of the little boy and dragging him away. Phung turned to Sanh, who threw the letter into the burning trashcan.

  “What was that?” Phung asked as they ran down the street, avoiding a broken bicycle in the middle of the intersection.

  “Nothing important,” Sanh said.

  * * *

  The waiting room at the refugee resource center was full of mostly Vietnamese men, a few with their children. Lum kept shaking his sandals off, dangling them from his toes, before flinging the shoes across the room, under the folding chairs onto the gummy, hair-infested floor. Though Sanh roughly scolded him each time, Lum considered it a game until his father finally forced the boy to sit in his lap, which didn’t please Lum at all. He whined for his mother, and elbowed his father in the chest.

  “Where is his mother?” the man sitting next to him asked. He had on a baseball cap and a toothpick dangling from his teeth.

  “Cosmetology seminar,” Sanh said. “It lasts all day.” It was the only reason he agreed to watch Lum, after a wall-bending screaming match with Tuyet. She had to take notes and practice hand massages and manicures, while Sanh only had to wait at the resource center, again, applying for jobs he’d never get, again. To stop the neighbors from stomping on their ceiling, Sanh finally relented.

  “You’re kinder to your wife than I am,” the man said. “We have four kids and they go where she goes. Usually s
he leaves them at her sister’s.”

  “We don’t have any family here yet,” Sanh said.

  “Lucky you,” the man said.

  He hadn’t mentioned anything to his parents about losing his job, only listened as they talked about Yen’s apartment in the Latin Quarter, the Chinatown district that had a decent amount of Vietnamese vegetables and groceries, how the kids could already speak conversational French to their parents. Though Lum’s articulation was impressive, he was lazy about practicing his vocabulary, in part because Tuyet continued to speak to him in Vietnamese.

  Last week, Sanh had thought it made sense to apply only for jobs that required one bus route, no longer than a half hour. That way, he could stay closer to home in case Tuyet went into labor. But this morning, Sanh applied for every position posted on the job announcements boards along the hallway, from Fullerton to Laguna Beach: administrative, custodial, technical, manual. If he could get an interview, if he could only talk to someone, he could explain why he needed the job, why he would never mess up again.

  “My wife is going to have our second child,” Sanh told the employment counselor, as he did every time. His eyes avoided the stacks of other applications on Mr. Stoops’s desk. “She is very worried about our finances.”

  “There are many refugees looking for work,” Mr. Stoops said. “We have to be patient.”

  “I don’t think my wife has any more patience,” Sanh admitted, remembering how Tuyet locked herself in the bathroom the night before.

  The fight had begun after Sanh decided he wouldn’t pawn his mother’s jewelry, arguing it was more important to preserve it for their children. Tuyet insulted the jewelry, calling it worthless anyway, throwing it in his face before retreating to the bathroom. Through the closed door, she threatened to leave him if he didn’t get a job in another week; she could find another man to take care of her and the children.

  The counselor looked up from his paperwork, his deeply tanned face concerned. “Is there a domestic situation we need to discuss?” he asked.