by Lan Cao
I think of what the thay phap said about a snail that looks for a shell in which to house itself. I think of myself as the snail that is expelled. I see the shadowy others, like disembodied spirits on the outskirts, circling time, waiting to enter, to hug the overlapping whorls and swooping imprints that spiral against the small grandeur of my shell. There they are, circling and circling inside the same coiled refrain, waiting for the perverse moment in time when I am defenseless so they can take over and lay claim to my territory, its every space, its every echo.
I am slowly learning how to carry on calmly, projecting a singular, unified self, even as she buzzes about. I am practicing how to be a statue even as her sensation grows slowly inside me. When she exerts herself, I can hear the noise she produces as if it were a background buzz of static.
I have come to expect them both. There are two. I wonder if one of them is my sister or even her ghost. Both are a cross-stitch of personalities that lie languorously about, waiting to be released from sorrow and pain, waiting to enter the darker solitude that I too long for.
Our mother is lying on a hammock, deep inside her own unrelinquished sadness. She is the central riddle in my life. Here she is, alone in the brightness of a beautiful day. Our father is away. Ever since he became commander of the airborne division, and not just the brigade, he is almost never home.
I hear a shuffling sound. A little girl, smaller than I, emerges from a mysterious place, not much different from that delicately balanced space in time when dawn first becomes morning and dusk first becomes night. Her face is sweet and soft, framed by fine black hair that curls like mine used to when I was little. The girl reaches over and gives our mother a squeeze on her arm. Mother neither responds nor pulls away. She looks indifferently at the little girl. Cecile, I think. No, I don’t think—it’s nothing so rational. I sense or feel that it is Cecile. Playmate to the mynah bird. Still miraculously a little child somehow immune to the passage of chronological time. When Cecile emerges, I am edged out, lost inside time, but not completely. I am both in and out of consciousness. I see the world before me, but it is more like a mirage.
In this shifting, parallel world, Mother’s face remains expressionless. With childlike fussiness, Cecile gives her arm another tug. Mother stares into the direction of Cecile’s face but she does not tip over into the present. I watch in this dreamlike moment. I see the bony edge of her withdrawn hand and an imperviousness to her surrounding space. I can feel the agitation of Cecile’s efforts. She caresses Mother’s face, like a blind person who counts on her sense of touch to open up the world for her. I watch her fingers as they trace Mother’s nose and eyes and mouth. Our mother briefly stirs and puts her arm around Cecile, like a hug, but not quite. Cecile is held but not comfortingly. A few moments later, Mother rises, disowning the touch.
With surprising clarity, I see disappointment on Cecile’s face. She is not able to dislodge Mother’s attention from that other world she is in. She cajoles and pouts and climbs into the hammock with her favorite Arabian Nights book. “Read, Ma, read for me.” Her desires are ravenous, like those of a little child. Mother shifts her body. She is busy pursuing mental errands of little consequence. It is a repudiation. Cecile gives up, embracing herself in her own arms instead.
There is nothing more except a half-light stillness that expands everywhere I look. I know Cecile has given up and I have been returned fully to the present.
Later, after our mother has left, I lay my body on the hammock, and I feel her hypnotic presence blue-glowing against my flesh and bone.
• • •
On a thin strip of molten asphalt, a few sunken lanes away from the air traffic control tower, planes take off and land as they always do. One plane takes off and runs into trouble. It tries to return to the airport but crashes. Its wheels slip left and right, as its twisting torque of a body vibrates violently. The tail jumps and spins. The wings hang on to the metal body, barely tethered by the hinges. It makes a lot of noise. We are silent, watching the plane’s jackknifed carcass on the television, its floating, windblown remnants scattered along the flooded rice fields.
The news is terrible. The American military plane carried hundreds of orphans—127 infants died. Its bloated, orange corpse has faltered and fallen, trembling in the water like a bewildered fish. One lone headlight can be glimpsed even if most of its body is submerged under- water.
“Why were they leaving on a plane?” I ask Mother.
“Because they are orphans and parents have been found for them in America,” she answers, unblinking.
The war is not going well for us. But it hasn’t gone well before and we have always recovered somehow. This war has always been here and we live with a continuing expectation that it will remain a part of our lives.
I keep my eyes on the television. Parts of the plane continue to burn, their glossy reflections cast against the black glass screen. Rescue helicopters hover above, their rotors whipping up debris. Babies are carried out of the plane. Tan Son Nhut Air Base has been shelled for the past several days, its runways bashed to bits. Night after night the sky turns fire opal. Mother’s eyes are fixed on the sky. She is finally drawn to something and cannot be diverted from it.
16
Peace in Paris
MR. MINH, 2006, 1973
Imagine a war that might have been won.
After Tet the enemy had been shackled with more than forty-five thousand dead, in just that one offensive. The mass graves unearthed in Hue had shocked us. Like rivers that flow downhill, refugees too flowed southward, toward Saigon, shattering any illusion that Southerners would embrace the arrival of Communist liberators. Indeed. The momentum was ours. We became the war’s conscience.
