The Forbidden Purple City

by Philip Huynh

  “Everything tastes wonderful,” says Yuri’s daughter. “Though I’m surprised there’s no abalone.” She is smiling keenly at Thuy.

  “You always hated abalone,” says Yuri.

  “That’s not fair. If I did, I don’t anymore. I’ve learned to appreciate it.”

  “That’s because your tastes are more expensive now,” says Yuri.

  Thuy asks Insuk if he’s read Anne of Green Gables, because that it is all she knows in relation to Canada. Yuri’s daughter laughs. “That’s a children’s book for girls,” she says. Insuk nods his head and gives Thuy a warm, manly smile, both reassuring and pitying. Whatever it is that a management consultant does, Thuy is sure he does it well.

  “What is a ‘kindred spirit’?” says Thuy, continuing a conversation that she has momentarily forgotten these people were never a part of.

  “I have no idea,” says Yuri’s daughter.

  “It’s simple,” says Insuk. From under the table he takes his fiancée’s hand then raises it, places it over his heart. He gives Thuy a wink, which to Thuy is all of Western culture contained in one gesture.

  “She’s learning how to dive,” says Yuri.

  “It’s such a shame,” says Yuri’s daughter in English. “The waste of another good mind.” It takes a moment for Thuy to realize that they are speaking about her.

  “Shush,” says Yuri, then she says something in Korean to her daughter. All the while Jun smiles as if he has no idea what they are talking about. In a gentlemanly manner Insuk steers the women to other topics. Jun does not say much during the dinner, and perhaps to draw him out, Insuk asks him about the farm. They talk mostly in Korean, though sometimes Insuk throws out English terms like “diminishing returns,” which are equally foreign to Thuy, and Jun nods his head as if he is about to purchase something from this man.

  When her guests run out of things to say, Thuy fills the gap in the conversation in the only way she knows. She talks about television.

  “Winter Nocturne!” says Yuri’s daughter. “That used to be my favourite show.”

  “Whatever happened to that actor who played Sung?” says Insuk.

  “You don’t remember the scandal?”

  “The scandal — of course!”

  “You must have forgotten because it was so embarrassing,” says Yuri’s daughter.

  “Something to do with prostitutes and laser tag.”

  “Please don’t remind me. He was a Presbyterian too, remember.”

  “Allegedly.”

  Thuy wishes she had never heard any of this. Sung never had an existence outside the show. The whole evening becomes strange. It is strange eating Vietnamese food with Riesling, which they only have mugs for. Thuy covers her face with a napkin.

  “What’s wrong?” says Yuri’s daughter.

  Thuy drops her napkin and stares this girl down. “Your fiancé could play Sung,” says Thuy. “He is even better than the original. He just needs to grow his hair.”

  Yuri’s daughter gives Thuy a dirty look, and Yuri looks amused. Insuk smiles courageously at Thuy. Jun asks Thuy what is going on, but Thuy ignores him. Thuy can tell that Jun wants their guests to leave, to resume his life with her. He has the gift satchel of mandarins ready. But as the evening draws on, and the champagne is uncorked and drunk out of mugs, Insuk begins looking at Thuy with an open gaze that Thuy returns. This man is so young, Thuy thinks. His whole life is waiting. In another time, in another world, she thinks.

  Yuri tells her how much harder it is to harvest abalone these days. You need to swim farther and farther away from the cove. Now a ship takes you to them. The real diving takes place away from the tourists.

  Before dawn, Yuri picks Thuy up at the farmhouse. Jun is still asleep when Thuy jumps on the back of Yuri’s motorbike. She feels like a rebellious teenager holding on to Yuri’s waist. They head over to a warehouse where the hum of motorcycle engines echoes off the tin walls. The mermaids change into their suits inside the warehouse. There is the cheerful, incomprehensible chatter of women preparing for work. When Thuy asks Yuri what it is they are talking about, Yuri tells her it is always about the same thing. “Money and our aching joints,” she says, laughing. A toothless haenyeo points at Thuy’s face before pointing at her own. “She says enjoy your smooth skin now,” says Yuri. “Soon it will be lined like ours.”

