Only the Heart (3 page)

His family were all dead, so there was no one to pay the bribes, and … well, I guess he just ran out of reasons to keep living.

My father was luckier than most.

Our family was not particularly wealthy, but we were in business, and we were … comfortable, and even before the war ended we had already converted most of our wealth into gold, so we had enough to pay the bribes to all the officials, from the local Party bureaucrats to the head guard at the re-education camp itself. It took six months, but finally my father was freed.

Thanh Tran spent over ten years being “re-educated”, partly because he was an “intellectual”, but mainly because of his rank. My father would gladly have paid the bribes, if that was what it took, but the higher you had been in the system, the harder it got to buy your way out. And Thanh had been a colonel.

So Tran Van Thanh, intellectual, “war-criminal” and threat to the new order, watched the rice fields and the river through a chain-mesh fence for ten long years, listened to the re-education propaganda and wrote his famous first collection of poems.

And when he came out, we were long gone.

2

GHOST STORIES

LINH'S STORY

Some of my earliest memories are of the visits we made to Saigon. The war was still on, and the capital was … chaotic, I guess. With the American soldiers on leave and the business that they represented to the shops, the bars, the sidewalk food-vendors—and the girls—the streets were even more crammed and disorganised than they had been before the French left and the war escalated out of control.

Of course, I was only five or six at the time, so I don't remember the city before the war, but you pick up on what your parents say, and it becomes a part of your memory, almost as real as your own recollections.

“That was Huyen's house,” you say, like a parrot, though Huyen died years before you were born.

I do remember the visits, though: the long bus-ride from Rach Gia, where we lived; eight hours to travel about three hundred kilometres, waiting at the river-crossings for the barges to carry us across, while children my own age bargained with my parents over fruit and sweets and the delicious-smelling
bánh bao
. And then arriving at the centre of Saigon, drained from the travel-sickness, but excited all the same.

There was a life there that was different from the easy-paced existence of the coastal town I had spent my whole life becoming familiar with: the packed streets, the noise, the hundreds of bicycles and the tinny motor-scooters that wove in and out of each other's way, like strange buzzing insects. But almost no cars.

When everyone you know and everything you need is within walking distance, there is really no need to own a car, and that was always how it was. Very few people had ever ridden in a car, let alone owned one, even before the war.

The war had just made transport more difficult still. Apart from the few ancient buses and taxis, about the only vehicles with more than two wheels were the military ones: jeeps, trucks, the occasional car — every one with a uniformed driver.

It was a city in a country at war, tuned to the needs of the soldier.

People lived and breathed and did their shopping and went about their occupations as they had probably always done, but woven into everything was the war, and the business of war.

I remember, I was fascinated by the strange faces of the American soldiers. Especially the black ones …

*

14 July 1974
Saigon, South Vietnam

LINH

Sweating inside his uniform, the young GI sneaks a look at the clock on the building across the street.

Two more hours.

The passing crowd is a blur, and he blinks the sweat away from his eyes. If he could stand apart and look at himself, he would see the sheen on his dark skin, and the beads of perspiration marking the lines of his cheekbones and the ridges beneath his eyes.

But Corporal Travis Sloan cannot stand apart. He cannot stand anywhere but exactly where he has been ordered to stand. For two more hours. Guarding one of the buildings inside which his superiors sit planning how to make the best of a lost war.

Vaguely he hears music from one of the bars down the street. Jim Morrison and the Doors.

Come on Baby, light my fire …

He smiles ironically and continues to sweat.

And he notices, through the jostling crowd, a young Vietnamese girl, maybe five or six, standing quietly beside her mother, who carries on an animated conversation with another woman. The girl is staring straight at him. No embarrassment, no fear. Studying him. He feels like some strange specimen under a microscope. She stands, she stares, her almond eyes unblinking.

He has seen it before. The fascination of children with his size and the colour of his skin. But always, when he stares back, they look away, or hide behind the nearest adult.

Not this one. She holds his gaze, her face expressionless, taking in everything. For a few seconds he stares back, feeling the power of her self-possession like a physical force. Then he smiles, and winks at her across the crowded street.

She winks back, then pokes out her tongue. Just as a convoy of trucks moves past, blocking her from view.

Try to set the night on fire …

When the view is clear again, she is gone. He looks both ways along the street, but She has disappeared.

And he will never see her again.

Three weeks later, near a bombed-out village whose name he will never be told, he will lose his left leg below the knee to the shattering pain of a sniper's bullet. He will almost die from shock and infection, and it will earn him a medal and a free trip back Stateside.

But through days of pain, in the half-world between agony and the morphine dream, with death beckoning, and the long tunnel stretching before him, through some trick of the mind, the memory of that tiny face, those almond eyes and that short encounter will stay with him, holding him back. Delaying the journey long enough for the doctors to claim their victory.

