Love Like Hate (6 page)

Kim Lan politely declined.

Hoang Long met Kim Lan at Dai Trieu’s funeral and was smitten immediately. She looked striking in white, the color of mourning, an ethereal presence next to the garish coffin, which was decorated
with dragons. Looking at her smudgy eyes, her powdered cheeks smeared by mascara, her open lips misshapen by sobs, he held her hands extra long, crushing, draining them of blood, and heard himself declare, “He was my best friend in life. We were inseparable. I was kneeling next to him when he died.”

Teary, dizzy with grief, she could barely make out the dark, earnest face hovering just below eye level. His eyes were tearing up, too, from the incense smoke. Their pupils collided for a brief second. “What was his last word?”

“Your name, of course.”

A week after the funeral, Kim Lan received the first of Hoang Long’s endless stream of letters. Before long, their tone shifted imperceptibly from condolence to bonhomie to suave seduction. This disgusted her at first but, after six months, she agreed to go out with him. The turning point came after the insertion of an anguished, writhing poem by Han Mac Tu.

Kim Lan had always been a huge fan of the pathetic poet. As if spending one’s life with line breaks and meters wasn’t pitiful enough, the poet had also died, alone and unloved, of leprosy.
How pathetic
, Kim Lan thought. The celebrated poet had only pined after others, Mong Cam, Hoang Cuc, Mai Dinh, Thuong Thuong, Ngoc Suong, Thanh Huy, My Thien—the list was truly endless. But no one loved him back.
Who would want to?
The fact that Hoang Long also read Han Mac Tu indicated to her that their fates were somehow intertwined. She ignored the fact that everyone else in Vietnam also read Han Mac Tu. As for Hoang Long’s signing his own name to someone else’s poems, it did not bother her in the least.
He’s doing all this to impress me
, she thought, smiling, tears gleaming on her long eyelashes. Since childhood, she had always felt like crying when extremely happy. She also loved to tear up at the movies. The oddest thing about Kim Lan’s crying aptitude, however, was that she could always stop at will. One second, she could be crying, but the next, her face would be ice cold or she could even be laughing.

Thinking of childhood, most people can readily conjure up high-definition memories of riding a red tricycle or eating vanilla ice cream, sequences so cinematic they can replay them at will, complete with soundtrack, but not Kim Lan. Her mother had died when she was two and she was raised by a stepmother. Her father was a police captain who had patiently taken enough bribes by 1945 to buy a three-story house in the Cay Go district, a year before she was born. Kim Lan spent every day of her life in this house until she was nineteen. After she left, its pale green walls, smudged by dirty fingers, oversized boots, and gecko droppings, hundreds of charcoal black, slightly-less-than-rice-size grains, would haunt her dreams for as long as she lived. In these nightmares, the familiar rooms multiplied, stairs led to endless stairs, windows contracted into slits and slid toward the ceiling, allowing no view and only the faintest light. Chased, harassed, she could never find the front door.

Leaving home did allow Kim Lan to purge her father mostly from her consciousness. She eventually succeeded in scraping away most of his eyes, nose and mouth, sanding his face smooth, but his voice would always remain, though only faintly, as incoherent fragments devoid of authority.

Her father was a wannabe Frenchman, or, rather, an aspiring Corsican. He had studied at Lasan Taberd, a French school in Saigon, and supposedly spoke French, although no one had ever seen him talk to a Frenchman. His conversations were sprinkled with a dozen or so French words, such as
moi, toi, bon
and
écoutez
.

“
Écoutez
! Do
toi
want to drop by
moi
house this evening?”

The only book he had ever read was a biography of Napoleon, which he kept rereading until he knew all the details of Napoleon’s life better than Napoleon himself. He was one of those people who simply assumed that whatever they happened to be thinking about had to be of
immediate
interest to everyone else. Looking up from his crumbling book, he would ask Kim Lan’s mother, “Did you know that Napoleon was five foot six, only an inch taller than me?”

“Why are you always talking about that man? What has he ever done for you?”

“Did you know that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper, which contained arsenic? Isn’t that amazing? Did you know that Napoleon only had one testicle?”

“What’s wallpaper?”

“It’s something they do in France. You wouldn’t know.”

