Dragon House

by John Shors

  Now, as Thien led her along once again, Iris wondered where they were headed. Who’s Thien bringing the food to? she asked herself. What good is she going to create, and why did that awful man say those things to me? As she thought about the last question in particular, Iris watched Thien interact with some of the merchants and vendors they passed. Clearly, she had walked this path many times before.

  Thien guided Iris across a boulevard, moving in a start-and-stop fashion to avoid hundreds of approaching scooters. The air here was so thick with pollution that Iris held her breath for as long as possible. When she finally needed to draw air, she placed her T-shirt over her face and inhaled through the thin cotton.

  After crossing the boulevard, Thien seemed to walk away from the city’s biggest and most beautiful buildings. Soon she passed people who appeared to live on the street. She dropped Iris’s hand when they came upon a one-armed man who begged in front of a travel agency. Handing Iris the bowl of food, Thien greeted the man. They spoke for a moment and he grinned. Thien lifted her Polaroid, capturing his face and smile. The photo emerged from her camera, and after blowing on it for a moment, she showed it to Iris.

  Iris saw that Thien was skilled. She’d shot the picture so that the man’s head was in front of a store light, so that this light created a halo effect around the man’s features. His wrinkled face struck Iris as having seen more tragedies than triumphs, yet at the moment Thien had captured him, he seemed to be pleasantly surprised, as if life suddenly weren’t all that terrible.

  Thien handed him the photo. He chuckled, showing it to a nearby soft-drink vendor. The two men laughed and spoke with Thien. She soon waved good-bye and moved ahead, stopping every block or so to take someone else’s photo. “We are going to Ben Thanh Market,” she finally said. “Someone there is very hungry.”

  “Who?”

  “A sick girl. Her grandmother tells me that she likes my cooking.”

  Iris walked behind Thien, amazed by the sudden notion that she’d follow this stranger anywhere. Soon she recognized the market, the front of which was crammed with cyclos and scooters. Drivers asked foreigners and locals if rides were needed, dusting off cracked seats. Thien zigzagged through the mayhem, soon approaching an old woman who sat with a child on her lap. The woman smiled, her tongue visible between gaps made by missing teeth.

  Thien dropped to her knees before the woman, handing the girl on her lap the bowl of food. Iris’s gaze didn’t leave the girl, whose legs and arms were impossibly thin, whose eyes wandered about as if unable to focus on anything. Remembering the girl from their earlier encounter, Iris watched Thien and the woman converse, watched the woman gently and patiently guide food into the girl’s unresponsive mouth.

  “These are my friends,” Thien said in English, nodding toward the pair. “This is Qui, and this is her granddaughter, Tam.”

  Iris nodded, feeling ridiculously tall, wanting to be at the same height as these strangers. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Iris. It’s nice to meet you.”

  The woman motioned for Iris to crouch beside her and then asked, “What you think about Vietnam?”

  Iris watched the spoon rise slowly, depositing half of a prawn into the girl’s mouth. “It’s not what I expected.”

  Thien took a photo as Iris responded to the question. The photo soon emerged, and Thien handed it to Iris, who held it carefully and watched colors and shapes materialize. Soon she saw herself, saw how she contrasted so mightily with the girl and her grandmother. Iris had never felt so different from anyone, and yet she also felt connected to these strangers. She felt connected to them because she knew she could help them. She could give them food. She could buy them clothes. She had the power to take their hands in hers and make their lives better.

  Iris was tempted to ask Thien about the girl, about her condition. But not wanting to appear rude or to make some social blunder, she simply sat and watched Tam eat. Several times Tam looked at her, and Iris tried to smile. But it was hard to smile when staring at such a sick child. Iris couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be ill and young and on the streets. Tam must be lonely, and, thinking of her own experiences with feeling abandoned, Iris wanted to sit beside Tam and do something to make her smile. Iris thought about reading her a story, about combing her hair, about doing so many things that might lessen the burdens that she carried.

