The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  Jun and Thuy did not speak to each other until near the end of the night. By then things had loosened up and alcohol was brought to the table to fan the volume in the room like a flame. Jun stood out from the other two men with their starched white shirts and silk ties, who clearly enjoyed being fawned over by a dozen women. She liked that Jun looked bored. A couple of the girls next to her were asking a broker how long the men were staying in the city. The broker said not long, they were heading to Hue the next morning to interview more women before making a decision. Thuy could hear the gasps from the girls. Women from Hue were famously beautiful. The broker checked his notes and corrected himself. Hanoi, not Hue. “Hanoi girls have buckteeth and horse faces,” one of the girls assured the others. “They stew cats.” Again a gasp, but this time it seemed more from relief. The girls begged the broker not to speak a word to the Korean men about Hue.

  A cocktail glass shattered on the floor and all the voices jelled into a single laugh before breaking up again. In all of this Jun and Thuy found a bubble of silence to hide in until one of the brokers came. The broker made no effort to mitigate the awkwardness, taking his time to chew on Jun’s words before passing them on to Thuy in processed Vietnamese.

  “What did he say?” said Thuy to the broker. “Why is he smiling?”

  “He says you must be very hungry, you are the only girl eating the food,” said the broker. “He says he will order you anything you want.”

  “More shrimp,” said Thuy.

  In the end it took a sophomoric question from Jun, “What books have you read recently?” — something likely straight out of the instruction manual for potential Korean grooms — to provoke a sneer from Thuy when she answered, “War and Peace.”

  “You speak English?” said Jun. He was speaking directly to her now.

  Thuy nodded.

  “I do not believe you.”

  “I am speaking English now.”

  “No, the War and Peace. Your English cannot be that good.”

  “Okay, then,” said Thuy. “How about Anne of Green Gables?”

  “I can believe that,” said Jun. “Anne of Green Gables is for every high school girl.”

  Thuy lowered her head at that reminder of their respective ages, and she gave him credit for sensing his indiscretion.

  “I have read it too,” he said. “Not too long ago.”

  “There is only the English version here in Vietnam,” she said.

  “Do you know what the ‘kindred spirit’ means? It is mentioned often in the story.”

  “Strange term! It means best friends, no?”

  “In Korean version it means friendly ghost.”

  “That must be incorrect.”

  “Incorrect,” repeated Jun. “I mean that I agree.”

  She let out a small giggle. It felt like a subversive thing they were doing, speaking directly to each other. The broker left the two of them alone. Thuy’s broken English was better than Jun’s, and he often hesitated at the edge of a thought, grasping for the right word — his uncertainty bridging their age gap. He was more quiet than the other men and preferred not to talk about himself. Thuy credited him with humility. Only when he spoke of Jeju Island did he become excited. When there was a term that was missing from his vocabulary (octopus, say, or subterranean lava), he reached into his blazer pocket for his Samsung phone. He had installed a translation app.

  He preferred listening to Thuy rather than talking about himself, tensing his jaw in empathy at appropriate moments. Thuy had thought she was more of a listener herself, but now she enjoyed unspooling her broken English without thought to how she sounded. She had never had such an audience with an older man. She felt reckless with her stream-of-consciousness meanderings, about the omnipresence of coconuts in her village and working in the market, about her mother, though she never mentioned her father and Jun did not ask. She felt like a child again, swimming in any direction in the ocean instead of being tied to the straight lines of the competitive pool. She noticed that Jun was missing a side molar, but she didn’t mind.

  She thought she had gone too far when she mentioned her favourite television show. She was so relieved when Jun said that he watched Moonlight Nocturne as well, and then gobsmacked when Jun told her that in fact it was filmed on Jeju Island. Then she confessed her infatuation with Sung. Jun began to say something in English but once again couldn’t find the words. He pulled out his app and typed something, then handed her the phone.

  The screen read: “You are in love with this character, but he is not real.”

