The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (20 page)

Hung Truong

Paris, France

 

Chapter Five

XUAN

P
ARIS
, F
RANCE
, 1992

Is dialogue the path to truth?

This was the bac's most popular philosophy question from the previous year. Reported in the daily newspapers, it inspired speculative editorials from the country's leading philosophers and write-in rebuttals from politicians, doctors, soccer players, and pastry chefs. The debates stretched into the late weeks of summer. Xuan remembered, because he clipped every article. The question would likely not appear on this year's bac, but his cousin Cam still wanted to go over it, not because she was studious, but because debating amused her.

“Let's talk it out,” Cam said, an intoxicated smile playing on her lips, her hands carelessly wrinkling the organized clippings in Xuan's notebook. “Let's try to reach the truth.”

“You'd have to be an honest person to understand,” Xuan said, snatching the binder back from her, smoothing out the damaged pages. “And you're a liar.”

“Ooh,” Cam said, her eyes widening. With one hand, she pushed her long, tangled hair from her face, using the other hand to support herself against the toffee-colored lounge chair. “Strong words. But I can rebut. Aren't lies simply alternate perspectives of the truth?”

“‘Mother, I'm going to study' is not another perspective of ‘Mother, I'm going to my boyfriend's house to smoke hashish.'”

Cam's smirk faded at last, Xuan's wish fulfilled. “Michel and I are friends.”

“Who sleep with each other,” Xuan corrected.

His cousin peered behind her shoulder. When she realized Petit Michel was still in the kitchen, her gaze returned to Xuan. “What's with the attitude?” she whispered. “I brought you here to relax.”

“I need to work,” Xuan said, stuffing his books and study guides into his backpack. “So do you. The bac is in two weeks and you are wasting my time.”

“Michel said he will help us,” Cam said, her voice low, but determined. “He got a sixteen, remember?”

But they had been at Petit Michel's apartment—correction, the Bourdains' apartment—for over an hour and all Xuan had learned was that Petit Michel's hairline was receding, just like his father's, and despite this, Cam was openly fawning over him. A surprising, annoying revelation; he had no idea how long the two had been seeing each other, and didn't plan to ask. Xuan also had suspicions about Petit Michel's too-impressive score on the bac. It didn't seem coincidental that the richest children in the city consistently received the highest marks, securing them positions in the
grand écoles,
and further perpetuating the exclusivity of the French elite. Those who failed to possess such luck and wealth had to work even harder for their scores.

The unfairness itched at his concentration. He stood and pulled on his jacket. “I'm going to the library.”

“Now?” Petit Michel asked, returning with a plate of cookies and chocolates. Like Cam, he was dressed all in black. Xuan, in blue jeans and a red sweater Grandmère knit, felt like a bright, shiny clown.

“I really should,” Xuan said, annoyed how his voice turned soft, his politeness returning, just as it would for Petit Michel's parents. “It closes in three hours.”

“But it's Saturday,” Petit Michel said, leaning a hip against the arched entry of the living room.

“I need to work on my flash cards,” he lied, reaching for his backpack.

“No, you don't,” Cam said. When Xuan looked at her, she smiled with her lips. “Xuan has a genius memory.”

Xuan sighed. “She means photographic.”

“It's true. He reads a book only once and he'll remember chapters, footnotes, everything. It's frightening.”

“Yet, I'm rusty on the seventeenth century,” Xuan said, then offered a tight smile to the frowning lovers. “Thanks for the drinks.”

He turned and walked out, past the furniture and décor, clear indications that Petit Michel's mother had decorated this home as well. As a child, he would marvel over the Bourdains' shiny, ornate decorations, items he was afraid to touch without his mother's permission. When no one else was looking, Xuan's mother would shove a decorative plate or crystal vase in his small, chubby hands, softly whispering in his ear, “Look at that, darling. Feel how heavy and solid that is? This is worth more than a year's rations of meals for a child in an orphanage.” When Xuan asked why, his mother would shake her head and simply say, “That's the rich for you. They have the ability to do right, but they'd rather have pretty things.”

