by Lan Cao
James waves to us from his spot in a distant crowd. My sister runs and throws herself into his arms. His big hands cup her head. Shrieks crescendo from somewhere a ways off. Black smoke makes lolloping curls and hangs lazily in the blistering heat. On a day like this, I would rather be home in front of our air conditioner. I close my eyes and lick the sweat beads that have collected on my arms and shoulders. James jabs a bare arm in the air as my sister waves me toward them.
I take our Chinese grandmother’s hand in mine. Around us, children our age, barefoot and stripped down to their underwear, jabber in a foreign language.
James scoops me up and hoists me over his head. Perched on his shoulders, I take in the view. We stand before an outdoor eatery famous for its roasted meats, or so our Chinese grandmother says. A suckling pig lies flat on a metal grill set atop two large concrete blocks. Hot coals glow red underneath. A sauce of oil and other seasonings is lathered onto the length of the pig’s body to produce a thicker, brawnier taste. The pig’s skin will turn crisp even as its flesh, larded and white, turns tender.
A small and slender man, bare-chested and fine-boned, runs his finger along a knife’s blade before placing it on a sharpening stone at his feet. Then, with surprising speed and using only his bare hands, he pulls a fat chicken out of a wire coop and holds it upside down by the legs. The chicken lets out full-throated clucks. It sputters and thrashes violently. I want to turn away but I find myself a captive of what is occurring before me. His arm fully extended, the man swings the chicken by its legs in wide, windmill-like circles. Dazed and dizzy, the blubbering bird is placated at last and cannot move. The man holds it against a cutting board and whacks its head off with a precise downward motion of his knife. The crowd coos. I feel a grunt, an echo deep from James’s diaphragm. He nods approvingly and tells me that it is not always easy to deliver such a deft and decisive blow to end an animal’s life.
“When I was thirteen, I killed my first chicken,” he says. I remember “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” I imagine James as a farm boy, surrounded by chickens and pigs and cows. “I used a hatchet, and even with my full strength coming down on its neck, the blow barely broke the skin. The chicken stared at me, eyes wide open, before it escaped and then collapsed, its body shaking against the ground. My mother was horrified.”
I too am horrified. With feigned calmness, I remain motionless on his shoulders. My sister is transfixed, sucked into the drama of agony and surrender. The man hangs the chicken by its feet on a low tree branch to let its blood drip in a red arc into a bucket below. When the blood stops draining, another man dunks the bird into a pot of water boiling on a portable charcoal stove. The feathers loosen and are ready to be plucked. The man pulls the feathers off the chicken, reaches inside its body and scoops out the guts, then throws it on another large grill already covered with roasting fowls. A third man brushes sauce on the breasts and thighs. Drippings of concentrated sugars and soy sauce fall on the coal-fed flame.
When we sit down to eat, I concentrate hard on the task of chewing and swallowing, the stench of guts and blood still in my nostrils. Clouds have swallowed the sun but the heat still sticks to my skin. James twists open a “33” beer and takes a long swig, wiping his mouth with one bare arm and tickling my sister with the other. Somewhere deep inside myself I feel the urge to retch and vomit. My sister turns to me, squeezing my hand.
“Are you upset I wanted you to come?”
I nod. I don’t lie to my sister, not even to spare her feelings.
Our Chinese grandmother takes a bottle of mentholated oil from her pocket and rubs the balm on my stomach and throat. She dabs a few drops on my tongue to keep the nausea at bay. I put my head on my sister’s lap as I lie on the bench.
• • •
To my delight I am awakened by a gushing downpour. It is the sort of rain I love. No threat of thunder or lightning, just torrential rain that empties the sky and cools the earth. It is the sort of rain that will make water run off the roof for days, spilling into the waiting cisterns of hot-fired clay. The grown-ups run. Our Chinese grandmother takes cover under the store’s awnings. My sister grabs my hand. Rain pelts our faces. We are drenched. Doors open and children run out, arms extended, faces up, mouths open, screaming ecstatically. The smallest of them peel off their clothes and surrender themselves naked to the force of rain. My sister and I pick a puddle and splash. James whoops and throws himself into the downpour. He puts me on his shoulders. Occasionally he dips his body and threatens to spill me onto the street.
