The Tapestries

by Kien Nguyen

  “Look, Mouse.” She pointed at the single rosebush along the stone wall. “Can you see that last rose of autumn?”

  “No, darling,” he said, his breath hot against her ear. “It is the first rose of spring.”

  Author's Note

  I was six days old when my grandfather first told me his life stories. I was lying in a small bamboo cradle suspended by ropes from a high wooden beam. From the window, the summer sky shone like an inverted ocean, motionless except for a few distant clouds. Hummingbirds fluttered over the garden fountain, then disappeared into the pomegranate trees.

  While the ceiling swayed he would speak to me in a melodic tone, always with the same introduction: “During the winter months, the Perfume River was chilly, especially at dawn.” In my recollection, the world of my grandfather was simple, irregular, and deliberately void of anything material. No photo albums or mementos helped illustrate his tales, only his soothing voice, flowing in the river of his memory.

  At times, my grandmother would join him. In the background, she would pluck the strings of her lute and sing Vietnamese folk songs. Between the two of them, my childhood was filled with wonder. I could always close my eyes and allow myself to be transported back to a time when my grandfather was a child. While in the rest of the world, children grew up with fairy tales, I lived in my grandfather's stream of consciousness, feasting on his thoughts, feeling his emotions, and absorbing his legacy.

  When I was older and able to retain some of the plots, we ventured into our garden. By that time, the trees had been replaced with rose vines on white trellises. The hummingbirds had moved on, and the new tenants were butterflies. No matter what direction I looked, the sky would be drenched in a sea of ocean blue, forever concealing its secrets.

  I was at the age when everything seemed complicated, and giving something a name only added to my confusion about its nature. I could not understand why a dog would be called “dog” and a cat “cat.” The stories took longer for my grandfather to tell because of my endless questions. But with great patience, he always explained them to me in meticulous detail.

  This state of communication between the two of us was heightened as time passed, because of my love for him as a storyteller and also because of his zest for living. I remember the excitement I felt the first time we waited together for the midnight cactus to bloom. I marveled at the sight of the plant's tender buds and the way they reached for the moonlight with long, tapering, and delicate sprouts, uncurling like tendrils of a fern. To purify the air, my grandmother had lit sandalwood bark in a copper urn nearby. Listening to my grandfather, I could almost see the music of his voice swirling in the smoke. But the endless wait was impossible to endure. Before long, I fell asleep on his lap.

  Late into the night, I was awakened by a strong scent of perfume. I opened my eyes. The moon seemed to shine through a layer of rice paper. The sandalwood had burned out. We were still in the garden, but now the wind was softer and almost liquid with humidity. At first I thought it was the moon that had the smell like the inside of a temple. But then I saw the blossoms on the cactus. The outer sheaths that had once been pinkish were now red—vermilion—like blood flowing over the white petals. I remember the very moment when the moonlight became a part of the flower's pistils. I watched as the entire tree emitted an iridescent glow. My grandfather was silent. And when the fragrant mist disappeared, all of the white petals withdrew into the plant. The brief courtship between the moon and the flowers was over.

  Living with my grandfather, every day was a surprise. I never knew what his next lesson would be. It could be a story he read from an old book, or a tale he told of his own experience, or my likeness that he embroidered in one of his tapestries, or a discussion of the plants and herbs in the garden.

  In the morning, he would wake me before the sun rose to go to the pond where the lotus plants thrived. I can still feel the cold sand under my bare feet as I ran a few paces ahead of him, carrying a child-sized teapot. While he collected the morning dew from the lotus leaves, I would hunt for tea that was hidden deep inside the blossoms.

  For a long time I didn't know how the tea got there. I imagined that the plants manufactured their own tea, or perhaps it was placed there by a water nymph for the taking. Years later, it dawned on me that my grandmother had been putting the tea leaves inside the lotus buds the night before, so that they could marinate over night. Even after the mystery was solved, the enchantment lingered in me whenever I reminisced on those days. Like a child looking for Easter eggs, I would run from flower to flower, searching for my treasure, disappointed each time I found an empty bloom.