Why are we sensitive to beauty?

The air felt cooler outside, and a sweetness had descended upon the boulevards. Early summer evenings were always pleasant. Xuan could walk for blocks and blocks without a jacket or sweater, even beyond the arrondissements, through the suburbs and into the countryside, where his relatives would never think to find him.

The university library was only a few blocks from Petit Michel's apartment. Xuan was tempted to take the metro to a library outside the quarter, to avoid any chance encounters with classmates—and being forced into more needless conversation—but he determined that the risk did not outweigh the extra travel time. Xuan hated wasting time. Since his first level of secondary school, Xuan consulted a daily organizer to evaluate and assign every hour of his life. He disliked how sleep occupied at least a third of his days, no matter how many times he tried getting by with less. His mother could do it—she regularly catnapped, sleeping a few hours here and there, never more than four at a time. But she was assisted by prescription pills and chronic insomnia.

If he turned left at the flower shop where Grandmère bought her Sunday floral arrangements, Xuan would be at his family's apartment house. He veered right instead, eyes fixed on the concrete, his stride pointed and brisk, hoping none of his relatives was around to spot him. Although Grandmère and Aunt Ngoan occasionally complained about living in such a busy district, too far from Chinatown where they did most of the grocery shopping, Xuan was grateful for the Latin Quarter. It certainly wasn't the wealthiest area in the city (where the Bourdains lived) and they had their fair burden of tourists (especially in the summer), but there were excellent schools, libraries, and hospitals. The Bourdains had helped Xuan's father locate his apartment in the building, where the whole family now lived, years before the real estate values and rental prices went up. They considered the building home, despite its leaky pipes and ant infestations every spring. Whenever Xuan's father would mention the possibility of buying a house in the suburbs, the family members would ask: What about their church? The Vietnamese Community Center? What about Dr. Robin?

Dr. Robin was his mother's best psychiatrist. She wasn't her favorite—that was Dr. Henri, whose solution to every setback was new medication, and who could always make her laugh. Dr. Robin hardly smiled and could not be intimidated or flattered by his mother, which helped tremendously. She was the first psychiatrist to recommend in-patient treatment. Xuan was twelve during Trinh's first hospitalization. The psychiatric ward was actually located in their arrondissement—a five-minute walk from the apartment house. And while Xuan wasn't allowed to visit during his mother's treatments, Grandmère would walk him and Cam to the hospital and stand under the window of his mother's room.

“What a nice location,” Grandmère said. “She gets to look out this window all the time and see these pretty flower beds. Aren't we jealous?”

They waved to the dark window, three mittened hands in the gray air, even though they couldn't see anyone or anything inside it. But Grandmère assured them that his mother was there, waving back and growing healthier. When Trinh returned home six weeks later, Xuan told her about their window visits.

“You were there?” Xuan's mother said, noticing him for the first time, though she'd been home for hours. He could see the black pupils in her brown eyes as she gazed at him, so dark and deep that he finally stepped back. “Then why didn't you come get me?” As his father pulled him away to another room, Xuan saw that both her hands had curled into fists.

His mother had returned last week from her most recent treatment and she appeared significantly calmer—no spells, no crying fits, no inappropriate confessions … not yet anyway. There was no point in getting overexcited. It would take more time to determine if the results would last. The day before she was released, Xuan's father had asked if he wanted to move into his grandparents' apartment downstairs to minimize distractions before the bac. But Xuan didn't see the benefit. After so many years living in the apartment house, he knew how ineffective a locked door was to his mother. If she wanted him to hear her, to pay attention to her, a different floor wasn't going to matter.

Can humanity be envisaged without religion?

Xuan usually enjoyed the Sunday breaks from studying, when his family attended Mass in the morning and then prepared for an elaborate family lunch. He'd stopped believing years ago, but the predictable, comforting rituals of the service, the psalms and gospels, the kneeling and recitation of prayers, revitalized him for studying on Monday. But as the weeks before the bac thinned, he found himself reviewing facts and theories in his head during the homily, imagining logarithm equations scrolling across the altar as he stood in line for communion. When he looked at other students from his class in the church, he envied how calm and bored they appeared.

