by Lan Cao
Mrs. An has apparently collected her ten thousand already. The defining feature of any hui is the commitment even of those who have drawn the entire amount from the pot to continue contributing until every member has had a chance to draw. Once the hui has rotated among all the members, a new cycle begins.
In this tightly knit community of Little Saigon, has anyone collected and then failed to contribute? No, even suggesting such a thing is ludicrous. So why is the woman concerned that Mrs. An will not make her payment?
The hui is a venerable arrangement of ingenuity and trust. When we first came in 1975, it was clear none of us would qualify for a bank loan. This is our way of saving and lending to one another. With the hui’s help, we became fluent navigators of the American landscape. Over the years, withdrawals from the hui have been used for so many purposes—college education, home renovation, weddings, funerals. It is the hui that allows people with no collateral or credit history to nurture their largest dreams and tenderest hopes, by leveraging the circuitry of friendship and social connections for financial purposes.
“With that no-good son of hers saddling her with his debt, of course sometimes we have to worry,” the woman explains, squinting to gauge my reaction. “Even if she’s been with the hui so many years.”
This is all news to me. I am not aware of these details of Mrs. An’s life.
“Of course I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. She’s practically a member of your family. You must be so worried,” the woman says, masquerading flagrant gossip as care and concern.
I keep my face neutral, showing no reaction. “There’s no contract, nothing. Just trust and honor,” she continues, half musing, half lecturing. “Don’t you think that as organizer I am supposed to be vigilant?” she prompts, looking to me for affirmation.
The organizer is not reluctant to wield communal power to ensure compliance with hui rules. I sympathize with her but my allegiance is to Mrs. An. “You’re right. Completely. But I’m sure Mrs. An is honorable,” I say as casually as I can. Still, I am stupefied.
“Oh, sure, honor.” The woman shrugs. “The hui is supposed to make you save, not spend.” She purses her lip up, baring teeth. A gold crown flashes. “But too bad she’s cursed with having a leech of a son. Her husband works two shifts and is never home. Mrs. An herself works nonstop. But no, not the boy. The boy drinks and lives a jolly life. Gambles. Wears fancy clothes. Hangs out with hustlers. There’s only so much money she has to spread around. And she doesn’t have the guts to cut him off. Everyone here knows it.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about it,” Mai says.
“I do know something about it. Her business is my business. I am liable if she defaults.” The woman shakes her head disapprovingly. Still, she accepts the envelope that Mai hands her. She counts out loud, one hundred, two hundred, until she gets to two thousand. I watch from the corner of my eye. I am relieved. I know it is important to Mrs. An that this transaction goes through. Wiring money through the bank or some other official channel leaves a record, and Mrs. An’s relative does not want the authorities in Saigon to know she receives regular transfusions of cash from America.
“Just to be sure, let me write the address down again,” Mai says. “When will the money arrive?”
The woman gives Mai a quick, penetrating look. “Tomorrow. Is that fast enough?”
Mai nods. “That is splendid,” she says. “Thank you.”
We call this flying money, an ancient remittance method resurrected to evade Hanoi’s repression. This is how it works: Mai gives the woman cash, in dollars, plus commission. The woman calls up her counterpart in Vietnam. The counterpart delivers the equivalent amount of money in dong, using a more favorable exchange rate than the official rate, to the designated recipient, in this case, Mrs. An’s sister, who is entitled to claim the money if she provides the correct password. There is no actual physical transfer of money. The woman and her counterpart will settle up later. Both are part of a subterranean import-export network. This proprietor in Virginia will sell goods to her counterpart in Saigon but under-invoice them by two thousand dollars to pay off the debt.
Given its need to control, Hanoi can’t be too keen about flying money. But the American government would not appreciate such transactions either, I imagine, given their strict banking regulations, especially after September 11. The flying-money business is not shared with outsiders.
Mai buys a CD and hands it to me. “Here, Ba. It has those singers you like.” It is a collection by an eclectic group of pre-1975-era singers, Thanh Thuy, Thanh Tuyen, Khanh Ly, and Thai Thanh. I am not particularly fond of the new crop of singers who mouth meaningless lyrics in mediocre voices camouflaged by a surfeit of synthesized drums, electric keyboards, guitars.
I smile broadly on my way out and wave my hand over my head to the proprietor, who returns my smile.
“Overbearing,” Mai mutters.
“She’s probably worried.”
“So she gets to spread nasty rumors about people?”
It is true that what she said was unkind. “Is it only rumors?” I ask.
“People talk. You know that. What else is there to do in a tiny little community like this?”
As Mai pushes me from the warmth of the shop into the brisk air outside, I look around. The sun is out, its rays shining full tilt through the lot. Mai still has some more shopping to do. She will buy pâtés chauds, a French pastry filled with meat, light and flaky on the outside and crispy at the edges. There will be bags of banh tieu, a Vietnamese doughnut that is round, puffy, and slightly sweet with a hollow center. I admit it is not as rich or tasty as a Dunkin’ Donut, but it tugs at an old longing. I remind her to get Mrs. An a bag of roasted watermelon seeds. My teeth are no longer strong enough but I love to watch others maneuver teeth and tongue just so to crack the shell and get at the flesh, which has a salty and slightly nutty taste.
