The Lotus and the Storm (46 page)

A hard breeze flattens the candle flame. He cups his hand over it, shielding and steadying the smudge of light from the wind, prolonging its glow in the darkness. He sits with his hands almost touching hers, expelling plumes of smoke through his nostrils. The candles have nearly burned away so James inserts new ones into the holders and lines them up, creating a sieve of light. There is no talking, only a brooding silence as he crushes his cigarette in the chock-full ashtray.

As she finishes off the last dumpling, he peels a green mango, slices it for her, and slips a morsel into her mouth.

A big round moon, shrouded and moody, shines down on them.

He opens his knapsack and removes a three-quarters-full bottle of Dewar's White Label scotch.

They are in a darkness that covers fear and makes talking easier. Something happens; Mai can talk. “Tell me something,” she finally says.

He tells her about his years of loss after 1968. Mai, I, we, all of us are rapt, listening attentively. He explains that there was the long period of time spent in a veterans' hospital and a rehabilitation center. He talks about his cross-country wanderings and the years living at home with his mother on Long Island, doing odd jobs. He says something about a disreputable existence and shakes his head as he tries to sum up his life. “Everything was temporary. Nothing stuck to me. I caused my mother untold worries, broke her heart. I spent my time watching movies at home on TV. When she died, I upped and left. Wandered about for a while and then came here. To try and make a go of it.” He gives her a long, focused look, then adds, “And to stay.

“This is where my daughter was born,” he whispers.

Mai is stilled. She tries to give shape in her mind to the word
daughter
.

“I've been given a new life here. Look at her,” he says, pulling a photograph from his wallet and putting it under the pale light.

Mai looks at the photo. There are traces of Asian features in the little girl's face.

“Where she was born is where I am putting down roots.”

Instinctively, Mai pulls away, not trusting herself to speak. So this is how he has been brought to this moment, she thinks. A hot flare rises from her cheeks. She imagines James holding the child, now four years old, he says, and she muses about the quiet, meaningful life that now moves through him.

It always comes back to the mother and so he tells her. “The child's mother, my wife,” he says, “tried to escape by boat with her mother in 1980 and they were caught and imprisoned. She was only four then and her mother wanted to give her a future away from Vietnam. Her father was a soldier for the South and did not survive his reeducation camp years.”

I see the watchfulness in his eyes as he tells Mai about the mother of his child and her life of frailty and torment. “Every day she puts on makeup and goes to work at Apocalypse Now. It's one of the most famous clubs in Saigon.” James's voice becomes a monotone, pitched low. “She is a good mother,” he adds, nodding for emphasis. His voice, gritty from cigarettes, is breaking as he tries to loosen the inhibition and finish the thought. He is struggling to put the words together. After a moment's pause, he pulls a pack of Marlboro from his trouser pocket. He flashes Mai a smile and confesses that he needs a cigarette to figure out what he wants to say.

The smoke burns Mai's tear ducts and stings the back of her throat.

James lifts his eyes. The brownish filter tip hangs from his mouth. He takes a deep drag and stares into a vacant space and begins to talk. His voice hoarsens. “Since our first meeting, my wife had looked to me to take us out of Vietnam in order to fulfill her own mother's hope for her,” he says. “I'm sure that was my appeal to her.” He clears his throat. “But especially now, after the birth of our child. It has become a matter of her future, our daughter's future,” he adds, throwing the weight of his voice into each word, “that we have to leave Vietnam.”

He reaches across the table and holds Mai's hand. “You know I cannot return to America, don't you?” Mai says nothing. “And so we are still here, much to her chagrin.

“I know it is a big disappointment for her,” he continues ruefully, taking in a long drag of smoke. “With a few strokes of the pen and forms from the American Embassy, my signature would confer American citizenship on her immediately,” he murmurs. “And we could all take a plane and land in the U.S.” At last he raises his head and stares straight at her. He foresees the hooks and snares of judgment, and to soften it, he inserts his own self-assessment. “Maybe what she says is true. Maybe I am hard-hearted,” he concedes.

James tells Mai how his life has been a spiral circling back into itself, a snake swallowing its own tail. But he will not leave Vietnam. “Saigon is a gentler place,” he says, “for people like me. A less judgmental place.” He smiles. “There are many drifters here and I am just one of them.”

