by Lan Cao
I close my eyes. I see her as I first saw her, in soft lavender silk, in purple gloss. That day of our meeting, I glimpsed a sliver of bare midriff. The ao dai’s body-hugging top splits sensually, slightly above waist level. From the waist down, it flows daringly, the way rivers flow, with desire and intensity, into two streams that float over wide satin trousers. It reveals and conceals, like a confession.
Even after years of marriage and separation, my heart quickens. I am still undone by the sight of her. The first time we met, she spoke without once turning toward me. Why was I even in the same room with her? I, an impecunious wanderer passing through the land of the Mekong? Someone must have introduced us. We were seated at the same table. There was the porcelain face, almost masklike, unconquerable and untouched by the ravages of sun and weather. She glanced in my direction only in quick flashes, a detachment that I first took as arrogance and later as something more. I tucked the moment away, to be retrieved when I was alone.
As she dabbed her lips with a napkin, her manners revealed centuries of exquisitely honed breeding. Her ao dai had an open boatneck that dared to show cleavage. Around us, French was aggressively spoken, sometimes translated for my sake, sometimes not. At one point, she rolled her eyes at the excessive use of a foreign language by those wishing to signal their upper-class starchiness. She flashed an aristocratic sneer, turned away, and at that moment noticed my own similar reaction. Our eyes locked and we smiled at each other. She did not say a word to me and turned to speak to someone else. In French, presumably to keep me from understanding, she asked someone my name. A toast to celebrate some occasion was called. Her lips parted as she raised the glass to her mouth. Only when she was getting ready to leave did I make a point of saying a few words to her, first in Vietnamese, then in French.
I smiled. I bade her farewell. “Miss Quý,” I said. “Je vais sans doute vous revoir.” Quý pronounced with a rising tone means “precious.” I had boldly declared I would see her again. My hand lightly touched her wrist. For a few seconds, she did not answer. Nor did she withdraw her hand. Her eyes gleamed. She turned her head, looked up at me, her chin jutting out in an apparent show of disapproval and defiance. Because she was sitting and I was standing, her neck arched scandalously. “One might have thought you would have spoken up sooner,” she finally said, almost mockingly. Sooner. She stretched it out to produce a sense of stickiness or elongation in a word that ironically suggests the opposite—a shortening of time. She too was leaving. I kept my eyes fixed on her even as she turned her back and walked toward the door. I noted her excellent carriage. As she craned her neck toward me, raising her eyebrows to signal she knew I had been watching her, I gestured a farewell.
I had been wholly unprepared for anything as extreme as that first meeting.
When the day comes, and it will, when everything, even memory, of people, of earth and water, of history, has gone from me, this is what will remain—the dreaming colors of purple evenings, a lavender ao dai that flows this way and that, and a rice field that illumines earth and sky in a shimmer of liquid emerald.
Mrs. An has prepared me for an outing, made me presentable to the outside world. I am dressed in a collared shirt, a thick cardigan, and neatly pressed khaki pants. I give the belt a tug and notice that its buckle gleams. Footsteps come toward me. “Ba,” a voice calls. I nod. I like the sound of the word. Father.
I lift my head and see her eyes fixed upon me. I look at the knot of tightly wound hair on my daughter’s head. Mai is made up. Brown eyeliner, a dab of rouge, and glossy pink lipstick. She sports a buttoned white shirt and black trousers. She flashes me a big smile. “Are you okay, Ba?” I nod. She slips one arm under my shoulders and helps me to my wheelchair. The act of bending down momentarily shifts her scarf, revealing a brilliant bruise on the side of her neck. I have not seen bruises on her for some time and their reappearance startles me. I know the hurt she carries but I work to keep what is so unsayable about it deep inside my own self.
“Little Bao,” I say, a nickname I first used when she was a child. It means little treasure or keepsake when pronounced with a gentle dipping-rising tone. “Ba’o,” treasure, like her mother, “Quý,” which means precious when spoken with an upward lilt. “My Bao Bao?” I repeat. Fear and tenderness fill my heart.
