The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  Nga’s husband banged on the door in the manner that he had at my hotel room. No one came. He twisted the doorknob and it opened.

  We walked into the broad gallery space. There, in the centre of the space, was Nga. She had a brush in her hand, hunched over a lacquer painting. She looked at me, then her husband.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in Vietnamese. “I had to finish this. I felt inspired.”

  I walked up to the painting. “There goes your affidavit,” I said. The landscape looked familiar. “What is it?”

  “Burns Bog,” said Nga. “As I remember it.”

  “We should leave them alone,” said Haejin.

  “Not until I know whether I still have a client.”

  “Let’s go outside at least,” said Haejin.

  Haejin and I stood on the sidewalk like sentries while Nga and her husband talked inside. It was sunrise. The city began to swell with people and cars. Haejin went across the street to get us coffees.

  We must have been there for over an hour when Nga opened the door of the gallery. “You should go home,” she said.

  “Are we still making the affidavit?” I said.

  She didn’t answer, just looked sad and contrite. “You must be so tired,” she said. “We’ll speak soon.” She closed the door.

  Back on the street, I said to Haejin, “We still don’t have a turkey.” Our friends would be gathering at the apartment in Brooklyn in the early afternoon. “We might as well go home and get a couple of hours of sleep.”

  “We’ve made it this far,” said Haejin. “Why don’t we just keep going?”

  Haejin and I walked south, past the site where the Towers had stood, beyond the lingering mourners at St. Paul’s Chapel, and over the Brooklyn Bridge, holding hands. We took the whole morning. We didn’t bother looking for a turkey. We arrived at the apartment surrounded by our friends, all of whom had moved here from all over our country. They had everything ready for me and Haejin laid out on the kitchen table — the stuffing for the turkey made out of apples and maple syrup in a big red bowl, the cranberry sauce still in tins. Haejin covered her eyes when she saw the baster lying expectantly next to the empty roasting pan lined with foil. I wanted to cover my eyes as well, but it was up to me to speak the simple truth: “We couldn’t find a turkey. We didn’t bring anything.”

  Haejin and I couldn’t face each other for the rest of the meal. Our friends, though, were understanding. We rifled through takeout menus. We gorged on stuffing as if we were the turkey. One of us broke a box of Smarties open into a glass bowl, then broke open another. Haejin and I were separated, lost to each other among our friends and in their warm embraces. We almost forgot what we had escaped, what had escaped us.

  Toad Poem

  Diem knew that one day he would return to Hoi An to write his toad poem — to memorialize his parents in verse so great as to rouse the heavens from indifference. Forty-five years ago, he had fled Vietnam at the age of nineteen by merchant ship, making it to the Philippines, then Vancouver. There he had stayed put all these years, until the day he emptied his meagre life savings from a CIBC account and boarded an Asiana flight to Da Nang, connecting through Seoul. He bought a suit for the trip. The young officers at the airport in Da Nang leered at his shiny grey suit, his canary-yellow tie, and his Canadian passport and visa, and asked him in English if he was travelling alone. When Diem answered in Vietnamese that he was indeed alone, they asked him (stubbornly administering their broken English) for his “purpose.” “Simply pleasure,” Diem said in Vietnamese, and the officers checked his visa again, then for a third time, and finally let him through.

  Diem had intended to take a bus to Hoi An, but a skinny young man wearing a baseball cap snatched his suitcase the moment he put it down, smiling at Diem then walking away. If Diem had been younger, he would have run the man down and cracked his spine with his fist. But as it was, he could only follow limply. It was too early in this trip to start crying for the help of strangers. Although the man kept up a brisk pace, he had no intention of outrunning Diem, and Diem followed him through sliding glass doors out into the warm, damp night air that felt suddenly so familiar. The man stopped at a green taxicab with an open trunk.

  “Da Nang?” asked the man.

  Diem shook his head.

  “Cheaper than a bus,” said the man in English, placing the luggage into the trunk.

