by Laura Lam
I had also learned from Mrs Qua that following the death of Son my mother went to one of the village shrines and made a prayer. She had asked the spirits to give her a son.
And indeed Mother gave birth to a baby boy in the Year of the Monkey, 1956. My father named him Trung, meaning Loyalty. He too was delivered by Mrs Qua, and at home. As was the custom, Mrs Qua was presented with a live chicken after the delivery, and my mother was given a bowl of a child’s urine to drink. Following Mrs Qua’s orders, she followed a very strict diet. She had to consume a huge quantity of green tea and eat fish or meat cooked in fish sauce seasoned heavily with black pepper. No citrus or unripe fruit was allowed before six months were up. Every day for an entire month my mother had to lie flat on her stomach on the bamboo bed under which the charcoal was burning. The heat helped tighten her muscles and the belly would return to its normal size rapidly.
My father and I visited a fabric merchant in the village and bought some cotton cloth for Trung and also for me. He paid the merchant with “real” money. This was the first time I’d seen money in paper form. Counting out the correct amount, my father also showed me some bills with the likeness of Uncle Ho (Bac Ho). They were no longer valid, he said, but he’d kept them as a souvenir. I asked him who Uncle Ho was and he answered, “ His name is Ho Chi Minh, the father of our country”. He began telling me a sad story about the childhood years of the great man, who had been born in a war-torn village called Lotus (Kim Lien) in Central Viet Nam. Bac Ho’s name at birth was Nguyen Sinh Cung, my father said. In the year 1901, when Cung was ten years old, his scholarly father had to travel from their home in Hue to Thanh Hoa to supervise an imperial examination – a great honour at the time. Cung’s elder brother accompanied the father during the dangerous journey on horseback, travelling through dense forests, remote hills and mountains that were infested by bandits. The one-way trip alone would take more than a month. Cung was left at home with his pregnant mother. One morning Cung had gone to the village market to buy food and when he returned home he heard the crying sound of a baby – his baby brother. He rushed in, and saw that his mother was lying immobile in bed, next to the newborn baby. He called out to her and shook her shoulders, but there was no breathing. Cung started crying and went to look for the neighbours. For several days he wept and wasn’t able to sleep. After the mother was buried, Cung had to carry the baby from house to house asking for milk. His village had been among the poorest but they did their best to help while waiting for the father to return. By now, Cung’s father had left Thanh Hoa. But on the way home he stopped in Lotus village to build a stone tomb for his parents – a foolish decision on his part.
When he received the news of his wife’s death, he hurried back to Hue, but it was already too late to return in time for the funeral. He felt deep regret and became angry with himself. For young Cung, the sudden loss of his mother under such tragic circumstances was the saddest experience in his childhood years. When my father ended the story, I said to him, “It’s terribly sad. Is this a real story, Daddy?”
“Absolutely! It’s a true story. Now you have a baby brother too. Will you help your mama to look after him?”
“Of course I will, Daddy!”
When my baby brother was three months old, a major family expedition took place. The cause was my birth certificate. Issued originally by the village authorities under the Viet Minh, mine and all certificates like it were considered invalid under the Diem regime once it took over from the French in 1954. It was necessary for me to have a “substitute birth certificate” issued by the Civil Court of Can Tho, and this meant a personal appearance before the court. We would stay at the house of Uncle Nam.
My mother had made two new blouses for me – one pink and one purple – and trousers to match. She also cut my hair to shoulder length and I wore a pair of gold earrings my father had given me for the occasion. He’d always felt a girl ought to own one good piece of jewellery, even when her family was poor. My baby brother wore a yellow T-shirt and nothing else. Father put on his usual outfit – beige khaki shirt and matching trousers. Mother had on a green silk blouse and black satin trousers. He wore black leather sandals. She and I went barefoot, as always.
