Love Like Hate (5 page)

The best boobs deserve the best bras, Kim Lan firmly believed. They cannot be degraded and humiliated by cheap Vietnamese or Chinese products. After careful research, Kim Lan chose Arc de Triomphe bras for Hoa. Her daughter looked best in the Fragrant Mystic Flower Padded French Balconette model, the Lamborghini of bras. Combining full chalice styling with a plunging design, this underwire bra boasted central lattice detail and asymmetrical floral embroidery, ensuring an enticing look. Each one of these bras cost an average worker’s monthly salary, so Kim Lan only bought two. It was worth it, she figured: An Arc de Triomphe bra would last a lifetime, maybe even several lifetimes. Hoa could use these in the afterlife, in heaven or hell, and when she was reincarnated, as long as she returned human. Not trusting the servant not to mangle them, Kim Lan washed them by hand herself, on alternate nights.

In the neighborhood there was a woman with no breasts at all. She lived with her sister, her aging mother and a male cousin. Neither
sister had a husband, but the one with breasts took a lover occasionally. The woman with no breasts had only a lapdog for company. She took the dog everywhere, even to the shoe factory where she worked. As a teenager, she had massaged her chest constantly, hoping breasts would grow. She had assumed breasts were like muscles. Later she massaged her padded bra to make the cups less pointy. She finally stopped wearing this bra because it kept hitching up to her shoulders. Implanting themselves in her mind, her missing breasts tormented her night and day. She felt so much rage at times that tears would well up in her eyes. To add to her insult, her sister had huge, absolutely humongous breasts. All her mother’s breast genes had been apportioned to her sister, apparently. The two of them walking down the street together constituted an unfortunate sight gag. She had read in
Today’s Knowledge
that breasts were only a secondary sex characteristic. It was the only one she lacked. All the others—smooth skin, wide hips and fat deposits around the buttocks and thighs—she had plenty of.
Today’s Knowledge
didn’t mention pubic hair, but she also had a thick, luxurious bush that fanned out to her thighs even.
So it shouldn’t matter
, she told herself,
that I have no breasts. I have everything else in good measure, and a pretty face besides
. But it did matter. Giving up on bras, she also stopped wearing panties except during her period. She never put on makeup and hardly combed her hair, but she always took a long time drying her body after a shower. At home, she liked to walk around in a nightshirt. It was comfortable but threadbare. She enjoyed standing in the doorway, so the sun could shine through her nightshirt, silhouetting her body. Every so often she would smile a very odd smile at her male cousin.

In the neighborhood there was a second woman with no breasts at all. This one was married to a sunken-chested man. Everything about him was sunken, with nothing jutting out to sniff or explore. Smooth and uniform, he resembled a well-encased sausage. Likewise, his wife. Lying together, they were like two synchronized hot
dogs spinning in boiling water, barely touching. It was a mystery how they managed to produce three children. A skillful goldsmith, he had a steady, prosperous business. On her thirty-fifth birthday, he surprised his wife by taking her to a plastic surgeon. Three hours later, she came out with a new pair of breasts, curvy and pert, just like in the brochure. Her arms moved clumsily at first and her nipples were deadened permanently, but it was well worth it. For the first time, she could feel some resistance, some friction, when she hugged her husband. Standing naked in front of a mirror, she swooned with pride, cupping her bosom with both hands. But she was not satisfied. Stacked up front, she now felt disadvantaged out back. She returned to the same surgeon a month later for a buttocks augmentation. After her buns were well rounded, the doctor offered to tuck in her stomach and to peel her face at a discount. She readily agreed. With all these operations, her husband had to borrow money and to mix silver with gold to increase his profits. On the plus side, his wife was magically morphing into a goddess in front of his eyes. The next surgeries yielded more discreet results. Her strait was narrowed, its frilly fringe fluffed out. With a new body, her mood improved and her confidence shot up. She went out and got herself a handsome, well-muscled, twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, a stark contrast to her grimacing, coughing, sunken-chested husband, who was going steadily blind from overwork, then finally went to jail for cheating his customers.

