If You Lived Here (7 page)

I nod. I may not be as pretty as my mother, but all I have to do is look in the mirror to see her. And as for My Hoa, well, sometimes I wish I didn’t see her so clearly.

Hannah Ellis hands me the book. Its textured cover feels weighty and damp, worn smooth from years of use. “Page forty-one, female bone structure. We’ll start there.”

It happened in 1979, on the third anniversary of my mother’s death. On that morning, My Hoa drank four cups of
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the roasted rice water that, because of her sensitive stomach, we often made for her. My sister, Lan, had gotten up first, grilled the dry rice, eaten a bowl of leftover rice herself, then hurried off to work. Our father, Bo, left soon after, anxious to secure a spot at the veterans’ center for his morning game of Chinese chess. By the time My Hoa woke at seven, I’d already poured hot water over the grilled rice and let it steep in a glass. I dressed my niece in the same yellow shirt and shorts that she wore most summer days, the outfit Lan washed at night and hung to dry. Then I poured the
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into an old teacup and handed it to her. She knew that she and Khoi and I would spend the day in Unification Park, and as she perched on her stool in the middle of the room, she beat her feet against the concrete floor impatiently.

My Hoa wanted the time to pass faster, but I wanted it to slow down. Khoi had found a boat to take him away from here, and this evening, with nothing but a small book bag over his shoulder, he would take a bus to a village near Hai Phong, climb on a fishing boat, and sail away. He had a rich uncle in Los Angeles or California—I didn’t know the difference then—a man who owned two Fords and a house with an entire empty room that Khoi could sleep in. For months, we had planned to make our escape together, but over the past few days I’d changed my mind. As much as I hated life in Hanoi, I couldn’t leave my family here, and neither my father nor my sister showed the slightest inclination to leave Vietnam. Bo had abandoned his belief in Communism, but he remained loyal to a government that had given a semiliterate veteran a good education. Besides, he planned to reunite with my mother in the afterlife and he didn’t know how they’d find each other if he died overseas. As for my sister, she had rejected a prestigious scholarship to study in Moscow. Why would she leave the country in a leaky boat? Khoi didn’t argue with them, or with me, but he didn’t cancel my place on the boat, either. Just in case. Still, expecting that I wouldn’t change my mind, he promised that in five or ten years, after he made thousands of dollars, he would entice my entire family away, and when we got to America, he would marry me. I smiled as if I believed him, but we were only nineteen. Five or ten years seemed impossibly long, and I’d heard about the girls in America.

I dressed while My Hoa gulped down the liquid in her cup. I filled it again, and she finished it again, laughing. She was small for her age, and looked exactly like her father, Tan, a slight and clever man who had made it home from war only to die of his wounds a few years later. None of us ever discussed the resemblance, but I always remembered it when, late at night, I saw my sister staring down at her sleeping daughter. I had never lost a man I loved and so I came to imagine that this ability to see him and not see him simultaneously would constitute both the best and the worst of it.

With My Hoa’s eyes following me around the room, I put on my only good shirt, a white cotton button-down on which I’d embroidered lavender flowers. Standing in front of the mirror, I pulled my hair back with a

Bulgarian barrette, then let it down, then pulled it back again, considering how this skinny face and skeleton body would be the last thing that Khoi would see of me. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be beautiful. I wanted the delicate features of my friend Thuy, the rounded breasts of my neighbor Hang. I wanted hair like my sister’s, which was full of body and always shone. I went to Lan’s drawer and fished a tiny secret bottle of perfume from underneath her clothes. Not knowing what else to do with it, I rubbed some on my cheeks. My Hoa, wide-eyed and serious, stuck her hand in her teacup and splashed
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all over her face.

