The Headmaster's Wager (15 page)

When Percival submitted the official registry for the new semester of the Percival Chen English Academy, he received a phone call from Mr. Tu. “Dai Jai has been placed on a ‘not eligible for school enrolment' list. Routine—political lists,” Mr. Tu said. “But don't visit me on this problem. Stay away for awhile, actually. I attracted attention with your last visit, coming so near to your son's antics.”

It was not a big problem, Percival decided. It was his own school. Dai Jai could attend classes without being registered, and later, when
they fixed the papers, Percival would backdate the registration. A few days later, Percival saw the headmaster of the Teochow school at a money circle. He told Percival that he could not register Dai Jai at his school either. He began to explain.

“I know,” said Percival, “he's on a list. I haven't had a chance to fix it yet.”

“I'm not so sure it's easily fixed, old friend. I've had a few ‘inspections' by the quiet police.” Not about Dai Jai, he assured Percival, but the officers asked about their curriculum and seemed to be looking for anything outside the official guidelines. “They asked me why we teach Chinese history rather than Vietnamese history. They said they might have us replace the calligraphy classes with basic military training—I think they were joking, but I'm not sure. Anyway, please keep Dai Jai away from his old Teochow classmates and well away from the school grounds.” He added apologetically, “The Chinese schools are an easy target. We are only one step away from being closed.”

So, they were putting extra pressure on the Chinese schools. Mak had advised Percival well in 1950, when he suggested that Percival open an English school. They might close the Chinese schools, but not an English one, he had said even then. Not as long as the Americans were in Vietnam. That year, French bureaucrats had taken the rice and transport licences from the Chinese and given them to Vietnamese. It was to prevent those vital industries from being infiltrated by Chinese communists, they said. In giving the licences to the locals, the Chinese grumbled, the French hoped to buy their allegiance after nearly a century of abusing them. This was how Percival became an educator, exaggerating the extent of his British education in Hong Kong and relying upon Mak to cultivate friendships for the school in Saigon. Cecilia always said that it was best for Chinese to be in the money-exchange business precisely because it was the black market. It had no regulations. A school was different—even English schools needed licences to issue diplomas.

Percival did not immediately ask Mak to fix this problem, because he was tight for cash. He had the Peugeot back and was making progress on the Clan Association debt, but the weekly interest payments
dogged him. They had extended his loan at eight percent monthly. Dai Jai still hesitated to leave the house, so there was no rush to get him to school. For a routine political list, there should be a similarly routine solution but it would still have a price. Once he had worked off a little more of the debt, Percival would ask Mak to find a contact to remove Dai Jai from the list.

With the new semester, Dai Jai began attending classes at the Percival Chen English Academy even though he was not registered. He began to venture out of the house regularly. Since the boys from the Teochow school had been told to stay clear of him, Dai Jai played soccer and basketball with the Vietnamese houseboys, and Percival excused them from their work. Occasionally, Percival saw Dai Jai retreat into an empty classroom after school. A few times, as he marked papers in his office, Percival heard a girl's small laugh, quickly muffled. He did not even get up to investigate.

“Is she kind?” he asked Foong Jie. The head servant pretended not to hear.

Then, one day after Percival had missed an ancestor worship day because he had passed it at the Continental Hotel with a lovely young thing from a nearby village, a letter arrived for Dai Jai. Foong Jie brought it to Percival in the school office. Mak was with him when it came, going over the monthly receipts and the debt repayment list. It was a South Vietnamese Army envelope. Percival tore it open, read it twice.

“What is it?” said Mak.

Percival handed it to him.

“This must be a mistake,” said Mak. “Students are not eligible for the draft.”

“I meant to have you inquire. About Dai Jai being on a list of students not to be registered for school.”

“He is to report for basic training in three weeks' time. Near Cu Chi, a dangerous place,” said Mak, rubbing his forehead. “That is a problem. It would have been easier to deal with this before he was drafted. Now it's an army matter …” Percival picked up the phone. He asked Cecilia to meet him at the Cercle Sportif in an hour, to
discuss a small complication. This was how he put it, and then said he could not elaborate on the phone.

