by Lan Cao
We write letters to our mother and Chinese grandmother. We wait for letters to arrive from Cholon, even Saigon. People we know in Virginia are beginning to receive correspondence from Vietnam, sent first to France and then forwarded to America. Our neighbor, Uncle Somebody, whose name I couldn’t recall so I nicknamed him “Somebody,” hands our father a smudged envelope he recently received from his wife, Mrs. An, postmarked Ho Chi Minh City. Inside is a circuitously worded letter containing mundane daily details, visits to the market, routines at their son’s school, exaggerated declarations of their new and happy lives, and then the disguised news about the family’s impending escape. They will be visiting her brother soon for a few days, the wife announces in the letter. The brother, Uncle Somebody explains, is already in California. He is choked with joy and fear.
Of course we continue sending letters whether or not we will receive replies in return. We are told by the newcomers to Little Saigon that the names of streets have been changed. Letters might be undelivered, lost. This is pure speculation. Still, every evening, Father inserts a small metallic key into the mailbox lock and, in a gesture saturated with meaning, sorts through the supermarket mailers and other junk mail. His voracious eyes fix on every envelope. It is a ritual in hope he engages in. No one will contradict him. No one will tell him there is no letter coming.
By 1978, more than half a million people have fled. Our neighbors, also former Saigon dwellers, join us for the evening news. I hear the usual musical passage that drumbeats the start of the program. Our visual and auditory cortexes are charged. Even in the narrative compression of five-minute sound bites, the sight of wrecked boats rammed onto a beachhead and human beings lurching in the water has pulled Vietnam again from the disinterested realm of background and anecdote into a central matter of concern.
Even during the height of the war, no one fled the country.
Father tells me that the South is a place where the language of commerce is spoken. It is a place of barter and trade, chaos and free-spiritedness. Southerners are a freewheeling, all-or-nothing lot. This explains the whooping, swerving Saigon traffic, he says, smiling. No Southerner can put up with the calamity economics of Communism, the so-called reeducation camps, or the austere grimness of the northern pall.
Of course I know what Father is secretly thinking when we walk the circumference of our apartment complex at night. The paved pathway is narrow and so he walks slightly ahead. From his gait I know he is thinking thoughts that leap and plunge. He is thinking that perhaps Mother will be among those on one of the boats that reach a foreign shore one of these days.
It is possible. Vietnam’s entire length hugs the coast of the South China Sea. Coves and inlets dot the southern tip of the country. Fishermen too are having trouble eking out a living because their properties have been seized and their catches taxed. Southerners are harassed simply because they are from the vanquished South. They will be willing to aim their dinghies seaward. Word has gotten out that a clandestine network organized by the Chinese has emerged. Southerners with gold pay the Chinese who in turn bribe government officials. Even as they denounce the Chinese, Communist functionaries are all too eager to accept their tarnished gold in private. Gold is favored above all other currencies. Our mother has gold in a safe. This is what he is thinking, and I am thinking the same.
20
Watching
BAO, 2006
I am here, inside the tumult of air and wind that fills Mai’s chest. I am still Bao, the storm, but for now I have calmed myself and I am just watching. The law firm is entangled in a criminal defense case that involves charges of racketeering, murder, and extortion. The client is alleged to be a mob figure who has infiltrated the music industry and his identity has thrown this prestigious and upscale firm into disequilibrium. This is a firm whose clients include large corporations, rich bankers, and chief executive officers who are occasionally charged with more palatable crimes such as insider trading or stock manipulation. The partner who heads up this racketeering case apparently accepted the client without going through the firm’s usual vetting process. The team has been formed, and Mai is on it, along with three associates. They support David, the partner and senior rainmaker of the firm.
Mai is crisply dressed, in a skirt and blazer, a pin-striped suit cinched dramatically at the waist. Our private dramas and internal turbulence are hidden from view. Her hair, chin length, is parted to one side and swept neatly back. She is clear-skinned, wide-eyed, clear-headed, seemingly unaffected by the large-scale events that have defined our lives. That she can be so cool and calm enrages me. That she remains oblivious to my role enrages me even more. It is only because I have shielded her and saved her from feeling the pain of loss that she is able to stand here, showing off her fancy Americanized polish.
