Inheriting the War

  I was part of a wave of immigration fortunate enough not to have to amputate my “birth” limbs, as my host country took on a more pluralistic stance by the mid ’70s. Those limbs remain under my jacket, weak and pale, yet ageing with the rest of me. I take them out now and again to grasp the texture of words and ideas, to finger-tap quiet rhythms with those tiny fingernails, to listen for the resonances within. They can also be useful when I need to reconnect with a time when my actions did not necessarily represent those of my entire race; they were just mine and my interlocutor’s to answer for. My “alien” limbs are now strong through daily use, so that I can no longer imagine myself without them. After more than thirty years in Australia, my dominant language has become English. It shapes my conscious thoughts, while the Vietnamese still shapes my feelings. So how does this affect my approach to writing?

  Given the double blow of cultural and linguistic displacement (both the “content” and “form” of one’s life becomes unfamiliar as a result of migration), it then follows that the self is also experienced as uncanny. Who is the “I” in this exchange speaking this encountered language? How is one to approach the “I” to draw out its many-faceted secrets? How can this “I” be both familiar yet estranged from an original and undivided “I” (if such a person ever existed)?

  I don’t mean to be slippery or sly with my different aliases and identities; I cannot write about a self, using a single “I,” when this self is fragmented.

  IV

  When I was in grade three my parents were able to send me to a Catholic school. They had the impression from the French colonial period in Vietnam that Catholic schools offered greater opportunities and provided a more formal and therefore stricter education. They were not to know that the Irish Catholics had been an oppressed minority in Australia’s early settlement, and perhaps held more firmly to their beliefs as a result.

  It was at my new school that I was introduced to the idea of an all-powerful, omniscient God. Until then I had been without this knowledge, but now that I had it I felt my world changing. During recess I went to the loo, and still heard the strident voice warning us: God watches us always. Always. I had a moment that could be considered a parallel with Adam and Eve’s after they had eaten from the fruit of knowledge—they suddenly realized their nakedness, became ashamed and hid from God. Except I was thinking why would a powerful god watch a little kid in the toilet? Why? I couldn’t understand the teaching I’d been given. Rather than feeling shame, I felt a vague sense of dismay.

  My teachers were caring and attentive. I learnt to say the Lord’s Prayer. I settled in with a group of Vietnamese girls like myself, and we played a high-jump game called “elastics”—all day, every day—using rubber bands that we’d hand-braided together into a thick cord. I was happy.

  Living in a new country is a series of conscious and unconscious decisions about what you hold onto and what you let go of. Many are superficial choices, or are minor in their consequences. Some have long-lasting effects on how others view you, on which doors will be open or closed to you. And which doors do you try to keep open, despite the price?

  In grade four, the children in my class were to go through First Communion. My homeroom teacher asked me whether I wanted to take part in this ceremony as well, and I guess if I had truly wanted to do it, my parents would have supported me. After all, I was the one who had introduced the idea of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy to them, and they went along with it.

  In religion class, we had started learning about the woman who had spent her whole life in pleasure, wearing perfume and make-up, never lifting a hand to help the poor, being carried up some mountain by her slaves. But then she became sick and was going to die, even though she was still young and beautiful. Just before she died, she renounced her sinful lifestyle, and accepted Jesus Christ as the savior. So she was accepted into the kingdom of heaven.

  “What? She gets to go to heaven?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because she said that she accepted that Jesus was the Son of God?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And there’s no other way to get into heaven?”

  “You don’t have to wait until you’re about to die—you can accept Jesus now . . . ”

  “Even if you were, like, Ghandi, you wouldn’t be able to go to heaven?” We must have just learnt about Ghandi in history class.

  “Not unless he accepted that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

  “But he was a man of peace, while that woman spent her life selfishly. She gets to go to heaven, but Ghandi goes to hell?”

  “If she accepts Jesus, she can go to heaven.”

  I thought about all my uncles, aunties, their children (dispersed across the globe after the war), and my parents and siblings who would all burn in hell. And if I accepted this First Communion, I would go to heaven where it would be nice, but there would be no one I knew. And in talking about heaven, if you were genuinely a saint like Ghandi—who although he was Hindu, was a man of peace—wouldn’t you feel so upset that you were in this nice place while all these other people were being tortured in hell? If you were a saint that would upset you, and you would probably give up your place in heaven to save someone else.

  I told my homeroom teacher and the assistant principal that I didn’t want to undergo First Communion with the other kids. They looked at me, at each other, and then back to me. Something in my teacher’s eyes dimmed when she looked at me after that, as though she had done her best to save my soul, but it was ultimately up to me.

  The day arrived. My fellow classmates, who had been so nervous before the ceremony, came streaming out of the school church, so proud and confident. The boys looked dapper in their suits, shirts and polished shoes, and the girls beamed with joy in their white dresses and white veils (white being the color of death in Vietnam when worn on the head). I waited in the shadows with the other kids, who did not undergo First Communion as they held even stricter religious beliefs than Christianity, and imagined the crackling flames of damnation licking at our feet.