  They climb down rocks, a shortcut to the dock, and there are cries of pain among the women as they lift their feet tentatively around the jagged formations. Once Thuy helps Yuri to the dock, she clambers up to help another mermaid down. They all board a motorboat operated by a man who looks to be Jun’s age. On the deck of the boat they all huddle together, knee to knee, rubbing their ankles back to life or wiping dirt off their diving masks with mugwort. One of the women stuffs the green tendrils of mugwort into both her nostrils, to keep the abrasive salt air out of her hacking lungs. Yuri starts a chant that builds down the line, before the boat stops and the mermaids jump into the sea feet first.

  They shed their age with each thrust of their hips deeper into the water, so that by the time they reach the craggy bottom they are young women again, the movement of their joints as smooth as the sea itself. Thuy, who has been building up her stamina so that she can stay under the water for over a minute, has to swim up for a breath before diving down again. The mermaids have entrusted her with an abalone knife. A minute is both nothing and forever. After a minute Thuy feels as though she has lived a lifetime under the water and is down to her last breath, but it takes her that long just to orient herself upside down, never mind trying to spot the abalone with their black shells hidden in the crevices of the black rocks.

  The key, the mermaids tell her, is to find the gleam of their lips from under their shells. By the time she finds her first one, her lungs are about to explode. The key is to wedge the knife under the abalone’s foot, and to do so quickly before it can fasten itself more firmly onto the rock. Her hands, though, tremble desperately, and her blade simply taps the abalone’s shell, awakening it. By the time she gets the blade underneath the creature, it is too late, it will not budge. Thuy is now seeing stars in her eyes from both anger and lack of breath, and she stabs at the abalone on the underside of its shell, trying to wrench it from the rock. She destroys the creature, rendering it useless, and as white strands of its innards float off, Thuy heads back to the surface.

  When the mermaids float back up, it is to deposit yet another abalone into the net tied to their floating red basket. When they break the surface and let out a whistle, it is the sound of pure victory. This they do with a mechanical compulsion. Meanwhile, Thuy’s net lies empty. Already, after half an hour of submerging and then re-emerging, she is exhausted, and cannot tell anymore which part of the world is right side up.

  Finally, just when her face is about to freeze into a rictus from holding her breath for yet another interminable moment, she finds her technique. She is developing an eye for the abalone, the subtle glitter they give off. Her knife slides easily beneath one of them and she pulls it whole off the rock. She finds her second wind. When she breaks the surface with an abalone, she gives her own victorious yelp.

  For the next half-hour she is so caught up in her new-found power, almost drunk on it, that she does not notice that the current has pulled her away from the other divers. Now she can only see a few feet in front of her — it is as if she has entered a dark cave. She looks above her and the sunlight is blocked by a thick blanket of kelp. There is no light to reach for as she thrusts her hips upwards, only more kelp, enough to wrap her whole body, to mummify her.

  The last thing she remembers is the glint of a knife blade cutting through the thick kelp, untangling her from it. Yuri’s arms are wrapped around her, helping her to the surface. When she is back aboard the boat, throwing up water, she is crying and apologizing to Yuri.

  “Don’t worry, you did well. You didn’t die.”

  Thuy takes off her cowl and removes the pearl earrings, but Yuri will not take
them back.

  “They’re yours. My daughter didn’t notice them on you at all that night. Do you remember?”

  “Maybe she was just pretending not to notice.”

  “Is that better?”

  Back in the warehouse, as the mermaids take off their rubber suits, the talk among them is merrier — not about death or their aching joints, but how the ocean has opened herself so generously to them this day. When they smile at Thuy and put their hands warmly on her knee and give her advice on technique, Thuy also forgets how close to death she was. She believes, for this moment, that she has made it through purgatory.