1
WEDDING AT A CHINESE RESTAURANT

H
oang Long, the groom, was a captain in the ARVN. He was a short, wiry twenty-four-year-old with a permanent smirk on his face, no facial hair, his skin the color and texture of beef jerky. As with many short men, his body language was a bit exaggerated. He sat (too) ramrod straight and stood with his feet (too) wide apart. When he walked, he swaggered, swinging his narrow shoulders from side to side. A first-strike guy, he was always ready to preempt you to a punch. Being small had sensitized him to the fact that there was conflict inherent in every human encounter. How one dealt with this determined the shape and tint of one’s life—or even whether one would have a life. He never strayed into a shoe store unless he had to.

But he was in fact a tough cookie. As a leader, he had the respect of all the men in his company. Already that year he had survived the Tet and Mini-Tet offensives. That night, standing next to his prize catch, he felt particularly triumphant and invulnerable.

Kim Lan also appeared triumphant. As a twenty-two-year-old nurse, she had seen enough messed-up bodies to know that love did not come to everyone. Showing her nice teeth, her eyes gleaming, she felt saved and vindicated. Ditzy with joy, she could have died right after the wedding, or even during it, and been satisfied. She had never envisioned spawning children, weekly arguments, a pension plan, or widowhood. She had only dreamed of being feted at a
glorious wedding, and here she was. In spite of the red dress, she was still a virgin. No one had touched her. Hoang Long had never even pecked her on the cheek. They had sat on park benches to admire the Saigon River without incident, and he had never attempted to grope her inside a darkened movie theater. They always perched high on the balcony, away from the chatterers. Hoang Long loved Westerns. The dating couple saw
Hang ’Em High
and
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Kim Lan enjoyed sitting through a foreign film just to hear an exotic language. Equally charmed by English, French and Italian, she thought they sounded exactly the same. Once she suggested
Born Free
, which left him dozing by the end, swathed in swooning music, his head resting on her soft, silky shoulder. Moved by the sight of the lioness being released into the wild, she secretly planted a light kiss on top of her boyfriend’s head. His hair gel smelled nice but tasted bitter, forcing her to pucker and wipe her lips on the back of her hand. The only film they both hated was
The Poseidon Adventure
. It was resonant yet disturbing to see so many people, Americans, trapped inside a topsy-turvy world for three hours, trying to squabble their way into sunlight. They felt relieved when it ended, and even a little foolish leaving the theater.

At other times they had merely held hands on tense and romantic walks through the Saigon Zoo. They flung peanuts at lunging monkeys and extended sugarcane to shuffling, curtsying elephants. She was drawn to caged animals because she loved to feel pity for all living things.

In the end, it was Hoang Long’s tact and composure that won her over. She saw him as her tender warrior. She was also touched and reassured by his patience, as proven by the fact that he could wait an hour or more whenever she showed up (deliberately) late for a date.

Just outside the circular entrance to the banquet room, the newlyweds stood next to a large photo of themselves, retouched, baroquely framed and placed on a frail easel. Slightly taller than the
groom, theatrically made up and radiant in a red dress, the bride held a bouquet of red roses and wore a tiara over a bouffant, helmetlike hairdo in the photo, provoking mutters of “fake” from some of the female guests. A hairdresser had recommended that she balance and soften her sharp profile with a “Jackie Kennedy,” poor woman. The groom looked spruce in his white tuxedo.

There would be 360 guests that night, seated at thirty round tables. Waiting for the first of nine courses—a lucky number—the men guzzled 333 beer as the women sipped Coke, the gas in the drink tickling their larynges, making some of them burp. A scowling, papyrus-skinned octogenarian, shivering from the air conditioner, thawed herself by compulsively gulping scalding tea. Having seen a thousand weddings, she no longer remembered any of them, not even her own. For the entire evening, she exchanged not a syllable with the drowsy old man parked next to her. 333 beer, 360 guests, 9 courses, on the 24th day of the 12th month: On this special night, nothing was left to chance.

