by Philip Huynh
More than anything, we wanted to come as close as we could to the source of these stories, and we knew that we could not stop with Thanh. And so, on what turned out to be our last day with him, we left school early. Instead of going back to class after recess, we gathered our knapsacks and headed down Knight Street. When we reached the mouth of the alleyway, the older ones zippered the jackets of the younger ones before we turned into it and faced the whipping winds. We covered our ears when we heard the pigs, sheep, and chickens. We knew that Thanh would be at home, but when we reached that last white stripe, we did not sit down and we did not wait for him. Instead, we walked across the stripe and entered his backyard through the flame-shaped gap. Those of us who were small enough walked through, while the rest of us got down on our hands and knees.
The grass grew wild in his backyard and was covered with a dusting of dandelion fluff. We stepped on dead figs, which gave way softly beneath our feet like curled-up mice. We walked towards the sound of the barn animals, which seemed to come from a window on the second floor of the house. When we reached the wooden stairs to the balcony, with its flaking blue paint, these animal cries yielded to a single insistent voice. It was Thanh’s mother, whom we were looking for on that day.
The first one of us to reach the top of the balcony knocked on the door. We waited in a descending line, holding on to the creaking banister, which shook from both the breezes and our weight, holding on to each other’s hands like slipping climbers, until Thanh’s mother opened the door and let us in. She didn’t look surprised to see us, only sad. One by one we filed into her little dining room. She pulled her jet-black hair back into a bun, which had the effect of smoothing out some of the wrinkles on her forehead. She wore a bright yellow ao dai with a floral pattern, dressed for some special Vietnamese occasion that our parents were too busy to tell us about. Her face looked tired, but no more tired than our parents’ faces. Her body was svelte and wrapped tightly beneath the ao dai, and she walked around the dining table with a vigour that belied the look in her eyes when they met ours. She was talking the whole time, not to any one of us, but to herself or to some imaginary person standing next to her. She never stopped talking to herself even when she stared at us and motioned for us to take our jackets off and directed us to our seats. Then she disappeared into the kitchen, her voice trailing over her shoulder.
At first we didn’t smell food, only incense. We saw against the wall an altar with a photo of an ancient couple who could have been the grandparents of any one of us, saw the smoking joss sticks whose ash tips lengthened, greyed, and curled like the fingernails of this same couple. It was then that Thanh appeared, and for the first time we were truly scared. His hair was tangled as if he had been standing in a windstorm. He was wearing one of our Whitecaps shirts and clutching his lamp base, which he raised over his head. We realized that he had been sleeping the whole day. He looked at us with both anger and fear.
Then his mother came back into the dining room and in a moment of lucidity looked Thanh in the eyes and spoke to him directly. “Let them be,” she said. Then she turned back to the kitchen and Thanh started to follow her. “Sit with them,” she said. “I don’t need your help.” We heard the kitchen windows close.
Thanh put down the lamp base and sat down on a fold-out chair, more than ever like one of us. We knew they rented this house with some sort of uncle, but didn’t dare ask where this uncle was. Meanwhile, we could hear his mother humming in the kitchen over the spatter of oil. Restless Yen got off her seat and took a peek inside the kitchen, then scampered back to us trying to hold back her giggling. She had seen Thanh’s mother bent over a red bucket filled with soap water and set on the ground, washing her hands in the bucket instead of the sink.
We tried to sit politely until Thanh’s mother came out and set the table, leaning over us as if we weren’t there. Afterwards, she brought out the food — no meat, of course. The smell of it made us crazy with hunger. She brought out steaming pots, sizzling and popping bowls, and dishes cold as a corpse. We ate as if our parents had never fed us in our lives.
She sat down with us, but she didn’t touch her handiwork. Mostly she talked softly but rapidly, as if in a chant. Every so often she would interrupt her own rhythm with a shriek and other sharp-sounding utterances, making us jump up from our seats. Both apologies and accusations spewed from her, her voice as animated as her face was expressionless. We weren’t sure if she was talking to one imaginary person or if she herself was taking on several roles. At times it sounded as though she was yelling at Thanh’s father, at other times pleading with a jailer. Once she said, “If you are the Seven Dwarfs, then what am I?” One of us answered, “Snow White!” while little Yen said, “The evil queen!” We shushed them both, told them to let Thanh’s mother be. She wasn’t talking to us.
Thanh did his best to ignore her, but we knew he wanted us out. She kept her eyes focused on something on the oak-finished tabletop, as if concentrating on its grain at an atomic level. And yet she always noticed from the corner of her eyes when one of us had spooned our last bit of rice and made sure to fill our bowls herself. We had no words to describe her condition at the time, and could only say that she was half in this world, half in another.
When Yen had finished her bowl, she caught Thanh’s mother’s eye and said: “How did your husband die?” which provoked the little boy next to her to say: “Shut up, Yen, who says he’s dead?”
For a moment Thanh’s mother closed her mouth and stared at the children, then looked at each of us with such a clear gaze that we could see her sane, beautiful self flickering like a ghost somewhere behind her eyes. Now we wanted to ask what this woman’s last moment was like before she became the one standing before us, but instead we held our breaths and let the temptation flicker past. Thanh’s face reddened, and we were not sure if it was from anger, embarrassment, or an awful insight into the danger he had created by attracting us here. For the first time we considered our own time on this earth.
