by Lan Cao
I scanned the room, searching for my daughters. “They are with their Chinese grandmother,” she said reassuringly.
There were radios on both night tables, each tuned to a different station. I could make out snippets of the news reports: The emphasis was on change but also continuity. A new prime minister would be appointed. The country would embark on a strong, steady, newly charted course. Corruption and authoritarianism would be yesterday’s problems. The Revolutionary Military Council had seized power to build a strong regime and to terminate the fake anti-Communist policy of the prior government, which was aimed not at winning but at engaging in an illicit peace dialogue with the enemy. And to top it off, the new regime, the announcer assured, had also been promised continued American support.
Of course.
The statement carried within it a dreadful truth. Its gravity ran right down to my core. American support for the coup had been secured not after its success but before its attempt.
My wife clicked both radios off and let out a muffled groan. She wanted to insulate me from reality. She wanted to console.
I heaved myself up. “Of course the Americans are behind this coup,” I said.
“Shhh. All that matters is that you’re home and safe.” Her voice came out as a long, low moan. She flicked specks of dust from my face. She stood on tiptoe and pressed her cheeks against mine. Touched my hair. Pinched the fabric of my uniform between her fingers and thumbs, as if to test the authenticity of my physical presence. I felt the soft fluttering of her eyelashes against my face and heaving sobs against my chest.
“I am here,” I whispered, suppressing my own emotions in order to soothe hers. I reached for her hand and held it.
My wife headed for the bathroom and ran a hot bath. I lowered myself into the water and relinquished my body to the steaming heat while she sat on the edge of the tub.
“Let it go,” she finally said. Three limpid words. I looked at her. I wanted to be blotted out, erased.
“Let it all go,” she said again, as if to herself this time.
I leaned against the tub and allowed my wife to scrub my back with a sponge. “Quy,” I said, not knowing what else would follow. “Quy.” I merely wanted to call out her name. Her fingers worked my shoulders, massaging the complications of muscle and bone. I wanted to collapse into something, the rampaging thump of love renewed, the unashamed confession of fears and failures. But for the rest of my time in the tub, neither of us talked. We both gave each other the gift of silence.
Outside the phone rang. I could see a flutter of shadow through the door’s crack. My body went rigid. Yesterday’s experience had made me watchful.
The nanny knocked on the door.
“It’s Mr. Phong,” she said.
What does he want, I wondered, and reached for the towel.
My wife rushed toward the door. “Stay,” she said emphatically. “You lean back and rest. I’ll handle it.”
I obeyed. In fact, I was relieved that my wife took the initiative to handle the phone call herself. I would not know what to say to him and I needed the time alone to mull over and allay my suspicions.
Later that evening, my wife surprised me by initiating our lovemaking. The surprise was not the initiation but the timing. I was settling myself and trying to fall asleep. The neighbor’s cat yowled. A tree branch jumped against the moonlight. My wife cleared her throat softly and leaned over to kiss me. I allowed myself to be kissed, to catch up with her desires and abandon myself to her care. I raised my head off the pillow and kissed her back. As I pulled her closer, I felt a slight resistance from her that I registered but swiftly flicked away.
3
Two Sisters and One Thousand and One Nights
MAI, 1964
Outside the wind blows steadily and drives sheets of rain against the walls and windows. Once again our mother reaches into a straw bag and pulls out a book. Khanh is skeptical but our mother smiles and pulls her into the circle of folded arms. The overhead fan briskly stirs the air as our mother reads one story after another. It all began once Scheherazade was in the sultan’s chambers. “Shahriyar,” I whisper. Shahriyar, the sultan who out of spite married a virgin each day and beheaded her the next. Scheherazade volunteered to spend one night with Shahriyar, to save herself and her sister, knowing that her sister too would eventually be next in line to be the sultan’s wife and then his murder victim.
Our mother fixes her attention on us. I wait to discover how Scheherazade would save her own life by telling one thousand and one enthralling tales to the sultan, each one a story within a story, hypnotically interwoven. Scheherazade asked if she could be permitted to bid her last farewell to her beloved sister Dunyazad by recounting a story to her. The story would be fantastical, alluring. The sisters would take the whole of the night and, under the entirety of the moon’s glow, spin each detail until it was fully stretched, drawn and twisted, like a magical yarn whose filaments looped and enveloped, seduced and ensnared. At dawn, the cluster of knots that kept the story’s mystery suspended would not unravel. It would still be there, the complexity of cross-grained nodes that intersected and entangled, that Scheherazade would not undo until the next night and the night after that.
And so every night brought with it another night, every moon another moon, until a thousand and one nights were strung and webbed and desire and faith conquered death. I know each story by heart, but still I yearn for every additional half hour, every quarter hour, of our mother’s time, to hold and stretch like a ribbon around us. I put my hand over my mother’s to keep her from turning the pages, hoping to slow her down, to fix her in the infinity of our present. I hold my breath as one story, then another, loops back upon itself, like a serpent swallowing its head.
