If You Lived Here (25 page)
I lift a finger, touch my chest, and employ one of the few words I have mastered in Vietnamese. “
M
Ó
.
” Mother. Then I touch his chest. “
Con,
” I say, offering up nearly the last of my vocabulary. Son.
He grins. His eyes are not all-forgiving, but they are tolerant. He pushes himself off my lap and slips over the side of the chair.
By the time Mai returns with bottled water and bags of food, Hai Au has pulled all the newly folded clothes out of the drawers and I have replaced them so that he can pull them out again. He has gnawed on his toy train and eaten two Hershey’s Kisses. He has pooped. I have changed his diaper.
Mai looks at the clothes strewn across the floor and laughs. “
Ngh
Þ
ch l
Ä
m!
” she exclaims. “He a little rascal!”
Together, we eat dinner. Proving the value of this hotel in addressing the particular needs of the international adoption crowd, the staff downstairs have sent up a bowl of rice porridge for Hai Au. He eats hungrily, then he circles the food that Mai has bought us—pork buns and candied ginger and sticky rice. It’s an odd combination, one that wouldn’t make sense in any culture. Mai says it’s all an “impulse buy.” She seems content and I imagine that her successful procurement of dinner has given her more confidence that she can function here. We eat as ravenously as the baby. After we’ve finished, she looks out the window toward the dusk. “I think I go outside and walk around for a while. Maybe it cooler now.”
The lights have come on in the buildings across the narrow street and the roar of rush hour has lessened to intermittent honks and beeps. It’s a good sign that she would like to walk outside, and I don’t want her to
think I will need her every minute that we’re here. I grip the back of a chair so Hai Au doesn’t pull it over. I say, “I’m hoping to be asleep when you get back.” We both look at the baby doubtfully. “Him, too.”
After she leaves, I sit down on the carpet. Hai Au moves like a bee traveling from flower to flower. He careens from bed to wardrobe to chair, then back again, pulling and tugging at whatever his little hands can reach. Every time he falls to the floor, he pulls himself up. He smiles with satisfaction, but his smiles are close-mouthed, a little off. He’s puffy, swollen around the jaws. Am I only now noticing that something’s strange, or has a problem developed? Moving slowly so that I won’t frighten him, I edge closer. I lift my hands to his lower jaw, and gently press with my fingers. “Is it okay?” I whisper. “Does it hurt?” My mind races through the symptoms of all the exotic maladies that adoptive parents of Vietnamese children report to each other on the Internet.
Hai Au makes a grimace, then whips his face out of my hands and pulls away. He scrambles silently into the space between the bed and the portable crib. I sit down on the floor, clutch his feet, and pull him toward me. “Wait a minute, buster,” I say, setting him into my lap. I take his face in my hands again. He tries to squirm, to throw himself face-first onto the carpet, to shield his mouth from me. I pull him up, as gently as possible. Is he in pain? Clearly, he doesn’t want me to touch him there, so I hold his head with a hand at each ear and stare down at him. “What is it, sweetie?” I ask, even though I know he won’t understand. “
Con
ê
i,
” I say. Oh, son!
For a long moment, we stare at each other. He locks his lips together.
His nostrils flare. His eyes narrow, fearless and stubborn. And then I understand that he has something in his mouth. Slowly and carefully, I move my thumbs down along his cheeks, slide them into the corners of his mouth, and pry open his jaws.
His mouth is full of porridge. It lines the pockets between his cheeks and gums, lies like buried treasure beneath his tongue, hangs in a clod on the roof of his mouth. I keep his jaws wide open. His eyes burn with rage at me.
Vaguely, I remember a report from some Midwestern mother, describing how her adopted daughter from Vietnam hoarded wads of beef in
her mouth for hours. The child had known hunger and she didn’t seem to trust that another meal would ever come. I pull Hai Au up. “Eat!” I urge, then drag the Vietnamese from my memory: “
A
n
d
i!
” Thank god for Mai and her lessons. Gently, with the tip of my pinkie, I scoop the porridge from its hiding places and set it on his tongue. How long will it take before he trusts me? “
A
n
d
i!
” I say, closing his mouth. Eat!
Slowly, resentfully, he begins to chew. I grab the bowl of porridge off the counter. It’s still half full, and there’s more downstairs. There’s always more, I want to tell him. I hold out the spoon and smile encouragingly while he takes another bite. I admire him. He is not yet two, but he has suffered and he has learned to keep himself alive. I see now, among all the other qualities that I am just beginning to recognize, all the things that make him
this
boy, unlike any other. Everything he does gives me more information. I think: This is my son. And this. And this. Sitting here on the carpet, he stares at me, still chewing, his eyes now glazed with fatigue. I listen to his feathery breaths, to the sound of motorbikes puttering past on the street, to the occasional honk of a car, to the wails of babies in other rooms, and to the soft, slightly desperate sounds of new parents trying to soothe them. “You’re the sun and the moon to me,” I whisper, watching him swallow. “The earth, the planets, every single star.” I run my finger across his little chipmunk cheek. For the first time, all the pain I’ve experienced makes sense. I started trying to have my baby many years too soon. But I had to wait for Hai Au to be born, for this child to be ready for me to come and get him.
ven at night
the heat feels immense, a huge animal wrapping its body around the city. When I leave the hotel, I head down the sidewalk toward Hoan Kiem Lake, walking so rapidly that the cyclo driv-
ers waiting for fares don’t even notice me. Out in the street, the river of traffic flows past, more recreational and less hurried than earlier in the day. Even with such unfamiliar noise, the scene reminds me of my youth, of cycling along the shores of the lake with Khoi, or with Lan, or with friends. Somehow, in the darkness, the city seemed so intimate. We chatted with anyone who happened to be gliding along at the same speed and willing to talk. How would it feel now, I wonder, to be so young and free and happy? At the corner, I stop and instinctively lift the hair off the back of my neck. With a quick flick of my wrist, I’ve tied it in a knot. Funny, I haven’t done that since I was a girl.
