The Lotus and the Storm

by Lan Cao

  “Quite so,” I said.

  “I’m impressed you know so much about our history, Cliff,” my wife said, gazing at him thoughtfully.

  “As I said, I wanted to learn about the country before coming,” he answered. “You can tell a lot about a country by the historical figures it celebrates as national heroes. I noticed right away when I arrived that you have major boulevards named after the Trung Sisters and Madame Trieu.”

  My wife continued to look at him, almost in a clinical, appraising way. I imagined she was wondering what I myself had wondered many times. Why such a man would leave his country to come here.

  To help, he answered amiably when she asked. The simplicity was so startling that I could tell she wasn’t sure whether it was true. “What do you get in return?” my wife asked.

  “Me? Contentment. Satisfaction that one has made an important contribution,” he answered.

  “What about your country? What does it get in return?”

  Cliff shrugged. “I am more concerned with my own decisions. What I can do. Whether I can help. The big picture is beyond my control.”

  She seemed genuinely surprised. We were sitting at the dinner table. My wife urged me to pour the wine, nudging me gently with her elbow.

  “So simple?” Quy persisted.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Some things are simple. If you allow them to be stripped to their true essence, you would see simplicity.”

  My wife hardly blinked. “Really? Can you give me an example?”

  “It’s easy enough. Loyalty, for example. Loyalty is very simple. You don’t abandon someone who has been a friend to you at his moment of need.”

  “But can’t there come a time when you have to let go? There are limits to everything, even friendship.”

  Cliff closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “What is that scent? The flowers here give off such an incredible fragrance.”

  “Oh, that? It’s the dwarf ylang-ylang. It blooms all year on our terrace,” my wife said. “It’s the flower that gives Chanel N° 5 its signature scent.”

  Cliff lifted his eyes and inhaled. “Lovely,” he said. “As I was about to say . . .”

  “Yes, my question. Loyalty. It isn’t always so simple, especially when life gets complicated and circumstances change.”

  Cliff smiled, unflustered. “It’s simple enough if you follow your heart. But when you start to overthink with your head, that’s when it gets complicated. You churn and churn and churn, seeing this side and that side until you are immobilized.” Cliff looked at me and nodded knowingly. “Surely you can relate to that after what you went through in 1963,” he said.

  My wife seemed satisfied. She unfolded her arms and relaxed. I opened another bottle of wine. She smiled her approval. A Cabernet Sauvignon from Bordeaux. She was smiling through most of dinner. The soft golden hue of her face, almost a honey color, heightened, providing a nice contrast to the pale lavender ao dai. We were comfortable with many topics, some political, some personal. Cliff praised Johnson’s domestic policies, his so-called war on poverty, but disdained his gingerly approach to fighting this war. My wife looked at me, as if to goad me into taking a position, but I neither contradicted nor supported Cliff. After dinner, I opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label to pair with the Roquefort cheese my wife had selected for the occasion. I leaned fully against the chair’s back and felt the warmth of the alcohol in my throat and chest. It felt good. There was the clink of glass, the sound of easy laughter.

  “Isn’t it difficult to be so far from your family?” my wife asked.

  “Yes, but they fully believe in what I am doing,” he answered. “That makes it easier.”

  “They do? Really. You believe in what you’re doing and they believe in what you’re doing.” My wife looked away from him, her brows furrowed. “What does your wife do?”

  “She took care of the three boys full-time when they were growing up. She is completely devoted to them. An extraordinary mother . . . So you see . . .”

  He beamed.

  Cliff continued proudly. “Even when we had only the first child, she quit her part-time job to be with him. She didn’t even want the help of a nanny.”

  My wife nodded politely but I sensed an inward shift. “A mother can be devoted to a child in many ways, no?”

  “True enough, but I suppose I am referring to something intangible but innate. A maternal instinct, so to speak.”