With a flicking motion, she waves the sound of this name away. For a moment she looks achingly little but that moment quickly dissipates. “No,” she answers with polite firmness, or rather, exaggerated patience. With a shake of the head, she pivots into the present and in the process reverts to adulthood. Our eyes meet, unblinking. Her body stiffens and she diverts my attention with a series of coughs and a question. “Are you looking forward to our outing?” she asks in her usual obliging way. Her voice takes on a tone of utter normality.
“Yes, very much. It’s a nice day to be out.” I look at her with tender devotion. I know the gamut of her emotions—reserved and reticent, dutiful and steady, but also occasionally stormy.
As she wheels me through the kitchen and toward the front door, Mrs. An looks up from the kitchen table and calls out to her, “Don’t forget to send money home for me.”
“Aunt An, I will take care of it for you,” Mai promises. “I’ve got the envelope you gave me.” Mai fixes her scarf, flipping it nonchalantly around her neck in a manner meant to simulate carefree ordinariness.
Mrs. An nods. She walks briskly to my side and kneels down so her face is at the same level as mine. “How nice you look all put together, Mr. Minh. Have a good time out.” Pointing to Mai, Mrs. An says, “She’s going to help me with an errand while she’s out. She’s so skilled at these things.” And she is.
Here in this external universe my daughter is clear-eyed and straight-backed. “Hullo,” she answers when a young Korean man hauling a thirty-pound bag of jasmine long grain rice greets us in the ground-floor lobby. A young Indian boy fingers his collar and lapel, revs his motorcycle engine, and winks at his girlfriend to hop onto the backseat. “Hi, Dinesh,” Mai says breezily. Dinesh nods at Mai and gives me a deep bow the Vietnamese way—arms folded across chest, head down. I recognize Dinesh. Slicked-back hair. Copper-colored tone. He lives with his father and grandmother across from us. He and Mrs. An’s son are best friends. Both are charmers.
Mai manages the car smoothly, neither too slow nor too fast, piloting it along Sleepy Hollow Road and Leesburg Pike. When she makes a turn onto Wilson Boulevard, I see the dramatic Lion’s Arch gate with sloping red roofs that marks the beginning of Little Saigon’s Eden Center. Almost immediately I feel a sense of relief. Leaving behind the hooks and snares of life in this new country, we come here for the comfort of pho noodle soup and other aromas from home. I can almost feel its recuperative powers, the full-throated pleasures promised by the simulation of familiar sights and sounds. Authenticity is not the point. Although the car windows are all the way up, I hear Vietnamese music coming from loudspeakers. A beguiling complexity of shops and restaurants lies before us, promising an abundance of nostalgia. Even the food in all its varieties of northern, central, and southern fares, is incidental. For it is nostalgia, the vehement singularity of nostalgia, more than anything else, that brings us here.
Mai glides the car into a tight parking space. She unpacks the wheelchair and positions it by the passenger’s side. I am able to walk by myself, with the occasional help of a cane, but I indulge her insistence that I be wheeled instead. I pivot my bottom and sidle onto the wheelchair. The sun is high and the sky is clear, though the grounds are still wet. Mai rolls me toward several sidewalk carts piled with papayas and rambutans, each labeled with a placard that advertises the price accompanied by exclamation marks in bold black markers. ONLY ONE DOLLAR EACH!!!! and ONE DOLLAR A POUND!!!!
“Do you have longans?” Mai asks the vendor in a convent-schooled voice typical of well-bred Southerners. I note the ease with which she navigates the world.
“Yes. Only o
ne shipment came in this morning. I have not even unpacked the carton,” the vendor replies.
Mai beams. The longans are fat and plump. Swiftly, almost greedily, she picks out several bunches. She does not comparison shop nor does she haggle. “We’ll get more than you need so you can share with Aunt An,” she says, leaning close to me.
“Yes, isn’t that lovely,” I tell her. I am pleased.
