The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  “I used to always cry when I heard that story,” said My Linh.

  You said you didn’t get it.

  “Mayflies only live for a day,” she said, but you still didn’t get it. Then you asked My Linh straight-up, what had she brought you here for?

  “You want to be a Face, don’t you?” she said.

  You said you didn’t get it, and anyway that was for Brother Number 1 to decide.

  She looked like you had just thrown water in her face. “You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re my inheritance. All of you are.”

  You got up.

  “You leave when I say so,” said My Linh.

  Sang made a kissing sound behind you as you busted out the front door. With no ride, you took the bus home.

  A few nights later, the Moustache and Sang knocked on the window outside your bedroom, woke you up, and pulled you out for a grow-rip. “Just like old times,” said the Moustache. You said that they weren’t qualified to be ripping grows. “Then show us the way,” said the Moustache. It was straight-up an order from HQ.

  They still rolled in a beat-up old car. During the day you wouldn’t have noticed the wheezing muffler, but now at night the car made a mess of a noise. Still, the giddy flash of their yellow teeth in the shadows was contagious, and being with them took you back to old times — to the candy store beside your old school, to the cracked asphalt courts.

  Your destination was a crack shack on East 22nd with a pit bull sign and no lights. Your homies didn’t have any tech with them, no night-vision goggles, no gun and silencer, just a crowbar to scratch open the back door. With a single twist from Sang the door yielded like butter. “We have already cased this joint out,” said the Moustache.

  Inside there were no traps or alarms that tripped off. Just darkness, and then Sang’s flashlight beam on pot after pot of second-rate bud. “Too easy,” said Sang, as he cut the stalks with a machete and stuffed them in a canvas bag.

  The Moustache tossed you a canvas bag and told you that the next door had more plants. Too easy was your thought too. You went into the room by yourself and the homies closed the door behind you. You flicked a switch and there were the shivering tendrils of weed begging for you to take them. It looked like a little boy’s bedroom, with silverfish scurrying on the floor over a balsa wood airplane and a bunch of deflated balls. You forgot about the plants when you saw the posters on the wall. The greatest ballers of the day were staring right at you: Michael Jordan, Isaiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins.

  And that’s when you heard the popping of the Moustache’s muffler in the distance, and then a fainter but rising bark of a dog. You tried to open the bedroom door, but it was locked from the other side. You kicked the door but it would not yield. You turned off the lights and saw the glimmer of bodies out in the yard, throwing up shadows through the shut blinds. All you could think of was the lavender smell of your mother’s bookmarks and the clean smell of static whenever your father was close. Now you heard the shuffling of steel-toed boots in the next room, the bark of the dog. How could they abandon you? You weren’t just a baller, you were the MVP. You despaired that in the faces of the strangers who were coming for you, that you would not see your homies in them, but rather something more like your own.

  The Abalone Diver

  Winter is the best time to harvest mandarin oranges on Jeju Island, and Thuy cannot escape the smell of them. She works alongside her husband, plucks the small fruit with her bare hands, brushing off snow, the oranges half-buried in white. It is so cold that the green leaves tremble. She stubbornly refuses to wear gloves despite Jun’s suggestions. Her hands turn a red so deep that when, working in haste, her palm gets pricked by the shears, the blood is just a darker shade of her skin. Drops of it speckle the snow. The whole collage — all the colours obscenely vivid in their contrast — reminds her of the red, white, green, and orange ice desserts she had in Vietnam, although then it was the orange of mango.

  The skies are a whitish blue, cloudless, but the air is so cold that the sun seems unreal, merely a painting over the horizon line of the East China Sea. By day’s end there are still so many oranges left on the trees that they multiply the sunset through the leaves. They are working too slowly, and will need more pickers than the two farmhands they have now. When it is dark, husband and wife retreat inside their home, heat rising from the floorboards as if from the centre of the earth. She washes the crusted blood off her hands so as to tend to dinner. Jun must be tired — he does not help her as he usually insists on doing. She steams his favourite type of rice, a rustic purple as if bruises have been mixed in. Dried fish, kimchi, and seaweed on the side. When dinner is over, Jun settles into the couch with the television on, but not her favourite soap opera, the one that she sometimes holds responsible for taking her to this country. So she puts on her winter jacket and a broad-rimmed hat, slips out the back door for a walk. She never wore clothes so heavy back in Vietnam. Jun does not say a thing when she leaves. He is not that type of husband.