  “Pardon me?” she interrupted. “How interesting. I’ve always wondered what a man means when he talks about maternal instinct. It’s certainly something to ponder, when men all over the world have such opinions about women’s instincts. And in particular, women’s motherly instincts.” She had always been fiery. She leaned toward him to better make out his words.

  “Well, sacrificing everything for the child. For the family,” he answered tentatively. His roguish eyes twinkled.

  “Is that so? In a poor country like Vietnam, I’d say people know something about sacrifice.” Quy gave him a dismissive shrug and shot me a look of indignation. “Any Vietnamese from any street corner can tell you about sacrifice. Ask a cyclo driver who pedaled all day under the hot sun. Or a South Vietnamese soldier who hasn’t been paid in weeks.”

  “I am sure that is so,” Cliff conceded.

  His voice was low and soft, but it resonated, as if it came from someplace deep inside his chest. I noticed that the weight of his eyes rested—a viewfinder—on the bareness of her slender neck. I was not offended, nor concerned. Why should he not look? Our country is a grand wreck but our women are beautiful. A river of hair flowed down my wife’s shoulders and back. Her tightly fitting ao dai hugged her form and was cinched at the waist. The couture silk fabric covered her body and even the entire length of her arms. A personal preference of mine—that she should dress this way. It was subtle theater. It produced a lush, sensual sensation, yet nothing showed, except the shape, the contours, and the curves. All the more intriguing, as it had the effect of provoking and sparking one’s imagination. It created a dance of revelation and concealment—one of pure visual exuberance. With a figure like hers there was no need to show skin. Naturally, I noticed. And so would other men. Foreign men. This we have in common. Noticing is a normal enough thing to do. I liked Cliff all the more for it.

  In the background, a voice from the radio rose. Khanh Ly’s, wistfully singing a beloved song about tomorrow. Sad, of course. A song about departures, of course. And a weeping ocean that mourns love lost. Hers was an understated style, a pure lament that took us by the hand and walked us into the song’s despairing essence itself.

  Over the course of the evening, Cliff managed to earn our trust. Beneath the surface charm was a decent man. I imagined that Quy was disappointed, just as I was, to bid him good-bye when the evening ended.

  We showed him our garden. My wife followed his movement, with her eyes and with every part of her body—a head turn, a shoulder twist. Moonlight danced on the leaves of bougainvillea petals on our garden wall. Tiny green flowers bloomed spikelets that shot upward from the branches of our mango tree. This was where Khanh and Mai hid when they played hide-and-seek and where I found them, after pretending that the hiding spot was so difficult to locate. My wife picked several star fruits, so ripe and swollen they were ready to drop. Cliff took a deep breath, inhaling the intense fragrance of the garden. We tarried by the door even though it was late. Mosquitoes gathered overhead. In the most natural way, my wife reached over and lightly swatted them away from Cliff’s face.

  “We hope you will come back again,” she said.

  When he bade good-bye, he said “Quy.” It was the first time he had spoken her name. For some reason, that he called her by name commanded my attention. “It means precious, I understand,” he said.

  “Yes,” I quickly replied. “Very precious.”

  He did come again. Ove
r time, he became a regular presence in our household.

  A faint, unobtrusive light shines through the window and enfolds me in its steadfast glow. I am still floating in a wonderful, extravagant element, soft and swift, vast and luxuriant, like water. It is water, sometimes metal-colored, sometimes blue, with an occasional frosty cresting of whitecap slipping and slashing through calm and turbulence. The horizon, an unvisited line in the distance, is dotted by a hopeful bank of coconut trees. I feel a tiny ping of recognition. It is the South China Sea. Quy waves at me from the sky, from the water, from shore.

  I am encased in peace until the rattle and pang of fork against plate jostle me awake.

