by Lan Cao
One evening I walk around the sinuous bend of road that hugs a distant part of the camp. I am slightly off the path and my feet sink in the bare earth. Wisps of grass and wild creepers brush my ankles. There is a strange comfort to this. And then suddenly I stop. No more than two meters away is a large black cricket sitting in front of me, as if to block my way. He stares at me, holding my eyes for several minutes. I squat and put out my hand toward him. I feel the brush of his antennas against my skin. He puts out a loud calling song, thrumming and rubbing his wings, tilting his head. The serenade haunts. And then it abruptly stops. He hops across the tracks and disappears into the bleak wonder of a soft, purple mist. Above us, a dying star shines.
Everything else is a blur, blasphemously so, perhaps. Surely whatever is happening inside this camp is important, the bullhorn announcements, the interrogative voices, the notices about who among us has found a willing sponsor outside these encampments. No one here can leave without receiving an offer from an American pledging responsibility for his well-being. All of us here will soon be scattered across the United States. Father is anxious for us to leave so I can start school at the beginning of the school year. A woman points to a map and shows her son where their sponsors live. There it is, the city, a compact dot representing a new destiny.
Ngo Quyen Street and the tamarind trees along its edges, the garden path behind our house, the soccer field where James performed dribbling feats, the profusion of mimosa plants among the cluster of bushes and trees my sister and I hid behind, the first inward turning of their leaves when they are touched. I see and feel all these and more as a continuing presence, a waking consciousness, their being, their reason, their somethingness, palpable and within reach even if their physical manifestation is not. That they have vanished is what has given my imagination its proper sense of wonder and awe. Try as I often do to push it all back, just to reassure Father of my well-being and normality, it will not concede. It is there, now a crumbling presence, but I know I will covet it in perpetuity. “It.” It is everything. It is always there, in the center, without edges.
• • •
Soon things move with superstitious dread at an even greater speed. I see the shadows of our new life coming at us. Something is emerging at last from all those forms and questions and answers. After six months in the camp, Father has found us a sponsor who will for one year be responsible for our housing and food and Father’s job and my schooling. It is one of the many Catholic churches in Virginia.
He delivers the news with intuitive grace, as an anecdote to accompany his simple gift, a pack of Wrigley’s gum. He mouths the words “We are leaving.” I am simultaneously skeptical and curious. So we are sponsored, our future officially stamped and processed.
After a bus ride and a plane ride, we are in Virginia. A priest and a nun greet us. We are provided with a four-room apartment, all laid out in a line, each room spilling into the next without corridors. From the front door, there is the kitchen, then a bedroom (mine) and another bedroom (Father’s) and a bathroom. To get to the bathroom one has to walk through his bedroom and to get to the kitchen one has to walk through mine.
Within six months, Father and I find jobs and we partially wean ourselves off the church’s charity. We stay in the apartment owned by the church and pay a discounted rent. Within the year, we move out so that another refugee family can move in. During the day Father cleans a bowling alley. I am home from school by the time he returns and I make a point of greeting him with great solicitude. In the evening, he writes about the “lessons of Vietnam” for a research center that is part of the American military. I clean but I am not a cleaning person, he says softly. It is something he does but it is not who he is. I too clean—the shelves and floors of a Vietnamese-owned grocery store, one of two already established on Wilson Boulevard by the pre-1975 Vietnamese, those who are in the United States for reasons having nothing to do with the loss of our country. The owners are friends of Father’s acquaintances and allow me to work there when Father pleads our case to them.
A few months into our new Virginia life, I again wonder out loud where Cliff is. At dinner I ask my father the question. I touch his hand for emphasis but he disowns my touch. He recites his well-rehearsed reassurances. “Everything passes. We will be all right. We don’t need help.” He means to console yet I am strangely disquieted. A part of me wonders if Father was ever grateful to Cliff for the companionship he provided Mother after catastrophe struck, which freed Father from the burden of being solely responsible for her daily well-being.
I remind him that Cliff is his friend. Father turns pensive and nods, more to himself than to me. “True,” he says. “But people change.” He stands up, goes to brew a cup of tea, and sips it. I suspect there is more to his formidable resistance. Perhaps he is too proud to have Cliff see us in this condition. Knowing he has disappointed me, he makes a point of holding me tightly.
I remain silent but allow myself to be pressed against him. Still, what I mind most is the slyness of his reticence, the dissimulation of any interest or curiosity about Cliff.
“Remember what I told you and your sister when you were little? Be careful whom you trust.”
I am startled. It is one of the few times he has mentioned my sister since her death. We turn quiet, facing each other, not together but not apart, just silent between thoughts, each intent on protecting the other by keeping our small despairs to ourselves.