Uncle Muoi accompanied us, paddling the sampan. He wore a black cotton outfit, a checked scarf in black and white around his neck, and on his head a non la, the typical Vietnamese conical straw hat. About half way to Thanh Chau town my father insisted on taking over the paddling from Uncle Muoi. It ended with my mother scolding him, “When it comes to physical labour, you’re quite useless, Master! Here, let me do it.” And she did.
It took us about three hours to reach the busy town. The sky was clear and bright. I was immediately astonished by the sights and the masses of people. The land had little greenery and no palm leaf houses. Standing against the blue sky were colossal buildings of various styles and textures. For the first time I saw bicycles, cyclos, cars, buses – all in a blur of traffic. And gray smoke with a strange smell. Machines were honking and making horrendous noises. People filled the streets, so many of them – talking so fast, running, pushing, shouting – and they dressed differently. Most people, especially the women, wore such elegant clothes, all colours imaginable. The openair market was a giant cornucopia of food and household items.
I wanted to taste everything. I couldn’t make up my mind. My baby brother glued himself to my mother’s breast while my father took me through the market. Such was my amazement and confusion that finally he had to choose something for me. He bought me a bowl of noodle soup with meatballs and shrimp – delicious! – and for himself a package of steamed glutinous rice in fruit puree – a disappointment to me because we had it regularly in our village. My mother, meanwhile, had grilled chicken and rice noodles with vegetables. We also bought several varieties of small cakes for me to take on the bus. I plagued my father with questions. “Why are they so rich?” “Why are we so poor?” “Why did you choose such a poor place for us to live?” My father answered that it had been my mother’s decision to stay in the village, but that we needn’t live there forever. “We might even move to Sai Gon,” he said, “so that you can go to a proper school.”
We boarded an enormous bus that took us all the way to Can Tho, a place that would prove to be even more astonishing. Uncle Nam’s house was some distance from the bus station, and we had to take two cyclos. As gifts to Uncle Nam and his wife, we carried two live chickens and a dozen live fish in a large tin, half-filled with water. We finally arrived at their villa and stood on the threshold in our normal bare feet, afraid to walk onto the clean and shiny tiled floor. Nam came out to greet us with his wife’s mother. We gave her the chickens and the fish. A solidly built man with a broad and pleasant face, he was dressed in civilian clothing, a short-sleeved yellow shirt and dark trousers. His mother-in-law appeared to be in a pleasant mood, but I sensed that she was not thrilled with our visit.
Nam offered to take my mother and me to buy sandals at a market nearby but my mother refused, so he instructed the maid to find some Japanese slippers for us. My mother and I wore them for a short time, then went back to bare feet.
We met Nam’s wife just before lunch, an attractive woman with long curly black hair and dark complexion. Her face was oval and she had very nice teeth. She was very talkative, with a domineering voice.
We all sat around a long table with a white cloth on top. Out in the garden a nurse was taking care of my brother. Uncle Nam lifted me from the French tile floor and he sat me next to him. The maid had already placed a large cushion on the chair as a booster for me. Nam asked me what dishes I liked best. How could I answer him? There were too many and I felt my mother’s eyes on me constantly, worried I might spill food on the white tablecloth. Nam wanted to know about my schooling and I told him I had started school only a few months before. He asked me, “Do you know how to write your name?” I nodded. He then asked me to tell him how to spell his name.
After lunch Nam said he would take us
to the Court in his car, which was parked in front of the house. Unused to automobiles and awkward in her slippers, my mother nearly fell down while she tried to get in the car. I felt as if I was on my way to heaven but my mother just stared out the window, rigid, looking as though she was having trouble with breathing. Whenever we stopped for a red light or at an intersection, Nam turned to talk to me, pointing out the sights in his warm and clear voice. I liked Uncle Nam. I liked his piercing but gentle eyes.
My father had taught me and made me rehearse what I was to say to the judge in Can Tho. I could recite perfectly my birth date, the place I was born, and my full name. We were told to return in a month’s time to collect the certificate.