  Iris watched the woman continue to feed Tam, the process seeming to occur in slow motion. As she ate, Tam often moaned softly, and these moans somehow penetrated Iris’s skin, seeping through her flesh, past her rib cage, and into her heart. These moans dampened her eyes. They stirred her soul. They caused her fingers to move out, to rest upon Tam’s swollen knee.

  At that moment Iris realized that she didn’t know where she was going, but that she wasn’t going back.

  FIVE

  Bridges

  Breakfast was a hurried affair of coffee, French baguettes, and sliced papaya. Iris wasn’t hungry but forced herself to eat. A full day awaited her. The previous night, as they had walked back to the center from the market, she’d asked Thien if they might explore more today, perhaps even venturing outside the city. Thien had seemed pleased by this request and had promised to arrange such an excursion.

  Iris had decided that she’d be best able to help street children if she better understood their plight. And that meant understanding their country as intimately as possible. She needed to know how people lived, what made them succeed and struggle. Though in the past she might have read dozens of books in an effort to learn such things, she wanted to experience life in Vietnam firsthand.

  Finishing the last of her baguette, she strode upstairs and into the classroom. Noah lay asleep on his cot, his arm over his eyes, a T-shirt and shorts covering his torso. Unlike the previous morning, beer cans weren’t present. But she suspected that he’d drunk late into the night, for she had heard him moving about long after she’d first dreamed. “Noah,” she said, standing respectfully distant.

  He stirred, moving his arm from his face. Blinking repeatedly, he pulled the sheet over his stump. “Yes?”

  “I’ve rented a car and driver. Thien and I are going out to the countryside, to the Mekong Delta. I want to do some exploring. I think it’d be good, really good, to see how people live. And I think you should join us.”

  He rubbed his aching brow. “I’d slow you down.”

  “We’re not in a race.”

  “No, you go. I’ll stay.”

  She crossed her arms. “If you’re going to stay here . . . you need to work. All right? Would you please do that? I won’t ask anything else of you as long as you do that.”

  “Sure.”

  “I wish you’d come with us.”

  “Not today. But thanks.”

  Iris said good-bye and hurried downstairs. Thien was waiting outside, dressed in white trousers and a collared blue shirt. Her baseball cap had been somewhat cleaned of paint. She spoke with a small man who leaned against a battered car. “This is Danh,” she said to Iris. “He will be our driver.”

  After introducing herself, Iris climbed into the back of the car, sitting next to Thien. Soon they were rumbling over the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, listening to the radio, feeling the wind against their faces through the open windows. Thien acted as a tour guide, eagerly pointing out landmarks. They drove past the former U.S. Embassy—a white, forbidding building that looked unchanged since the war. As they followed a treelined boulevard, Iris marveled at impressive displays of French architecture. She’d never been to Europe but for a moment felt as if she looked upon the streets of Paris.

  In thirty minutes they made it to the outskirts of the city. Their driver paid a toll and abruptly they were on a new highway. The pavement was smooth, the air almost clean. A blue suspension bridge carried them over a wide river. Alongside the highway flowed a series of canals. Large stretches of water were surrounded by nets, and Thien explained that these areas were fish farms.

  Buildings disappeare
d, replaced by endless rice fields, which were such a bright green that they seemed to sparkle. Men used ancient, see sawlike contraptions to ferry water from narrow canals into the fields. Women in conical hats weeded, ankle deep in water. Behind the fields rose palm trees and a blue sky.

  The highway was shared by huge, Russian-built trucks, as well as buses, taxis, countless scooters, and water buffalo that pulled stout carts. At one point traffic stopped as a pair of boys with bamboo poles herded thousands of white ducks across the pavement. The ducks were remarkably orderly, waddling between the bumpers of trucks and buses as if strolling across a meadow. Iris was surprised that not a single vehicle honked. Those riding scooters spoke through their face masks, sent text messages on cell phones, and readjusted children and produce.

