The Lotus and the Storm (9 page)

As Mai pushes me from the warmth of the shop into the brisk air outside, I look around. The sun is out, its rays shining full tilt through the lot. Mai still has some more shopping to do. She will buy
pâtés chauds,
a French pastry filled with meat, light and flaky on the outside and crispy at the edges. There will be bags of
banh tieu,
a Vietnamese doughnut that is round, puffy, and slightly sweet with a hollow center. I admit it is not as rich or tasty as a Dunkin' Donut, but it tugs at an old longing. I remind her to get Mrs. An a bag of roasted watermelon seeds. My teeth are no longer strong enough but I love to watch others maneuver teeth and tongue just so to crack the shell and get at the flesh, which has a salty and slightly nutty taste.

There is activity all around: heels clicking on the pavement, doors opened and banged shut, muted laughter, children's cries, greetings. Through closed eyelids, I imagine Mrs. An's tightly rolled washcloth pressed against my forehead on cold nights, her hand cupped gently under my chin as she repositions my head on the pillow. And then I think of what the woman at the music store said about Mrs. An's son and wonder if Mrs. An has been quietly suffering. I see her face, her long hair pinned back by combs, the tilt of her head, the open gaze of her eyes when she enters my room, and a wing beat of sadness flutters and settles in my chest, refusing to let go.

 • • • 

The day is almost over. I enjoyed the outing with Mai but it has also worn me out. I experience fatigue as a creeping, physical sensation moving from one part of my body to the next until it takes over completely.

I turn my head toward the door. “Mrs. An, are you still here? I thought you would have gone home by now.”

She grins. In the refracted light, her face shows lines of worry I hadn't noticed until now. I feel some responsibility to look at her carefully, to search for clues I might have missed.

“I popped home and put something in the oven. But I want to hear about your day and to thank you for the longans.”

I nod. “We also sent your money home to your sister.”

“She needed more than the usual amount this month because of the doctor. If I send a little bit each month, she can even live off the interest. Banks over there have been paying over twenty percent interest, can you imagine?”

“Isn't it already late?” I ask.

“Mr. Minh, it's only four in the afternoon. It gets dark early now, don't you know that?”

“Still. You should go home and rest,” Mai interjects.

I don't know how long Mai has been in the room. “You're still here too?” I ask.

“I can stay for a little while,” she says. “I don't have to be at work until later in the evening.” My daughter sometimes takes the evening shift at the law firm, which goes from six
P.M.
to midnight. Her face beams with pure affability. I smile. The sun has gradually tucked itself behind the distant church steeple.

“Let him rest, okay?” Mrs. An tells Mai. “I'm going home to check on the roast chicken and then I'll return to give him his pills.”

I hear the front door open and the sound of boots trudging down the hallway. “Leaving so early? No one has minded me one bit today,” a woman's voice complains in the distinct accent and tone of someone from the Indian subcontinent. I recognize the voice of the crazy old woman from Bengal whose apartment is across from mine. Mrs. Amrita Amar. Her door is usually left open and the nickname Mai gave her when we first moved in has stuck. “A Door Ajar.” She thinks she is already in a nursing home and has been abandoned by her family. Mrs. An's voice replies, “No one is leaving you. Your son is coming home at six. Your grandson Dinesh only went out for dinner with his girlfriend.” “Liar. Liar.” A wheelchair shoots swiftly across the floor and a door slams shut.

I struggle to find a comfortable position on the bed. Although I am thin—I have never been fat, but thin is something new—I do not feel agile or light. My ankles are puffed out. Mai murmurs something as she hesitates by the foot of the bed. I turn my gaze to the ceiling, letting my eyes drift in the sea of white above.

I can hear the deep murmur of voices outside the window where people congregate to smoke. But the ocean beyond continues to beckon through the fog and eclipse of a life from long ago. A high wind blows through the room. I struggle to draw breath. I have been given morphine to open my veins. Red pills to make my heart strong. White pills to drain excess fluid from saturated tissues. I lie back, my body drugged and duped.

I know life can only be, should only be, lived in the present.

I squeeze my eyes shut, then open them. Mrs. An has come back. She catches me looking at the empty space near the overstuffed armchair.

“Are you looking for something?” she asks.

I hesitate.