There is activity all around: heels clicking on the pavement, doors opened and banged shut, muted laughter, children’s cries, greetings. Through closed eyelids, I imagine Mrs. An’s tightly rolled washcloth pressed against my forehead on cold nights, her hand cupped gently under my chin as she repositions my head on the pillow. And then I think of what the woman at the music store said about Mrs. An’s son and wonder if Mrs. An has been quietly suffering. I see her face, her long hair pinned back by combs, the tilt of her head, the open gaze of her eyes when she enters my room, and a wing beat of sadness flutters and settles in my chest, refusing to let go.
• • •
The day is almost over. I enjoyed the outing with Mai but it has also worn me out. I experience fatigue as a creeping, physical sensation moving from one part of my body to the next until it takes over completely.
I turn my head toward the door. “Mrs. An, are you still here? I thought you would have gone home by now.”
She grins. In the refracted light, her face shows lines of worry I hadn’t noticed until now. I feel some responsibility to look at her carefully, to search for clues I might have missed.
“I popped home and put something in the oven. But I want to hear about your day and to thank you for the longans.”
I nod. “We also sent your money home to your sister.”
“She needed more than the usual amount this month because of the doctor. If I send a little bit each month, she can even live off the interest. Banks over there have been paying over twenty percent interest, can you imagine?”
“Isn’t it already late?” I ask.
“Mr. Minh, it’s only four in the afternoon. It gets dark early now, don’t you know that?”
“Still. You should go home and rest,” Mai interjects.
I don’t know how long Mai has been in the room. “You’re still here too?” I ask.
“I can stay for a little while,” she says. “I don’t have to be at work until later in the ev
ening.” My daughter sometimes takes the evening shift at the law firm, which goes from six P.M. to midnight. Her face beams with pure affability. I smile. The sun has gradually tucked itself behind the distant church steeple.
“Let him rest, okay?” Mrs. An tells Mai. “I’m going home to check on the roast chicken and then I’ll return to give him his pills.”
I hear the front door open and the sound of boots trudging down the hallway. “Leaving so early? No one has minded me one bit today,” a woman’s voice complains in the distinct accent and tone of someone from the Indian subcontinent. I recognize the voice of the crazy old woman from Bengal whose apartment is across from mine. Mrs. Amrita Amar. Her door is usually left open and the nickname Mai gave her when we first moved in has stuck. “A Door Ajar.” She thinks she is already in a nursing home and has been abandoned by her family. Mrs. An’s voice replies, “No one is leaving you. Your son is coming home at six. Your grandson Dinesh only went out for dinner with his girlfriend.” “Liar. Liar.” A wheelchair shoots swiftly across the floor and a door slams shut.
I struggle to find a comfortable position on the bed. Although I am thin—I have never been fat, but thin is something new—I do not feel agile or light. My ankles are puffed out. Mai murmurs something as she hesitates by the foot of the bed. I turn my gaze to the ceiling, letting my eyes drift in the sea of white above.
I can hear the deep murmur of voices outside the window where people congregate to smoke. But the ocean beyond continues to beckon through the fog and eclipse of a life from long ago. A high wind blows through the room. I struggle to draw breath. I have been given morphine to open my veins. Red pills to make my heart strong. White pills to drain excess fluid from saturated tissues. I lie back, my body drugged and duped.
I know life can only be, should only be, lived in the present.
I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them. Mrs. An has come back. She catches me looking at the empty space near the overstuffed armchair.
“Are you looking for something?” she asks.
I hesitate.
“There’s no one there,” Mrs. An says authoritatively.
“Yesterday there was,” I answer. The stolen image of a woman’s body, quietly curled into itself, a soft lavender petal, lingers. I close, then open my eyes to discover it has vacated.
She looks at me and shakes her head. I hear a sigh.
How did I get here? From my house in Vietnam to this apartment complex in America? she wants to know.
I am willing to tell her the essential story that has been all too easily mistold.
I watch her dark, flickering eyes, and the face that turns toward me, waiting.
“I will tell you,” I whisper. “Soon.”
5
Salted Lemonade
MAI, 1965
Mick Jagger growls against a raucous surge of drums and electric guitars. This is music, the kind that imparts unlimited possibilities. That is why it is addictive. My sister and I move to its beat, knowing that boys and girls all over Saigon move with us.
While the music blares, we take turns walking on James Baker’s back. James has blond hair that sparkles against the sun’s glare. His neck turns red, not a honeyed brown, when exposed to the searing heat. James swears he has never in his life had his back walked on. I find that hard to believe. Certainly it is a back to be admired. I can feel with the balls of my feet the two solid mounds of muscle rising under the swell of his shoulders. Carried on this back alone is a mass of muscles, regal and arrogant.
A back walk is an uncommonly effective form of massage. When I make my way up the plates of his back and press my heels against a stray knot, James lets out a long, low moan. Sometimes it is a painful grunt—“Ouch!”—which James tells us is what Americans say when they feel pain. My sister and I laugh. What a funny word, we both think. I wonder why people from different countries produce different sounds of hurt, when what comes out of our mouths when pain is inflicted is purely reflexive. Why would pain, universally felt, not have its own universal expression? When James asks us what the Vietnamese yell out when we are hurt, we teach him the word, oui yaaah. It is more open-mouthed, more emotional. “Oui yaaah,” he would mutter, and chuckle when I step on the knots along the length of his back.
