If You Lived Here (17 page)

Shelley says, “It sounds like something from Shakespeare. ‘Her eyes like autumn rivers.’ ”

“Yeah. ‘Compare you to a summer day.’ Like that.” “You know the sonnets?”

I shrug. “A little.” I don’t want to sound too pleased with myself. “I studied literature at Hanoi University. We read Shakespeare, but I didn’t know English then. We only read Vietnamese translations.” My father used to complain that the family would have to go without fuel on the

death anniversaries of our ancestors because I kept the lamp lit so late at night. He never made me turn it off, though. He was proud of my diligence, proud that he, a poor boy from the countryside, would have a daughter at the country’s finest university. And he refused to believe that our family was so desperate we couldn’t waste a bit of kerosene in the interest of my education. My father, who had memorized the entire
Truy
Ù
n Ki
e
u
as a way of testing his own intelligence, used to recite it to me and Lan when we were children. Those were the words to which we drifted off to sleep.

Shelley says, “You seem to know the English pretty well now.”

“I just memorize the words, like we do in Vietnam. Shakespeare too hard. I don’t really get him.” Still, I’ve learned most of the sonnets. That’s one thing I can say about a Vietnamese education. If I read the words often enough, I will learn them. And what else do I have to do late at night in Wilmington? It’s one option if you can’t sleep.

Outside, above the jagged line of pine trees, I can see the moon ris-ing in the blue-black sky. I still remember the face of that old bicycle mechanic, that old gentleman. “If someone tell you you’re pretty like Miss Kieu, it’s a fine day for you.”

“You’re prettier than you think you are,” says Shelley. I grin at the road. “Thanks,” I say.

The Willie lady finishes on the CD and Shelley puts in one she calls “Blues Grass,” which sounds just like more people singing. “Let’s eat more,” she says, digging around again in her bag.

We eat cold fried chicken, more deviled eggs, and pickles. Shelley made cheese sandwiches, too, but I’ve had enough by now. She opens a package of Oreos and puts them on the armrest between us. We cross the Virginia border. I lift my coffee out of the cup holder and take a sip. I can’t believe it stays hot this long. When we get back, I’m going to Target.

“I want to ask you something,” Shelley says. “You say you’re from Saigon, but you only tell stories about Hanoi.”

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I guess I’ve expected her to arrive at this conclusion. No one in Wilmington knows the truth. What would

Gladys do if she learned that both my parents fought with Ho Chi Minh? Now, my secret slips out like a bird from a cage and I make no effort to restrain it.

“Vietnamese in America, they don’t like Hanoi people,” I explain. “So I tell them I from Saigon, my family northerners who come down to the south in 1954 to get away from the Communists. It’s better for my business.”

“Would they stop shopping at your store?” Shelley asks.

“Before, yeah. Now? Maybe they don’t care so much. But I been lying for so long, you can’t go backward and tell the truth.”

The Blues Grass has a twang that reminds me of the music of minority people, up in the mountains on the border with China. I like it. When the CD ends, Shelley switches off the stereo and turns to me. “You say your father used to recite that poem to you. Can you recite it to me?”

I nod. “But it’s been long time. The whole thing take hours.” “I’ve got hours,” Shelley says.

For some reason, I don’t feel self-conscious and, to be honest, my voice sounds quite lovely in Vietnamese. I think for a moment, take a deep breath, then speak the first few lines.
“ ‘Tra˘m na˘m trong cõi ng
U:o
i ta, ch
ù
tài ch
ù
m
Ù
nh khéo là ghét nhau.’ ”
The sound is soft and rhythmic, soothing as rain. I think of my father, sitting beside me on the bed, holding his palm against my cheek. I recite the next line, then the next.

It surprises me, after all these years, how the words gush from mem-ory, like water from a spring. I continue for an hour, then two. At first, I glance over at Shelley every now and then, to make sure I should keep going. But Shelley’s head eases back against the seat of the car. Later, her eyes are closed. Still later, I can hear her breathing.

My father. Bo. Are you still alive? Do you ever think about your little one?

