by Lan Cao
The city itself has been resurrected and revived, after its long decline. People are now allowed to buy and sell. Cars and motorbikes rev their engines and honk their horns as they swerve through the vertiginous Saigon traffic. Tourists sip coffee at outdoor cafés and luxuriate in the delicately mannered, colonial atmosphere of Old World hotels.
Despite the familiar undertow, everything has been altered by the vagaries of fate and the curse of defeat. It is still Saigon. But my infatuation with it is mingled with suspicion. There is the old Rex Hotel and the Brodard Café where we used to have ice cream served in pineapple and coconut shells. There is the French Opera House. For all their anticolonial rhetoric, the Communist regime has preserved everything French. I look around, wanting to be overtaken by nostalgia.
I wonder what can be won back from the jolts and bends of loss. The black, stolid statue dedicated to the South Vietnamese soldier and sanctified has been torn down. A new flag, not yellow with three red stripes but red with a five-pointed star eerily reminiscent of China’s flag, now flies above the old French Opera House and every other public building. I am on Tu Do Street. I cannot bear to call it by its new name, Dong Khoi. This is where our parents used to take my sister and me for early evening strolls through the boulevards of venerable villas and old tamarind trees. But the place has turned falsely familiar.
It is exactly as it was—this is what people like me want very much to tell themselves when they return home. But this is not the case. Thirty years after the war’s end, the city is visited daily by the love-struck Viet Kieu, the overseas Vietnamese who, like me, are perpetually filled with unrequited longing. We have embarked on our trips in search of a time and place that no longer exists. We have carried our lives here from the other side of the earth. We want to take a lungful of air and fall in love. And we are clearly not ready to adjust our expectations to meet this radically different reality.
If it were not for the hard currency—U.S. dollars—we bring with us, we wouldn’t even be welcome here. This is no longer my city. It is no longer my inheritance.
I keep a strict accounting of my activities. I take care to avoid raw vegetables for fear of getting sick. I drink only bottled water and even then I check to make sure the thermoplastic sheet hasn’t been broken and surreptitiously resealed. I prefer water with fizz—the hiss and crackle produced when the bottle is opened will guarantee that it hasn’t been tampered with. I ignore the call of street vendors hawking steamed crepes served in bamboo bowls. “Baaaannnhhhh cuuuoooon,” an elderly woman beckons in a long-drawn-out drawl as she drifts by. I shy away, cast my eyes downward, stumbling past her, and I feel a quick tumult of disapproval moving inside me.
I know it is Bao, disappointed that I have returned home only to behave the way an ordinary stranger to the city would. Over the years of shadow dances, I have managed to get a sense of her mood. Right now she is feeling almost primal excitement. Home at last, she makes peace with Vietnam as it is.
I am surprised that since my return to Saigon, Bao’s slippage into my reality has been more frequent. I have, more than ever, felt her thumping presence and the push of her ravenous will. It is as if the secret tangle of her existence has escaped from the subterranean darkness, shooting life outward. She is at home and so she exerts herself fully here. A part of me feels what she feels—a humming exhilaration that vibrates as if the atoms were aligned and alive.
Just a few hours ago I found myself in a network of unpaved alleys rutted with dry, brackish mud. I was emerging, with unfolding exactness but a fraction off center, from a blackout—many minutes, perhaps hours, of lost time—in which Bao customarily takes over and I lose consciousness. Bao must have taken charge and made a foray into a neighborhood I would never have ventured into on my own. Around us were modest structures of unfinished plywood and corrugated tin that randomly doubled as houses and makeshift restaurants. Men and women with children were sitting on short wooden stools, hunched over long tables covered by smudged plastic tablecloths. The air was permeated with the pungent scent of charred meat, fried scallions, dripping fat, and chopped lemongrass. A man lit his cigarette. The sudden flare of his match emitted a phosphorescent glow. A stray dog sniffed through the garbage and howled. I suddenly felt feeble, caught inside the agitation and chaos merging and converging within me. Bao looked at me with the pure bafflement and practiced disdain of her assessing eyes.
I knew, of course, that she did not like me.
