Goodbye, Vietnam (2 page)

In the bed with Anh and me was my six-year-old brother, Thant, who lay curled up like a small animal. Nothing bothers Thant. Because he is the only boy in our family, Thant is spoiled by everyone. Even when there was nothing in the house to eat, my grandmother would sneak Thant some little bit of food she had hidden away. Thant would eat it greedily, never thinking to share it with me and Anh.

The whispers on the other side of the room grew louder. I opened my eyes a little and looked at the three shadowy figures sitting cross-legged on a mat near the altar. The only light came from a small oil
lamp that filled the house with smoke and made my eyes smart. It was seldom lighted because oil is so costly. In the days when I went to school I had to hurry to finish my homework while it was still light.

Two years ago I had to stop going to school to work in the rice paddies, for our family needed every penny to keep from starving. My mother was very sad on the day I went to work in the fields. But my grandmother only scoffed at girls who could read. “They will be spoiled for housekeeping, and no man will want them,” she said.

My grandmother earned extra money because of her remarkable powers of healing. Of course, she was not an
ong thay phap
, a master of sorcery. That was allowed only to a man and was passed on from father to son. But my grandmother was thought to have much power against evil spirits. She knew all about herbs and the art of letting blood. She even preserved snakes in rice alcohol to make a powerful medicine. My grandmother was also a midwife for the village and had brought many babies into the world. For all these services she received small payments, which she kept hidden, not sharing with us. She had not even helped when my father had been sent away to a camp for
nearly a year. There had been nothing to eat then but the frogs we had been able to stick in the fields and a bit of rotted rice.

Listening to the whispering, I could hear talk of my mother’s brother, Diep Van Tien, and his family. They had disappeared from our village one night. It was said that they went on a boat and would never come back. Some people in the village were envious of Tien and his family and said they were going to a country where there would be all the food you could eat and no policemen to carry you away. Others disagreed, saying the boats were not an escape but a trick to get your money. Even if you did manage to get on a boat, the boat would not be seaworthy and would sink, or even worse, pirates would descend upon the boat and murder everyone.

But my uncle and his family had been lucky, for many months later my mother received a postcard through the mail. On the back was a picture of a silver city with buildings so many and so tall it was hard to believe the earth could hold them. Neither my father nor my mother can read, so they handed the postcard to me. It was the most important moment of my life. I held the card very carefully and
read the message. “ ‘My honored family: We are now in Hong Kong and soon we go to America to a place called Chicago. We think of you every minute. Make our humble thanks to our ancestors for watching over us.’ ” It was signed,
DIEP VAN TIEN
. We were happy for Tien and his family, but we shook our heads over the strange name of the place they were going to.

The card was secretly passed among all the families in the village, and while only Tien and his family had escaped, his freedom gave all of us hope.

The police were angry at the escape of Tien and his family. The whole village suffered. All of our work hours were increased so that we had to leave for the rice fields long before daylight. It was hard work. My back ached from the hours of bending over to push seedlings into the wet mud. Sometimes you worked under the scorching sun. Sometimes the rain poured down on you. Your fingers shriveled from being in the water so long, and when you climbed out of the knee-deep mud your legs were covered with fat, slimy leeches that had to be picked off one by one. The first time Anh helped, she disgraced our whole family by screaming when she discovered the leeches on her legs.

I listened again to the whispers. “Never,” I heard
my grandmother hiss in answer to something my father had said. She was so angry she forgot to whisper. “I will die here so that I may lie beside our ancestors. On the sea the
noi
will take all of us.”

I trembled. The
noi
were evil spirits that could put a curse on you so strong you would have an irresistible urge to plunge into the water and drown. So awful was the curse, you could drown in something as small as a teacup. I couldn’t understand why my grandmother was speaking of the sea. Our village in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam is many miles from the sea. In my geography book I had traced the Mekong River from the Gulf of Siam down to the South China Sea. How large a sea must be, I had thought. The only water I had ever seen besides the water in the fields was the small stream that wound along the edge of our village. But it was so narrow that even my brother Thant with his small chubby arm could fling a stone across it. I could not imagine water that stretched so far you could not see to the other side.

