by Kim Thuy
Jean-Pierre had noticed the French exercise book given to adult immigrants, which she was reading assiduously. He had greeted her with a word or two before he held out the restaurant’s card with a handwritten hour and date. He had asked me to write on the back that I would be his interpreter. She had phoned me before the date of the appointment. She assumed it was a trap, but Jean-Pierre only wanted to tell her that she was as beautiful as the Blessed Virgin and that he would like to take care of her. At first, Jean-Pierre waited patiently for her at the entrance to the Metro, walking a few steps behind so he wouldn’t scare her, and gradually he’d approached her to relieve her of a bag weighed down with dictionaries. And then, one day, he had asked her to marry him, had sponsored her parents, her two brothers and her four sisters, had made a garden for her and reserved a wall for photos of her in winter, in love, in the family way … To us, he had presented her beauty like a French jeweller convincing his customers of the magnificence of an uncut diamond. Lan had never dreamed that a hand would caress her cheeks ravaged by adolescence—nor had she planned her departure from Nha Trang.
She had ended up by chance one night in the middle of a group disembarking silently and swiftly from a truck covered with canvas and now heading for a plank joining the shore to a boat. She had been taken there by the hasty movement of a hundred persons, with whom she had reached the shores of Indonesia and, some years later, the island of Montreal. Chance had given her a new beginning and a love that erased the grey of her teeth, damaged by tetracycline, and had softened her skeletal silhouette that her neighbours called “dried squid,” a delicacy sold on the beach whose flesh was flattened and hung by a thread in the sunlight like clothing on a rope, with no body. Jean-Pierre had discreetly wrapped that bony structure with his flesh by standing close to her, always. Whenever I saw Lan, during the first seconds, I was always surprised at the gap between her and my impression of her, that of a dazzling woman.
quà
present
WHEN I CAME HOME FROM PARIS, my face may have given me away. Maman had grasped my feverishness at once, despite the flood of presents on the living room table: ribbons for my daughter’s hair; a big book with photos of French army planes, a subject that fascinated my son; marrons glacés, a stupendous delight for my husband, who had discovered them when an aunt who lived in Niort brought some to his parents. For Maman I had some of the Seyès ruled notebooks like those she’d used as a child, on which the ls all stopped at the fourth horizontal line and the round of the os was restricted to the first two. I’d bought ten, hoping she would write our story, hers and mine before she was mine, and that she would leave her words as a legacy for my children.
The night of my return, I fell asleep at the same time they did, before my husband, which allowed me to get up in the middle of the night and read and reread the dozen emails Luc had sent to describe Paris without me. He had followed my plane, kilometre by kilometre, hour by hour, cloud by cloud. I went and sat in the kitchen plunged in darkness, where Maman came and found me, not saying a word. She brought me tea and a box of tissues, and we stayed like that until sunrise, until the first rustlings of bedclothes.
hạc
crane
OVER THE WEEKS THAT followed my return, Luc constructed a new universe for me with words that were hardly ever spoken, such as “my angel,” which became exclusively mine. In my mind, I now heard only his voice, asking what was new every morning at 8:06, the hour when I started my day’s work. At the same time, catering orders were multiplying, which justified my solitary nights in the kitchen cutting lengthwise fine slices of lotus root the size of a straw, and counting for Luc the number of holes in the young shoots. He would listen to me on the telephone as if he were attending a recital. I sometimes asked his opinion on the passages I chose to write on the back of menus for private evenings.
Once, for a fundraiser, I went back to an old Chinese lesson where the teacher had explained that the character for the verb “to love” incorporated three ideograms: a hand, a heart and a foot, because we must express our love while holding our heart in our hand as we walk to the beloved and make our offering. Julie had printed the explanation on long sheets of red paper that my children, Maman, and the daughters of Hồng and of Julie had sewn onto the bodies of hundreds of origami cranes. In the function room, birds suspended from the ceiling came down to the guests to deliver this message, which I had originally addressed to Luc. His crane was covered with words that I’d adopted as a second skin so I could identify the brand new feelings that were tormenting me. In reaction to my half-avowed declaration, Luc had sent me an official invitation to a festival at which restaurant owners would entertain a foreign chef in their kitchens for a week. Clients would be offered three evenings when unfamiliar knowledge and expertise would be wed.
Not knowing Luc’s true motivation, everyone was happy about this Parisian showcase—everyone but Maman, who reminded me that success attracts thunderbolts, which was why particularly beautiful newborns were given hideous names. Parents would call them such things as “dwarf” or “gnome” or “corkscrew” (a reference to a pig’s tail), and families tricked the gods by referring to them as ugly, loathsome, forgettable. Otherwise, they’d have attracted the attention of jealous wandering spirits, capable of casting evil spells.