  “Hoi An,” said Diem, and got into the back seat.

  The man tried to ply Diem with conversation in broken English, and when Diem did not answer, the man switched to broken Mandarin. Diem replied in the languid central Vietnamese accent, and the cab driver turned to face Diem with one hand still gripping the steering wheel while the other hovered over the horn. He did not ask where Diem had come from, only asked if he wanted a driver for the next day.

  “I’ll take you to all the sights,” said the driver in Vietnamese. “The ruins of My Son, the ruins of My Lai. Even Hue, if you have the time. Cheap.”

  “No, thank you,” said Diem. “I’m not a tourist.”

  The man dropped him off at the five-star hotel that Diem had booked across the river from Hoi An’s Old Town.

  By ten the next morning, Diem was wearing the same suit and tie and strolling the Old Town, feeling as if he had fallen back to earth after a lifetime away. To Diem’s surprise, he was perspiring. The locals were unperturbed in long sleeves, some even wore jackets, and here he was like the many tourists — red-faced like the Koreans or Australians fanning themselves with open copies of their Rough Guides.

  He walked the north-south streets of the Old Town where American sailors on break from the local patrol boat base once walked arm in arm, haphazardly bartering. Back then, Hoi An was not a UNESCO World Heritage Site and he did not have to buy a ticket to enter the Old Town. Here were the merchant houses that he had taken refuge in while hiding from a war that was happening everywhere, it seemed, except here. Somehow, by some guiding hand, Hoi An was spared despite being in the centre of the country, close to the DMZ. These houses were elegant mutts of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and even French architecture, built in the centuries before the Thu Bon River silted up and turned this trading post of a city into a museum piece, preserved in the amber sunlight. Some of the houses had wide facades with colonial balconies, but also dragon-scale rooftops made from yin-yang tiles. The Japanese elements were in the triple beams descending from the ceilings and, to Diem, in the houses’ nighttime air of secrecy, when the facades were enclosed by black wooden shutters slotted one on top of another.

  What, then, was truly Vietnamese about any of this? The answer lay in the mornings, when the shutters were lifted off and each house became an open storefront with limpid bartering or gossip beneath its awning — in the way that private lives were open to street view. It was in the tropical moss, glistening green along the walls that were painted to shine like yellow sandstone in the afternoons. It was in the incense that was lit in the early evening by the shopkeepers to venerate the ancestors, before the shopkeepers boarded up the front again. At least this was how he remembered it.

  When Diem was a young man, the merchant houses were dilapidated, the roofs sagging, the shutters of the facades cracked, coal-scorched, and ancient. Now the roofs had been restored and the shutters painted with this lacquered sheen, as if honey had been poured over them. The stores were now chic boutiques, no longer doubling as homes or echoing with bartering. Even the tendrils of moss along the walls seemed finely articulated.

  He had rehearsed many times over what he would do if someone called out to him as he walked down Nguyen Thai Hoc Street as he was doing now. The merchant who gave him refuge, for instance, or the shopkeepers he met that spring. How he would explain himself. No, he would say, he did not come back with a wife and descendants, and yet his life had been successful nonetheless. But after an hour of walking, he met no one he recognized. Diem was sure that Mr. Fang, the old merchant, was long departed. The tourists who towered above him dodged him a
s if he were a post in the dirt. To the young locals he was a pane of glass. Maybe the locals were instructed to ignore his ilk. None of them asked where he had come from or what he had been up to all these years. Their chatter, either eye to eye or into a phone, was painfully clear and bright to Diem, so full of their own concerns and the life of this alien place.

  He found a fancy-looking restaurant with little palm trees set in planters, and retreated to its rear patio — to get away from the people on the street as much as anything. The patio was mostly empty, except for a waitress clearing the dirty plates and glasses that remained on the tables.

  The waitress smiled when she saw him, but said in English that they would not be open for another hour.

  “That’s fine, I’ll wait,” he answered in Vietnamese. “Let an old man rest here awhile.” He realized that she was likely clearing dishes from a banquet the night before.

