The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  “You don’t understand,” he said. He wiped the spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Of course the Communists would come after the biggest house in the village. They chose their fate. There was nothing for me to do.” The buttons of his shirt were undone and his shirt was drunkenly untucked.

  “You could have stayed with them.”

  “To do what? To simply tend to their graves, if I didn’t also end up beside them? And then what? I had no wife, no children.”

  “Your parents’ souls are your children,” she said. “Their eternal happiness is in your hands.”

  He nodded, tucked in his shirt, buttoned his sleeves. “I’ve always kept an altar for them.”

  She wiped the edge of her lip with a bolt of silk. “You’ll have your suit by the end of the day.”

  “Can I see where you make them?”

  “Still curious,” she said, then bit her lip. “Okay.”

  She led him through the familiar arcs of shadow and light towards a humming in the back. She opened a thin plywood door, behind which was a large room where rows of girls in pink hairnets were working with sewing machines. Large electric fans kept generators from overheating under fluorescent lights speckled with dead flies. Fresh flowers in a tin can reached for a small window.

  “Nothing has changed,” he said.

  “You’ve been here before?” she asked.

  Was she still playing? He stayed silent.

  “What’s really changed is the cost of electricity,” she said. “It’s valuable as gold. I heard they are building big dams in Cambodia. Maybe we’ll get some of it.”

  “Cambodian electricity,” he said. “Just what this house needs.”

  She closed the plywood door and muted the sewing machines to a dim hum as they returned to the store. “Where are you staying?” she said. “We can deliver to your hotel.” She gave him her card.

  He read the card out loud. “Madame Nguyen,” he said.

  “I’m married now,” she whispered, then disappeared. He felt lifted by this confession.

  Back out on the streets, he found Duc lying among the fancy hammocks.

  “I need a driver.”

  “Cheap, cheap,” Duc tweeted, saluting. They walked together out of the Old Town, stopping by the Japanese covered bridge. To his relief, it was the same old bridge, with its worn tiled roof and brittle wood picket railing, except now he needed a ticket to enter its little shrine.

  They found Duc’s cab and headed for his parents’ village. Diem dreaded what he would find in place of the grand old house, but there was no turning back.

  Diem’s father liked to call himself a farmer, although he had a courtier’s hands — soft, long, and slender. He was the largest landholder in their village, owning fourteen hectares of paddies, and the only one who could afford enough fertilizer to cultivate more fragrant, premium varieties of rice. It was other villagers who bent over to harvest it; his father’s tan was from tennis. Diem remembered banquets during the Tet holiday, how his father would end up inviting every single peasant from the village to share in the slaughtered pig, and how his father’s dark complexion matched everyone else’s, all of them pinkened from rice wine.

  Diem’s mother was a beautiful but prickly mandarin’s daughter from the royal capital of Hue. She liked wearing silk ao dai dresses with her hair in a lotus chignon, as if she were attending court, and she never failed to let his father know how much she had sacrificed to be with him. She gave up proximity to family, other Catholics, and all the delicacies of Hue, such as its spicy beef noodles or its royal cuisine garnished with carved mythical creatures. Its solid, weatherproof churches. The way she talked about Hue, it was as if Jesus had been born there. And yet, it seemed to Diem, she was ultimately glad about her sacrifices, glad to walk barefoot in the wet paddy in the early evenings after the workers left, just the three of them, as if they were at a beach resort, for the pleasure of the mud around their ankles, for the feel of coolness in those humid evenings.

  Diem had carried in him for years some unwritten lines about them, like so many pebbles hidden on the floor of his mouth beneath the tongue. All this time he had thought about how easy it would be to write it. Their beautiful, short lives would give ready-made form and momentum to the poem. All he had to do was spit it out.

  But now, as the ancient town disappeared behind the cab in a trail of ochre dust, Diem knew that all those errant verses would never cohere into a poem, that the words would die in this pungent air. In the end all he could write down would be the most simple facts of his parents’ lives, and that the moments they all shared together were just too brief. They breathed and loved him and each other, he left them, and soon after they were no more.

