by Eric Nguyen
“ ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.
“I went to get his coat and he left. It was only after he left that I remembered his name. I remembered him as a child, so small and quiet you sometimes forgot he was there. I remembered his mother.”
Sitting on the bed, Hương remembered how he always scowled as a boy. That, along with his shyness, made everyone in Versailles somehow suspicious of him, mean to him, though he was only a child. Once, she remembered, she found him out back by the bayou in the middle of the night. He was holding a large cardboard box, something that once held a large appliance. She asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was trying to get back to his Vietnam: they left on a boat and he thought they could go back on a boat. His response took her breath away. She didn’t know what to say to him then. So she just shook her head and told him he had to go home. She remembered that scene now and wondered what she could have said, what she should have said, and if that could have changed the outcome of things.
“What do you make of all of it, Vinh?” Hương looked over and saw Vinh was already asleep.
It was still raining outside; the wind had picked up some more.
Hương wondered if the boy was still walking around New Orleans now, head down, pushing against the falling water. She wished she could have helped him, could have picked out the father he’d lost in the crowd.
She imagined the reunion—the tears, but also the questions that needed to be answered. Why had he left? Why had he never come back? Where was he all this time?
In another life, the boy would find his father and they would be happy. In another, he would find him and everything would be ruined: his father had left him in Vietnam, never thought about him in the last twenty years, resented him. In yet another, it would have been the father who came to her that night.
She imagined her own sons flying to Vietnam and wandering the streets aimlessly. How lost they would be. How disappointed they would become. What sadness they would encounter that she could not protect them from.
Hương
1999
A Vietnamese woman called Hương with the news. She told her her husband had died.
“Husband?” Hương was confused. It was five in the morning. The sun was not yet up.
“Chị Hương,” the woman said. “You were the first wife. You must come. He will not rest.”
Later that day, a thin white envelope arrived by express mail from Vietnam. Inside, Hương found a small clipping, only a few inches wide, from a newspaper glued to the front side of a postcard, covering a picture of a government building:
Professor Trần Vaˇn Công, 43 years old, of District 2, died of lung cancer. He is survived by a wife.
Hương read and reread the obituary on the airplane. She reread the date: August 4, 1999. What was she doing on August 4, 1999, just a few days ago? What was she doing when Công took his last breath?
“He started smoking,” she said to no one in particular. Tuấn slept in a seat across the aisle, and Vinh had been angry and silent since the letter came.
Hương told Vinh he didn’t have to come, but he insisted—for her own safety, he said—though she was sure he was jealous. Hương said that she wasn’t in love with Công anymore. Công was married to someone else. And she had him, Vinh.
She opened her window shade and was surprised to see water. She wanted the water to be blue, like in the maps. In her memory, it was blue the first time she flew over, a fluorescent blue that was strange and wonderful and alive. On the boat ride, she remembered the water being black and threatening. The water was black now, too, but flat; it looked plain and boring. Disappointed, Hương closed her eyes and tried to remember what Công looked like and why this woman, his wife, had called to tell her the news and ask her to come.
“I feel his spirit,” she had said. “He will not rest.” The woman made it sound like Hương would be doing her a favor.
* * *
—
As they walked through customs, people swarmed beyond the glass that separated the inside of the airport from the outside that was now Ho Chi Minh City. Hương felt like one of those celebrities she saw on TV, greeted by screaming fans as they stepped off their planes.
Lan, Công’s wife, would be among them. Lan had said, over the phone, that she was a short and simple woman, whose hair was stringy and flat so she tied it in a bun. Her clothes were simple, too.
“Not extravagant clothes like you have in America,” Lan said. “They’re simple clothes. I’m a practical woman, chị Hương—có hiểu không?”
Lan might as well have been describing everyone in Vietnam. They all looked the same: small, tired, dirty. Hương felt pity for them, then she felt guilty for feeling that way. They were her countrymen, and she was returning.
Her eyes scanned the crowd as a customs agent inspected her bag. He tapped her shoulder and held up a makeup purse. Plastic and transparent, it looked as harmless to her as anything else. Its contents—her compact, lipstick, a brush, a small pack of ear swabs—couldn’t hurt a fly if she tried.
“Cô,” said the customs agent. “You can’t bring these in here. These are illegal.”
“What do you mean illegal? It’s makeup. Women everywhere—”
“Cô không phải đang ở Mỹ. Rules are rules here,” he replied with a smirk. He had a sloppy way of pronouncing words. He had too-thick eyebrows and oily skin. Then she realized how young he was. Perhaps Bình’s age, this boy was born after the war. “Rules are rules,” he repeated, raising his caterpillar eyebrows.
Vinh pushed her aside. “Here, take it.” He threw a crumpled American bill at him, grabbed her bag, and moved her along. Tuấn followed behind.
They passed through the doors and an old woman grabbed her. “Phương? Phương? Is that you? It’s your Auntie Bích!”
“Không,” said Hương, pulling back her arm. “I’m not your niece.” She walked on.
