If You Lived Here (37 page)

On Bat Dan Street, we go into Café Phuong, all wicker chairs and greenery and soft-focus photographs of landscapes and beautiful women: another spot on the Hanoi map that didn’t exist when I was young. A cou-ple of men sit at a corner table with coffee and cigarettes. One of them raps his finger against an item in the morning paper. The other is shaking his head. A teenage girl stands behind the counter, wiping it with a rag. She’s tall and graceful and wears her hair in pigtails, a new style that Marcy has adopted back home. “Dr. Dario,” she says in English. “What’s up?”

“Not much. Two black coffees, please, Stephanie, with fresh milk.” He looks down at me, then explains, “She studies at the International School.” We take a table by the window. Outside, the rain begins, loud and sudden, like the overture of a symphony. Inside the air-conditioned room, the temperature feels artificial, almost too cold. On the wall beside us hangs a photograph of a woman wearing a white
áo dài
and sitting on the beach. She hugs her knees and cocks her head so that the wind blows her long hair off her face and into the air behind her. Unadorned and glamorous, she is half peasant, half beauty queen, vaguely familiar. I wish I’d put

on lipstick.

“That’s Phuong,” the doctor tells me. “I delivered her daughter.” Stupidly, I glance at the girl behind the counter. “No. Stephanie is Phuong’s older daughter. I’m talking about the baby, Christina. Phuong’s an actress. Did you see
Indochine
?”

I shake my head, but I remember Gladys talking about it. She complained that it made the Communists into heroes.

“Phuong played the wife of a mandarin in Hue,” the doctor says. I shrug. “Look—” He makes me get up and examine another photo farther down the wall, a black-and-white still from the movie, the beauty queen as colonial princess.

“Maybe I’ve seen her in some other movie,” I say.

He pulls out my chair and I sit back down. Stephanie has delivered our coffee. “Phuong’s husband, Dat, is a photographer,” he says. “Actually, quite a good one.”

I’m Vietnamese. I should be the one explaining the facts of contemporary culture. “They have sugar?” I ask, glancing around the room. I’m looking for what I’ve found in all the other cafés I’ve visited here: a clump-filled bowl with an ant or two crawling through it, a spoon encrusted from too many dunkings in too many cups of coffee. Dario pushes a little wicker box across the table. Inside, I find sugar cubes wrapped in rose-colored paper. Imported, the label indicates, from Japan. As I said, this is not my Vietnam.

Dario picks up his coffee and leans back in his chair. “Why haven’t we gone to see your father?” he asks.

The cigarette smokers have begun to debate Argentina’s odds in the World Cup. From somewhere in the rooms behind the café, I can hear the sound of running water, shrieking and laughter, the movie star’s baby taking a bath. I stir one, then another, sugar cube into my cup. Dario sips his coffee and watches me. We have come to a crossroads and perhaps he knows it. If I lie—“Actually, his health improved. He doesn’t need anything”—I would discharge his debt to me for serving as a translator at his clinic. We could finish our coffee and say good-bye and never have to bother each other again. It’s a convincing answer, more or less, and satisfying, too. It frees him of awkward obligations and frees me of the humili—

ations of the truth. I open my mouth, but I don’t lie. I look at the doctor. “It’s a long story,” I tell him. And the route that I choose is the one that takes us past every single ugly thing.

Now that I’m initiating the second in my string of confessions (two in less than two months), it should be easier. I should be able to distance myself—perform it, so to speak. Actually, it’s worse. The first time, I knew Shelley well enough to trust her, and so, sitting in that van in Virginia, I told her my story as if I were alone there, as if I were speaking to the clouds above our heads. Today, I am a guilty person standing before a judge. But why this man? Why here? Why now? Because he seems capable of hearing it. Because I’m not ready to say good-bye yet. Because he seems to want to know me, and this story is me.

And so I talk. I don’t skip anything. The man listens without responding. At one point he nods, but only to indicate that he hears. A while later, as Stephanie wipes a nearby table, he orders a bottle of water for each of us. When I finally finish, the rain has stopped. Sunlight pours over the street outside, making all the wet things sparkle. I feel as if I’ve exposed every inch of my body. My worn-out body, panting, alive, and surprisingly thankful, more or less.

Dario lifts a hand and massages his eyes. He looks very tired—not old, but not young, either—and disappointed, too. I may have snatched from him the hope that I’d be different. But I don’t know for sure. The man is three continents away from me, at least.

