The Reeducation of Cherry Truong

by Aimee Phan

  Imagining the letters still in her car, realizing what she knew that they didn’t know, Cherry turned and walked upstairs.

  SAIGON, 2002

  In the cavernous new house, the Trans’ furniture looks outdated and small. While Cam and Cherry unpack boxes around Anh’s crib—another gift from the absentee grandparents—Tham and Grandaunt Tran compile a list of fabrics and shades for dressing the windows and open doorways. Lum screws lightbulbs into the fixtures and the chandelier in the atrium. Xuan and Granduncle hold the ladder.

  To celebrate, Lum takes them out for a seafood dinner in the Cholon district, a restaurant he regularly frequents with his foreign clients. The server shows them to a spacious round table on the second floor beneath several ceiling fans.

  Lum insists that everyone order a dish. Steamed whole catfish, giant crab legs, black bean clams, salt and pepper prawns, deep fried tofu squares, corn and coconut fritters, fragrant gingered bok choy, and garlic broccoli overfill the table until they have enough food for a party twice their size. They maneuver teacups and plates to keep dishes from falling. Tham mashes chunks of catfish into broth and rice with her chopsticks and patiently feeds it to Anh. Cherry eats more than she has in days.

  After dinner, they walk to the nearby outdoor market so Grandaunt can pick up fresh vegetables for lunch and dinner tomorrow. While the rest of the family filters through the market, Lum and Cherry take Anh to a mango cart near the west entrance. Despite the gorging, Lum still needs dessert. Anh grabs a piece of fresh mango from his father’s fingers, and Lum allows him a nibble. The air feels tight and smoky around them, the sky swirling sherbet pollution clouds. Across the street, a group of school children practices a marching routine. They wear identical haircuts and outfits, and Cherry can easily imagine Anh one day chanting and strutting with them.

  * * *

  On her first night back in Saigon, Cherry had shown her brother pictures of his California wedding reception, unsure if Tham should see them, if she would be offended. As he flipped through the photos, laughing, he called for Tham to come into the room, and they giggled at all the flowers and decorations for their make-believe wedding.

  Cherry pulled the pictures away after Lum started mocking the MC’s bouffant hair. “Mom worked really hard on this reception,” she said, holding the photographs to her chest.

  Lum’s forehead creased, his smile fading. “I know that. I’m not laughing at her.”

  He tried to make up for it, complimenting the cake and exclaiming that he couldn’t wait to read the cards from all the guests. But it was too late. He probably thought she was overreacting, and perhaps she was; this was exactly the sort of thing they would have laughed about before.

  * * *

  After they find some plastic chairs under a shaded tree on the outskirts of the market, Cherry pulls out two letters and places them on the table. Lum settles Anh into his lap and then lifts up one of the letters.

  “Haven’t we moved on to e-mails?” he asks.

  “They’re not from me.”

  He opens the first one, reads a few lines and puts it down. He glances at the other letter and sets it aside as well.

  “Where did you get these?” he asks.

  “Grandmère gave me Grandpère’s letters,” Cherry says.

  “And what about Mom’s?”

  “I found hers in Grandmother Vo’s closet a few months ago. A whole box of them. She was going to throw them away.”

  “So that’s what made you think you could take them?”

  “Yes,” Cherry says, sitting back, frowning. “I thought you’d be happy to see them.”

  Lum shakes his head. The look on his face is strange. “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why are you walking around Saigon, in ninety-degree weather, carrying pounds of letters that don’t belong to you?”

  Cherry stares at him. “You’re mad?”

  “This isn’t like you,” he says, shifting Anh to his other knee.

  “How would you know?” she asks. “Maybe this is me. Maybe, unlike the rest of you, I want to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why we keep hurting each other. Why none of us can stop.”

  “Do you really think you can learn that through some old letters?”

  She thinks of her afternoon conversation with Xuan and Cam, and wonders if Lum knew, wondering if he should know. “They’re all I have,” she says.

  Baby Anh snatches the ripe fruit, delightedly squishing the mango in his fist, the bright pulpy juices dribbling between his fingers. Lum reaches over to dab them with a paper napkin.