  V

  The task here is actually to untangle which consequences are due to being a migrant, and which are specifically due to having fled as a refugee. The impact of the latter comes down to this: that when things get really difficult, as they do once in a while, I remember that my family and I could have all easily died at sea, no problem, no trace, unable to be found, as was the fate of up to half a million of our contemporaries. Anything from that time onwards is to be considered “bonus points.” In writing the above, it seems that some small part of me (and I assume for each member of my family as well) did die on our journey over. For a consciousness of the truth of our deaths is itself a form of death, even though our bodies are safe and sound. For the miracle of land and birdcall and halcyon dawn afterwards is now bled with the passage of time. For when we next face the abyss again, we already know its fathomless darkness, its ceaseless horror.

  VUONG QUOC VU was born in Saigon. His family emigrated to the United States and settled in San Jose where he grew up. He has an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Fresno State University. He is the founder and editor of Tourane Poetry Press and Perfume River Poetry Review.

  TWENTY TWO

  Old men from my father’s village

  still speak of him and the night

  he led a group of men across a river

  to their freedom, he, himself,

  carrying on his shoulder

  a young man who could not swim.

  At twenty-three, I am barely the man

  my father was; I’m barely his shadow.

  At my age, he had already made

  a home with the timid farm girl

  who would become my strong mother,

  had fathered a son, the first of thirteen children,

  and he had fought in a war

  he was too poor to understand.

  At twenty-two, my father was held

  in a prisoner-of-war camp; he led
>
  a group of men to climb over

  the sharpened ends of bamboo poles

  that lined the prison walls. They hid

  in the mud of rice fields until night

  to cross that river,

  to return home to their villages.

  My father told me this story one summer,

  the summer my mother lived away,

  the summer she told him if he missed her

  to water her flowers, and so he drowned the garden,

  the summer I was twenty-two and felt crushed

  by the weight of life that lay before me,

  the summer I sat with my father

  in the still-bright evening

  in the heat of the kitchen

  and he became my friend.

  THE YEAR OF THE PIG

  In the Year of the Pig, the city burned,

  and it was supposed to bring full bowls

  the lucky year of the lucky pig.

  How it always fed, even in war.

  One pig can feed a whole village.

  People had been in prayer all year—

  incense and red candles glowing

  in temples like kiln fire,

  but now the temples burned.

  In the marketplace, the meat of pigs,

  butchered for the New Year,

  lay with the bodies of the dead.

  Charred flesh all the same—

  Who now would eat the pigs?

  FLOWER BOMB

  The bomb / also / is a flower.

  —William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

  My brother, come home from war,

  sits now for hours in the garden.

  I see now, he says, everything

  as flowers, the tendency of all things

  to bloom—the way blood spills and splatters

  like asters, the fire from guns, the sun unfurling

  after the longest night. Everything blooms.

  Brother, he says, I saw so many dead

  I’ve realized that the body is, after all,

  a flowery thing—soft tissues, clustered petals

  of cells. Despite the marble column of its spine,

  the great architecture of how it stands,

  the arches and taut ropes of muscle,

  it is easily torn apart, gunned down,

  drowned, and plowed under,

  how it withers and wilts with hunger

  When I saw the dead, I didn’t look

  at faces and never, never into the eyes.

  I avoided all implications of a soul, a name.

  I looked at hands—those miracles of sinew

  and veins—and imagined them to be leaves.

  I have seen severed hands

  as if they’d fallen from a tree,

  hands crushed and burned crisp like autumn leaves.

  I have seen wounds like purple trillium

  forced through the skin.

  I have seen the plum colors of viscera.

  Brother, I have come home from Hell.

  How now shall I tell the story

  of Man—the wars, wars, wars

  until the end of time?

  How now shall I tell—my mind

  already a shattering lake of glass,

  my heart bullet-holed—

  to write in blood or with red rose petals?

  OCEAN VUONG is a poet and essayist and is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). His grandfather served from 1967–1969 as a member of the US Armed Forces during the American War in Vietnam. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean currently lives in the Pioneer Valley, Massachusetts.

  THE WEIGHT OF OUR LIVING: ON HOPE, FIRE ESCAPES, & VISIBLE DESPERATION

  Surely it is a privilege to approach the end

  still believing in something.

  —Louise Glück

  There should be tears. There should be a reason. It’s 7:34PM on New Year’s Eve. I am lying in my kitchen in Astoria, New York, my cheek pressed to the cold tiles. My mother has just called. My child, she says in Vietnamese, her voice barely a gasp, your uncle has killed himself. It was not until she heard herself say those words did she start wailing into the phone. I open my eyes and see only the blue and yellow tiles on the kitchen floor. Little blue flowers on tiny sun-lit fields. When did I fall? Is that my voice? I didn’t know it could sound like that: like an animal that just learned the word for God. The cell phone lies open beside me. I can hear my mother—now hysterical—sobbing through the crackling receiver. I reach for it. She is pleading for me to come home. And I can. I can take the bus or the train from Penn Station and be in Hartford before midnight—but I won’t. I can’t. Instead, I tell her the trains aren’t working. That I will find a way home in the morning. In my shock I am selfish. I hang up. I go for a walk. And I keep walking, passing people decked in glitter, plastic top-hats, and glasses with “2013” across their eyes, shuffling to the myriad bars or parties to drink and welcome the new year. I walk until I end up in Brooklyn—near midnight, by the East River. My fingers and snot-brightened lips numb from cold and grief. Fireworks unravel across the New York skyline, coloring the black water with shredded light as I stand in the sharp, freshly anointed January air—slowly forgetting my hands.