  “I know that, that is okay,” she said, looking Jun in the eyes.

  The next morning, when Thuy woke up on her old mat in her old hut, on her floor of pounded dirt, Jun’s spirit was a faint mist that disappeared in the light. All Thuy could remember was his missing molar and the lines on his face when he smiled. When she confided in her mother that she did not think she could go through with this, her mother told her not to be a coward.

  They had two weddings, one in her village and one on Jeju Island. The wedding in Vietnam was in December and was sparsely attended. Her mother was there, along with her mother’s uncle, a couple of distant cousins, a few friends from high school. Thuy suspected that most of the villagers were scared off by anything even distantly connected with her late father, fearing that the authorities would be aroused, though the Catholic priest who officiated let them use the village church for free. The priest was used to butting heads with the cadres and regarded the wedding as an act of subversion, however small.

  The small procession made the inside of the church feel enormous. Jun wore a dove-grey suit with polished black shoes. Thuy wore a simple wedding dress that her mother had bought from the village market, its most extravagant feature a pair of lace gloves with little white bows fastened at the wrists. Everyone else wore knitted sweaters or nylon jackets against an unusual chill. The inside of the church was drafty, its upkeep neglected when the Communists choked off funding to the parish. Monkeys bounded outside, casting shadows resembling arched-back cats through the stained-glass windows. Then they started infiltrating the inside of the walls in search of warmth. Thuy couldn’t see the monkeys, but she could hear their laughter, making the timber walls vibrate as she and Jun exchanged vows. When she swam in the rivers as a child, she would hear the monkeys cheer her on, see them above in the boughs of the jackfruit trees while she did the backstroke. Now their cackling cheered her again, made her family seem larger.

  After they exchanged vows, Jun faced Thuy’s mother, got on his knees, and bowed so low that his forehead touched the ground. His pant leg cuffs pulled up and Thuy could see his socks. There was a wedding cake and a bottle of red wine, though not enough glasses and so the guests shared.

  Jun left first for Korea to prepare for the second wedding, and later that spring Thuy flew for the first time. Everyone at the airport on Jeju Island seemed to be either middle-aged men with golf clubs or young couples with matching sweaters and neon-bright sneakers. Honeymooners, Jun would later tell her.

  Thuy wore the same dress for her Korean wedding. Instead of a church, this wedding took place in a glass high-rise. Another bride was exiting the same revolving door that Thuy entered. In the lobby she found the posters of the couples getting married that day, and the one of her and Jun was framed by a heart with a time and room number stamped on the top corner.

  She proceeded alone down an aisle that was more like a catwalk, with strobe lights and dry ice smoking up the runway and the heads of diners beneath the haze. There were flashing bulbs, massive television screens on every wall. Jun waited for her at the end of the aisle with his wide smile, never showing his teeth, wearing a pair of bright white gloves like a valet. Diners looked up from their steaming plates at the monitors so that they didn’t have to turn their heads to the altar.

  Afterwards, she cut the cake with a long knife, more like a sword, never getting to taste it before being hustled by the woman with a headset from table to tab
le, where Thuy was embraced by complete strangers. It took only thirty minutes in total before she was returned to the lobby with her new husband. They stood at a table with a small gathering of their gift envelopes, each with money inside. Jun wore a stalwart expression while he fingered the cards and glanced at the other tables, where people were collecting much larger piles of envelopes. Thuy daydreamed about the taste of wedding cake.

  Thuy waits until after the orange harvest is over, when she can claim a morning for herself, before she tries to make it down to the cove again. A warm spring morning, when the rocks take on a gentler, silver cast. When she gets to the bottom of the stairs, tourists are standing along the shore taking photographs. The mermaids are already beneath the sea — all except for one, a skinny old woman with her wetsuit on but without the cowl. The tourists take pictures of this haenyeo while she stands among them, a head shorter.