Years later, the subject came up, and I asked my father about the cost of my substitute birth certificate. He said, “ It ought to have cost only a few piasters, at least as far as the government fee was concerned. However, your aunt-in law said that we would only get it if we let her make the ‘arrangements’ for us, and she made me pay her in cash – an amount that was enough to buy a thousand chicken eggs.” My father admitted that the cost of this piece of paper had wiped out a good portion of his savings at the time.
That evening, at Uncle Nam’s house, I saw an electric light bulb for the first time. I couldn’t understand what it was doing, hanging upside down, instead of sitting in a base like a kerosene lamp. I couldn’t sleep, partly because of excitement but also because of the street noise. I tiptoed to the balcony outside my room. There, in a daze, I watched the fast moving cars, the slow peddling cyclos, the hurrying street vendors, the laughing of people out late on the streets, and, shining above all, the bright electric street lights. What my father had said to me in Thanh Chau – that we might end up living in Sai Gon one day – became that night my most fervent wish.
Nam talked to my parents about the problem of safety in the villages and about schooling for me and later for my brother. Although he couldn’t say so directly, he must have known full well that the Diem regime was going to take an increasingly hard line against the former Viet Minh and the delta villages. As a known stronghold of underground resistance, Truong An would be targeted for reprisals. Uncle Nam tried to convince my mother, “Big Sister, I think you all should move out of Truong An. You may come to Can Tho and live near us, or to Sai Gon to be near my brother Nghiem’s family.” But my mother would hear none of it, “I know what you are saying. But it’s not easy just to move out of the village and move into the city like that. Thank you any way, for your concern.” For one thing, her life and her family were in Truong An. For another, they were resolutely opposed to everything Nam stood for. In her mind, he was the enemy of the village.
* * *
On the eighth of October, 1956, without a word of warning to me, my father disappeared from the village. He didn’t even say goodbye. I didn’t pay much attention at first – he had been absent before without explanation. I waited for him at the house entrance that evening as usual, but there was no sign of him. It was raining heavily and I thought that he might have been caught in the storm, so I continued to wait until my mother ordered me to bed. I asked her where he was and she said he would return “later,” but she said it in a tone that suggested she didn’t want to hear anything more about it. I started pestering my grandmother. Where was he? I wanted to know.
She said he’d gone to Can Tho for his asthma.
His asthma? I asked. My father suffered intermittently from asthma as I did, but he hadn’t had any recent attacks that I knew of.
But Uncle Nam, I knew, lived in Can Tho. Had he gone to visit Uncle Nam? But if he’d gone to visit Uncle Nam, why hadn’t he told me?
My grandmother simply shrugged.
More time passed and there was still no sign of him.
I pressed my grandmother again. She became evasive.
“But where has he gone? You have to tell me!”
She didn’t answer. Finally, her voice grave, her expression sombre, she said, “To Sai Gon, Hoa Lai. He’s gone to Sai Gon.”
“To Sai Gon? But why?”
“For work,” she said.
“Work?” I asked. “What work? And why didn’t he even say goodbye?”
I began to cry.
My grandmother took me in her arms and explained that he hadn’t said goodbye to me because he was afraid that I’d be too distraught. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. I had never felt so betrayed, abandoned. I cried for a long time. That night I refused to eat. I went to bed instead but couldn’t sleep. My grandmother wasn’t sleeping either and I saw her wiping her own tears.
I asked her again, “Grandma, are you sure he’s coming back?”
She answered, “Yes, I’m sure.”
Somehow I doubted her. Her distressed look made me feel there must be something very wrong. When my brother Son died, hadn’t I been told he would come back? If they hadn’t told me the truth then, why should I trust them this time? How did I know my father wasn’t dead?
Some months later, however, my father returned to Truong An for a short visit. He had gone to Sai Gon where he’d taken a job with the Ministry of Transportation and his work was to help maintain and protect the country’s roads and waterways. For the next seven years, I would see him only on sporadic visits. It would be many more years before I learned the real reason he had left and why his departure had been so sudden.