• • •
Our father works all day almost every day. My sister and I love to watch him put on his starched, crisp uniform and polished boots. They give him an air of gravity. Sometimes I wear one of his uniform jackets around the house. Bury my face in its folds and taste our father’s valor, witness the majestic eloquence of his flight. A paratrooper’s emblem is stitched on the sleeve. You have to have a certain confidence to take your body and fling it from the sky toward the earth, to let the parachute catch and billow in an updraft of air, with nylons and canvas answering wind. I am not courageous, certainly not—I make no move without my sister’s approval—but I believe that I have the possibility of courage in me. Inside our father’s jacket, I am something else altogether.
Almost every morning before school, we take his hands and walk him to his jeep. He calls us by our names. “Khanh.” “Mai.” He calls us good little girls, and because of his prophetic powers and triumphant glance we would become so. I am sure of it.
But our father also has fears. He fears that wrongness would insinuate itself into our flesh and blood. Not our own wrongness, but the world’s.
He speaks to us sweetly but with conviction. “You must not trust easily. Trust has to be earned,” he says. “The person who can harm you the most is the one you mistakenly trust.” Judas kissed Jesus and in so doing identified him to enemy soldiers. Brutus, who was made governor of Gaul and allowed into Caesar’s inner circle, led the plot to assassinate him. Oda Nobunaga, one of the greatest military geniuses of all times, had harbored the singular dream of uniting Japan under a single sword but was thwarted by his most trusted general. Nobunaga hid in a monastery and disemboweled himself.
We listen to our father more to indulge him than to try to understand his warnings. I abandon myself to the certainty of his protection. I remember how he would toss me in the air and inevitably catch me in his arms.
He pushes us to study. For me, the world is full of facts to be learned. For Khanh, it remains full of mysteries to be solved, beautiful mathematical rules to be discovered. Our father believes that education offers a hope, even if it is an obscure hope, of allaying life’s dangers.
He warns us about love. “You must not trust a man to support you.” Love is independence. Love is self-reliance. There is no Prince Charming and Cinderella in our house. Our father does not allow it.
When Khanh asks if he trusts our mother, he says simply that it is less important whether a man trusts and depends on his wife. It is more important that a woman not find herself dependent on her husband.
Why? Khanh asks.
A boy’s life would not be ruined if his love is a mistake, but a girl’s life would be.
Why? Khanh asks again.
Boys start life on one side of the equation and girls on another side, our father explains. The boys’ side has additions and the girls’ subtractions. Girls have been unfairly pushed onto the margins where human failings will harm them more. “That,” he said, “is human history.”
For a moment I feel afraid of him and wish to take flight from his warnings. Until his stories curl back to where they started, to the yearning toward that which is good in the world. Our father always returns to what matters. His face shines with happiness when he kneels to kiss our faces.
• • •
Our mother too works almost every day but her work does not always take her out of the house. Because our mother comes from a large landowning family, her fortunes have become the foundation of our future. She speaks triumphantly of what the shimmering stretch of her family’s land—pungent black earth—faithfully yields, an accumulation of harvest dawns. But despite the vastness of the land, it is no longer of any use to us. The land, boundless acres of it, is all in unstable territory—government control by day, Vietcong by night. Without the steady rhythm needed to prepare the land for tilling, it can no longer reward us with the fruits of its fertile soil. And so our mother cannot afford to inherit the life of comfort that has been her birthright.
Our father often speaks of her resilience. The loss of the family’s wealth has not undone her. She has given us a revised but undiminished future—one that depends not on land but on ideas. She has a discerning eye. A piece of land here, in a modest, marginal locale on the outskirts of Saigon, is likely to become prosperous in a moment’s time. Under her ministrations, an ill-fated enterprise can be turned around with a modest infusion of cash.
Our mother is a businesswoman, our father often says with pride. She has her Peugeot driven all over the city to the houses of Chinese merchants. They also come to our house. Ours is one of a few Vietnamese families in this Chinese-dominated city of Cholon. While feasting on elaborate meals prepared by our cook, our mother and her Chinese friends contemplate new ventures. Their success is based on astute commercial calculation, but also intuition. Among them are many years of experience. Buying and selling rice. Building and renting houses. Putting money in this and taking money out of that.
There is in our Cholon villa an almost daily chaos of visitors. My sister and I can barely keep everybody straight. We do not call them by their names, first or last. It is impolite to call adults by their names. In order to create an atmosphere of familiarity, it is customary to address family friends as Younger Uncle Number Three or Younger Aunt Number Four, Older Uncle Number Six, and so forth. What each person is called depends on whether he is older or younger than our father or mother and his birth order in his own family. To be accorded a number is to be included in an intimate ritual—to be inside an orbit of enumerated family members and special friends, first, or second, and so forth, among a brood of just so many. A number conveys a relationship within a particular order. By contrast, a name is impersonal and commonplace, available to strangers, proffered to the world at large. And so we children do not use names when we refer to those embraced within the circle.
Khanh and I refer to one visitor as Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller, a pasty-faced, plump woman who smiles compulsively, and another as Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist, a tall, slender woman who presses coins into our palms and asks our mother for Coca-Cola, not tea, so that my sister and I might partake of the forbidden drink. When Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist comes to our house, she bears gifts for my sister and me, plastic swords and daggers and mentholated oils. Sometimes we dump out the oils but keep their tiny glass bottles with the long necks and curved bodies.
