by Black Inc.
‘It’s hot,’ a writing instructor told me at a bar. ‘Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.’
A couple of visiting literary agents took a similar view: ‘There’s a lot of polished writing around,’ one of them said. ‘You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out?’ She tag-teamed to her colleague, who answered slowly as though intoning a mantra, ‘Your background and life experience.’
Other friends were more forthright: ‘I’m sick of ethnic lit,’ one said. ‘It’s full of descriptions of exotic food.’ Or: ‘You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab.’
I was told about a friend of a friend, a Harvard graduate from Washington, D.C., who had posed in traditional Nigerian garb for his book-jacket photo. I pictured myself standing in a rice paddy, wearing a straw conical hat. Then I pictured my father in the same field, wearing his threadbare fatigues, young and hard-eyed.
‘It’s a licence to bore,’ my friend said. We were drunk and wheeling our bikes because both of us, separately, had punctured our tyres on the way to the party.
‘The characters are always flat, generic. As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people, or a Peruvian writer about Peruvians, or a Russian writer about Russians …’ he said, as though reciting children’s doggerel, then stopped, losing his train of thought. His mouth turned up into a doubtful grin. I could tell he was angry about something.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing at a floodlit porch ahead of us. ‘Those guys have guns.’
‘As long as there’s an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text’ – he held out his thumb and forefinger to indicate half a page, his bike wobbling all over the sidewalk. I nodded to him, and then I nodded to one of the guys on the porch, who nodded back. The other guy waved us through with his faux-wood air rifle. A car with its headlights on was idling in the driveway, and girls’ voices emerged from inside, squealing, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’
‘Faulkner, you know,’ my friend said over the squeals, ‘he said we should write about the old verities. Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ A sudden sharp crack behind us, like the striking of a giant typewriter hammer, followed by some muffled shrieks. ‘I know I’m a bad person for saying this,’ my friend said, ‘but that’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. Like in your third story.’
He must have thought my head was bowed in modesty, but in fact I was figuring out whether I’d just been shot in the back of the thigh. I’d felt a distinct sting. The pellet might have ricocheted off something.
‘You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans – and New York painters with haemorrhoids.’
For a dreamlike moment I was taken aback. Catalogued like that, under the bourbon stink of his breath, my stories sank into unflattering relief. My leg was still stinging. I imagined sticking my hand down the back of my jeans, bringing it to my face under a streetlight, and finding it gory, blood-spattered. I imagined turning around, advancing wordlessly up the porch steps, and dropkicking the two kids. I would tell my story into a microphone from a hospital bed. I would compose my story in a county cell. I would kill one of them, maybe accidentally, and never talk about it, ever, to anyone. There was no hole in my jeans.
‘I’m probably a bad person,’ my friend said, stumbling beside his bike a few steps in front of me.
If you ask me why I came to Iowa, I would say that Iowa is beautiful in the way that any place is beautiful: if you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.
That afternoon, as I was leaving the apartment for Linda’s, my father called out my name from the bedroom.
I stopped outside the closed door. He was meant to be napping.
‘Where are you going?’ his voice said.
‘For a walk,’ I replied.
‘I’ll walk with you.’
It always struck me how everything seemed larger in scale on Summit Street: the double-storeyed houses, their smooth lawns sloping down to the sidewalks like golf greens; elm trees with high, thick branches – the sort of branches from which I imagined fathers suspending long-roped swings for daughters in white dresses. The leaves, once golden and red, were turning dark orange, brown. The rain had stopped. I don’t know why, but we walked in the middle of the road, dark asphalt gleaming beneath slick, pasted leaves like the back of a whale.
I asked him, ‘What do you want to do while you’re here?’
His face was pale and fixed in a smile. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I can just meditate. Or read.’
‘There’s a coffee shop downtown,’ I said. ‘And a Japanese restaurant.’ It sounded pathetic. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about what my father did all day.
He kept smiling, looking at the ground moving in front of his feet.