She is approaching David the partner with a wide smile glued on her face in the manner of a person who is meticulously in charge. He is in his midfifties and sports a thick, graying mustache that nicely frames his smile. He is known to be one of the more volatile partners. She has worked with him before. Under intense pressure to generate business, outmaneuver opponents, and score points, partners too work intense hours and are driven to extremes. They are permitted all manner of liberties, like barking and venting and generally being hostile and demanding for little or no reason.
But David is different with her. He likes her and doesn’t issue orders. He finds her charming, precisely because she is so unreachable. Ambition, the cross and backbone of everyone here, has no claim on her. And hence he, the gatekeeper of career advancement, has none either. He knows enough about her prior life to realize that parts will remain impregnable. Over the years he has even developed a protectiveness toward her. He probes experimentally instead. Weekend work will be necessary to prepare for the upcoming trial. Their team is up against the federal government. There will be research pursued in blind alleys that will lead nowhere. Ambitious schemes will have to be concocted to exclude the evidence the government currently has against their client that has been gathered by wiretap. There are federal rules of evidence to research, such as the hearsay rule and its innumerable exceptions.
She reassures him, one arm on a jutting hip, that this work will be her priority. At the same time, she warns him with a spunky half-smile and a wink that he will not find her at the office night and day. I watch her haggle flirtatiously with him. “I’m not one of your precious associates you can overpay and overwork,” she chides. He is divorced and if she gives him a signal, he will eagerly demonstrate his interest in her. But she does not.
Once, he followed her into the library stacks and with her back against the books kissed her, or attempted to, his mouth briefly touching her throat as she swiftly spun her head away. I saw how he looked at her accentuated lips, the dent of flesh where a necklace had been worn. He struggled for composure and offered her an obliging smile as if to signal harmlessness but she refused to grace his action with any discernible response. Anything beyond that quick turn of the head, such as a push or a verbal reprimand, would have seemed like too much of a reaction that would in turn invite apologies. Instead, she knitted her brows and gave him a cool stare before maneuvering herself toward the narrow doorway. The incident was never spoken of.
He remains intrigued. He touches her whenever he can, her wrist, shoulder, or elbow. She is all possibility to him, only partially revealed and fully unfulfilled. He probably believes she is a daydreamer, her emotions full and ripe and ready to spill over. He does not know what I know. Mai lives her life in this country as if it were but a prelude to something more lasting that is not here yet and might never be.
I know he touches a sore point when he asks if she wishes to have a working dinner with him to go over the case. “Unless you have other plans,” he adds. She has no other plans. She knows that being by herself day after day is outside the realm of normalcy. But she stands there stolidly in the middle of the room rejectin
g his invitation. “Just a quick dinner,” he insists, slapping his hands together. They both know this has nothing to do with work. I listen while she emits a soft, single-syllabled “um” and then, with prim dismissal, tells him that she needs to go home. She does not even make up an excuse. She keeps up the barricade. Her blazer hangs on her arm. Her shoulders are exposed and catch his attention as she disappears into the elevator.
I watch as she considers carefully what she says or does not say. She listens to his account of their new case as if the matter were deeply personal to her. She has been at this firm for many years and she has seen the associates’ accumulation of billable hours sweetly resolved into year-end bonuses and the possibility of partnership at the end of it all. She has taken herself outside the realm of this possibility, recognition, success, or partnership, and so can maintain an easy façade of calm.