A melodic voice floated from an open window nearby. A woman was singing a simple lullaby. It was a swelling, blossoming moment for Bao. Her feelings coursed through me, expanding into something arching and enormous. Here, in Saigon, inside this transport of Bao’s intense emotions, it still might be possible for me to absorb Bao’s fervency. I might even feel her ardor and claim the fullness of the moment as mine.
I am suddenly seized by a thought: To truly discover myself here, I must hang on to Bao. I keep going despite the fear of relapse. Both of us are claiming the moment. It is a big task, managing and modulating one’s expectations. For the first time in more than thirty years I am riding on her optimism. I am filled with a large, booming sense of anticipation.
So I hail a taxi. I hold on to myself and put myself in full alert mode. The air smells of heat. Smoke rises from the parched tar on the road. Around us, motorcycles surge and shudder, shifting gears. I am in teeming, battered Cholon. There is Ngo Quyen Street. The taxi edges through a dismembered line of traffic and makes a slow-paced turn onto my street. The sight of it through the car window fills me with a soothing warmth. I crane my neck, trying to feel the old moorings. There is much unburdening and resolving left to do, even in a place that is barely recognizable. The possibility for salvage remains, even when the slippage is great and the framing skewed. The entire body remembers.
I feel her jazzed-up emotions plainly, without letting them displace my own perceptions and expectations. I get out and walk about, eavesdropping on this new far-flung life that is shimmering into place. I know this diesel-scented air and the hawkers and peddlers who do commerce in the pulsing energy and bustling chaos of Chinatown. I know the crisscrossing roads where our mother used to drive around in her Peugeot. I know the confined spaces between tight alleyways, the five-spice powder and other odors emanating from sidewalk stalls. I am walking past the corner where James’s encampment once stood. Now it houses a narrow three-story villa with a disconsolate sign dressed up in gilt letters advertising lodging. This is the street my sister and I roamed. A thousand new possibilities could have occurred here. Instead the future was foreclosed in one quicksand moment.
I realize that I am but a few steps away from a house that is no longer there. I cannot even locate the spot where it once stood. French-era hotels and the Opera House are preserved but everything else has been demolished to make way for the new. Still, I step up to that imaginary spot where the future once held little threat. I look at the surrounding space with proprietary wonder and ascendant hope, searching for the afterimage of life as I once knew it. I imagine a little black mynah bird flying about, swiping its wings, black eyes peering, yellow beak searching and poking. My head swivels, as if to catch sight of shiny black feathers dancing nearby.
My sister might be standing nearby with her notebook, an angel without a shadow. The mango tree might have been here, frail and muted, or over there, its leaves moist and green. The star fruit tree could have been somewhere next to it. I am both restless and anchored, touched and alienated, present and invisible.
Droplets of water fall from the treetops. The clouds are swollen and flannel gray, beautiful and awful. The sky darkens and glistens, signaling the imminence of short but heavy downpours. I realize we are at the peak of the monsoon season. Under the threat of rain, footsteps quicken. Engines spurt and rev. A car nearby bolts and squeals inside a puff of tire smoke. Headlights glow pale and jaundiced in the accumulating haze. Plastic sheets are draped over head
s and shoulders.
Quickly, I seek shelter under the nearest eaves, still trying to determine the approximate location of our house. All the landmarks that I would normally use to calculate its whereabouts are themselves gone. I stand there, staring, waiting to see if our old life can somehow return to its original shape.
Before I know it, the sky opens and it pours, just as it did when my sister and I played on this street. With the rain, new life, plucky and eager, is unsprung. Little children peel off their clothes and run open-mouthed onto the sidewalks into the drumming downpour. Sheets of silken water pour from gutters and eaves and produce a deafening sound that vivifies and overwhelms. I remember how it was on that fateful day. Children shrieked. Rain poured, overwhelming the roof spout. A few hours later, there was the long-drawn-out instance of momentary indecision as our parents’ car slowed down beside us.