  She walks down to the sea. The smell of oranges is still present, as if embedded inside her nostrils. The sea is never very far away no matter where she is on this island. She heads to the cove that belongs to the haenyeo, the old mermaids. She steps off a path worn down by tourists and clambers down jagged rock beaten over by the waves. It is a volcanic rock that glints more brightly with reflected moonlight than during the day, when its blackness sucks up all the sun.

  Right now there is not another soul in the cove. The air is heavy with a salt that stabs Thuy’s lungs, and then the sound of pounding waves wipes away all other sensation. She comes down to a flat landing by a small pool of standing water, protected on the far side by a sheer slab of rock that takes the brunt of the waves. It is here where she takes off her winter jacket, her hat and shoes, and strips down to her underwear. Her bare skin feels electrified. When Thuy was a child in Vietnam, she swam in the brown streams of her village and in the sparkling South China Sea. She was older, in high school, when she entered an indoor pool for the first time, and the feeling of completely still water clothing her body was a revelation, like touching a sleeping beast in captivity. She became a competitive swimmer in high school, which was not so long ago.

  She jumps in feet first, the sharp teeth of frigid water tearing into her skin. Somehow she manages this thought: the East and South China Sea, though separated by thousands of kilometres, are really one body and therefore this moment is tied to her childhood despite the gaping passage of time. As she is swallowed up by this acid chill, this is both a feat of the imagination, and the truth.

  She is immersed in the sea for only a moment, but when she emerges, she feels whole and new. Only briefly, though, before the greater chill of damp air and dissipated adrenalin settles in. She has also brought a small towel, snuck inside her winter jacket. When she gets back home, her husband is reading a book. She does not read Korean and so has no idea what the book is about. She has the broad-rimmed hat on and Jun does not know of her damp hair beneath. She does not get close enough for him to smell the brine on her.

  “Exploration?” he says, a coarse finger caressing the thin spine, a smile that is still bashful across his broad face though they have been married for almost a year. This is how they communicate mostly, in their mutually cumbersome English, one word at a time. Jun has recently taken to wearing a thin baby-blue scarf around his neck, his indoor scarf.

  “Yes,” she says. “Exploration.”

  In Vietnam, both Thuy and her mother loved watching Korean soap operas. Mostly from pirated DVDs that Thuy bought for a discount from the village market where both she and her mother worked, her mother in a dry goods kiosk and Thuy for whatever monger could fit her school and swimming schedule. Most Korean soaps were mega miniseries consisting of twenty hours of television or so, but Thuy’s absolute favourite was Moonlight Nocturne, which went on for countless hours over several seasons. It featured a lead named Sung who was handsome and slender, with floppy hair that grew ov
er his ears and touched his brows. He was a wealthy orphan who lived in a large mansion by the sea. Somehow, losing his parents at a young age and being left with nothing but his good looks and a vast sum of wealth did not make Sung callous and cold-hearted, but quite the opposite. He was unwittingly charming and funnelled the energy from his pangs of loss into good causes. He was also perhaps too open-hearted to his myriad lady friends, who drove the plot of each episode by conniving against each other for his attentions. He wore colourful scarves that made him seem even more sensitive. The quality of the pirated DVDs varied wildly — at least with regard to the reproduction and the dubbing — but never the quality of the storylines and acting.

