by Philip Huynh
Josephine sits on a Popsicle-orange chair in the corner and Christian stands by her side, his hand on her shoulder. The teacher turns around and calls the children to attention, ignorant of Josephine’s presence.
There are many things here that remind Josephine of her classroom in Vietnam. There is, for example, the alphabet that snakes across the top of the walls, the various accents hanging over the vowels. There are familiar books, which seem beyond the grasp of five-year-olds but which thrill her to see: Tintin, Les Fables de La Fontaine, Le Petit Prince. But here the pupils come in varying colours — brown, yellow, and white — though the squealing of children is the same everywhere.
All of this is to be expected. What is surprising is that the teacher does not have a Québécois accent. It is Parisian, like the nuns who raised Josephine. And that accent belongs to a man.
He is very tall and wears a yellow bow tie over a blue sweater vest, both as bright as crayons, and has a five o’clock shadow. He is like Gulliver as he tries to herd the children (dangling from windowsills, buried in plastic toys) to the worn-out polka-dot rug in the centre of the classroom.
Josephine had hoped to simply drop Christian off, but already he is fidgeting with his clip-on tie. She knows he will start wailing the moment she leaves him.
“Attention,” says the teacher. No response, so he claps his hands. Nothing. He sucks in his breath to let out a holler, then sees Josephine sitting in the corner.
“You’re a teacher?” he says.
“No. Not here.”
“Oh, I see,” he says. “The new boy. You can leave him.”
“He will be a nuisance to you if I leave him alone.” She says this in French, the first French she has uttered in seven years: “Il sera une nuisance pour vous si je le laisse seul.” She is not a smoker, but she can imagine the feeling of a long-awaited relapse. Blood rushes to her head.
Meanwhile the children have stopped in place and now look over at Josephine. She claps her hands. “Over to the front,” she says in French.
“I can…” says the teacher, then loses his train of thought as the children gather on the rug at the centre of the classroom for their morning alphabet lesson.
The copper statue of General Tran Hung Dao beside Thuong’s desk is not the image that most are familiar with — that of Vietnam’s great hero who fought off the Mongol invaders almost a millennia before Ho Chi Minh thwarted the French and Americans. It is not the General Tran struck in the tunic, cloak, and shoulder armour of full battle regalia, his dark beard in warring bristle, one finger pointing ahead — to a distant enemy or windswept oasis, Thuong is not sure. In this version, which stands three feet tall, General Tran is dressed as a scholar king. His eyes are just as piercing, but tempered with sympathy. His beard is a pointed wisp. He wears a turban, not his war helmet. His thin cloth belt is wrapped around a scholar’s gown that is embroidered with a pattern of clouds. His sword rests in its sheath. In his hand instead is a rolled-up scroll. His victory over the Mongol oppressors is behind him, his fate as a deity lies ahead.
Thuong rescued the statue from the temple in his neighbourhood in Saigon. Who knows what the Communists would have done if they had got their hands on it. Thuong packed it in a huge steamer trunk that belongs to Josephine, swaddled in Josephine’s silk dresses.
The statue stands in the corner of the study that doubles as their bedroom, the only spot for it in the basement where all four of them live. When Thuong sits at his desk, he meets the General at eye level on his woodblock pedestal. The statue is still beautiful, although the copper is turning green-blue. Thuong isn’t sure whether it is proper to regard the statue as an object of beauty. He is not sure if the look on the General’s face is meant to instill awe, or fear, or devotion, or all of these things at once, and if so, in what proportions. This is what he thinks about when he looks upon the General, when he should be working on his dissertation.
Sometimes he thinks the General speaks to him. The General has goaded him to study harder for his exams. He has commanded Thuong to settle on a dissertation topic, even though it may not be the perfect choice. Thuong knows it is improper to pretend that an object of worship would stoop to be his personal academic mentor. But he can’t help himself.
