by Lan Cao
With unguarded eagerness, Uncle Number Two ignores the scowl and returns a wide smile. This is what he said when he was here the first and last time: Nothing can equal the memory of having faced the future together at a time when the future promised so much. There is still that singular fact. He is willing to wait for our father’s true feelings to arrive, when he will be able to understand the core of their friendship at last.
“Look what I brought you,” Uncle Number Two says, rummaging through a bag in a show of excessive solicitude. It is 2006 but he acts as if he had just seen Father yesterday. His fingers are stained by nicotine. His shoulders fold inward, making him seem even smaller than he is.
He pulls up a chair by Father’s bedside. When he sits, his prosthesis is revealed. The metal limb seems to have aged along with him.
He offers Father what he brought: a persimmon, a mangosteen, and a star fruit. He is bringing California’s harvest to Virginia. Father watches with annoyed indifference. Mai steps in and exclaims over their ripeness. She gives Father a pleading look to be civil and restrained. He eases up fractionally. She takes a mangosteen, puts a knife’s edge to its purple rind, and runs the blade along the circumference. She holds it in both hands and pries it gently with her thumbs until the rind cracks and the halves are pulled apart to reveal a circle of fleshy wedges, like a tangerine, but white and soft.
The way she cuts the mangosteen and brings it to her lips, she is so much like our mother at the breakfast table eating her favorite fruit that I have to stop and stare at her. Except that because it is Mai who is doing the cutting, there is something unutterably final about Mother’s absence. She is not here and she will not be here. Uncle Number Two is here instead. It is a state of mind, an evocation that memory triggers. Right there in Mai is a flick of Mother’s old self, interposing. The world before me alternates harshly and abruptly between anger and sadness.
I feel the “Bao”—the storm—in me swell and expand. I turn away quickly. I feel a burn in my throat and little explosions in my chest. It always returns to Mother, and the moment it does, the past keeps coming and coming straight at me. I don’t know what it is that makes it all suddenly very clear to me, but here it is. I put my head deeper into the realization. I am almost drunk, almost manic, with this simple but now-obvious singularity of thought.
Of course after our sister died our mother did not want us. On this rare occasion Mai and I are on the same unwanted side.
And it is not because grief edges out love. Rather it is because we became unlovable. Imagine being the one who was not adored but who lived. I quickly glance at the mirror. I see a shocked-looking face full of harshness. It is finally obvious. You can’t be lovable if you are always scowling.
I feel anger rising inside my chest. This is how my violent episodes begin. Madness edges out reason. I overpower Mai and with propulsive recklessness take over.
But a part of me knows the importance of this moment. I clench my fists and restrain myself. To avoid the appearance of impropriety before Uncle Number Two, I force myself to recede. Our father notices a distinct element of sensory shuffling, a substratum of movement in his environment that usually spells trouble. He grimaces. Mai steps forward with a tended eagerness and spoons a wedge of mangosteen into his mouth. He receives it but unwillingly. He is still simmering, though only slightly below the boiling point. Uncle Number Two says, in a tone more penitential than upbeat, “It was absolutely her favorite fruit.” I struggle to stay inside the vast symphonies of normalcy. But I feel my nose running and my eyes tearing, as if I have taken a bite out of a hot pepper. A noisy disorder is building up. I know these signs that will add up to an explosion. The construction of my very sense of self is falling apart. Recklessness before our father, but not before Uncle Number Two, I mutter. I still have the clarity of mind to know what I must do.
“Ever since I first knew them, we ate mangosteens together. That was fifty years ago.” He turns to Mai and emphasizes their long history, but our father will not receive the offering. Instead, he casts a critical eye at Uncle Number Two.
I slink my way behind Mai’s being, searching for the neutral zone inside her. It is still possible to be becalmed. I float in and out of the glittering madness.
“I asked you not to come,” I hear our father say. “It can never be forgiven, Phong.” I hear both the grief and the censoriousness in his voice. “Never,” he adds with arched inflection. They are almost face-to-face, as if in a contest of wills eerily reminiscent of the one involving Uncle Number Two and our mother years ago in our Cholon dining room.