And years later, when his own child is born, though her skin will be dark like her father's, she will have the same eyes. Almond eyes. Eyes like her mother's.

Like those of a tiny girl he glimpsed once across a crowded street, in a doomed city, near the end of a useless, brutal war …

*

LINH'S STORY

In Saigon we got to sleep upstairs. It was a kind of attic room, and they rolled out thin straw mats for us kids to lie on. Two to a mat — top and tail.

But we had to wait of course. The men used the room for gambling — cards mainly; blackjack and Chinese poker. Sometimes it went on late into the night, and we had to hang around downstairs until they were finished and we could go up to bed.

There were compensations. Usually the winner would celebrate by sending Phuong or one of my cousins out to one of the street-vendors to buy
bánh ú
or some other treat for supper. There was usually change which he would give to the messenger. If it was Phuong, she would often share it with me.

I loved those late suppers, and the feeling of security that being there gave me. But I was only young, and exciting as it was, sometimes I just wouldn't make the distance.

I remember lots of times being woken up where I'd fallen asleep on the floor behind the shrine or under the window, and being taken upstairs to bed, secure in my father's arms.

That was before he disappeared one night, and never came back …

They were fun times.

If we got to bed early enough, and we were still awake, Phuong or one of the older kids would tell us ghost stories. Really creepy tales of lost souls and monsters that looked like beautiful humans — until they got you in their clutches.

But I wouldn't pull the pillow up around my throat, like the other girls, when they told how the fangs bit into the hero's neck and the blood began to spurt. I'd always ask questions, trying to satisfy my curiosity about things that struck me as a bit dumb.

Like, “Why would anyone be stupid enough to follow a beautiful woman into a dark cave, when everyone knew it was haunted?” or “Why would any spirit powerful enough to destroy a whole village choose to live on top of a cold, windy mountain-top, instead of down in the valley?”

In the end, they got into the habit of telling me to shut up before I even opened my mouth. I suppose questions of logic do ruin the atmosphere of a scary story.

Toan was too young to think of asking those sorts of questions. And you could tell the stories scared him, even when he tried to act really brave. He always gave himself away. A couple of times he even asked me to go with him to the toilet, because he was too scared to go alone. He whispered it in my ear, and I never told a soul.

It doesn't do to show your cousins and their friends that their stories have scared you. They know how to make the most of it later on.

Still, it was pretty obvious that they'd scared him. He hadn't developed his acting skills yet. Which meant that he was no challenge.

I think they were more interested in scaring me. But they just never could. Maybe I had no imagination, I don't know.

Toan reckons I was just born tough.

You have to love him. He always says the right things. If he wasn't my cousin, and I wasn't already … attached, I'd probably end up marrying him, in spite of the fact that he's eighteen months younger than me. As it is, I'll just have to make sure he chooses the right girl. The way they're throwing themselves at him just at the moment, it would be easy for him to make a mistake. It's the sort of thing that happens when you become an “overnight celebrity” …

Look, just stop me any time I start rambling, will you? I get side-tracked easily. And I doubt you're the slightest bit interested in Vo An Toan's love life — even if I am.

I was just making the point that I was never afraid of stories. Or real life. I guess I took after my mother.

Even losing my father didn't break her.

It was right near the end of seventy-three. He was doing reconnaissance for the army, and when he was reported missing, everyone in the house knew what it meant.

My mother sat in her room for three days. She didn't eat and she didn't speak to anyone. I don't know if she slept, even. They wouldn't let me go to her.

Then on the fourth day she came out of the room, lit three sticks of incense in front of the goddess, said prayers for my father, and went on with her life.

In the years that followed, many men were drawn to her beauty, but she always cut them off with the same line.

“My husband will return …”

I don't know if she really believed it, but no one ever saw her cry.

No one ever saw
me
cry, either. I made certain they weren't around when I did …

But I really loved the city. It was so … alive. Even with the war on, and the news getting worse daily.

I was a kid, and it was fun being there with my cousins and the children of our parents' friends. Even if the stories were dumb.

After 1975 we only went back to Saigon the one time. The communists renamed it
Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh
— Ho Chi Minh City — in honour of their dead leader, and for us it was like the old city died with the name. But the memories remained, dragging their feet around inside our heads like the ghosts from all those midnight stories.

3

PRIME POSITION

TOAN'S STORY

My father was lucky. If you can call six months in a re-education camp lucky.

In some countries, he said, they wouldn't have wasted their time “re-educating” him. They'd just have taken him out and shot him. The winners make the rules — on torture, murder … whatever.

But there wasn't too much of that after the war. At least, not in our part of the country. Maybe everyone had had their fill of killing in the long years before.

Of course, getting shot was still a real possibility.

But that wasn't why we decided to leave.