  She cannot escape the sight and smell of oranges. They are everywhere, and not just in her backyard, not just in every crevice of her house, where they roll out of crates and down the kitchen floor, but in the city, in every storefront window, it seems, in every gift box. They are the gift of the island — small and sweet, with a peel so bright that she wonders if the whole fruit is actually made out of wax. Around the house she has taken to plugging her nose with mugwort to keep out the smell of the citrus. Her only escape from this land is beneath the sea.

  Acknowledgements

  I owe my thanks to many dear people who have helped me along the journey to publishing this book.

  Thanks to my editor, Bethany Gibson, for believing in these stories and for her tireless and deeply insightful work to help me improve them. Thanks also to John Sweet, my copy editor extraordinaire.

  Thanks to my agent, Carolyn Swayze, for her invaluable tenacity.

  Thanks to my writing teachers — Shannon Stewart, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Lee Henderson, and the late Wayne Tefs. Your lessons have not been forgotten.

  Thanks to the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop for their continued support, and to the late Jim Wong-Chu for his sadly brief yet enduring mentorship.

  Thanks to my parents, who arrived on these shores with little, and who worked tirelessly to provide for their children, and yet also to teach us to appreciate the wonderful and the glorious.

  Thanks to my sisters, Adeline and Monique, and my brother, David — little, wise siblings who have let me share their fascinating lives. And thanks to Peter Klassen, my best man and close reader.

  Thanks to my wife, Sowon, for her love and best friendship, which have endured despite her reading all my first drafts. And thanks to my daughters, Margo and Oona, for always getting their father up when he is down (especially on cartoon Saturdays).

  Earlier versions of most of these stories have appeared in the following journals: the New Quarterly, EVENT, the Malahat Review, Prairie Schooner, Ricepaper, and Prairie Fire. I want to thank the editors of these journals for their keen eyes and encouragement: Pamela Mulloy, Kim Jernigan, Anna Ling Kaye, Ian Cockfield, Shashi Bhat, Kwame Dawes, Ashley Strosnider, Rhonda Batchelor, and Andris Taskans. I would also like to thank Anita Chong, who edited two of these tales for The Journey Prize Stories.

  The folk stories that appear in “Toad Poem” and “Mayfly” are found in Vietnamese Folk-Tales: Satire and Humour by Huu Ngoc (Ha Noi: The Gioi Publishers, 2010). Thanks to my father, Cam-Loi Huynh, for researching Vietnamese-language versions of these folk tales and providing me with their translations. My father is also responsible for translating the verses from The Tale of Kieu that appear in “The Forbidden Purple City.”

  The following is a list of other books that I found particularly useful while researching for several of my stories:

  Brigham, Robert K. ARVN: Life and Death in the South Vietnamese Army. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.

  Do, Thien. Vietnamese Supernaturalism: Views from the Southern Region. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

  Hickey, Gerald Cannon. Village in Vietnam. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1964.

  Long, Patrick Du Phuoc, and Laura Ricard. The Dream Shattered: Vietnamese Gangs in America. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1997.

  Nguyen, Du. The Tale of Kieu. Translated by Huynh Sanh Thong. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1983.

  Pham, Quyen Phuong. Hero and Deity: Tran Hung Dao and the Resurgence of Popular Religion in Vietnam. Chiang Mai: Mekong Press, 2009.

  Truong, Buu Lam. A Story of Vietnam. Parker, CO: Outskirts Press, 2010.

  Turner, Karen Gottschang, and Phan Thanh Hao. Even the Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

  Weist, Andrew. Vietnam’s Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007.

  Philip Huynh was born in Vancouver, BC, where his parents met after fleeing Vietnam during the war. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Huynh is also a practicing lawyer.

  Huynh’s stories have been widely published in literary journals, including the New Quarterly, EVENT, Prairie Schooner, and the Malahat Review. His fiction has also been published in two editions of the Journey Prize anthology and cited for distinction in The Best American Short Stories. He is the winner of the Open Season Award from the Malahat Review, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Richmond, BC, with his wife and twin daughters.