He kept a nearly full bottle of Napoleon on the highest shelf of a glass cabinet, flanked by upside-down snifters and brushed by cobwebs dangling from the ceiling. Even an adult standing on tiptoes could not reach it. He admired the liquor’s amber glow and aroma, appreciated the bottle’s elegant shape and brown-gold label, but had no stomach for cognac itself. He began each morning with a croissant and a
café au lait
, chain-smoked Gauloises, and snacked often on
pâté chaud
. Once a week he had to have a
steak au poivre
or a steak tartare, which he ate while scanning his wife’s face for hints of amused disapproval. “What are you grinning at?” It also irritated him to no end that she could never tell cheese from butter. The only cheese she had ever tried was Laughing Cow, which she always enjoyed with a banana. The sight of his wife holding a banana in one hand, a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese in the other, chewing happily, always made him seethe.
I’m married to a monkey
, he’d think.

“Cheese stinks, but butter smells good,” he would lecture her for the umpteenth time. “They are both yellow, agreed, but butter melts much faster than cheese. Laughing Cow cheese looks just like butter but it is still cheese. Camembert cheese smells worse than anything in the world,
ma femme
, but it is the champagne of cheese. Are
toi
listening to
moi
?”

“I heard you. I’ll get you some more cheese tomorrow.”

“
Écoutez!
Eating cheese, everyone grows tall and square shouldered. That’s why we must learn how to eat cheese, starting right now. Turks and Arabs eat goat cheese.…”

In 1948 Kim Lan’s mother had a brain hemorrhage and died in
the hospital after an unsuccessful surgery. She was thirty-two. During the funeral, the house was bathed in brilliant sunshine, but was soon drenched by a cloudburst, an excellent omen.
Money is coming in
, Kim Lan’s father thought with gratitude and relief,
and my wife has already forgiven me
. Wearing a sad face, he watched the coffin being lowered into the flooded pit. A month later, he formalized his relationship with the domestic servant—a fleshy girl from Phu Quoc Island. They had meshed a dozen times over the previous year, and he had never had the heart to fire her, as was customary. After each bout, he’d vow never to do it again, only to climb into her bed a few weeks later. She smelled very nice; her skin smelled just like butter. Parts of her smelled just like Camembert cheese. “Don’t ever wash, Josephine,” he’d mutter during sex.
She’s already in the household
, he rationalized even before his wife had expired,
and will make a perfect replacement mother for my infant daughter
.

As the lady of the house, however, the stepmother was anything but nurturing. She yelled at Kim Lan constantly and gave her household chores inappropriate for her age. By nine, Kim Lan had to do the dishes, sweep, and wash the floor each day with a bucket and a rag. She had trouble handling the larger bowls, breaking many, and it was two more years before she reached the height of her broom. “The girl needs more discipline,” the stepmother explained to her yielding father. “I learned to do housework when I was only seven. A girl needs to become familiar with all facets of running a household.”

She scolded Kim Lan for taking too long to wash the floor, “You’re using too much detergent. That’s why it’s taking you
forever
to wipe that floor. You’re wasting detergent and water. A girl must learn to economize right from the beginning so she can save her husband money in the future. A frugal mother can buy nice things for her children; a wastrel will end up living on the streets. When you brush your teeth, for example, I notice that you use twice as much toothpaste as necessary. A ridiculously extravagant glob. That’s why you have to
gargle at least six times to get rid of it. You’re wasting toothpaste and water. I never gargle more than twice. You’re also brushing way too hard. I don’t care if you destroy your gums in the process but why should I allow you to ruin the bristles, splaying them ahead of time? They’re made of nylon, you know, not steel. It’s in your blood to waste everything. You go through toothbrushes like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve also noticed that you always use an extra toothpick after each meal. Now tell me: Do you have more teeth than other people?! Toothpicks don’t grow on trees, you know. Just go ahead and jab at the gaps between your teeth until they bleed, why don’t you?”

The root of the toothpaste problem, the stepmother figured, was probably a billboard Kim Lan strolled past every day on her way to school. Below a grinning black face, a twelve-foot-long toothbrush was crowned with a monster glob of Hynos. “
SO FRESH YOU CAN ALMOST EAT IT!
” They have to encourage a superfluous use of toothpaste, she reasoned, to sell their decadent product. Growing up in a village, she simply dipped her toothbrush in salt or ground-up charcoal and brushed away. Poorer kids even used their index fingers. It hadn’t hurt her much: At twenty-six, most of her front teeth were still upright, though leaning slightly, some outward, some inward, in a subtle syncopation. All the ones in the back, however, in the hardest-to-reach regions, had long ago been uprooted.

