Inheriting the War Read online

  There’s more. I slept badly at night in my hotel room throughout my time in Hong Kong and had horrid, vivid dreams. The summer heat was getting to me. In the center, I was getting tick bites, rashes. I never got used to the fetid smell of the entire place.

  The division between Northerners and Southerners who did not trust each other made the situation worst, and many fights that broke out were due to this century-old demarcation. Gangs referred to as “bear heads” by the internees were also a problem, as Vietnam released its worst elements and let them escape and Hong Kong authorities allowed them to mix with various sections as a way to create unrest and disorganization. Though I could not confirm it, rape was reportedly occurring in the camp with impunity, and though no one would talk about it, young women without men were free for all.

  There was a kind of pettiness among some of the people in the center that greatly irked me. A few times, when I had listened to someone for too long, another would come along and say, “His story is not as good as mine. He lies. I don’t lie. Let me tell you mine.” It was as if I was the UNHCR official myself and could decide their fates.

  One windless afternoon I nearly passed out. It was right before Dai Nguyen had wanted me to touch his scars, as if to validate what I saw with my other senses. “Touch them,” he said and I smiled and shook my head no. “That’s okay. I believe you, Brother.” I suddenly realized that until that moment I had been holding my breath.

  And so, if I left for Hong Kong with rage against the West for closing its doors on the boat people, I was coming back with more or less the same rage but with one caveat, a self-knowledge I didn’t expect: I was having compassion fatigue of my own.

  On my last day in Whitehead a young woman named Tuyet wanted to talk with me. I had talked to her before and she had asked if I could send letters she’d written to friends in America on her behalf, a request to which I said yes.

  Within earshot of several young women friends of hers, Tuyet asked for another favor. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she began.

  “Yes,” I answered politely. She hadn’t really stood out among her friends; average was my assessment. It occurred to me as I said this, however, that she was wearing makeup, which was unusual in the center.

  “Would you marry me?” she asked softly. Her voice had perceptibly changed. She was trembling. “Save me, Brother, please,” she whispered. “If you marry me, I won’t be sent back. Save me. I’ll be your servant for the rest of my life.”

  The night before, the women in Section 6 were tearing white cloths for headbands and some were sharpening knives fashioned out of metal bars pulled from their bunk beds. There were rumors of an impending raid to take more people back. As far as many were concerned they were being ushered back to their own funeral, and they were not going without a fight.

  I looked at Tuyet. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. If I can’t save them all, why not just one? Others have done it. New brides have walked out of this barbed wired prison on the arms of the NGO worker-heroes while the rest looked on with envy and awe.

  For a few seconds, under the burning sun, I hesitated. I didn’t say anything. I kept looking at her. It felt as if the culmination of my own confusion and conflict seemed to have come to rest at this juncture.

  In my mind’s eye I saw a fading ghost of myself saying yes. I saw another narrative taking place other than the one I was after. Tuyet and I would be married. We would stay and fight the good fight. Then, when it was all over, I would take my new bride home to America, to glorious California, the Golden State, the ultimate destination for all refugees, to see my family, and beyond that the events were invisible and innumerable, beyond my imagination.

  Then, just like that, I started to break out in a cold sweat. I saw my own future as dead-ended as her own. Instead of doing the story I was sent to Hong Kong to do, I would end up married to it. It was not a narrative that I had imagined for myself. And it was not what I had given up going to medical school and picked up the pen for. I had yearned to be free from the past. This was why I had become a writer, wasn’t it? Or, was this—the past, the war, and its aftermath—the story I was ready to tell and, by saying yes to Tuyet, willing to live with for the rest of my life?

  In the end, I was both a coward and, typical of myself in the face of someone else’s great distress, indecisive. I became helpless. In retrospect, I dearly wish I had been deliberate instead of circumspect and just said no. Instead, I told a lie. “I am so tired, Tuyet. Listen, I’ll come in tomorrow and we’ll talk then, all right?”

  Tuyet smiled and thanked me profusely as I walked out of the center for the last time. I felt her stare on my back from behind the chicken wire fence. I was sure she was beaming. I dared not look back. In my hesitation, I had given her false hope.

  And no, I am not unaware that I had become a bit like the West itself; the West, that is, writ very, very small.

  Mid-flight back to San Francisco, I woke from a dream in which many indistinguishable dark faces from behind barbed wire fences stared out at me. I saw those laughing children playing hide-and-seek among the barracks, their bare, dirty little feet slapping against the cement surface of the courtyard. It was an early dawn and out the plane’s window, far down below, the Pacific Ocean glowed like an iridescent mirror while above it my plane softly hummed and soared. Why is it some can travel back and forth over its vast expanse with ease and others die trying to traverse its treacherous waters? And what are the moral obligations of a free man to his countrymen who are not?

  I had no easy answers. I still live with the questions.

