by Lan Cao
9
The Mynah Bird
MAI, 1967
I am lying in bed with our Chinese grandmother. Already the evening is dimming.
As her hand reaches the small of my back, I feel a new inner static under the skin’s surface. I must have reacted in an abrupt way because she jumps and asks in a tone of hushed astonishment if something is wrong.
I shake my head.
Poor child, our grandmother nonetheless whispers. Poor child.
Our parents too have whispered something similar to each other, when they think I cannot hear.
Why, in heaven and earth, can’t she at least try to appear normal?
She has to try.
She is.
She has to try harder.
At night, our Chinese grandmother invariably mutters to herself. Poor child.
I do not mind it. I want to be small inside the world’s vastness. They don’t understand, but I have grown to like the emptiness and stillness of silence itself. I want to be swallowed up inside a vast expanse of space.
Tonight, a tide of light swells beside me. The first time I felt this lurking feeling was on the night after my sister’s burial. I was in bed then as well. In my head were images of tombstones and the symmetrical shadows cast against the hill’s crescent sweep of grass. The shadows had followed me home, into my bedroom. A strange feeling sank into me that night.
I felt a mass of churning emotions inside me. I thought it had to do with my sister, with the lingering imprint of her presence, with the fact that certain things can attach themselves to your body and soul and cling forever to your heart. Even after the fleshly presence, a fragment of a memory might remain, spinning alternative versions of what might have been. That was what I thought.
And the feeling that there was another person nearby became more pronounced. Is there someone on the other side of me?
So when this charge surges, I recognize it immediately. A body double is clinging seamlessly to me, like a double helix that has been lovingly orchestrated into a single wave, dancing out there, matching my movements. It is there but it is outside my range of vision. I snap my head around. Still I cannot see.
I nudge my Chinese grandmother with my elbow and point to the night-prowling shadows that have emerged from the dark. She shushes me. And then, perhaps out of curiosity, she bolts up, looks, and, seeing that nothing is there, murmurs, “Go to sleep,” as she flicks my eyes closed with her fingers.
Ghosts can be found anywhere, but especially here. Even in Saigon where people can flip a switch and summon electricity to make a dark room bright or a hot room cool, people believe in the supernatural. What inhabits us is something much more primitive. A mysterious noise in the chimney, a fleeting silhouette by the window, an electrical charge in the air—these can all be explained away by reference to ghosts. I understand it now more than ever. The explanation satisfies. It feels personal, like the presence of a loved one. I am not sure how spirits fit into my sister’s world, the world of physics. But I embrace the thought: My sister has turned into a ghost, a flying, extravagant figure that floats and hovers, creeps and crawls, always watching over me.
She is here, I say to myself.
• • •
One night, months after my sister’s death, I hear our parents talking. Despite their efforts to control the modulation of their voices, it is clear that they cannot. I have understood for some time now that their manner of being with each other has become perverse. There is an inhibited quality in their talk, the subdued ferocity under the unstirred surface of apparent calm, the deliberate lowering of voices that serves only to magnify the underlying tension.
“How could you?” Mother hisses. Her power to accuse is at its peak. “How could you not?” she admonishes with a sovereign’s authority. She pauses again and this time it is a long one.
“I will not be a party to it,” Father says after a moment’s hesitation.
“To what? To protecting your family?” Mother asks.
“He’s not my family. Your brother . . . I will not . . .” His voice trails off.
“Surely you see that it is not proper to mix official duties with personal obligations,” he admonishes.
I hear her accusation again, this time more loudly. “A disgrace.” And then moments later, more of the same. “A disgrace,” she repeats with greater indignation.
I imagine our father’s face as he is pressed by our mother into doing something he does not want to do. What do his eyes say? Are they sad? Where is the vertical line that customarily creases his forehead when he is nervous?
“It’s too bad you feel that way. But I will not. I cannot,” he insists unapologetically.
I press my ear to the bedroom door. Mother continues to exhort Father. Then silence settles briefly. Even in my most extravagant fantasy, I cannot will peace or harmony into them. Some things cannot be instilled merely by acts of imagination.
“It’s too much to ask,” I hear Father exclaim. He is vulnerable. He is being pushed out of shape. He cannot stop himself from going on. “What do you think this is? This is a real war, not make-believe,” he says. “There are limits. I can’t do it.”
“You can’t or you won’t?” Mother quickly replies, matching his excitement with her own shrill rage. “You would if you cared about the family.” An opening has been created. They will walk screaming into it.
Father’s voice quivers. “How dare you,” he says. I have never heard such a bite in his voice. I fear the direction their conversation is taking. I hear their footsteps—father’s booted thud, mother’s wood-sandal clatter against the bare tiles.
“It has been done before,” Mother continues more calmly. “You would not be the first.”
There is then an unwavering flow of unintelligible words. I cling to them, hoping to decipher their meaning.
“Others have saved you before at great sacrifice and risk to themselves. He did it for you. Have you ever thought of that?” our mother asks with deliberateness.
A chaotic exchange follows. Mother lashes out and Father breaks down. The recrimination continues.
Our father emits a snort of disdain, as if to shrug off our mother’s unwelcome but all-too-obvious revelation.