  When the old haenyeo catches Thuy’s eyes, she smiles. Her face is a set of craggy vertical lines and appears to be made of the same stuff as this island. Thuy had come bearing a request in Korean, but in her nervousness she cannot form the words. Instead she says, “Annyeonghaseyo,” the standard greeting, the only Korean she can conjure at the moment despite being enrolled in a language class for months now.

  The haenyeo pricks her ears up at the slant in Thuy’s accent. “Ni hao ma!” she says.

  Thuy shakes her head. She is not Mandarin. “Beteunam-ui,” Thuy says, pointing to herself. Vietnamese.

  The mermaid shakes her head as well. “Beteunam-ui, non,” she says. “Zhunguo. Nihon-go. Deutsch, Francais, oui.”

  The tourists say something in German to the haenyeo, hard consonants falling from the fair sky, and she answers back in German, clapping her cotton-gloved hands. They laugh at what must be a joke.

  “How about English?” says Thuy.

  At this the haenyeo smiles. “Of course, English.”

  By now some of the other mermaids have raised their heads out of the water. They recognize Thuy and start saying something that Thuy does not understand.

  “Oh, you are the one who wants to dive with us,” says the haenyeo, her eyes disappearing into the lines of her smile.

  Thuy nods. The old woman has taken the one wish Thuy had come bearing, somehow has returned it to her stronger, more real. “Yes, I do,” says Thuy.

  “Cha, don’t you care about your life?”

  During her first year on Jeju Island, she saw ponies. Silver-maned and small enough to ride under low-hanging fruit trees. As ubiquitous as the plodding water buffaloes back home, but dreamier, like moonlight. They could be seen grazing on both sides of the road, at the end of every curve.

  During her first year she saw honeymooners all over the island, with matching T-shirts, standing under waterfalls. Thuy hated to be one of them at first, but Jun wanted his neighbours to see them like this. They took long hikes up Mount Halla, where they would pass hale elders using ski poles on the wooden steps. They had sunset picnics on the ancient fortress wall, which had once protected the island against the invading Mongolians. They visited the volcanic stone dol hareubang statues with phallic noses and vaginal lips.

  Jun had lived alone just before she moved here, although he had been with his mother until she had died a year earlier, had been his mother’s boy for almost all his life. During Thuy’s first year in his home they mostly had sex, cooked, and worked on the orange farm. Of these things, it was the cooking that most surprised her. The kitchen was the one place where she had expected to be left alone. When Jun was there, it was at first to teach her how to prepare raw fish or to make kimchi, and she thought that after she learned these things she would be left to her own devices. But he insisted on being in the kitchen even when she had obtained this competence, just as he was always by her side in the market and in the orange fields. Even when she made him Vietnamese dishes, he insisted on helping her or just standing over her while she chopped. He always helped her clear the table before they retired to the living room to watch TV. He told her he was not that kind of husband, though he didn’t explain what other kinds there were. Every month he mailed a letter to Thuy’s mother, a small red envelope inside the larger envelope.

  During the first year he showed her the jokbo, the lineage books of his family. The books lined two shelves at the bottom of his bookcase. He pulled out a volume in the middle of the shelf where he had the thin pages earmarked. Here was a yangban, a mandarin, here was a naval officer. He moved his fingers down the centuries. Here was a doctor, here was a shipbuilder. Then, cracking one of the newer spines, he showed her the name of the first mandarin orange farmer in the family. He picked up the final volume and turned to the last page, which had Chinese characters, pointed to the blank space where their son’s name would go. He had a thought that he couldn’t speak in English, so he reached for his phone. “Our family started with our heads in the clouds, then moved down to the sea, and now here we are close to the earth,” said the screen.

  “Your head is still in the clouds,” said Thuy.

  During the first year she was mistaken for a prostitute twice while walking with Jun in the evening on the boardwalk, and Jun got into one fist fight defending her honour.

