Postcards From Nam

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “I love your song, Mi Chau,” he kept at it, “and I…love you.”

  I stopped playing to look into his almond eyes, wide open and tearful. His lips trembled; his nostrils palpitated beneath the red tip of his slender nose. He looked weak and vulnerable. In his adolescent way, he was also beautiful, like a baby nightingale with drooping wings, caught in the tropical rain of the Far East.

  “I love…your hands. The way you play. The way your long hair falls to one side of your face. The way the corner of your mouth curls up in your concentration…”

  Such a child! His hands shook, his almond eyes watery and blurred. I was not exactly moved. Nam was just a boy. He did not know how to love. Love was something that happened between adults. Furthermore, Nam would not be the type fitted to love a young woman like me. He would grow up gambling, baking honeyed biscottes, at best drawing and painting cartes postales. I, with my grandmother’s aristocratic training and knowledge of life, would move on to much better things.

  So that day I ignored Nam’s tearful eyes and returned to Beethoven’s “Für Elise” while he watched. The music turned crescendo, taking on a faster pace. Fa la do fa mi mi re ti la la sol fa mi re do ti la ti la sol la ti do. I went about my business.

  Nam saw my nonchalance. He lowered his head:

  “Mi Chau, I’ll find out on my own. I’ll find out the name of your tune. I’ll find out who wrote it. And I will always love you.”

  Even though I tried to be cool, I felt a little dab in my heart at the broken sound of his trembling voice. After he left, I felt bad and could practice no more. I closed the lid of my piano and stared out at the window for a long time.

  How I longed to see the pair of almond eyes again, on a pale teenage boy, to whom I could say sorry.

  4. MY SEARCH FOR NAM

  In America, the regaining of my memory of Nam meant I lost my peace.

  In the first ten years of my life after the fall of Saigon, occasionally, like threatening thunderstorms and piercing winds, unwanted images flashed through my head and disturbing sensations crept past the core of my bones, permeating through the joints of my limbs. In those moments, I relived our departure from Saigon at the end of the war. I saw myself running on bare feet in a dark night on the airport runway underneath a sky full of stars that lit up and then quickly died out when a gray metal wall took over. The wall became the back of a cargo plane, resembling a cold, gray shark that opened its mouth and swallowed me in, together with hundreds of awe-struck Vietnamese who wept. The incapacitating coldness of the floor of the plane underneath my feet traveled to my heart, and then the terrible spinning headache spread to my temples. I was a lone traveler, and the road ahead was reduced into a dot of light dashing through the darkest of night, without a clear course.

  In America, I often wiped those haunting images from my mind with a will to forget, a will so strong it felt as though I could structure and engineer my own rebirth. But certain parts of memories came back with enduring effect. On April 30, 1975, as I was standing in line to get food at the refugee camp in Guam, the GI working the food line told us that Saigon had surrendered to advancing Communist troops, and Russian tanks were rolling onto the presidential Independence Palace. I remember so vividly the feelings and the sight of the crowd upon hearing the news. It was as though time had stopped and the world froze. There was no crying. No discussion. No reaction. Just a bunch of people, completely lost and dazed in a frozen space. And then I ran as fast as I could back to the tent where my parents were. I dropped the food, and my ankles pained me. The sight of my grandmother circled my head, and the light of life around me became the signal of death. I made up my mind then and there that to survive this pain and confusion, instantaneously I had to transform myself from Mi Chau of Saigon to a new being, some teenager of America, or anywhere the next plane would take us.

  Then, America became my reincarnation.

  Of necessity, reincarnation involved the wiping out of memory of a past life.

  But I, too, the cocky and studious teenager of my former Saigon, have my own secret to bear about my escape from South Vietnam. My share of bad luck. At the gate of Tan Son Nhat airport, I decided in a split second to leave my parents to go back home to get my grandmother. I could not bear the thought of leaving the country without her. So I took my moped and headed home, against Mom and Dad’s wishes.

