The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  She orders, through Lee, the liver, onions, and mashed potatoes. He asks his mother the same for himself, just to keep Jude company. Then he tells Jude that her code is the most elegant thing he has ever seen. He speaks about all of his doubts as a coder. He has such a facility for abstractions, he is a master of the language of mathematics on the page, but he cannot turn this into life on the screen. It is a dimension he cannot break through.

  Jude listens to him while he unburdens himself. Lee is so busy talking he has barely touched his food by the time her plate is licked clean. It’s okay, he has no appetite at the moment. He tells Jude to switch plates, so that his mother won’t hassle him about not eating when she comes to pick them up.

  “She’ll think I didn’t like the food,” says Jude.

  “She’ll think you’re being a lady,” says Lee.

  His mother brings them bowls of vanilla ice cream and fruit cups for dessert. When they get up to leave, she gives them each a cookie, wrapped in a napkin. When he gets Jude into his car, he feels the night is opening up to endless opportunities. He’s going to take Jude back to his house. His mother will be at the restaurant for the rest of the night.

  “Take me home,” says Jude.

  “What? It’s still early.”

  “Not for around here.”

  “What do you mean ‘not for around here’?”

  “I’m tired. Please.”

  He does a U-turn around Ellice Avenue. It is then that he notices that the Passat has a new dashboard radio. Bao must have installed it while replacing the spark plug. It’s a garish thing, too shiny and new for the rest of the car. He can’t get the radio out of his mind when he turns into the long private driveway of Jude’s house on Wellington Crescent.

  Lee had thought about trying to change her mind, but when he drives up to the elegant brick fortress that is her house, he can only muster a feeble “see you” as Jude hustles out of the car, leaving footprints on the moon-white snow as she disappears from his view.

  Lee, driving home, makes a detour onto Maryland Street. He rips out the dashboard radio, tucks it under his arm, and treads with it through the snow, through a small tinted-glass door that conceals the larger space behind it.

  This is the immigrants’ community centre where Bao volunteers. Next door is the women’s shelter where one morning Lee came to pick his mother up. The community centre is a space that Lee has been in before, with the card and mah-jong tables set up for the old men, the ping-pong tables that are cleared at night to make way for bedding, and the large canteen of tea on the sidelines of a gymnasium-like space, like a remnant of a bygone prom. He strides past a cloud of smoke where the card tables are, bumping into elbows, which releases a fluttering of cards and curses, past the overhanging curtain into the sleeping space, knocking his feet against sleeping bodies because his eyes have not adjusted to the darkness.

  There is a promise of light on the other side of a curtain. Past the curtain is a little warren of offices and a worn-out couch in the hallway, where he finds Bao smoking and reading a magazine.

  Before Bao looks up, Lee has just enough time to rehearse, once again in his head, what he had wanted to tell Bao the first time he saw him.

  The Fig Tree off Knight Street

  We did not tell our mothers why we suddenly refused their meats. We just left them on our plates — the pork chops, lemon grass chicken, tilapia, whatever they were — and ate the rice and vegetables served underneath. If the meat lay hidden in a stew, then we drank the soup until the clams or scallops or prawn eyes emerged whole to dry out in the air. Of course, we knew we would suffer for this. Some of our mothers spanked us, some sent us early to bed, and some shed tears to make us feel guilty, as if the animals we waved away were being dealt another death blow at our little hands. But we would not capitulate. At the time, we were aping Thanh, the boy who cured Yen. We would not, of course, give him up to our mothers, at least not for a while. Instead, when they pleaded with their greasy hands for an explanation, we said we were just doing ourselves some good. We thought then, as many of us still do now, that of all Thanh’s traits we could have aped, his disavowal of the flesh was the least peculiar.

  Some of us first met Thanh in ESL class, some outside on the steel climbing dome. Those late joining our group met him at the little parking lot off Knight Street. Thanh was fresh to Vancouver and had spent his life in a Communist Vietnamese re-education camp. He didn’t speak a lick of English. And yet he walked our grounds with a weary stoop, as if he was already too familiar with the terrain. He seemed older than us, though he was no taller. He lacked our fidgety energy. His air of quiet resignation was unchanging, whether he sat still in class listening to the teachers speak incomprehensibly above him, or ran at full pace while being chased by larger boys around the concrete track.

