“Oy, Houa. I caught with my own energy. I want you to have it.” Newly grown. You pick! “It’s a frogfish!” I said, as if that would settle everything. We had stepped out into the road and now were being pressed in by the flow of people around us, tourists, grocery shoppers, orchid collectors, laborers returning home.
“I don’t want your charity,” Houa said. “Don’t pity me.”
“It’s not. I don’t. I give it as a dear sister of a life we both knew from long ago.” Stopping, I turned to Houa, and a body bumped into me before continuing on.
“All right,” she said, accepting the fish I had taken out of my sack, “but only to help you sleep better.” We walked on. Purple Locust Orchid! Cheap! But as I stepped into the intersection to cross the street, she was no longer by my side. When I looked back at her, four-five paces behind, she said, “Ask it.” But who am I to ask? What do you say? Because I am a woman, I am fluent in vagueness but had no courage for bluntness. “You want to know how could I, right?”
“Anything for the heart to be calm,” I repeated, knowing our existence here was lived closer to death than to life.
“You speak like it’s opium. Something I need to do to survive the long day, to be able to face the world, to face you.”
“It’s not opium,” I said. “But one must live, must try to go on. Believe me, I know it’s not.” But already she was in the street, crossing over to the next square, into the next group of vendors along Rue Labeottadok, never listening to the words I was never saying. New orchid. “Houa,” I said, catching up to her, afraid to be alone with my own voice.
“All this time I’ve been wondering, Did she do it on her own? Did her father and I force her? Did she have a choice?” Blue-Winged Dragonfly.
“It’s done,” I said. “Think instead of the two months you have to live and use it to prepare for the next two months.”
“But—listen—it is not done. Never done unless you’re dead. After two months, it might need to happen again.” Pink-Tipped Orchids. Come see.
“Then you’ll make the decision then.”
“But it must be considered now,” she said, shaking the fish in her hand as though swatting a small grease fire. She stopped walking and faced me. Her face was calm with the trouble of thinking, but having strong currents underneath. Did my old friend think I was naive? “Tell me what you think of me?”
“It’s never easy,” I said, “this life.”
Trembling now, the fish in her hand. “You think she had no choice. Because if she had a choice, she wouldn’t have done it?” I had no answer for her, but knew and was afraid she would take my silence wrong. “But what does that say about me,” she said, “as a mother?” Because I did not know what to think of myself, I could not tell her what I truly thought of her as a mother. What would I think of myself if I were in her position? Of all things, this was the one difference in our paths. And now, it seemed, we were arguing about it. Besides, she had a husband, which left her decisions not so easily made. Pink-Tipped Orchids, fresh and sweet. A throng of people caught up to us, surrounded us. We quickened our walk, to let them separate themselves and hurry on, leave us behind. “However, if you think about it”—she stepped slowly and gingerly now, as though, with bare feet, walking on broken glass, Purple Petal Golden Heart—“she has many years ahead. And she could still get married.”
“You want to know who gets to make the sacrifice?” I said.
“I want to know who gets to decide,” she said. Come see best orchids in Laos!
“Maybe no one gets to decide,” I said. “Maybe it was already decided long ago for us.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Maybe it was us who decided long ago, and those decisions are just now starting to show. Or maybe it has nothing to do with decisions. And choosing. Maybe it’s just our luck. That we change. Forced to change. Everything changes.”
“You have some luck!” she said. “Only one child, two mouths to feed. If your neighbor didn’t pity you, how helpless you are without a husband, she never would let you fish with her.” Her tone made me wonder if she wished her husband dead. Would she prefer that type of luck? Blue Hooded Orchid. For sale. For sale, Blue Hooded Or—
“That’s true,” I said. “That’s my luck.” We came to the end of the paved section of Labeottadok. Ahead was all red dirt and tire ruts, then home.
“Some luck, you don’t get to change.” Her knowing tone was an elder’s, lecturing me before weighing me down with guilt.