Another woman, a younger one, grabbed her wrist. “Is that you?” the woman asked.
Hương stopped. “Are you Lan?” she asked. “Are you Công’s wife?”
The woman paused. “Yes,” she said. “This way; I have a taxi waiting for you.” She pulled Hương through the crowd, pushing anyone else who got in her way while Vinh and Tuấn trailed behind.
When they reached the curb, the woman let go of Hương’s hand. “Five American dollars, please,” she said. She stuck out a palm.
“What?”
“I walked you through this crowd, didn’t I?”
“Who are you?” Hương asked.
“How about one dollar? I have two kids to feed.”
“Get out of here,” Vinh yelled, shooing her away.
“Who asked you, anyway?” the woman said to Vinh.
“Đi!” Vinh said, and the woman ran back into the crowd without another word. “Panhandler,” Vinh said.
Hương turned back. “Lan?” she yelled through the crowd. “Lan? Lan?”
At last, she spotted a poster board sign: Chi Hương va Gia đình từ New Orleans. She rushed over.
“Lan?” Hương asked the woman.
“Chị Hương?” The woman looked at Hương intensely, then her eyes opened widely in recognition: Yes, I do know this woman. On the walk to the waiting van Lan told Hương, “It’s like I’ve known you in another life. Yes, that’s what it must have been, why you look so familiar.”
* * *
—
Công had settled in Ho Chi Minh City, across the river, in An Lợi Đông, District 2. His wife kept a calm voice as she directed the van driver down a long stretch of highway and down smaller streets. Behind, the city—its buildings still under construction—faded.
“I’m sorry I was late,” Lan said. “The funeral preparations. We’re behind on everything. I’m behind on everything.” The b
ody had been cremated the way Công had wanted, but there was still more to do. She had not yet notified all the extended family, had not yet sent out the mourning garments, the white headbands and the thin tunics. She had trouble deciding which poems and prayers to have read at the memorial ceremony. Decisions were so easy with someone else. Now, alone, she told Hương, everything was up to her.
Remembering her own first days in New Orleans, Hương almost said she knew how Lan felt but stopped herself from saying it.
“You must be strong, Lan,” she said instead.
Lan said she had not even given Công a posthumous name for his afterlife yet. She was afraid if she didn’t choose a tên thụy soon, his spirit would not leave. He would show up every time someone called his name and his family would suffer the consequences of a restless spirit. Think of not being able to go home, Lan said; it could make one mad. Lan didn’t believe in much, but she believed in this: that life was a temporary stop, and death a journey home, wherever that was.
Công never cared much for religion and neither did Hương. She asked herself how Công could have fallen in love with this type of woman.
The van stopped on the side of the road. Lan hopped out with a flashlight. Together the four of them walked a dirt path that cut through a thicket of trees.
“You see these trees, Tuấn?” Hương asked aloud. “These are rubber trees. Like in your shoes or tires.” She had to look back to make sure Tuấn was still there, he was so quiet. For half a mile, they walked until the path ended and they came to a clearing and a house with marble steps. Lan slid open the front door.
Inside was spacious, bigger than Hương’s Versailles apartment. Compared to Versailles, Lan’s home was a palace. The polished wood floors led to polished, clean rooms, several of them, immaculate with neat beds, white sheets, and bamboo art panels on the walls. It felt like an insult, this house. What you could have become, who you could have been, where you could have lived. As Lan led them to their rooms, she told them it was built for the entire extended family. With the family wealth on her side, she wanted a family home, where everyone could belong. But no one ever made it to the house. After she showed Tuấn his room, Lan walked Hương and Vinh to theirs.
“Sorry it’s a small bed,” Lan said. “We usually don’t have guests. Maybe a family friend, but no one else.” She turned on the light and wiped a finger on the sheets as if checking for dust. “You need more pillows,” she declared.
“Don’t,” said Hương. “We couldn’t have asked for more. Thank you, Lan. Thank you.” Hương shut the door. There was a long pause before Hương heard footsteps walking away, bare feet slapping the floor, repeating until they faded behind another door.
* * *
—
The next day was Wednesday. The memorial would be held Saturday, the most auspicious day, according to Lan. They would walk, along with Công’s lifelong friends, through the neighborhood to a creek at the edge of the woods, where they’d let his ashes float.
When Hương woke up, Vinh was gone, though she heard his voice outside. He stood leaning against a doorway in the back of the house. “You and me have a lot in common, then,” she heard Vinh say when she got to the door.
Outside, Lan squatted in front of a hole in the ground where a grill rested over a fire. She placed a wok over it and threw in minced garlic.
“Chị Hương,” Lan said. “Did you sleep well?” She fanned the fire. The garlic sizzled. She added more oil.
“I slept well enough,” Hương answered.
Lan smiled and threw in vegetables and meat. The frying meat sounded like electricity until it was put out with fish sauce and steam rose from the wok. She tossed the vegetables and used chopsticks to turn over the pieces of meat.