“But I haven’t even told you what I am here to say,” Uncle Number Two insists with pointed determination. The room is filled with tension. There is a coughing fit followed by long, raspy breaths.
“Listen to your old friend Theo,” Uncle Number Two begs our father.
Our father shakes his head to signal he is not interested. He has no choice but to remain lying down. His eyes glare with icy coldness.
“You feel contempt for me,” Uncle Number Two suddenly says.
Silence.
Uncle Number Two takes in our father’s weakened condition. I can see his eyes’ appraising gaze. “We are too old now to continue . . .”
“I don’t know what it is you want, Phong.”
“Not one thing for myself. I just want to give us, you, peace of mind.” Uncle Number Two looks down, his eyes taking on a sad look.
Our father stiffens. “It is surprising that someone as keen as you should have so little sense of proportion. My peace of mind is my own private journey and no one else’s.” He makes no effort to rein in the admonitory tone.
Mai frowns. The clinical nakedness of their emotions embarrasses her and at the same time compels her interest.
Our father yanks the cord by his bed. Quickly Uncle Number Two reaches for our father’s hand. The move is not intended to achieve physical contact but rather to restrain. “No,” says our father. “You are hardly a trustworthy one,” he declares.
I hover about. Mai flutters awkwardly in an uneasy silence. I hear a derisive laugh but I cannot tell whose laugh it is.
“It is indecent of you. Everything else can be forgiven but not this. She died because of you,” our father says. He emphasizes the word died. For almost thirty years he has lived with the jarring knowledge of her death. It has been the prelude to everything that he has experienced while in this country. It is inside him. And Uncle Number Two epitomizes it by his continuing existence.
A terrible silence settles in the room. I have never heard it uttered this directly before.
Where our mother is concerned, we are neither neutral nor impartial. Her death has become the essence of how we measure time itself.
Our father’s lowered voice suggests a lancing anger he is trying to restrain. I see a bodily alteration, black, brooding eyes fixed upon the fork-tongued charmer by his bedside. Between the two of them, the past they share is forever here, to be disassembled and reassembled again and again.
Uncle Number Two hangs his head, as if to ask for forgiveness. Mai withdraws into the core of her privately retained self.
“Even before I got your letter in 1978, I knew she had died because her death registered on me like a deadweight when I woke up from a dream. I felt it in my body, like a paralysis one moment and a terrible burden the next.” His face withers as if he will never recover from a loss so beyond imagining. “But what I did not know until I got your letter was how she died, Phong, and how you let it happen.” For a moment, his deathbed eyes flash.
She died in 1978. We found out from Uncle Number Two’s letter. We were still hanging on to hope before that. Uncle Number Two’s presence entangles our father in the very moment of our mother’s death years ago. Not just her death, but the manner of her death. It is this fact that has strained Mai all these years. It is what has made her live a half-life of acquiescenc
e in this country, removing herself from everything that truly matters.
Our father’s body shakes. Uncle Number Two is here only on our father’s sufferance. To witness how a shared history can somehow deteriorate, one only has to look at them. Aunt An, responding to the bell, appears, watchful. Our father says he is too tired to have visitors who upset him and she approaches Uncle Number Two to usher him out. Uncle Number Two’s face trembles and his skin flushes, as if he too were shaken to the core by an everlasting wrong. With a show of resignation, he holds his head in his clasped hands as if to still the turbulence inside it. He must be reliving it physically.
And then he says so softly I can barely hear it, “History is responsible. I did not let it happen.” Tears roll down his cheeks. “I was the one who was in love with her, for God’s sake.”
I freeze. Our father’s very being shifts. He too freezes. He fears Uncle Number Two’s loyalty. He fears his disloyalty. Like a law of nature, it has been that way forever.
