Love Like Hate (13 page)

In literature, they studied a 1979 poem by poet laureate To Huu:

Cun’s literature teacher was a doe-eyed, slightly stooping woman in her late fifties who wore only black and white. Her thin white blouses were so worn out at the back, you could see her bra strap as she stood at the blackboard scratching her neat letters. Her black pants had become threadbare at the knees. The students joked that one day their teacher would just show up naked.

A spinster living with her ailing mother, she had never strayed beyond the suburbs of Saigon, though she loved to stare at any and all large, colorful maps, mooning over them in her spare moments. Seeing all seven continents at once always gave her a special thrill. It was as if she were perched high on a satellite, cheek by jowl with God, the first and last astronaut, with her arm around him, or even, God forbid, as if she were God himself. Far below, five billion-plus people were enduring their ridiculously petty yet murderous lives, hyperventilating or gnashing their teeth over the tiniest fears and aspirations. At such moments, she could forget her own tiniest fears and aspirations. God had left, she suddenly realized one day. Hungry, she peeled back the aluminum foil from her space dinner: one quarter of a freeze-dried chicken over rice with vegetables on the side. As she ate, she noticed with rancor that God had forgotten, again—how many times had it been?—to close the lid on the space commode, leaving his copious leavings to drift out and form a ghastly nimbus around her head.

She asked the class, “What is poetry that does not save nations or people?” Fifty-five faces stared at her blankly. Hearing not a peep in response, she provided the answer, “Poetry that does not save nations or people is a song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment!” Baring her yellowed dentures, she sliced a crooked finger across her wrinkled neck while making a spine-tingling slurping sound. “And readings for shallow girls!” As an example of poetry that does save nations and people, she had the class read a To Huu poem about Marx:

Cun’s history teacher was a young man with solid revolutionary credentials. His father had fought the French; his two brothers, the Americans. One brother was killed by ARVN troops during the last days of the war. Growing up poor in Lai Thieu, he studied by candlelight. Out of candles, he squatted under a flickering street lamp. Once he even tried placing fireflies in a jar, having read about the trick in some pamphlet. He now lived with his wife and four children in a rented room in Thi Nghe. The two youngest, aged one and three, slept with their parents on a bed. The two oldest, aged seven and nine, slept on a straw mat on the floor.

Glaring at Cun, the history teacher began a lecture, “The Saigon puppets loved the Americans, but the Americans hated them. The Saigon puppets worshipped a race that called them Gooks and rained bombs on their heads. The Saigon puppets were like animals the Americans raised to become meaty shields. Absorbing bullets, they spared the GIs from being wiped out even sooner by revolutionary troops. The Saigon puppets denied American atrocities that even the Americans admitted to. The entire world witnessed these monstrous crimes, and became even more aghast at the spectacle of the Saigon puppets abjectly denying everything. The Saigon puppets existed only to receive chump change from their American masters.…”

Cun had had only one direct contact with an American. When he was three, an American had come into his mom’s café accompanied
by a Vietnamese woman in a miniskirt. Well groomed, in civvies, he was twice her age and size. His prominent beak contrasted sharply with her bridgeless nose. Ignoring an iced plastic mug, he drank his beer straight from the can. When not shouting in sentence fragments, they communicated with exaggerated laughs, grins and grimaces. A housefly pinged against his lips, drawn to the hop-sweetened spittle. Beneath the table, their legs dallied awkwardly. Her bare calves clamped his pant leg for a moment, before a mosquito landed on his sockless, white ankle. Thrilled by this rare derma, it drilled its serrated proboscis into a fatty capillary, drank deeply, closed its eyes and sighed as its abdomen swelled to capacity. It needed this rich protein for its egg development. Nectar and fruit juice just wouldn’t cut it. The American’s blood tasted a bit like vanilla ice cream. As it sucked, the mosquito’s spit lubricated the bite mark to lessen his victim’s pain. Entering the bloodstream, malarial pathogens inside the saliva quickly reached the man’s liver, where they could begin to search and destroy his liver cells. Staring at the couple, Cun tried to mimic their conversation. He said, “Woe me yo fat hotel!” He said, “Yo me boom boom cheap?” He repeated these two phrases around the house for more than a year, but gradually forgot about them as the novelty of speaking English finally wore off.

