by Kim Thuy
“Would you agree to cook for my mother?”
cầm
chin
ON THE WAY HOME, Luc pointed to the poppies that coloured the edges of the highways. How could such a fragile flower inch its way through the wild grasses, defying concrete and asphalt? He explained to me that their appearance was deceptive, that poppies could sweep through uncultivated lands or attack a whole wheat field. A number of painters had been captivated by their cockscomb colour, but for Luc the poppy brought to mind Morpheus, who uses the flower as a magic wand. He just has to touch us gently with some petals for us to fall asleep and dream sweet dreams. As for me, I was living a waking dream where I dared not blink for fear it would all disappear. I discovered Monet’s Coquelicots at the Musée d’Orsay, and also the triangle of skin beneath my chin where Luc’s fingers had brushed against me to fasten and unfasten the buckle of the motorcycle helmet.
chợ
market
THE NEXT DAY, between two appointments for him and between two commitments for me, we went to the thirteenth arrondissement to go shopping with his children, who had the day off school. We zigzagged down the narrow lanes, amid baskets and boxes piled according to some obscure logic known only to the store. The children weren’t the least bit intimidated by the size of the crowd or by the din of foreign languages. They were comfortable bombarding me with questions: How do you eat a sapodilla? Where do dragon fruits grow? How many arms does an octopus have? Why are the eggs black? Their enthusiasm drove me to buy with no exception or hesitation everything that had roused their curiosity. Back at their grandmother’s place, we spread the fruit on the garden table before having her sit down with us. To our great surprise, she divided the custard apple in half before eating its milky flesh, spitting the black pits into her hand.
mãng cầu
custard apple
WHEN THE COMMUNISTS WON and the country was reunified, numerous families were reunited.
Many young people had fled the North by crossing the seventeenth parallel, which divided the country in two, leaving behind parents they found again twenty years later. The young people had become parents in turn and their children, little Southerners, knew nothing of the tradition among Northern women of coating their teeth with black lacquer, an operation that took two weeks of diligent work by a professional lacquerer and the same number of days of pain and discomfort. Jet teeth have been celebrated by the poets and considered one of the four criteria of women’s beauty. The dye lasted a lifetime and protected the teeth against any attack by food. Women wore the shiny black smile with pride until the tradition was eclipsed by elegance à la française. The disappearance of that cultural legacy was confirmed for me when I heard a child ask why his grandmother from the North kept the pits of custard apples in her mouth instead of spitting them out. The child couldn’t conceive that his grandmother had black-lacquered teeth and that she was one of the last representatives of a dying tradition.
I was pleasantly surprised, then, to see Luc’s mother scatter the pits on the table and try unsuccessfully to push one between two others. It was a game played by Vietnamese children who didn’t have marbles. I approached her to help continue the movement of her finger, which was refusing to obey her wishes. Luc came to play his turn and, finally, the children. Each one held on jealously to the pits he’d collected and the winner performed a victory dance as if it were the World Cup. They also tried to kneel on the skin of the jackfruit like Vietnamese students being punished, but they jumped as soon as they felt the scales.
While they were playing with wooden swords they’d found when leaving the store, I was caramelizing the fish above a battered, rusty old bucket filled with blazing coals that made it into a kind of grill. I was cooking outside, as they’d done at the orphanage, as is done at most houses in Vietnam. Luc’s mother came and sat on a stone beside me, taking the long bamboo chopsticks from my hands to turn the pieces of fish. Luc took her photo so he would never forget that act, which had been absent from his memory for the past twenty-five years. I prepared two portions, one not so spicy, for the children. On the other, Luc’s mother sprinkled pepper I’d crushed roughly in a mortar. While we had her attention, I whispered a lie: “The children at the orphanage are well. They can’t wait to see you.” I don’t know if she believed me, but she began stroking my hair again.
cải cúc
chrysanthemum leaves
I SUGGESTED THAT WE EAT at the children’s table to re-create the atmosphere of the street restaurants in Vietnam, where the customers sat on very low tables and stools. Luc’s mother was still in the habit of drinking broth with chrysanthemum leaves after the fish, at the end of the meal. For dessert, the children tried unsuccessfully to pick up cubes of mango with chopsticks. They challenged me, so I placed the pieces delicately in their mouths, which raised me to the rank of acrobat or magician. Luc tried to make them laugh by picking up a cube intended for them. His abrupt movement sent the cube flying and, instinctively, we both caught it in mid-air. I found myself one iota from his lips. Until that precise moment, I had never felt the desire to kiss anyone on the mouth. As well, when I kissed, I used my nose in the way that Vietnamese mothers do, inhaling the perfume of milk from their baby’s chubby thighs.