This is the structure of my new life. I enrolled in school two months after the school year began. In the morning a school bus takes me from my house to school. To give me an additional year in high school, Father falsified my age, marking me down as fifteen and enrolling me in the tenth grade. I am small in size so no one suspects. We have no official documents such as birth certificates to produce so anything can be invented. Our father does not allow himself to demonstrate much in the way of emotions, but I know he has many worries. He fears that I will have no friends or, worse, that I will be mistreated in school because I am new and all the students have been through the lower grades together. But I assure him I am unruffled by school and I am relieved when I do in fact experience these words as the truth.
Despite the romanticized view of what it means to become Americanized, I see through it all too well. The molecular makeup of the melting pot is three parts mundane and only one part visionary. The fakery of assimilation itself is tame and, worse, tedious. Father finds it hard to believe when I tell him that school is easy or that its very ordinariness will not be difficult to manage. I am newly invented, a persona practicing my will and focusing my powers of attention on high school English, history, math, biology. Most are two grade levels easier than what I studied in Saigon. And so I am here, persistent and competent and capable of producing the top grades that will make Father happy. I take care to study in school and at home.
I hone the brain’s dull organ of logic and exhibit a credulous acceptance of all that is required to make the transition into Americanness. I understand its allure and can make a show of turning myself over to it when I am in school.
My heart remains elsewhere. Perhaps Bao has it, staking all her being on it. I struggle to keep it all separate. I strive to leave my memories scattered behind so the transition can be efficiently managed. Once, I might have reminisced, but now I strive not to. The curtain falls, an iron curtain, separating my heart from my head.
In the evenings, Father and I sit together at our round table and pass the time. Neither of us has ever cooked before but over time Father has learned to produce a modulated heat, just right and not a flicker more, that simmers the stew and allows the pork to linger in its clay pot. I hear the sound of a spoon going round and round in a pan. Sometimes we allow ourselves to be surrounded by the brilliant distractions of television.
I do my homework at the kitchen table. Father pushes a Hershey’s Kiss on top of my notebook. He gets chocolate candy from the bowling alley
and brings it home. He puts one foil-wrapped chocolate on the table for me, then, when I am done, another. And another.
He turns from the stove and says to me, “Any of your friends live nearby?” looking for an entry into the time I spend away from him.
I set down my pen and align it in the groove of my spiral notebook. “No,” I say. “They are in a different neighborhood.” He nods, seemingly reassured. He assumes they are in their own houses doing their homework as I am in mine. Here, in this new country, he feels relief and anxiety in equal proportions.
I do not tell him that I am stalked by Bao and Cecile and that I exhaust myself managing them and keeping them from escaping into the public world. I do not tell him about the math teacher who excoriated me when I questioned the grade I received on a test. The hardened face. The speech about “you people” delivered with pointed finger while I sat stilled and muted. I do not tell him that I am sometimes seized by a churning sensation that makes me vomit.
Instead, I tell him about the wonders of school because he so believes in the radiating, transforming power of education. I assure him that I am entering into a world of prodigious knowledge. Everything comes out almost as a debriefing. For him there is a comfort in the reiteration of my day, as if here is finally a shift to the essentials, a formal aesthetics that matters at last. I find at least one element of the day to share with him. I tell him about isosceles and equilateral triangles, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. I practice words like hypotenuse. Father listens attentively.
The daily format of my school day and its coherence soothes. I have geometry first period, English literature second period, social studies third period, then lunch, and so forth. There is one tabulated point, then another one, that punctuates the day. Everything about school becomes material for his plainsong celebrating the refugee’s hope that the child will have a better future than the parent.
If it were not for my constant fear that Bao will catapult out and cause me to lose time, my school obligations, the subject matters themselves, would be but a balm. So far she has not trespassed into the world of my school. So for now, my classes are manageable. They allow me to pivot into the present while looking toward the future and boxing away the past. Boxing it the way I try to box Bao, mentally inside a metal enclosure guarded by ferocious animals pictured on its metal lid.
I suspect that Father’s work is also, for him, a circumvention of a disquiet that must lie underneath us both. I think it is the persistence of absence that we both feel.
Years are missing from our lives even as we live them.
I try to erase from my memory that day when Father and I left without her.
• • •
We hear a bit of this and that about her from the gathering of Vietnamese in our area. A community is being built here. We know what we are. We are the barnacles of a lost war, struggling against disdain, and here we are day by day building this cloistered niche for ourselves and filling it with improvised charm. One shop opens, one restaurant, then another and another, each dedicated to the sensual cues of memories, the mouth-savoring tastes of a time past. The enclave owes its accoutrements to the real Saigon itself. It owes its very soul to the indulgence of memory. What we yearn for is an element of the commonplace and so it is the commonplace and its lesser emblems that are resurrected here. The walls are painted rice-field green. The air is permeated with the distinctive scent of spices. Loudspeakers play mournful music about love lost, its notes and chords pulling sadness from the air. As more of us congregate in the area, there is comfort in the reiteration of our replicated past, in the regresses of our memories and the pretense of normality. We are eager to be neurally tripped. We wish to trick our brains into believing we are still in Vietnam. Here in this little community forged by fate and circumstance, there are shops that cater to the flavors of Hue, Saigon, Hanoi, returning us to the simple assertion of first loves and other essentials.