‘I have to write,’ I said.
‘You write.’
And I could no longer read his smile. He had perfected it during his absence. It was a setting of the lips, sly, almost imperceptible, which I would probably associate with senility but for the keenness of his eyes.
‘There’s an art museum across the river,’ I said.
‘Ah, take me there.’
‘The museum?’
‘No,’ he said, looking sideways at me. ‘The river.’
We turned back to Burlington Street and walked down the hill to the river. He stopped in the middle of the bridge. The water below looked cold and black, slowing in sections as it succumbed to the temperature. Behind us six lanes of cars skidded back and forth across the wet grit of the road, the sound like the shredding of wind.
‘Have you heard from your mother?’ He stood upright before the railing, his head strangely small above the puffy down jacket I had lent him.
‘Every now and then.’
He lapsed into formal Vietnamese: ‘How is the mother of Nam?’
‘She is good,’ I said, loudly – too loudly – trying to make myself heard over the groans and clanks of a passing truck.
He was nodding. Behind him, the east bank of the river glowed wanly in the afternoon light. ‘Come on,’ I said. We crossed the bridge and walked to a nearby Dairy Queen. When I came out, two coffees in my hands, my father had gone down to the river’s edge. Next to him, a bundled-up, bearded figure stooped over a burning gasoline drum. Never had I seen anything like it in Iowa City.
‘This is my son,’ my father said, once I had scrambled down the wet bank. ‘The writer.’ He took a hot paper cup from my hand, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Thank you, no.’ The man stood still, watching his knotted hands, palms glowing orange above the rim of the drum. His voice was soft, his clothes heavy with his life. I smelled animals in him, and fuel, and rain.
‘I read his story,’ my father went on in his lilting English, ‘about Vietnamese boat people.’ He gazed at the man, straight into his blank, rheumy eyes, then said, as though delivering a punch line, ‘We are Vietnamese boat people.’
We stood there for a long time, the three of us, watching the flames. When I lifted my eyes it was dark.
‘Do you have any money on you?’ my father asked me in Vietnamese.
‘Welcome to America,’ the man said through his beard. He didn’t look up as I closed his fist around the damp bills.
My father was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me. He was a soldier, he said once, as if that explained everything. With me, he was all proverbs and regulations. No personal phone calls. No female friends. No extracurricular reading. When I was in primary school, he made me draw up a daily ten-hour study timetable for the summer holidays, and punished me when I deviated from it. He knew how to cane me twenty times and leave only one black-red welt, like a brand mark across my buttocks. Afterwa
rd, as he rubbed tiger balm on the wound, I would cry in anger at myself for crying. Once, when my mother let slip that durian fruit made me vomit, he forced me to eat it in front of guests. Doi an muoi cung ngon: Hunger finds no fault with food. I learned to hate him with a straight face.
When I was fourteen, I discovered that he had been involved in a massacre. Later, I would come across photos and transcripts and books; but there, at a family friend’s party in suburban Melbourne, and then – it was just another story in a circle of drunken men. They sat cross-legged on newspapers around a large blue tarpaulin, getting smashed on cheap beer. It was that time of night when things started to break up against other things. Red faces, raised voices, spilled drinks. We arrived late and the men shuffled around, making room for my father.
‘Thanh! Fuck your mother! What took you so long – scared, no? Sit down, sit down—’
‘Give him five bottles.’ The speaker swung around ferociously. ‘We’ll let you off, everyone here’s had eight, nine already.’