  During the first year she met his friends, farmers his age or even older with yellowed teeth who spoke not a word of English. They would come to play a card game that Jun called Go-Stop. It seemed like such a dainty game for men, with little red cards that were just larger than a thumbprint depicting cranes, chrysanthemums, and other animals and flowers on one side. When these men came over, she was finally left alone in the kitchen, coming out only to bring them snacks made out of cracked wheat and dry seaweed, or to serve bottomless amounts of soju that Jun had chilled in the freezer. Once she had made a crack about these men needing to drink so much to play a little girl’s game, lining these little cards side by side. It was the first time that Jun had ever told her to shut up, then drew in his breath and explained to her that it was gambling, and therefore as manly as smoking or drinking soju. After a certain hour in the night his friends openly leered at her with the tips of their tongues jutting through the gaps in their teeth, and sometimes slapped her ass as she served them snacks. Jun would snort alcohol out through his nose at the sight.

  In that first year she met Jun’s aunt who lived on a neighbouring farm. The aunt wore a purple shawl and nodded silently when Thuy was in the same room, but never spoke directly to her. Thuy thought the aunt spent most of her time complaining about her, though Jun would never really explain what his aunt had said. The aunt sometimes brought over some old local wench or another to talk to Jun.

  “Why is she still trying to introduce you?” asked Thuy.

  “Her bad habit,” Jun explained to Thuy with his smile.

  After the first year she took birth control, keeping the dial of little pills hidden deep within her cluttered purse. And after that year there were no more ponies. Horses were still everywhere on the island, but Thuy no longer noticed them.

  This time the skinny old haenyeo — her name is Yuri — is expecting her. The other mermaids started their dives at around nine in the morning, so Yuri told Thuy to come out a little later, when the others would be busy in the sea. At the top of the cliff is a ramshackle change room where Yuri has set aside a black wetsuit. The suit is a little short, and Thuy has to stretch the rubber against her spine as she pulls the sleeves over her shoulders. She walks stiffly at first, but the rubber is worn and soon yields to her form. “Is it one of yours?” Thuy asks. Yuri is much shorter, with bones as thin as a bird’s. Thuy could never fit into something of Yuri’s.

  “My older sister’s,” says Yuri. “But don’t worry, she won’t be asking for it. She drowned a few years ago in that same suit.”

  Yuri buckles a set of square metal weights around her own waist. Then she reaches for Thuy’s arm. “Help me down the steps, will you? These weights are going to crush my knees.”

  “Where are mine?”

  “Yo
u don’t need them. Not yet. You stay in the shallow water.”

  When they reach the bottom of the cove, the other mermaids are all underwater. Thuy can only see their floating orange baskets, the taewak. There are already tourists taking photographs. “You’re late!” says one of the tourists to Yuri. “We thought you had drowned.”

  “Still alive!” says Yuri. She starts chatting with the group from South Africa. Yuri’s walking is laboured, but when she is waving her arms she is a stationary sprite, petrified from the waist down. She points the tourists to another old lady on her haunches beside a series of red buckets, the day’s early catch of periwinkles and abalone. “Good deal, good deal!” she says.

  Thuy does not have the chance to set foot in the water by the time the other mermaids emerge at the shore, heralded by the slapping against rock of wet flippers. Their suits are bright orange at the torso, which makes Thuy think of an angry mob of mandarins. Yuri stands between them and Thuy. “Stay behind me,” she says.

  Yuri and the others are yelling at each other, their flying spittle mimicking the ocean spray. Although Thuy does not understand a word, the lines of argument are completely clear. The mermaids would have continued to yell at each other except that more tourists are gathering on the platform. With two claps Yuri breaks their collective fever. The mermaids need to gather in front of the tourists to chant their prayer before diving into the water again. The show must go on.

  “You come back tomorrow,” says Yuri to Thuy. “Those old women don’t know this, but they need you.” She explains that because the haenyeo are a dying breed, their daughters preferring not to continue the profession, they need young blood like Thuy. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” says Yuri. Thuy wonders if Yuri picked up that proverb from one of the tourists.