* * *
One evening in the dry season of the Year of the Rooster, 1957, my grandmother had just prepared supper. She had cooked fluffy fragrant rice, and made my favourite caramelised fish dish. That afternoon I’d gone fishing with my cousin Dzung and had caught a large goby from the stream. Dzung was like my big brother. He was born in the Year of the Pig, 1947, the third son of Uncle Phan. He had a round face and a pale complexion. His eyes were bright and they welled with tears whenever he saw my mother hitting me.
We went fishing together at least twice a week. I owned a tall bamboo basket with a narrow neck, the shape of a squash. My fishing rod was also made of bamboo. I used earthworms and cicadas as baits. Sometimes I caught nothing, and Dzung would divide his fish and give me half. “Tell your mother you caught them yourself if she asks.” This day Dzung was very pleased with my catch and on the way home kept looking inside my bamboo basket, “ You’re lucky to have caught a goby, Hoa Lai!” He himself had caught several large anabas and two catfish. His mother would turn the anabas into a sweet and sour soup and the catfish would be grilled over the fire.
I gave the fish to my grandmother, “Grandma! Now I will go to the back garden and pick out a perfumed squash, the largest one on the trellis.” My grandmother and I were going to eat by ourselves. My mother had gone to see her mother, taking my baby brother with her.
“Now come and sit down at the dining table, Hoa Lai!” instructed my grandmother, while she was scooping out the steamed squash into a serving bowl. Since the day she arrived in the village we had begun to use her blue and white china, but it was still not her best dinnerware, and some pieces were chipped. Her best china remained stored in a metal trunk.
Suddenly violent sounds burst above our heads, a terrible hissing and whistling. I immediately rushed to her and asked, “Is somebody getting hurt now Grandma?” (Some weeks earlier, I’d been at my maternal grandmother’s house when a visitor had imitated just those same hissing and whistling sounds. Then she followed these immediately with human crying sounds and her face went agape with an expression of horror. Hung and I had just come into the house, and, seeing us, Uncle Muoi’s wife interrupted the lady and signaled her to stop telling the story. In my family, they kept many secrets from young children.)
Now, as I clung to her, my grandmother told me, “Stop asking such foolish questions, my child! Of course no one is getting hurt. The noises will go away soon. Let’s go and have our dinner.” We sat down at the table and began eating. I heard another whistling sound, and then another one, and another one. She too was afraid but continued eating, pretending to igno
re what was going on around us.
We finished dinner quickly, and, just as she had said it would, the noise did stop.
The next day I went to a friend’s house to play and there I overheard the adults talking about “roc-ket”. I asked my friend Lien, but she didn’t know what a “roc-ket” was. I went on playing until my grandmother came to collect me, but on the way home I asked her the same question. She didn’t answer till we were inside. With me on her lap, she began explaining to me about the “roc-ket” and the other strange sounds we had heard.
“They’re the same noises you would hear,” she said to me, “if you were out in the deep jungle in the middle of the night.”
“But what makes those sounds in the deep jungle, grandma?” I asked.
“When the lion is growling you hear ‘rrhaaaa,’” she said, imitating the lion’s roar. “And when there’s a strong wind, what do you hear? ‘Sssshheeeesh.’ ”. She gazed at me. “And the ‘rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tattat?’ That’s a very big rainstorm. Very big!”
I accepted these explanations willingly enough – after all, she was my grandmother and she knew everything. But soon afterwards I learned that neither she nor anyone else was able to shield us from the sounds and the terrors of war.
One day, when we returned after one particularly fierce and prolonged raid and reached our house – or what had been our house – we stood in shock, unable to believe our eyes. The building no longer existed. In its place was a heap of ashes, in which the only recognizable object was the pendulum of the grandfather clock. My grandmother’s trunk of blue china, although not burned, had been taken by looters (shortly afterwards items of our porcelain started to appear in other village households; we eventually retrieved nearly half of them).