“And so he did, did he?” he says loudly. “Of course he did. But are you sure he did it for me?”
Mother hisses back, and then their voices drop. Still, I manage to hear our mother say something about Uncle Number Two. Theo this, Phong that. Uncle Number Two and his thickened jawline scar. So many names for just one person. So many complications. I hear our father snicker. He tells her not to call Uncle Number Two by a name meant to be endearing, a name he came up with years ago out of habitual affection. “I never use that name anymore, haven’t you noticed?” he says, and then he turns quiet. Mother ignores his question. I hear her use the word sacrifice several times. She tells him to look at those around him. Not just at the war, she adds. By the way she pronounces it, with a particular pitch of her voice and with particular emphasis on the word, the just is packed with judgment and tension.
“And what do you mean by that?” Father asks.
“You would not have to ask if you open your eyes. Do you think he is the only one who has put you above others? You see nothing unless—no, you see nothing even—when it is right in front of you.”
“I see more than you think. I just choose not to announce it.”
They both turn deadly quiet. And then I hear a muffled, melancholic cry.
“After Khanh’s death, I just can’t cope with another loss.” She lets out a soft moan that rises excruciatingly into a raw wail. It resembles the raging howl I once heard from under my bed, that weekend long ago when she believed she was home alone. But she knows that she is not alone now. Her cries soon turn into long, plaintive sobs that mount in a swelling undercurrent of grief.
I wait for something to happen. A moment passes. Then our father gets up and moves around, sending a brief shadow across the door’s crack. “Very well then,” he mutters. “I will see what can be done.”
Mother’s sobs abate for a few moments and then rise again, although it seems more from momentum than from continuing distress.
A few moments later, I hear this: “I will do my best. I promise.”
Mother’s tone changes. Father lingers in the room. “But you understand, I’m sure, that there will be some ground rules that must be followed afterward. It’s for all of our safety.”
I hear nothing from Mother. An agreement of sorts has been forged between them. Perhaps they have finally crossed over the turbulence and arrived at a truce. I am relieved.
I want to offer Mother a gesture of kindness. Her wail has so distressed me that I am ready to summon up my nerve to rush in and whisper something in her ear. But as usual, a swell rises in me and I will not disrupt the slumbering silence that is mine alone. There is no beneficent normalcy to offer her, after all. I sit still, listening, as Father leaves. The door opens, then swings back on its hinges, and closes with a click that signals finality.
• • •
The mynah bird charms me. Perched on the edge of James’s palm is a shiny black-feathered bird with a bright orange beak, its face lined with an iridescent yellow stripe. James snuggles it under his chin, then feeds it a bowl of scarlet-red peppers. The bird loves to cuddle and to be cuddled, James says. I stare into its clear, bright eyes. It returns my stare, then cocks its head as if it were trying to figure me out. Round eyes lock with mine. Thick wings flap.
Be still.
“Come closer,” James says.
As I press toward him, my Chinese grandmother sneezes. The bird sneezes too. I am amazed. Intense black eyes glare at me. Head rears back, then turns askance. James whistles one of Grandma’s favorite tunes, “Yesterday.” The bird immediately hops on James’s shoulder and whistles. James runs his finger over the bird’s clipped wing, then thrusts a mirror in front of its face. “What a bird!!!” the bird says, then laughs. An English-speaking bird. Both James and my Chinese grandmother laugh as well. “What a bird indeed,” James agrees, nodding.
“Some bird!” he says, and the bird repeats the words. James takes my hand and places it on the bird’s head. “Stroke it.”
I obey. My Chinese grandmother explains that a mynah bird is a bird that repeats the words of others.
The bird again cocks its head, then rubs it against the back of my hand with surprising enthusiasm. I feel a twinge of excitement. A lightness fills me up. I answer its inaudible call and quicken my caresses of its feathered breast. The bird stretches its body this way, then that, as if to get me to touch the precise location of an elusive itch.
“Hungry?” James asks in Vietnamese. “Hungry,” the bird says, also in Vietnamese. A Vietnamese-speaking bird also! I can detect the dripping smell of mango and papaya coming from the bird. “Food?” James suggests in English. “Food,” the bird rasps in English.
“Two languages,” my Chinese grandmother exclaims.
I feel an odd and astonishing sense of complicity with the bird.
James leans toward the bird and whispers something in its ear. “Go on,” James urges, nudging the bird and giving it a slice of ripe-yellow mango.
“Ah, ah, ah, ah, mynah bird,” the bird says proudly. It continues with “Vietnam, Vietnam,” which, given its slight flaw in locution, sounds like “southern duck, southern duck.” This mishap provokes laughter in my Chinese grandmother. James shakes his head and offers an explanation. “We’re still working on that one. We’ll get it right.”
James drops to the ground, kneeling on the sidewalk. “So, what do you say?” James searches, looking at me. “Do you like the bird?”
Yellow feet step forward. Head tilts side to side. Body tips.
“Yes,” the bird insists, striking a pose with an ecstatic flapping of the wings. “Yes. Do you like the bird? Do you like the bird?” It nods its head frantically, repeating James’s words.