  When he had gathered enough water off the leaves, and my little pot was one-third full, we returned home. Outside the kitchen, my grandmother had prepared a terra-cotta stove with burning coals, ready for his ritual. It was his own ceremonious way to pay respect to the higher power of nature. As the water boiled, its steam became a thick mist, erasing all that was real around me. A new setting would emerge, narrated by his voice—a world that had once belonged to him, a world that he now handed over to me. After telling me a story, he would ask me to repeat it over and over again. I did not know whether it was a test to see if I was listening, or his way to keep the past alive.

  I asked him, “Who was the beautiful dancer, Tai May?”

  “She is here,” he replied.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, only now her name is Grandma.”

  “What happened to Ven?”

  He stirred the fire with a bamboo stick. Sparks of ember crackled. “After she took the maps, she vanished. I never saw her again. Your grandmother and I returned to live in the Cam Le Village. For many years that followed, on the morning of my every birthday, I would wake up to find a small tray of my favorite food on the front stoop of my house.”

  “Banana custard packed in rice with coconut juice?” I asked.

  He smiled. “She was the only person who knew how to prepare it to my liking. This went on for many years, and one day it stopped. I knew then that she had died.”

  “What about the treasure in the maps?”

  “I don't know if Ven ever found it. It didn't matter because I have found my own fortune. It is the family that I have now.”

  Grandpa, I never forgot you or your story. Wherever you are, I am still listening.

  Acknowledgments

  In memory of Christine Jampolsky and my grandparents

  With heartfelt thanks to Judy Clain, Fiona and Jake Eberts, Michaela Hamilton, Brenda Marsh, Peter Miller, Claire Smith, my brother, Jimmy, and sister, BeTi

  Special thanks to Do Phuong Khanh, Kathleen Bui Mai Khanh, Vu Quang Ninh, Nguyen Xuan Nghia, and Dinh Quang Anh Thai

  Additional thanks to Kathy Bishop, caumo Hoa Buu, Christine Crownin, Doan Thu Doan, Pi Gardner, Michelle Hillman, chu thim Hoc, Bob and Sally Huxley, Tom John, Bill Richards, Camilo Sanchez Julia Szabo, and Patricia Urevith

  And thanks to everyone at Little, Brown; PMA; Corbin and Associates; Little Saigon radio; Viet Tide newspaper; and Thuy Nga Productions

  A note about the author

  Kien Nguyen was born in 1967 in Nhatrang, South Vietnam, to a Vietnamese mother and an American father. He left Vietnam in 1985 through the United Nations' Orderly Departure Program. After spending time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Nguyen arrived in the United States. He now lives in New York City. His first book, The Unwanted, was a memoir about his childhood in Vietnam. For more information, visit the author's web site at www.kiennguyen.us.

  The Tapeslries

  A novel by

  Kien Nguyen

  A Reading Group Guide

  Out of Whole Cloth

  A profile of the author of The Tapestries

  Kien Nguyen talks with John Habich of the Minneapolis Star Tribune

  When he was eight years old, Kien Nguyen watched from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the helicopter coming to lift his family to safety exploded in midair. His mother's mansion
was looted and seized by the Communists. At thirteen, he nearly drowned trying to escape Vietnam with a group of boat people, and spent two months in a prison cell after he was washed up on the beach at Cam Ranh Bay.

  He moved to New York City a week after arriving in the United States in 1985, with no mastery of English. Unable to find a job after he finished college five years later, he eked out a living on the streets by drawing $2 portraits. A psychic who became his sponsor sent him to dental school and set him up in a posh practice just off Central Park.

  “It was an American dream come true for me, a refugee,” said Kien in the garden of the S0H0 townhouse he shares with his sponsor. Yet he gave it up to write books. “I was only gambling with my life,” he said. “I have done that before.”

  To vanquish his nightmares, he chronicled his young years in the acclaimed 2001 memoir The Unwanted. His first novel, The Tapestries, draws from the harrowing youth of his grandfather, an embroiderer in Vietnam's imperial court. It was a selection of the Talking Volumes book club, a public service project to build community through reading, founded by the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Loft Literary Center.