There was a girl in Cun’s class who was rumored to be half American. She had a thin nose on a pink, freckled face that drove all the boys crazy. Her hair was chestnut brown, and she either tied it with a thin, bright ribbon or kept it braided. She dressed simply yet impeccably, betraying a sense of style no one else had. Shunning pastel colors, she preferred darker hues like maroon and indigo, which made her seem very grown-up and elegant. There was a small gap between her two front teeth, but that imperfection only added to her allure. Even the history teacher appeared moonstruck whenever she opened her mouth to speak. He always insisted that she sit in the middle of the front row, apparently so he could better admire
her face. Once he even had to cut short one of his anti-American rants because it was clear the girl was about to cry. She used her mother’s last name and whenever anyone asked her about her father, she’d only say, “He lives very far away.”

“How come you’re so pretty?”

“Because my mother is pretty, and my father is pretty, and my grandparents are pretty.”

“But who’s your father?”

“He lives very far away.”

During recess, all the teachers sold snacks to make extra money. The literature teacher offered sugarcane cubes and pineapple chunks in plastic bags. The history teacher pushed pudding. In the evening, he diversified by peddling balloons of cartoon figures, Barney and Mickey Mouse, etc., up and down the street. As an entrepreneur, he was superfriendly toward everyone, even Cun. However phony, the common courtesy encouraged and enforced by capitalism did make life more tolerable. Like all parents, Kim Lan gave Cun money to give to his teachers to bump his grades up. Cun hated them so much, however, he always kept these bribes for himself. In the spring of 1987 he quit school over Kim Lan’s weak objection. He decided he was going to spend the rest of his life sitting in his mother’s café. From now on he would live life as painlessly as possible. To pass the time, he sipped iced coffee and chewed on one toothpick after another.

14
POETRY AND USURY

R
enaming her café Paris by Night proved to be a stroke of genius for Kim Lan. The glamour it evoked attracted an entirely new class of clients. Aside from neighborhood people, the café became a magnet for poets and intellectuals. On any day, you could find a dozen poets, writers and hacks congregating at the different tables. Kim Lan knew little about this milieu, but she could recite half a dozen of Han Mac Tu’s shortest poems by heart. Occasionally, she would join the poets at a table and perform, in a shrill, earnest voice, “Tears” or “Sleepless Night,” her eyes shut tight with emotion. The poets dreaded these embarrassments, but they always applauded Kim Lan heartily afterward. Moved by her own voice, she nearly cried several times. The sight of Sen playing chess with some sucker also added to the intellectual atmosphere of Paris by Night. Cun had his own table where he could brood behind a bottle of root beer, talking to no one. With yellow music no longer banned, Kim Lan went out and bought cassettes of Trinh Cong Son’s and Pham Duy’s music. Khanh Ly’s warm voice washed over her café, alternating with Thai Thanh’s.

Fortified by Saigon beer, the poets chattered about life, love and literature, or they flirted with each other. One who came often was Nguyen Quoc Chanh. Bearded and a bit scruffy, he always wore the same pair of jeans and a faded indigo T-shirt. Chanh told Kim Lan he had just finished his first collection of poems,
Night of the Rising Sun
. “My mind was racing, sister. I stayed indoors almost continuously.
Inside my darkened room, I scrawled pornographic images on the walls with a pencil. I was hopped up.”

Another was Bui Chi Vinh, ex-combat soldier, solidly built, tall, in a crew cut, with the air of a gangster. Vinh’s racket was the detective novel. “I write two hundred pages a week,” he boasted to Kim Lan. “Most guys are lucky to sell five hundred copies of a book but each one of mine sells five thousand copies.”