This time, she did not stage her theatre of a tennis match. She sat waiting for Percival in the pavilion near the tennis courts, drumming her nails on the table. After she read the draft notice, she said, “He must go to France or America. A Chinese boy cannot be in the South Vietnamese Army.”

“Of course not. You think I'm so naive?” He thought of several former neighbourhood boys. When their bodies were returned home, the bullet wounds were often in their backs. “Our son must return to China,” said Percival. “It is the only safe place for a Chinese person.”

“Don't you know what is happening in China?” she said.

“What do you mean? They are moving forward. They are making steel now. Tons of it. Sometimes, I don't even think you are Chinese.”

“Sometimes, I don't think you are even awake.” Cecilia had taken little interest in the victory of Mao in 1949, but after the land reforms she criticized everything about the People's Republic with as much fervour as she found fault with her husband. For years afterwards, Cecilia continued to complain bitterly about her family's estates of several hundred
li
having been seized and given to the tenants. Percival had declared that he was proud that his family's land would serve the people of China. Cecilia had ridiculed those two
li
as the size of her family's vestibule, and cheered the Americans in Korea. “Do you still send money to China? I'm sure whatever you send ends up in a vault in Geneva. You think the communists don't steal?”

Every year, the Clan Association took up a collection for schools and hospitals in China, and Percival was one of its most generous supporters. He said, “I don't know anything about communists. I am a patriotic Chinese, and I send money to help my country.” He also sent money every year to a poor cousin in Shantou to maintain Muy Fa's grave, and the cousin sent letters that both praised Percival's generous remittance and listed the wonderful developments in the new China. “My cousin writes that things are better all the time in China. Dai Jai should be in his own country. Mak says he might be able to get him there.”

“Don't you ever wonder how Mak can do these things? Is it normal for a school teacher to know everyone of importance in Saigon? And how could he get Dai Jai to China?”

Percival signalled the waiter. “That's Mak's private business. I don't involve myself.” He ordered a Martell and Perrier, didn't ask Cecilia if she wanted a drink. Mak lived exactly as one would expect a teacher to live, comfortably but modestly. He did not siphon even a little money from the school, as many right-hand men in successful businesses would be expected to do. So what difference did it make to him what Mak used his contacts for? Perhaps the school gave Mak cover, a legitimate reason to have connections through which he found other business. However he profited from his connections was his own affair. The waiter brought the drink, a twisted napkin around the stem beneath the frosted glass. There were discreet men in Saigon and Cholon who, it was said, had all their gifts and envelopes deposited in overseas accounts. That would be like Mak—the kind who did not need to taste and touch his profits. For some, Percival supposed, the existence of money was its own satisfaction. Percival lifted the glass, enjoyed the tickle of mineral-water bubbles in the cognac. He did not see the point of such asceticism, but some did. “Oh, did you want a drink?” he asked Cecilia.

“Not with you. One day Mak will be arrested for something, or he will turn up dead. He is deep into something, and you just don't know what it is.”

“And why should I ask? He always comes through.” He hoped Mak could find people who could get Dai Jai to China. If they were criminals, what well-connected person did not step in and out of the law as the occasion required? Percival put the glass down and repeated, “What I know is that Mak can get Dai Jai back to China.”

“Just as your father tried to return, while there was still a war under way,” she shot back. “To this day, you don't even know where his corpse lies.”

Percival's anger flared in his stare, so glaring that Cecilia looked away, a rare flinch. “Sorry.”

“Let's not get into our own battles again,” he said. Cecilia usually
reserved this painful barb, the journey of Chen Kai, for the height of an argument rather than its beginning. “I'm trying to get our son away from this war.”

“America would be even safer.”

“They can draft him there, too.”

“France, then.”

“Besides, how will
you
get him out? Half of your clients sell the guns Dai Jai is now being called up to carry. You think your business partners can get him a visa just like they get you military scrip? They wouldn't even help you find him in a Saigon jail.”