His mother wasn't with them. She hadn't been for several years. His dad didn't think she should attend until she felt healthier, a vague status, but his mother had easily agreed. He was right to be cautious. The last time she attended Mass, she stood up during the Eucharist and accused the priest of diluting the wine. Another reason that Mass had become discreetly relaxing for Xuan—he was free to think only of his concerns.

After Mass, while Xuan's father and Uncle Phung chatted with some acquaintances, and Grandmère and Aunt Ngoan nagged Cam about the sleeveless dress she had chosen to wear that morning, Xuan walked with Grandpère to their favorite bench near the fountain. Grandpère pulled out two cigarettes and handed one to Xuan.

“I remember taking the bac,” Grandpère said, fumbling for the lighter in his other suit pocket. “Did you know I chose Spanish as my foreign language? Of course, I can't remember any of it now … and if I'd known Sanh and his family would go to America, I would have learned English.… Are you learning English?”

“Yes, Grandpère,” Xuan said, taking the lighter from him to prepare the cigarettes.

“Good, good,” Grandpère said. “We must acclimate to the changing world, right, Xuan?”

“Yes, Grandpère.”

A year ago, on another Sunday at church, Xuan noticed Grandpère's attention shifting to the Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac statue, on the opposite side of the altar. When his grandfather failed to recite the Our Father along with the rest of the congregation, Xuan gently nudged him on his side. Grandpère turned to him, but his eyes wouldn't focus, his gaze arching upward to the angels sleeping on the ceiling, and Xuan realized, as everyone else kneeled to the pews, that his grandfather was having a stroke.

The doctors diagnosed it as a minor stroke, and determined no significant consequences, beyond a slight tremor in his right arm that one had to observe closely to notice. He continued volunteering at the Vietnamese Community Center and still bickered with Grandmère. That morning, in his crocheted hat and navy blue suit, Hung Truong looked healthier and stronger than most of the elder French men in their congregation. He only allowed himself one cigarette a week since the stroke, always after Sunday Mass.

Amid the crowd of neatly combed heads and stylish hats, Xuan recognized his father and uncle talking to the Bourdains. The four of them turned, smiling and nodding, and Xuan politely reciprocated. Though their families had ended their weekly Sunday brunches years ago after his mother's breakdown in Lourdes, they remained on friendly terms. They hadn't seen the Bourdains for several weeks, which meant they'd probably returned from another holiday. After shaking hands with his father and uncle, the Bourdains started walking toward the bench.

Up close, Xuan could tell the Bourdains were aging—graying in Émilie's hair, wrinkles around the elder Michel's eyes and lips. Not as thin as they once were. But these were still subtler, gentler aging adjustments compared to Xuan's parents. Xuan's father lost more weight with each year, his bony shoulders protruding through his sweaters and dress shirts. And his mother, a woman who once regularly attracted the stares of French men on the metro, now looked older than Aunt Ngoan.

After exchanging pleasantries with Grandpère about the weather and church service, the elder Michel turned his attention to Xuan.

“So, young man, studying hard?”

“I'm trying,” Xuan said. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, keenly aware of his slouching posture, a habit since he was very young.

“You know, you should really give Petit Michel a call,” Monsieur Bourdain said. “He is very busy—we hardly see him ourselves—but he must have some advice for you. And isn't your cousin also taking the bac this year?”

Xuan nodded, looking past Monsieur Bourdain, where a few feet away, Cam expertly avoided his gaze and turned to chat with Grandmère.

“Fantastic,” Monsieur Bourdain said. “You children grow up too fast. I'll have Petit Michel call you.”

“We really should all get together again soon,” Émilie Bourdain said, a phrase the Truongs had learned in the last few years signified only politeness, nothing more. “When we return from Morocco next month, perhaps. It is so busy this time of year.”