There were also women poets among them. One called herself Lynh Bacardi. Bespectacled with thick, rimless glasses, she was often seen in a red-and-black-plaid turtleneck and plaid skirt. Despite her name, she always drank whatever was available: gin, vodka, whiskey, rum, sake, or snake wine, often in combination, without showing the least sign of drunkenness. “It’s a special gift,” she said to Kim Lan once, smiling. Though she was half Kim Lan’s age, Bacardi always used the pronoun “I” instead of “little sister,” as was customary. She used “I” with all her elders, a fact that annoyed Kim Lan considerably. Kim Lan remembered with distaste the time Bacardi kissed Hoa on the eyelids and said, “You’ll grow up to be a poet, won’t you? We need more girl poets.”

Sometimes the poets did get a little rowdy, though Kim Lan could never figure out what they were arguing about. Reading Han Mac Tu, she had assumed that poets were suffering creatures, frail individuals with wild hair, bad breath and worse skin, but she was wrong. The poets in front of her were quite happy, much happier than anyone else she knew, though they seemed to have no reason at all to be happy. They had neither money nor status and most of them couldn’t even publish. Photocopying their poems, they distributed them in her café.

“The trick is to square first thought best thought with last word best word.”

“Why enjamb if you don’t want to sucker punch the reader?”

“You’ve got to see behind what’s behind, man!”

“There’s no self to excavate, don’t you understand?”

“If you can’t turn a poem inside out, then don’t write poems!”

“Your problem, you see, is that you always write horizontal poems. You don’t know how to go up or down. You should try a vertical poem every once in a while.”

Occasionally a wild-haired, feverish-eyed old man came to sit with the poets. He’d speak incoherently in the foulest language, obsessing about how he wanted to fuck the actress Kim Cuong over and over, and how he was going to blow up Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. Once or twice he came close to taking his clothes off. Each time she saw him, Kim Lan wanted to kick him out immediately, but the poets insisted that the madman was a famous poet, perhaps the most renowned in all of Saigon, that he was even a scholar and a translator of French and German. The poets told her she should feel honored to have someone of Bui Giang’s stature in her establishment.

Bui Giang lived one of the more peculiar lives in twentieth-century Vietnam. Born in 1926, he’d grown up the scion of a wealthy family in Quang Nam, an arid province known for its egg-noodle soup and harsh accent. They owned lots of land and the only two-story house in the village. After graduating from high school in 1945, Bui Giang stayed in Quang Nam to marry his sweetheart and to raise goats. He had over a hundred animals, most of whom he knew by name. Already there were alarming and charming signs of his eccentricity. He followed his goats into the hillside each morning, holding a thick French book, according to the peasants who saw him, and was led back into town by his flock each evening. Weaving garlands of wild flowers to drape around the necks of his beloved goats, he never sold or slaughtered any of them, but only squeezed a glass of goat milk each morning to give to his young wife. In 1949, Bui Giang joined the anticolonial resistance. He lived in the jungles for two years and fought the French. In 1956, disaster struck: His wife died at the age of twenty-six after an illness. Bui Giang finally left Quang Nam to move to Saigon. There he
wrote many poems and befriended all the leading Saigon intellectuals of his time. The celebrated and sneaky Trinh Cong Son even stole a couple of lines from him. Already fluent in French, he taught himself German, translated Heidegger and wrote a two-volume study of the existentialist philosopher. He also translated Camus, André Gide, René Char and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
Le Petit Prince
. He wrote about Sartre, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Gandhi and the classical poets Nguyen Du and Huyen Thanh Quan. In 1965 his house burned down, destroying all of his manuscripts. By his own admission, he started to become “brilliantly mad” in 1969. Though he never went abroad, he explored all of southern Vietnam with the curiosity and appetite of a foreign adventurer. He sampled the whores in each town but never remarried, so as not to desecrate the memory of his dead wife. He complained of catching the clap in Cho Lon and bragged that a hotel owner in Long Xuyen gave him free lodging “with all amenities.” After 1975 he slept in a squalid shack next to a fetid pond. He knew all of Saigon’s neighborhoods intimately and wandered its meandering streets and alleys like the city’s lost soul. He wrote: