by Eric Nguyen
“Mẹ, what’s wrong?” Tuấn asked. He looked back toward where they had come from.
“Don’t look back,” said Hương. She pushed the stroller and led Tuấn away. “Don’t you look.”
Suddenly, she noticed, all around her people were talking. There were couples talking, groups talking, children talking, a woman held a dog in her arms and she, too, was talking to that small animal. Yet the words they were saying didn’t make any sense. She repeated the words she knew in her head, a chaotic mantra of foreign sounds that contorted her mouth comically, strangely, like a puppet’s—Yes, no, thank you, please, yes, no, sorry, hello, goodbye, no, sorry. The important part was to keep moving. She knew that much. She saw a fenced-in and empty park across the street and without looking ran toward it, but before she reached the gate, a man with beads around his neck and oversized sunglasses bumped into her. She could smell the alcohol on him. All of a sudden, the whole city smelled of alcohol and everyone everywhere was drinking and smiling and laughing. What was wrong with these people? What was wrong with this place?
She turned back and was stepping into the street, pushing the stroller with both hands, when a car slammed its brakes and the driver pressed down on his horn. It stopped before hitting her or the stroller. She looked down at her shaking hands: she had let go. In the surprise of the car coming and its horn sounding, so suddenly and so loudly—she had let go. The first sign of danger and her first instinct was to let go and she’d nearly killed her son and the man pressed down on his horn again and she realized she was still in the middle of the street and she felt ashamed, the most shame she’d ever felt in her life. She held back tears, but Bình cried. She clasped the handlebar of the stroller more tightly.
“Stupid fucking lady!” the driver screamed.
“What did he say?” Tuấn asked.
“Let’s go home,” she replied. “He said we should go home.” They crossed the street and headed down another.
“But home is so far away,” said her son. “I’m tired.”
“What?” She had forgotten what she told him. She looked around for anything that might have been familiar.
“Home is far away,” her son repeated.
“I know,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I know.”
* * *
—
The Minhs were home when Hương returned. After dinner, Mrs. Minh left for a job cleaning at a university. Hương’s sons slept peacefully. She kept a watchful eye on Bình. Did he understand that he’d nearly died today? Did he know he had a horrible, reckless mother? She would have to tell Công, wouldn’t she, about all that had happened? She would confess it to him, everything she’d ever done—if only she were given the chance, an opportunity to talk to him, to learn what had happened, to get him to America and plan a way forward. For that she would confess it all.
At the camp, she had written him and mailed the letter to their home in Mỹ Tho. When she received no answer, she wrote to their old home in Saigon. She wrote as soon as she was able to. She must have sent a letter every day. Noticing how many letters she had been sending off, another woman at the camp reprimanded her.
“Are you so stupid?” the woman asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The Communists, when they see the letters, they’ll know you escaped and they’ll know who to punish: your husband!” Hương stopped writing then.
As the sun rose, Mrs. Minh arrived home, smelling of detergent and rubber gloves. Without a word, she joined Hương on the couch and watched TV, which Hương had turned on for its soft glow. From her seat, Mrs. Minh would glance at her temporary guest every few minutes as if to say something important but ended up talking only about the shows. In this show, a witch causes havoc by her misunderstandings but her husband loves her anyway. In this one, there’s a magical talking horse. Here, a group of Americans are shipwrecked.
They settled on the shipwreck show, or at least Mrs. Minh did. In black and white, it looked far away, a different place, a different time. Even if it was a different language, it was easy to laugh at, easily understood.
Except Hương wasn’t laughing. It didn’t even look like she was paying attention. The light on the screen bounced off her eyes.
This would happen multiple nights: Hương staring blankly at the screen in the dark while Mrs. Minh sat on the edge of the couch in contemplation. It made the air heavy, both of them knew, but neither one knew how to fix it.
Then one night Mrs. Minh asked, “What do you think of America?”
