The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (2 page)

“Grandmother already rented that condo for Dat and Quynh in August,” Linh said.

“You want to go with them on their honeymoon?”

“The condo has three bedrooms. We already talked about it before you came and they're fine with it.”

The prospect of spending two weeks tagging along on her cousin's honeymoon sounded like a punishment. This vacation was supposed to be a reward for all her hard work. She wanted to spend it with someone important to her.

The garage door opened and Cherry's father wandered in, holding a plastic grocery bag. He smiled at the guests until her mother approached him and impatiently tugged at his arm. Cherry immediately stood.

“What do you mean you got lost?” her mother asked as Cherry walked up to them. “We've been going to that supermarket for years.”

“They were doing construction work on Jamboree. I had to take a detour.”

Her mother peeked inside the grocery bag. “I told you vanilla ice cream,” she said. “Who is going to eat all this mint chocolate?”

“Mint is Cherry's favorite,” her father replied.

“It is,” Cherry agreed quietly, taking the bag from him. “I love it.”

The next morning, Cherry brought up the idea of going to Vietnam. Her grandmother and parents rejected it: too far, too expensive, too risky.

“You let Lum live there for five years,” Cherry reminded them.

“He's a boy,” her father said. “And it wasn't supposed to be for that long.”

“Some playboy will target you,” Grandmother Vo said, “and trick you into marrying him for a visa. I've seen it happen before, trust me. Remember that Lam girl?”

“What happened to Hawaii?” her mother asked.

“I don't want to lie on a beach and chase after boys,” Cherry said. “I want to see my brother.”

They finally relented, purchasing Cherry a ticket to spend a month in Vietnam. No one else wanted to go with her. Her parents had to work. Linh and Duyen claimed they didn't want to get stuck in Vietnam, like they heard had happened to others returning to the motherland. But because Cherry wasn't born there, she probably wouldn't have such trouble. No one could mistake Cherry for anything else but an American.

“Maybe you can talk some sense back into your brother,” Grandmother Vo said. “Bring him back to where he belongs.” She was not specific on the
where,
which was not surprising. Lum's former bedroom had long since been transformed into a guest room and Grandmother Vo's occasional abode, his clothing, posters, and CDs packed up in cobwebbed boxes in the garage.

The day before Cherry was supposed to leave, her mother had a bad dream. She normally wasn't superstitious, and even as she described it to them the next morning—the threatening Communist police officers; the dark, rat-infested jail cells—Cherry couldn't help wondering if she was making it up as she went along, recalling melodramatic scenes from an old movie she once saw on television.

“You can save the trip for another time,” her mother finally concluded. “How about next summer? Daddy can ask for vacation leave, and then we can go with you.”

“Why can't I still go now?” Cherry asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Don't listen to me. You never do.”

Later that evening, Cherry's father softly knocked on her bedroom door and tried to play peacemaker. “She is scared,” he said. “She doesn't want both of her children so far away from her.”

“No one's stopping her from coming with me. She's always saying how much she misses Lum. Here's her chance to see him.”

“Mommy needs more time,” he said. “Leaving Vietnam was difficult for her. It was for all of us.”

Cherry did not press her father to elaborate. She knew better. This was all she knew of her parents' departure from Vietnam: they escaped by boat and landed in Malaysia. Her parents and brother left for America, while her father's relatives relocated to France. Then Cherry was born.

“What else do you need to know?” her mother would say. “That's what happened.”

“But why did you and Dad choose America?”

“Are you unhappy here? Haven't we given you a good future? Why are you complaining?”

“I'm not,” Cherry would answer. “I just want to know more. I want to know what it was like.”

“Such silly questions. How is knowing how poor and desperate we were going to help you? These things will only distract you, pollute your brain. Look at the problems in your textbooks. Those are the answers you want. Those are the ones that will help you.”

*   *   *

Aside from the afternoon tour of the housing project, Cherry has barely seen her brother. Lum's company is at a crucial stage in the project, days away from their grand unveiling to clients, and he can't afford to go sightseeing. He leaves her every morning at the house with Grandaunt and Granduncle Tran.

It's not so bad. She has a month. She likes exploring the house where her grandparents lived, sleeping in the bedroom that once belonged to her parents. Cherry's grandparents gave their house to the Trans before escaping the country. The tall, gray concrete house with creaky floors and paper-thin walls sits in a middle-class neighborhood surrounded by other homes just like it. The shady winding street crackles with women young and elderly cooking outside their front doors, trucks and scooters rattling by, and children chasing one another in overlapping, endless games of tag. At night, Cherry listens to the thumps of the water pipes constantly adjusting to the changes in pressure. She imagines one of them bursting, flooding the house, forcing them all out.

Spending so much time with the Trans, Cherry understands why Lum hasn't bothered moving out. They are his ideal parents: compulsively doting upon him, preparing his meals, and pressing his clothes, without ever questioning his comings and goings or scolding his table manners. Having lost two sons in the war—the youngest, Cherry's father's age—Lum's presence is more than enough to fill them with excited chatter at dinnertime.

In the daylight, Cherry can best recognize Grandaunt's resemblance to Grandpère, the same lion's nose and widow's peak forehead. While these features accentuated Grandpère's stern demeanor, Cherry finds them unsettling and severe on Grandaunt's face. Granduncle appears less intimidating, a chubby squat man with ice-white hair and a sneeze that can shake the kitchen table. He and Grandaunt owned a tailor shop that catered to foreigners during the war; after the Fall of Saigon, the Communist police forced their business to close. Eventually, through persistent networking with the local government, they landed a uniform contract for the primary schools in Ho Chi Minh City, which allowed them to reopen their shop.

After Grandaunt prepares a breakfast of pan-fried noodles or vegetable soup, they walk around the neighborhoods, attempting to fulfill Cherry's request to see the city her parents once knew, before the Microsoft billboards and ubiquitous Kodak photo shops. In the Cholon district, Grandaunt points out the Trans' old apartment and former friends' homes. They pass the food markets her grandmère once frequented and have lunch in Grandpère's favorite garden. They visit the cemetery where the Trans' sons are buried.

Cherry never feels more American than when they are walking. She guiltily buffers herself between her much frailer relatives, who never seem nervous as they weave through the steady cross flow of cars, motorbikes, and pedestrians, pulling Cherry through the city current.

“They won't hit you,” Granduncle tries to assure her, “if you go slow enough.”

“In America, we stop for pedestrians,” Cherry says, eyeing a family of four sailing past on a scooter.

Grandaunt shakes her head at yet another illogical foreign habit. “If we all stopped, no one would get anywhere.”

No matter. Grandaunt feels most comfortable at home, cleaning the rooms and preparing meals, and when Cherry sits with her, Grandaunt likes to tell stories. Her subject taboo is clear: nothing about the war and its aftermath (
Bad memories,
she says,
I'm too old to cry anymore
). She prefers talking about her childhood in Nha Trang with Grandpère, her sons, and the fables she learned from Cherry's great-grandmother. Her favorite is the Trung sisters, legendary warriors from the first century, who successfully drove out the Chinese (the first time anyway) to establish the country's independence. They are considered Vietnam's national mothers.

“But they were married to the same man,” Cherry says.

Grandaunt waves her hand dismissively. “All marriages have their problems. Look at your grandparents. Perhaps they would have been happier with that kind of arrangement.”

“You mean, Grandpère would have been happier,” Cherry says.

Grandaunt only smiles. “They had a complicated marriage. Many of us do.”

The Tale of Kieu,
which Cherry tried to read in college, is another fable Grandaunt likes to repeat. Though the main heroine is a prostitute, her despised social position is a tragedy she is forced into. Every story ends with a lesson: everyone has choices taken away from them. Despair is pushed into our lives. We can only control how we recover.

“Like you,” she says carefully, as they assemble salad rolls for dinner. “You look so healthy and strong now. Your parents must be proud.”

So Lum has told her about the accident. This shouldn't surprise Cherry, although she suddenly feels self-conscious, wondering how much Grandaunt knows.