Most weddings in Vietnam are occasions for ostentation and bankruptcy, with many families having to borrow beaucoup cash to stage appropriate feasts for their sons. Guests don’t bring gifts, but legal tender in red envelopes. The ones who had arrived early were already getting bored with the lively music. Absentmindedly picking at dried squid and caramel peanuts, they joked about sex and soccer. Under a gathering haze, tin ashtrays fumed and filled. Playing tag, small children chased each other, shrieking. Some merged with potted plants or crawled beneath tables to mesh into a circle of darkened, anonymous legs, where they crouched in silent trepidation, hoping never to be found. In this sudden catacomb, seconds could stretch into minutes, into centuries, and all was peaceful, despite the cacophony just beyond the fluttering cloth. A middle-aged, mustachioed drunk draped his heavy arm across a neighbor’s shoulders, confessing, “The only American song I like is ‘Shake, Twist and Roll.’ ”

Hoang Long also had a sappy side. Courting Kim Lan, he had hand copied a dozen poems by the wretched poet Han Mac Tu, and given them to her under his own name. Using a ballpoint pen, he had written in purple ink on pink stationery, a bunch of pale roses ghosting the lower right corner of every page. “I have a new poem for you,” he’d announce at the beginning of a date. “I wrote it just last night.” He always insisted that she read each poem right away, to hear her gushing praise. He had also given her a handkerchief embroidered with two colorful birds kissing, and a gold necklace with two more birds dangling, their beaks welded together.

Later, after the champagne had been spilled and the cake eaten, after all the guests had gone home and they were alone at last, she would be shocked to discover how brutal a lover her husband was. He would make love to her with such force and haste, with such angry desperation, that it would scar her for decades. She did not suspect that everything he knew about sex he had learned from prostitutes. He would not kiss her, because the last thing a prostitute wants is to be kissed. A prostitute would sooner swallow you whole than kiss you on the lips. He would not caress her cheeks or stroke her hair, but only place a firm hand on top of her head to keep her stationary. He would not prolong the process but would try to get it over with as quickly as possible. He would fuck her as if he were paying by the second.

Done, he turned on the fluorescent light to look for his boxer shorts. “Did you like it?” he asked, chuckling, while examining his new wife lying there uncovered on the pink rayon sheet. Two pink pillows with embroidered swans were on the floor, kicked or tossed aside during the upheaval. Not hearing a response, he joked, “You were so cute. You lay there just like a piece of wood.”

2
A FRENCHMAN AND PUBLIC NUDITY

H
oang Long was not Kim Lan’s first love. Before him there was Dai Trieu, an army medic. A man of erect posture and firm principles, he was rather humorless but very gentle. Kim Lan became engaged to him in May of 1965. In June, he was killed at the Battle of Dong Xoai. Dai Trieu belonged to a very prominent family: His father had founded the Brimstone Tire Company of Vietnam. Everyone used Brimstone tires. Many people criticized Dai Trieu’s father for allowing his son to enter the army in the first place. “What a heartless man,” they cursed. “If I had that much money, I’d never let my son die as a soldier.” After Dai Trieu’s death, his mother told Kim Lan she still wanted her as a daughter-in-law. To prove her seriousness, she suggested that Kim Lan marry Dai Trieu’s twin brother, Dai Truong, who resembled him in every way, down to the smallest habits and vices. “You won’t know the difference,” the old lady said. “Even I couldn’t tell the difference sometimes. They dressed the same and had the same haircut. They even smoked the same cigarettes. I’ll talk to Dai Truong tomorrow and tell him to break up with that slutty girlfriend of his. I never did like that girl anyway.”