History is pacified. War’s indecencies are tamed. Day by day, like a recurring dream, a little Saigon is willed into reality.
There is an almost daily arrival of Vietnamese leaving their one-year, two-year lives with their American sponsors to join this little community. With them come fragments of Mother’s story. There are inconsistencies that Father cannot make sense of. How much is pure fabrication and how much is truth, we do not know.
Within a few months, the new government took steps to ensure the irrelevance of wealth by decreeing that everyone would start out as equals in the post-1975 world. The old currency would be invalid effective immediately. Inequalities would be razed and everyone would be given two hundred dong to start a new life, even if jobs could not be had or could be had only if you could afford to pay a steep bribe.
The neighbor telling Father the story becomes increasingly perturbed as he recounts his ordeals. His hand gestures assume attitudes of anger and unrest. Call him Uncle, Father directs me. We are becoming familiar to each other so a new appellation is required. To his grave discredit, Uncle Somebody was a well-to-do owner of a popular restaurant in Cholon. He and Father become immediate friends. Uncle drones on, bitterly. When excited he pauses to spit, his horrible, angry spittle sometimes hanging by a thread from the corner of his mouth. I turn away but Father is too preoccupied to care. He listens instead. Houses were confiscated and subdivided if they were deemed unnecessarily large.
A Communist Party commissar took over our house for himself and his family within the first few weeks. But your mother was fine, the neighbor quickly assures me. She was not alone. She moved in with a Vietcong relative. Of course, Uncle Number Five. Father nods, as if that were to be expected. Her Vietcong brother will protect her, Father assures me. Others connected to the South would not be so fortunate. Soldiers of the old, defeated army were sent to reeducation camps to languish and die.
I was not there to see our mother leave our house and make her way to join her brother. But I have in my head an imagined memory of this moment. She is there in her purple ao dai, under the shade of a tamarind bough, closing our front door with finality and walking away from the place that had housed us all.
Father keeps repeating that having a brother who was a Vietcong will serve her well during these menacing times. Both his protective impulses and the integral power of his love are intact. He wants to put his arms around Mother, knowing she is so easily wounded.
• • •
They are called the boat people. It is because they flee from Vietnam’s coast by boat. Their very essence is aptly distilled by two simple, sorrow-filled words.
It is 1978. The world is taking note of these people who willingly set their bodies upon the wide-open sea in the hope of reaching some distant, kindly shore. Coastal towns are increasingly depopulated because of this opportunity to escape.
In Little Saigon, our eyes behold the incandescent allure of ocean-blue spaces on a map of the world. Our relatives are leaving in droves, seeking some other place to call home. We know what the South China Sea is like with its mahogany blackness and its sinister, palpitating presence. We absorb these physical facts with our entire bodies, not just with our eyes or our heads. I imagine the silence of the water as it gathers strength, the spectral mass underneath the calm that creates turbulence and capsizes boats. Following the wandering threads on water are months and months in Malaysian, Thai, and Hong Kong camps and then an arrival, at last, as nature’s elements onto the shores of a country willing to take them in for good and offer them its many possibilities. Somehow they leave behind the lost, the fallen, and the dead.
The boat people restore and comfort us. They bring news when they come, not the sort of news with hedges and qualifications that seeped out of the country after the foreign journalists were expelled, but real, firsthand news. Families here in Little Saigon wait for their arrival. The Chinese are fleeing in droves. With blunt naïveté, the new government has begun persecuting them, accusing them of undue economic
dominance, treachery, and divided loyalties. Once again, as in Tet, it is Cholon that is at the epicenter of this upheaval.
I remember what our Vietcong uncle once told Mother. “The Chinese are seldom harmless.”
Of course Cholon will defy its oblivion.
The government claims punitively that the Chinese in Cholon—dubbed the Jews of Southeast Asia—are strangling the economy. One percent of the population controlling 80 percent of the food and textile industry and 100 percent of the wholesale trade. The Chinese will have to adopt Vietnamese nationality or they will be heavily taxed and their food rations reduced. Even those who already have Vietnamese citizenship are harassed.
This news inverts my childhood perspective. I can feel a sliver of memory move through me. I worry about our Chinese grandmother, Older Aunt Number Three the Pharmacist, Younger Aunt Number Three the Rice Seller, stilled by the anxieties and jolts of their new lives and the slights that might have come or might yet be coming their way. It might already be impossible for them, skillful traders Mother admired. Private trade, wholesale, retail, large and small, is abolished by Party decree. Cholon, home of the Chinese, must be deflated, its commercial essence snuffed. In one of the coordinated raids on Cholon, thirty thousand police cordoned off the city and conducted searches, confiscating goods and valuables from fifty thousand retailers. Did they go through Ngo Quyen Street?
The Chinese are fleeing, along with Vietnamese of all stripes, including former soldiers, farmers, peasants, and traders, carrying nothing with them but hope and grievances.