And so this demeanor, and it is only a demeanor, of efficiency and self-advocacy is all the more incomprehensible to me. Does she think that her polish sets her apart from us? I see her becoming not American but simply un-Vietnamese, and the visual assertion of this process is enough to make her even more of a stranger to me. She is, by all outward appearances, standing guard against the trespasses of Vietnam, palms turned outward as if she were there to forestall our advances. True, she has made it here in America with bold forays into the unknown and a careful and precise mind. But she has done it completely unaware of what has happened within herself. She sees me as someone who lashes out. I am inside the dark recesses of her being. She does not know me. I am a mystery. She looks in the mirror and sees only my scowling and angry face. But she does not bother to reflect and ask the one obvious question—why?
I try to push on, observing her as she moves past offices and computer terminals, but I am unable to manage it. I am taken over instead by an echo of pleading voices. I know I can filigree my way through the brain’s circuits. I can fake hope and trick my own feelings. “Mother, Mother,” I call. We call. We stay hidden in the jar. I shush Mai up. James falls. She blames me for his death.
Cecile too is agitated. She is the one who saw our sister collapse. I can feel her sobs, the sorry sounds coming from her chest.
Mai is still there, working on the LexisNexis terminal. She is stopping at irregular intervals to massage her temples as she tries to soothe the palpitations we have created inside her chest. I am like someone in the dark shadows looking at someone in the bright light. From my vantage point, I know every thought that scurries through her head and every feeling that she hides in her heart. She is perpetually perched on terror’s precipice, fearful that I will break out and throw her into unconsciousness. She can feel the scurrying movements Cecile and I are making within the depths of her being.
Quickly she stands up. Over the years she has become better at the task of managing my and Cecile’s discontents and disturbances. She works hard to forestall the onset of insanity associated with my appearance. Deep down I have no wish to do Mai harm. I try to cooperate. I try to save my outbursts for private times. I know we are in a public space, but as I watch her exaggerated display of Americanness, I am seized by uncontrollable rage. Still, I delay the onset of dark clouds and malicious storm. Instead, I thrash about for a long time inside her and thus give her sufficient warning to retreat to safety.
With each successive occurrence, the transit point that marks, to put it euphemistically, my entry into and exit from her world has become smoother. She knows I am about to push her into lost time. She rushes back to her office, locks the door, and with a sigh relinquishes herself and her consciousness to the forward and backward drift of our mutual lives.
• • •
Mai is home. Cecile is at the piano. The music she produces is beautiful, lush and prolonged inside the slow-moving dusk. It is music gorgeous enough to deflect all else. Here is beauty at last, in all its glory and raw intensity, briefly attained but somehow forever out of reach. It remains a mystery how she does it. She is playing Chopin but not quite. There is a faint disturbance in the air, a minuscule fragment of a sound, and then, suddenly, the music merely levitates effortlessly from the notes.
Our father exhales sighs of appreciation.
Sometimes it is like a mynah bird singing. The notes are held in its throat and then released. A beautiful birdsong emerges, elegiac in tone.
Sometimes it is like cupping the past in two hands and bringing it tenderly to the present. In her music, our essential life comes back in bursts the way a bush might explode in white blossoms one early spring morning.
I hang back and listen. Sometimes I try to pick up the notes and other times I just take the melody in.
She must be playing from memory. Our mother loved Chopin. So this is where Cecile goes to save herself, I think. So this is how the keyboard holds these hidden chords inside itself.
On those rare moments when Cecile emerges from Mai, she does so softly, melodiously, by playing the piano.
Unlike me, Cecile does not scowl and has no malice or wrath inside her. She is still an innocent. Her silhouette moves slightly. Outside, the long hanging branches of a sycamore also move. It is as if she were fully awake to life outside our louvered glass windows. It is as if she takes her cues from the old shade tree itself as it sways against the deep-churning rush of the wind.
It is her evening hour. She is alone at the piano, with our sister’s heart in hers and a high-flying cascade of music inside her fingers. Mai has been redirected elsewhere. The transition is much smoother than when I elbow and bang my way out. It is as if she were merely sliding down the coiled shell, following the spiraling lines that mark its cylindrical shape. She meets no resistance. It is as if Mai knows that it is only little Cecile and she is willing to relinquish the space.