sống
to live
I TOO TRIED TO FOOL myself by thinking of my encounter with Luc as a tragedy, a drama or a calamity that had swallowed me whole. Had I been a zealous Catholic, I would have worn a hair shirt and practised mortification for self-denial, so as to kill this sudden desire to live, to live to a great age. I heard mothers dream, make plans to attend their children’s graduations, their weddings, the births of grandchildren. Unlike them, I could never imagine those different points of arrival, those different milestones that punctuated their road. My role was limited to that of a bridge or a ferryman who would help them ford a river or cross a border, with no wish to follow them to the end. My movements had always been dictated by the humdrum life of every day, by Maman’s missions, by impossibilities and possibilities. Like her, I had never chosen one particular goal. Yet somehow here I was seated once again on an airplane taking me towards a precise destination, planned, desired, and most of all towards a person who was waiting for me, who would welcome me, take me in.
nước tím
purple water
AT THE AIRPORT’S TERMINAL 3, Luc did not appear when the doors opened, which matched one of the many scenarios I had anticipated. Instinctively, my hand had started searching my purse for the notebook on which I’d jotted the telephone number of a cousin of Maman’s who’d been living in a suburb of Paris since the late fifties.
I had visited her on my last trip. She and her husband were frozen in revolutionary Vietnam. He wore the Communist soldiers’ green cap as he was digging in his garden like a farmer, and she, in black trousers and dark shirt, was washing some freshly picked cherries for me by rubbing them together one by one as if she were still in Vietnam, where herbs and lettuces had to be sterilized with potassium permanganate that turned the water purple. She had brought out some old letters from Maman, with whom she’d corresponded regularly until Maman disappeared. She wrote to her in Vietnamese and Maman replied in French. The two women were the same age and the cousin had been Maman’s confidante during the difficult years with her “cold mother.” Maman had given me her name and contact information with no other explanation except for a brief sentence on a card without an envelope: “Sister, this is my daughter. I’ll explain someday.”
bà con
relation
THAT COUSIN, WHO’D BECOME an aging hunchback, took my photo to add to the family history, with an old camera protected by its leather case. She promised to send the photos to us and I promised to do the same with pictures of Maman and my children. I knew that I could turn up at her house without notice like the last time, like in Vietnam, where doors were opened without knowing who would be there.
/> Maman and I had showed up suddenly at Sister Two’s house one day without a word in advance. Maman had resurfaced to save her from imminent danger.
chính trị
politics
SISTER TWO WAS MARRIED to a retired high-ranking official in the old political regime, which turned her into an enemy of the people under Communism. At the time, one needed only live on a large property to be subjected to a variety of accusations. Sister Two’s family corresponded to the portrait of capitalists guilty not only of the country’s decline but also of its devastation and its indecency. After an absence of more than twenty years, Maman had rung the bell and Sister Two had received her and settled her into the house as if the absence had been only physical; or that time had accounted for her absence; or that the wrinkles on their faces were already recounting their respective lives lived in the other’s absence.
Thanks to her status as participant in the revolution, Maman had been able to prevent the family’s expulsion into hostile zones to clear the land and dig canals with shovel in hand and only rations of barley to eat. No one then could compare those arid and hostile territories with the ones in Siberia because most likely no one would survive in either place, according to the revenants who slept in the street, often on the sidewalk in front of their former home. I wondered if it would be unbearable to have your past planted right in front of you. Maybe they hoped that out of compassion the new occupants would take them in, give them back a corner of the house, so that the past would no longer be a flaw, so that people would no longer have to take a felt pen to erase controversial faces and flags of the old regime on photos, and, above all, to reintegrate the past into the present.
quá khứ
past
WHILE I WAS GROPING in my purse for the address book, from the corner opposite the airport exit I saw a man running towards me. In less than a second his face appeared, and at that exact moment I was in the present tense; a present without a past. He had stood off to one side to observe my arrival, to test us, to measure his resistance, which had lasted exactly seventeen seconds. An eternity, he had said, adding: “C’est l’évidence”—It’s obvious.
In my circle, I often heard the expression, C’est pas évident—It’s not obvious!—but never the opposite, and always as an adjective. As a common noun, I knew only the English definition that talks about proofs, or “a body of facts,” that confirm or contradict a belief or that help draw a conclusion. Between French and English, such faux amis—false friends—set their traps and every time, I fall in.
Luc knew that I committed millions of errors in grammar and logic, but also in comprehension. Like a sherpa, he guided me through the bends and curves, the twists and turns of the French language, undressing it layer by layer, one subtlety at a time, like stripping a rose of its petals. And so the meaning of the word évidence was explained to me, underlined and expressed in a hundred different ways, in contexts as varied as they were unexpected.
In his opinion, it was the évidence that had shown him the hooks hidden behind the buckles on the straps of my pumps, because his hands had taken them off without hesitating, as if he’d rehearsed that action all his life. It was the obvious as well that had made me feel entitled to place my lips in the hollow of his collarbones and to elect it as my resting place. For the first time I felt the urge to plant my flag in that square centimetre and to declare it mine, whereas Maman and I had left so many places without even glancing behind us. If it weren’t for the obvious, we would have seen the sun set over the city and I’d have recited to him the poem by Edwin Morgan.