“Goodness,” Mai exclaims when a man accidentally elbows her in his haste to hand out leaflets. She protectively grips the handles on my wheelchair. The man smiles apologetically and asks if we would sign a petition protesting Hanoi’s human rights violations. He points to a poster board covered with photographs of mock trials of dissidents. I see color pictures of priests and monks with duct tape over their mouths and military police at their side. A man in the role of judge holds a gavel, pointing it at the accused. Adrenaline charges through me. In this part of the parking lot people walk together in twos and threes, holding banners denouncing Hanoi’s repression. There is no paucity of passion or goodwill here. Little Saigon needs the perpetual buzz of Vietnam, even if it is to condemn. Everything before me, Little Saigon itself, is part of war’s debris. We are here to reminisce and sometimes to denounce. We are here to salvage something from the ruinous disorder of defeat.
Mai doesn’t stop, although I would like her to so I could peruse the leaflets. She pushes my wheelchair, using it to part the crowd. The man persists, rushing ahead and stretching out his arm to slow us down. “Miss, excuse me,” he says agreeably, while his fingers dig into her upper arm. “These are calamitous times in Vietnam. Please. We need your signature.”
His persistence takes me by surprise. “You too,” he says to me. The “you” he uses to address me is a respectful “you.” I take the pen he gives me and sign a petition addressed to our congressman. Mai smiles and speaks in a breezy, conversational tone. “Yes, Uncle,” she says. “I am sorry. I was rushing to a shop before the owner leaves for lunch.” She signs the petition too.
A voice booms from the loudspeaker. There will be a demonstration at a neighborhood high school to protest plans to fly the current Vietnamese flag in the school’s hallway on International Day. The demonstrators will insist that the flag of the now-defunct Republic of Vietnam be flown instead. “We did not flee the Communists in search of freedom only to be confronted with the Communist flag here,” the voice continues. The Vietnamese in Virginia have become unapologetically political. I do not know when this happened. It was not so when we first arrived in 1975; we had worried more about how our children fared in school or whether we should relocate to warmer locales in California or Texas. The younger generation’s interest in the political embattlements of Vietnam surprises me and sometimes fills me with renewed hope.
Mai has locked my wheelchair to keep it from rolling off. Nearby, she talks in a soft voice to the man with the loudspeaker. After a certain amount of back-and-forth, she says with finality, “It’s a good idea but I won’t be able to join you, unfortunately.” Her face flushes pink. She fixes her scarf methodically and tightens the knot. She is eating a doughnut and sucking frosting from her thumb and finger. In the light her face reflects a startling childlike quality that endears. Still, I am watchful. My child has had her share of suffering and I can sense the fury and spit of darkness that still cling to her. I always understand more than she thinks.
“All right, we can go now,” she says to me.
“How about we stop at the banh mi store?”
She looks at her watch, and then nods. “Okay, but we need to leave time for Aunt An’s errand.”
Banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich that is a favorite of mine. We head toward a nearby bakery. There is the whole French baguette, perfectly crunchy, and the usual colorful spread of vegetable slaw—daikon radish and shredded carrot marinated in salt and vinegar. There is a variety of fillings to choose from—fatty roast pork, pâté, grilled chicken, meatballs, red pork, marinated tofu, and fried eggs. I opt for pâté and a profligate slather of aioli, topped with jalapeño peppers and cilantro sprigs. The bakery has a buy-four-get-one-free policy, which has attracted an ardent following. Sometimes the line is out the door, Mai tells me.
I chew slowly, savoring the sweetness of earthly comforts. Mai reaches over and dabs my mouth with a corner of the napkin. She does not eat lunch and so she waits patiently for me on a counter stool, her hands calmly folded across her lap. I offer her a bite of the sandwich but she recoils and utters a fastidious “No.”
“Your sister would love this pickled daikon,” I say to myself, though in a voice meant to be heard. A moment passes. I persist. “Has she visited you lately?” Mai briefly looks up, her face flushed. She opts instead to read a Vietnamese paper, occasionally pausing to relate a story to me.
She shows me a front-page picture of a demonstration in Little Saigon in Orange County, California. A video store owner had put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the store’s window and refused to take it down despite widespread protest and condemnation. The gaunt, goat-bearded, tubercular face of the Communist leader has sparked scuffles outside the store. To compound matters, plastered next to his picture is an oversized Communist flag of the current regime. A higher-court judge will soon rule on whether the store owner is provoking the more than 300,000 Vietnamese Americans in the area with “fighting words,” which would not qualify as constitutionally protected speech.