Today we come home from school to find the usual congregation of Chinese aunties impeccably dressed—black slacks, colorful silk blouses, shiny black sandals. I take my cue from my sister, who hovers near them. She has made eye contact with our mother, who then offers us an unopened bottle of Coca-Cola. The women are sitting expectantly around the table in a seating area near our family room, waiting for our mother to preside as host. “Our capital account is large enough to move forward with the deal,” our mother declares. The aunties all nod approvingly. Our mother smiles. “We talked about this last week, but here are the papers I’ve prepared for you to examine,” she says. “This is actually your idea,” she adds, turning graciously to Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist.
Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist sits up straight and nods proudly. She owns a business that makes tiger balm, a concoction of eucalyptus ointment that cures everything from headaches and stomachaches to nausea and the common cold. “Taiwan is a good market for us,” she explains. “A Taiwanese businessman I’ve known for years needs an infusion of cash to grow his herbal medicine business. He’s had to divert his attention to deal with family problems and the business has struggled a bit. This is an opportunity to help his business grow for him and for us.”
“Look at the charts I prepared and you’ll see why this is a good idea,” our mother chimes in. Columns of colorful numbers and arrows crisscross the pages.
The Chinese really know how to make money, our mother has often noted admiringly. A small part of her is Chinese, perhaps a Chinese grandmother or great-grandmother. She believes with a profound sense of conviction that the Chinese are trustworthy, that they work hard but expect only modest rewards, that, surrounded by non-Chinese, they have to turn inward and depend on themselves alone. They do not use contracts but instead rely solely on trust. They work with one another whereas the Vietnamese work against one another. Being a foreigner means learning how to share burdens, to trust and depend on others of one’s own kind. Somehow she has gotten into their inner circle, perhaps because we are almost foreigners ourselves, part of the Vietnamese minority in heavily Chinese Cholon.
Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller heaves herself up from the table and reaches for the papers our mother is handing out.
“This is quite good,” she says. The visitors share a vocabulary of commerce. All the Chinese aunts speak Vietnamese with a particular Cantonese or Fukienese twist and cadence. Some speak with the delicate undulation of upper-class Northerners who fled the Communists in 1954 when Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel into a Communist North and a non-Communist South. Even now their voices carry traces of nostalgia for faraway places.
“Yes, then, right?” our mother asks.
Once the aunts agree, their attention turns to card playing and eating. The cards are small and narrow, no bigger or wider than an index finger and imprinted with Chinese ideographs. A hand consists of twenty cards. All twenty are stacked between the thumb and index finger of one hand as the other slowly spreads them out like a fan. We hear laughter. Our mother slaps a card against the table and grins with satisfaction. The Chinese aunts shake their heads and sigh. “Sister Quy, she’s lucky today,” they say, laughing.
“Luck plus skill,” our mother replies lightheartedly.
Khanh and I sometimes bet if a particular business deal is likely to make money. “This one will,” Khanh assures. “I looked at Mother’s charts,” she says. I am wide-eyed and impressed that my sister can tell, simply by looking at the numbers, when our mother’s sure-footed prophesies and firefly intuition are going to pay off, when guesswork and luck are likely to materialize. “According to the numbers, in a year, Mother will double
what she puts in. All of them will.”
While our mother and the Chinese aunties play cards downstairs, my sister takes me by the hand and leads me toward our parents’ room. I sense that we are engaged in something forbidden. She stops abruptly at the landing, tilting her head toward the bottom floor and pulling her hair behind her ear, presumably so she can better hear. “They’re still down there,” she declares.
I am not afraid. She leads me on tiptoe toward our parents’ closet and opens the door. I see nothing out of the ordinary. There are, on one side, dangling trousers, shirts, and jackets, military uniforms in jungle-green camouflage; on the other side, women’s blouses, silk pants, long flowing ao dais that our father always admires when worn by our mother.
Khanh touches my shoulder. “You wait and see,” she says. With both hands, she parts the heavy curtain of clothes to the side. I see, at the very back of the closet, a square-shaped box covered by an olive-colored military blanket. There it sits: an emanation of the forbidden and the mysterious. She nudges me forward. I creep inside the cavernous enclosure of the closet. An eagle, buoyed by a parachute, stares down at me from the South Vietnamese Airborne insignia stitched on our father’s jacket. Khanh ignores its electric-black eyes. The closet door makes a firm, solid thud. She yanks the blanket off the box to reveal a metal safe. My sister turns the dial left, then right, then left, and clicks the door open. “I figured out the combination. It’s their anniversary date,” she says.
Khanh shows me packets of banknotes and gold bars wrapped in plain tissue paper. “Take this to the window and look,” she says, handing me a bar of pure yellow gold. Urged on by my sister, I inhale its metallic smell. “Better than money printed on paper,” she explains.
I nod. My sister returns the notes and gold bars to their rightful place. When she shuts the door of the safe, it clicks securely into place.