“Dạ thích,” Hương said. “It’s not Vietnam, but it’s not bad, either.” She coughed to clear her throat. All day she hadn’t been talking to anyone in Vietnamese except her sons. It felt so strange after so much silence, and the words came out muddy and sticky.
“The priest said you left on a boat,” the wife continued. “Is that true?”
“Vâng.” Hương wanted to tell the wife about the way the water moved, how you never got used to it, about the men on the boat and their constant fighting, about the uneasy sense of knowing only water, knowing that it connected the entire world—one shore to another—yet not knowing when you might see land. There were so many things to say, and finally she decided to ask a question, the most important question she could ask, the only one that mattered—“Do you know how to get a message back to Vietnam? I have a husband. He was left behind…”—but Hương stopped short of finishing when there was shuffling noise in the bedroom, the rustling of sheets, the bouncing of bedsprings.
She bit her lips and held her breath. Something was coming; she could feel it. Mrs. Minh’s eyes wandered to the back of the house. Then came a scream and the sound of glass hitting wall, one clash of impact followed by the rainlike sound of hundreds of shards falling. The baby woke with a cry and Hương got up to calm him. Tuấn stirred from his corner of the couch and asked what was going on.
“Nothing,” she told him. “Nothing to be afraid of.” She bounced the baby as footsteps made their way across the hardwood floor and the bathroom door closed and the shower turned on. The baby leaned his head on her chest and quieted.
“I’ll go check on him,” Mrs. Minh said, standing up. “Yes. I’ll go do that.”
The couple would fight into the morning. Something else would break. At one point, Hương thought she heard a smack on skin but she wasn’t sure.
By eight, Mr. Minh had left, slamming the door so hard Hương was sure the house would fall down. Mrs. Minh mumbled as she prepared breakfast, “Damn that man. Worthless…”
The next afternoon, Hương left the Minhs. With Bình in her arms and Tuấn following behind, she walked several blocks until she saw a motel. The word, she remembered, meant place to stay. She would stay at the motel for a week, find a way to get in touch with Công, and get him here to New Orleans. No one told her how to, but, she decided, no more waiting. It was time for action. She paid in cash. The room was twenty-five dollars. She put the thirty dollars she had left in her front pocket, holding her hand over it to make sure it was secure.
* * *
—
After she called him, the priest arrived the next morning. He sat in his van as Hương led the boys out. The radio played gospel hymns, but he turned it off as they made their journey downtown.
He had been searching for her all morning, he said when they were on the highway. The window was down and the wind was more hot than cool. The Minhs had told him she “just up and left,” without telling them where she was heading. She hadn’t even left a note about where she was going, how to reach her, or what her intentions were. She could have “dropped off the face of the earth”—she had no idea what that could possibly have meant.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” the priest said. Did she know New Orleans could be a dangerous place? he went on. People get murdered here. Robbed. Beaten. She was a recent im
migrant, and people could have taken advantage of her. Why did she leave?
She didn’t answer him right away. It could have been a rhetorical question. But he didn’t have to live with them. He didn’t have to live with Mr. Minh’s night terrors or his drunkenness. Or the couple’s arguments. He didn’t have to live as if in a nightmare, where everywhere she turned something was strange, askew, incoherent. That was what her time in New Orleans had been like. He couldn’t have understood any of this. His life wasn’t complicated. He was a priest, for God’s sake! He didn’t know a thing about suffering.
At the church, they filed into his office. The priest turned on the air-conditioning and searched through the mess on his desk.
“They don’t like us,” she said finally. She didn’t know what she expected him to say or do. Anger bubbled inside her. “You don’t understand,” she managed to say before taking a seat.
The walls of the room were lined with certificates with fancy writing and gold seals; crosses, some plain wood, others decorated with gold; and there were photos, mostly of him—here with a group of nuns, there with a youth baseball team, another a group portrait with other priests. And among all this, a framed cream-colored piece of paper. An emblem sat in the middle and below it, a motto: In service to One, in service to All.