Thuong wishes the statue wasn’t such a distraction from his studies. Heaven knows, both the university and the Canadian government have given him enough scholarships, stipends, and breaks to get him this far. They have even supplied him with his own IBM PC, which takes up most of his desk, and a daisywheel printer that rocks against the wall when it runs.
But the General is always staring at him, unblinking.
Thuong gets so dizzy sometimes with all his thoughts that he has to stand up, stretch his limbs. Get some fresh air. Call his friend Fred Wong, another economics student. See maybe if there’s a card game he can join in Chinatown, just some penny-ante table. Just to take his mind off things.
The students call the teacher Monsieur LaForge, though Josephine has learned that his first name is Paul. Against the walls of Paul’s classroom are little framed pieces of paper containing pithy quotes in the French language:
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is
grief that develops the powers of the mind.
— Marcel Proust
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
— Winston Churchill
Be less curious about people and more curious
about ideas.
— Marie Curie
Josephine can’t help but ask Paul about them.
“They are for the children to read,” he says.
“You can’t expect them to absorb all this wisdom,” says Josephine.
“When I am done, they should at least be able to mouth the words, if not understand them.”
Josephine has attended the half-day kindergarten all week. Christian starts crying even if she gets up to go to the washroom, and has not improved.
Paul was at first annoyed by Josephine’s presence. It was one thing for five-year-olds to judge him, it was another thing to have an adult’s eyes on him as well. But Paul cannot deny the calming effect that Josephine has on all the children. When she is not in the room, they not only fidget, as five-year-olds do, but cough, go glassy-eyed, snap at each other, nod off, make a break for the Lego. Perhaps it has to do with Paul’s deep, sonorous voice delivered at the pace of a metronome, a voice that could command the attention of a jury but which lies outside the register of young children. Josephine just barks across the room when there’s defiance. She has a tone that corrals the children when they lose their focus on Paul.
It is during a rendition of “Ballade à la lune,” when the children start laughing in the middle of the song, that Paul can smell sulphur. The children pinch their noses, then point fingers at each other, and then the fingers settle on a little red-headed girl with a sombre expression. The smell gathers strength. As the girl’s pallor turns pink and tears roll down her face, the children laugh harder and clear a radius around her.
Josephine comes to the girl, checks under her navy dress, and picks her up by the armpits.
“It’s diarrhea,” says Josephine.
“Oh dear,” says Paul.
“I’ll take her to the washroom. Can you bring a pair of pants?”
“How would I have an extra pair of pants?”
“The nuns must have supplies,” says Josephine. “You must have a physical education department? An extra pair of shorts or jogging pants in a locker room? It doesn’t have to be the perfect size.”
“Of course,” says Paul. “I’ll be right back.”
Paul does not realize that he has sweated through his dress shirt until class is done. The red-headed girl’s mother shudders when she finds her daughter in baggy sweatpants.
“She had an accident,” says Paul.
“You changed her?” says the mother accusingly. She hisses in relief when Paul points at Josephine.
Josephine sta
ys after all the other children have gone, waiting for Christian, who is so absorbed with a strange-looking toy that she finally has to pull it away.
“Until tomorrow,” she says.
“You know, I really teach fourth grade,” says Paul. “Fourth grade and up.”
“I understand.”
“I’m just substituting for the term,” says Paul. “Until a spot opens up in fourth grade. Or higher. Hopefully.”
“We will see you tomorrow.”
“Certainly.”
Thuong’s daydreams are as vivid as his nighttime visions. Now he is on a warship, looking for General Tran. The year is 1288. The Mongol naval fleet has settled at the mouth of the Bach Dang River, close to Hanoi.
Under General Tran’s direction, the Vietnamese navy waits until high tide, and then its fleet engages the enemy’s boats. When the tide ebbs, the Vietnamese boats retreat towards the ocean. The Mongol boats give chase, not realizing that the Vietnamese have laid metal spikes along the riverbed. The Mongols’ heavier, sturdier boats become embedded in the spikes in low tide. Meanwhile, another cohort of the Vietnamese fleet have been lying in wait in the tributaries behind the Mongol boats. The Mongols are surrounded and skewered.