It was the uncertainty. Never knowing from one day to the next what was going to be demanded of you. Never being able to speak your thoughts without looking over your shoulder first. You'd think that dying was the worst thing you could imagine happening, but I guess for some people it isn't. For some people it isn't even pain they fear.

It's a future stretching out ahead of you without any hope of freedom.

I know. Freedom is just a word. One that politicians love to use to justify things they can't justify any other way. The communists were fighting for freedom — so was my father. So were the Americans … and every soldier since the first caveman hit someone over the head with a sharp rock.

But it's a real thing. And in the end, it's all about who has control. Of what you own, of what you build. Of who you are.

Take my grandfather. He wasn't a wealthy man, but everything he had he'd built from nothing. He hadn't inherited it, he hadn't stolen it. He'd earned it. It was his. At least, that was how he saw it.

Then, at the age of sixty-nine, reality struck.

For most people it might not have seemed like much, but to my grandfather it was devastating. His shop — our home — was a three-storey structure on the main street of Rach Gia. So when the new government decided to put up a propaganda post — a pair of those huge speakers they use to broadcast the Party line to the masses — where could be more perfect than the roof of my grandfather's home? There was no discussion; they just arrived one day and began assembling it.

I remember he stood in the street all day, looking up as they worked.

After that, the broadcasts and the music became a part of our existence, but my grandfather never mentioned them, never reacted. As if he could deny they existed.

Even though he died inside a little every time the speakers thundered into life.

I loved my grandfather.

He was full of great stories.

Like the time my mother was going off at me for not doing something she'd already told me to do a dozen times. I was only a kid, but I was learning fast. I knew what was women's work, and I knew I was on my way to being a man.

My grandfather just looked at my mother, shook his head and took me aside.

“It isn't man's work …”I began, but he put his fingers to my lips.

“And you are not yet a man. So you cannot use it as an excuse to be lazy.”

I'd already had the lecture a hundred times from my mother.
Being the youngest son makes you spoiled and lazy …
I didn't expect to get it again. Not from my grandfather. He was supposed to be on my side.

He stared at me for a long time. But then he smiled, and I could sense a story coming.

“In China there was once a lazy young man,” he began. “He came from a wealthy family and he was so lazy that he was famous all through the province. But he was not satisfied.

“ ‘I have heard,' he told his father, ‘that in a cave in the mountains near Shanglin, there lives an old man who is a master of laziness. I want to go there and learn from him, that I might know all the secrets of my calling.' And because his father refused him nothing, he had his servants carry his son to the cave — for the young man was, of course, far too lazy to walk there.

“Now the master sat at the back of the cave, doing nothing — which was his particular skill — when he saw the young man enter, walking backwards. ‘What do you want with me?' the master asked.

“ ‘I want to learn all the secrets of laziness,' the young man replied.

“The master leaned lazily on his elbow and looked up at the young man's back. ‘Before I agree to teach you,' he said, ‘you must answer me one question.'

“ ‘Ask it,' the boy replied.

“ ‘When you entered my cave, you walked in backwards. Unless I am to take it as a sign of disrespect, I must know why.'

“ ‘I did not know if you would agree to teach me,' said the young man. ‘I walked in backwards so that if you refused I would not have to bother turning around to walk out. Now, will you teach me?'

“The old man shook his head. ‘I can teach you nothing,' he said. ‘But if you will sit down, perhaps you can teach me.'

My grandfather looked at me for a few seconds, then smiled again.

“You have a lot to learn about being lazy, Toan,” he said. “So for now, do what your mother says.”

I wonder if he would have come with us if he had lived. I like to think he would.

*

10 June 1977
Rach Gia

GRANDPA

The old man stands in the street and looks up at what he has built. In sixty-nine years he has come such a long way. Yet it feels like no distance at all.

Behind him, the main street runs down to the sea, out of sight behind the rows of buildings, but he has his back to the onshore breeze. Slowly, he tears his gaze from everything he has achieved, and stares northward in the direction of his past.

Shinan, southern China. A small farm, a string of poor harvests. And then the devastation of the last year's flood. No prospects beyond poverty.

Being the youngest son in a family blessed with five boys and cursed with as many girls — left the young Chau with few choices. So, at the age of fourteen, armed with his father's gruff blessing and a few days' food, he made his way to the sea-port of Beihei, and found work on the
Albatross,
a trader plying the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea.

It was the 1920s and trade was good, but the sea is not the life for a Shinan farmer's son, and when the ship berthed one evening at Rach Gia, the boy saw his chance.

Three days later the
Albatross
weighed anchor and sailed — minus its youngest crew-member — and the town had a new citizen.

Working for a French store-owner, the boy learned quickly the art of buying and selling, and the value of smiling when you really wanted to frown. He even learned the language of the city, and the strange, musical language of his employer's family.