Finally the priest said, “I’ve been a priest for ten years.” He took off his glasses, rubbed them with a cloth, and put them back on. “And I don’t think I’ve ever taken on more than I have this year.” He went on to talk about God, bringing up Bible stories about tests and hardships. God was testing him, he told her.
For the first time since she’d met him, she realized she was less of a person and more of a test to this man. She was a puzzle to figure out, a jigsaw, a number among other numbers. He lived to serve not humanity but his ideas and career. In that way, she thought, Catholics were not too dissimilar from the Communists. She had been hoping this man was different. How foolish she was to put her life in his hands.
“Don’t you understand?” he asked, rhetorically. He smiled dumbly, as if he had reached an epiphany.
She breathed in and exhaled. She was exhausted. “Yes,” she said and left.
As she closed the door, a woman’s voice, somewhere, squealed, “Trời ơi!”
Hương looked up. She scanned the pews to see if anyone was there, and her eyes stopped at a closet door left ajar, a thin strip of light streaming out. She paused at the threshold. Inside, Thủy, a girl younger than Hương whom she knew from the church, was bent over a table.
“Chị Hương!” Thủy opened the door and cried out her name again. The girl jumped up and down and reached out for Hương’s hands. “Come! You have to hear this!” she said. Hương didn’t know how to react as Thủy moved aside and showed her the cassette player on the table. She pressed a button and it began to click. Soon, through the static, a man spoke.
“Thủy ơi!” said the grainy voice. “How I miss you so! It is raining here again, my love. Can you hear the water? The heavens cry.” The voice quieted to the sound of water pelting against mud.
The man was probably a young boy Thủy’s age. Hương wanted to laugh at their young, naïve love. Instead, she took a step closer, inspecting the cassette player—the spinning of the tape reel, the clicking of the movement, the smooth buttons with their colorful symbols on top. She focused on the spinning of the wheels. For a moment, there was no other sound except that clicking as it echoed in that small closet.
“Thủy?” the man’s voice came on again. Hương stepped back.
“There he is!” Thủy squealed and clapped her hands in excitement. She hugged Hương, and then, embarrassed, restrained herself.
“Thủy, when you return home, we should get married! I know that’s not what your parents want, but…”
Thủy turned down the volume and Hương left the girl to her tape message.
Walking down Camp Street, Hương thought about the ease of making a cassette. Unlike the letter, its content wasn’t obvious; instead, it was hidden, unless the tape was played. But people would play it only if it looked suspicious. If she were to label it “Uncle Hổ’s Teachings” or maybe just “Communism,” they would not even bother looking any further into the matter. Yet there was the cost of sending it. And would she mail it to their Mỹ Tho address or their Saigon one? Would Công still be there? Was Công safe? What if the Communists captured him? No, she had to wipe those uncertainties from her mind. She needed to think positively; it was the only way. She would have to ask the priest about the tape recorder. After apologizing for her behavior that morning, she would say politely, “Cha, cho con mượn cái này.” Coyly, she would add, “I will return it, I swear. Just one night.”
Công would be reached. They would be reunited. New Orleans looked brighter and happier then. She smiled. It was the first time in weeks. Perhaps even months.
* * *
—
At the motel, she set the tape recorder on the desk. She tested it, and the sound of her voice surprised her. She sounded young and immature, a little bit needy. Did she always sound like that? She tested it again, changing her voice and the pitch of the words. She wanted to make a good impression. When she was happy with her test recording, she cleaned up and dressed the boys as if the recorder could see what they looked like.
“I don’t like this,” Tuấn complained. He pulled at his shirt. “Itchy.”
“It’s only for a little bit,” she told him. “It’s important. We dress up for important things.” She told this to herself and changed into an áo dài, the one luxury she had packed. After they were ready, she pressed the button and the machine began recording.
“A lô, anh Công? Hương đây.” She paused. Where to start?