“Lum had me call every day while you were in the hospital,” Grandaunt says, dipping another sheet of rice paper into a bowl of water to soften it. “I tried to get him on the phone, but he didn't want to speak to your parents.”

“My parents don't know the whole story,” Cherry says. “They still can't understand.”

“Have you tried to make them understand?” Grandaunt asks.

Cherry falters briefly under the woman's firm gaze. “Yes.”

“It doesn't matter,” Grandaunt says, returning to her rolls. “He is fine now. I don't have to tell you, you can see for yourself. We have been good for your brother.”

“They did ask him to come back.”

“He has a life here now.”

“But it's not home,” Cherry says, struggling to control her impatience. “It's not America.”

Instead of becoming angry, as Cherry expects, Grandaunt only smiles faintly, bemused. After spreading the mint, basil, bean sprouts, and shrimp together, she wraps and tucks it into a perfectly shaped roll.

“You know who you sound like?” Grandaunt says. “Your grandfather, when he tried to convince Bac Tran and me to leave Vietnam.”

Cherry peers down at the saturated rice paper between her fingers. She held it underwater too long. It is ruined now. Folding it up, she tucks it behind the water bowl. “Grandpère wanted you to escape, too?”

“He'd already bought our seats,” Grandaunt says. “He bothered us until the night they left. But the point is, he was wrong. I am glad we stayed. How could I have left my two boys before they were properly buried? And now we have your brother. Not everyone was fated to leave.”

“Maybe,” Cherry says, distracted. It doesn't matter what she thinks, this relative she hardly knows. Instead, Cherry imagines these two seats on the boat, empty, wasted. They mold the salad rolls in silence, allowing the chorus of children's chatter and motorbike engines from the alley to fill the kitchen.

*   *   *

The legend of Grandmother Vo's grudge against the Truongs was far juicier than any mundane story about how any of their parents met. Grandmother Vo always referred to them as
those relatives,
reminding Cherry and her brother every opportunity she had that their father's family had gone back on their promise to help the Vos escape, disappearing into the night to selfishly save themselves. While the Truongs lived the good life in France, the Vos endured the vengeful wrath of the Communists. They tortured Cherry's uncles in reeducation camps, killed her eldest uncle, and harassed Grandmother and her daughters, who were trying to make any kind of living they could manage, so Cherry's cousins wouldn't starve to death.

Of course, it was more complicated than that. Her father had explained that the Vos were supposed to be on the same boat with the Truong family. Grandpère, who had purchased the contraband seats from the boat captain, was unable to secure enough. He was lucky to provide for his own family. When he came home from his meeting with the boat captain, Grandpère told Cherry's mother that there were no other seats left—not even for Grandmother Vo.

Her father's explanation had never satisfied Cherry, but then again, she had no reason to push for further details—until now. Although she believed she understood both sides, she felt protective of Grandpère and Grandmère in France, who had never even met Grandmother Vo, and couldn't defend themselves against her accusations. Cherry knew she couldn't always trust her maternal grandmother, who painted herself the victim in every story. As Cherry knew firsthand, Grandmother Vo was no martyr.

But what had happened to the extra seats? Couldn't Grandpère, with all his connections, have found another boat for the Vos? Couldn't he have offered another way to help?

Her grandmother, aunts, and uncles, and even her cousins, talked as passionately about these lost years as if they had just happened. If they'd escaped Vietnam earlier, perhaps Uncle Chinh would have earned his business degree. Perhaps Linh's little brother, born prematurely in Vietnam, would have survived in America. Perhaps Grandmother Vo's heart condition would have been detected earlier. Perhaps Lum wouldn't have lost his way. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

When they put it that way, Cherry couldn't help but dream with them.

*   *   *

After dinner, when the relatives go upstairs to bed, Cherry finally has her brother to herself. They sit on vegetable crates in the alley, smoking cigarettes and throwing the butts into the dumpster so Grandaunt doesn't find them in her herb garden. Stray dogs poke their noses into loose garbage, occasionally sniffing at their feet.