  “That’s not true,” Lum murmured, looking up at Cherry. “You have me.”

  * * *

  Later that night, while everyone else is ready to sleep, exhausted from the day’s events, Anh will not cooperate. Perhaps unsettled by the central air-conditioning from his new home, he wails in his crib. Tham tries everything. She nurses him, rocks him, coos songs to him. Finally, Lum offers to take the baby on a stroll around the block. Cherry, still writing postcards in the living room of boxes, offers to walk with them. They pull out the bassinet stroller their parents sent, too bulky to use in most of the city streets, but a perfect fit in this new neighborhood.

  Though they are the only occupants on the block, the gaslight streetlamps cast a warm glow on the sidewalk and fresh asphalt—so much energy burning for only one house. If it weren’t for the humidity, Cherry could easily imagine herself in Orange County. She watches the long shadows they create, and attempts to step on her own. Lum adjusts the shade of the bassinet several times, attempting to find the angle that will lull Anh to sleep, but it is useless: the little boy chatters softly, enjoying his midnight ride.

  “He really does look like Grandpère,” Cherry says.

  “Maybe,” Lum says, pulling the shade down. “You know the last time I saw Grandpère, he thought I was Dad?”

  “Really?”

  “He yelled at me,” Lum says. “That’s when I realized he thought I was someone else. He asked me if I was still married to that bitch of a woman. Grandmère had to lock him in his room. She asked me not to say anything.”

  Cherry peers up at her brother. “That’s your last memory of him?”

  “I know. But at least he couldn’t remember it, right? A few hours later, he let me take him out for a walk in the gardens.”

  “But we’re not sure,” Cherry points out. “We’d like to think all he remembers are happy and pretty things, but we don’t know.”

  “I’d like to think he had some peace,” Lum says.

  “Do you think it’s better that way?” Cherry asks. “Having the worst memories erased? Or would you want to know all of it?”

  “I don’t know,” Lum admits. “I think you have to make sense of whatever you have.”

  Cherry gazes at her nephew’s small, still feet. He is finally asleep. They have reached Lum’s house, but instead of strolling up the walkway, they make another loop around the block.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Lum says, his voice slow and thoughtful, “Mom wrote that letter a long time ago, before she even knew who you were going to be.”

  She inhales a breath of hot air. “But what if she was right?”

  Once again, her mother’s letters creep inside her skin, the angriest, most frustrated passages wrapping around her chest; her mother fancifully imagining a family of three, a more manageable number to care for, only one child to support—one dutiful, filial son. It was enough. It was all she wanted. And then this other child had to come along and ruin everything. If Cherry hadn’t been born, things could have been different. Once her mother introduced this possibility, even in decades-old letters, Cherry imagines fulfilling her mother’s wish—of disappearing, of never existing.

  “She was just a scared girl back then,” Lum says. “My age. She was only trying to get her mother to forgive her.”

  “You only read one letter,” she says. “I’ve read all
of them.”

  “And how do you feel?” he asks. “Is it enough? Do you feel like you know her now?”

  “No,” she admits, and merely uttering it, admitting it, feels both painful and exhilarating.

  “See? It doesn’t matter. The things our family did to each other, what we did to each other, they don’t make up who you are. Our mistakes don’t dictate our lives.”

  She looks up to the sky. “Is that why you stayed away?”

  “I don’t know. It was nice to only think of myself for a while, to learn who I was away from them. Maybe you don’t need to move to Vietnam, but you can move on.”

  “I’m trying.”

  They leisurely round another block, listening for some time only to their footsteps. Cherry feels like she can walk this cul-de-sac for hours and never grow tired.

  “She’s been calling me,” Lum finally says, “ever since you arrived. She asks about the baby, but really, she wants to know about you. She wants me to tell her you’re coming back.”

  “Of course,” Cherry says. “I’m all she has left.”

  Lum sighs. “She told me about Dad. He refuses to see a doctor. He thinks his memory is just fine.”

  Cherry’s hand reaches for the stroller bar to balance herself. She thinks about their father, how he wept while dropping her off at the airport this last time. She’d never seen him cry more than in this past year.