Even at this hour, the shops remain open. Khoi didn’t tell me how bright the city has become. In my memory, Hanoi at night is empty streets, darkness lit only by the moon, the occasional sound of a creaky bike. Tonight, fluorescent lights give the city a glare, turning night into day, as if mak-
ing up for all those decades of missed opportunity. I could read a book out here. I step up to one of the shop counters, the gold and silver jewelry twinkling in the glare. Twenty years ago, the only gold we saw was in the sparkle of the sun on the lake, the only silver in the underside of clouds. Now, inside the glass cases lie dainty bracelets, jewel-studded necklaces, tie tacks engraved with cursive monograms, and watches that look too heavy to wear. The shopkeeper sits on a stool behind the case, holding a mirror to her face and carefully applying mascara. She doesn’t pause in what she’s doing. Her voice is flat and bored.
“Cô mua
d
i.”
Lady, buy. I step away, wander here and there until I reach the open plaza that faces the lake.
When I was a child, we’d sometimes see Russians lumbering along these sidewalks. We used to run along beside them, yelling, “
Liên Xô!
”— Soviet! Sometimes we raised our fingers over our heads and wiggled them, pretending we were communicating telepathically with beings from another planet. Come in, Commander Astro! Can you hear me? I’m Commander Astro now, but lacking nerve. I don’t even know how to get across the street without being run down by a passing vehicle. I stand for long minutes, stepping off the curb, then back on, then off again. The traffic never even pauses. Finally, two young women, graceful in high heels and tight skirts, appear beside me. Talking, they don’t notice me cowering beside them. When they cross, I cross with them. They follow some kind of ritual, an unspoken communion between pedestrian and driver that I can’t understand. For so many years in exile, I’ve considered myself the sophisticated one. I own a house in the United States of America. I get 327 channels on my cable TV. I can turn on my computer and order books over Amazon in dozens of languages. But now I feel like the country girl in the city, uncertain and all alone, nothing to look at, bumbling. Why didn’t I get a stylish haircut before I came? Why don’t I wear mascara?
On the far side of the road, the girls and I step up onto the sidewalk. They turn one way and I turn the other. The air feels fresher here. I walk to the south and west, along Le Thai To, past a café with blinking lights, past a vendor grilling dried squid, its sharp, rich aroma rising in the air, past a police kiosk where two young officers play
d
á c
Ë
u,
which—and
if you lived here
171
I’ve never made the connection until now—looks a lot like the game Americans call Hacky Sack. Couples wander along the sidewalk holding hands. Small children, even at nine o’clock at night, make wobbly circles on bikes, their parents poised to catch a fall. Hoan Kiem is a good lake, an uncomplicated lake, not the lake with so much grief in it. If I stare out at the twinkling water long enough, I can pretend that I’m eighteen again, that not a single thing has changed.
I walk quickly now, with purpose. I don’t lie to myself. I know where I’m going. At the intersection of Trang Thi, I’m grateful to see a traffic light, and I manage to get across. A block farther on, I come to a small open square with a simple playground in the center of it. A policeman, alone in a kiosk, stares out at me. A few yards on, I reach the corner of Quang Trung. In this part of town, the streets are nearly as empty and quiet as the streets of the Hanoi I remember. I stop at the corner and look across.
On the other side of Quang Trung lie three cafés in a neat little row. A teenage boy squats by the curb, washing dirty dishes with a hose. I walk along the curb until I’m directly opposite the first. The sign above the door reads Café Lan, of course. Low wicker chairs and tables are scattered across the sidewalk, lit only by the dim light of a streetlamp. All but one of the tables are empty. Here, three men smoke cigarettes, waiting for the coffee to drip through metal filters into the pools of sweetened condensed milk in their glasses below. I walk across the street, stand in front of the café, gazing in. Now I notice it again, that familiar scent from the airport. Tobacco! Have I always thought it smelled so good? I imagine my father, thirty years ago, smoking a Song Cau cigarette, patiently waiting for his coffee. My father as a younger man, sitting with his friends every morning that I can remember, waiting out the rain or the heat, discussing the latest news, reciting poetry. After my mother died, he did little else, really. She had kept the family going and after she was gone, he left that role to my sister. Lan was twenty-two, a widow already, and capable. But she lacked my mother’s ability to accomplish things without seem-ing petulant and bossy about it. Most days, my father retreated to the Army Club just after breakfast. Sometimes we didn’t see him again until dinnertime, when he’d arrive home with a bag full of mandarin oranges,
or candied plums, or books—treats rather than necessities—which made Lan seethe.
Inside the café, a teenage girl wipes tables. The three men stop their talking to stare at me. The first few notes of “Let It Be” float from the speakers on top of a small refrigerator in the corner of the room. On the street behind me, a lone motorbike whistles past. One of the men yells to the girl, “Hey, kid, you’ve got a customer.”