“You’re right, Houa. Some luck you don’t get to change.” My friend stepped into the dirt road, then, realizing her sarong was brushing over it, hopped back onto the paved street. “What were you doing on Rue Lab?” I said. Houa lived north of the city. There, the buildings thinned out, and more land was available for farming, where the popularity of Laotian orchids was making some farmers wealthy.
“Talking to myself about what was done and what to do,” she said, then turned around, heading the way we had come, saying over her shoulder, “Meet you again,” and fell in with a crowd walking back toward the heart of Labeottadok, the marketplace, and the orchid sellers. I knew I would again find her along this road, and maybe, someday, I would stop speaking to her like a woman who has been given space to remain silent about her luck.
On the road coming to my house, Bone and Skin slid out through the gate hole to warn me with their teeth, slowly backing as I came forward. I encouraged their barking at strangers and willingness to bite, but this had not been their usual behavior with me, only after I returned from the last time I saw Mr. Cha alive, as though, overnight, they had aged and were going blind and I now was difficult to recognize by sight. But always, when they heard my voice—Bone and Skin, I would say, because one is white and the other yellow, go home—they would quiet down and lead me home. This day, though, after seeing my old friend Houa and trying to help quiet the voices in her head, to reassure her of our decisions in the past, walking home, I remembered the disagreement I was having with Hnuhlee when my dogs ran out to greet me with their teeth and severed my thought, made me gasp, forcing a curse on my tongue, and for a second, I forgot how to quiet them down, to remind them it was only me, still me coming forward.
* * *
—
We now live in a house with two floors and whitewashed walls. To look like Modern Woman, as she calls herself, Hnuhlee has cut her hair short. All the reading she has done has made her need eyeglasses. She is pregnant with her first child. And this is the seed of our disagreement: whether we prefer a baby boy or baby girl. Hnuhlee said it does not matter, but I think it does, even for a modern woman.
And you? I had asked her husband.
Hnuhlee was born in 1978 in the Ban Vinai refugee camp. We had fled our village in Laos the year before without my in-laws. They believed things would not be as everyone feared when the communists arrived. When Hnuhlee was one, my husband heard from a new arrival in camp that his parents had disappeared into the jungle and were trying to join us in Thailand. He told me this at night as we lay facing each other, Hnuhlee asleep between us. He said he was going after them.
What do we do if you don’t come back?
Why think that way?
What am I to think? I wanted to yell at my husband, but feared waking up our daughter. He turned onto his back. We had to leave fast, he had said after he returned from war the second time; he knew what the communists would do to us. Did he forget? This, the man, to become his wife, I had shouldered a ker for and fell in behind when he came through our village on his way back from war the first time. I wondered if still he was the sixteen-year-old who said to me as we came upon a stream during that march, I can be a horse, then laughed when I lost my footing on a slippery rock. Sitting in the water, I was angry at him for his man language—which I took to mean, then on, I will have to feed him, his horse’s appetite—and his laughter
at his clumsy bride. I was almost fourteen, but in the years since, I have come to understand his words to mean sacrifice, for me to jump on his back and ride across.
The small wooden shed the refugee people gave us had only a door. Between the wall planks were gaps allowing you to see the stars and brighter night sky, but the weak skylights did little to the darkness inside. I turned my husband’s face and held it between my hands. His nose bridge was high and sharp: with enough light, I could pick out its outline in a sea of a million faces. I heard us all three breathing—Hnuhlee’s deep and evenly spaced, mine shallow and hurried, my husband’s broken now and again with sighs—and hoped in the morning the door would not open, that it would seal us in, and if we were to die in this wooden box, then it would be all right because we would die as a family, our breathing, finally, as one. He said, Follow your family to America. His words burned my insides like hot metal, and this time, letting go of his face, I turned on my back. I had married him and was part of his family. Saying that was like he wanted to divorce me. I breathed loud out of my nose because too much it was to use my mouth. He said, I’m their son. Do I leave them?