So a few years later, when the Great Depression scoured Europe, and his employer fled to Paris, never to return, Grandpa was ready. He rented a small store in the prime position on the town's main street, and within five years he had made enough to buy the building. Another five and he had made enough to knock it down, to build a larger shop and a home for his young wife. Two storeys of living space above a thriving business. One of the tallest buildings on the north side of the street. The foundation for his future. His family's future.

And now, almost half a century later, he stands in the street and watches that future slipping inexorably away.

On the roof, sweating in the hot sun and murmuring curses to each other, a small group of men is manoeuvring into place a huge, red loudspeaker.

He has not asked for it to be placed there. He does not want it there. But in these times refusal is not an option.

The shop is in the prime position, and its three-storey-high roof towers over the street. An ideal spot to place a speaker if it is to broadcast its wisdom to a waiting populace.

Be thankful that they have taken no more than a portion of your roof, when they have the power to take the whole building…

Tuyet, his wife.

Things are never as bad as we allow them to appear.

Sometimes he wonders what he would have done all these years without her gentle optimism.

Accept what must be borne; solve what is not understood. Face each day as a new beginning …

But at some point a man grows too old for new beginnings. That is why a wife must give him sons …

The leader of the working party, a young peasant with rotten teeth and foul-smelling breath, moves up beside him and stands staring up at the building.

Without looking at the old man, he begins to speak, parroting the lines he has been fed, testing the weight of his power.

“ ‘Property is theft.' Do you know who said that, old man?”

He knows. He has heard it all before. All the lines, all the theories. All the propaganda. He knows, but he says nothing. This man is not interested in having a conversation. His words are weapons, not bridges.

“It was Karl Marx.” Now he turns and faces the old man, his breath a gust of contagion. “Why they let you hang on to the building at all is beyond me. But make the most of it. Things can change. If I was in charge …”

He shakes his head and trails off, as if the dream of some future advancement makes conversation with this remnant of the old order superfluous.

And the old man masks a frown with a smile, as he learned to do so many years ago.

Later that evening the technicians test the speaker, playing a burst of martial music that shakes the walls and fills the upstairs rooms with thunder. A disembodied voice utters some proclamation that the old man tries not to hear, though it vibrates in his bones like the voice of doom.

*

TOAN'S STORY

My grandfather died not long after my father was released from the camp. I think perhaps he just wanted to hang on that long, to make sure the family would be in good hands.

He was pretty old. And in a few short months his whole world had be turned upside down. It must have been hard for him to adjust. He lived with the constant fear that someday soon the authorities might decide that enough was enough, and nationalise his home, just as they had done with so many other properties.

They had the power to do it. Just as they had the power to strip the wealth from people overnight.

One day you were rich, the next day … everyone was equal. And the way they did it was so deadly efficient. If it wasn't that they were trying to destroy your life, you could almost admire the simplicity of it.

My mother explained it to me once.

There was no warning, she said. Overnight they changed the currency — all the notes and the coins. Next morning, all the old money was worthless and only the new kind was acceptable. On the day of the change, each family was allowed to exchange just two hundred
dòng
for the new money, and that was it. It didn't matter how much cash you had hidden away, you could only change two hundred, and the rest was just so much paper and metal. Rich or poor, landowner, shopkeeper or worker, overnight every family had exactly the same wealth.

And it affected everyone. Not just the rich. There was the story of the street-vendor who had spent his whole life working with his wife, selling food on the streets of Saigon. Unknown to him, his wife had been putting aside money for the time when they could no longer work. one note at a time, over many years.

I guess what starts off as a good idea can become an obsession, because the pile was worth a fortune. At least it had been the day before. On the morning of the exchange, she came to him crying, and showed him the pile of useless paper.

Suddenly all the years of work and sacrifice came crashing down on him. He took the money into a small shed and set fire to it — and to himself.

Of course, that was why the gold my father had bought and hidden away was suddenly so valuable. Money is just money, but gold is … gold. I asked him once what had made him buy all that gold.

He just smiled and said my grandfather had told him to do it …

Freedom.

Now I can talk about it like I know what I'm talking about, but in those days, I didn't think about freedom, or politics. Or anything more than getting up in the morning and acting like a kid. But for the last ten years I've listened to my parents and their friends talking. And I've tried to figure out just what it was that made them gamble their lives, and the lives of their children, in leaky fishing boats, when there was every chance of capture and imprisonment.

Or worse …

You see, between Vietnam and the promised land of Malaysia sailed the murdering pirates of the South China Sea, and every person who made the decision to try and beat the odds knew the terrible risk they were running.

But they tried anyway.

So what did freedom mean to my father? What did it mean to my mother, or to Aunt Mai? I guess, in the end, it meant the simple right to make choices.

And they chose to go.