hôn
kissing
MY HUSBAND AND I didn’t exchange kisses as did other couples, either as a greeting or as foreplay. We were still modest, even after two children, even after twenty years of marriage. Language probably contributed to that restraint. We talked about things without naming them. It was enough to say “to be close” (gần) to understand that there had been sexual relations. My husband just had to turn towards me and I would understand my wifely duty. It was enough for him to be happy for all of us to be. Our marriage was uneventful, undramatic.
vô hình
invisible
MAMAN HAD TAUGHT ME very early to avoid conflicts, to breathe without existing, to melt into the landscape. Her teachings were essential for my survival, because she was sometimes called away on assignment. We rarely knew when she would leave and even less often when she would come home. While she was away, she sent me to stay with people she knew or who had been ordered to look after me. I learned very quickly to be at once invisible and helpful so that I’d be forgotten, so no one could criticize me, so no one could attack me. I knew exactly when I must set a plate down next to the mother who was on the point of taking the vegetables out of her wok without her seeing my hand, just as I could keep the porcelain filters filled with drinking water with no one seeing me empty the kettles that had cooled down during the night.
I could identify the needs of my foster families in one day, two at most. It was very easy for me, then, to anticipate my husband’s wishes before he was aware of them himself. I saw to it that his underwear drawer always held enough white T-shirts with no shoulder seams, a garment worn by certain working-class Chinese. From habit and nostalgia, he had continued to wear one under his shirt. I replaced the worn-out ones with new ones bought in a store in Chinatown without his realizing it because I washed them twice to soften the fabric, to make them his. Similarly, the ball drawer always had new tennis balls for his Wednesday and Friday game nights and more recently, golf balls for Saturday mornings. The advertising inserts were always removed from his National Geographics because those pieces of cardboard irritated him particularly and pointlessly.
As for him, he never criticized me for spending too long in the kitchen, any more than he questioned me about my choices for the children’s education. My husband and I were advancing along a road as smooth and level as a landing strip.
tóc
hair
LIKE LUC, I HAD A perfect marriage until he smoothed my hair with the backs of his hands and breathed in the side of my neck, asking me not to move or he would fall, he would scream. The only trace of Luc that I could bring back to Montreal was that of his hands on my eyes, which he had covered so that I wouldn’t see his tears flow silently in t
he airport parking lot. I stood there in front of him, motionless, overcome by a shock of emotions so foreign to me. He had watched me cross the security line, leave with no date and no promise of return.
thở
breathe
I LEARNED TO CONTROL my breathing, to need very little oxygen, like mountain dwellers and those who lived in the Củ Chi tunnels during the war. When Maman and I were living in a room assigned by the government in Hanoi, we slept with a towel over our noses so we wouldn’t be wakened by the foul smells that came out of the walls like putrid monsters. In those days, I exhaled more than I inhaled, but I never suffocated. Through the window, appearing and disappearing in the clouds, the image of the fullness of Luc’s shoulder under his violet shirt, of his strong wrist with a red string around it or of his curls that spilled out of his helmet sucked up all the air in my lungs and made the enclosed space of the airplane stifling, unbearable.
lụa
silk
ASIDE FROM THE NAIL clipper he kept permanently in his trouser pocket that I’d used on his sons in his mother’s garden, I still knew nothing about this man who had suddenly become the centre of my universe, though I had neither centre nor universe. I may have been mistaken to have mocked people who believe in the story of Saint Ông Tơ, whose role is to bind two persons with love by twining two red silk threads together between his fingers. Maybe Luc was the red thread intended for me?
And perhaps he was right after all, the young student Alexandre, a customer suffering from heartbreak who’d sworn to me one day that he would never love another and had upheld his conviction by clipping onto a cord in the window this quotation from Roland Barthes: “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of those millions I may desire hundreds; but of those hundreds I love only one.” At the time, that sentiment was utterly foreign and incomprehensible to me because I had never experienced that sensation of exclusivity and uniqueness.
sân bay
airport
I AM CERTAIN THAT not one passenger had noticed Maman in the crowd in front of the sliding doors on the way out of Customs. To me, she looked particularly thin and old. She seemed to have reached a threshold where she let herself be lulled by time, not in an attitude of surrender but tenderly, as if they were confiding in one another and poking affectionate fun at the whirlwind of youth. Maman stroked the ends of my hair three times, as she’d always done when she came to pick me up from my babysitter. When my hair was short or tied back, I could feel the warmth of her hand on my back, tiny but powerful, like a healer’s. I found myself doing the same to my own children when they got off the school bus in front of the house, after a week-long absence. The contrast between the minimalism of my action and the spontaneous affection of Luc’s children, who had held me in their arms for an eternity to say goodbye, stunned me.
bảo hiểm
insurance
THE CLOSENESS BETWEEN MY children and Julie has always reassured me. They kissed, embraced, murmured secrets and sweet nothings. Julie took them regularly to concerts, where the conductor would show them how to listen to the instruments to hear the voices of the characters in the stories told in music. She signed them up for hockey, swimming, ballet and drawing. She decided, with my daughter, on her hairstyles: shoulder-length, medium, bangs, no bangs. My children knew Julie’s phone number by heart and called her Má Hai, Mother Two.