  On the plane, the backpack on which I rested my feet was bulging with unpublished biographies and poems and letters that people had entrusted to me. They could not very well take them back to Vietnam or these stories and testimonies would, ironically, be counted as evidence against the state, reasons enough for imprisonment, or worse. Vietnam was the only country willing to use the boat people’s biographies verbatim against them.

  But having read many of their stories I realized they offered me no answers, only added to my sense of guilt for having survived, for being what one religious gray-haired woman in the center called me, “the blessed one.” The stewardess who tapped me on the shoulder to offer me various choices of drinks was as startled as I when I turned from the window: my face was full of tears.

  The boat people once raced toward the promised land when the iron curtain still divided the world, and it was understood that risking one’s life to be free was a good thing. But the myth ended midway in their flight. Their misfortune was not that they were liars but that history, having taken a sharp turn around a bend, made liars of them.

  Hon Vong Phu, so I read recently, had crumbled and fallen into the ocean. The stone woman and her child, broken into many fragments, are scattered now on the ocean floor. Their curse, released at last, clings to the fleeing people of Vietnam.

  LÊ THỊ DIỄM THÚY was born in Phan Thiet, Southern Vietnam. She and her father left Vietnam in 1978, by boat, eventually settling in Southern California. Lê is a writer and solo performance artist and her works “Red Fiery Summer” (Mua He Do Lua), “the bodies between us,” and “Carte Postale” have been presented at, among other venues, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, USA; the International Women Playwright’s Festival in Galway, Ireland; and the Vineyard Theater in New York City. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A 2008 United States Artists Ford Fellow in Literature, she is currently at work on her second novel.

  THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR

  Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard. They are sitting tall and proud, surrounded by chickens and a rooster. Between their feet and the dirt of the courtyard are thin sandals. My grandfather’s broad forehead is shining. So too are my grandmother’s famous sad eyes. The animals are oblivious, pecking at the groun
d. This looks like a wedding portrait though it is actually a photograph my grandparents had taken late in life, for their children, especially for my mother. When I think of this portrait of my grandparents in their last years, I always envision a beginning. To or toward what, I don’t know, but always a beginning.

  When my grandmother, a Catholic schoolgirl from the South, decided to marry my grandfather, a Buddhist gangster from the North, her parents disowned her. This is in the photograph, though it is not visible to the eye. If it were, it would be a deep impression across the soft dirt of my grandparents’ courtyard. Her father chased her out of the house, beating her with the same broom she had used every day of her life, from the time she could stand up and sweep to that very morning that she was chased away.

  The year my mother met my father, there were several young men working at her parents’ house, running errands for her father, pickling vegetables with her mother. It was understood by everyone that these men were courting my mother. My mother claims she had no such understanding.

  She treated these men as brothers, sometimes as uncles even, later exclaiming in self-defense: I didn’t even know about love then!

  Ma says love came to her in a dark movie theater. She doesn’t remember what movie it was or why she’d gone to see it, only that she’d gone alone and found herself sitting beside him. In the dark, she couldn’t make out his face but noticed that his profile was handsome. She wondered if he knew she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. Watching him without embarrassment or shame. Watching him with a strange curiosity, a feeling that made her want to trace and retrace his silhouette with her fingertips until she memorized every feature and could call his face to mind in any dark place she passed through. Later, in the shadow of the beached fishing boats on the blackest nights of the year, she would call him to mind, his face a warm companion for her body on the edge of the sea.

  In the early days of my parents’ courtship, my mother told stories. She confessed elaborate dreams about the end of war: food she’d eat (a banquet table, mangoes piled to the ceiling); songs she’d make up and sing, clapping her hands over her head and throwing her hair like a horse’s mane; dances she’d dance, hopping from one foot to the other. Unlike the responsible favorite daughter or sister she was to her family, with my father, in the forest, my mother became reckless, drunk on her youth and the possibilities of love. Ignoring the chores to be done at home, she rolled her pants up to her knees, stuck her bare feet in puddles, and learned to smoke a cigarette.

  She tied a vermillion ribbon in her hair. She became moody. She did her chores as though they were favors to her family, forgetting that she ate the same rice, was dependent on the same supply of food. It seemed to her the face that now stared back at her from deep inside the family well was the face of a woman she had never seen before. At night she lay in bed and thought of his hands, the way his thumb flicked down on the lighter and brought fire to her cigarette. She began to wonder what the forests were like before the American planes had come, flying low, raining something onto the trees that left them bare and dying. She remembered her father had once described to her the smiling broadness of leaves, jungles thick in the tangle of rich soil.

  One evening, she followed my father in circles through the forest, supposedly in search of the clearing that would take them to his aunt’s house. They wandered in darkness, never finding the clearing much less the aunt she knew he never had.

  “You’re not from here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “So tell me, what’s your aunt’s name?”

  “Xuan.”

  “Spring?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. I can’t be here, she thought.

  “My father will be looking for me—.”

  “It’s not too late, I’ll walk you home.”