  “Hello,” I hear. I am surprised by the unceremonious “hello” so early in the morning. No knock, not even a rattling of the doorknob to provide notice. “Ba,” a voice calls. The ritual greeting seems particularly hurried and peremptory. My daughter, ghostlike for an instant, glides into the room, sits on the chair by my bed, shaking her crossed leg. Her eyes squint, searching for responsiveness in my face. She reaches over and grips my wrist. Anxiety presses down on me. I look at her through a befuddling knothole of misapprehension.

  “Can you hear me?” she asks. Each word comes out slow, somehow muffled.

  She slaps her hand on the night table to get me to snap out of it and focus.

  “Is that you, Mai?” I ask.

  I hear a sigh. “Who else, Ba?”

  “What did you say?” I ask blankly.

  In almost equal proportions, reality and dream envelop me.

  Her eyes seek me out. I think she takes my hand and holds on to it. Today the pills have left behind a corrosive, molten slag of torpor.

  “Are you there?” Mai asks. She appears stricken. Where would I be? I want to say, but I am distracted by the voice. Almost not her voice, but another’s. Something has insinuated itself into the room, something that blurs and warps instead of clarifies.

  Mai goes on, “I am worried about Aunt An.” She calls me “Ba.” Father. Her eyes sympathetically widen as if to lift and soothe the worrisome message. I see the dark dabs of inadequate sleep under her lower lids. Purple-red leaps from the top part of her partially scarfed neck. I want to intervene but feel ill-equipped. I don’t know what questions to ask. I don’t have the words to begin.

  I point toward her neck with my chin. On cue, she spreads the scarf to cover a larger area and tightens the knot. I hoist myself up and listen.

  “I have not wanted to involve you but now that it’s getting more serious every day, I think I need to tell you.” She retains a measured demeanor.

  “So there is something to what that woman at the music shop said,” I say tentatively. I am worried but touched that Mai thinks I still have the capacity to remedy wrongs.

  She shrugs and rummages through her purse. She finds her checkbook and studies it, assembling information from the muddle of figures organized under debit and deposit columns. Her eyes sink inward. “We’ve been part of the hui now for several years. Every year the numbers change. The pot is worth ten thousand dollars this year but last year it was only five thousand dollars. Most people wanted a bigger pot. And with a bigger pot, things became more formal and rigid. At the beginning, several years ago, our club was, how should I put it, more gentle. We used to not pay out anything to anyone the first month. Instead, the first month’s draw would be set aside in an emergency fund to assist any one of us who had a family crisis. Sometimes, we would even have a communal fund and take a few dollars from it to play the lottery, agreeing to split any winnings equally among all of us. But when Mrs. Chi’s sister died and she became the organizer, things changed. The hui became more like a money-making business and she allows less flexibility.” Mai sighs. “It’s become less about pooling our money to help each other, and more like dealing with a bank.”

  Her voice, roughened by nerves, drops to a whisper. “In the past few months, I’ve had to help Aunt An out with her contribution. Not a huge amount.”

  “So it is money trouble?” I ask. “She drew the money from the hui and now she can’t deposit the necessary amount each month?” It is as I have suspected—financial gloom encloses Mrs. An.

  “That’s only part of the problem, although it’s a big enough part. She gives her son most of what she makes and what’s left over she gives to her sister in Saigon and there’s hardly anything left for anything else now.”

  “What did she do with the ten thousand dollars from the hui?” I ask.

  “She gave it to the boy, I think.”

  The word boy has upset me. Boy means “child.” Of course a parent has to help her child. What parent would not? Compared to your child’s life, yours is the more expendable one. Mrs. An needs help and the boy needs help. I don’t dare ask Mai how much she has given to help. She has a law degree but she does not work as a lawyer or an investment banker. She is a research librarian instead, preferring the less hectic lifestyle it affords her. “So now every month she has to put in one thousand dollars but can’t,” I mutter to myself.

  “Mrs. Chi’s sister used to call each of us before the draw to see how things were. She would ask if we had personal problems and she would cover for that person if needed,” Mai says.

  “So it’s basically a money issue,” I declare. I am trying to follow the story and formulate a solution.