  But Grandma Que refused to leave, for fear that an old woman like her would hamper our chance of escape on a plane under that American evacuation plan. So, as the day died down, I sat in front of our townhouse in the alley of District Eight, crying, until Nam came by and got me back up on my feet, with the promise that I had to go on, because he would take care of Grandma Que for me. Nam gave me the strength to get back to the airport.

  On the way back to the airport, something happened to me, too, but that had to be the story for another day, even another life. I could not allow myself to be immobilized with that part of memory. It just had to go.

  That was how I forgave myself for having forgotten Nam. I blamed it on my constructed amnesia of a painful past.

  Yet I have never been unable to ignore his postcards.

  All those beautiful and confusing postcards!

  In one of his later postcards, Nam drew a picture of a woman wearing a Vietnamese cone hat, with her eyes closed into two slanting ink strokes under two arches of brows, delicate and soft. Her hair was pulled back into a bun behind her hat. The postcard said:

  Mi Chau, I was not with her when she died. I am very sorry I let you down. Nam.

  I held Nam’s postcard in my two hands, shaking and crying uncontrollably until I felt dehydrated. My eyes, throat, and skin were cracking, and liquid was sucked out of me, and I was ready to die like a dehydrated, crumbled leaf, losing its stem, forever departing from its tree, tumbling down, down, down until it could fall no farther, onto a damp ground where it gradually disappeared into the earth. Back to its roots.

  It was the first time I could openly cry for my grandmother and mourn her lonely and painful death in Vietnam. It took a postcard from Nam to unleash the river of tears.

  I knew then that storing Nam’s postcards in a cosmetics box was not enough. I had to do something. I just did not know what.

  Shortly after I received the drawing of the reclining woman, another postcard arrived. This time, Nam drew the figure of a man dancing on stage.

  The stage seemed to float at sea. The blue ink strokes depicted immense, angry waves. The dancing man was alone, a skinny figure in black ink, with his eyes closed and his mouth curving downward. He stood on a red stage, amid an ocean of turbulent blue.

  This time, Nam talked of his life:

  Mi Chau, when I was living in an overcrowded refugee camp, thinking of you kept me alive. I am now working hard to help my family, still in Vietnam. I work in a bar serving foreigners. I am very alone, but I still want to take care of you. Love, Nam.

  It was obvious Nam was trying to tell me how unhappy he was. Nam had no future working in a bar in Bangkok. He needed to go to school in America. Those days, in the late eighties and early nineties, the media occasionally reported to the world about the treacherous conditions of refugee camps in Southeast Asian countries. The resettlement of these refugees had evolved into a burden for the free world, especially in non-Communist neighboring countries where the refugees’ boats kept arriving. Many of these countries turned the refugees away from their shores. Others turned the burden over to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Vietnamese “Boat People” waited for years in isolated, unsanitary camps; many were repatriated; others, forgotten by the free world.

  I construed Nam’s postcard to mean that Nam, like most desperate, misplaced refugees, wanted financial help and a way out of Thailand, to America perhaps. While I could guess at Nam’s motivation, I never understood why he would not let me have his return address in Bangkok.

  I bought a money order for one thousand dollars and set out to locate Nam in Thailand. I
wanted to send him money, but more than that, I wanted to help him with a new life in the US, making America the real promised land for an old friend. Nam became my project—the symbol for my pursuit of nobility and the return to my roots. In addition, I also volunteered pro bono for a human rights project dealing with the repatriation of Boat People, coordinated by a group of public interest lawyers based in New York City. Thus, in addition to my law job, I had on my shoulders two projects: the “Help Nam Project” and the “Human Rights Pro Bono Project.” I did all this for Nam and all the Nams of the world. I was determined to overcome my engineered amnesia about Vietnam that way.