For the first time, my father let me stay. I sat on the perimeter of the circle, watching in fascination. A thicket of Vietnamese voices, cursing, toasting, braying about their children, making fun of one man who kept stuttering, ‘It has the power of f-f-five hundred horses!’ Through it all my father laughed good-naturedly, his face so red with drink he looked sunburned. Bowl and chopsticks in his hands, he appeared somewhat childish sitting between two men trading war stories. I watched him as he picked sparingly at the enormous spread of dishes in the middle of the circle. The food was known as do an nho: alcohol food. Massive fatty oysters dipped in salt-pepper-lemon paste. Boiled sea snails, large grilled crab legs. Southern-style bitter shredded-chicken salad with brown, spotty rice crackers. Someone called out my father’s name; he had set his chopsticks down and was speaking in a low voice:
‘Heavens, the gunships came first, rockets and M60s. You remember that sound, no? Like you were deaf. We were hiding in the bunker underneath the temple, my mother and four sisters and Mrs Tran, the baker, and some other people. You couldn’t hear anything. Then the gunfire stopped and Mrs Tran told my mother we had to go up to the street. If we stayed there, the Americans would think we were Viet Cong. “I’m not going anywhere,” my mother said. “They have grenades,” Mrs Tran said. I was scared and excited. I had never seen an American before.’
It took me a while to reconcile my father with the story he was telling. He caught my eye and held it a moment, as though he were sharing a secret with me. He was drunk.
‘So we went up. Everywhere there was dust and smoke, and all you could hear was the sound of helicopters and M16s. Houses on fire. Then through the smoke I saw an American. I almost laughed. He wore his uniform so untidily – it was too big for him – and he had a beaded necklace and a baseball cap. He held an M16 over his shoulder like a spade. Heavens, he looked nothing like the Viet Cong, with their shirts buttoned to their chins, and tucked in, even after crawling through mud tunnels all day.’
He picked up his chopsticks and reached for the tiet canh – a specialty – mincemeat soaked in fresh congealed duck blood. Some of the other men were listening now, smiling knowingly. I saw his teeth, stained red, as he chewed through the rest of his words.
‘They made us walk to the east side of the village. There were about ten of them, about fifty of us. Mrs Tran was saying, “No VC no VC.” They didn’t hear her, over the sound of machine guns and the M79 grenade launchers. Remember those? Only I heard her. I saw pieces of animals all over the paddy fields, a water buffalo with its side missing – like it was scooped out by a spoon. Then, through the smoke, I saw Grandpa Long bowing to a GI in the traditional greeting. I wanted to call out to him. His wife and daughter and grand-daughters, My and Kim, stood shyly behind him. The GI stepped forward, tapped the top of his head with the rifle butt, and then twirled the gun around and slid the bayonet into his neck. No one said anything. My mother tried to cover my eyes, but I saw him switch the fire selector on his gun from automatic to single-shot before he shot Grandma Long. Then he and a friend pulled the daughter into a shack, the two little girls dragged along, clinging to her legs.
‘They stopped us at the drainage ditch, near the bridge. There were bodies on the road, a baby with only the bottom half of its head, a monk, his robe turned pink. I saw two bodies with the ace of spades carved into the chests. I didn’t understand it. My sisters didn’t even cry. People were now shouting, “No VC no VC,” but the Americans just frowned and spat and laughed. One of them said something, then some of them started pushing us into the ditch. It was half full of muddy water. My mother jumped in and lifted my sisters down, one by one. I remember looking up and seeing helicopters everywhere, some bigger than others, some higher up. They made us kneel in the water. They set up their guns on tripods. They made us stand up again. One of the Americans, a boy with a fat face, was crying and moaning softly as he reloaded his magazine. “No VC no VC.” They didn’t look at us. They made us turn around and kneel down in the water again. When they started shooting I felt my mother’s body jumping on top of mine; it kept jumping for a long time, and then everywhere was the sound of helicopters, louder and louder like they were all coming down to land, and everything was dark and wet and warm and sweet.’
The circle had gone quiet. My mother came out from the kitchen, squatted behind my father, and looped her arms around his neck. This was a minor breach of the rules. ‘Heavens,’ she said, ‘don’t you men have anything better to talk about?’
After a short silence, someone snorted, saying loudly, ‘You win, Thanh. You really did have it bad!’ and then everyone, including my father, burst out laughing. I joined in unsurely. They clinked glasses and made toasts using words I didn’t understand.