I edge closer to James and rest my head against his chest. I might have said how much I already love the bird, its sense of humor, its imperious ways. “I like the bird.” Those words stay stuck in my throat. Yes, one word, just one. I can feel an ocean swell of a word forming inside me. I can answer it, this rumbling expanse and its accompanying inclination to say yes.
But as I feel the eyes on me, I know I cannot do it. The task of actually forming and uttering one word is daunting. I content myself with keeping my head against James’s large, cupped hand and tickling the feathered mound of the bird’s wattled neck.
The bird pulls back and looks at me in reproach.
The temptation for me to make a sound is almost irresistible.
“It’s okay,” he says, as if to soothe both the bird and me. “Squeeze my hand if you like the bird.” I squeeze his hand.
James smiles broadly. He pulls me closer and asks, “They’re sending me out of here for a few weeks. Do you think you can keep the bird for me?”
I don’t answer James’s question, but this time when he offers me his hooked finger, I curl mine into his and pull, the way I did so many times with him when my sister was alive.
My Chinese grandmother quickly says yes. “Yes,” she answers in Vietnamese, making eating motions with her hands and mouth. “I’ll make sure it is well fed.”
I am delighted. I feel a burgeoning sense of well-being and joy that must add up to a happiness of sorts. James opens his backpack. He takes out a portable cassette player and a tape that has been compiled by his mother in Long Island, New York, and includes songs she thinks her son will like.
He flips the ON switch. And there it is. That riff. I have no choice but to stand there and surrender, wide-eyed and open-jawed, to the hard-core, miscreant guitar lurking under a brisk punctuation of highly syncopated chord progressions. It is a number I have yet to hear. The opening alone thrills. The beat takes you by the collar and shakes you up and launches you into a low-key but hard-edged whisper. Mick rasps about satisfaction, repeating the word over and over and over, despairingly, menacingly, urgently, until it merges with the catchy riff-filled beat. I am almost breathless as I struggle to keep up. There it is again, the chorus of double negative, half-sung, half-screamed, hissing and haunting against drum, acoustic guitar, and bass. I cannot make out all the words but I love the beat.
“Hot damn,” James says, shaking his head. “I love it.”
“I love it,” the bird hollers.
And before I know it I hear myself repeat after the bird. “I love it,” I say, startled by my own voice. The bird looks at me. It is used to repeating others’ words and is startled to hear me repeat its words. “I love it,” I say again, a little more subdued this time.
James scoops me up and draws me into his arms, a gesture suggestive of our old ways. I let myself stay inside his embrace. “Step by step. One day at a time,” he says gently. “You will get your voice back. You have the loveliest of voices.”
I smile. James gives me the tape.
“This way you can listen to Mick anytime.”
My Chinese grandma rolls her eyes.
James also reserves the privilege of naming the bird for me. “When I come back, you tell me the name, okay?” I nod. I already know the name I will give the mynah bird. “Galileo” is the obvious choice. But the urge to speak has vanished and I tell myself I will wait until he returns to share the name with him. Before we say good-bye, James plucks me from my silence and presses his smiling face against mine. “See you soon, kid,” he says to me. And to Galileo, he says, “Keep an eye on her for me, won’t you?”
I watch him leave. The backpack disappears when he turns the corner. Our Chinese grandmother bends down, wiping the tears off my face with her hands.
• • •
My most intense time with Galileo is spent during a monsoon month while James is away. The skies darken and water pours down in absolution. The bird seems to love the rain. The harder the better, as if it knows that a torrential, windswept rain is necessary to alleviate the overbearing swelter of heat and humidity. As gusts of wind loft sheets of rain against our windowpanes, Galileo scratches the newspaper-lined floor of his cage and asks to be moved closer to the window. Often he will perch triumphantly on the window ledge, observing the implacable cascade. I stand close to him, placing my eyes as much at his eye level as possible to try to take in exactly what he must be absorbing.
In our yard, against the garden wall and hemmed in by thick leafy hedges, is the giant rain-collecting cistern my sister and I once used for hide-and-seek purposes. A caterpillar, tremulous and fat, is trying to escape the rain, looking for cover under the arch of a drooping leaf. The grass-covered grounds are waterlogged. Galileo seems enthralled by it all—the wind-whipped trees stoically standing up to the rain, the clattering of water on tiled roofs, the sound of little children playing naked in the streets. Sometimes he will almost flatten himself against the window, as if to help him see through the glistening rain and his own blurred vision. I watch him rub his body against the glass, lifting his wings, sinuously preening.
What are you doing? I ask silently.
And as if she can read my mind, my Chinese grandmother volunteers an answer. “Birds like to take baths,” she says, as much to herself as to me. “We must get a bath pan for the bird,” she mutters. I am pleased. She too is enthralled by Galileo.
“Galileo, Galileo,” the bird says, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Grandma laughs. “What a quick study you are. Are you sure you want such a name?” And then turning to me, she asks, “So, little one, you have been talking to this bird and teaching him his name?”
I shake my head. I have not. Perhaps it is Grandma herself who has been playing with Galileo. I hear her call his name. I decide she is the one who told him his name and she is simply playing a game with me.