Then Thanh’s mother resumed talking to herself and everything seemed normal again. We all looked down at our bowls and gorged ourselves until we were stuffed. How could we eat anything our parents gave us now? Of course, our parents asked this too, because when all the food was gone, we could hear the sound of rubber on gravel through the shut windows. We heard our parents in the butcher’s parking lot. We heard their approaching footsteps. We got up and grabbed our knapsacks, pulled out our objects of devotion, what our parents so lovingly gave us, and we lined them up on the threshold of the doorway. If not to stop them, then at least to make them pause.
Turkey Day
I hadn’t planned on speaking to anyone that day. All I wanted to do, all I had promised to do, was find a turkey.
I was being put up at the Swissôtel by the law firm that employed me. Until less than a month ago my apartment building had stood in the shadows of the World Trade Center. The apartment was still there, but now nothing stood between it and the sunrise. I wasn’t allowed to move back in yet. The building was being tested for structural stability and barricaded by the National Guard. Downtown Manhattan still resembled a war zone. The Swissôtel was located a world away, in shiny Midtown.
It was early in the morning. I was, in fact, still in my boxer shorts when I got the call from the lobby. “Mr. Chau,” said the concierge. “Your wife is here to see you.”
“I don’t have a wife,” I said. In fact, at the moment, I wasn’t sure if I had a girlfriend.
“Just a second,” said the concierge. I was put on hold, and listened to static broken by muffled voices in the background.
“Hello?” I said.
“She swears by it,” said the concierge. “Can I let her up?”
Before I could reply, the concierge hung up the phone. I hardly had time to put on a shirt and a pair of pants, and to look out the window to catch a glimpse of my favourite tree on Park Avenue before the doorbell rang.
I carried a faint hope that it was Haejin
, playing some joke on me, telling me that her answer was, finally, yes. But it was Nga, dressed in a rain jacket, though it was sunny outside. I barely knew her, and only as a client. And yet I knew I should not have been surprised.
“You can’t go around lying like that,” I said. “You have no reason to say you’re my wife.”
“I needed to tell them something,” she said. Nga had probably never been inside the lobby of such a nice hotel, and felt she needed to give a reason to be here.
My hotel room was well-appointed but small. To get to the living area/study, you had to brush by the bed. It had one chair, which I offered to Nga. I also offered her a cup of coffee, but she waved me away. I took her rain jacket and threw it on my unmade bed.
“The deadline for my filing is today, no?” said Nga, smiling prettily. Her tanned skin made her tea-stained teeth seem lighter. “I have to sign my affidavit?”
“No, it’s not due today,” I said. “I’m still drafting it.” I had her file on my small desk, her “battered spouse” application for permanent residency, as it is known in INS parlance. Nga was from Ben Tre, a little town to the south of Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon, as she insisted I refer to it). Her husband lived in New Jersey. A couple of years earlier they had met over the phone, long-distance, through a professional matchmaker. They got married last year, and she had left Vietnam for New Jersey. But even before the ink of Nga’s green card application was dry, he started “abusing” her. Her word. She needed to leave him, but was scared of losing her conditional permanent residency status and being deported. The immigration laws provided recourse. An alien could still maintain permanent residency status in the United States if she could show that she had entered into a genuine marriage and had to leave the marriage because she was battered by her husband.
“We can finish it today, no?” said Nga. She went to my small desk, picked up a manila envelope with her name on it, and handed it to me.
“I suppose so,” I said, “since you’re already here.” My plans for finding a turkey would have to wait until the afternoon. At least working on the file would distract me from thinking about Haejin. At noon she would be having lunch with her parents, who were visiting from Vancouver. I knew where Haejin would be taking them, even though she had never told me.
Nga’s case was in fact the only file I had been working on for the last month. I took it on pro bono, because I was sick of the mundane tasks of junior lawyering for a corporate law firm, my regular fare of reviewing documents for privilege and drafting letters for the partners’ signatures. I wanted my own case, and I was referred to Nga because I spoke some Vietnamese, albeit with a heavy Canadian accent. I had been in New York for a year now, and the work I was doing for the law firm seemed so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
I had already drafted most of the affidavit. I had written Nga’s story down as she told me it, from the moment she was introduced to her husband — or at least the idea of him — through a matchmaker. Inside the manila envelope were all the constituent parts of her application: phone records showing all the calls between Trenton and Saigon, where Nga was living; photographs of her husband’s first and only visit to Ben Tre to meet Nga and her family; photographs of their two wedding ceremonies, one in a hotel in Saigon, one in Trenton’s City Hall. These I would attach as exhibits to the affidavit, her narrative of her voyage from Vietnam to the United States, and the two months of bliss once she arrived here.
“I need one more thing,” I said. I was surprised that I couldn’t finish the sentence. I was trained in business litigation. I was used to analyzing financial statements and initial public offering prospectuses, not the formation and breakdown of a marriage. What I needed from Nga was intimate.