When you go,
if you go,
and I should want to die,
there’s nothing I’d be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle,
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream,
and half-dreaming still you only said, I love you.
da
skin
LUC FELL ASLEEP BESIDE ME even though he’d never before given himself over to sleep in a lover’s arms. As for me, I had learned how to fall asleep very quickly, on command, so that my eyelids would serve as curtains over landscapes or scenes from which I preferred to be absent. I was able to move from consciousness to unconsciousness with a snap of the fingers, between two sentences, or before the remark that would offend me was spoken. Oddly enough, during that day stolen from time, I couldn’t sleep. I engraved in my memory every fragment of Luc’s skin. I counted each of the folds in his body, including those in his neck, in the cubital fossa, that reverse of the elbow, and the popliteal cavity, the H just behind the knees—all the grooves where dirt lodged when I was a child.
Mothers had to scrub those spots that imprisoned dust carried by the wind and caught unintentionally by children. Observing the lines of Luc’s body, I realized that I’d never had a chance to run my fingers over my children’s folds because they never came home with collars of dirt, as I did after a day of school. The Montreal air must have been filtered, purified—or was it simply too pure to leave traces? The whiteness of Luc’s skin bore that purity, even though the scar above his eye told of his closeness with his dog and the one on his ankle, of his reckless youth, a mark that still made him jump at the slightest touch.
thẹo
scar
THE PAINLESS SCAR on my thigh showed skin burned by the hot water in a Thermos bottle spilled, accidentally most likely, by a child who was afraid of having to share the powdered milk I was stirring up in a glass for her. Maman had never seen that burn, only the scar when she returned from far-off places, whose names could not be spoken of.
I hadn’t seen her wound either, only the hole from the bullet that had pierced her right calf. She’d reassured me, saying it had been an accident. I had reassured her in turn, saying it was my own awkwardness. We never had to talk about those scars again, because Maman didn’t wear skirts and I didn’t wear minis. My husband assumed it was a birthmark, and my children saw no anomaly because I didn’t parade around the pool in a swimsuit, never stretched out on the beach to melt in the sun. Only Luc had observed that slight discoloration of my skin long enough to make out a map of the world there and to draw the road he would walk along towards me. Meanwhile, he had to attend a parents’ meeting with his wife, at the children’s school, far from me.
ngủ
sleeping
I LISTENED FOR HIS FOOTFALL on the first steps before I ran to the balcony. He came back into the bedroom and found me leaning over the banister, on tiptoe, waiting for his silhouette to appear on the sidewalk. I went down to his car with him so that he would leave, so that he would continue to be a good father. I reminded him that he wasn’t abandoning me, that the bed still held the shape of his back and the pillow, that of his arm which had reached for me after the brief moment when he’d nodded off. I was sitting a breath away from him, just far enough to watch over his sleep without disturbing him.
I had learned to glide silently both inside and outside the covers because my husband was a very light sleeper. Early in our first months together, he had asked me to sew for him a long, round cushion like the one he used to wrap his arms and legs around when he was a child. Only that human-size cushion could soothe him and keep him from dreaming about his grandfather who often, in the middle of the night, gathered together in the ancestors’ hall the grandchildren and children who lived on the family property so that all would kneel before him and listen to him scolding his wife. The grandfather imposed his authority on the house just as he did on the military base. He demanded absolute obedience so he could go on giving orders that would rip open the sky and tear apart destinies in the hundreds without blinking, without collapsing. My husband slept with frayed nerves. A single clumsy movement on my part and he would waken with a st
art, frightened eyes staring at me, surprised I was there. Luc had had the same terrified expression when he’d felt, unconsciously, not my presence but my absence.
xèo
pschiii!
ON THE NIGHTS WHEN WE offered the Vietnamese menu, Luc set up three islands in the restaurant. The first held huge platters of woven water hyacinth filled with fresh herbs for preparing spring rolls, and green papaya salad with dried beef marinated in rice wine, wrapped in sesame seeds and grilled at a very low temperature for ten hours. Two young Vietnamese girls in silk smocks slit to the waist on both sides handled the rolls with the slowness of hot countries and the confidence of young girls in bloom.
Luc had decorated the second island with four yoke baskets containing bowls, rice noodles and two big cauldrons of broth, including one typical of Hue, the former imperial capital that took pride in the refinement of its cuisine, conceived and developed for emperors and dignitaries.
The third was reserved for me, for turning crepes with turmeric, pork and shrimp, a process that required a flexible wrist and quick movements so the batter would cover both the bottom and the walls of the pan, in a thin layer. Since the name of the dish—bánh xèo—evokes the sound of the liquid crackling in contact with the heat, the temperature had to be high but controlled to prevent it from boiling. The challenge was to stuff the crepe with bean sprouts and yellow beans and fold it in two without breaking it. It always pained me to break the first finished crepe, but I had no trouble with the one offered to Luc. I wanted him to taste the pleasure of feeling the crepe give way and crack between his lips. I could feel the fine crust melting in his mouth and disappearing instantly, as fast as the beating of wings. And I hurried to wrap the second mouthful with a leaf of white mustard so it would leave a hint of bitterness and freshness on his tongue.