  In the dark, she could feel his hand extending toward her, filling the space between them. They had not touched once the entire evening and now he stood offering his hand to her. She stared at him for a long time. There was a small scar on his chin, curved like a fingernail. It was too dark to see this. She realized she had memorized his face.

  My first memory of my father’s face is framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam. My mother’s voice crosses through the wire. She is whispering his name and with this utterance, caressing him. Over and over, she calls him to her, “Anh Minh, Anh Minh.” His name becomes a tree she presses her body against. The calling blows around them like a warm breeze and when she utters her own name, it is the second half of a verse that begins with his. She drops her name like a pebble into a well. She wants to be engulfed by him, “Anh Minh, em My. Anh Minh, em My.”

  The barbed wire gates open and she crosses through to him. She arrives warm, the slightest film of sweat on her bare arms. To his disbelieving eyes she says, “It’s me, it’s me.” Shy and formal and breathless, my parents are always meeting for the first time, savoring the sound of a name, marveling at the bones of the face cupped by the bones of the hand.

  I trail behind them, the tip of their dragon’s tail. I am drawn along, like a silken banner on the body of a kite.

  For a handful of pebbles and my father’s sharp profile, my mother left home and never truly returned. Picture a handful of pebbles. Imagine the casual way he tossed them at her as she was walking home from school with her girlfriends. He did this because he liked her. Boys are dumb that way, my mother told me. A handful of pebbles, to be thrown in anger, in desperation, in joy. My father threw them in love. Ma says they touched her like warm kisses, these pebbles he had been holding in the sun. Warm kisses on the curve of her back, sliding down the crook of her arm, grazing her ankles and landing around her feet on the hot sand.

  What my father told her could have been a story. There was no one in the South to confirm the details of his life. He said he came from a semi-aristocratic northern family. Unlacing his boots, he pulled out his foot and directed her close attention to how his second toe was significantly longer than the others. “A sure sign of aristocracy,” he claimed. His nose was high, he said, because his mother was French, one of the many mistresses his father had kept. He found this out when he was sixteen. That year, he ran away from home and came south.

  “There are thieves, gamblers, drunks I’ve met who remind me of people in my family. It’s the way they’re dreamers. My family’s a garden lying on their backs, staring at the sky, drunk and choking on their dreams.” He said this while leaning against a tree, his arms folded across his bare chest, his eyes staring at the ground, his shoulders golden.

  She asked her mother, “What does it mean if your second toe is longer than your other toes?”

  “It means . . . your mother will die before your father,” her mother said.

  “I heard somewhere it’s a sign of aristocracy.”

  “Huh!”

  When my mother looked at my father’s bare feet she saw ten fishing boats, two groups of five. Within each group, the second boat ventured ahead, leading the others. She would climb a tree, stand gripping the branch with her own toes and stare down at his. She directed him to stand in the mud. There, she imagined what she saw to be ten small boats surrounded by black water, a fleet of junks journeying in the dark.

  She would lean back and enjoy this vision, never explaining to him what she saw. She left him to wonder about her senses as he stood, cigarette in hand, staring at her trembling ankles, and not moving until she told him to.

  I was born in the alley behind my grandparents’ house. At three in the morning, my mother dragged herself out of the bed in the smaller house where she and my father lived after they married. My father was away, fighting in the war. Ma’s youngest sister had come to live with her, helping with my older brother, who was just a baby then. Ma left the two of them sleeping in the hammock, my brother lying in the crook of my aunt’s arm, and set out alone.

  She cut a crooked line on the beach. Moving in jerky steps, like a ball tos
sed on the waves, she seemed to be bounced along without direction. She walked to the schoolhouse and sat on the ground before it, leaning against the first step. She felt grains of sand pressing against her back. Each grain was a minute pinprick, and the pain grew and grew. Soon she felt as though her back would erupt, awash in blood. She thought, I am going to bleed to death. She put her hands on her belly. We are going to die.

  In front of the schoolhouse lay a long metal tube. No one knew where it came from. It seemed to have been there always. Children hid inside it, crawled through it, spoke to each other from either ends of it, marched across it, sat upon it and confided secrets beside it. There had been so little to play with during the school recess. This long metal tube became everything. A tarp was suspended over it, to shield it from the sun. The tube looked like a blackened log in a room without walls. When the children sat in a line on the tube, their heads bobbing this way and that in conversation, it seemed they were sitting on a canopied raft.

  The night I was born, my mother, looking at the tube, imagined it to be the badly burnt arm of a dying giant buried in the sand. She could not decide whether he had been buried and was trying to get out or whether he had tried to bury himself in the sand but had failed to cover his arm in time. In time for what? She had heard a story about a girl in a neighboring town who was killed during a napalm bombing. The bombing happened on an especially hot night, when this girl had walked to the beach to cool her feet in the water. They found her floating on the sea. The phosphorous from the napalm made her body glow, like a lantern. In her mind, my mother built a canopy for this girl. She started to cry, thinking of the buried giant, the floating girl, these bodies stopped in mid-stride, on their way somewhere.