I come from the union of an impersonator and an impostor, which is how, I suppose, I learned the skills of deception. My father was born in a coal-mining village near Cam Pha. The eighth son in a family of twelve, he left

home in 1950 for the simple reason that his parents couldn’t feed him. He was fourteen years old and hoped to get work in a factory in Hai Phong. Instead, he joined the Viet Minh forces because the prospects for food seemed better. At that point, my father’s political beliefs resembled those of many people in the country at that time: He followed the demands of his stomach. Although such an ideology (if you could call it that) seems, in retrospect, ridiculously simple, it had an obvious soundness that con-tributed to the swelling numbers of people who joined the ranks of the Viet Minh. My father dreamed of rice—not those scant and bitter brown grains that failed to adequately fill his belly, but white rice, fat and succulent bowls of it, fragrant, warm, satisfying. If you were hungry, it didn’t seem so silly to put your life on the line for food.

During his first few years in the army, my father’s battalion massed itself in the northern mountains, along the Chinese border, a cold and spooky place for a boy from the coast and, though he suffered continuously from malaria, he grew strong and agile and somehow survived. The soldiers spent most of their time hiding in the jungle, ducking into villages only occasionally, to resupply, or recruit, or commit sabotage, or, sometimes, murder. The political indoctrination was convincing and basic: Drive out the French imperialists and their Vietnamese lackeys; bring independence to Vietnam. Over the years, my father came to understand and cherish those goals in a more subtle and profound way, and he became very good at convincing others of their merit. Though his skills as a fighter didn’t impress anyone, he possessed a talent that did. Even at that young age, he had a booming voice, and an easy way with it. The officers gave him the bullhorn and he spent his days walking up and down the lines of troops, singing of patriotism, telling jokes, spurring the company forward. He didn’t feel like a leader, but he became excellent at acting like one.

My father met my mother in late 1953, during a forty-five-day trek west from Thai Binh, as General Vo Nguyen Giap gathered his troops for the battle that would eventually take place at Dien Bien Phu. My father had lived in the jungle nearly four years already. He had grown solid and tough, if not exactly brawny, and he thought little of traveling through the mountains with nothing but his rifle and bullhorn, an extra set of clothes,

a blanket, a mosquito net, and enough rice to last a week. My mother, a member of a supply brigade that converged with his battalion at a crossing on the Da River, had only joined up a month before. Her delicate skin, which she had always shielded from the sun, had become cracked and burned. Blisters covered her hands and feet. Her muscles ached. To him, she looked lovely and exhausted, and he had never seen such fine gray eyes, which were both sorrowful and expectant, a quality that so perfectly matched the mood of those years that he took it for wisdom (as it turned out, she was, in fact, wise, but she never agreed that the look in someone’s eyes could prove it). At that time, she barely spoke, certainly never complained, but he wanted to help her. For five days, the troops marched in tandem, and, taking advantage of the flexibility of his position, my father spent much of that time marching beside her, doing what he could to lift her spirits. She cried regularly. He wooed her with the wild vegetables he collected in the forest. He cooked for her, sang for her, teased her to make her laugh. When he asked her about her childhood, she told him she’d grown up in a rice-farming village near Hai Phong.

He shook his head in disbelief. “I grew up near Hai Phong myself. I know the accent.”

The troops were camping above a narrow valley, and my father had found a rock that served as an overlook. From here, they could see a dozen Thai minority villages spread out below them. Birds fluttered through the trees before settling down for the night. In the distance, a band of monkeys whooped like ghosts. In another era, this spot would only have seemed beautiful and eerie. Now it seemed beautiful, eerie, and tragic, too. My mother looked away. When she was younger, she had found tragedy terribly romantic. Now she merely found it tragic. She was only sixteen.

“You might as well tell me what happened,” my father said.

On that evening, on that particular outcropping of rocks, a half dozen couples giggled and flirted, and their presence nearby left my mother reluctant to tell the truth about herself. Paranoid and frightened, she believed that someone might overhear, that her own words might kill her. She thought of her parents, dead in the fields; her house, looted and