  I used the Human Rights Pro Bono Project to help me locate Nam. I contacted several New York City public interest lawyers whom I worked with, the Ford Foundation–sponsored lobby group on Southeast Asian affairs, and various churches, including the United States Catholic Charity, working with Southeast Asian refugees. I called upon lawyer friends and acquaintances at the State Department, the Department of Justice, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and as many humanitarian and public interest groups involved in Asian affairs as possible. My mother helped put together Nam’s biographical sketch based on what we knew of his family in the past. I attached his latest postcard to the biographical sketch, which together served as the necessary ID for the search.

  After months of phone calls, as I had exhausted all of my contacts and had engaged all possible organizations in the search for Nam, one of my colleagues in the DC bar, a public interest lawyer named David Daugherty, called me one day with Nam’s address in Bangkok. They had located him.

  “How did my friend find my address in America to send me postcards all this time?” I asked David.

  “There are United Nations groups and volunteer services working with immigration authorities onsite in those refugee camps. An intelligent person should be able to trace you down.”

  “My friend is an intelligent, resourceful person, in your opinion?”

  “It appears that way. About these postcards, I think he is trying to tell you something, Mimi.”

  “Why postcards instead of words? Why me?”

  “I don’t know, Mimi. I guess drawing is a way to absorb experience and express himself to you. He must feel connected to you somehow. Or perhaps he has just cracked up. Those refugee camps, Mimi, are not exactly the Hyatt Regency.”

  “He is trying to tell you something, Mimi.” David Daugherty’s statement rang in my head that night, as I sat down at my desk to write Nam a letter. I tried to stay calm and unemotional, but my heart was seized by images of the past. The basket of honeyed biscottes. The scene near the tomb behind the kitchen of our townhouse in Saigon. Humid almond eyes that contained a thousand questions as they stared at my piano keyboard. How a teenage boy had stood for hours listening to my practice of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” Finally, the day of my mother’s miscarriage and those assuring words: “Mi Chau, don’t be afraid.”

  I did not mention any of these overwhelming emotions in my letter. I talked rationally, instead, of my desire to help him relocate in America, where he could have a brighter future than waiting tables in a Bangkok bar.

  I had difficulty expressing myself. The tone of my letter sounded alien and restrained. I had comfortably found my refuge in forgetting. I had followed the American dream and its notion of success. Being sentimental was considered weak in my line of work and professional setting.

  I hurried on to sign and seal the letter.

  I mailed the envelope and waited.

  There was no reply.

  All of a sudden, Nam broke the habit. No more postcards. I kept waiting and waiting, hoping for some news that would lead to a reunion with a childhood friend. I wrote a few more letters. No result.

  Months passed. Finally I resigned myself to the thought the reunion might never come. Nam, I reasoned, must have settled down in Bangkok.

  My mother had a theory. Like most proud Vietnamese men, Nam must have been offended by my one-thousand-dollar money order. A Vietnamese friendship was not supposed to be based on monetary help, and the money order must have insulted Nam. It would have been better, she reasoned, if she had sent the money. He would have felt better accepting a favor from an older person, a parental figure, rather than from a childhood friend and a woman his age.

  Life in America has its way of creating a hypnotizing level of comfort: its highways, traffic lanes, shopping malls, generous servings of food in noisy restaurants, neatly arranged aisles of foodstuffs in white-glove clean supermarkets, refrigerated vegetables and frozen dinners, soft dissolvable tissue papers and toilets that flush properly, neat and green front and back yards maintained with electric lawnmowers, and many other well-planned, luxurious, and convenient things. One hardly thinks of another world, so different, so faraway—like the back alleys of my former Saigon, some bar in Bangkok, or remote locations that house the less fortunate.

  My thirties came gradually as I fell fast out of the trendy yuppie lifestyle into the hypnotizing effect of American suburban existence, restrained further by the hectic career path of a big-firm lawyer. I moved from West End in northwest Washington, DC, across the Potomac River to Northern Virginia, and commuted to work. During deadlines, I checked into the Westin Hotel on M Street, next to my law firm’s offices, to avoid the commute.