  The Forbidden Purple City

  I do not have any appetite for the sentimental music of a bygone era, and so I was leery of picking up the two musicians from the airport. Their youth ran counter to their reputedly stoic commitment to vong co, that form of tonal melancholy developed by a Mekong Delta composer almost a hundred years ago. The idea of these dove-cheeked throwbacks frankly smacked of disingenuousness, exploiting our audience’s emotional blind spots with old formulas. Tiet Linh booked this husband-and-wife duo for our New Year’s concert here in Vancouver, though she was in no state to tend to the details of transportation. She left that to me.

  In addition to their luggage, the man carried two hard, black instrument cases, one for him — I thought — and one for her. The couple looked like slick moderns, in their late twenties or early thirties, bleary-eyed from their flight but well dressed and coiffed. Both were overcompensating with wool jackets, knitted caps, scarves, and leather gloves. In fact it rarely ever snows here in Vancouver, though when I led the couple outside into the drizzle they both hugged themselves as if they had underdressed. I admit I was touched by this gesture, perhaps more so than I ever could be by their music. I have lived in Vancouver for over thirty years now, and had forgotten just how cold those first winters were for me. I hurried them into my taxicab, the meter turned off because this was a personal errand.

  In my cab we discussed our common connection with Tiet Linh. I didn’t ask them about what life was like back in the old country, not even the customary questions about the weather, for though I have not returned in over thirty years, I have gained a sufficient sense of contemporary Vietnam through the internet. Perhaps they took my silence on that matter as an aversion to conversation in general, because for the rest of the ride they kept their chatter to themselves.

  “I hope they’ll be okay. The air here is very dry,” said the man (though, as I have said, it was drizzling).

  “You worry about them, and not my throat?” said the woman.

  “You can take care of yourself. They can’t.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought her. You never listen.”

  “She’s safer with me, even here.”

  “I wish I felt the same way.”

  “Don’t talk silly.”

  None of this talk made sense to me at the time, but later I found out that the man was speaking about his dan bau, the single-stringed instrument that he kept in one of the cases. The other instrument was an electric moon lute. I know something of the dan bau: that when played by a master, the monochrome has the resonance of a woman’s vocal cords.

  “I will not sing if you play her.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll stay in the case.”

  The woman seemed to be comforted by his words, but the peace only lasted for a moment before they started arguing about some point of music theory that I could not grasp. She complained about how he always tried to lose her by playing in day kep, the key of the man. He made some fresh retort, and I heard a scratching of plastic that made me worried she was going to fling open the door, but then he said something else that seemed to soothe her.

  Perhaps it was disrespectful for them to speak so openly about themselves in the company of an old man, but I didn’t mind their self-absor
ption. Such was their licence as artists, and yes, I also took comfort in listening to the ebbs and flows of a young couple’s intimate dispute, as one sometimes does in a sad memory.

  I drove them to Tiet Linh’s house. The lights of her East Vancouver duplex were off. I was so relieved when her daughter answered the door, but began to worry again when she said that Tiet Linh had retired early. Tiet Linh had become increasingly removed from our affairs ever since Anh Binh, her husband, passed away six months ago.

  “Would you like me to leave her a message?” said the daughter.

  “Yes, that her guests are here.”

  “Guests?”

  “The musicians that your mother arranged for. All the way from Vietnam. They are staying here, no?”

  “Oh, dear,” said the daughter, thinking with Anh Binh’s darting eyebrows — so much her father’s daughter. “Bac Gia, leave the two with me.”

  I miss Anh Binh dearly for all he did for me over the years, but despite my mourning I am still living up to my responsibilities to ensure the success of the New Year’s celebrations. Am I selfish for wishing that Tiet Linh would do the same?

  Tiet Linh and I work together as concert promoters, though each of us would deny being “partners” in any sense of that word. We do not share the profits from our mutual labours (there aren’t any), though Tiet Linh often jokes that we share the liabilities of each other’s company. That does not a “partnership” make, I say.

  We’ve had our disagreements over the years as to the musicians we wanted to promote, and not only because of our own aesthetic preferences, but because such choices would bear on the composition of our audience — the very community we sought to create on these errant weekend nights. In the late 1980s we filled the stage of a community centre on Victoria Drive with old-fashioned cai luong singers — they were in easy supply, as I recall, all those keening singers in high-necked silk ao dai dresses — and were thusly rewarded with a lukewarm assemblage of the curious, idle elderly. In the early 1990s I took the initiative of promoting New Wave acts, and we were able to fill the gyms of various East Vancouver elementary schools with Vietnamese covers of Krisma. Tiet Linh, however, thought we had gone too far with attracting a certain segment of the floppy-haired youth with their Glow Sticks and marijuana cigarillos, driving everyone else out into the moonlight. After much tussling back and forth between us, we have settled on a variety show format (perhaps reminiscent of the Paris by Night series) featuring a revolving tray of singers, but always with the Aquamarines as the backup band, these former South Vietnamese soldiers in hepcat berets and fedoras. This has worked well: you can now find all the generations at one of our concerts.

  Whenever Anh Binh saw us arguing, he would smile with the masked equanimity of a dentist (he was, in fact, a dentist) and shake his head. Arguments over whether, for instance, the reds and yellows of the old South Vietnamese flag should always appear somewhere on the grandstand. Or whether, as master of ceremonies, I should stop wearing the same brown suit and bespoke tie (I believed my trademark attire was important for brand recognition, while Tiet Linh thought it begged more the mood of Sunday church). Although Anh Binh often played the mediator, to him our fights were at once absurdly quotidian and impracticably philosophical.

  I knew that Anh Binh was dying when Tiet Linh and I stopped arguing — when she started nodding at whatever I said, looking for ghosts.

  We were all young together in Hue, the old imperial capital in central Vietnam. All four of us had known each other in somewhat more innocent times, before that awful year of 1968 when Hue was held captive by the Communists for a month (how awful we thought that month was, but how little did we know what was ahead). I was living with my wife in my family’s home, and Tiet Linh was living with Anh Binh in his. We were all in the same neighbourhood near the university, just south of the Perfume River, where Tiet Linh and I studied literature and art history respectively, and Anh Binh was studying to be a dentist.

  My wife, meanwhile, was already making a living as a nurse and bone-setter (a trade passed on by her father to his only child). My wife’s name was Ngoc, meaning “gem,” and her mind was as sharp as one; she was a practical gem, a diamond not an emerald — not only beautiful but able to drill.

  The Communists came during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. The noise that in my memories could be heard above the firecrackers was the teeth of the old women chatter-chiming from door to door of our neighbourhood, like electricity running down a live wire, for it was the old women who felt the advance of the Viet Cong deep inside them — all those angry sons coming home to roost upon their mothers’ ringing bones. The Communists were looking for people like Tiet Linh and me, the intellectuals and the Catholics. We escaped through the back while the soldiers knocked on our front doors.

  We scrambled on foot down dusty roads with a flood of humanity that was equal parts panic and resignation, as the Communists took over the Citadel north of the Perfume River, and the south bank. The Communists had planted their flag high behind the stone walls of the Ngo Mon gate, and we made sure our backs were to it. We made it out of the city to a farmhouse in Anh Binh’s ancestral village, all four of us crowding in with Anh Binh’s aunts, uncles, grandparents, and assorted nephews and cousins.

  During the month that it took the Americans and the South Vietnamese to retake Hue, both Anh Binh and Ngoc worked in the village hospital, where they tended to the civilian casualties that overflowed the hospital beds. Anh Binh even conducted rudimentary surgeries. A doctor was a doctor even if he was a dentist. It was no time for fine discernments.