  “The ducks don’t bother anyone?” Iris asked.

  Thien removed two tangerines from her pocket. She handed one to Iris and began peeling the other. “We Vietnamese love to eat duck,” she said, smiling. “Those boys are just bringing us our food.”

  Soon the car was once again heading south, toward wide waterways that flowed from Cambodia. Every five or ten miles they passed a small city, which was little more than a collection of stores, schools, and repair shops that bordered the highway. Bulky Christian churches dominated many horizons, crosses of cement or steel thrusting high into the air. Temples were also plentiful, their walls covered with dragons, clouds, and pink lotuses. The dragons often wrapped around columns, rising toward the sky.

  “Did it look like this before the war?” Iris asked.

  Thien smiled. “This superhighway was not here before the war. But, yes, many things are the same. In the countryside, not much has changed.”

  An immense snake somehow made it halfway across the road before being crushed by a bus. Iris turned from the sight. “How well did you know my father?” she asked.

  Thien paused from scratching paint off her elbow. “Your father wanted to work,” she replied. “I have never seen a man work so hard. But sometimes I would bring him tea and we would talk. He told me many stories about you.” Thien pointed out a trio of boys riding an immense water buffalo. “May I ask you something, Miss Iris?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your father . . . he was so proud of you. But he also seemed sad when speaking about his family. I always wondered why.”

  Iris nodded absently, watching scooters dart around them. “I was born five years after he returned from Vietnam,” she replied, trying to resurrect her earliest memories, wanting to let Thien into her life.

  “So long after?”

  Iris knew that her father had tried to give himself time to heal before bringing her into the world. But five years hadn’t been enough. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until I was six or seven. Then I started to notice things. The mood swings. The silence. The fighting with my mother. One day he left and didn’t return for three weeks. When he finally came home he brought presents. But he soon left again. I thought it was because he didn’t love us, that we’d done something wrong.” Iris glanced at a rice field, which shimmered in the early light. She remembered crying after a dance recital, how she’d searched for her father in the audience until she ruined her routine. After turning again to Thien, she continued. “As I grew up I spent less and less time with him. I read books and . . . and I stopped looking for him. Later, maybe in high school, I tried to stop loving him, even though I always did. He came back enough for that.”

  “He loved you. Very much.”

  “I know.”

  Their driver turned down a narrow street and suddenly Iris was looking at the Mekong Delta. She’d once crossed the Mississippi River and had never again expected to see anything so wide. But the waterway she saw now was miles across. Their car pulled up to a wharf of sorts—the trunks of decapitated palm trees had been chained together and rose from the shallow water by the shore. A blue boat was tied to this bundle of trees. Their driver led them across a plank to the boat, chatting briefly with a man who’d been sleeping in a hammock that hung from the boat’s roof. The shirtless captain introduced himself and then reached into a cooler and withdrew two green coconuts. The tops of the coconuts had been sliced off, and a straw inserted into the white, fleshy hole at the top of each fruit.

  Iris sipped the sweet milk, surprised at her thirst. She emptied the entire coconut without pause. The captain pulled the straws out, threw the coconuts overboard, and said something in Vietnamese. He then untied the bow and hurried to the stern of the boat, which was no larger than the back of a pickup truck. The boat’s engine powered a propeller that sprang from the end of a long pipe. The captain lowered this pipe, so that it was almost parallel to the water’s surface. Once it dropped about a foot beneath the surface, he started the engine and the boat lumbered out into the delta.

  “This water is born in the mountains of Tibet,” Thien said, pointing to the northwest. “It runs through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia before it gets to Vietnam. When the Mekong River enters Vietnam, it breaks into two smaller rivers and finally enters the sea as nine rivers. And so we call this area Song Cu’u Long, or the River of Nine Dragons. The Chinese, the Thais, the Burmese, we all have different names for the river. But of course, I like our name the best.”