Each beat of my heart was a yes!-reply, a thump in my ear, but I let my silence speak, my breath scream. Hnuhlee started and stirred but did not cry; she knew to save her tears for later. Even in the dark, I could see what my husband was supposed to do: stay with his wife and daughter. But he was a man who walked the narrow path of a son—help your parents, protect your family, take a wife, have children, raise your grandchildren—and I knew my words would not enter his heart. Helping your parents was the first thing you learned to do and the first thing you got to let go. And long as they drew breath, their pull on him was strongest, and that night, briefly, I wished my in-laws dead.
The next night, I held tight my husband’s arm and pushed Hnuhlee at him to hold, but he refused to take her. He pulled away and disappeared through the camp fence. In the dark of our shed, I cried and held my daughter’s face next to mine, her cheek warm and soft, then my bitter tears, when they dried on her face, itched her, and she started to cry. Everything my mother had told me, it seemed, I was forgetting. She said to me once, Never cry on a baby’s face. If your tears get in a baby’s eyes, the baby will feel what you feel. So I put my daughter down on the bed and sat away from her, so I could cry by myself, and she by herself. I did not know how to stop for a long time. For a long time, I could not even hold my own daughter.
Seven months after my husband left, his parents arrived in the refugee camp. They were bones and walked slow. They explained to me this: They traveled with the last group of people from their village. My husband found them and led them through the jungle until the communists spotted them, and again, he had picked up a gun, making him a soldier. He drew the communists away from the group with two other men from the village.
You are so stupid! For many days, I said nothing else. Their assurances meant nothing to me, and I was a bad daughter-in-law to close my ears to their words, my heart to their suffering, too, and they had every right to beat me but could not find the strength to hurt. We all waited in silence. My husband was in the jungle, I believed, still fighting the war, and only waited for the perfect time to drop his gun and slip the communists and return. When my in-laws filed the paperwork to leave for America, I decided to stay. Don’t make the mistake we did and stay too long, they said. But again, worthless words to me. They offered to claim Hnuhlee as theirs and take her ahead with them. But I told them no. She is mine, and she will wait with me.
Despite arriving in the refugee camp before my in-laws, my parents left two years later, watching and waiting on me, the last of their children in the camp. Mother said childhood is the length of your parents’ lifetime; but I was only a daughter so did not believe her.
Grief has blinded you, Father said. Your in-laws, they have already left. They know your husband is dead.
They don’t love him, I said.
Love? He left his wife and child.
His reason for leaving, I wondered, was it not a good reason? Would you have asked your sons to do the same?
If I made that decision, to stay behind, I wouldn’t expect help. I wouldn’t trouble my children. I’ve lived a full life, but my children have not. A parent’s life is built on what you can give your children. You think about Hnuhlee. I was only twenty-one years old and knew there could be still many more years. We old people don’t say this because we are afraid to die alone, afraid no one will remember us, but duty has an end date. Your duty to me, whatever you think it might be, should not dictate your decision now that you have a daughter. From this day forward, do not think of me when you think of her. Always, Father’s words sounded like commands, and to disobey him was to disrespect him. Like my in-laws, my parents offered to take my daughter, but again, I refused. Only later, when Hnuhlee was twelve, would Father’s words enter my heart.
The morning they left for the airport in Bangkok, Father spoke to me as his daughter for the last time. You have such a hard heart. Good for a man, but you are my daughter, he said before turning away to board the bus. I did not know if he meant I was brave, which is one meaning, or stubborn and thick-skinned not to think of my daughter, which is another meaning. Even now, I think, he meant both. Even now, the last image I have of my husband is his back, and he is walking away from me. For a wife who knows her husband loves her still, that should never be her last image of him.