  She seemed surprised that he spoke Vietnamese, and showed him a table. “Would you like some water?” she said.

  “How about a beer fresh?” he said, and the waitress complied, then started clearing the table next to him. She would be his daughter’s age, if he had one. In fact the waitress was dressed exactly like so many young women back in Vancouver would be right now, on a drizzly mid-spring day — in trousers and a light cashmere sweater that was rolled up to her elbows. Yes, just like his daughter, he thought. Except for the blue-green tattoo of raindrops in a strange pattern that this waitress sported on her wrist. He would never allow his daughter to have a tattoo.

  He asked the waitress for a napkin. She got him one and just smiled as though he were from China, then returned to clearing and resetting tables. It awed him to see her move so swiftly from under one umbrella to another, without breaking a sweat in the sweltering heat.

  He tore the napkin in half, used one half to wipe his face and the other to write on. He needed to figure out how long he could live in Vietnam with the traveller’s cheques he had stowed in his room’s safe.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he said to the waitress, then pulled on the back of her sweater, because she did not seem to hear him. She turned around with a stack of dishes in her arms, tried to re-affix her smile for him, although now it was lopsided.

  “Do you know where I can find the exchange rates?” he asked.

  “Are you asking about the wifi?” she said. “Yes, we certainly have wifi.”

  “No,” he said. “Where is the bank? They’ll have the exchange rates there.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “What are you exchanging?”

  “Dollars for dong,” he said. “Canadian dollars.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” said the waitress. “It’s one Canadian dollar to 19,300 dong. Give or take.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We have many customers from Canada,” said the waitress.

  He wrote down these mind-boggling numbers on his napkin. Earlier in the morning he had stopped by the covered market to look at the price of food and clothing. Now he regarded his half-drunk beer fresh, which cost fifty cents. He made a few educated guesses about the price of a room, if not in the Old Town then perhaps in the surrounding villages, somewhere the tourists never went, where the locals lived on less than three thousand dollars a year. He looked over the results of his initial calculations, and tore up his napkin.

  He started his calculations over. He would not have long even if he stayed in a thatched hut with a pounded mud floor, a few months at most. So why bother scrimping? He had scrimped his whole life and had little more than a bag of bones to show for it. At fifty dollars a night he might as well extend his hotel reservation. Why prolong his poverty when he could spend a much shorter time in luxury?

  “Miss, come here,” he said.

  “I’ll be right over after I clean up this table.”

  “Has this country changed so much?” he said to her. “Is it no longer rude to ignore your elders?”

  The waitress came over, carrying a pile of dishes in her arms. “Yes, how can I help you, sir?”

  “Another napkin, please,” he said. Then he took out a bill from his wallet — from the large wad of American bills that he had saved for street beggars — and handed it to her. “For your time,” he said.

  The waitress took the bill and nodded solemnly. “Are you working on more exchange rates?” said the waitress. “I can tell you the conversion for American dollars to dong, if you’d like.”

  “I’ve had enough of numbers,” he said. Now he wanted to start on his toad poem. “Miss, do you know the old story, about the toad poem?” he said. She was about to turn away, so he took another bill from his wallet and gave it to her.

  “No, it’s not something we learned in school,” she said, pocketing the bill.

  “Are you serious? Your parents never told you?”

  “I lost my parents when I was very young.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. That must explain the tattoo on your wrist. You didn’t have parents to teach you the proper ways.”

  The waitress looked at the pattern on her wrist. “No, it’s just beautiful,” she said.

  “The last time I was in this country, only gangsters and criminals wore tattoos. Never mind girls. Never mind respectable girls!”

  She squinted at him the way certain women did back in Vancouver on the bus, when they found him peeking over their shoulders to see what they were reading. Perhaps it was just the sun. “And what about your parents?” she asked.

  Diem choked on the mention of his parents, and had to take a sip of his beer fresh.