At the dinner table, the stepmother even found fault with how Kim Lan held her chopsticks. “Look at that!” she snapped at the silent father. “If your daughter can’t hold chopsticks properly, how is she going to hold a broom?!”

When Kim Lan was eleven, the stepmother caught her trying out some lipstick. “You’re a damn whore!” she screamed while smearing lipstick violently onto Kim Lan’s face. “I’ve always known you were a whore!”

As punishment, she forced Kim Lan to strip and kneel in the courtyard for all the neighbors to see. “Take your clothes off! Take them off! What are you waiting for?!”

To prevent her from covering herself, she also forced Kim Lan to stretch her arms out.

“Now do you see what it’s like to be a real whore?” the stepmother sneered at a stone-faced Kim Lan as dozens of neighborhood boys, many of them her classmates, quickly gathered to gawk at their first naked girl. With scarlet lips and scarlet lipstick slashed across her face, Kim Lan looked like a bloodied clown. Someone pointed and laughed. Kim Lan could shut her own eyes but she could not shut the others’. Nor could she shut out their murmuring, snickering voices.

Kim Lan was still playing with a doll at that age. That night she held the doll by its feet and slammed it repeatedly against the floor until its head snapped off. “That’s what you get for being a whore!” she hissed. She would have screamed, but she didn’t want her stepmother to hear. Seeing the doll mutilated and in pain, Kim Lan quickly reattached its head, hugged it and apologized, and the two of them cried themselves to sleep. The doll’s name was Hoa. In the morning, Kim Lan said, “Do you forgive me, Hoa?”

“Yes, I forgive you.”

“You’re the only one I have. But you know that already, don’t you?”

“Why did you call me a whore last night?” Hoa seemed ready to cry. Much of the paint on her eyeballs had scraped off and all her eyelashes were missing. When she blinked, her eyes only closed halfway. Held together by a single button, her acrylic shirt hung from one shoulder. She wore neither skirt nor pants.

“You’re not a whore, Hoa. I’m the whore!”

The word “whore” sounded so ridiculously funny that both of them laughed themselves silly.

Kim Lan’s father was not around the house much to protect his suffering daughter. He was at work maintaining public order. One day his men brought to police headquarters the proprietress of an opium den. She was a woman of twenty-five, with large eyes, wild hair—a raw beauty. This was her first arrest ever and she was sobbing
miserably. The police captain appraised the young prisoner and made a quick calculation. He released her within an hour and from that moment on, the only cop to raid her place would be the police captain himself. He grew so fond of her, he became an opium addict. Like an overgrown infant, he’d lie for hours next to his naked mistress as his sallow form wasted away. The opium cleansed him inside out, fumigated all his pretensions away, French or otherwise. It was soothing just to watch her roll an opium pellet before stuffing it into the little hole, smiling all the while. She had gotten him an exquisite pipe, with a green jade mouthpiece, a slender bamboo stem and a ceramic head shaped like a pubescent breast. An opium dream can last several days. Whenever he soiled himself, she cleaned him up. In his stupor he even babbled like a baby, “I’m not forty years old, Mama, I’m only four.”

Kim Lan’s only wish growing up was to leave the house as soon as possible, the promised freedoms of adult life pushing her forward. At seventeen, she asked her father for permission to enter nursing school. Two years later, she was a nurse in the war zone. Caring for victims in extreme pain, she always felt like crying, but was forbidden to do so. Her extreme self-control would be perfected during this period, to desert her only in the direst situations. Away from home, she heard praise for the first time. Her superiors praised her for her competence and composure. Men praised her for her looks.

Her first year away, she came home twice, obligated by a residual sense of duty, but since each visit was nothing more than a screaming rant by the stepmother, enraged as she was by the mere sight of Kim Lan’s face, she stopped going. It was clear the stepmother wanted her out of the house permanently. In the old house, now as then, the rote ants continued to crisscross the pale green walls, lugging with their side-closing mandibles grains of rice, bread crumbs, salt, sugar and a young dead gecko, its sandy skin already slack and darkened in the wake of its premature end.