I practice my elementary English with him when I make my way up and down his back. “Where are you from?” I ask in as casual a tone as I can. We watch an array of American shows on the English language channel—The Wild Wild West, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Combat!, Combat! being our father’s favorite. I try to emulate the breezy American way of talking.
Sometimes he answers in Vietnamese. “I am from New York.”
“Where in New York?” I ask, although my sister and I already know the answer. We are learning the rudiments of conversational English.
“Long Island,” he says, making a motion with his hands to describe something long and narrow. Switching to English, he explains, “I grew up on a farm. Faaarm.”
“Moo, moo. Oink, oink?” I say.
“No, no. Po-ta-toes. Long Island potatoes are famous.”
Sometimes my sister and I sing a song about a boy who herds buffaloes that roam the green rice fields. Sometimes James tells us about a man named Old MacDonald who has a farm. We love the sound he makes. “Ee ai ee ai oh.” He points to the tip of Long Island, the southern fork, where the family farm is located. He points to the ocean he crossed to get to Vietnam. Ocean travel, even if it is by air, on a plane flying over an ocean far below, changes a person, James says. “If you ever travel across an ocean, you will see what I mean,” he says.
We have never crossed an ocean. According to James, it makes some people crazy or afraid and others curious. He has become curious, longing to learn our cries, our language. James doesn’t speak our language fluently, by any means, but he does speak it enthusiastically. He has managed to make himself understood, in an elementary way, in our mother tongue. My sister considers it a most impressive feat. James has command of quite an inventory of practical, serviceable words. In addition, he has mastered our six tones, though not in the back-and-forth necessary for smooth conversation. In conversation, his Vietnamese becomes atonal. But in controlled moments of recitation, James enthralls us with his skill, unleashing the six tones of the word ma, which, depending on how it is uttered—with a level pitch, a steep rise, a soft curve or a sharp one, a slow fall, a deep drop—may mean ghost, mother, graveyard, horse, but, or seedling. When he finishes, he takes a bow and we applaud, especially when he makes a mistake.
• • •
One day I am home early. Our mother is at the table in the upstairs dining area with Uncle Number Two. He is not my uncle by blood, unlike Uncle Number Five. But as my father’s close friend, he is entitled to this honorific. We call him by a word that signifies not just a familial relationship to our father—a brother—but also an elevated status: our father’s elder brother.
Our mother loves the foods of many countries but especially those of France. The pastries on the table are from the famous Givral bakery, consecrated by the hands of a master chef trained in a top restaurant on the Left Bank in Paris. I smell the creamy, ambrosial scent of whipped butter and sugar; fresh croissants, perhaps; the slightly smoky caramelized sweetness of crème brûlée; the sustained bitterness of dark chocolate, undoubtedly of the famous Menier brand, simmering in a fondue bowl. There is an extravagance of flavors delicately balanced on one silver tray—even an imaginary taste would do.
I sneak up the stairs and stand at the top of the staircase, peering through the screen door, coveting the feast before my eyes. The top of my head barely touches the bottom of the meshed screen, but if I stand on my toes, I am able to see the full span of our dining area.
Uncle Number Two is sitting across the table from our mother. I am able to hear bits and pieces of this and that if I press my ear to the screen. They are so immersed in
conversation that our mother has not detected my presence.
Her finger traces the contours of an earthenware pitcher—lemonade, perhaps? Lemons, unripe enough to be sour but not acidic, a quick slash into its flesh so the pulp can be squeezed, releasing the tartness of the juices as well as the faint bitterness of the rind. What makes our lemonade intriguing to foreigners, according to our mother, is the addition of salt to temper the sourness, rather than sugar. Indeed, sour and sweet balance each other out, as in sweet and sour soup or sweet and sour pork. But a grain of salt can just as well take the edge off the tang of lemon, though in an irresistible, unexpected way, like a sinuous bend in an otherwise straight road. Our mother might have prepared this lemonade with seltzer water to give it an additional kick—a surprise on the tip of the tongue.
They are mostly silent. Sometimes their eyes meet but other times they look away from each other. Because nothing seems to be happening, I skip down the steps and head toward the kitchen. My arms are outstretched like the wings of a plane as I glide here and there.
“Go to the garden if you want to play,” our Chinese grandmother says, waving me away. She is lying on the hammock, swinging back and forth, watching me. “This is not a suitable place to run around.”
I am almost seven and I do not like to be ordered around. When I balk, she explains that our mother is right up the stairs and that she has asked not to be disturbed.
Immediately that piques my interest. I sneak back up the stairs and peek through the screen door. Uncle Number Two is now pacing back and forth, his steps measured and methodical, then frenzied and disturbed. Occasionally he stops in front of our mother and settles his gaze upon her face. He gives her rueful looks, then averts his eyes. She is still seated, her elbows on our dining table, her back erect.