“The piastres you get as tuition are printed in the same press. You think Mak can do something beyond bribing Saigon officials?” she said. “Let's see who can find a way abroad sooner.”

Since Dai Jai's appetite had returned, Percival directed Foong Jie to serve rich dishes—wheat noodles in pork-bone broth, pickled eggs, dry shredded meat—to build Dai Jai's strength. Percival tolerated the smell of
nuoc nam
at the table, which Dai Jai liked to flavour his soup with. During breakfast a week after the draft notice came, Percival said, “Son, a minor issue has come up. I don't want you to worry, because I'm going to fix it.” He slipped the envelope across the table.

Dai Jai read the paper. He pursed his lips slightly, but his face barely reacted. The boy was still in shock, Percival decided. His reactions were still numbed by his ordeal. Clearly it would be dangerous for him to be in the army.

Percival said, “I will find a way to keep you out of it.”

“I know boys who have gone into the army.”

“Vietnamese.”

“Some people buy safe postings. The post just over there is all people who paid for it.” Dai Jai pointed to the quiet army post across La Place de la Libération, in the shadow of the church. Connections and money should be able to manage that, but now Percival was not sure of his influence in Saigon.

“The best thing will be for you to get out of Vietnam. Mak tells me he has already found a possible route to China.”

At this, Dai Jai sat up straight. “Leave Vietnam? After being drafted? They check the draft lists at the airport.”

“Your father has lots of
gwan hai
,” Percival said. “You know, when I was a small boy, my greatest dream was to study in Shanghai, or in Beijing. You could have the opportunities I never had. You could be a real scholar.”

Dai Jai resumed eating as a worried look spread over his face.

Cecilia made inquiries in Saigon about sending Dai Jai to France or America, but Percival had been right. It could not be done. The draft notice blocked every avenue, trumped every favour that she tried to call in. Every Frenchman sent her to another office, to pay another bribe, to find another dead end. They shrugged, ever polite, blamed bureaucracy with Cecilia's money in their pockets. Her American friends told her that if her son had not been drafted, they might have been able to do something. As it was, they could hardly interfere with the South Vietnamese Army's draft. They had enough problems in America with their own draft dodgers.

Meanwhile, Percival made only the monthly money-circle and minimum loan interest payments as he put away cash for the expense of sending Dai Jai abroad. Mak said he was getting close to settling the route for the journey abroad, but it would be expensive, at least five thousand American dollars. Cecilia mocked Percival's gullibility when he told her the price. She refused to contribute to it. Clearly, Mak was taking a cut, she said. When the garage owner saw Percival driving up to pawn the Peugeot again, he laughed and called out a price even before the headmaster stepped out of the car.

Two weeks after the draft notice, Mak came and explained the details of the plan to Percival and Dai Jai. Dai Jai, dressed in shabby clothes, would pretend to be a local trader and travel with a snakehead on a local bus to Cambodia with several suitcases full of transistor radios. It was a bus that traders often took to sell U.S. Army PX goods in Phnom Penh, and Mak would pay the officer in charge at the border to simply collect his usual bribe from the traders without checking their documents. He did that often enough anyway, but Mak would pay the officer to ensure it. Once across the border,
an old friend of Mak's would take care of Dai Jai, arranging documents and air tickets. From Phnom Penh, there were flights to China. Once he was in China, Dai Jai would be fine. Every Chinese had the right to return. Mak had been in touch with an educational cadre at a secondary school in Shanghai who had agreed to register Dai Jai. Had Percival raised the cash? Mak asked. Cecilia might be right, but Percival did not mind. Mak deserved a cut, after all. Percival handed him the money. He did not look to see what Dai Jai's reaction might be—taking his silence as agreement.

That evening, Percival sought out Dai Jai on the balcony. To see him in the half light of dusk carefully tending his fish, his bruises healed and his hair grown back, one might forget that he'd ever gone to the National Police Headquarters. Percival did not dare stir up the recent past by saying how much better Dai Jai looked, or by saying how happy he was that his son moved with some of his old confidence.