  Iris nodded, scanning the immense waterway. In the middle of the river, monstrous barges fought against the current, brown water splashing almost as high as a pair of great, painted eyes below each bow. Scores of much smaller vessels stayed clear of the behemoths, bobbing up and down in their wakes. The barges were wooden, which amazed Iris, for it seemed as if every tree on a mountainside would have to be cleared to create enough lumber for one such craft.

  In the shallows Iris saw children jumping from docks, women attending to large pens of fish, and men sleeping in brightly colored, anchored fishing boats that were rigged with massive lights. The shoreline was rimmed with palm trees and giant ferns that rose twenty or thirty feet into the sky. A floating market came into view—a collection of perhaps a hundred longboats filled high with fresh fruits, vegetables, and fish.

  “In Cambodia, there are dolphins in this river,” Thien said. “And here, there are giant catfish as long as a truck.”

  Iris smiled. “You like being my tour guide, don’t you?”

  “I do. It makes me happy. And I am glad that you are exploring Vietnam. This will help you open the center.”

  “It is helping me.”

  “Good.”

  Iris watched a longboat full of bananas rush forward with the current. “Did my father ever do this?”

  “Come to the delta?”

  Nodding, Iris replied, “He always liked the water.”

  “He came here three times, I think. The last time, he rented his own boat and was gone all day.”

  Iris remembered her father taking her to the shore of Lake Michigan. He’d shown her how to skip rocks, and they had counted splashes together. She wished that she’d traveled with him up and down the Mekong Delta. To do that once would have created one of her most precious memories.

  Holding her baseball cap between her knees, Thien ran her hands through her hair and then retied her ponytail. Iris was abruptly conscious of her beauty—how her skin was nearly flawless, her eyes wide and pleasing, and her hair impossibly black. Yet Thien appeared unaware and uncaring of her appeal. She didn’t call attention to it. In fact, her clothes almost seemed to hide it.

  “Your father was so brave to come back here,” Thien said, breaking Iris’s train of thought. “I cannot imagine doing such a thing.”

  Iris watched a man on a small boat carefully unroll and position a fishing net into the dark water. “Do you think I can do both, Thien?”

  “Both?”

  “Explore the city and open the center?”

  Thien nodded. “I think you must do both, Miss Iris. And I think you can do both.”

  Iris wiped her brow, which glistened even in the shade beneath the boat’s canopy. “You have a beau
tiful country,” she said. “I can’t describe why, but I don’t feel as much like a stranger here anymore. Maybe it’s because my father spent so much time in Vietnam. And being here . . . it makes me feel closer to him.”

  “I am so happy to hear this.”

  “I think it’s also because of you, Thien. You make me feel welcome. And that means so much. You have no idea how much. So thank you for being my friend. And for helping my father.”

  Thien reached across the space between them, taking Iris’s hands within her own. “We will be great friends. Like sisters.”

  Iris looked closely at Thien, wondering where she came from, who she was, and who she wanted to be. “I don’t have many friends,” Iris admitted. “I’ve never been good at that. But I’m glad . . . I’m really glad, Thien, that you’re with me now. I don’t think I could do this alone. I wouldn’t have the courage.”

  Thien shook her head. “You came here. To Vietnam. I did not help you come here.”

  One of the gargantuan barges neared, its owlish eyes growing larger. “Why do I feel so alive?” Iris asked. “Is it because everything is so new to me? Like I’m discovering a new world? Or do you think it’s something else?”

  Thien grinned and, holding Iris’s hand, led her forward to the bow, into the sunlight. “We should put our feet into the water.”

  Iris removed her sandals and sat where Thien pointed, placing a leg on either side of a pole that ran from the boat’s deck to its roof. Her feet struck the brown water and she sighed at the warmth of it. The boat rose and fell amid gentle swells, and her feet plunged into and soared above the water. She smiled. For the first time since her father’s death, the troubles of the world didn’t seem to press on her shoulders.