Love Like Hate (25 page)

“I’m not blaming the women—I think prostitution should be legalized, as a matter of fact—but I’m condemning any society in which women have little choice but to become prostitutes. The red-light district in Amsterdam is tiny, but all of Saigon is a red-light district.”

“You’re right. Whenever I sit on a public bench by myself, men ride up on their motorbikes and say, ‘You’re coming with me, little sister?’ They all think I’m a whore! But no one is forced to become a prostitute. A girl can always find work as a domestic servant.”

“But a domestic servant is a slave, and who wants to be a slave?”

“I, for one, don’t treat my domestic servants as slaves. I rarely yell
at them and I give them all my old clothes. We watch TV together and we even eat out together.”

Quang Trung was so charmed by this response, he stopped talking. Smiling, he leaned toward Hoa and gave her a big kiss.

Quang Trung had a loft by the river he divided into a practice studio and a bachelor pad. Hoa came there almost every day. She loved to just lie on his bed and listen to Blondie, Grace Jones, Burning Spear or the Butthole Surfers. She liked most of Quang Trung’s CDs except the jazz ones. Music without singing was too alien a concept to her. Hoa could easily have imagined moving in and staying forever, maybe without telling her parents. They would panic and wonder where she had gone. I’ve moved to the dark side of the moon, she thought with pleasure, borrowing an image from Pink Floyd. I’m writing to you from a faraway country. Music took her places, or at least it removed her from Vietnam. Grooving to Shonen Knife or Control Machete, she felt liberated momentarily from her native society. With the AC on full blast, she imagined what it must be like to live in a cold climate, where words like “coziness” and “warmth” must have entirely different meanings. To live in a cold country was to be chilled by the AC even when out-of-doors. Every so often, sometimes twice a day, a blackout would happen, shutting down the AC, lights and music. Plunged into darkness, silence and heat, Hoa was reminded that she was still very much a citizen of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
It’s a real bitch to be born into a closet-sized country
, she thought. A tiny country is like a tiny prison: One is shut off from the rest of the world and knows it.

When Kim Lan asked her where she had been, Hoa always lied. Her job was to go out and hook a Viet Kieu so she could fly to America, not sleep with some punk rocker with an upside-down tattoo on his arm, even if he was superrich. Hoa could just hear her mom’s shrill voice yelling, “His father is a crook and will go to jail before you know it!”

Hoa never gave Quang Trung her address or phone number. She
didn’t even dare to call him from home because her mom always lurked in the background whenever Hoa picked up the phone. She did say that her mom owned a café called Paris by Night. Even this spurred him into a tirade. “Paris by Night?! To call a Vietnamese café in Saigon Paris by Night is absurd! That’s just typical! Typical! Tell your mom the French left half a century ago!”

“My mom thinks it sounds classy and intellectual.”

“Intellectual?!” He shook his head, disgusted.

Hoa had never seen anyone with so many books as Quang Trung. She came from a home with no books, only a few tattered magazines. She hadn’t thought a mind could contain more than a dozen books. To buy more than a dozen books was sheer vanity and a criminal waste of money, she thought, like having too many pairs of shoes while children were starving. She stared at the hundreds of books lining Quang Trung’s shelves. “Have you read all of these?”

“Most of them.”

“Why read so many books?”

“Because I don’t want to be an idiot.”

“I haven’t read any books. Am I an idiot then?”

“No, you’re a young woman who hasn’t had a chance to read books.”

“My mom hasn’t read any books either. Is she an idiot?”

“No, she’s Mother Vietnam! She already knows everything.”

Reading Quang Trung’s books at random, Hoa became very fond of Ho Bieu Chanh. She had seen his books before, at street stalls among displays of chewing gum, nuts and candies, and had assumed they were cheap romances because of their lurid covers. But Quang Trung told her that Ho Bieu Chanh was a very serious and prolific writer, someone who had produced sixty-four novels over a five-decade career. He also wrote plays, short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and travel books. Ho Bieu Chanh was one of a handful of extraordinary men from the first half of the twentieth
century who tried with superhuman effort to modernize Vietnam through literature. By exposing age-old vices and idiocies, they hoped people would slowly change. Their influences remained subtle. Reading a Ho Bieu Chanh novel from 1935, Hoa noticed that the society he depicted was dominated by lust, greed, deceit and abuse of power, just like it was today, only peopled with characters who walked and talked a little slower. One day Quang Trung saw Hoa reading a slim novel by Pham Thi Hoai.

“Do you like her? She’s the best Vietnamese writer on the planet. She lives in Berlin.”

“Have you met her?”

“Yeah. I met her and her German husband. The guy speaks excellent Vietnamese.”

“Will I get to meet them someday?

“What do you mean?”

“Will you take me to Germany to meet them?”

Quang Trung smiled. “Only if you say yes.”

Hoa did not answer, she only blushed, because everything was understood.

6
LOVING DOLPHINS

O
ne beautiful Saturday morning Hoa and Quang Trung took a hydrofoil to Vung Tau. The stretch of the river connecting Saigon to the sea boasts some of the loveliest landscapes in all of Vietnam. Sampans paddled by feet bobbled in the shadows of mangrove forests. Much of what greets the eye is lush green, unmarred by human habitats, a true rarity in an overflowing country. At the mouth of the ocean, bright sky and shimmering sea merge into a single liquid universe, with the warm wind still blowing in your face.

