by Lan Cao
But I suspected too that our father began to embrace me for a different, more private, more poignant reason. Once, in Cholon, in the near-total darkness of night, a few days after the thay phap issued his diagnosis, our father entered my room and lay quietly on the side of the bed where my sister used to lie before she died. Mai was also there of course. But he could sense my presence too, halved and spliced, twinned to yet also separated from Mai.
“What is your name?” he whispered.
I had never been addressed directly before. The world around me felt like a storm. “Bao,” I said. Vertigo unsettled me. I was merely repeating the word he himself had used to describe Mai. I didn’t have a name before then, but once I uttered it, I knew it was mine.
“Bao,” he said, accompanying my name with a thoughtful nod. “Which Bao? Bao meaning storm, or Bao meaning keepsake. Or treasure,” he asked.
“Both,” I whispered, though I was unsure of the answer.
“Does Mai know about you?” he wondered.
I nodded. “But she doesn’t like me,” I admitted.
And then in a gesture that both touched and astonished me, he stroked my hair and called me con, a word used to address one’s child. “Don’t worry,” he said effortlessly. “Mai will like you. She will learn to. You’re her sister, after all.” And although it was dark and I couldn’t see him, I sensed that he was taking in the situation and trying to understand it. He put his arm around me, and in that moment, I believed he saw me as someone his dead child, Khanh, my sister, had somehow been reborn into. It was as if Khanh had not departed irrevocably into death but could be reclaimed in this strange and new realm.
I often caught him in a state of observation and contemplation, perhaps trying to figure out how two (sometimes three, if you counted little Cecile) beings shuffled through one physical body. Who is before me, he might wonder. And I wondered in turn which adjectives might come to mind for him when he thought of us—ordinary and extraordinary, normal and abnormal, peaceful and stormy, sane and mad.
At the beginning he was wary of my appearance, which he instinctively associated with Mai’s strangeness—lost time, purple bruises, obsession with order. I understood because I too could not predict when black clouds thickened and the waters churned and a storm trapped me inside its vortex. It had happened before, many times. Both Father and Mai fear me, or are wary of me. Sometimes I am all moods and contradictions and untraceable convulsions plying and pressing against Mai with wrathful exigency.
Mai’s attempts to impose logic or design can be done only in retrospect and are always wrong. She fears my sourceless anger, the fluctuation of my moods, and the tangle of greedy, raw feelings that overwhelm me and her. She is afraid of the sudden mutation of an ordinary moment into something awful. She knows that with me lurking around it is all the more difficult to hold on to ordinary happiness.
That was how it was this morning at our apartment. Everything inside me conspired to thicken and expand. I recognize these spells but only after they have claimed me and I feel nothing but the rush of righteous anger that burns like a bed of hot coals in the pit of my stomach. When the heat is burned out, what I am left with is a low-slung sadness that hangs within me silently. I remember how I woke up one day and discovered that Mai was afraid, that her fear banged and clanged perpetually inside her little chest. That realization had given me a surge of power and a big, brawny sense of personal importance. Although she is the one with the public face, in truth she is small and subsidiary, a weakness that can be obliterated.
Now her eyes dart about, still in suspense. My eyes catch her look. I can smell the primitive scent of her fear. It is the fear of not quite knowing what happened or why. I am inside her and I am privy to her most intimate thoughts. She knows less about me than I about her and that fact makes her unbalanced.
I plop down, wrapping myself in my own omnipotent narrator’s gaze. The episode itself has set me spinning in a blind fever of after-rage.
What was there before the darkened world took over and made me smash about?
It is always Mother I see even as I slip back and forth through the black waters of consciousness. It is always about her repudiation, her disappearance and withdrawal, like Aunt An’s absence when what I longed for most was her animal warmth, the soulfulness of her motherly presence. I return to those starkly separated scenes when she and I were in differently configured positions. There I was, stilling my heart as I bolted after her through the gardened paths. It was Tet. It was 1968. I was both Mai and my incipient self at the same time. I was tentatively there, submerged among the darts and points of light and dark, under water looking up through the jumping, electrified ripples, watching as Mai dipped and dodged and scurried after Mother. The flesh on my arms pricked up. I heard Mother call out our sister’s name, “Khanh, Khanh,” as she walked obliviously from tree to tree, then room to room, searching, searching. Mai was calling after her. Mai was trying to hold on to a corner of Mother’s sleeve. I listened as Mother repeated our sister’s name, over and over, abandoning us with each repetition. A tear fell but I wiped it off.
A long, plaintive cry came out of Mai when she fell and lost her grip on Mother’s sleeve. Her body was flattened against the ground. Mother had disappeared. A hurt cut through me and settled in my flesh. Still, I struggled to come out, to come up from the murmuring swell of water I was still in. I knew I had to resurrect myself. I knew I needed to reach her.