The war was now fought differently. The Americans switched tactics. Instead of a war of big battalions and divisions that swept the remote jungles to pin down an elusive enemy, instead of “search and destroy,” they favored security and pacification, “clear and hold.” Things were turning around. Imagine rice harvests that bloomed and blossomed. Imagine an extravagance of green inside an expanding perimeter of security. Imagine giving away hectares of land, its fertile silt and dark black earth that boasted rice fields and ripe fruits, fortune and prosperity, to landless peasants eager to slip the bright green sweetness of a rice plant inside their mouths. Hundreds of thousands volunteered to join the Regional Forces and Popular Forces and stayed close to home. The Americans called them by an endearing term that stuck, Ruff-Puffs. They became our eyes in the earth and the sky. They would defend the village and till the land. They would carry hoes and, finally, the prized M16s. And so 90 percent of the population came under government control by 1971. After the incursion into Cambodia, the multidivisional columns of enemy soldiers that used to slip across our borders from safe havens there now slithered in place. Vietcong agents who for years had been germinating and hungrily feeding off our country were being unmasked. We discovered the betrayal of the mimeograph operators whose hands held classified documents and the journalists who befriended American newsmen and fed them stories passed off as legitimate news.
And so the enemy had no choice but to shift into a different mode. Some thought it was a lull, a respite. But they were rebuilding and preparing new attacks. We knew better.
Despite our dwindling connections, Phong and I somehow found ourselves in the same orbit again. We were coming full circle, back to the point in time when we first met so many years ago. Once again we had to watch the gradual dismemberment of our armed forces. American advisers I had never met informed us that the geopolitical landscape had changed. Their own withdrawal would be accelerated. A secret peace plan would be cobbled together. We would have no choice but to bend toward the light of peace.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
My daughter is here in my bedroom in Virginia, looking at me with vexed eyes, as if I can make sense of the splintering of history
for her. She is now at an age at which the course of history, its fine-veined glories, its ruins, its snags, so thoroughly entangled with her own life, captures her imagination.
“I still wonder, Ba. Where is Cliff? Don’t you want to find him? What’s his last name? I can look,” she says in one breath. I shake my head. Since the war’s end in 1975 and our exodus from Saigon, I have not wanted her to make contact with him.
I don’t want to talk about Cliff. I want to talk about the war. I give her a look that quiets her.
In the years following 1963, the Americans marched in. They had thrown Diem off his shaky throne and witnessed the never-ending coups and never-ending maneuverings that followed. Then the Americans decided they had had enough and left. History is filled with stories like ours. Losers are maligned, left behind, and worse.
Of course much depends on how one leaves.
Much depends on how my wife left.
And I wonder about it every day.
I hear the whisper of a memory, lost in its own diminution, with the slow, dragging movement of a lost heart.
I am better able to understand the loss of the war and my country than I am ever able to understand the loss of my daughter and my wife.
I want to tell Mai this. “Mai,” I start.
The look on her face almost stops my heart. She looks at me as if she does not recognize her own name. “Mai?” I ask.
She seems jolted. She nods, bringing herself back.
This is what I wanted to tell her but I couldn’t put the words together. Your mother believed all was lost and hopeless after your sister died. It was not so, but she believed it and made it her reality. We had no chance. In the end, her lot was cast with the country.
I repeat her name. Quy, like a long-repressed endearment.
Friday night dinners with Cliff became a routine. My daughter had her weekly outing on Fridays with her Chinese nanny at the Crystal Palace, a new indoor mall in Saigon with an escalator that was so enticing she could go up and down it for hours. An intimate meal alone with my wife after a week’s estrangement would be uncomfortable for me and perhaps for her too. Cliff’s presence was a buffer. And as Vietnam held its breath, waiting to see how America would determine our fate, there were always new developments to discuss with Cliff in the privacy of our home.
I sat at the dinner table, aware of the unpromising future that lay ahead, even as Cliff tried to cheer me up. “The situation can still change,” he said, projecting hope. He must have detected my anxiety. The room, illumined only by low-wattage lightbulbs to create intimacy, felt depleted and confined instead.
I took a deep breath and resisted the temptation to refute hope with facts. Quy put a restraining hand on my arm. “He’s not been home all week,” she said to Cliff, signaling that I needed rest. And to me, she said in a soft, soothing voice, “Here’s coffee the way you like it.” Her hand brushed against mine. Despite the hairline crack in our marriage, my wife’s presence still softened me. She was by my side, offering me a cup of Vietnamese drip coffee. She had just shared with us her recently completed deals with various Chinese merchants—rice dealer, pharmacist, gold dealer. She looked up and smiled at Cliff, telling him that he was an eternal optimist. “You like to see the good in everything, Cliff. Nothing ends badly for you.”
“The war is not lost. I firmly believe it,” Cliff said. He meant to reassure but I found his arduously impassioned earnestness troubling. He wanted to convince me that this was but a brief faltering in will with no lasting effect.