“Auntie!” she called. “More tea.” I looked at the clock. We would be late to meet Khoi, but I couldn’t turn her down. In our household, the task of getting nutrients into My Hoa had become an obsession. The three of us—Lan, Bo, and I—had developed a dozen tricks to get her to eat and drink. Late at night, while she lay sleeping in Lan’s bed, we would recount our successes like pickpockets after a day of thieving. Lan could get her to take a few bites of porridge by distracting her with stories. Bo slipped pieces of bread into her mouth while getting her dressed. I plied her with cups of
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making her feel grown up by calling it “tea.” Surreptitious feeding. It was both our entertainment and our central task in life. Now My Hoa had asked for more. I put a few spoonfuls of grilled rice into the glass, poured more hot water over it, then blew on it. As the liquid cooled, My Hoa walked over and squatted down beside me, peering into the glass. “Pretty tea,” she murmured.

While My Hoa waited to drink the
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I picked up Bo’s metal toolbox and sorted through the family’s food ration coupons. In anticipation of my mother’s death anniversary, we had been saving our meat ration coupons all month so that we could eat beef tonight for dinner. The government called religion reactionary, but my mother had always insisted that the family commemorate its death anniversaries by making offerings and lighting incense before an altar to the ancestors. After my mother died, we lost our momentum. Incense was hard to come by in a city of professed atheists, and so, as each anniversary approached, we simply saved up our coupons to have a big meal. Being the cook in

the family, I would ride my bike to the market, stand in line for hours, and buy what we needed. Tonight, as Khoi was boarding a boat to leave Vietnam forever, my family and I would sit on the floor in our house in Hanoi, eating beef for dinner.

By a few minutes before nine, My Hoa was ready. I stuffed some rice wrapped in a banana leaf into my bag and set her into the rattan child’s seat on the back of the bicycle. I tied a piece of pink mosquito netting over her face to keep the dust out of her eyes, then walked the bike through our courtyard, out the front door, and down the alley to the street. The sun had not even appeared above the roofs of the houses to the east and my clean shirt already stuck in patches to my back. We rode down past Hoan Kiem Lake, then out Ba Trieu Street. At the gates of Unification Park, I heard my name, turned, and saw Khoi. He was perched on his bicycle, with one foot on a peddle and the other foot touching the ground to keep himself balanced. Hanoi boys always sat that way, leaning their elbows on the handlebars while they waited for a train to pass or for a mother or sister to finish bargaining for a piece of fish. Khoi, though, had a grace that made even a pause on a bicycle look beautiful. That one toe seemed to hold him to the earth. At that moment, he was nothing but light and air to me. I felt that if I reached out to touch him, he would disappear.

My Hoa, who was not a little girl to wait for anything, marched through the front gates of the park, assuming Khoi and I would follow, which we did. She was still young enough to believe the world belonged to her and, in recent weeks, had become more and more able to express it. At home, she appropriated everything. She had an old burlap rice sack in which she kept a collection of different colored bits of string, a tattered book of poetry, three of her grandfather’s socks, my comb, a pencil, seven chopsticks, and a neatly folded piece of newspaper containing a lock of her mother’s hair. Khoi, who called her “little princess,” made dolls for her out of kindling sticks, fabric scraps, and wire. Every evening before going to bed, My Hoa would lean all the dolls against the wall, sit down on the floor, and stare at them. She called them “my people.”

The three of us walked down the shady main path of the park and

headed toward the swings. Every few seconds, I glanced at Khoi, wanting to memorize how he held his hands in his pockets and the way his rubber sandals kicked up dust from the path. Today, he walked along beside me in the park. Tomorrow, he would be no more real to me than a ghost, than someone dead. Letters did not arrive from America, so what was the difference, really, between going to America and being dead? The thought of it made my mouth go dry. I had to turn, then, and look at My Hoa, telling myself that, even without Khoi, I would still have my niece. I would still have something precious left.

My parents worshipped learning. Throughout my childhood, my father memorized poetry, and my mother, who could never hope to travel, continued to work on her French. On her side, those values made sense, because she came from an educated family. But my father was the son of farmers; he claimed he could trace his proletarian lineage back to the time of the apes. My mother’s ideals had rubbed off on him, though, and he believed in them as avidly as any convert. That’s why I don’t imagine that either of them would be impressed by the fact that I own a little grocery in Wilmington, North Carolina. How does that elevate me? they would want to know. How does that help to improve the world?