  “He is trying to tell you something, Mimi.” David Daugherty’s words kept ringing in my head each time I went through my cosmetics box and caught sight of Nam’s postcards. In those moments, I fought the urge to cry. I never understood the real reason behind Nam’s postcards—why he was trying to contact me, yet gave no mailing address. The postcards from Nam continued to be a mystery, yet my life then hardly demanded that the mystery be solved. Like Vietnam, the mentioning of Nam plunged me into reverie, nostalgia, and unexplained sadness.

  Then, one day, in the middle of a litigation deadline, I got a call from David Daugherty. We had developed a cordial professional relationship as he became more and more intrigued by my search for Nam.

  In the unexpected phone call that morning, David spared the niceties and went right to the gist of the matter. My money order had been returned, in care of David’s international public interest organization, with no explanation. David also wanted to deliver to me some interesting news, but it would be better if we met in his office.

  “The news is about that friend of yours in Bangkok. It might shock you,” he said.

  “Let me guess,” I said in despair. “My friend is dead?”

  “Oh no.” David paused as though probing for words. “Who did you say this guy is? Your childhood friend? Secret admirer since you were nine? You may not know him well. I told you he was trying to tell you something.”

  I thought of all the horror stories about Southeast Asian refugee camps that had been tossed around the Vietnamese immigrant community. Whatever shocking news about Nam’s life had to concern the conditions of refugees in Southeast Asia. Or perhaps the hardship and horror of the escape at sea. Raised as a full-blooded American in the comfort of the developed world, perhaps David was not accustomed to these horror stories and must have seen them in a more dramatic light. So, I decided to postpone the meeting until after I had met deadlines at work.

  Three weeks later, I sat in David Daugherty’s office. David had the typical bohemian look of an overworked public interest advocate. A reddish beard, reddish long hair in a ponytail, blue jeans, wrinkled Oxford shirt, circles under his pale green eyes, and his emerging love handles all spelled the life of too much work, little play, a yearning to break traditions, and the early signs of middle age. His desk and office were full of papers, and I wondered how he could work in that mess. He smoked like a chimney. I was seriously concerned he would set his office on fire, considering the amount of papers surrounding him. The phone kept ringing, and since there was no secretary, David jumped up and down around his desk trying to answer the phone, twisting the phone cord in one hand and gesturing to me with the other hand. />
  In that chaotic environment, I sat and waited until he finally unplugged the telephone, pulled out a chair, opened the desk drawer, and threw at me, across piles of papers, a set of black-and-white photographs.

  “That’s the place where your friend works.”

  I glanced at images of young Asian men wearing G-strings, chained and handcuffed in various sexual poses. I couldn’t help wincing. Lewd and demeaning were moderate words.

  “Sure this is not a joke?”

  “No, Mimi. You’re too serious for me to joke with you. I can tell by your grimace that the pictorial description isn’t dignifying enough for your refined, conservative big-firm lawyer’s taste.”

  “Cut the irony,” I said, ignoring his mockery emphasizing the contrast between his line of work and mine. “So my friend Nam works there. Big deal.”

  “The place is called ‘Ginger Head.’” David drew on his cigarette, lifted his chin toward the ceiling, and smiled vaguely, perhaps at his image of the neon-lit Ginger Head.

  “OK, he waits tables at the Ginger Head. Or maybe he is a bartender.” I was getting confused.

  “The Ginger Head is not just a bar, Mimi. It’s a special place, for a special kind of men. Foreigners, of course. Typical native Thais can’t afford these kicks. In certain places of Bangkok, you can get just anything. You can get a small boy to cut off his fingers for five bucks.”

  He pressed what was left of his cigarette into an already full ashtray and immediately lit another one. He slowly drew another smoke, keeping me anxious.

  “Listen, Mimi. Your friend left the refugee camp to become one of the top entertainers at the Ginger Head. These boys screw on stage for money, Mimi. That was why he didn’t move to the US. He probably wouldn’t pass the health screening even if you could get your senator to sponsor him. It is wretched out there. But maybe, just maybe the dude likes the sex and the good money that comes with it, and he wants to stay on.”