The whispers grew quieter and lulled me to sleep. I woke only briefly when my grandmother pushed her bony frame rudely onto our bed, taking up nearly half the bed’s space. My grandmother always smelled
of incense and
nuoc mam
, the fish sauce she dabbed on her food. In a minute her quick, sharp little snores began and I fell asleep again, Anh’s hand clutching mine for comfort.

When I awoke, my grandmother was already up and burning joss sticks at the altar while she recited her morning prayers. As she kneeled and bent her head to the floor, her sharp elbows stuck out. “She looks like a cricket,” Anh giggled in my ear.

It was my job to start the fire for the morning tea. I hurried into my trousers and shirt and went outside to bring in rice stalks and coconut shells to fuel the fire. The pale sunlight was tangled in the branches of the great mango tree that stood in the center of our yard. It was the oldest mango tree in the village and the object of much veneration. My grandmother said its great pools of shade attracted spirits that lounged about under the green canopy. We were forbidden to get too close to the tree lest we interfere with the spirits, but when my grandmother wasn’t looking Thant would scramble up the trunk like a monkey and steal the fruit.

In the distance I could see the paddy fields. The last crop of late rice had already been harvested.
Everyone in the village, even Thant, had helped, but there had been no pleasure in our work. The government had come and filled their trucks with the sacks of rice and carried them away. The villagers had grumbled that what was left for us would never last, not even until the hasty rice was harvested in September.

“Hai,” my grandmother called to me, “you are slow as a toad this morning.”

I hurried in, trying to hold on to the rice stalks that were escaping from my arms and flying about in the light breeze. My mother always called me by my name, Mai, which means “cherry blossom” and which I like. But my grandmother calls me Hai, which means “number-two child.” Anh is Ba, or “number-three child.” Thant is Tu, or “number-four child.” No one is called number-one child. This is a clever trick to confuse the evil spirits that wish to harm young children and that are particularly eager to injure the eldest.

Anh had taken the straw mats from the beds and was airing them. Thant was feeding his two goldfish. My father had brought him the goldfish, and Thant seldom let them out of his sight. The fish, whose names
were Yin and Yang, swam about like two slippery orange suns.

For breakfast there were rice balls and tea. It was strong tea because it was the first brewing. Water would be added to the same tea all day. By evening it was hardly worth drinking. My mother served the grandmother first. The grandmother never ate much. This morning she ate almost nothing, putting most of her own portion into Thant’s small hand. She was in a cross mood and would not speak a word to anyone. When she finished she went outside with a handful of grain for the two ducks she was raising for the celebration of Tet.

“Why is our grandmother so angry this morning?” Anh asked.

My mother sighed. It would be unbecoming for her to say anything against the mother of her husband, to whom every respect was due, but on this day I could see her heart was as heavy as one of the three stones that lay upon our altar.

“Anh,” she said to my sister, “take Thant and help your grandmother round up the ducks.” When they were outside, Mother turned to me and spoke in a hushed voice. “You are thirteen now, Mai, and old
enough to know what will happen. I am going to tell you something that you must tell to no one else. Our lives will depend on your silence. I am telling you because we will need your help with Anh and Thant when the time comes.”

“When the time comes for what?” When I heard the sorrow in my mother’s voice, I was not sure I wanted to hear her secret.

“We are going away tomorrow.”

“Away?” I said, not understanding.

“We are going to travel to the sea, where we will meet others. A boat will be waiting for us. The boat will take us to Hong Kong. We must go away. The police may come soon to arrest your grandmother because she practices healing and the telling of fortunes. There is almost no food in the village and each day everything costs twice as much as the day before. You are out in the rice fields instead of in school. We must find a better place, but your grandmother does not want to leave the village.”