  Thuy and her mother would watch these DVDs in their hut just outside the village, beside rice paddies owned by one of her mother’s uncles. They used to live in a larger house on their own farm until the Communist government seized the land for a multiplex development. When that happened, Thuy’s father shot the local cadre member who was in charge of urban planning and then shot himself. Thuy’s parents had always intended to spare their daughter from a life spent on haunches in the rice paddies, but the seizure almost ensured her a life of menial labour of one sort or another. During high school Thuy worked in the kiosks when she wasn’t studying or swimming the butterfly in competitions. Often after school she would go help her mother close the dry goods kiosk for the evening, and both women would sneak glances at the little television set that was mounted high on a wooden shelf, watching one of the Korean DVDs.

  It is a bright Sunday the next time Thuy comes down to the mermaids’ cove. A day of church and rest from the harvest. On past Sundays, Jun has taken Thuy hiking up Mount Halla, or to visit the ancient lava rock huts held together by a clay and barley stalk mortar, or to the pine and rose mazes — the places where honeymooners from all over South Korea go. Now she heads down to the cove by herself. She sees some of the mermaids returning with their catch for the day, letting out sharp whistles as they break the surface of the water. They emerge in smooth black wetsuits that give ageless form to their bodies, some thin, some portly, but all with strong thighs and robust biceps. They take to the small beach like calm seals, with their nets, their bowl-shaped floats and weeding hoes. The youngest of them is in her sixties.

  Instead of clambering down the cliffside rocks, Thuy takes the wooden steps that the tourists use. During the summertime the cove is infested with visitors, but in the winter the mermaids are left unbothered. Thuy walks past rows of plastic red buckets filled with sea cucumbers, the water trembling at the lips of the buckets. The cucumbers within seem like squirming red caterpillars, water-swollen and huge. Winter is their season.

  On this day the waves are not as violent as they were the last night she was here, though the water is almost as dark as the volcanic rock. Thuy skips over a few sharp rocks to the same flat landing by the same calm pool. She takes off her clothes. She is wearing her bathing suit beneath, the shimmering aqua-blue Spandex. Some of the mermaids look up from whatever it is they are doing — removing flippers, untangling nets. Some of them cluck their tongue against the roof of their mouth in disapproval. The tide is lower this time, and when Thuy jumps in feet first, the water reaches only halfway up her thigh, just above her knees. She has to bend her limbs low to get shoulder deep. Before her chin breaks the surface of the water, one of the mermaids pulls her up by the shoulders from behind, as if to save her from drowning. Thuy shakes her head at first, but in the end lets the old woman pull her back onto the flat rock. The mermaid still has her diving mask on, the tempered glass surrounding the woman’s oval face, the rubber hood thick over her ears so that Thuy is not sure if the woman can hear her. She wouldn’t understand the Vietnamese that Thuy is speaking anyway, which is the only true way that Thuy knows how to ask this: to be allowed in the water, to be a mermaid too.

  Thuy met her husband through a matchmaker. Not the traditional kind, those old ladies who dotted the villages and who knew all the local gossip and who the dependable astrologers were. Instead, Thuy and Jun were matched by VietSeoul. The company was based in Seoul, according to its bilingual Korean-Vietnamese website, and was affiliated with a finishing school in Ho Chi Minh City that taught Vietnamese girls how to be good Korean wives. Make sure that the rice is on the left side and the soup on the right side when setting up the table. That sort of thing.

  It was Thuy’s mother who forwarded the VietSeoul link. Now that Thuy was done with high school but could not afford to leave home for university, what was she going to do?

  “You can work with me in the market for the rest of your life,” said her mother. “Or you can find your own Sung.”

  Thuy received the VietSeoul e-newsletter that included testimonials of happy couples and passwords for the next matchmaking sessions in Ho Chi Minh City. When she signed up for one of the sessions, she was emailed the photos and bios of the Korean men who would be attending. Jun’s short bio simply gave his name, listed Jeju Island as his home, Christianity as his religion, and “land development” as his profession. His photo was in colour but was grainy due to a poor scanning job. It was of a man in his early to mid-twenties in naval dress uniform, a stiff white-gloved hand in salute, not quite touching the black brim of his white hat. She showed her mother the photos of Jun and two other bachelors.

  “Handsome,” her mother said, without specifying which one. Thuy thought Jun was handsome enough from his photo, with a square jaw and a soft curl of the lips belying an otherwise severe military expression, although she wanted to see him without his hat to make sure.

  Her mother went with Thuy on the two-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City. The matchmaking session wasn’t until the evening, but her mother insisted on leaving in the morning. She wanted time to buy Thuy a proper evening dress and to visit a hair salon, so that Thuy would have the same highlights in her hair that the soap stars had.

  How uncomfortable Thuy felt in Ho Chi Minh City. And it wasn’t just a matter of being a peasant dodging the choking rivers of motorbikes. The metropolis rang false to her. It seemed that new skyscrapers were sprouting up every day in order to cast the old colonial villas in their shadows, or at least the villas that were not already torn down. And all this progress was made in order to ape other places where bigger lives played out. As with the gaudy glass buildings, it was the same with the imitation pop music and soap operas that they made there. Ho Chi Minh City could kill off old Saigon, but it would never be Seoul.

  In District 7 they bought a cicada-green dress at the Lotte Mart, the Korean shopping chain. Thuy walked out of the mall wearing it while her mother carried her old clothes in a plastic bag. “Overpriced, but maybe you’ll earn it,” said her mother, smiling.

  In the evening, they went together to the nightclub where the meeting would take place. The highball glasses, the strobe lights, the bar stools — television had made such an establishment familiar. On the wall were glowing murals of cats with whiskers made out of some luminous plastic material, thin strands of light protruding out of flat surfaces.

  One of the marriage brokers was standing outside the door to a private room. He was a short, brusque man who wore a name tag with a Vietnamese name but who spoke the language with a broken Korean accent. He gave Thuy her name tag and motioned her mother to wait at the bar.

  “Take as much time as you need,” said Thuy’s mother. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Inside the private room, three bachelors were hunched together on a lounge sofa on one side of a long table, while a dozen women sat pressed against each other on the other side. On the table were plastic bottles of water. Thuy took a quick glance at the women — girls really, around her age, all villagers. Thuy shouldn’t have been surprised; was she expecting big-city girls with university degrees?

  When she saw Jun in profile, she thought it was his father. The salt in his hair glittered in the track lighting and deep grooves were worn into the laugh lines of his face. He wore a black blazer over a black turtleneck,
which made him look even older. All the Korean men would have been her father’s age, if he had still been alive.

  The broker clapped his hands together to get everyone’s attention. “Mingle, please,” he said in Vietnamese, and then spoke for an extended period in Korean to the men. Jun turned to Thuy and presented her with a full smile, all lips, the smile that his military photo only hinted at. Thuy ran out the door.

  Her mother was at the bar nursing a small cup of tea. “Were they being mean to you so soon?” she said. When Thuy explained to her what she had seen, her mother dabbed her daughter’s tears with a napkin. “Don’t act so surprised. A mature man is for the best. Now, stop ruining your mascara.”

  Thuy returned to the private room. The other girls were frozen in place on the couches until one of the men sidled over to talk to them, at which point the girl would come alive, tilt her ear towards the man like a plant to the sun. The men took turns speaking to the girls according to ground rules that weren’t shared with the Vietnamese, hopping from seat to seat like frogs on lily pads. There were only two translators, who buzzed above the couches to where they were needed most.

  Jun took his time talking to one girl then another while Thuy sat silently. Beneath all her feelings — of fear, excitement, disappointment, and pity — was a keening hunger. Thuy had eaten only a couple of small, sticky rice cakes during the bus ride. Finally a waiter brought in some appetizers, small plates of tiny salted shrimp strategically spread across the table. Thuy picked up as many shrimp as she could with three fingers and tossed them into her mouth, the shrimp spreading across the surface of her tongue along with the melting salt. The pleasure of the salt and protein did not dim her pain, nor did the pain detract from the pleasure of the shrimp. These feelings simply coexisted, distinct and intense at the same moment, with the integrity of their forms intact. Another man sat next to her and smiled, spreading a Korean-Vietnamese dictionary flat on the table like a road map.