I felt the quickening beat of time and the constellations of light, a voluptuous phosphorescent silver that charged about and sizzled loudly above, like fireworks. I pushed myself upward. My hands grabbed her arms and legs, and I heaved her into the cistern. Her body gave no resistance. I would save her. I saw her bulging, fearful eyes, and for that one moment I despised her, her smallness, her weakness. In that moment of piercing consciousness, my dislike of her grew and I saw how easily she could be blotted out, how insignificant she was in the shifting order of our world. I saw her lying there, like a withered thing turned brown, and I was seized and possessed by an urge to injure her.
She deserved to be harmed.
I am sitting here on the snow-covered sidewalk but Tet 1968 comes back to me as if I were still there, inside that terrible nucleus of fear.
Here I am, floating from above in a state of elliptical meditation, looking down as if I have left my body for good. I am observing even as I am observed. Colors wing skyward, beyond the chilled fog that settles in midair.
It was of course Tet. Always Tet. I shouted out the warnings through my crushed windpipe. The sky was still illuminated like a glaciered mirror. A noise deafened us all. James was wandering about, calling her name.
I knew without thinking what had to be done.
I had absorbed the lessons of our father’s yoga practice almost by osmosis—thinking without thinking. Unburdened by the back-and-forth of contemplating this or that course of action and with single-pointed insight, I pushed her down into the cistern’s depths. Silence, I told her. I got loud. Quiet! I dared not breathe. I pushed her down into the jar’s depths. I calmed the lunatic whoop whoop whoop rushing through my temples up my head. It was the continuing silence that ultimately saved us. The sniper’s gun swept unpityingly left and right. I covered her inert carcass of a body with mine. And at that moment I felt the small, flaccid body of Cecile as it hugged itself against my flesh. I covered them both. I was steely and enormous.
I could tell from the softness of her limp body that she was inside a humming unawareness of lost time. Her memory would be smudged, erased even as mine was expanded. Like an idiot machine, she remained prone to malfunction. She would remember little or nothing at all, leaving me to bear this burden and absorb it all myself.
You might wonder why I dislike Mai. Because I alone have held our mother’s disappearance inside my heart. Because I alone have absorbed it, shielding her from immense sadness so she can be free t
o move on in this country. And when it is no longer possible for me to hold it all in, when it swells grotesquely in me, when I end up releasing everything so it can wail and thrash inside the frenzied shadows out there, she, the miscreant one, is the one who will become enraged. She will sigh and sulk and seethe and exclaim “You again!” as if she has lost a war and is now looking at the face of a returning enemy that sinks heavily into her world. Yet again. She will continue to blame James’s death on me even as she ignores my struggles to save her.
Deep inside the flesh of her brain I can see how the mind hates itself.
I refashion myself inside a small, dwindling space. I know about accounting and double entry and balancing the books. She is back. I might have saved her life but that does not matter to her. Someday my innocence will be established. I leave the light and go back into the fatal blackness I have been in since Tet.
Sometimes she inspires a tenderness in me. She is slowly, tremulously coming out of her shrunken world. She stands up, her body fitting neatly inside a tree’s slender shadow. Rubbing her eyes, she stirs and then moves with vigorous but restless force. She collects herself and tries to reverse her mind in circular turns and half-turns to that moment in time before I took over and pushed her out.
As our father aged, he increasingly dwelled in our sweet and bitter past. I know she is uncomfortable with what she considers his stodgy devotion to our former lives. She wants to be freed of memory, its empty shape, its hardened imprints. Vietnam for her is a tragedy of forms, to be sloughed off. The more our father circles it, the longer its slow fade, the more Mai stays away. She doesn’t stay away in the physical sense of course. But she is nudged away, elbowed into the wary background while I take over. She will recall bits and pieces of this and that about our past lives but hardly ever the entire story that he shares.
After thirty years in this country, our father and I still dwell on the tender pinprick of Vietnam as if it were there that we will find deliverance. And so our father’s stories, all about what happened years ago, are exactingly configured to my needs. Vietnam has not receded for me, as it has for Mai; it still tugs and pulls. Its murmuring voice beckons. The arrangement, her staying away, my coming, suits us both.
For months now, I have been the one who is present when we listen to his stories.
Still, our father misses her. He will sometimes ask for her or talk about her. He refers to her as my sister.
I can tell he understands we have a division of labor. I bring him food, feed him, and cater to his needs. Mai works and pays the bills.
And so even in this freezing commotion, she will go on to do what she always does, day after day.
Despite the firefight I unleashed just moments before, I can tell that for Mai, today will be no different from any other day. She made her apologetic exit from our apartment. She condemned herself and me once she got outside. But within a few moments, she gets herself into the car, punctilious even on a moorless, blustery day like today. With the glass fogging the moment she slides into the front seat, she taps the pedal and heads as far away as possible, in the direction of the city.