I hear a voice, not mine, but another, inside mine, calling out for forgiveness. In my mind I see James, our Chinese grandmother, and my sister as we walk back from our illegitimate outing in the alleyways of Cholon. Now death has followed two of them. Is our Chinese grandmother still alive, eking out a living somewhere in Cholon? The rain continues its downpour, drowning out most sounds. But through it all I hear a barely discernible voice again, floating in the hot quavering whiteness of a summer downpour. It is not just enunciating a name, but rather, calling out to me. It is intimately known to me, like an alternate, parallel voice that bears my soul but has split from me to forge a different path. There it is, to my left, to my right, transparent and lucid, like starlight. I try to hold the moment, to be part of it, to snake my arms around it. I feel it vibrate briefly until it moves on.
I feel Bao’s shudders as she steps out, straight into the cascade of water, hoping to catch the voice in her hands, but the moment she moves, it vanishes. I stand still, watching, immobile, oblivious to the water that washes over me. I am drenched but I seek no shelter. Instead, like Bao, I too lean into the rain and allow myself the opportunity to catch up with the buildup of emotions. Bao’s shoulders heave—a sight that springs a rush of tenderness in me.
Our lives of separateness seem to be disintegrating here. For a few moments I am inside her gravitational field. We are together in a double loop of shared consciousness, hermetically sealed from the world. I can feel, down at the molecular level, what she feels, a deep condensed grief that seems unbounded.
• • •
I am eating pho at Pho 24, a few blocks from the hotel, enjoying the rich broth, delicately balanced with the right mix of beef bone, charred onion, roasted ginger, star anise, black cardamom, coriander, fennel, and clove. The restaurant, part of a franchise, is authentic but also clean and somewhat Westernized. The idea is to bring pho from the world of cheap street food to a more upscale and modern setting.
The local magazine I am reading reports that the “24” refers to the twenty-four ingredients that make up the secret formula. The lawyer in me finds the story behind Pho 24 interesting. I have studied franchise agreements. I am intrigued that there are plans to expand the Pho 24 brand to international markets, beyond those already in the Asia-Pacific region. California, New York City, perhaps? The transfer of intellectual property, the trademark, from East to West?
I read on, flipping the pages absentmindedly as I wait for the food to arrive. A story on the next page about an orphanage catches my attention. The headline states, in bold letters, AMERICAN VETERAN VOLUNTEERS TIME. There he is, the much-beloved American, in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt, standing in front of a decrepit building, seemingly transfixed by the crowd of children aligned in a tight circle surrounding him. Despite the graininess of the black-and-white photo, there is something familiar about the American suspended in freeze-frame. According to the article, a group of nuns founded the orphanage and a school that is dedicated to teaching the bui doi, “dust of life children,” who roam the streets and scavenge garbage dumps. The children learn English and crafts, quilt making and carpentry. Their creations are sold in select shops in the city.
The story lifts my heart. Something tender drifts unintelligibly toward me, the strain of hope against blood. I scan the rest, looking for confirmation of a name my heart already knows. I read on, spasmodically picking up keywords. Veteran. Wounded. Lost years. Returns to Vietnam. New life here.
James Baker. Resurrected. Never dead.
I sit still, my heart thunderous. Apparently, the American has a rigid routine. Every Monday he ventures to open-air markets to buy produce for the cook and then goes to Ben Thanh Market to eat at one of the food stalls and hawk the orphaned children’s wares at one of its most heavily trafficked corridors. Every Wednesday and Thursday, he gives two hours of English lessons. And on top of everything, the writer remarks, he spends time making connections with a number of nongovernment agencies to promote the orphanage.
I am perched on the chair’s edge. Is it another James Baker whose name is etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? Can there be another James Baker? Here, in Vietnam?
Later, I Google the name and get pages and pages of search results. Indeed, it is a common name, but the facts are matched up with dates. The man in the photo has the same way of standing. It is James.
The certainty of the knowledge suggests that there is no internal static or dissent. All of us are together and aligned.
We all know it, Cecile and Bao too.
29
The River Flows but the Ocean Stays
BAO, 2006
For Mai, this trip was flawed from the start. But now that she is here, she is beginning to give in to my full range of emotions, to my recriminations and my sadness. Her mood has turned conciliatory and, of course, now hopeful.