In a family, “Two” expresses the highest rank, and Julie occupied that place because she was older than me, because she was my big sister. Often, the aunts in a family are called “mother” because they have nearly the same duties and the same rights concerning the well-being and education of the child. As soon as Julie came along to guide them, correct them, entertain them, I stepped aside so the relationship between them could deepen and exist without me, after me. In Vietnam, it is said that the fatherless child still eats rice and fish while the motherless child must spread leaves on the ground for sleeping (Mồ côi Cha ăn cơm với cá; mồ côi Mẹ lót lá mà nằm). My children were very lucky. They had life insurance and mother insurance.
tim
heart
I ALSO THANKED PHILIPPE for telling them constantly, “I love you,” with hearts drawn, moulded, written on almond tuiles, marshmallows, jujubes or mousse au chocolat. My children copied him, spontaneously signing their drawings and cards with hearts, while none of the letters I’d written to Maman contained the three words “I miss you” or mentioned that I suffered from her absence. I had described to her the staggering number of shampoo brands in just one store because I hoped to pour water over her soapy hair again while she bent her head over the aluminum basin that we used for washing clothes.
I had sent her a map of the Metro, explaining the speed of a train plunging into the dark tunnels as precisely as a bullet down the length of the barrel because I preferred the slowness of our train, so slow that we could nearly touch the lives of people who lived near the tracks. The passengers complained at the narrowness of the berths, even in first class, because there were six of us in each compartment. The last berths were attached some thirty centimetres from the ceiling, barely enough room to slip inside. Once, a fat woman had settled in above us, her stomach nearly touching the ceiling. I was terribly afraid that the Formica sheet would break and the woman would land on us, sleeping just underneath. My anxiety soon faded because I was happy to be curled up against Maman. With my nose pressed against the wall, my back covered by her warmth, my head against her heart, I slept the sweetest and deepest of sleeps. Maman thought I must lack air in that limited space, yet I’d never been so alive as during those rare journeys by train, when she protected me against passengers with roaming hands, where she offered me lightness, where she had reduced life and the entire world to a single bubble.
I no longer witnessed, in the window of the house our train nearly touched, the father who threw an iron at his daughter’s face because she had on too much makeup. I was no longer listening to the conversation of the two men next to me, reminiscing about their student years in the former Czechoslovakia, how they’d made money clandestinely selling goods that had been rationed. I had stopped counting the cockroaches that zoomed over the walls or wondering if the pink polyester satin pillow, edged with a lot of gathered, dusty flounces, provided by the train, had assembled the entire population of lice in the country. Enclosed in here, I could rest, let myself go and relinquish the millions of details in the world around me. I dismissed everything, knew nothing as soon as I was lying spoon-fashion with Maman.
nhìn
looking
WHEN LUC’S GAZE WAS ON ME, I had that same impression of exclusion, where the things around me disappeared and the space between us contained my whole life. I had read in a book a client left behind that regarder, to look, means esgarder, to be considerate, to have égards for someone. During the Middle Ages, to describe a state of war or conflict, it was said of enemies: “ ‘Neither one has regard for the other.’ For centuries the word has contained respect, of course, but also concern, worries for the other.” My husband didn’t have to offer me either regard or égard because he didn’t need to be anxious on my behalf. Since he often described me to his friends as a woman who would survive as easily in the desert as in Antarctica, he could go on walking and moving away from me without realizing that I was a block behind him, because a strap on my sandal had broken. Since I’d been lucky enough to be chosen by him, by his family, I was the one who should be concerned about him, not the reverse. In any case, I was already seeing to all the details, from the most trivial to the most obvious, from slippers pointing in the right direction by the bed to birthday presents for his family, from the pope’s nose of the chicken set aside in his bowl to parents’ meetings at the school. I anticipated, I foresaw, I prepared, my hands as invisible as Eleanor Roosevelt’s, who filled her husband’s fountain pen every morning before putting it back in his jacket pocket.
Đức Mẹ
Blessed Virgin
JEAN-PIER
RE, ONE OF our regulars, a paramedic and former priest, also concerned himself with the details of the daily life of his Vietnamese wife, Lan, but always in a festive way. He would lift her in his arms with the light movement and the supple body of a dancer. He had seen her at the same time on the same Metro platform for four days before he approached her, smiling. In front of his big blue-green eyes, she had frozen like a deer in the headlights. She was one of those women Mother Nature had neglected or who, on the contrary, had been created to confirm the existence of sublimated love. Lan had always behaved as if she were invisible, to avoid intrusive eyes. She carried an umbrella in her purse to hide from the sun, snow, rain and people, and indoors she would disappear behind an open book.