Well, I would just say that this business suits me. I appreciate the clar-ity of my responsibilities. I appreciate the limits, too. And I like the way my position entitles me to observe the little dramas of society—my customers, Gladys and Marcy, the guests on
Oprah
—without having to get involved in any of them. Lately, it’s become a little harder to keep a distance, though.

One afternoon, about a week after my first visit to Hannah Ellis, Shelley walks through the door and says, without any other introduction, “I should tell you. I’m going to adopt a baby from Vietnam. I’ve been try-ing to find out about his homeland.”

Her face is bright, vulnerable, anxious for my response. I look away. Out in the parking lot, the glare of noon has begun to soften. Later in the day, I will get a rush of customers dashing in for bags of rice, or frozen

catfish, or chilies. Each time the door opens, it will sweep in some fresh scent of spring. But at this hour, the door stays mostly closed and the air inside remains processed and artificial. Is adoption, then, her reason for coming to my store? Am I, after all, merely a mine for information that some prospective mommy seeks about my homeland? A strange emotion washes over me, one I can only compare to the feeling I experienced, long ago, when I realized a favorite classmate visited my house only because she loved my mother’s cooking. I haven’t felt hurt in many years, but I recognize the emotion quite easily now.

And so I don’t respond as kindly as I could. “Why?” I ask.

The sarcasm in my voice is clear, perhaps even more pronounced than I intended. Her face colors. Her lips purse. She looks away, then back at me, her gaze steady. “I’ve always wanted a child,” she says simply. “And there’s a boy in Vietnam who needs a home.”

Now I experience a little bit of embarrassment, which I also haven’t felt in years.

We talk. I have heard about infertility, of course. You see it every few months on
Oprah,
but like the shows on alcoholism or Alzheimer’s, I watch for ten, twenty minutes, then switch it off. In my experience, we worried about getting pregnant, not about
not
getting pregnant. Of course, people failed to have children in Hanoi as well as here. I had a barren aunt, but no one talked about it. My father’s cousin left his wife because she couldn’t bear a child, and a lot of people considered his actions to be perfectly natural and just. I remember, too, the couple from Lao Cai who lived up the alley. We neighborhood kids solved the mys-tery of their childlessness by constructing a story even more bizarre: the
husband
and
wife
were actually
brother
and
sister
. I never considered the failure to have a child as anything resembling a tragedy. Love and death and war created tragedy. How could you mourn something that never even existed?

Shelley doesn’t use the word
tragedy,
either. She doesn’t present herself as a victim, or even as someone deserving of pity. She recites the litany of her experience with a straightforward, almost amused detachment. But the numbers pile on top of each other in what amounts to an avalanche

of suffering and bad luck. Five years of trying. Six pregnancies. Six miscarriages. Two failed surgical procedures. Four doctors. Three fertility clinics. Six rounds of hormones. Hundreds of injections. Thousands of dollars in medical bills for services not covered by insurance. A year spent begging her husband to adopt. A third successful pregnancy for her sis-ter, an event that precipitated her husband’s sudden, much appreciated, change of heart. And then, three months of wrangling with adoption agencies, ten hours of interviews with social workers, hundreds of pages of paperwork, eight months of waiting, five drives to Raleigh, three drives to Charlotte, two lost birth certificates, thousands of dollars in fees, and one failed adoption, only weeks before they hoped to leave to pick up a little girl from Europe.

“And then they told me about this little boy in Vietnam,” she says in a little sigh of exasperation, as if it’s the latest not-so-funny punch line in a never-ending set of pranks designed to keep her from actually having a child. I start to laugh, but the expression in her eyes surprises me. She doesn’t look defeated. She looks kind of hopeful. Hopeful without any kind of conviction, but hopeful nonetheless.

“I think you’ll get this boy,” I stammer. Even as I say it, I’m questioning myself. How could I know? Why should I care? I can’t know. But I do care. I do.