  “He’s been talking to me, too,” Lum says. “More than he ever had before. He keeps asking when I’m coming back to visit, so I said maybe over Christmas.”

  Was that what it took? The possibility of their father forgetting their inconvenient past? She doesn’t know what to say. It is everything she has wanted and not wanted, all at once. The grief cancels out the joy cancels out the anger, so she cannot feel anything.

  Cherry glances over her shoulder. The house is dark. They are still alone. “Tell me a story,” she says.

  “What do you want to know?”

  She considers this her opportunity, and she is no longer timid.

  “The afternoon at the Tet Festival,” she says, “what you saw.”

  “Cherry…”

  “Tell me,” she says again. “I need to know how you felt. I promise that by tomorrow, I’ll forget.”

  Lum hesitates, looking around him, even though it is the dead of night. No one else can hear him except her. Looking again at Anh, assured his son is asleep, Lum turns to his sister. Cherry feels her ears, mind, heart opening. He tells her.

  HA LONG BAY, 2002

  Minh Quang, the fishing junk they rented for the day tour through the caves, is large, with cabin seating for at least twenty passengers. Yet, they are only three. The family of crew members (two brothers, their wives, and four children) outnumber Cherry and her cousins. Once the junk pushes off from the dock, Xuan and Cam strip down to their swimsuits to sunbathe.

  “Get out here,” Cam barks from behind her sunglasses. “It’s better if you lie down.”

  “Or I can wait for the Dramamine to kick in,” Cherry says from the safety of the cabin.

  “What kind of Vietnamese are you?” Xuan mocks. “It’s a good thing you were born in America. You never would have survived the ride out.”

  Cherry checks her watch and realizes they still have nine hours before returning to land. The nausea weighs like a cloud in her chest and abdomen. She lies out on a row of seats, using her messenger bag as a pillow, listening to the chug chug of the boat engine. Cherry wishes her brother could have come with them, but there was no way he could leave Tham alone with the baby, even with the Trans’ help.

  Small fingers tickle through her hair. Cherry turns and one of the children, the youngest girl, smiles at her, a dimple in her left cheek. The other kids stand behind her. When Cherry sits up, the older boy points to her bag, which she obligingly opens. They touch everything, her digital camera, her Dramamine, her journal, her purple leather wallet. Cherry asks them to be gentle with the bundles of letters. She lets them take pictures of each other with the camera and promises to mail them copies. Eventually, one of their mothers yells for the children to leave their customer alone.

  The boat captain hollers that they are approaching the first isle of limestone caves. The morning fog has melted off, unveiling more fishing junks around them. Cherry steps out on the deck to join her cousins, who are waving at the tourists and locals passing by. The breeze feels soft and cool. One boat is full of fraternity boys who whistle at Cam, beckoning her to come on board. She shakes her head no, then flashes them.

  Once the boat anchors, Cherry eagerly steps off to join the queue leading into the caves. Inside, she and her cousins shuffle through the line, gazing at the stalagmites and stalactites and the gaudy Christmas lights draped around them. The caves must have been beautiful once—they probably still are—but the rainbow neon lights and fake water fountains remind Cherry of a bad Vietnamese pop-music video. Empty beer bottles and stray trash litter the partitioned walkway and the corners of the caves.

  When the second isle offers more of the same, they request that the captain scrap the caves for the rest of the day. The captain suggests taking them to a secluded bay that none of the other junks know about for kayaking and swimming. They stop at a floating fishing village, where the wives pick up some of the most colorful fish Cherry has ever seen to cook for lunch.

  As promised, the captain takes them to an empty bay of lushly forested islands and islets surrounded and shaded by larger karsts. Some of the faraway limestone islets look like giant sea turtles bubbling to the water’s surface, while others resemble stony skyscrapers. Cam and Xuan race each other to the closest isle, diving off the junk without hesitation. After pulling off her tank top and shorts, Cherry stands at the edge of the boat. She stares into the water, remembering all the gasoline and refuse floating in the harbor. The first time she tried swimming in the ocean was when her parents took them to Mexico for a vacation. While the rest of her family swam through the waves, she was repulsed at how the saltwater burned at her eyes and nostrils. For the rest of the afternoon, she sat on the shoreline, waiting for her parents and Lum to return. But that was many years ago. Behind her, she can hear the children laughing. Instead of looking, Cherry closes her eyes, bends her knees and jumps.