“Free speech,” Mai says. A lower court had issued a restraining order for the poster’s removal.
Whose? I want to ask. The insane Ho Chi Minh sympathizer who owns the store or the equally insane, easily goaded protestors whose intemperate display of political passion provoked sneers from Americans admonishing Little Saigon to get over it?
“Free speech,” Mai repeats. I cannot tell if her voice lilts upward, like a question mark, or if it is flat, like a declaration. “Of course,” I say, though I am hardly convinced. Still, I can see the relevant legal point, but less well than Mai. She has a law degree. She is trained to see both sides of everything. I suspect she is not wholly devoted to either side. Her back is straight, her demeanor proper. Outwardly she can always retain her poise. You have to, to function in this country.
She grows increasingly animated as she reads the story aloud to me. One hundred fifty police in riot gear. Fifteen thousand protestors spawning sympathy and solidarity protests some four hundred miles away in San Jose. Effigies of Ho Chi Minh hung from lampposts. Some slept outside the video store in homemade replicas of the cages used to house political prisoners in Vietnam. Two mock coffins, representing American and Vietnamese war dead, were paraded along the frothing perimeter of the parking lot. It did not help that Hanoi, through its Los Angeles consulate, called for the protection of the store owner’s First Amendment rights. The crowd outside the video store surged with this news. Insults were screamed, vengeful chants lobbed. Punches were thrown, demonstrators hustled into custody. The police swung their black baton sticks. This is America? Little Saigon in Westminster, California, is on the verge of conflagration. I wince when she tells me about violence and arrests.
Mai glances at her watch. “All set?” she asks. I know we still have the important errand to do for Mrs. An.
About ten stores away is a shop that sells curios and Vietnamese CDs and DVDs. I have always liked its collection of pre-1975 music, the sort that follows the bent of one’s soul and its deepest longings. The door releases a loud chime, announcing our entry. There is a familiar tune, plucked from a guitar. The proprietor stands up and greets me cheerfully. Her jaw drops in a feigned look of surprise. “How nice to see you out and about at last,” she exclaims. I cannot recall her name but I know she is a friend of Mrs. An. “How are you?” the woman says, presumably to me, but Mai answers.
“Fine, fine,” she says. And after a momentary pause, “Busy.”
“Who isn’t.”
Mai nods. And then without
any further preliminaries, she comes to the point. “Mrs. An wants to send money home to a relative.”
“Oh, sure,” she says comfortably. “How much?”
“Two thousand,” Mai says.
After a long pause, the woman declares curtly, “We are all up next month for the hui. That includes Mrs. An.”
Hui. Money club, I say to myself.
“Yes. I am sure she is aware of that,” Mai replies. There is a quiet attentiveness in her demeanor, a defense of what she takes to be an implicit questioning of Mrs. An’s reliability and her commitment to the hui. She turns toward me and fixes her scarf.
“Well, she will still be responsible for the usual one thousand,” the woman insists. “If she sends two thousand home now, will she be able to make her one-thousand-dollar contribution?”
Mai nods. “Of course.” The shop is sparse and the surrounding white walls make things stand out. Awkward moments can’t be hidden or tucked away here.
The woman walks toward the cash register and flashes me a questioning look. I quickly nod, as if to back up Mai’s assertion. Her eyes catch mine and soften. “I don’t mean to offend. You understand that I’m the organizer of the hui, so if anything happens or someone defaults, I’m responsible,” she says, defensively.
I am familiar enough with the hui to know that it is an informal rotating credit association. This one has ten members, including Mai, Mrs. An, and the shop owner. For years, Mai had made monthly deposits of the requisite amount, to be mutually determined by the members. How much the pot is worth depends on the members’ collective decision. The hui meets monthly, like a book club or Weight Watchers. Each member deposits her dues once a month, which for some might be half of their monthly earnings. And everyone has a chance to draw from the hui pot once until the rotation is complete and a new hui rotation begins. The current pot is worth ten thousand dollars. It is supposed to rotate ten times, giving each member a chance to collect.