“There's no one there,” Mrs. An says authoritatively.

“Yesterday there was,” I answer. The stolen image of a woman's body, quietly curled into itself, a soft lavender petal, lingers. I close, then open my eyes to discover it has vacated.

She looks at me and shakes her head. I hear a sigh.

How did I get here? From my house in Vietnam to this apartment complex in America? she wants to know.

I am willing to tell her the essential story that has been all too easily mistold.

I watch her dark, flickering eyes, and the face that turns toward me, waiting.

“I will tell you,” I whisper. “Soon.”

MAI, 1965

M
ick Jagger growls against a raucous surge of drums and electric guitars. This is music, the kind that imparts unlimited possibilities. That is why it is addictive. My sister and I move to its beat, knowing that boys and girls all over Saigon move with us.

While the music blares, we take turns walking on James Baker's back. James has blond hair that sparkles against the sun's glare. His neck turns red, not a honeyed brown, when exposed to the searing heat. James swears he has never in his life had his back walked on. I find that hard to believe. Certainly it is a back to be admired. I can feel with the balls of my feet the two solid mounds of muscle rising under the swell of his shoulders. Carried on this back alone is a mass of muscles, regal and arrogant.

A back walk is an uncommonly effective form of massage. When I make my way up the plates of his back and press my heels against a stray knot, James lets out a long, low moan. Sometimes it is a painful grunt—“Ouch!”—which James tells us is what Americans say when they feel pain. My sister and I laugh. What a funny word, we both think. I wonder why people from different countries produce different sounds of hurt, when what comes out of our mouths when pain is inflicted is purely reflexive. Why would pain, universally felt, not have its own universal expression? When James asks us what the Vietnamese yell out when we are hurt, we teach him the word,
oui yaaah.
It is more open-mouthed, more emotional. “Oui yaaah,” he would mutter, and chuckle when I step on the knots along the length of his back.

I practice my elementary English with him when I make my way up and down his back. “Where are you from?” I ask in as casual a tone as I can. We watch an array of American shows on the English language channel—
The Wild Wild West, The Beverly Hillbillies,
and
Combat!, Combat!
being our father's favorite. I try to emulate the breezy American way of talking.

Sometimes he answers in Vietnamese. “I am from New York.”

“Where in New York?” I ask, although my sister and I already know the answer. We are learning the rudiments of conversational English.

“Long Island,” he says, making a motion with his hands to describe something long and narrow. Switching to English, he explains, “I grew up on a farm. Faaarm.”

“Moo, moo. Oink, oink?” I say.

“No, no. Po-ta-toes. Long Island potatoes are famous.”

Sometimes my sister and I sing a song about a boy who herds buffaloes that roam the green rice fields. Sometimes James tells us about a man named Old MacDonald who has a farm. We love the sound he makes. “Ee ai ee ai oh.” He points to the tip of Long Island, the southern fork, where the family farm is located. He points to the ocean he crossed to get to Vietnam. Ocean travel, even if it is by air, on a plane flying over an ocean far below, changes a person, James says. “If you ever travel across an ocean, you will see what I mean,” he says.

We have never crossed an ocean. According to James, it makes some people crazy or afraid and others curious. He has become curious, longing to learn our cries, our language. James doesn't speak our language fluently, by any means, but he does speak it enthusiastically. He has managed to make himself understood, in an elementary way, in our mother tongue. My sister considers it a most impressive feat. James has command of quite an inventory of practical, serviceable words. In addition, he has mastered our six tones, though not in the back-and-forth necessary for smooth conversation. In conversation, his Vietnamese becomes atonal. But in controlled moments of recitation, James enthralls us with his skill, unleashing the six tones of the word
ma,
which, depending on how it is uttered—with a level pitch, a steep rise, a soft curve or a sharp one, a slow fall, a deep drop—may mean
ghost, mother, graveyard, horse, but,
or
seedling
. When he finishes, he takes a bow and we applaud, especially when he makes a mistake.

 • • • 

One day I am home early. Our mother is at the table in the upstairs dining area with Uncle Number Two. He is not my uncle by blood, unlike Uncle Number Five. But as my father's close friend, he is entitled to this honorific. We call him by a word that signifies not just a familial relationship to our father—a brother—but also an elevated status: our father's elder brother.

