Inheriting the War Read online

  makes sound-deadening material that insulated

  airplanes, sometimes cushioned cockpit seats.

  Forest of kapok trees, in Khmer, is Prey Nokor, later called

  Saigon. My father might have crouched behind these trees

  in ’68. The trunks and branches crowded

  with large, simple thorns. The leaves like palms.

  The pods, the size of soda cans, grow hundreds

  to a tree. Their fibers light, buoyant,

  resilient, highly flammable, resistant to water.

  His favorite drink was root beer. My three sisters, star-eyed

  in ’82, gulped A&W in the yard

  and when an airplane crossed, they’d stretch tan

  arms and hold up cans in an unheard toast.

  CORK

  There’s only the cork bobbing in the sink where water soaks plates

  greased by meat. Think where the wing joins to the airplane’s body.

  Think the passing air. Coat anything in this grease and it would burn

  but the cork trees would be renewed in time for harvest.

  At the holiday table you told us about a soldier you knew

  who slit his wrists. Cork can be harvested a dozen times

  before the death of the tree. It forms the fairings that smooth the surface

  so the plane can sail. Even the tip of the wing, so far from the body,

  must be streamlined, must be corked. You told us about a buddy

  shot down, VC imprisoned seven years. He came home to a wife

  who had left him for dead so he died by his hand. The bark

  of the cork oak deadens vibrations in the walls of the plane.

  Your bark. What has been cut from you a dozen times Dad?

  Sometimes you sit so still.

  ASH

  It’s not a climbing tree. Strong but elastic,

  it is for bent parts: wingtip bows or door jambs,

  your knuckles, your brow. You climbed

  through clouds, dead soldiers in your cabin. You climbed

  clouds with flight attendants stirring your coffee, calling

  you Captain, serving you the pinkest steaks,

  extra coffee in winter when ice sleets wings.

  You circled airports in snowstorms. You pulled

  in the driveway with cusswords on your lips and arctic gear

  in the trunk. In case of? You hid beneath your plane

  when you heard Vietnamese. You bought a boat,

  yelled for us to keep our goddamned arms in when you docked

  as if the water could hold our floating limbs. If a small cry

  comes from under my door jamb, will you bend to hear?

  SILK

  In the attic boxed in mothballs, no silkworms cocoon,

  no white mulberry leaves, rather, an áo dài from Lam Dong

  and a taffeta gown in violet, for bleached-cotton mom.

  Miles

  of silk thread coil the wires of aircraft electrical units. Radio waltzes

  spool the air-traffic commands that fold around you, your switches

  around you on your workshop floor, scrubbed cat food

  cans, lengths of twine, blunted nails in coffee cans,

  wall sockets, brushes in their packages, locks in their packages,

  a wood plane, zip ties and bungie cords,

  spools—

  And upstairs, in your study so overfilled

  you’ve moved out, under boating magazines

  is your pile: pages of ball gowns clipped,

  cut and glued so the skirts flare fuller.

  Each one turns figure-eights

  beneath the weight of men’s things.

  CATHY LINH CHE is the author of the poetry collection Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Her father was a soldier in the South Vietnamese Army for eight years and a helicopter mechanic in the Air Force for four additional years. Her mother also grew up in Viet Nam during the war. They both escaped on a boat in 1975 and ended up in a refugee camp in the Philippines for 11 months before being sponsored to the United States.

  SPLIT

  I see my mother at thirteen

  in a village so small,

  it’s never given a name.

  Monsoon season drying up—

  steam lifting in full-bodied waves.

  She chops corn for the hogs,

  her hair dipping to the small of her back

  as if dipped in black

  and polished to a shine.

  She wears a side-part

  that splits her hair

  into two uneven planes.

  They come to watch her,

  Americans, Marines, just boys,

  eighteen or nineteen.

  With scissor-fingers,

  they snip the air,

  repeat cut,

  point at their helmets

  and then at her hair.

  All they want is a small lock.

  What does she say

  to her mother

  to make her so afraid?

  Days later

  she will be sent away

  to the city for safekeeping.

  She will return home

  only once to be given away

  to my father.

  Her hair

  was dark, washed,

  and uncut.

  LOS ANGELES, MANILA, ĐÀ NẴNG

  California drought withering the basins,

  the hills ready to ignite. Oh, stupid ways

  I’ve loved and unraveled myself.

  I, a parched field, and not a spit of rain.

  I announced to a room of strangers,

  I’ve never loved anyone more.

  Now he and I no longer speak.

  Outside: Manila, 40 years after my parents’ first arrival.

  I deplane where they debarked.

  At customs, I am given a sheet warning of MERS—

  in ’75, my parents received fishermen’s lunches,

  a bottle of fish sauce. They couldn’t enter

  until they were vaccinated. My mother, 22,

  newly emptied of a stillborn daughter.

  In Đà Nẵng, my cousin has become unrecognizable

  after my four year absence. His teeth, at 21,

  have begun to rot. His face swollen over.

  I want to shield him from his terrible life.

  Tazed at 15 by the cops until he pissed himself.

  So beaten in the mental institution, that family had to

  bring him home. His mother always near tears

  when I ask, How are you doing?

  You want to know what survivorhood looks like?

  It’s not romantic. The corn drying huskless

  in the front yard. The ducks chasing each other in the back.

  The thick arms of a woman who will carry bricks

  for the rest of her life. The plainness with which

  she speaks of hardship. The bricks aren’t a metaphor

  for the weight she carries.

  Ánh, which means light, is sick, and cannot work,

  but instead goes wandering the neighborhood,

  eating other people’s food, bloating

  his mother’s unpayable debts.

  What pleasure can be found here,

  even if the love is palpable?

  My mother stopped crying years ago.

  What’s the use, she says, of all this leaking.

  Enough to fill a drainage ditch, a reservoir?

  No, just enough to wet a pillow.

  What a waste of time, me pining after

  a man who no longer feels for me.

  Today, I would give it up. Trade mine

  for theirs. They tell me that they are not hungry.

  Happy is their toil. My uncles and their

  browned skins, not a pi
nch of fat anywhere.

  They work the fields and swallow

  beer after beer, getting sentimental.

  Whose birds have come to roost, whose pigs in the muck?

  Their dog has just birthed four new pups.

  Despite ourselves, time moves on.

  I walked lover’s lane with my cousin.

  The heart-lights reflected on the river’s black.

  The locks clustered and dangling.

  I should have left our names on that bridge.

  My name, the names of my family, written there.

  TERESA MEI CHUC was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and immigrated to the United States under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War, while her father, who had served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) during the war, remained in a Vietcong “reeducation” camp for nine years. Teresa is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012) and Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014) and a recent chapbook, How One Loses Notes and Sounds (Word Palace Press, 2016). She is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and teaches literature and writing at a public high school in Los Angeles.

  from Year of the Hare

  HOANG LIEN SON REEDUCATION CAMP

  Baba was a military captain in the ministry of law for the Republic of Vietnam. The Vietcong communists wanted to “re-educate” him.

  On June 5, 1975, Baba reported to the Vietcong. Mama lost all contact with Baba for one year, then she was able to find out where they had taken him.

  If Baba worked hard in the labor camp, every one or two years they let him read the letters Mama sent. Before he could read them, the letters were inspected by the Vietcong—they were not to be criticized in the letters.

  Baba and about one thousand other prisoners worked in a forest in North Vietnam. They built a house for themselves with bamboo that they gathered in the forest. All the prisoners lived in this house and each one slept in a space about the length of his body. Every day, seven days a week, the prisoners dug holes, chopped bamboo and trees, built houses, and cooked for the Vietcong. In cold, windy weather, they walked barefoot up the mountains to find bamboo, trudging miles from mountain to mountain until their feet were bleeding and the soles were pink, red, and swollen, the exposed flesh scraping against rocks and branches. Due to the difficulty of finding the bamboo sticks, the weight of the sticks, and the weak, emaciated state of the prisoners, each one of them was usually only able to carry one bamboo back to camp each day.

  They had no rest. Baba, like the other prisoners, wasn’t given any meat or rice to eat. They gave him two meals a day, one in the afternoon and one at night. One meal would consist of fifty corn kernels, and Baba counted as he held each one between his thumb and index finger, slowly placing it on his tongue, savoring each bite. The meals alternated between corn kernels and small pieces of yucca root.

  The prisoners were always hungry, always thinking about food, but after eating they felt even more hungry. At night, they chewed in their sleep and dreamt of eating.

  One day, Baba fell down a mountain that was about three stories high because he was too tired and his feet collapsed under his own weight. He rolled down and lay there at the bottom like a sack of rice. His foot was injured and he couldn’t walk. For a week, Baba wrapped his foot in heated lemon leaves and salt. He got better and continued to work.

  If prisoners didn’t follow the rules, they were forced to work more hours, deprived of food, beaten, tortured, put in isolation, or sentenced to death, depending on the seriousness of the offense. The Vietcong said to Baba and the other prisoners, “We don’t need a bullet to kill you, ’cause you are not worth a bullet. We’ll let you live like this to die day by day. You have to work for us, then you die.”

  Baba couldn’t think about Mama, Brother, or me. If he did, he couldn’t survive. He would break down. He would want to kill the people keeping him in prison or kill himself. He didn’t think about anything at all. He told himself, “Don’t feel, don’t think, just survive.”

  Every couple of months, the prisoners were given weed to smoke. When someone was put in reeducation camp, there was no sentence; you could stay your whole life. They released you when they wanted to.

  SNAPSHOTS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

  When I was three years old, I was still drinking from a bottle and sucking my index finger. Mama was praying to Buddha and gave up eating beef in the hopes that it would contribute to our reunion with Baba.