We walk home along the washboarded alleyways, water running down our shoulders and arms.
• • •
Hours later, I’ve recovered and we are playing on our own street. Ngo Quyen Street. I love this time of the day, when time makes a turn around the bend and slides into the purple evening hours. The tamarind trees lining our block shade it from the summer heat. Soon the mimosa leaves will close up and night will arrive. A brisk wind stirs the tamarind pods, making scraping sounds as the surface of things shifts. Our parents are getting ready to leave the house.
I am giddy with happiness as I walk with my sister and our Chinese grandmother toward James’s compound to cook our evening meal outdoors. We each carry a bag of ingredients for tamarind soup. James is fond of meals that appeal to a peasant’s palate. I have the tamarind, pineapple, shrimp, and fresh coriander to give the broth a savory balance of sweet and sour. The pineapple will infuse a sweetness into the sharp tamarind base, tempering its reddish-brown sourness with a flicker of delicate redolence. It is not a temperamental dish and requires no vigilance, merely a steady flame. We will cook in the open field across from the military compound. Once James emerges from the sandbagged garrison, we will take three bricks and make a triangle with them. We will put a pot on this impromptu stove. We will gather clumps of dry grass and wood shavings to make a fire. We will bring the soup to a boil, then add tomatoes, celery, and garnishes. We will eat in bliss.
From the other side of the street, James comes toward us from the military compound, holding a portable cassette player. I see the starched crispness of his uniform. Our father wears his the same way. Ironed and pleated.
I am about to wave at him but I freeze instead. I find that I am gazing right through him, into a washed-out, speckled grimness that so startles me I close my eyes to ward it off. A moment passes. My bare skin registers a sensation of dread. I hear the sound of my shoes tap their own tentative echoes against the cement. An enormous heaviness swoops through me, pressing my eyes shut. When I open them, I see my sister as she meets her reflection. I see the pale contour of her shadow sliding into itself, like a retrospective likeness that glides softly by.
No, I say to myself, not knowing what it is I am saying no to, not knowing why it is I am trying to wrap myself inside her reflection.
A car drives past us, then backs up. It is our black Peugeot. Our father rolls down the window. We look in. Something heavy hangs in the air, the weight of an argument cut short and suspended to create the appearance of peace.
“No,” I repeat.
“Yes,” commands our father, thinking I had said no to him. He tells us to get into the car. Our Chinese grandmother gives us a gentle push. Our parents would like to kiss us before they leave. We jump into the backseat. Our mother turns around and pinches our cheeks. She caresses Khanh’s hair.
I look out the window. James is walking toward us, waving. My sister waves back. He is waiting to cross. In a slow, rippling motion, a peddler stretches her legs, hunches down, and shoulders a pole with two baskets dangling from each end. Several men gun their motorcycles down the street. Horns blare. Motors rumble. Heat blasts from the asphalt road.
The windshield shatters.
My sister is sitting next to me, then the entire weight of her body collapses into my arms. We both fall against the seat. It is as if the laws of physics themselves have been broken. People begin to shr
iek.
Khanh reaches her arm to her neck as blood shoots out from it. Every time I think of it, it is as if I have never moved from that spot nor emerged from that moment in time. I see her arm reaching up, touching her neck. Our parents scream. Our Chinese grandmother screams. James screams. Our mother clambers into the back of the car and clamps her hand on my sister’s neck. She tries to plug the hole with her finger, first this finger, then that finger. Red oozes around her hand, gradually turning brown. Our father throws our mother aside and takes over. He ties a piece of cloth around Khanh’s neck. Our mother screams instructions. James also tries to help, pressing his hand as if it were a bandage over the cloth covering the hole. Helpless, my mouth opens. I impulsively take in her breath, breathe it into my mouth and lungs, holding it inside. My sister’s breath is in me. Her body collapses against mine as her shadow wavers over me.