  “Well, it’s more complicated than that,” Mai says sadly. “Aunt An antagonized the hui members. They’re going to ostracize her.”

  “But she’s been paying. So why ostracize?”

  Mai turns her gaze toward me and murmurs, “She got the group to let her access the money first because she claimed to have an emergency. The organizer later found out there was no emergency, that she was just giving the boy money again, as usual. Feeding his dependency.”

  She is probably surprised to find herself discussing such matters with me. She studies me with a serious, considering eye. Mrs. An’s plight wrenches little flutters from my chest.

  “Was there really no family emergency?” I ask.

  She mutters a muted “um” that signifies no.

  “They don’t consider giving the money to a boy in need an emergency?” I ask.

  “Not when she gave it to him so he can gamble it away. Or sink it into another idiotic business. Anyway, I think they will make her pay interest on it at the next drawing. She’ll have to put in eleven hundred dollars or more, not one thousand dollars.”

  “Will she be able to?” I ask.

  “Even if she does, she will still be shunned for making what they consider to be false claims.” Mai looks away. And then after a moment’s pause, she says, “It is a sickness. He can’t stop gambling. It’s an addiction.”

  I am skeptical of this diagnosis. In this country, no one has flaws or foibles. Weaknesses, however pitiful, are armored in psychological jargon that insulates them from scrutiny. But this fact hurts Mrs. An’s case, so I keep it to myself. “So your point is that giving him the money so he can gamble qualifies as an emergency because he is sick?”

  There is a silence and then the squeak of a chair being pushed against the floor. Mai leans in closer, her voice tightened. “Psychologists can testify to this fact, you understand. That it is not his fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s a sickness.”

  “Testify? As in court? Will it come to that?”

  “Not necessarily. I’m sure not.”

  “What can be done to help Mrs. An, then?” I ask.

  Her voice turns soft. “I am worried about both the shunning and the money.”

  “We cannot do anything about the shunning. If they think she misused the emergency argument, they will shun her.”

  Mai says morosely, “But she will suffer if she is shunned. . . . Soon enough they will turn the community against her. It will be devastating.” She looks frazzled, yet fierce. “I don’t think there is any
way to make them stop talking. And in any event, what people think can ruin you in a tiny community like ours.”

  I nod. Here is the darker underbelly of community. The flip side of tight-knit circles and trust is claustrophobia and the conspiratorial hiss of ostracism and expulsion.

  “And the money issue?” I ask.

  “That is why I am coming to you,” Mai says, her face upturned and eager, like a magnifying glass set against and focused upon a specimen.

  I do a quick calculation in my head. Almost all of my social security payments go to help pay the rent. I also set aside a small amount to help Mai with a down payment should she decide to buy a house. I fear unmet expectations and disappointment.

  “Not that I think you can give her any money,” she quickly adds. Her lips quiver. “I know you haven’t got extra money to give. But I just can’t discuss this with anyone else because I think Aunt An would consider it a betrayal, my sharing her business with another. Please think about what I can do.

  “It is tight for me if I have to help her make her payment every month. But it gets worse,” Mai confides further. “Once the rotation of drawings is completed and this hui is over, she might not be able to participate in the next hui at all.”

  From her tone, I can tell Mrs. An counts on money from the hui. But I still ask, “Does she need to? Does she need a lump sum of ten thousand dollars every year?”

  Mai says yes in a single exhalation of breath.

  My mind churns, thinking of ways that we can shoulder into Mrs. An’s growing problems.

  “I’m going to work, Ba. I would have waited to talk to you later today but I have been feeling so anxious about this that I couldn’t wait. Aunt An will stop by soon on her way to the nursing home. I don’t want her to think we have been discussing her,” Mai says. The chair makes a scraping sound as she pushes it back. I look out the window at the interlock of remaining green cast by the hemlocks and firs. A breeze stirs, casting a flickering, mothlike shadow on her face as she stoops to bid me good-bye.