I nodded but kept my private doubts to myself. Cliff had always subscribed to old-fashioned views of American benevolence. But I feared we were too distant from Washington, D.C., to be within the core of their sympathy. For all of Cliff’s discerning talk, I was beginning to see the war through Phong’s eyes.
“Minh, you needn’t worry so. Let me tell you why,” Cliff persisted stiffly.
I strained for cordiality. “It’s hard not to worry, Cliff. You share confidential information with me about these new American intentions and programs and timetables, and then you tell me not to be concerned,” I said.
I paused. My wife was searching for a spoon and Cliff stood up and got it from a drawer—the right drawer—in a gesture so casual and easy that it momentarily disassembled me. His presence was taking on—or had already taken on—a sense of inevitability in our house.
I commanded myself to ignore this telltale sign of familiarity and intimacy but I could feel a blooming anger. I sat up straight and manufactured a controlled appearance. “CRIMP,” I said, boldly underlining the word. I first heard about CRIMP from Cliff himself. The Consolidated Improvement and Modernization Program. “What’s the reason behind CRIMP?” I asked. “For years we begged for modern weapons to match what the Russians were giving the North. And after years of ‘No, no, no’ from your government, now suddenly you shove modernization down our throats. What’s that for except to pave the way for your own escape?”
“Well, I would look at it this way. You’ve needed modernization for years, and now you are going to get it.”
I was no longer going to hold back. “Your modernization program is being implemented now only because it suits you. It’s all about you.” And after a moment’s pause, I added with flippant spitefulness, “Everything here is about you.”
Cliff turned red and silent. And then he said softly, in a tone that suggested concession and accommodation, “That may be so, and I see your point, but I think you are reading an insidious motive into an otherwise laudable goal.” His voice cracked.
I laughed. Of course he would keep the discussion away from the personal and focused on the political complexities of American policy. As he should. But I was beginning to understand American policy all too well, the new American expectation, lobbed unceremoniously our way.
“Okay, Cliff, even if CRIMP were just another harmless, or, to adopt your perspective, even helpful, development, remember, it’s not going to be adequately funded. General Abrams didn’t get everything he asked for from your Congress.”
Cliff looked up, seemingly unsure of what I was talking about.
“So you aren’t even fully aware of what’s going on,” I said dismissively.
Quy detected derision in my voice and looked up, fixing her gaze on me. My stomach tightened.
“Your very own Stars and Stripes reported on it,” I said. General Abrams, the commander of the American forces who succeeded General Westmoreland, had warned that the South Vietnamese army had for years not had the necessary firepower, mobility, or communications. So of course we had to be modernized. As General Abrams explained, in that aptly thunderous way of his, “You’ve got to face it. The Vietnamese have been given the lowest priority of anybody that’s fighting in this country! And that’s what we’re trying to correct.”
I liked him, General Abrams. But even General Abrams had limited options. This was how their politicians would extricate themselves. By posing for history. They called it by an artificial but brilliantly contrived term, Vietnamization, announced with great fanfare in 1969, as if the war had never been Vietnamized to begin with.
“Oh, my,” was all that Cliff could utter.
I took the Stars and Stripes out of my briefcase. “Look,” I said, pointing him to the news story. Indeed. Congress approved less than half of what it would take to fund CRIMP. There would be no supplemental appropriations. Without the funds, everything that had been planned would crumble to dust.
I could almost see the scene as it might have unfolded half a world away. Kissinger opposite Nixon in an office far away in Washington, D.C., as they leaned back in their chairs and let the rising cold from an overworked air conditioner cool the sweat off their faces. In the toiling silence they mulled this matter of the war over. Kissinger sat up, adjusting his thick, black-rimmed glasses. He was by inclination a nervous man. Nixon, slack-jowled and impatien
t, fidgeted irritably. He wished for a decision rather than this brooding, ongoing deliberation. Their dilemma was they both wanted to get out but they couldn’t afford to be blamed for losing the war and the country to the Communists.
I rotated my neck as if to limber it up, but truthfully, it was to shake off the dark, ugly narrative that was taking hold of my mind. I would like to believe in Cliff’s version of events. For a moment, I mourned the loss of innocence that Cliff still wanted to thrust my way. There he was still exulting in the nobility of American intentions. I kept quiet as he read the Stars and Stripes.
“Wars have trajectories, as you well know, up, down, then up again,” he said. “This is the usual tug-of-war between Congress and the president. It’s the normal stuff of American politics. But you know, we’ve put so much into this war—troops, money, effort—it would be unimaginable if we allow all of it to collapse.”
I pressed my palms against my head. “So your Congress refuses to give us the funds to spite your president?”
We would inherit more than seven hundred military facilities from the departing Americans. We would have to grow our own army, handle more weaponry, more arms. Logistics, personnel, would have to increase. The American drawdown would be complicated in any case, and even more so without money from Congress.
“Not to spite, but you could say to assert its constitutional prerogative. In the end, though, neither Congress nor the president would be crazy enough to let us lose the war.”