“What is it?”
“I need to know how your marriage failed.”
“It failed because he no longer respects me.”
“I understand that,” I said. “But does he hit you?” She shook her head. “Does he abuse you in any other way?”
She lifted her eyebrows.
“We need some sort of evidence to make this work,” I said. I took out a copy of the Power and Control Wheel that came with my pro bono attorney’s packet, which diagrammed all the possible forms of domestic violence, organized inside evenly measured pie slices. We went through them one by one: Using Coercion & Threats; Using Intimidation; Using Emotional Abuse; Using Isolation; Minimizing, Denying, Blaming; Using Children; Using Male Privilege; Using Economic Abuse.
She shook her head as I pointed to each pie slice.
“He’s done none of these things?”
“Maybe that one,” she said, pointing at Using Emotional Abuse. “And that one,” pointing at Using Isolation.
“You’ll have to provide details,” I said. “Does he bully you?”
“He tries,” she said. For the next half-hour she described to me the litany of arguments she had with her husband, over money, over his smoking, over her mother-in-law, how he would abruptly leave in the middle of a yelling match and be gone for days and come home with no explanation.
“And how has this affected you?” I asked, trying to be clinical.
“I have brain damage.”
“Brain damage?” I said. It took me a moment. “You mean psychological damage?”
“I can no longer paint. I’ve lost my concentration. Because of the abuse.”
“I didn’t know you were a painter,” I said. “I thought you did nails.”
“Now, I do nails,” she said. “In Saigon, I painted with lacquer. I was famous.”
I suddenly felt tired, though it was only morning. If Nga was telling the truth that she was a professional painter, then I would need to attach reproductions of her paintings to the affidavit, maybe even get reference letters from gallery owners, curators, or customers, and would likely need them to be translated.
“I’ll need more evidence,” I said. “We’re definitely not going to finalize this today. Maybe you can gather the additional materials and we’ll reconvene another time.” I picked up her rain jacket from the bed and handed it to her. I wanted to be alone, and I needed to get a turkey.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“To get the evidence.”
“Why do you need me to come with you?”
“Because I can’t bring the evidence to you,” she said. “You need to see it yourself.”
I didn’t understand her, and I wasn’t sure if it was because my Vietnamese wasn’t sufficiently fluent or because she was being deliberately enigmatic. In any event, I knew that Nga would not leave my hotel room without me.
On the way to the subway station, I popped my head into a grocery store, but the only turkeys they sold were sliced like ham. Nga could sense my distraction and pulled me back outside by the arm. We took the number 6 train south, towards Lower Manhattan.
“Vancouver is such a beautiful city,” said Nga. “I miss Burns Bog very much.” I had mentioned to Nga when we first met that I was from Vancouver, and she wouldn’t let me forget this fact. Nga told me that on her way from Vietnam to New Jersey, she had arranged to stay with a friend in Vancouver for a few days.
“I can’t believe you know anything about Burns Bog,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t you believe me?”
“Visitors aren’t allowed in the area, for one thing. It’s a protected ecosystem. Besides, it’s not even in Vancouver, it’s all the way out in Delta.” I had been to Burns Bog once in high school, sneaking past the No Trespass signs with a friend. I don’t remember very much about it, other than that the flat landscape with its reeds, ponds, and cranes was very different from the mountains and evergreen forests that surrounded most of Vancouver. I remember walking on what seemed like a carpet of moss. The ground was dry, but the moss undulated and rippled with every step I took, as if I were walking on a waterbed.
“My friend lives in Delta,” said Nga. “I told her I wanted to visit a park, and that’s where s
he took me. I miss Vancouver very much.”
“Delta is not Vancouver,” I said, sounding unconvincing even to myself.
When the Towers fell, all of Lower Manhattan was barricaded, at first all the way up to Union Square. Gradually the barricades moved south as the streets were opened again, down to Canal, then to Houston Street, then beyond. Although trains ran all the way down south to Bowling Green, I still felt uneasy heading in that direction. My pulse quickened when we hit Union Square. I had not been this far south since that day. Luckily, Nga motioned to get out at the next stop, Astor Place. We walked up back into daylight and towards the cavern of Broadway. Almost a month after the event, the air down here was still dustier than in Midtown. The sunlight, when mixed with the dust, grew a darker shade of orange.
“This way,” said Nga, touching my elbow. “Across the street.” She took me to a set of stairs that drifted down from the sidewalk to a basement door. She rang the doorbell. An old lady opened it and smiled with polished black teeth when she saw Nga. The old lady was Vietnamese as well.
Inside was an art gallery. “They sell only Vietnamese works here,” said Nga. “By appointment only.”
I had never been to Vietnam, or a place like this. I had expected to feel claustrophobic in a room with low ceilings, but the basement was combined with the ground-level floor to form one loft space, magnifying its airiness. On the walls were paintings of mothers in silk dresses, or of the countryside, or of the imperial palaces of Hue, or the merchant shops of Hoi An. There were pastels, and watercolours, and oils. There was nothing about war, not a hint.
“This is me,” said Nga. She took me by the elbow to a display in the corner.
“What are they made of?”