Maybe he didn’t tell it exactly that way. Maybe I’m filling in the gaps. But you’re not under oath when writing a eulogy, and this is close enough. My father grew up in the province of Quang Ngai, in the village of Son My, in the hamlet of Tu Cung, later known to the Americans as My Lai. He was fourteen years old.
Late that night, I plugged in the Smith Corona. It hummed with promise. I grabbed the bottle of Scotch from under the desk and poured myself a double. Fuck it, I thought. I had two and a half days left. I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. It was a good story. It was a fucking great story.
I fed in a sheet of blank paper. At the top of the page, I typed ‘ETHNIC STORY’ in capital letters. I pushed the carriage return and scrolled down to the next line. The sound of helicopters in a dark sky. The keys hammered the page.
I woke up late the next day. At the coffee shop, I sat with my typed pages and watched people come and go. They laughed and sat and sipped and talked and, listening to them, I was reminded again that I was in a small town in a foreign country.
I thought of my father in my dusky bedroom. He had kept the door closed as I left. I thought of how he had looked when I checked on him before going to bed: his body engulfed by blankets and his head so small among my pillows. He’d aged those last three years. His skin glassy in the blue glow of dawn. He was here, now, with me, and already making the rest of my life seem unreal.
I read over what I had typed: thinking of him at that age, still a boy, linking him with who he would become. At a nearby table, a guy held out one of his iPod earbuds and beckoned his date to come and sit beside him. The door opened and a cold wind blew in. I tried to concentrate.
‘Hey.’ It was Linda, wearing a large orange hiking jacket and bringing with her the crisp, bracing scent of all the places she had been. Her face was unmaking a smile. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Working on my story.’
‘Is your dad here?’
‘No.’
Her friends were waiting by the counter. She nodded to them, holding up one finger, then came behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. ‘Is this it?’ She leaned over me, her hair grazing my face, cold and silken against my cheek. She picked up a couple of pages an
d read them soundlessly. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said, returning them to the table. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You never told me any of this.’
I shrugged.
‘Did he tell you this? Now he’s talking to you?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Not really?’
I turned around to face her. Her eyes reflected no light.
‘You know what I think?’ She looked back down at the pages. ‘I think you’re making excuses for him.’
‘Excuses?’
‘You’re romanticising his past,’ she went on quietly, ‘to make sense of the things you said he did to you.’
‘It’s a story,’ I said. ‘What things did I say?’
‘You said he abused you.’
It was too much, these words, and what connected to them. I looked at her serious, beautifully lined face, her light-trapping eyes, and already I felt them taxing me. ‘I never said that.’
She took a half-step back. ‘Just tell me this,’ she said, her voice flattening. ‘You’ve never introduced him to any of your exes, right?’ The question was tight on her face.
I didn’t say anything and after a while she nodded, biting one corner of her upper lip. I knew that gesture. I knew, even then, that I was supposed to stand up, pull her orange-jacketed body toward mine, speak words into her ear; but all I could do was think about my father and his excuses. Those tattered bodies on top of him. The ten hours he’d waited, mud filling his lungs, until nightfall. I felt myself falling back into old habits.
She stepped forward and kissed the top of my head. It was one of her rules: not to walk away from an argument without some sign of affection. I didn’t look at her. My mother liked to tell the story of how, when our family first arrived in Australia, we lived in a hostel on an outer-suburb street where the locals – whenever they met or parted – hugged and kissed each other warmly. How my father – baff led, charmed – had named it ‘the street of lovers.’
I turned to the window: it was dark now, the evening settling thick and deep. A man and woman sat across from each other at a high table. The woman leaned in, smiling, her breasts squat on the wood, elbows forward, her hands mere inches away from the man’s shirtfront. Throughout their conversation her teeth glinted. Behind them, a mother sat with her son. ‘I’m not playing,’ she murmured, flipping through her magazine.