23
The Letter
MAI, 1978
The situation in Vietnam is getting worse. Father is sure our mother will leave soon. He is able to feel it. From which shore will she depart? We look at the map and speculate together. Aunt An says that, with so many people desperate to leave, any coastal city will do. Ca Mau, Vung Tau, Phu Quoc. I imagine rows of boats rocking in the harbor and patiently waiting. I want to know from which cities most escapes have been launched. I tell our father that Uncle Number Two is also exploring the possibility of leaving. I tell him the story Aunt An told me.
That is why we wait. It is our community ritual. It is 1978 and everyone in Virginia’s Little Saigon waits or knows someone who is waiting.
Finally the letter comes. It is stamped with a postmark from Malaysia, where ships from Vietnam often sail toward. In the past Malaysia has refused to let boats land, towed broken boats back to sea, and even fired on them. The country’s deputy prime minister announced that he would expel all those already in the country and shoot newcomers on sight. In a five-month period, fifty-eight thousand boat people have been dragged from shore and thrown back into the open sea. Our lot, our nagging humanity, a matter of statistical wrong, is no longer anyone’s geopolitical or strategic concern.
In an atmosphere of death and doom on the high seas, our father opens the letter. He is crying, his face drained of color. He lifts his head occasionally to look at me. He waves me toward him in a weak, somnambulistic manner. I am pulled into the rumpled folds of his overcoat until I disappear into his ravenous grief. He keeps me there, locked inside his embrace, until moments later, when I wrench myself from his grip. It is the first time in a long time that I am the one who disengages from a hug first. A sob comes out of him, expelled with the inconsolable force of something that has for years been suppressed. A minute later, he pulls me back, petting my hair in a state of great emotional agitation. He reads the letter and, when he is finished, pushes it into my hand and goes outside to cry.
The letter is from Uncle Number Two:
I am in Pulau Bidong. Malaysia. It is five in the morning. I write to you with tremendous sadness. We escaped together but she is dead.
For years now we have lived here in our country barreled against every conceivable hardship. You would want to know, I am certain, how she was after your departure. We have shared so much, but there is so much more to tell. Some I will wait to tell you in person when I make it to America. For now, let me recount the almost four years we had without you. Our journey out of the country. Her last days alive. You will know her to be more resilient than either of us imagined.
After you left, my wife and I and Quy moved in with your brother-in-law, yes, the Vietcong brother-in-law. Right on Rue Catinat, in a four-story villa with walls of dark mahogany wood and stairs framed by shiny balustrades. You have been there many times. The bottom floor functioned for years as a silk and fabric store that provided cover for the villa’s many clandestine activities. For one, it doubled as a Vietcong safe house. Your brother-in-law offered sanctuary to his sister and her friends, inscribing us into the official family register recorded with public security cadres.
Your house was looted the day Saigon fell. I went by. The gates were wide open. I made my way past the walls, walked alone through the garden and into your study, stood among your Buddhist and yoga books, still intact, though almost everything else had been stripped. Soldiers from the North Vietnamese army had pummeled and clawed open the walls of every room with sledgehammers, looking for gold or dollars hidden behind the mortar and bricks. A metal safe stood in your bedroom closet, its door ajar, a fact suggestive of many possibilities.
I suspected soon enough things might not go as many of us had hoped. The government newspaper Saigon Giai Phong announced early on that Southerners must pay their blood debt to the revolution. It was the gravity with which these things were being declared. And so it began, with that early writing providing some sense of an ominous horizon. Still, even if drawn by pathos, Saigon managed to overshadow its more backwater counterparts in the North. The city’s resilience, its energy, its forbearance, galled them. So appropriate wounds had to be inflicted. It was very sad, my friend. One evening, Quy and Thu and I took our walk around Rue Catinat, a street that has undergone a number of name changes, Tu Do, then Dong Khoi. We came across Khai Tri bookstore, where you once bought so many books for the girls. I breathed in the familiar odor of paper upon paper in an enclosed space. The shelves were emptied, books from the store flung onto the trucks parked outside. I asked one of the cadres seemingly in charge what was going on. He was a bony youngster from the North speaking in a sharp, self-approving northern accent, dressed in shabby fatigues. He showed me the list of more than one hundred authors and one thousand titles that were to be removed. Even Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, were on the list of decadent books. Around us, soldiers unloaded cartons of books from trucks and carried them inside the bookstore. Marx, Lenin, Engels. I read a few pages and struggled to take in the tumid prose. One crate had only framed pictures of Ho Chi Minh. “We are sending half a million pictures to the South on another truck,” he said.