It is Monday. We venture to the middle of the city’s raucous central market. Where would a mixed-race woman go to make a living? Here, I think, a crowded place filled with vendors and beggars jostling for money and space. That is but a tangential and secondary hope.
Before us is the clock, blunt and massive, that hangs on the external wall of Ben Thanh Market. This is the compass point of downtown Saigon. Tourists, drawn by the weathered flea market’s charm, will tolerate the unruly throngs of smooth-talking pushers hawking every object imaginable.
Mai has no intention of buying anything or even window-shopping. Neither do I. There is an urgency inside me. Mai leads the way expectantly. I find myself walking toward the center, as if ushered by the visceral compulsion of memory. I know exactly where to go.
The air smells of the hearty aromas of various soups simmering on stoves. There are rows upon rows of stalls selling fabric, bags, shoes stacked in towers of multicolored, glittering likenesses. The interior is cloistered and dark, slightly stale, a relentlessly uniform grayness ruptured by only the occasional shafts of natural light that spill through curtained windows. There are exposed pipes, protruding nails, crude, mismatched furniture, and wood floors with broken planks. I feel the flow and rush of pedestrian tourist traffic and the quiet thrill of haggling.
A child follows me, tugging at my shirt, pleading in monosyllables, her voice gentle and plaintive. A woman stands before her fish display, auctioning off giant lobsters and crabs and deep-sea bass. She is pointing to the pink flesh of the fish and the finger-sized anchovies. Next to a basket of catfish, a tangle of pincers, tied by rubber bands, struggle for forward motion.
I find myself staring at the fishmonger, assessing her facial features despite the infinitesimal chance that she would be our mother’s lost daughter. Still, even in the random ordering of the world, even against unimaginable probabilities, fate has managed to rear its head. It is not impossible. The woman is in her thirties. I study the eyes, the nose, where the balance of racial mix is most discernible. She senses me observing her and waves me forth. I hold her gaze and walk away, taking her seaweed odor with me.
Mai and I scan the crowd, our gaze directed in counterpoint at the
foreshortened mix of stalls made from corrugated steel and plywood. Our habitual sense of distance has broken down—we are together in a common quest. Everyone is eating, enthusiastically, some squatting, their haunches practically touching the floor, some on stools, others firmly ensconced in chairs. It is a serious enterprise here, eating. Loud voices permeate the market. Mai winds her way through the labyrinth of stalls and booths illumined by neon tubes mounted from the ceiling. A man sits on a low footstool sucking marrow from a bone, his head bent over his plate. Mai stares at him. I know what she is thinking: Bao too sits and eats exactly that way, squatting, back stooped, face to plate. Nothing goes to waste when she eats, gristle, fat, collagen, marrow, tendon, or cartilage.
Here in Saigon, she is face-to-face with the rival counterworld that I inhabit without ambivalence. After more than thirty years in America, I remain wholly and quintessentially Vietnamese, tethered to this place.
From a measured distance, a man catches my eye. I see broad shoulders and thick, wavy hair that shines. His presence fills the room. I see only his back through a rush of people in the dusty, main hallway. It is hard to say what he looks like from behind. But still, I know.
The man is wearing a cotton ribbed tank top, revealing bare arms and shoulders. Around him, vendors sit on low wooden stools smoothed and beveled by wear. They are hunched over the squat grayness of their own shadows. He is sitting by a stove that hisses blue and yellow flames atop a bed of burned-orange coals. A pot burbles, its lid clanging against the metal. By the smell, I can tell it is a Hue noodle soup, gilded broth, sawtooth herb, lemongrass, tomato, and shrimp paste, with lime, onion, and a madness of hot pepper and garnishes. The vendor, a woman with a crooked grin, throws in a dash of this, a soupçon of that, which produces a version of Hue noodle soup that is uniquely hers. Its richness comes not from fat but from marrow. I cast my eyes on the line of pushcarts, each advertising the chef’s specialty: griddled rice cake, vermicelli with minced pork balls and caramelized shallots, green papaya with chicken and shrimp.