Our mother loves the foods of many countries but especially those of France. The pastries on the table are from the famous Givral bakery, consecrated by the hands of a master chef trained in a top restaurant on the Left Bank in Paris. I smell the creamy, ambrosial scent of whipped butter and sugar; fresh croissants, perhaps; the slightly smoky caramelized sweetness of crème brûlée; the sustained bitterness of dark chocolate, undoubtedly of the famous Menier brand, simmering in a fondue bowl. There is an extravagance of flavors delicately balanced on one silver tray—even an imaginary taste would do.

I sneak up the stairs and stand at the top of the staircase, peering through the screen door, coveting the feast before my eyes. The top of my head barely touches the bottom of the meshed screen, but if I stand on my toes, I am able to see the full span of our dining area.

Uncle Number Two is sitting across the table from our mother. I am able to hear bits and pieces of this and that if I press my ear to the screen. They are so immersed in conversation that our mother has not detected my presence.

Her finger traces the contours of an earthenware pitcher—lemonade, perhaps? Lemons, unripe enough to be sour but not acidic, a quick slash into its flesh so the pulp can be squeezed, releasing the tartness of the juices as well as the faint bitterness of the rind. What makes our lemonade intriguing to foreigners, according to our mother, is the addition of salt to temper the sourness, rather than sugar. Indeed, sour and sweet balance each other out, as in sweet and sour soup or sweet and sour pork. But a grain of salt can just as well take the edge off the tang of lemon, though in an irresistible, unexpected way, like a sinuous bend in an otherwise straight road. Our mother might have prepared this lemonade with seltzer water to give it an additional kick—a surprise on the tip of the tongue.

They are mostly silent. Sometimes their eyes meet but other times they look away from each other. Because nothing seems to be happening, I skip down the steps and head toward the kitchen. My arms are outstretched like the wings of a plane as I glide here and there.

“Go to the garden if you want to play,” our Chinese grandmother says, waving me away. She is lying on the hammock, swinging back and forth, watching me. “This is not a suitable place to run around.”

I am almost seven and I do not like to be ordered around. When I balk, she explains that our mother is right up the stairs and that she has asked not to be disturbed.

Immediately that piques my interest. I sneak back up the stairs and peek through the screen door. Uncle Number Two is now pacing back and forth, his steps measured and methodical, then frenzied and disturbed. Occasionally he stops in front of our mother and settles his gaze upon her face. He gives her rueful looks, then averts his eyes. She is still seated, her elbows on our dining table, her back erect.

Neither Uncle Number Two nor our mother has touched the tray of pastries or the pitcher of lemonade. With labored breath, he continues pacing, occasionally flinging his arms in the air. When he speaks, he starts out in a normal voice and then inevitably lowers it. He looks at her intently as if awaiting her cue. Mother smooths the front of her dress, traces its open neckline. She ignores him and then finally she shakes her head. Again and again. No, emphatically no. He nods his head vigorously, yes, yes, as if to deflect Mother's denials. I am jolted into attentiveness. “General so-and-so,” he says. I cannot hear the name. But I hear a lot of “why's” and “why not's.” The words mean nothing to me but their force captivates me. Mother continues to shake her head, a few pins come loose, and a river of thick black hair tumbles down the back of her dress. She opens her palm and runs her fingers through the shimmering current of black before twisting it once again into a knot. Finally, as if exasperated, she allows her voice to rise to an audible pitch. I laugh to myself as she dramatically pleads,
“Troi dat oi.”
“Heaven, earth. Please listen.” Mother continues, “Let it be, Phong. Leave it alone.” “No. No,” he mutters. She is firm, although Uncle Number Two is on his knees next to her.

“Phong, please,” she says. “Please don't go on. Please, Theo,” she switches, perhaps as a last resort, to the endearing nickname I have heard our parents call him.
Theo
means “scar.” I see a thick cross-stitch of scar tissue along the length of his jaw. I was once frightened of its angry, purplish hue. Our mother must have sensed my fear and will sometimes invoke his name as a deterrent against possible bad behavior from me. She tells me he has many scars, a fact that makes me all the more wary of him.

A few moments pass and then I see tears. A grown-up man is crying. He stands perfectly still, his eyes fixed on our mother's face. He leans toward her, murmurs something, and her face turns even more remote as she looks away.