  I love going on walks by myself. No pressure to keep up conversation. And there is something about movement that helps me think. To charge an idea with the body’s inertia. To carry a feeling through the distance and watch it grow. When I first arrived in New York City I spent most of my time wandering. I was seventeen and wanted to write poems. With a red notebook and a slim volume of Lorca’s verses tucked under my arm, I walked the bright and liquid avenues, not ever bothering to look at street names or even where I was heading. I would start at my friend’s illegal basement-sublet (where I was sleeping on a couch salvaged from the back of a local Salvation Army) in Jamaica, Queens and trek until I ended up in Park Slope, Red Hook, Richmond Hill, or Gowanus, and once—even an abandoned shipyard near Far Rockaway.

  During these aimless forays, I kept finding myself looking up—particularly on residential streets lined with anything from monolithic tenements to luxury brownstones. But I also saw, attached to nearly every building, a skeletal structure of architectural finesse equal, in my eyes, to any of the city’s glittering towers. Fire escapes. Not buildings exactly—but accessories. Iron rods fused into vessels of descent—and departure. Some were painted blue or yellow or green, but most were black. Black staircases. I could spend a whole hour sitting across the street from a six-floor walk-up studying the zig-zags that clung to a building filled with so many hidden lives. All that richness and drama sealed away in a fortress whose walls echoed with communication of elemental or exquisite language—and yet only the fire escape, a clinging extremity, inanimate and often rusting, spoke—in its hardened, exiled silence, with the most visible human honesty: We are capable of disaster. And we are scared.

  It’s New Year’s Day. I’m standing in my uncle’s home in Hartford. The front door is propped open to air out the small one-bedroom apartment. It’s snowing. Sharp flakes flicker through the doorway and turn to rain on my face. A portion of yellow police tape flaps from the mailbox. I walk into the hallway where my uncle’s body was just removed the night before. For some reason, I thought the police, during their investigation and collection of evidence, would make things presentable for the family. I don’t know why I expected this. Maybe I’ve seen too many crime shows where a seasoned detective would prepare the grieving loved ones with a little speech before ushering the mourners into ground zero, forensics officers stepping gingerly across the rooms. But the police are long gone. And the first thing I see is the chair—sitting right beneath the attic opening where he placed a weight bar across and tied the rope. Next are the belts. Three of them—littered around the chair, all snapped at the buckle and coiled on the hardwood like decapitated snakes. He was determined. My legs grow loose, liquid. My jaw throbbing. I rush into the bath
room and vomit into the sink. As my sixth cup of coffee swirls down the drain I start to feel a wave of incredible sadness fill my bones. In his house, my uncle’s absence is sharpened. The running faucet. The silent rooms. My arms heavy, I kneel at the sink, listening to the water, letting it drown the dull ache in my temples. I open my mouth to speak—but no one’s here to listen. I open my mouth to pray, in earnest, but quickly abandon the endeavor when I hear my mother’s voice outside the house, calling my name. She’s walking up the driveway with a tray of food and a small folding table in her arms. I quickly grab the belts and toss them up into the attic’s dark, opened mouth. I never want to see them again.

  My mother comes in and starts placing hot dishes of vegetarian food on the small table. Her hands are shaking. The sound of utensils and glasses knocking into each other. This food is for my uncle. We Vietnamese believe the dead can still be nourished by our offerings and goodwill—even long after their death. She lights a bundle of incense and places a photo of him on the table between a steaming plate of rice and tofu braised in soy sauce and green beans. The picture is the yearbook photo from his senior year in high school. Taken almost ten years ago, it’s still true to his late features. He isn’t smiling, but his lips are parted slightly, as if on the verge of speaking. My mother and I kneel before the makeshift altar and raise the incense to our foreheads. We prostrate. We bow as if the dead, through their growing absence, have suddenly become larger than life. Tell your uncle to eat, she says, looking down at the floor. Uncle, I say, to no one, please eat . . . We miss you. Please . . . eat.

  A hole is nothing

  but what remains around it.

  —Matt Rasmussen

  The first fire escape was developed in 1784 by Englishman Daniel Maseres and was designed for personal use. This early model was simple: a rope, attached to a window, was anchored to the ground with a heavy wooden platform from which one could climb down and flee from a burning ledge. However, by the early 20th century, traditional iron fire escapes began to appear in America on the side of residential buildings, reducing the personal fire escape to obsolescence. In its place, a more collective means of escape was issued.