Everything that occurred then occurs right here, right now, and repeats in a perpetual present-tense time loop. Every moment I spent with my sister before this moment also occurs again and again, in the present tense. It is time bending, taking away my breath.
I am still there, at that moment when God or fate or a split second before or after could have made a difference but did not.
And that is how I still am today, in a half-life that only waits and sometimes hopes.
• • •
It is still a mystery where the bullet came from. It was Cholon, in 1967. She was thirteen. I was nine.
Seasons change but her absence is a hole I cannot fill. A primitive pain lies beyond the reach of language, like an oui yaaah that is too deep to be cried out. I stop talking after her death. Our parents ask, then beg, then order me to speak. Perhaps I should say “my” parents but I can’t because saying “our” honors my sister’s continuing presence. Just one word. Any word. They are well intentioned. They fear my remoteness is intended to punish. The truth is I have become capable only of pure, uninflected silence.
Our family goes through the outward motions of mourning. I wear a rectangle of white cloth pinned to my left breast. I absorb everything, note the lightness our father tries to instill in his own voice, the long wail that leaks from our mother’s chest one Sunday afternoon when she mistakenly believes she is alone.
I become a stone, elemental and geologic, transcending the human and the mortal. I merge seamlessly with the shade of gray that surrounds our altered lives.
Soon our mother begins visiting my sister’s grave every week. She does not announce it but I know because she leaves the house with a bouquet of flowers and a small bag of food soon after Father leaves for work. The spell of the cemetery runs through her. I recognize it because it runs through me as well.
Sometimes she takes me along with her. I watch so I can remember the way my sister’s name was carved into the stone. I watch silently as our mother gathers a few branches of frangipani blooms in one hand and a bag of sticky rice in the other. Hands folded together in prayerful supplication, she whispers to herself freely, as if I do not hear.
“Forgive me. Forgive me,” she says importunately, over and over. “If only I hadn’t asked you to stop and get into the car . . .” I hear the murmur of voices take on a different tone, a tone that beseeches. I let her be.
I still don’t speak, and more and more I come to feel content within my crucible of silence. With each new day, I feel a sense of raw, unadulterated abandon. Friends offer their diagnoses. Mat hon, they whisper. I am someone who has lost her soul.
As time passes, my silence tolls with mounting intensity and force. Our parents stop trying to draw me out and go about their own simulated lives, removed a reasonable distance from mine. I am relieved to be left alone, feeling as though I were a child of whom little will be expected from now on. I know what I can get away with without triggering ferocious reactions at home and make sure to manifest some sense of normalcy. I know that they will use school as a gauge, so my attendance is perfect. I do everything the teacher asks. Over time, I even begin to like being separate from the more animated world.
Our parents think silence means absence. But I am present enough to witness what they do. I see the down-turned corners of their mouths. When they talk to each other in my presence, they say only what is most obvious. Our mother drops her eyes when she talks. “Dinner is ready.”
Our father says, “Wonderful. I am sorry I was kept late at the office.” His eyes momentarily look at hers and then fix themselves on his rice bowl.
She moves food around with her chopsticks. We are eating pork ribs. I can hear the sharp gristly crunch of bone against teeth.
“The sauce is very good,” our father remarks.
Our mother nods. “Five-spice powder from Aunt Number Three.”
Our father tilts his head as a way of signaling his confusion.
“The Chinese rice dealer. Tomorrow I will go see her. I probably won’t be back in time for dinner.”
“Doesn’t she usually come here?”
“Yes. But not always.”
“Hmmm.”
I drift out of their conversation. Their voices sound strange, like a song sung on one note. When dinner is finished, each of us returns to the welcome solitude of our own private space.