In another life, they would have been rivals, vying for the same heart and the same lives. But in this life, Lan had won, and a pang of jealousy came over Hương. It was unjustified, she knew, though it didn’t make her feel any of it less.
“Let me,” said Hương, walking over the threshold and toward Lan. “You look tired,” she said. Then, looking at Lan, Hương realized she did look tired, not a sleepless tired, but a gripping weariness that seemed like it took hold weeks or even months ago and did not let go, did not give any sign of letting go. “I’ll finish cooking breakfast. You rest.”
Lan fussed but gave in. When she was gone Hương asked Vinh, “What do you think about her?”
“What is there to think about?” he said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “What should I think?”
* * *
—
After breakfast Vinh and Tuấn left for a city tour, leaving Hương and Lan to plan the memorial. They walked through the house and out into the backyard where Lan had been cooking earlier. Beyond the sheltered outdoor cooking space, there was a small plot of land with a clothesline hanging between two wooden posts. Beyond the clear plot, thick trees blocked out the rest of the world.
Hương looked up into the sky. A gray cloud bloomed into a bigger one. A flock of birds flew past.
“It’s supposed to rain today,” Lan said, squatting down over a basin of water. She poured in soap and began scrubbing. There was plenty to wash.
“I met Công while he worked at Open University,” Lan said. “We were both in the Humanities Department, though we taught different things.” She told Hương about the classes she had taught. A folk poetry class, a class on folk songs. “The trick,” she told Hương, “was to tell the officials you were teaching about Vietnam’s honorable peasant history. But then in the classroom, you do something else completely different. Hồ Xuân Hương didn’t just write about peasant things, you know.” She laughed and Hương tried to do the same, though she had no idea what Lan was talking about.
Hương found herself, in her mind, competing with this woman. She imagined she was in a race, but when the gun went off she realized someone had strapped cinder blocks to her feet. She told herself that she could have been teaching folk poetry—or a foreign language or even chemistry—if only there hadn’t been a stupid war. Had they thought about that when they started the war, she asked herself, that they were ruining so many lives? Yet she knew this was a lie. She was a housewife from a small village. She would have always been a housewife from a small village.
“He never told me about you, you know,” Lan said. “He told me he had a wife who went away after the war with his child.” Hương thought she heard an accusatory tone in her voice, but decided she was imagining it. “But it was his mother who told me your name.” She shook a pair of chopsticks to dry them off and moved on to a spoon.
Hương’s eyes lit up. “Is she still alive?” she asked. “Is his mother still alive?”
She remembered Công’s mother now, an especially tall woman with a long nose and tiny eyes. She didn’t want them to leave the country. She didn’t want Công to leave the country.
“No, she died last year,” Lan said.
Hương remembered the night on the beach. She remembered feeling his hand one second and then, the next, it was gone. He hadn’t let go, she had concluded, but he had paused. And she, in the mad rush, in the chaos of the night, must have gone on without him. Yet still, he hadn’t followed them, he hadn’t followed her. After years of contemplation, she was sure it was because of that woman, his mother. He could not leave her behind. That was at least part of it. At moments Hương hated her, but then she understood his love for his mother, a different kind of love that bonded them, and Hương admitted to herself that she would have wanted the same from her sons.
She had to ask Lan then, “Did he stay because of her?” Her throat felt dry and scratchy. “We, all of us, were supposed to escape together. But he stayed. And we lost contact, of course. Was it because of her? Did he stay because of his mother?”
Lan pa
used. A look of thinking came upon her face, and she licked her lips before continuing.
“The truth is,” she began.
Hương stopped breathing for a second.
“He said his feet stopped moving at the shore,” Lan said. “The coldness of the water was a shock to him and he couldn’t move.” She finished cleaning a plate and dried her hands on a towel. Hương did not understand.
“Let me begin again,” Lan said as if realizing a mistake. “He told me, years into our marriage, about the reeducation camp after the war. In Lăng Cô, the officers were these skinny boys from the countryside and they hated Công. They called him the Professor, locked him up in a cell by himself. During questioning, they asked him the question he most dreaded. What did he think of French literature, the literature of the colonizers? He knew, when he entered that camp, they would ask him that question. He had thought about it ahead of time, but none of the answers he came up with would have satisfied those prison guards. What could he have said to make them happy? In truth, nothing. So, he told them the truth,” and here Hương imagined Công, younger, idealistic—the way he always was in her head—but also afraid. “Công told them art transcended boundaries, beauty crossed borders. He said, one can’t contain life and the stuff of life. It was impossible, he went on, to imprison that; it was impossible, he said, to imprison beauty and truth, no matter who was in charge of Saigon—no person, no ideology, no misguided boys.
“He believed that, Công did.”
Hương agreed. He would have said that; he would have believed it.
“The prison guards, they laughed at him then and spat on him. The spit hit his cheek and before he could wipe it off, they grabbed him by the arms and took him away from the cell. Outside, they dragged him through the fields. Tied his hands together; his legs, too.
“ ‘Confess!’ they shouted at him. One of them kicked him.