* * *
—
In 1984, alone in camp, I thought about America for a long time, then I borrowed a cassette player-recorder and, for my family, recorded a cassette. I told them I had decided to go back to Laos. I sent them my words but did not wait for their reply. I took six-year-old Hnuhlee and, in secret, muffling her protests with my hand, walked out of the refugee camp in Thailand and followed the Mekong till I came opposite the shore of Vientiane, and hired a boat to take us into the city. While we waited for the boat, she cried, said she wanted to stay behind. I told her to be quiet, otherwise the Thai border authorities will hear us, and who knows what they will do to a young mother and her daughter. Or the evil spirits will hear her cry, seek her out, and make her sick and die, so her soul could be theirs. Did she want to be away from her mother? I held her hand tighter than when I held my husband’s before he left. Don’t you want to see your father? I said. What father? she said. Her father had died a long time ago because that is what everyone told her. Those words hurt me as much as if she had said she hated me. Again, hurt me like my husband’s suggesting I return to my family. To keep from slapping her, making her cry louder, I had to be strong. But I wanted to go back and find my husband, and whatever I needed to do, my daughter was to go with me, even if it meant I must drag her until her knees showed bones.
* * *
—
I first saw Mr. Cha from behind. He had just turned out of his courtyard and was walking with his sons down the road. I had learned of an empty hut on the outskirts of Vientiane, in Phondachet village. I believed it was a woman I was looking at because of the long yellow hair reaching below the shoulders, a woman whose figure was hardened by work and square-shouldered like a man’s. The Laotian lady in the hut across the dirt road caught me staring and shouted, He is a single man, you know? Her dark legs, round and fat as gourds, stuck out from her shorts.
That is a man? I said, hot with embarrassment when she nodded. I suspected, then, there were empty huts elsewhere in the village, but was told to come here for a reason. No, I am too poor to keep a man, I said to the Laotian lady.
Make him support you, she said, raising her chin, twitching her brows, a smile on her face.
Support me living in this? I pointed to Mr. Cha’s hut, then to the hut across the dirt alleyway, which was to be my own. Our huts were made of wood—some planks, some posts. To hold up the thatched roofing, a middle beam, supported by a pillar, ran its width. This pillar, always in the center of
the hut, seemed to cut right down the living space, and was either useful to hang stuff on or always in the way when you were in a hurry. Around each hut, people blocked off a small courtyard with wood poles, a private place to chop wood and husk rice and pluck chickens and gut a pig and plant a small herb or flower garden.
What is wrong with this? the lady said, sweeping her hand from one direction to the other. Not good enough for you? She rested her hands on her round hips. She was stout and strong, and my bony frame shivered from the fear of crossing her. Behind her were two girls and a boy.
No, I said. That is not it. There were a small, black fat-belly sow and six-seven piglets in a pen in the corner of her courtyard, and four hairy dogs tied to a sturdy post in the far back, all on their feet, looking at me, their back hair standing, trying to decide if I was friend or not. I said, For me, this is perfect.
* * *
—
Vientiane, being closer to ocean level, the dust and pollen floated even more, drifting from all the mountain trees and plants. But when the sun was near overhead, you could not make them out well, just a far-off haze, their presence only noticed when sneezing, because too much collected inside of your nose, or turning black in the folds of your body. Other refugees in the village had told me that with good luck I might talk to Mr. Cha about a job at the rubber-tree farm where he worked. Here, it is not polite to knock on the doors of people you do not know, so you try to catch them out in the open. I had heard music coming from his house. One day, while he was chopping kindling in his courtyard under the shade of a thin peach tree, I walked over.
How are you? I said from the dirt alleyway, a few feet from the gate door.
He leaned his long-handled sickle against the peach tree and tucked his yellow hair behind his ears. How are you? he said, walking toward me. I hear you have a cassette player—I held out my cassette—and was wondering if I can listen to this? Just arrived, I lied. It was the first tape my family had sent me, the only one I kept, the one with everyone’s voices.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 36