  In Saigon, Mama had worked for ten years as a telephone operator in an American trading company, so she knew some English. Mama studied data entry for eight months and got a job at Bank of America. She worked nights for a year, and I remember waking up crying to Grandma. I continued sucking my finger in kindergarten until Uncle put chili pepper on my finger to get me to stop.

  Mama, Brother, Grandma, and I lived with Aunt, Uncle, and their four sons in a faded yellow house on Allen Avenue in Pasadena until they moved to Missouri and we rented an apartment a couple of streets over on Parkwood. Shortly after that, Mama, Brother, Grandma, and I moved to a small house on Oak Avenue. The house was divided into two parts, and our neighbor Joe had two cats, Shadow, a black and white cat, and Snowy, a white cat with one blue eye and one yellow eye. Snowy’s tail had been cut off by a kid and he always ran away from us. At that house, I met my first love—the garden.

  Life was grass, bugs, flowers, and trees. I could eat bananas all day and climb the avocado tree or the plum tree, which was alternately full of flowers and fruits and naked, its branches clawing the sky. I would pick a plum, tear its skin with my teeth, and let its juice and flesh flood my mouth. I loved the fig tree, loved the fruits that bloodied the ground, loved sinking my teeth into the red, seedy meat.

  The grass was great for flips, cartwheels and fights with my brother. My sky was green. I would track down butterflies and follow them around. I developed a hobby of catching butterflies by their wings, but I never kept any of them. I was collecting spiders and would go around the garden, looking under leaves, in the cracks of the walls, under the rusting table, in corners, anywhere I could find a spider and put it in a jar. I had ten different spiders in a jar spinning ten different kinds of webs.

  My brother and I would make villages out of branches and leaves from the avocado tree, dig up a trail around it, and pour water into the winding trench to make a stream.

  I loved bananas so much. I was nine years old when I heard that Baba was coming. Baba was finally coming home! I always wanted a baba; the other kids had one, but I didn’t. I was thinking, “What should I give him? It should be something really special.” I decided to bring him a banana.

  Mama got us ready and we drove to the airport in our yellow Datsun. I was holding the yellow banana and while I rode in the car, I felt something changing; I felt myself changing. Someone was coming to live with us. I thought about what I’d longed for for so long—a papa like the ones who picked up my friends from school. The ones with the faces that lit up when they saw my friends, the ones who hugged and smiled. A papa that swooped up his little daughter as if he held the world in his hands.

  We waited at the airport and Baba got off the plane. I saw him and I started to cry; I cried and cried because I was scared. I saw my baba for the first time and I was scared that he’d be living with us. He was like an Egyptian cat: skinny, foraging, stern. He was impenetrable. He didn’t smile; he didn’t run up to swoop me into his arms. He was a stranger coming to live with us. I kept the banana, I kept crying in the car on our way home. Mama said, “See, your daughter is so glad to see you, she can’t stop crying.” I ate the banana.

  MY FIRST DINNER WITH BABA

  It was my first dinner with Baba after we picked him up from the airport. Grandma, Mama, Brother were there. We were sitting down for our first dinner together in nine years. We had rice, mixed vegetables and meat dishes, a typical Chinese dinner. Every
one had a pair of chopsticks. My brother and I had to “call” everyone before we could eat. “Ah Maa (paternal grandma) sik fan (eat meal), Ah Ba (papa) sik fan, Ah Ma (mama) sik fan.” Before anyone could touch the food, we waited for Grandma to eat first. We all picked up our chopsticks, ready to eat. I held my chopsticks and Baba started to yell at me. I was scared; I was confused.

  He said that I couldn’t use my left hand anymore; otherwise, he would punish me, and that I was bad because I was using my left hand. He said he wouldn’t love me anymore if I did. His screaming paralyzed me; no one had ever screamed at me like that before. I began to cry. I didn’t know how to use my right hand; I had never used it before for eating or writing and I didn’t understand Baba. Mama had never punished me before for using my left hand. I did as he said because I thought he was going to beat me or kill me if I didn’t. I knew my life was going to be different from then on. I wished he’d never come.

  A KNIFE

  I was sitting on the floor behind the leaves of a potted plant, doing my homework. Baba was in the next room, in the kitchen. He was busy cooking; I could hear the clanging of dishes and pots and see the smoke that carried the aroma of food into the living room. Then a knife flew past my face, on the left side, missing it by an inch. Baba had seen me using my left hand and didn’t like it. I thought that I could never forgive him. He could’ve killed me. Fear and anger became a constant reality. I lived with Baba, but pretended that he didn’t exist. Otherwise, I couldn’t have survived.

  THE HORSE STANCE

  I was in elementary school. Baba had promised me that he would take me to some kind of event. The day before the event, while in the car, I reminded Baba that he had promised to take me to school that evening.

  He said, “Well, no, I’m not taking you.” I asked pleadingly, “But why?” He replied, “I’m just not taking you.”