empty. Life could disappoint you in the most unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Somehow, in the course of a very few hours, her own existence had exploded into tiny fragments, then reconfigured itself into this scene, this evening, on this mountain. For days and days, one question had consumed her: What would happen tomorrow? The answer never changed: Her life might explode again. But now, for the first time in weeks, that answer failed to scare her. Why bother with fear? She could be brave or fearful, she realized, and it wouldn’t make any difference. She might die tomorrow either way. My father, sitting next to her, had seen so many friends killed that he knew this truth already. Most of the people on that mountain, in fact, knew it absolutely. But my mother had been slow to learn, perhaps because grief and confusion had made her mind so murky. And so she told him everything. “My family owned most of the land in Giang village, north of Hanoi,” she said. As the Viet Minh’s campaign for independence grew increasingly daring and successful, her father, who was loyal to the French, arranged for his daughter to go live with an aunt in the city. But before she could leave for the capital, Viet Minh troops entered the village. It was October 1953. A French newspaper would later claim that, “An intense firefight left sixteen saboteurs dead and twelve wounded, while loyalist troops suffered only minor casualties.” Perhaps it was so, but the French, without explanation, withdrew from the district a few days later. Having lost the protection of the government authorities, my mother’s parents decided to travel with her to the city. But on the morning they planned to leave, six Viet Minh cadres appeared at their door. “Dogs of capitalism!” they shouted. “Get to work.” With that, they used the butts of their rifles to drive my mother and her parents into the fields. For the next two days, the three of them worked their land like primitive beasts, without tools, or food, or rest, or water. Along the edges

of the fields, the other inhabitants of the village silently watched them.

My grandmother had always been frail, but she lasted surprisingly long before her heart gave out. When she finally did collapse, my grandfather stumbled over to help her. The soldiers began to beat him. They recognized the poetry in using forced labor to kill the elite, but the process had taken much longer than they had expected. Impatient, they finally

shot him in the neck, a gesture that wouldn’t kill him instantly but would certainly hurry him along. My mother, terrified that they would shoot her, too, continued moving diligently through the fields. Once they’d dispatched both the adults, however, the soldiers grew bored and wandered off. My mother ran to her parents. Her mother was dead already. Her father lay on the ground, bleeding, dying, staring toward the sky. She felt a hand on her arm and turned to see one of her neighbors, a man who had often worked for her father. “Go to Hanoi,” he told her. She didn’t move. “They will kill you if you stay,” he urged. “Go now.” She pulled herself up, took one last look at her parents, and ran.

But somewhere on the road between Giang village and the city, my mother panicked. She convinced herself that the soldiers were chasing her, that they would track her down and kill her, just as they had killed her parents. If she had been reasonable then, she would have realized that she looked like any of the thousands of traumatized peasants clogging the roads during that chaotic autumn, that she could easily have made it to Hanoi. But she wasn’t reasonable at all. For days, she lay in ditches, curled up behind haystacks, surviving on irrigation water and air. And then one morning, as she sat in a field by the side of the road, a farmer told her about a women’s division moving through that village. At dusk, she saw them marching by in tight formation. There were fewer than a dozen soldiers, but they looked strong and spirited, and were singing loudly. She pulled herself out of the ditch and stepped into line. Camouflage, she thought, as she continued with them down the road, toward the hills and away from the city.

As my mother told her story, my father listened intently. His military life had been colored and energized by tales of French cruelty. Like most Vietnamese, he had witnessed such ruthlessness firsthand. As a child, he saw a French colonel nearly rip the arm off a village boy who had whistled mockingly during a military parade, and he had been among the crowd of children who discovered the body of that same boy when it washed onto the beach a few days later. Individual stories no longer served to anger him directly. Rather, they hardened his sense of resolve and, if anything, made him wonder why his people had, for so long, tolerated such oppres—

sion. Still, even though he had never heard that the nationalists, his own comrades, committed atrocities, the news of it didn’t shock him so much as confirm a hunch. War made the spirit ugly.

Though my father felt no surprise about the details of her story, her means of describing it startled him. She didn’t merely relay the facts of her experience. She took these facts and sifted through them like a hand through rice, meticulously, considering each grain of meaning. Her grief seemed so complicated. Of course, she mourned the loss of her parents, and her privileged life, and her dreams for her future. But she also berated herself for the way that she had failed to help her parents, as if such a thing had been possible. At the same time, she asserted a distinction between “then” and “now,” describing her “then” self as both a child and a coward, and her “now” self as hopeless, but more astute. This new existence, she told him, offered a relief she would never have experienced had she fled to Hanoi, where life with her aunt would have been too terrible a reminder of her loss, like squatting in the empty shell of her childhood home. Perhaps most surprisingly, though she despised the soldiers who had killed her parents, she had no harsh words for their cause. “I haven’t said much since I’ve been in these mountains,” she told him. “But I’ve listened to what you say to the troops. The French should go.”