And so she is here, this evening, playing Chopin and keeping cadence. The world doesn’t fall in tune with our internal currents, but we are making do under the daily strife. I can hear the music wind along the narrow Cholon roads into Ngo Quyen Street where it slows down and rests itself inside the purple dusk of the Old World.
21
Waiting
MAI, 1977-1978
I am in my last year of high school. We are still in Virginia, my father and I and a scattering of lives—Bao, Cecile, but mostly Bao—roiling about inside the depths of my being. I have done well, my grades not the result of brilliance but of merely workmanlike steadfastness. Today Father complains that he feels funny. It is early morning and we are both getting ready for the day. The school bus will be picking me up soon. The sight of Father slumped at the kitchen table, stilled by a strange sensation, stops me from running out the door. I go to him and put my hand on his back. His face has taken on the pallor of the haunted. He is not able to identify the sensation that plagues him beyond the one description that he keeps turning to, that he feels funny. Still, looking at his swollen eyes and puffy lids, I probe. What does funny mean, I ask. I want to know if there are physical symptoms. With a slow, ponderous intensity, Father proceeds to describe them. There is a phantom sensation on the left side of his body, starting from the heart and going down the rib cage to the hip. When did it start, I ask? He does not answer that question but mutters this instead: I am here, waiting for something to happen and I don’t know what.
I ask him again when the funny feeling started. He tells me that he woke up two nights ago with a tightness in his throat. This very sensation has morphed into a feeling of numbness on the left side. He fumbles for an explanation. Here, he says, taking my finger and tracing it down the length of his body.
I know the feeling.
Is it a premonition, I ask, that might be producing the strange feeling? No, he replies petulantly, as if to dismiss this very unworthy thought as pure wrongheadedness. It’s a physical sensation, he insists, a solid numbness that at times hardens. I don’t suggest a doctor. He would refuse. I know his self-punishing beliefs about the need to endure quie
tly.
All through the day while I am at school, I think about the look on his gray-stubbled face as he left the house. In the morning’s dusty light I saw that he has grown diminutive in his blue-gray uniform. His gaze was slightly off to the side of my face even as he bade me good-bye in the muted voice of someone who is losing hope. I cannot shake off that sad look in his eyes, the retreating gaze that seems to hold nothing.
Later in the evening, as I sit in the living room reading, I experience him by my side as if he were a blur. Can a person dissolve before one’s very eyes, become out of focus because he is vanishing slowly into the dungeons of his own mind? He has nodded off to sleep on the sofa, cloaked in a pool of soft light. A book lies on his chest, opened and facedown. Reams of paper, some annotated, are scattered on the coffee table. I see his handwriting. Written in cursive, it is patrician and beautifully crafted, with each downward stroke firm and bold and each upward stroke light and airy. His breathing is steady and assured. His existence till now has been so inextricably married to his parental role that I can’t look at him without seeing a father first and everything else after. But tonight he looks vulnerable. I do not see the fatherly aspects I have loved about him—the booted thump, the muscled back, the broad smiles he gave my sister and me. I see instead a slumbering, unadorned being, lying with his arm dangling from the sofa. I note his more fragile, more human particulars—the eyes squeezed shut, the worn socks peeking through a rumpled blanket, his thoughts about a lost war set on paper scattered about on the coffee table. I worry about the funny sensation that clings to his left side and wonder if it is a serious medical condition. The deeper reserve of calm he has managed to accumulate through the years seems to be dwindling. Now, late in life and in a foreign country, he suddenly needs to be rescued.
A moist, whistling sound escapes from his lungs. I crane my neck to look. He stirs slightly and crosses his arms over his chest, as if to shield his vital parts with his more expendable limbs. His face takes on a beleaguered look. His eyelids move rapidly. With mounting irritation, his breathing becomes ever more labored in the evening’s prevailing hush. I reach out to touch him. Wake up, I say. My first thoughts are that he is having a heart attack, until I see that his fingers are pressed against his eyelids as if to seal them from the world, as if to shield something from view.