  “Oh, my father was the richest man in our village,” said Diem, though his answer didn’t seem complete. “He owned the village’s only machine-operated rice mill. He was friends with all the Chinese merchants in Da Nang and Hoi An.” Diem would in fact come to owe his life to one of his father’s merchant connections. “But my father liked to think of himself as a man of the people.”

  “I know quite a few men like that,” said the waitress. “They are all members of the Party.”

  Diem spat on the ground. “Do not mention my father in the same breath as those people,” he said.

  “Dear heavens,” said the waitress, looking at the spittle on the ground. “I didn’t know people still did that.”

  Diem bent down to wipe the spittle, and when he got up, he gave her another bill.

  “And my mother,” said Diem, struggling for the right words. “She was from Hue, at least before she moved to my father’s village,” he continued. “So she ran our home like it was the imperial court.” He hemmed and hawed for more words.

  “You mentioned the toad poem?” said the waitress.

  “Oh, yes,” said Diem, grateful to her for returning to his subject. “A toad poem is from the old folk tale about four idiot poets getting drunk at a tavern.”

  “I should have known,” said the waitress.

  “One of them saw our proverbial toad by a stand of trees and was inspired to belch out the following verse: ‘What a small toad, just resting in the shadows.’”

  “How fascinating,” said the waitress, though she had turned her back to Diem now, and resumed cleaning up the table beside him.

  “There’s more to it,” said Diem. When the waitress turned around, he gave her another bill. “Seeing the toad stir, the next poet said: ‘What a small toad, now hopping out of the shadows.’ When the toad came to rest, the third idiot contributed: ‘There it goes now, out into the open, and now once again it is resting.’ The fourth poet, watching the toad, finished the poem: ‘There it stays now, not a single shiver. And now there it goes again, hopping away!’”

  “Of course, course,” said the waitress. “Would you like more beer fresh?”

  “No, you don’t see,” said Diem. “The story isn’t finished yet.” He gave her another bill before she could walk away. “In fact, the puzzle is with what happens next: After reciting the poem, the idiots became quite sombre. They feared, you see, that they had angered the he
avens with a creation of such audacious beauty that they would be struck dead. And so they ordered four coffins, placing the order through the tavern keeper. The punchline doesn’t matter — the tavern keeper asked what the fuss was all about, and then the poets recited the complete poem. After, the tavern keeper ordered five coffins — the poem was in fact so awful that the tavern keeper feared he too would die from having the idiots repeat it!”

  “Bravo,” said the waitress, though she wasn’t clapping. “Would you like to see our lunch menu? It won’t be long now before we open.”

  “The intended humour of the ending has always eluded me,” said Diem. Diem had heard the story as a child, and even now its meaning lay just beyond his grasp. He didn’t understand what sort of god begrudged a man’s creative impulse. He was brought up Catholic and both his parents believed that all beauty was an expression of God’s grace. (His parents were the rare birds in their village because they did not regularly light incense or make offerings at the ancestral altar, preferring instead to recite rosaries before the shrine to the Blessed Virgin and the Infant Jesus of Prague.) Most of the villagers Diem grew up with were Buddhists, though Diem suspected that the algebra of karma would not come down so hard on toad poets. And neither would retribution be warranted under Confucianism. Perhaps the tale had some Taoist origin, but he was not familiar enough with the pantheon of Taoist deities to know if any of them could be moved in such a way by a toad poem.

  He reached for his pen, thought better of it, put it back down. “Yes, I’ll have a menu,” he said.

  The waitress came back with something that didn’t look like a menu at all; it was leather-bound with black tassels, and looked as though it belonged at the entrance to a wedding reception.

  “For an orphan, you’re doing quite well for yourself,” he said. “But you can do better.” He held out another bill, but this time she only looked at it, then at him, squinting again. Finally she took the bill.

  “Did your government train you to bite your tongue before taking money from foreigners?” he asked. He truly wanted to know. “It must be a useful skill, dealing with so many belligerent tourists.”