  Meanwhile Tiet Linh and I hid on the farm. During our first days we helped with the rice planting, though neither of us were trained to work on our haunches in the flooded paddies, and we both took turns falling headfirst into the mud, imprinting our bodies on the crushed stalks of newly transplanted seedlings. Mostly we read while waiting like children for our spouses to return from work. While we argued the finer points of Sartre or whether the French treated the Vietnamese worse than the Vietnamese treated its Cham minority, our spouses cut into bone and swept away entrails. They always came home late and too tired to talk, often with traces of blood on their clothes. How could two such soft-spoken and practical people be married to the likes of Tiet Linh and me? Anh Binh would retire with his wife to the main house, while Ngoc and I slept on the packed-dirt floor of the kitchen, where Ngoc would stare at the thatched roof in darkened amazement. She was a city girl and wondered where the chimney was for the cool metal stove that we rested our feet against.

  “It’s a thatched roof,” I said. “The smoke rises right through it.”

  Even after what she must have seen each day at the hospital, Ngoc still had the energy to look at me wide-eyed with disbelief, but she did not argue. This discussion of porousness made me think of the Communist invasion, and I talked of how the Communists weren’t bringing us a revolution but, like the French, were just trying to “civilize” us in their own terrifying ways. Ngoc replied with a purr of breath. She had left me for her dreamland and soon I fell asleep as well. Amazing how still those nights were, with that many people under one roof, the only noise the soft burps of distant shelling.

  When we returned to Hue after the month-long siege, my home was one of the few in the neighbourhood still standing. Bicycles wobbled over tank tracks. Before entering the house, we paid our respects to the Spirit of the Soil as if we were building a new house. Everything inside the house was destroyed. Books and photos were ripped down the middle of the paper, as if by a petulant child. The wires of anything electric were torn out of their bellies. By these signs the Communists were telling us what they would have done if they had laid their hands on us. I followed Ngoc into our bedroom as if we were newlyweds — carefully following the tradition of not letting the bride step on the groom’s shadow. It was only much later that we realized the extent of the civilian massacre during the occupation, that the hastily turned soil of the bare fields in Hue hid mass
graves.

  We were only days away from the New Year’s concert and I was left to do everything. Tiet Linh and I used to have a clear division of labour: I was in charge of the venue and she took care of the musicians. I booked the high school gym or the community hall, rented the sound and strobe machines, called up Ba Kim for the banh mi sandwich catering, made sure enough glossy New Year’s tickets were printed. Tiet Linh made sure that the musicians were happy. I preferred my job.

  Now that they could not reach Tiet Linh, the artists started calling my cellphone at all hours of the day. One diva called me while I was on shift in my cab demanding to know why she was in the lineup right after another diva who sings in the same tea-gargling style. How should I know? Then there was Ong Chinh, the civil engineer-cum-balladeer who called me while I was at peace eating my bowl of bun bo Hue to remind me to bring some marbles, with which he plugs his ears so that he can better concentrate on stage. Why doesn’t he just supply his own marbles? I tried to keep my composure, but then Johnny Nguyen called, his act our sole remaining homage to the New Wave. We have kept him on retainer though he has gone bald and continually defies our ban on Styrofoam cups.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Just saying chao, Bac Gia. How’s it going?”

  “How would I know? I’m on the stool.”

  “That’s cool.”

  Tiet Linh oi, wherever you are, you must come out of your hiding.

  All that Hue is for me now is the Forbidden Purple City, which lay in the very centre of the imperial fortresses of the Citadel. The Citadel itself is a massive walled city surrounded by a moat, and within it are the Palace of Supreme Harmony and other palaces and temples, the Halls of the Mandarins, the imperial pleasure gardens. Commoners may have walked among such grandeur during the reign of the emperors and even after the American War, though much of it was by then in ruins. The Forbidden Purple City, however, was the emperor’s personal residence, accessible only to his family and eunuchs. It was levelled in 1947, years before the first American soldiers set foot in the country. I have only ever seen photographs of the Forbidden Purple City — a single series of photographs, actually. And yet it is my most vivid image of Hue, the one that pushes out all my other memories.