Love Like Hate (7 page)

3
RICE BASKET OF THE SOUTH, A GHOST

H
oang Long was born in Can Tho, the chief city in the Mekong Delta. People in Can Tho considered their city the true heart of southern Vietnam. While they sneered at Saigon as a corruption of all things Vietnamese, they also envied it. People from Can Tho with ambition eventually moved to Saigon. Once there, they denied that they had ever lived in Can Tho.

As the rice basket of the South, Can Tho was a fairly prosperous place. Before 1975, the richest families owned vast tracts of land and lived in colonial-era villas built in a style that was a hybrid of East and West. Tucked in tropical gardens leafy with coconut, mango, plum, durian, jackfruit, guava, papaya, custard apple, banana, betel nut and lemon trees, each of these solid brick houses boasted a spacious porch with square columns. The high ceiling of the front room was often painted in pastel colors with bucolic scenes evoking somewhere in Europe. It was the rococo, Mekong style. On the floor were cool floral tiles, ideal for the hot weather. The furniture was made from teak, ebony or rosewood.

Hoang Long’s father belonged to this landowning class. He was a legend in Can Tho. If you go there, ask the old folks about Mr. Mot. They’ll tell you this story: Mr. Mot was not just a rich landowner, he was also the first in the city to own a gas station, which quickly multiplied into a bunch of gas stations. “Gas,” he’d
sigh, chuckling. “It’s like blood!” A careful if unimaginative dresser, he was always seen in a white cotton suit, the pleats of his pants immaculately pressed. Wearing tennis shoes, he’d rush about town carrying an alligator-hide briefcase. Reputedly full of money, it was actually completely empty. On cool evenings, you’d find him relaxing by the river, leaning against the railing, gazing into the roiling waters. He had a good mind for numbers, but routinely forgot names and faces, even of people he had known for years, even of very important people. He’d wave at complete strangers on the street, thinking he knew them, and in conversation he often asked people to repeat themselves, leading many to assume he was slightly deaf. He had a beautiful wife whom he did not love, from a marriage arranged by his father. To escape his conjugal unhappiness, Mot took to going to the many whorehouses dotting Can Tho. At one of these, he became particularly fond of an uncommon beauty named Saigon Rose.

Saigon Rose was half Cambodian, a quarter Vietnamese and a quarter French, or maybe she was half Moroccan and half Chinese. In any case, she was by far the most popular whore in the Can Tho area, demanding twice the fee of any other prostitute. Provincial men fancied themselves world travelers when they lay with her. As Mot fell more in love with Saigon Rose, it made him retch to think that she was being fucked, practically simultaneously, by all the other male citizens of Can Tho. To rectify this deplorable situation, he decided to turn her into his private mistress. Unknown to his wife, he bought a house for Saigon Rose on the other side of town, where he could visit her four or five times a week, usually just before dinner.

At home, his mood improved. He told bawdy jokes at the table and complimented his wife on her cooking. Mrs. Mot was glad to see these changes in her husband. Their sex life also improved and before long she became pregnant with Hoang Long.

A year later, Saigon Rose also got pregnant. Mot was not pleased.
Grumbling, he had to sit up in bed to have sex with her. “You’re going to kill the baby!” she whined, panting. At the hospital, the doctor and nurses were disgusted to deliver a grayish baby all gummy with dried love, his head covered with a billion dead siblings. Inside the womb, the boy could never figure out what it was that kept squirting on his head, his soft skull like a plastic tent in a thunderstorm. Even as an adult, he heard splattering sounds when it wasn’t raining. People often saw him grimacing, cursing and rubbing his bald head while looking up at the sky.

Being with child forced Saigon Rose into thinking about the future and her own mortality. Gazing in the mirror, she saw wrinkles all over. One day Mot complained about her bad breath. “It’s evil,” he grimaced. “I’m not kidding.” It turned out to be a cavity—all that chocolate he had given her—necessitating her first trip to the dentist. Everything was falling apart. Her prized body, gilded cage and carriage, was ignoring her daydreams for its own reality, careening creakily downhill from the glorious mesa of her youth. Fearing Mot would dump her eventually, she demanded much more money.

The woman had two distinct voices, a husky one for seducing and a reedy, girlish one she used to complain. “We’ve been together for three years now, and what have I gotten out of it? Next to nothing. You use me like a rag every day, keep me locked in this house like a prisoner, and don’t even allow my friends to visit. Soon I’ll be old and you won’t come around anymore.”

Mot looked at her pouting face. It was flanked by two enormous eighteen-karat-gold teardrop earrings he had given her for her last birthday. “How many times have I said it already? I’ll never leave you.”

“You must give me enough money to start a business, Mot. I’m thinking of becoming a hairdresser. And not just any hairdresser; I want to be a really classy one. I want to be a hairstylist, a beautician. I want to have a real boutique. And I’ll need to have three or four
girls working under me. You know I can’t work every day, but I’ll make a good manager. Think of the future of our son, Mot.”

Though Mot never gave her the money to start a beauty salon, he kept reassuring Saigon Rose that she was indeed the love of his life and that he would never abandon her. He ended up keeping his word.

By now, Mot’s wife had heard rumors about the other woman, but was too afraid of her husband to raise the issue. When Hoang Long was four, she became pregnant again. The day after she gave birth, Mot came to the hospital to see her.

Mot hated all hospitals for their odor of disinfectants and sad mixture of dread, absolute pain and hope, so this visit was indeed special. Some sadists might enjoy loitering in hospitals to feel better about themselves, but not Mot. The oddest thing, however, was that he did not come alone but accompanied by his mistress.