Thuong is on the deck of a ship, but General Tran is nowhere in view. In fact, Thuong is among the Mongols, tall, burly, bearded men wearing looks of horror. They see through him, run right through him. The ship is sinking. In the distance he can hear the victory chants of his countrymen, while the Mongols around him are helplessly bailing out water with giant clamshells.
Once a year, on Josephine’s birthday, Thuong cuts her hair outside in the old style. Not only is it his tradition to do it outdoors, but there is no room in the basement to properly cut hair. Outside there is an old apple tree, its protruding roots radiating through the backyard. There is a nail on the tree where Thuong hangs up a mirror in a frame. There is a fold-out wooden reclining chair and a small plastic table where he lays out his implements. Thuong does his barbering bare-chested, so that he does not defile a good shirt with her hair. He keeps a folded white towel over one shoulder.
It is unfortunate that Josephine’s birthday is at the end of September, when, in Vancouver, the sunlight is spotty at best. At least today it’s not raining. In the afternoon Josephine has set out banh uot in the kitchen when Thuong calls her outside. She knows what is coming. “I don’t need a haircut,” she says through the window, as she always does, and as always, Thuong leads her outside, her arm held in his arm, after Josephine has put on her blue-laced slippers to walk on the moist grass.
He ignores his mother, who croaks out the window, “Leave her alone.”
Josephine wears her hair long and straight, cascading over her shoulders. Every year he takes off five inches. “You know this is my true calling,” says Thuong, who is the son of a barber. “You thought you were going to marry a professor.”
“I thought I was going to marry a colonel.” They regard each other through the mirror, the one time in the whole year they make eye contact while talking. “I can settle for a professor,” she says.
Every year, Thuong thinks, Josephine becomes more beautiful. Every year, it becomes harder to hold her gaze.
“Wait,” says Thuong. He calls Christian out from the basement. “Get the sprayer.” Christian mists Josephine’s hair while Thuong pulls out the scissors from their plastic cover.
Next door is a barking Doberman. Around dinnertime it sticks its nose through the wooden fence posts and snarls at the apple tree. Now it is digging into one of the posts to loosen the soil around it. The dog’s Cantonese owners have complained to Thuong’s landlord, although it’s been months since Christian threw fallen apples at the dog. Thuong’s mother speculates it’s Josephine’s cooking that sets the dog off. The dog gets this way no matter the dish, whether it’s beef noodle soup, imperial rolls, or even her cold shrimp and papaya salad.
The barking usually doesn’t bother Thuong, but now he nicks his little finger with the scissors.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve lost your focus,” says Josephine. “Maybe it’s the new incense.” She means the joss sticks that he burns for his father’s altar in their bedroom, the ones he got from Chinatown. “It keeps me awake too. It smells impure.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the incense.”
“They are opening up a temple on Kingsway,” she says. “You should get some proper joss sticks there.”
“A temple in Vancouver? Buddhist? Vietnamese?”
“I think so. You should also take that statue of yours. Leave it with the monks. You’ve been distracted by it. I can tell.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Josephine never complained when Thuong asked her to stow the statue in her trunk, never mentioned all the dresses she gave up, the farewell presents from her students that she had to leave behind. She had thought the statue was struck in pure gold, and was shocked when Thuong rubbed off the gold paint so it wouldn’t be confiscated by the border guards. She thought Thuong salvaged the icon for love of country, so there would be one less treasure the Communists could get their hands on. She didn’t think Thuong actually worshipped the folk deity. After all, Thuong got baptized just before they got married. They go to church every Sunday.
“Why else can’t you get your degree?”
Thuong taps her cheek with the scissors. “Please don’t,” he says. “Not today.”
Josephine brushes the scissors off her face. “Does the General belong in a temple or in our bedroom?” she says. They stare at each other through the mirror.
It takes all of Thuong’s power to peel his eyes away from her. When he is done cutting, he takes the towel and wipes her hair off his chest. The dog will not stop barking.
“Fish sauce,” yells Thuong’s mother through the window. “That’s what makes the dog crazy.” Fish sauce is the common ingredient in every dish Josephine makes.
There is one framed quotation Josephine had not noticed until today’s class, because it hangs in the corner where the children are sent to be punished: “La vérité, comme la lumière, aveugle.”
The truth, like the light, makes one blind. By Camus.
She cannot focus during class. This is the guilt that Josephine cannot admit to: she has read L’Étranger more times than any other book, except perhaps the Bible. There is little that moves her, but she cannot keep her eyes from moistening when the protagonist Meursault drinks coffee idly in front of his mother’s coffin. Nothing, nothing in the great Vietnamese romantic fables touches her as much as when, at Meursault’s trial, he can only blame the sun for his shooting the motionless Arab those four times. Nothing even in the Book of Exodus moves her as when Meursault is asked if he loved his mother, and he answers yes, the same as anyone.
She cannot explain it. She is as much an existentialist as the crucifix she wears is made out of water.
Maybe she feels all the things Meursault is unable to. Each scene of the novel evokes in her the true Christian feelings that Meursault ought to have if he were Christian as well. Plus there is the added pity she feels for Camus, for only a writer who feels such sorrow for the world can create a figure of such tragic emptiness. And yet she cannot condemn Meaursault. She comes back to the novel at least once a year, not truly convinced there is no place in paradise for such a man.
After class she tells Paul that L’Étranger is her favourite novel. She has never admitted this to anyone. Paul wipes his face wearily, as if every one of his students has told him this.
“It’s mine too,” he says.
“But you must love God?”
“I do.”
“Then isn’t it difficult to reconcile?” she says.
“It is very difficult,” he says, with furrowed eyebrows. “But we have to try, don’t we? Even if we have to start over every day.”
Josephine really does have a magic touch with the children. Those who fall off their plastic chairs, or scrape their knees during recess, go
to Josephine for ministrations. Paul is free to concentrate on his lesson.
Josephine’s presence is based on a fib, and the fib is different depending on who you ask. The nuns are told that Christian will break into tears and wet himself if Josephine leaves him for even a moment. The parents are told that she is a teacher in training. The children are told, for a laugh, that she is Gulliver’s wife.
Among the toys is one the children don’t know what to do with. It is the size of a tennis ball, but it doesn’t bounce. Josephine cannot tell them what it is. She shows it to Paul.
“It’s a heart,” he says.
“It looks deformed.”
“No. It’s the real thing, more or less.” It’s a model of a five-year-old’s heart, for medical school. The object looks like a toy, with the aorta, veins, and arteries rendered in a brightly coloured plastic.
Some child fished it out from Paul’s top desk drawer. It belonged to Paul’s late father, once the chief of surgery at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal. His specialty was mending the hearts of babies and little children. If you were a young child in Montreal during the 1960s, and if you had heart troubles, then the chances were good that you knew Paul’s father. He also taught in academies in Lyon and Paris, where Paul spent his childhood summers. Paul never thought of his accent as Parisian, but if Josephine thinks so, then this was how he picked it up.
Paul became an engineer. If he had become a doctor, he would merely be a sparrow walking in the footprints of a bear. He thought he would actually design things the world had never seen, which was better than what his father did. For what was a surgeon but a glorified mechanic, simply maintaining the designs of a greater creator?
Nobody told Paul when he dreamed of designing bridges that he would end up stamping drawings for retaining walls in residential subdivisions. Nobody told him that the materials of his trade would be modest lengths of Allan Block and shotcrete sprayed on boulder stone, not miles of big bright steel.