So that was it, an early sense of life as it would soon be. A book caught your wife’s attention, a hardcover Arabian Nights with pictures of magic lamps and flying carpets. The young cadre saw her looking at it and offered her a clandestine smile. “For you, Mother,” he said. She was frozen. I stepped forward and took the book for her.
At the time, soldiers in pith helmets ordered banks to seal safe deposit boxes and freeze accounts. Quy still had her valuables, gold bars and diamonds. She had removed them from her personal safe before she left with us to seek shelter at her brother’s house. Your brother-in-law was still esteemed by the state. And so we were in a sanctuary of sorts. Or that was what I thought. He had not yet spoken out.
But it didn’t last long. I remember the day Thu and I lost everything. It was some time after the midautumn moon festival in August of 1975, four months after the war was lost. Neither Thu nor I had our wealth in dollars or gold. Our savings were in South Vietnamese money, deposited in the bank. Thu had a beautiful diamond ring she wanted to sell. We found someone who agreed to pay for it in gold. Instead, on the day of the sale, he gave us South Vietnamese money. We needed cash to buy food, so we had no choice but to accept it. Several days later, old money was declared worthless. New money would be issued. Everyone would get the same amount—two hundred dongs. After that, we relied on Quy’s gold and diamonds and dollars and the underground market to survive. Quy would go to Cholon, exchange her gold bars at a premium exchange rate for cash from Chinese merchants who knew her Chinese friends. The Chinese merchants got their cash by turning their gold over to the new authorities. Around us, people queued at dawn in front of state-run cooperatives for rice and meat. We were all ambushed by a mandatory money exchange operation designed to ensure we would be str
ipped of our entire life’s savings, surprising us in both its severity and its effect. As if from a great height they were dispassionately decreed. Two hundred revolutionary dongs, or four hundred kilos of rice at the official price, in exchange for each family’s entire fortune.
A ration card system was introduced for people to buy their rations at designated state-owned stores. We were not allowed to travel, since we were legally permitted to stay overnight only at the address printed on the ration card. And our ration card had to be validated weekly, when we attended mandatory meetings to learn about Lenin. Quy and Thu came back from the first one, companionably paired in the late dusky light, two silhouettes drawn by pathos, mockingly whispering a poem by the Party’s favorite poet, To Huu, who declared that his love for his father, mother, wife, and himself was pale compared with his love for Stalin. Recited without false affect, those stale lines merely made us sad. It created an equivocal stir even in your brother-in-law, who at this time was ambivalent, still hanging on to his instincts to defend his cause and the grandiosity of its self-professed paradise. He was no doubt disturbed, but not yet willing to relinquish the last of his delusions.
He reassured his sister, though he must have known what was happening. I saw a Party document in his room one day containing guidelines to prohibit history, philosophy, or civics books written from the “American or puppet point of view” and those foreign publications that were of an “antirevolutionary or depraved nature.” Still, he continued to hope. He reminded his sister of the declaration made by Le Duan, the first secretary of the Communist Party. “The South needs its own policy,” meaning draconian rules should not be imposed by the North. Yet the very same man also wrote to assure us that the “Vietnamese revolution is to fulfill the internationalist duty.” A duty as yet unfinished.
Still, we were not truly suffering. We had connections, at least, and an inadvertent, fabled past. From your brother-in-law, I learned the name of a high-ranking but sympathetic Party leader who might grant us special dispensations based on your brother-in-law’s political pedigree and calculated loyalties. We two, along with Quy, would go to him for help. The presence of a woman could soften a tense situation. And perhaps I believed we would be the exceptional, unprecedented case that managed to defy reality to escape harm.