As always, I find consolation in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. It is precisely when our parents begin accusing each other that I turn to the stories of Scheherazade for support. Our mother lashes out forcefully but quietly. “We should have moved long ago,” she says on the other side of the wall, the should thick with a blame that refuses to let go. “Our house is too close to the military police. My brother warned us they would target the police headquarters. He warned us to be careful.” For a moment there is only a sorrowful silence. And then there is our father’s voice, summoning up his own curt defense followed by a string of words I am relieved I cannot make out. “Your brother is a Vietcong and who knows what else.” The sentence is followed, I imagine, by a dismissive wag of the hand. “That he is a Vietcong is all the more reason to listen to him when he gives his warnings,” she retorts.
A knot gathers in my chest. Quickly I return to the stories I know so well. This is where I learn that we read so we can hide within the pages of a book. That there are few things more reassuring than a story silently relished. A boy rubs a magic lamp and, arms outstretched, sits on a flying carpet. I see the opening of a cave. The sky blushes purple. Among the crowded bazaars and narrow streets, a minaret stands. Everything else falters and recedes.
• • •
One day, I find a new friend, a cricket who likes to sleep in a matchbox with needlepoint holes I poke one by one into the cardboard sides. I get down on my hands and knees to look at it. I touch its iridescent wings. It creeps tentatively onto my hand, then tickles its way up my arm one day when I am in the garden among the hewn rocks and tangled vines that hug our mango tree. It is a tickle not much different from the addictive ritual shared with my sister, the sort that produces a tingling on the skin’s surface and coaxes me into solace, then sleep. The cricket appears injured; one of its legs is falling off, one of its wings partially torn. I don’t flick it away but carry its slumbering body indoors with me. A persistent chirp, announcing its simple presence, lulls me into the night. Hello, I say soundlessly after school. I spend the hours reading. And the cricket is simply there, demanding nothing. A small rag on the windowsill keeps it warm. It is easy to please. It lives in my room, and whenever it wants to, it crawls into the matchbox on my night table to sleep. It shows no interest in escaping into the garden right outside the open window. I imagine the cricket making its way through the dark pungent earth, the neatly clipped stretch of grass, the open wilderness, while I am away at school. But like me, it is drawn to the safe confines of the box.
Hello, I say, soundlessly again, before bed. I can hear its response: a sharp scratch against the box and a soft chirp, small and wounded. Together the cric
ket and I listen to the murmurs of nocturnal life. Darkness inspires revelations that are less visible during the day. I know that we are still fighting a war and that our father is still caught up in it—no, has disappeared into it. That our mother is even more remote now than before. That we all want to be comforted, yet we are contemptuous of consolation when it is offered. That Khanh’s death has diminished our lives.
From my room night after night I can see a window light up when our mother or father returns. I can hear footsteps in the yard, then the creaky hinge of our swing set. Our father would be sitting there staring at the powdery sky, living inside the nocturnal distance that stretches between him and the rest of the world. I too know that distance all too well. I let him be, as I hope he would let me be. Our father simply sits there, cauterized, night after night on the swing and submits himself to the agitation of darkness. Mosquitoes and gnats buzz around his head. When our mother’s car approaches the driveway, its wheels crunch against loose pebbles on the partially tarred street; headlights shine a wide-angled beam at our house. I can hear our father move in a rush from the swing. His bedroom door rattles open, swift and certain, then closes with a click. He is still in the smaller room, two doors away from our mother’s. My heart flutters as I wait to see if something will happen.
Our mother does not follow him. They are far apart from such a possibility. I put my ear against the wall of our mother’s room. Now anger and grief bloom at night, when they are dark and raw. Through the force field of silence, I can hear it, the turbulence of clear liquid splashed against glass, releasing sorrow. I suspect it is vodka that flows so profusely. It would be feasible for our mother to harbor this furtive little secret, this inconsequential personal foible. Still, she has taken to drinking tea and eating wedges of lime to cover the odor. I know because when we eat crabs or lobsters, we dunk our hands into bowls of tea and lime juice to remove the fishy odor. Our mother is taking every measure to conceal her new habit.