• • •
The truth of her life, of what she has chosen, comes out here, in this city of monuments and angles. After visiting Father, she pilots her car onto the main boulevard, where a coating of snow has cast a preternatural glow on every surface. She hears the crunch of tires against the inevitable imperfections of the road, the granular layers of salt and sand on asphalt. Before her, a pale, misty spire rises from the tentative bend in the road. The falling snow continues its wind-whipped course, giving its fury the illusion of a manic purpose. She drives slowly. The normally busy street is quiet. Schools are closed. The car moves unthinkingly into the left lane, and as easily as that one moment of tranquillity and composure, the decision is made to enter the city. Her presence at work is not required today but she does what she always does.
She is on Constitution Avenue. A lone figure stands on the sidewalk. With his index finger, a child gingerly lifts a succulent flake from a struggling rosebush. A few others meander about as a plow truck heaves and rumbles. She stops the car a few blocks from the steel and glass of her office building and sits still watching the snow fall. It is different from a monsoon but not that different. Both can overwhelm. Both allow you to disappear into the shape of turbulence, to throw yourself into distant echoes and old vestiges that might be most strangely but also most strongly felt only when you are inside the center of the storm. A thin fog spreads across the windshield as if phantoms have opened their mouths and exhaled onto the glass. Her field of vision is narrowed and foreshortened. She shuts her eyes and leans against the leather headrest.
There are times when she wonders why she chooses this over that, includes this and excludes that, says yes to this and no to that. Perhaps they are all random, patternless occurrences, not decisions. The latter presumes a degree of planning that she lacks.
It may all be coincidental, these little truths, each like the splintered shadow of a bead hanging on a slender thread that wends its way through the life she is making for herself here. But lately, she has begun to wonder if everything about her current life is really birthed in that place that is now far away. How much, if at all, do we recover from the loss of love? How much, if at all, do we ever let go of grief, even as we proclaim the need to leave it in the past?
The truth of her life comes out here where she is a stranger to her own history. She lives sometimes in a half-life of green that is Vietnam and in a half-life of blackness that is Virginia. A line divides the two. But a black light follows her inside this ministered silence, like a missing voice. She is, in truth, of neither the past nor the present. She is somewhere in between.
Indeed, the present, the real present, barely touches her at all. It is merely a leftover life consisting of mundane details. It does not grab or take hold of her heart. She is outwardly Americanized but inwardly she is stuck in Cholon. In this country, where possibilities abound, where an accumulation of perfect grades could have opened up multiple worlds for her, what she has chosen instead is to do what comes most easily to her. She has stumbled upon a course that will give her what she has always wished to settle into—a long solitude. She has chosen to be among books, to be coaxed quietly into an assured world of lonesomeness.
Her work is all indoors, among rows of glass-windowed offices floored with gleaming marble and travertine. She arrives early in the morning and moves with a fierce sense of ownership around the office. A perpetual agitation gives everything in these offices a sense of urgency. It is work that is compelling, work that is pressing. All around her, people dissolve into it, pulling their sleepwalking shadows with them as they move from room to room, hunting for sacred answers among a littering of books. People are bent over tables clutching pens in their hands, adjusting the angles of their heads and bodies. This is what they do. Work. It is not just about work but it is the devotion to work, and the full understanding of the task at hand and the hard-heartedness of clients’ demands. Even in the earliest of mornings there, one can feel the extremity of panic when work hasn’t been perfected.
She goes to work almost every day but she is able to maintain a distance there. She is without fervor. She could have staked a larger claim. She could have been in its dead center but what she has chosen instead is to loiter along the edge. From this position, doing this work, in the shadows, among books, she is not called upon to step forward. She is allowed to remain inside her long buried proclivities and inclinations. You see, her work is important there but it is not central. The lawyers are the ones whose work defines the firm. She is a librarian. Her work supports theirs. And in this self-conscious space that is defined by power and rank, she is content to stand on the periphery.
Every weekday morning, she watches a frantic congregation of lawyers, one or two years out of law school, foraging for information by the reference desk of the library.
She can watch them as she eases herself slowly into the quiet, tentative space that is but four walls and a tiny window. She has grown fond of this carefully hewn private sanctuary outside her home. Especially the little window where a solid wall might have been. Nothing more is expected beyond her relationship with the books. It is enough that she has graduated from one of the most prestigious law schools in this country. That is all her father needs to know, that she has been redeemed by an appearance of respectability provided by a degree from a well-regarded school.
She parks the car in an unattended lot and makes her way up to the fifty-seventh floor, where she sees the firm’s logo, a composite of last names standing in angular brass letters. Around the corner from the elevator is a welter of brightly lit offices filled with the murmur of voices.
It is not a surprise that work continues here even on this day. The lawyers are both afflicted by and blessed with work. Not Mai. She is among it, but not of it. She walks through the portals to her office, leans back, and takes a sip of coffee freshly bought from the firm’s cafeteria. She plucks one book from the metal shelves, then another. She accesses online sites and databases. Methodically she types in search terms. There is order in the world and she is eager to practice her powers of attention, her technical precision in responding to research requests.
• • •
In the evening when she returns home, work, as much as she enjoys it, can be flicked away without much of an effort. It does not gnaw at her. Nothing does. No one does.