He takes a deep swallow of his scotch and gives her a quick smile. He tells her he teaches English a few days a week at a local school. “More than that,” he says, “would be too much for me. I don't think my wife understands this. But you do. I know.” He looks at her through the flutter of candlelight, as if to study her. “Maybe you found the American Dream. But it's not for me. I wouldn't even know how to look for it.” He sits there, biting a corner of his lower lip.

Mai listens and says nothing and I note when she lifts her head that she is tearing up. His story hollows her. James has taken his slender prospects and planted them here, in Saigon. He has found love, perhaps even the kind that rushes through the heart and yanks it loose, and it has given him a child.

He has managed it. He has outmaneuvered death and made it across the crags and precipices of war. He has thrown himself into the jostle of marriage and turned himself over to this seemingly undramatic task of making a home and settling down.

Mai struggles to simulate the requisite expressions of surprise and congratulations. Instead all she can manage is a suddenly sensed sadness and a question. “Where are they?” she asks.

James says that his wife has taken their child to visit her ailing mother in Ba Xuyen Province deep in the Mekong Delta. He is not sure how long she will be gone.

He does not bring his wife up again.

James puts his hand on Mai's cheek, wiping away her tears and leaving a warmth on her face. She smells smoke and beer coming from him. Her throat burns but she whispers that she is happy for him even as she looks away. He is leaning toward her and hooking his finger into hers.

You remember, she wants to say, but she does not want to turn her head and risk looking him in the eye. He nods again, as if he were replying to her unasked question. Of course he remembers the hooked fingers. In comforting her, he becomes confident and self-assured, not the drifter ground down by old wounds. With his appearance the dead have awakened; our sister dances as Mick screams, our mother with her face beaming and flushed drinks tea with her Chinese friends, and our father shows us his polished boots.

When they stand up to leave, he kisses the top of her head, wraps his arm around her, and leads her off. Almost by habit or instinct, she consigns herself to him, following him in silence down slanty alleys, making several turns through this and that street, past old lampposts oxidized copper and orange, and then onto the main boulevard. She hears his footsteps by her side. He leads her to a park bench across from the old French Opera House. There is a shimmering growth of green, slightly damp from the rain, beneath their feet. An occasional soft breeze breaks through the stagnant hot air. Lampposts shed pools of light that are too slim to illumine the expanse. But it is the dimness of night that comforts, shelters, and even elevates the spirits. I know that for Mai, darkness is a release. Under the glow of a nearby streetlight, she is visible but inconspicuous. They are alone but not really. They are in the city's center and so there are footsteps of people strolling by, conversations, and obliging laughter. Street vendors can be glimpsed along the edge of lamplight, carrying the burden of unsold wares home. They are resilient and dogged but weighed down by poverty and fatigue.

James puts his arms around Mai's shoulders. “Come close to me,” he murmurs into her ear. She looks at him, suddenly unafraid and intrigued. The miracle of it is this: how little things from such a long time ago can still be remembered as if they had occurred only yesterday. Tamarind trees, not much taller than when she was a little girl, still grace the streets. I feel the impulse to jump up and grab a low-hanging pod, crack it open, and suck on its sticky pulp while twigs scrape underfoot.

“Remember how your Chinese grandmother disapproved of our music?” he asks Mai. He tells her he has gone to Cholon many times to look for her. “I didn't forget her,” he says. “I never found her.”

She clasps her hands in her lap and gazes down at them. James is laughing at something. His hand rests on the curve at the nape of her neck. She hesitates to tell James where she is staying but he insists on walking her to her hotel. They stand by the entrance, among hotel personnel in traditional silk garb who open the door and bow as hotel guests go by, greeting them in the requisite spruced-up voice. She notices that he is edgy. I too recognize his nervousness. It is like mine. He lingers by the lobby entrance and then tells her that he will see her tomorrow.

 • • • 

The sidewalks offer us reminders of how things were. Mai's stomach feels the sharp bite of nostalgia as they examine mementos hawked by vendors, objects of importance only because of their link to something now defunct. James tells Mai that he has all of the South's old paper money and will give the bills to her. But Mai wants her own. They are being sold and displayed under glass cases. There is the red one-hundred-dong bill with the picture of Le Van Duyet, national adviser to emperors, great statesman, and protector of Christian missionaries from persecution. There is the orange-tinged five-hundred-dong bill with a photograph of the Presidential Palace. It was through the iron gates of this building that two North Vietnamese tanks crashed when they entered Saigon that last day in 1975. Despite James's protestations, Mai buys both and pays full asking price for them without even bothering to haggle. I remember the plates of
banh cuon
Uncle Number Five and our mother bought with a one-hundred-dong bill and the red plates of fireworks they bought with the five-hundred.