I understood. Everyone wished to stay near the tombs of their ancestors. My family had lived in this village for more than a hundred years. On
Ky
, when the dead are commemorated, people travel great distances
to their native villages to honor their ancestors. “Will we come back for
Ky
?” I asked.

“No. We will never come back.” My mother hid her face. Now she wept in that silent way she had, so that only the slight shaking of her shoulders and the way her hands covered her face gave away her crying.

I crept closer to her. “But we have no gold,” I said. After the Tien family had left the village, it was rumored that nearly nine taels of gold were required to buy their passage.

“A man has come to your father and offered us passage because your father has a skill that is needed.” My father’s skill was so great a secret that it was not mentioned even now between me and my mother. I knew that under the altar stones there was a hole in the ground. In the hole a metal chest was buried. In the chest were the tools of my father’s secret trade. During the war the army of the old government had trained my grandfather as a mechanic. After the war my grandfather taught my father how to use the tools. Soon afterward my grandfather was sent away by the police, and we never heard from him again.

My father pretended to be nothing more than a rice
farmer. If others in the village knew about his secret trade, they said nothing, for everyone had secrets.

“The boat is old,” my mother said. “The motor has many infirmities, and a skilled mechanic will be needed to keep it going. A man from a nearby village who knew your grandfather during the time of the war approached us.” My mother must have noticed how unhappy I was because she said, “Mai, it is the only way. Even with the harvest, each day we have less and less to eat. And your grandmother is too stubborn to change her ways.”

At that moment my grandmother walked into our hut. The two ducks trailed after her, quacking. “The fire is out,” she snapped. “The tea will be cold. How is it that two women can sit next to a fire and not see it go out? Why am I cursed with such an idle family? When I die you will be too lazy to put a bowl of rice on the altar for me.”

Listening to my grandmother scold my mother, I thought, I’m never going to marry and have the mother of my husband live with me and tell me what to do every minute. “As strict as a husband’s mother,” people said, and it was true.

2

“Mai,” my mother ordered, “take Anh and Thant to the village and buy a little tea at the Chans’ store.”

Anh and Thant were pleased to be let off their chores. The two of them ran on ahead, balancing themselves on the mud dikes that outlined the paddies. The fields were empty and nearly dry, but in another two months the monsoon would come. The rains would pour down day and night until the ground ran with water and the paddies were flooded again. Everyone would soak their rice seed, and when little pale green sprouts began to uncurl from the split seed, tea and cooked rice would be offered to the spirits to insure a good crop. The seed would be scattered and left to grow until it was high enough to transplant. All summer long the shoots had to be weeded. As they grew, they rippled like green waves in the wind. When the harvesttime drew near, the whole village was fragrant with the smell of the ripening rice.

A narrow footpath running beside the stream led to a dirt road that went into the village. We passed a
boy not much older than Thant riding a water buffalo. Thant looked up at the boy enviously. The boy was very proud of his buffalo and would not even look at us. Instead he lay down on the animal’s back and stared up into the cloudless sky while the buffalo plodded along, needing no guidance on a road it had taken a thousand times.

When we reached the cemetery where our ancestors are buried, we made our way carefully among the graves to the place where the Tran tomb stood. We were proud of our tombstone. Many graves were marked by nothing more than a mud pile that would wash away in the rains. On some of the graves there were offerings of bits of food to celebrate a death date. With great respect the three of us folded our arms across our bodies and bowed low to our ancestors. Thant in front and Anh and me a little behind him, as befitted girls.

“Grandmother says they’re at the altar in our house,” Anh said. “How can our ancestors be here and there, too?”

“Maybe they followed us,” Thant said.

With a shudder Anh looked quickly about her.

Beyond the cemetery was the temple where you
used to be able to hear the monks saying their prayers, but the government had come and taken the monks away. If the monks had still been there, Thant, when he was a little older, would have gone to join them for several months to practice his religion like a good Buddhist son. He would have had his head shaved and been given an orange robe to wear.