The clock on the wall says 8:47. I unscrew the top from my water and drink the whole thing without a pause, not so much out of desire as out of a need to focus on something else.

“Sorry,” I say. “You just ask me to come have coffee.”

He shrugs. “Maybe you always tell this story over coffee.”

I smile, shake my head. I press my bottle cap into the skin on my arm, lift it, and look at the circle left on my skin.

“Why did you tell me?” he wants to know.

I make another circle on my skin. Then another. “You didn’t understand me right,” I say.

“Now I understand you because I know that story?”

“Something like that.”

I would like to find a way to leave, or find a way to let him leave, but the door opens then with a blast of hot air and a woman bursts inside, her arms full of shopping bags, and spots Dario. “Hello there! Finally, you’ve come to visit me. How long has it been since you promised?” She calls toward Stephanie behind the counter, instructing in Vietnamese, “Child, go get the rest of the things off the motorbike.” The bags slide to the floor and then she is standing over our table and I recognize her.

Dario says, “Phuong, meet my friend Mai, from North Carolina, U.S.A.” “Xuan Mai?” she asks.

“
Ch
Þ
Ánh
?” I stand up, slipping into the old form of address: Older Sister Anh. As if it’s only been a day or two since I saw her.

“You’ve grown up,” she says, wrapping her arms around me.

Anh sits down in the chair next to mine, holding my hand. She was pretty then, and is beautiful now, as if it took her a decade or two simply to grow into it. Now, just back from the market, sweaty and mussed, her beauty seems thoughtless, more destiny than art. Still gripping my hand, she turns to the astonished Dario and explains, “We’ve known each other since we were children.”

“But you don’t even seem surprised to see her,” he says.

She puts a hand to my cheek, then lets it drop to her knee, smiling at me gently. “I’m happy, that’s all. But, no, not so surprised. We Vietnamese miss Vietnam. People come back. Even Xuan Mai came back, eventually.”

He looks at me. “Xuan Mai?”

I say, “That what everybody always call me here.” I can’t even describe how it feels to hear my name again. Xuan Mai. My whole name.

Anh says, “Mai is just a plain old apricot blossom, but
Xuân Mai
means ‘apricot blossom blooming in the spring.’ It’s almost like a poem, you see?” Before he can answer, though, she continues, “Xuan Mai’s sis-ter, Lan, and I are best friends. We used to play Hai Ba Trung—Vietnam’s warrior queens—out on the dykes beside the river. Xuan Mai would fol-low us and beg to play. Remember, Xuan Mai? If we were feeling nice, we’d let you be our chief ambassador.”

I nod. “And if you not feeling nice, you make me be the horse.”

“True, true!” she admits. She drops my hand, then cradles my chin in her palm. “You’ve gotten so lovely,” she muses. She turns to the doctor. “She was a scrawny thing. Isn’t she a beauty now?”

I stare down at my knees, willing the conversation to shift in a different direction. Dario says, “She is.” His voice sounds thoughtful, as if he’s actually considered the question.

Anh pokes at my shirt. “But these clothes!” she laughs. “Hanoi girls are so modern now. They wear short skirts and tight blouses. They want to be like Hong Kong starlets. Xuan Mai goes to America and comes back looking like 1975!”

I force myself to look at Anh. “Why you change your name to Phuong?” I ask.

She leans back in her chair, waving away the question. “You can’t be Anh and be an actress,” she says, as if merely asserting the obvious. But the doctor looks confused. “Xuan Mai, tell him. Anh—what’s a similar name in English?”

“Gladys.”

“And Phuong? What’s something glamorous?” “Gwyneth.”

Anh likes that. “Yes. Definitely. Gwyneth!” She looks at the doctor. “Now you understand?”

“In Italy, Gina would change her name to Eleanora.”

“It’s only common sense,” says Anh, as if the Italian names actually mean something to her. “I always planned to be an actress.”