What they need is simply to touch. They hold hands as they walk. The sidewalk is being repaired and whole cement tiles are being lifted up by jackhammers. The gravelly surface pokes at her heels with each step she takes. Peanut shells are scattered about.

The reality is that they have today together, and any other way of looking at time, perspective, scale, or distance, hardly matters, at least on the surface. They spend the day lounging about, walking here and there, as if it were the very route they were meant to take all their lives. They sip pressed sugarcane juice when they are thirsty, eat steamed peanuts to tide them over until the next big bowl of pho noodle soup. A breeze soaks up the humidity. Wind. So sweet and cool. They walk into several boutique shops on the main boulevard, the old Tu Do Street, so Mai can buy souvenir lacquer boxes as gifts for her law firm friends in Virginia. Saleswomen instantly lift their heads and slide toward them, shadowing their every movement in a space-invading way that Mai finds offensive.

“They don't know any better,” James tries to mediate. “It's a different sense of space here,” he explains. Of course I understand. But not Mai. He nudges her to admire the lacquer shine and luster and the mother-of-pearl inlay. He tells her when she hesitates that anything that seems mundane here because it is one of so many will be beautiful in America. They pick out several sepia photographs of old Saigon for her to frame when she gets home. A vendor hawking durians stops when she sees Mai eyeing her basket from the store's threshold. James picks out a medium-sized one and asks her to split its thorn-covered husk open. He does not want the vendor to touch the flesh. I know it is a sweet concession to Mai's concern for contamination.

“Leave it in the fruit,” he tells the vendor. It is the first time she hears him speak Vietnamese and she is impressed by it. Mai loves that moment when the tongue touches the durian's soft, creamy flesh. She loves how the custard pulp melts in the mouth. Mai is in a sweat, but she is happy squatting on the sidewalk with James by her side.

They walk past the Sheraton Hotel with its burnished marble walls and stairs, its ground floor housing a glass-encased Gucci store, then past the Esprit shop occupying the large corner across the street, past the row of small boutiques selling designer jewelry and other curios made of buffalo horn and tortoiseshell, past restaurants and cafés adjacent to the relatively new Versace store that has, James said, recently displaced a small coffee shop. Mannequins flash their metallic sheen through transparent designer dresses and half-zippered jackets. A wind starts to blow, then intensifies as it whistles toward the harbor. James pulls Mai under an aluminum awning into a small newspaper shop with racks of postcards in the front. A man looks at them through lifted eyes, barely nods, then returns to rocking himself slowly on a cane-bottomed rocker.

Mai is drawn to this small space crowded with stacks of old books and magazines, maps, and other miscellaneous papers. Old books are stacked against a row of windows in the vestibule. The sun enters at a slant, making dust speckles visible against the glass. She peers through a glass-enclosed bookcase, searching meticulously through the tattered covers for an English copy of
The Tale of Kieu,
the book she has brooded over since our mother first read it to us. She sees the curious stack of belongings pushed against a wall—photo albums, loose photos, letters—intensely personal, yet offered for sale, and in a surge of emotion she reaches over to touch it. She picks a random photo from a pile stored in a plastic container. It is a picture of a young woman, face illumined, palely but professionally, by the photographer's ivory light. It is but one among many loose photos. There are photo albums that remain wholly intact. There are family snapshots. Some are Polaroids, others glossy three-by-fives with white borders. Their colors, once lustrous, are now leached away. Some are wallet-sized, tinted a faint sepia. Next to the pile of photos are letters, evidently international by the flashes of red and blue along the envelopes' borders. Some have never been opened and perhaps never delivered to their intended recipients. Mai eyes the left-hand corner where the sender's address is written. San Jose; Washington, D.C.; Frankfurt; Paris. Judging by the postmarks, most of the letters were sent by boat people between 1978 and 1980, writing home to let their loved ones know they survived crossing the various oceans.