I am startled by the sound of a door opening on the other side of the dining room. It is too early in the day for our father to be coming home. It is, instead, Uncle Number Five. I can tell it is he even though he sports dark sunglasses and a scraggly beard, perhaps as a disguise. He is surprised to see the dining room occupied at this time of day. He lets out a small cough. Our mother appears equally surprised, and looks at her watch as if he were appearing at a time other than the one agreed upon. Uncle Number Two turns and stops conclusively in his tracks, his eyes fixed on Uncle Number Five before directing his hard, probing stare elsewhere. His face registers but a minimal shift in expression. Our mother leans in the direction of Uncle Number Five, hesitates, then smiles nervously. “Oh,” she says. Both Uncle Number Two and Uncle Number Five nod almost simultaneously. Uncle Number Two is no longer animated or sad, only impassive. To fill in the silence, our mother says, “This is my brother,” pointing to Uncle Number Five with her chin, and, “This is an old friend,” pointing to Uncle Number Two. They both nod, asking no question of or about each other.

I can see that our mother is nervous. Uncle Number Five does not usually visit us in the middle of the day. He is a family secret; his subterranean Vietcong connections can be revealed to no one, not even close family friends.

Our mother takes her brother's hand and squeezes it, but in an archly restrained way. Uncle Number Two smiles. Uncle Number Five's face sours. He understands our mother's signal. “I am sorry to interrupt. It's a glorious afternoon so I'll be out in the garden,” he says. Our mother does not try to detain him. Instead she quickly nods. “Good idea.”

Our mother exhales, visibly relieved that the two men are no longer in the same room. Soon after Uncle Number Five leaves, Uncle Number Two looks at his watch and says something to Mother in a much lowered voice. His face reverts to a more gentle version of itself as he removes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He holds a cigarette in his mouth and its filter tip dangles from his lips. Our mother leans forward to help. She strikes a match and brings the flame to the cigarette. He puffs on it several times until its tip glows.

I am relieved, as if a weight has been lifted. Of course, it may very well be that Uncle Number Two's presence itself is heavy. He is an important man, especially for our family. He and our father used to fight side by side. Our mother says he once saved our father's life when father was betrayed by those within our very own armed forces. We owe him devotion, kindliness; in other words, a debt too great to be discharged, one we have to wear on our bodies.
Mang on
indeed—“to wear a debt,” to be cloaked in its immaculate and terrible beauty.

Our mother too wears this debt. I hear her say “Anh Theo” as he stands up to leave.
Anh
is a word with dual meanings. It is both intimate and familiar, a word to call an older brother or someone who is respected and beloved. It is also a word to call a lover, and of course when our mother uses it with our father, that is what she means.

 • • • 

That evening, my sister and I rush to unlace our father's enormous boots upon his return home. Normally we would give him an ice-cold fresh coconut with a straw sticking out of a hole. The outer husks would be hacked away, leaving behind a smoothly shaven cream-colored shell. Once our father sips all the juices, we would scoop the sweet white flesh from the shell with a long spoon and slurp it with giddy delight. But that night, I suggest that our father drink lemonade instead. Salted lemonade, I add, as an extra temptation.

“Where did you get it?” Father asks.

“Mother made it for Uncle Number Two,” I say.

“Oh? He was here? Good. Very good.”

“And Uncle Number Five too.”

Our father stiffens. His mood darkens. “Really?
What a day. And where is he now, your uncle Number Five?”

“Sleeping in the secret room.”

When our father remarks that lemonade made for Uncle Number Two must be special indeed, I quickly run downstairs to fetch him a glass. That night I am awakened by the sounds of a long, drawn-out fight that simmers with whispers, a slow exhalation that eventually collapses into deep silence. For once in my recollection their love fails to comfort. I cannot hear everything they say, but I can feel the stings and smarts that are left behind. I can taste the bitterness on the very tips of their tongues. In a slow but sharp and sibilant tone, our father says Uncle Number Two's name. “Phong,” he snorts, and the name comes flying out, expectorated. Our mother uses Uncle Number Two's nickname “Theo” instead, perhaps to dilute the tension. Finally I hear them each, with caution and purposefulness, fail to answer the other's allegations.