  The bay feels seductively warm, the water gliding around her bare arms and legs like a silky blanket. Cherry blinks a few times and then stretches her arms into a lazy freestyle. Her cousins wave at her from the islet, and Cherry takes her time swimming toward them, enjoying her few minutes alone, yet still in the comfort of their watchful gazes.

  While Cam tries to climb up the limestone’s jagged edges, Cherry and Xuan find a smooth surface to sit and watch her. Occasionally, the water laps up, splashing their feet, trickling between their toes. Xuan and Cam had wanted to come to Ha Long Bay because of Grandmère’s stories. Her ancestors were once fishermen in Ha Long Bay, long before their family migrated to the south.

  “What was Grandpère’s funeral like?” Cherry asks. She has always regretted not attending to support Grandmère.

  “It didn’t rain,” Xuan says, “which he would have approved of. Most of our parish was there, and his friends from the community center. Even Ba Cuc and her family were there, though we didn’t realize at the time who she really was.”

  “How do you think they met?” Cherry asks.

  “I think they knew each other in Vietnam,” Xuan says. “I guess he followed her to Paris.”

  “Or she followed him.”

  He squints, leaning back on his elbows. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  Cherry falls silent. Although she hasn’t opened Grandpère’s letters, she doesn’t trust having them away from her, afraid that if left in Saigon, the Trans will find them, or worse, Lum will throw them out. But perhaps there is another reason she brought them on this trip. Maybe she and her cousins are meant to read them together.

  “I can’t really judge him,” he says, the water glittering off his hai
r. “Not now. People do really stupid things when they think it’s for love.”

  Cam calls out for a hand. Cherry jumps up to help her cousin with a final, slippery step over two mossy boulders. Several nicks decorate her legs, but Cam proudly grins over her accomplishment.

  “Nice view?” Xuan asks.

  “There isn’t a bad one,” she says, collapsing onto the rock, folding her scratched up knees in front of her. She looks around them, happily exhaling. “Maybe we should move here. We’ll get a houseboat and float around. I’ll learn to fish and Xuan can operate the boat.”

  “What about Cherry?” Xuan asks.

  “She’ll be the house doctor,” Cam says, turning to rest her head in Cherry’s lap. “In case any of my cooking makes us sick.”

  “I can barely watch over myself,” Cherry says.

  “You’re being modest,” Xuan says. “You survived one of the worst things that can happen to a person. They can’t teach you that in medical school.”

  Cherry feels her face growing warm. “That doesn’t mean I can take care of anyone.”

  “Yes, you can,” Cam says. “Who’s been holding our passports and getting us to our trains and boat rides on time? Who found the local pharmacy when Xuan got the runs in the middle of the night in Hue? You’re like Grandmère. It’s your nature.”

  “I knew it.” Cherry beams at her cousins. “I should have grown up with you.”

  “Trust me,” Cam says, closing her eyes. “It wasn’t so great on our side of the ocean.”

  “But we could have been together.”

  “We’re together now, right?”

  “I’m going home next week. So are you.”

  “We don’t have to,” Xuan says.

  “But you both have jobs,” Cherry says. “I have school.”

  “They’ll be there when we return,” Cam says, opening her eyes and spotting Cherry’s doubtful expression. “They will.”

  After they’ve had enough sun, they begin swimming back to the Minh Quang. There is no rush, so they float on their backs, admiring the bright blue of the cloudless, open sky. The children are out on the deck, and Cherry waves at them, thinking that lunch must be ready. They stand at the edge of the junk and one of the boys struggles with something in his arms. Cherry floats over on her stomach, treading water, trying to determine what it is. Then a flutter of papers drops from his arms and off the side of the boat. Another. And another. The children are yelling, and one of their mothers emerges on the deck. She roughly yanks at the boy’s arm, pulling him back from the junk’s edge. In his other hand is Cherry’s camera. He was trying to take a picture of them.