It felt odd speaking to a machine now. She had practiced so much, but now it meant something. She had to pick the correct words to get her meaning across clearly, to describe her situation correctly, to express her emotions so that there were no questions about how she felt. Her lungs became heavy and her cheeks flushed red. She turned off the machine and then turned it back on.
“We made it to America,” she started. She turned the recorder off and took another breath, then started it again. “But before, we were in Singapore in a camp full of other boat people. That’s what they call us: boat people.”
She wanted to stop, but the words just kept coming. She had so much to say and none of it would make sense to Công.
They spent a week on a boat, she and Tuấn, and, somewhere within her, their baby. The only food they brought were a small bag of cooked rice and another bag of bananas. (Công knew that already.) A few days in, this was split among the twenty or so people on the boat. (She had lost count of how many there were.) She remembered that at one point the entire boat ran out of water, and all the babies, including her son, were crying and screaming of thirst. Then it rained, the sky turning black, and water droplets fell down. They lifted their plastic bottles and bags to the air as the children opened their mouths. Soon came the lightning and thunder and everyone crouched down, huddled in the mass of skin and bones as if the act of clutching on to one another was enough to save them if the boat were to topple over.
The next day a ship found them, and their greetings were friendly. The ship sailed them to a camp in Singapore, where they stayed for several months, long enough for her to have the child, which she was surprised survived at all after the cruelties of the sea. Finally, they were told to get on a plane and that plane took the three of them—a mother and two sons—to New Orleans, a place she never heard of before and still couldn’t place on a map.
She held up Bình and the baby cooed into the recorder. She should have told Công about him first. Why didn’t she? “This is our son, Công. I named him Bình. Isn’t he đẹp trai? He was born at the camp. I thought I wouldn’t have been healthy enough and that if he came he w
ouldn’t be healthy, either, but here he is. He’s healthy and he’s strong! He’s a miracle.” She held the baby up higher and he laughed as if tickled. “That’s your father,” she said and pointed to the recorder. She waved his little hand and he laughed louder. She wished he hadn’t. This was a serious moment. They, all of them, should be serious.
“Công, are you safe?” she asked now. “Where are you now? Are you coming over? How is our house? What are the Communists doing? Is it safe there? Are you safe?” There were so many questions. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out except a weak whimper. She stood up to get a tissue.
* * *
—
The last night in Mỹ Tho they packed an old suitcase. They had used it years earlier—before Tuấn, before there was talk of family—on a trip to Đà Lạt. Hương remembered the rolling hills, covered in morning mist and looking like giants: tall and sturdy, mysterious and unknowable. She told Công that this was where she would want to spend the rest of her life. Công, on the other hand, didn’t like Đà Lạt. He didn’t like traveling. He had left the North with his family when he was a child. A refugee, he associated movement with loss. Since then, he had looked for a place to put down his roots—to stay. In the days before Saigon was lost, everyone was trying to leave, but Công was adamant about staying. They had just moved from Mỹ Tho to the city for Công’s job at the university. He had worked his entire life for this, he had said, and now they were letting him teach literature—to talk about not only the great Vietnamese poets but about the great French ones he loved, too, like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Gautier, Apollinaire, and Hugo. At the age of two, Tuấn knew these names better than those of the other kids, and he sang them wherever he went: Rim-baud, Ver-laine, Gau-tier. Công was proud of all he’d accomplished, even if teaching was, at times, difficult. More often than not, he came home with two or three full folders of papers to grade, along with stories of troublesome students. He struggled with the ones who were closed-minded, the ones who were stuck to their small-town ideologies and resisted being educated. The worst, he would tell her (looking around as if he were disclosing a secret), were the students who joined the Communist clubs. They were so set in their ideologies there was no teaching them. (“You would sooner teach a horse to fly,” he would say.) Still, his life was coming together the way he had planned. The look in his eyes said “hãy tin anh.” Trust me. And Hương did.