The Vietnamese word for a hospital is a “house of love.” A nun led them to Mot’s wife’s private room at St. Judas, the best house of love in all of Can Tho, efficient, clean, with a ceiling fan in every room and never more than one patient to a bed. Excellent food also. Waddling down the endless veranda, her right shoulder dipping, the old nun tried to make small talk, but Mot paid her no attention. They finally turned in to a bright room. Mot’s wife had just woken from a dream-racked sleep, her face pale, greenish, sweat beading her forehead. She had been tossed from one nightmare into another. In one, a bat jammed its cold, compact head into her mouth, forcing her to bite it off. In another, her head was dunked into a bowl of warm liquid swarming with tadpoles. In the last, the one that woke her up, she found herself lying on the sidewalk naked and bespattered with filth, under a sky blanching from a sun about to rise.

Still groggy, she heard the door open, saw her husband and smiled. Staring up at Mot’s hovering face, she noticed that the thick hair in his nostrils needed an urgent clipping.
Poor man
, she thought,
I spend two days in the hospital and he’s falling apart already
. Standing
next to his wife’s bed, with a smiling Saigon Rose beside him, Mot took a deep breath, then began, “We’ve been living a lie all these years and I cannot take it anymore. I’ve never loved you, not even one bit, and I’m sure you have no feelings for me either. We cannot deny that we are utterly indifferent to each other. We probably hate each other deep down inside, but neither one of us has the courage to admit it. Actually, I do not hate you, I respect you, but I do not love you. Seeing your face each day is pure hell for me. I also hate looking at your body and hearing your sweet talk in bed. None of this is your fault, of course, but that’s just how I feel and I cannot deny it any longer. That’s why we must stop it! As soon as you’re out of the hospital, I want to start divorce proceedings.”

Mot was so intent on finishing his speech that he did not notice that his wife had died. Her mouth was wide open in silent outrage and so were her eyes.

Overnight, Hoang Long had a new sister, a new half brother, and a new stepmother. The day after she moved in, Saigon Rose disinfected the house by removing all photos of Hoang Long’s mother from picture frames, albums and envelopes, and burning them. She also burned every piece of paper that had her predecessor’s name on it, including the birth, marriage and death certificates. Scattering the ashes into the river, she declared with a twinkle in her eyes, “Her soul will flow out to sea, and find peace and eternity there.” Reduced to a grayish white powder, the dead woman’s soul merged into the muck and flow of the Mekong River, a giant anaconda muscling its way toward the Pacific Ocean, overstuffed with half-digested cats, human beings, rats, toothless combs, toothpicks and rusted pull rings from exploded hand grenades. Saigon Rose also gave the dead woman’s clothes away and told Mot she would never sleep in the other woman’s bed, forcing him to buy a new, larger one with a fancier headboard.

Mot didn’t like Hoang Long’s sullen attitude toward his new stepmother. The boy refused to call her “mom” or even to look her
in the face. Whipping him across the body with a bamboo rod, Mot screamed, “My wife is always your mom! Get it?!” Sprawled on the floor, cowering and covering his head, the boy did not cry, but, smirking, glared at his father, provoking even more blows. They finally arrived at a compromise. After two weeks of constant beatings, Hoang Long started to address Saigon Rose as “auntie,” but always in an airless, mechanical voice that was almost inaudible.

Saigon Rose, for her part, had something else much more serious to worry about. Wherever she went inside the house, she could hear breathing noises and footsteps following her. She often felt an icy chill on the nape of her neck. Whenever she looked in a mirror, she could see a faint, disappearing face—it was always
that
face. She drew an
X
on all the mirrors, but could not get rid of the ghost. Even in bed, with Mot on top of her, she did not feel safe. It was always that face, a female face frozen in a silent scream, that she saw hovering over her as Mot worked up to yet another one of his endless climaxes.

4
RIFLES AS LIMBS

T
here’s a song that goes, “This is a beautiful season to go to war!” Hoang Long couldn’t wait to go to war. Any season was a beautiful season to go to war. At seventeen, using correction fluid and a borrowed typewriter, he changed the date on his birth certificate to join the ARVN. Apprehensive about their height and weight requirements, he was ecstatic to make it with the help of gel-thickened hair and a dishonest fishmonger’s reckoning of an ounce. It was the summer of 1961 and the Vietcong were not causing too much trouble yet, at least not in the Mekong Delta, and the Americans hadn’t yet arrived in massive numbers.

Hoang Long didn’t join the army just to escape from his family, he also wanted to learn how to shoot his rifle accurately and repeatedly at a moving target. For a boy who had never experienced freedom, he now craved the ultimate, the freedom to kill. He wanted to eradicate all that he hated in his fellow men—the unthinking cruelty, the raw selfishness, the stupidity. Determined to flex his manhood on behalf of a righteous cause over a mound of fallen bodies, he was eager to wipe out a mess of people, even if he had to wipe himself out in the process. Joining the army was a win-win proposition. His premature death, should it come, would be another blow against his callous asshole of a father.

He had never seen a Vietcong, but he knew they were assassinating government officials in the outlying areas. Their aim was to
abolish private property, or so he was told. Even with his limited experience, he interpreted this as a pipe dream if not a confidence trick. What they really wanted was to move into his father’s house after killing the old man and his prostitute bitch—which he wouldn’t mind at all; he’d probably help them—but why should they be allowed to steal someone’s home? A house is sacred and should never be stolen, burned, bulldozed or bombed. A Vietnamese even refers to his or her spouse as “my house.”