With 2,143 miles of coastline, Vietnam has many beautiful beaches. Although Nha Trang, Ca Na and Phan Thiet all boast finer beaches, Vung Tau is by far the most popular resort in Vietnam, thanks to its proximity to Saigon. During the war, Saigon residents had two options for a quickie holiday: Da Lat, for its cool weather, pine trees and lakes, and Vung Tau. Although it hosted a huge American installation, the Vietcong never shelled it. The joke was that the VC wanted to keep the city safe for their own vacationing officers.

At one end of the city is a pair of gigantic cement Buddhas, sitting and reclining on a hill. At the other end is a gigantic cement Jesus, arms outspread, standing on another hill. Beneath this rip-off of Rio’s
Hey-Zeus
is Back Beach, the main bathing area. In a country where palm trees are ubiquitous, Back Beach actually has none. They’ve all been cut to make room for the widened road and the hideous-looking guesthouses and restaurants. It doesn’t matter:
the sand is reasonably clean, the water warm, and all your earthly needs will be catered to you right on the beach. From the itinerant vendors you can order crab, shrimp, ice cream, lychees, durians, snails, a plate of green papaya with beef jerky, rice with pork chops, or a bowl of crab and tomato soup. You can even have your fortune read by a wandering fortune-teller.

After checking into a minihotel, Hoa and Quang Trung relaxed on two beach chairs, drinking iced beer and eating shrimp cooked in beer. Hoa wore a maroon two-piece with large daisies. The bikini was mostly string, with scarce room for the daisies. Quang Trung wore a blue Aquablade brief. In a country where female bathers sometimes wade into the ocean in pajamas, Hoa was drawing quite a bit of attention with her smooth form and meager thread. Dreading dark skin, most Vietnamese women shun both sun and sea, the only two things their country has plenty of. Exposed to the elements, their pores open, the young couple’s nakedness was warmed by the maternal sun and stroked and tickled by the sea breeze.

Noticing Jet Skis weaving among the bobbing heads, Hoa remarked, “They’re treating people’s heads like cones on an obstacle course!”

Quang Trung shook his head. “Those guys should be arrested.”

“They’re heroin addicts!” a man selling duck eggs, standing nearby, chimed in. “The law doesn’t allow them to come close to shore, but they’ve paid off the cops. You should never hire them. They always cheat when it’s over. They’d give you a twenty-minute ride and say it’s an hour!”

“Do they ever bonk anybody on the head?” Hoa asked.

“Rarely. But don’t swim underwater because they won’t be able to see you. Every now and then they actually save lives. This beach has no lifeguards so they come in handy when something happens.” The duck-egg vendor had a hard time focusing on Hoa’s face. Just seeing her lips was disturbing, but when he lowered his gaze he became even more rattled. He decided to focus just above her head as he addressed her.

“And what are those guys doing?” Hoa pointed to several men pulling a plowlike contraption across the shallows. “Are they catching crabs?”

“They’re trying to find gold!”

“Gold?!”

“Yes, gold. Not gold nuggets, but necklaces, earrings and rings left behind by bathers. These guys used to scoop sand into a strainer until someone came up with a new tool. It’s made of a net and a scraper attached to a harness.”

“Do they ever find anything?”

“They only need to find a ring a day to make it worthwhile. If they find a nice necklace, they can sell it for what I make in a month.” Tired of tilting his head up, he decided to focus on her bare knees as he talked to Hoa.
In her bright bikini, this girl looks a bit like a Jet Ski
, he thought.
In a century or two, when Jet Skis become affordable to someone like me, it will no longer be fashionable to own one. Progress is exhilarating and good, I’m all for it, but it’s making me a little dizzy. As a poor man, I can only look at progress, not partake in it
. “I thought about joining them in searching for gold, but selling duck eggs is more steady.”

Because Vietnamese had little faith in banks or their currency, gold was considered the safest means to store wealth. That’s why just about everyone had gold on them, even as they waded into the water. One was reminded of the boat people, who left with all of their wealth converted into gold and/or dollars, most of which ended up in the hands of Thai pirates or at the bottom of the sea.

The sun had turned fierce. Tired of everyone ogling her, Hoa finally said to Quang Trung, “Let’s go into the water!”

Is there a better sensation than embracing a beloved body in the ocean? What is more sacred than conjoining in the primordial stew? Some people interpret this to mean sex with dolphins: Male dolphins have S-shaped prehensile schlongs that can grow to fourteen inches. Aroused, they do not object to being handled by humans.
Female dolphins have genital slits that are swollen pink whenever they need to get laid. As a human, you can bury your hand deep inside the soft, spongy interior and slide it back and forth. Dolphins have up to one hundred teeth, all razor sharp, making them unsuitable for an oral connection.

Water on the body, inside the body, water lapping. The sun on one’s upturned face, inside the mouth, inside one’s body. Salt on two pairs of lips, coming in and out of the body. Two bodies joined, fastened, balanced on two sturdy legs, planted in the sand, in the sea, a tangible sea that connects one to everything. What Hoa and Quang Trung did that day was not perverse in the least. As two members of the same species, they had every right to give their bodies and souls to each other.

7
TWO AFTER MIDNIGHT

“A
re you sleeping yet, Hoa?

“No.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“It wasn’t too hot today. The sea was nice. Do you want to stay here an extra day?”

“No, we should get back in the morning.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“That was really fun, in the water.”

“Yeah.”

“People probably saw us.”

“So what?”

“Have you ever done that before?”

“No.”

“You’ve never done that with another girl?”