  We heard that Thanh lived with some distantly related uncle and an ill mother who spoke only to herself and her son. We heard that Thanh’s father was some American GI whom Thanh had never met. When he and his mother were let out of the re-education camp, his mother had the option of moving to America but decided on Canada because she couldn’t face the possibility, however remote, of encountering this GI again. Any GI, for that matter.

  Thanh was almost Vietnamese in every way; there was nothing to betray him as the son of an American except for his faintly violet eyes, as if they had once been a piercing blue but were now daubed with blood. We pitied him, for each of his rubber sandals, neither of which was shaped particularly for the right or left foot; for his uneven, matted bangs that stuck to his forehead; and for a ghastly odour that trailed him, provoking us to offer him our fresh socks or T-shirts. Those who could speak some Vietnamese did our best to translate the lessons for him, though it was hard, because most of us were not born there and were therefore not fluent. When Thanh was absent from school, which seemed more often than not, we tried to devise excuses to mollify his teachers so that they wouldn’t search for him at his home.

  We pitied him, but we did not take him seriously —that is, until he cured mute Yen. She had stopped talking on her first day of kindergarten and we had all heard how Thanh had, months later, shaken her voice free. How Yen, on the way home from school, was chased by a one-eared dog. How she turned off Knight Street and ran down a rutted alleyway that was bordered by the backyard fencing of Vancouver Specials on one side and little parking spaces behind the pharmacies, grocery stores, and flower shops on the other side. She ran until she reached a dead end just beyond the parking stalls of a German butcher shop, to a wooden fence that was too high to climb over. There was, however, a way through: the fence had a rotted-out gap in the shape of a flame. On the other side was the backyard where a large fig tree grew, its branches cascading over the fence, weighed down by leaves. Though the air had been still just moments before, the branches of the fig tree were rattling. Yen got down on all fours, was about to scoot through the gap in the fence when Thanh emerged through it from the other side. He wielded a broken lamp base. They say that the sight of Thanh and his violet eyes, compounded by the barking dog and the rattling fig tree, made Yen scream.

  Of course, we had to see what it was that had startled her. One day after school a small cadre followed Yen on that same path. Some of us wanted to see the fig tree, an unusual creature here in East Vancouver, long ago cleared of its old-growth conifers, which were replaced by stucco homes in neighbourhoods speckled with spindly maple and plum trees. Others of us were simply wondering what Thanh was up to, since he had not shown up to school that day. As soon as we turned off Knight Street and its paved sidewalk to the rutted alleyway, we felt as if we had stepped into the wilderness. We sidestepped rain-filled potholes and walked gingerly through rough, slippery gravel. The wood and chain-link fencing of the homes grew taller the deeper we walked in. And yet we felt more exposed to the elements. While on Knight Street the only breeze was from the hush of traffic, and little puffy clouds hung dormant in the sky. As soon as we turned the bend to our des
tination we felt a gush of wind that lifted our skirts or our jackets and our hair. The fig tree shook as if we had startled it, and we trembled from a noise that was a tripartite crying of pigs, sheep, and chickens.

  We now believe that there was something peculiar in the geography or construction of the alleyway that gathered the breezes into itself. We did not have an explanation then. And we still don’t have one for how the horns from the distant traffic or the pounding of the butcher’s knife from the nearby store were transformed by the wind into those animal noises. When we got to within ten feet of the wooden fence, which was marked off by the last painted white stripe of a parking stall, we stopped and waited for the air to calm. It eventually did, as we remember it, when Thanh emerged through the flame-shaped gap in the fence. Then those barnyard cries were replaced by a human’s, which we knew was Thanh’s mother talking to herself through her open kitchen window. We could tell from the fresh oil burns freckling his hand, from an overpowering smell of food in his hair, and from his sweaty brow that he was in the middle of cooking something. The younger among us felt envy at the licence he was given to play with stoves at his age. Those of us who were older felt pity at what this licence meant.

  Thanh looked into each of our eyes, until he was sure we were not an angry mob. Then he smiled. “You look scared,” he said, to no one in particular. Some of us took that as a challenge to our resolve and clenched our jaws. The youngest among us just nodded.

  From his jeans pockets Thanh pulled a large gold amulet with a hole in the middle, wrapped in a piece of cloth. It was almost the diameter of a puck and had on it unusual figures etched in relief. Its light made us shiver, yet helped us see why our mothers loved gold. Thanh bent down on one knee and placed the cloth on the white stripe of the parking stall, then the amulet on top of the cloth, then stood up again.

  “Where did you get that?” asked little Yen. The rest of us pulled her back.

  “Stay on your side,” he said in Vietnamese, motioning to the amulet and the white stripe, “and you’ll have nothing to be scared of.”

  Meanwhile, Thanh stayed on his side of the white line, under the fig branches by the fence. He sat down on the cracked asphalt and crossed his legs. We all sat down and crossed our legs as well.

  We asked him how he cured Yen. Thanh smiled peevishly, brushed the dust off his lap, and shook his head, as if embarrassed by the question. “I cannot say,” he said, and was silent after that, content to pick at the ground for oddly coloured pebbles. It was not long until we became fidgety, as if we were back in class.

  We told Thanh that since we were all sitting here cross-legged in this parking lot, he might as well tell us our fortunes. “I don’t tell fortunes,” he said. We didn’t believe him and couldn’t hold back our disappointment, because just as he said this, his hair became ruffled as if by some invisible hand, though there had not been a breeze for some time.

  He blew the hair out of his eyes and sighed, then stood up. He said he had to go home. He was hungry. But if we came back next time with “something useful,” then maybe he’d talk. Then he disappeared back through the flame, and we got up to retrace our steps through the alleyway, back to Knight Street.

  Of course, the next time that Thanh skipped class, we came looking for him after school. We had to overcome our fears of that alleyway — of the sudden wind and noises — and so we each brought along our own objects of comfort. When we made it to the dead-end fence, we stopped just short of the white parking stripe, just as Thanh had told us. We stood there, enduring the cries of the pigs, sheep, and chickens, until Thanh emerged and all those noises disappeared and all we could hear was Thanh’s mother scolding herself in the distance. We waited until Thanh placed the cloth and the amulet upon the white stripe and sat down cross-legged. Then we each took out something from our knapsacks. One of us brought a little figurine of the Virgin Mary that she placed on the white stripe. Another had a rosewood carving of the Buddha, while another had a picture of the Bodhisattva Quan Am and rosaries. Others placed their favourite Star Wars action figure, or a Care Bear, or a rubber parachute man. I had a plastic Battle Cat (of the He-Man series), with its bared fangs and yellow stripes set against a green suggestion of fur so smooth that you could pet it along the grain in any direction. I took my figurine out of my knapsack and placed it among the rest of our little protective friends.

  We also brought candies. There were boxes of jawbreakers. There were lime and grape Nerds that were like sparkling, rough-hewn grains of kryptonite. There were also Runts — these iridescently lacquered, tiny fruit dolls — and solid bars of Mackintosh’s toffee. We piled all of these into an offering for Thanh. At this Thanh smiled, opened a box of Runts, and told us to share the rest of the candies among ourselves. Now, as he chewed on hard candies, he was in the mood to talk. We sat there and gorged on sugar while Thanh spoke to us idly of the confections of our ancestors: of sweetened rice wafers and tamarinds that you ate and kept the seeds to play marbles with, of candied nuts and agar-agar jelly. All of this talk made the Nerds, Runts, and jawbreakers seem insubstantial. Their sugars melted in our mouths and left nothing but stains on our tongues. It was then that Thanh spoke of the perils of eating meat. Our faces turned red as we listened, and some of us put our hands on our stomachs.

  Thanh’s lesson on meat ended just when we finished all the candies. He was quiet again, picking at the ground for shiny pebbles. We were both agitated and emboldened by our sugar rush and could not endure the silence for very long. We demanded that Thanh tell us our fortunes.

  Once again, Thanh told us that he was no fortune teller. He said, however, that he knew something of our pasts, which was for us something more elusive. He knew how our ancestors died. Some of us didn’t believe him. “Well, then, who wants to go first?” he said. We all looked at each other and no one raised their hand.

  Thanh looked at each of us, then uncrossed his legs and stood up. “You aren’t at all curious?” he said. When we still didn’t answer, he turned his back to us as if he was going to leave. We clapped our hands so that he would stay. We told him that we would hear a story. He sat down and crossed his legs again. All he needed from us was a little piece of information, our names or our parents’ names. Maybe the city or village where they came from. He squinted at us, as if trying to see the resemblance between us and the faces he conjured in his mind. He finished his first story about one little girl’s grandmother whom she’d never met, and then waited to let the little girl wipe away her tears before moving on to the next story. Despite the tears, none of us were ready to leave, and so he started on another story, then another. Those who understood Vietnamese translated for those who did not.

  We heard of someone who was shot by friendly fire from the Hac Bao army company, then of someone who fell off a cliff in the wet jungle while carrying artillery because he wore rubber sandals without traction. One of us had the blood of a poet in his veins who died in prison starving himself, because the Communists had confiscated his sheaf of love poems, unsure if they were harmless odes to his wife or to counter-revolutionary ideals. We nodded with understanding; sometimes our parents took our poems or drawings or comics away.

  When it got dark, we knew we would be scolded at home. We gathered our belongings and made our way back to Knight Street. Afterwards, we tried to verify these stories with our parents, but surreptitiously, without giving Thanh away as the source. Mostly our parents dismissed them in some vague way that only made us more suspicious. They weren’t interested in hearing all this old news and told us to exercise some discipline over our imaginations. And they were too busy working double shifts, making us dinner, or scratching lottery tickets to replace these stories with their own.

  We never raised these subjects with Thanh when we saw him under normal circumstances. Instead, we lent him our bikes or gave him our extra T-shirts (he was particularly fond of the Whitecaps), or helped ward off the bullies who stalked him for his eyes. We gave him a pair of KangaROOS shoes w
ith Velcro straps and little pockets on the tongues so he wouldn’t have to fuss with laces and would have something to keep his pebbles in. We admired him for qualities that would have brought each of us into disrepute: how he had never watched TV and never combed his hair; how he could scamper barefoot up even the skinniest of East Vancouver’s plum trees; how he never rode a bike until we taught him and, when we did, how quickly he learned. He loved our bikes, and we were envious that he had no one to scold him about zigzagging from sidewalk to road and back, or to warn him not to rush through stop signs with his ankles raised on the handlebars instead of down on the pedal brakes.

  But it was just a matter of time before we betrayed him. It took only one weak link, one child like Yen to be given a good spanking for refusing her mother’s meat, for Thanh’s name to be mentioned. And it wasn’t long before one or two of us revealed to our parents the ritual in the butcher’s parking lot. Our parents, in return, clucked their tongues against the roofs of their mouths knowingly. They knew of Thanh and his mother and told us that they never lived together in the same re-education camp, but rather the Communists would have separated them when Thanh was an infant for “moral reasons,” which explained why Thanh was so unkempt and why his mother talked herself into a craziness. It was only recently that the two had been reunited. Our parents told us that his stories most likely came from his mother during her endless soliloquies. We shouldn’t take them so seriously.

  But still we went back to the parking lot and sat down with Thanh the next opportunity we had. We wanted to hear more, no matter what our parents said. Yet what we were interested in was not so much the causes of our ancestors’ deaths. We had heard too many stories of them having not enough food or swallowing too much salt water or of thatched roofs glowing with fire in the night. So many that Thanh’s voice was bland and his eyes went dull when he told them. What we wanted to hear instead was what Thanh could not tell us, what our unknowable loved ones were holding in their hands in their last moments — a gun, a pen, beads, another loved one’s hand. Still, we listened to Thanh, and huddled together against the chilly air while looking down at our own empty hands.