Anh and my sister were among the smartest and most ambitious of the girls chosen to study in the Soviet Union in 1973. Anh had a knack for languages and was being groomed for the diplomatic corps. Lan, unlike anyone else in my family, excelled in the sciences, and the Vietnamese government picked her to travel to Moscow to study physics. Then, a few months before she was scheduled to leave, Lan fell in love with Tan, whose family lived a few doors down. We’d known him, I suppose, my whole life. But Tan, who was two years older than Lan, never joined the neighborhood children who roamed the streets as guerrillas or cops and spies. Instead, he used to sit on the front stoop of his house, constructing buildings out of scraps of cardboard, wire, and wood. Then, when he turned seventeen, he left for the war. Three years later, in 1973, when he returned on leave, he was taller and more muscular, as quiet as ever, but confident, too. I think that Lan was drawn to the things he knew but wouldn’t tell her, the ugliness of whatever was going on in the south. Despite our familiarity with bomb shelters, evacuations, and the occasional low, booming rumble of airplanes or bombs, Lan and I had never seen the war itself. She complained that we were watching a play from backstage: You knew what was going on, but you never got to see it. The night before Tan was scheduled to go back to the front, they found an official to marry them. The next morning, Lan went to the station to see him off. Then she enlisted as a sapper along the Truong Son Trail, which the Americans called the Ho Chi Minh, and she left a week later. Two months after Lan left, Anh and the other students went to the Soviet Union. I never saw her after that.

“So you changed your name in Russia?” I ask.

“In Paris. I started doing theater, comedy mostly, in Moscow. After the war ended, I met some diplomats from France and they got me a scholarship to study in Paris. I made a passionate appeal about wanting to perform on behalf of my country and somehow I managed to convince the Vietnamese authorities to let me go. What did they have to lose? I already spoke Russian and, through no cost of their own, I could learn to speak French. So I went to Paris in 1976 and immediately met an American named Joe, who ran the French office of American Express. We had a love affair, totally Romeo and Juliet, you know? He taught me English. My French is awful, really.”

“When did you come back to Vietnam?”

She turns around and calls to Stephanie, “Darling, bring us some croissants, and that bunch of lychees!” Then she grabs her stomach. “I’m starved. Tonight’s my father-in-law’s death anniversary and I’ve been at the market for hours. So? Oh, I came back in 1980. I’d split up with Joe, then Mike, then—what was his name?—Hal; for some reason, I liked the American guys. And Paris wasn’t a bad gig. I got plenty of work in theater and even some in film. But, I just thought, enough already. I’m

sick of playing whores, you know? The whole Madame Butterfly bit gets old after a while. I came back so I could get some serious roles. And my mother was sick. After eight years, you know, it was time.”

Stephanie delivers the lychees and the warm croissants. Anh has hers in her mouth before the plate is even on the table. She says, “Eat. Both of you. They’re fresh, this morning.” She looks at Dario. “Even the European will be satisfied.” He and I taste our croissants, which are so fresh and light that each bite disintegrates into nothingness as soon as it touches the tongue.

Anh rests her hand on mine. “Have you seen Lan?” I nod.

She takes another bite of croissant, glancing at the doctor, then back to me.

“He knows everything,” I say. “Everything?”

He lifts a hand into the air and lets it drop against the table, saying, “Only recently.” I am so afraid that he will leave, but he doesn’t.

“I just saw her yesterday. She seemed kind of distracted, but she didn’t tell me you’re here,” says Anh. She pulls a couple of lychees off the bunch, peels them open, and hands one to the doctor and one to me.

“She not happy about it.”

“No. She wouldn’t be,” she says. “Come on. Eat.”

The lychees are plump and sweet, heavy with juice. The three of us devour them as if it were our occupation. Our eyes focus, our hands move efficiently, peeling, tearing the flesh with our teeth, depositing the smooth brown pits and rose-colored skins into a growing pile amid the dirty plates, the cups of cold coffee and empty water bottles. It’s convenient. No one has to look at anyone else.

By the time Anh returned from France in 1980, she tells us, My Hoa had been dead a year. At that time, Lan worked as project manager at the Institute for Marine Sciences. There, she ran a Swedish-funded study of shrimp farming that, as Anh remembers, was expensive, unpromising, and likely to continue for a decade, at least. Lan didn’t complain. In fact, she seemed perfectly content to fill her days with work and caring for my

father, who, frail but also newly ambitious, had decided to learn Chinese so that he could translate into Vietnamese a famous dictionary of Chinese idioms. “The two of them were like robots,” Anh tells me. “Their bodies moved, but their brains didn’t have anything but data in them.”

Then, in 1986, Australia and the Institute for Marine Sciences launched a joint-venture partnership based on preliminary results of the shrimp-farming project. Lan was sent to Sydney on a three-month study tour and, while there, fell in love with an Australian colleague, a Vietnamese-born man named Chung who happened to be married. Lan returned to Vietnam pregnant and gave birth to their daughter, Lien, the next year. “That’s when she finally came out of it,” Anh says. “I don’t mean she got over My Hoa’s death. She’ll never get over that. But she acted as if she were under a spell for seven years. Lien woke her up.”