  Kien's grandfather, who died the day before Kien's family left Vietnam, used to play the sixteen-stringed lute called a dang tranh and three-stringed dang bao and relate anecdotes of his life. The foundation of The Tapestries is found in those stories: about his father being a pirate; about his arranged marriage, as a boy, to a woman about twenty years older so she'd have to take care of him without being paid; about falling in love with the daughter of his family's blood enemy. “They loved each other immensely,” said Kien. “That was the love I was looking for, and I think it formed me a little bit, too.”

  The court of Vietnam's final emperor hired Kien's grandfather to make embroideries because of his dramatic three-dimensional style of pictorial stitchery. “The faces would come out of the canvas and look at you,” said Kien. He had asked his younger brother to retrieve a particular piece of needlework when he returned recently to Vietnam. Kien has been unwelcome there since The Unwanted painted its Communist regime as heartlessly self-interested.

  “It was a little boat, a sampan, in the middle of the water, which was very turbulent; you see slanted rain cut through the canvas. There was a man and a woman on that boat on that stormy night and the woman was bare-breasted and holding a child. She had really long hair, and he was guiding the sampan to shore,” said Kien. His grandfather told him the characters represented himself, his wife, and their son, Kien's uncle. The artwork had almost completely disintegrated.

  Kien's memory of his ancestor's tales also had holes in it, which he filled with his imagination. Veering from classic Vietnamese literature, which he described as poetic, slow-moving, and ornately styled, he filled the book with action and adventure. He also tried to paint the myriad beauties of Vietnam, which for most Americans are obscured by memories of war.

  His surprising metaphors and word choices owe partly to the fact that English is not his first language, surmised Judy Clain, the senior editor at Little, Brown who helped him shape both his books.

  The publishing house is marketing The Tapestries both to readers who love stories set in foreign cultures, such as those by Amy Tan, Manil Suri, and Arundhati Roy, and to Asian-American communities. Hundreds of Vietnamese-Americans have showed up at promotional events for The Tapestries in Texas and California, Clain said.

  Part of the enthusiasm may be credited to Kien's girlfriend of two and a half years, Kathleen Buoi, who owns the Viet Tides newspaper and Little Saigon Radio in California's Orange County. She has pushed Kien's career with everything from coffee mugs to backpacks. She is the daughter of Nhat Tien, an eminent Vietnamese novelist whose works Kien learned in school, and who has served as his mentor for the past few years.

  Kien is Vietnamese-American not only through immigration but through parentage: His father was a U.S. serviceman who shipped out when his son was too young to remember. The Unwanted abounds in anecdotes of the taunting prejudice he faced as a mixed-race child, albeit not as bad as the “burnt rice” offspring of black U.S. soldiers. He sees the abandonment of Vietnam's Amerasian children as one of the saddest stories of the twentieth century, and one of the least known.

  Nhat Tien's novel Singing in a Cage—whose central character is an Amerasian girl growing up in an orphanage—is a modern classic in Vietnam. But until The Unwanted, Kien said, “you heard the horrible, horrible stories about their suffering but nobody had actually put it into a book.” He gets many letters and e-mail dispatches from other Amerasians, and Tien has translated The Unwanted into Vietnamese.

  Kien described seeing a mixed-race family during the publication party for The Unwanted at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center: a Caucasian man who looked like a doctor with his Asian wife and their children. “Their boy, about fourteen years old, was a reflection of me at that age,” said Kien.

  “He asked his dad if he could have some ice cream and they brought out this huge sundae and I got really sad, because that was the family that I wanted. And then I looked at the family I had created for myself and thought, ‘This is my life. You appreciate what you have.’”

  Although his search for his birth father yielded only a returned letter marked “address unknown,” he and his brother found a father figure in Frank Andrews, the psychic he met twelve years ago.

  Kien writes every day, starting early in the morning. For fear that writer's block might set in, he tries not to take many breaks, except for his daily run with his big black dog, Star; he is training for his third New York Marathon. He has lunch in midafternoon, takes a quick nap, and then watches “really nondescript, mindless TV” to clear his mind before resuming writing. He then works until he is exhausted, usually in the wee hours.

  Kien has not given up dentistry entirely: He spends one day a week in the office of a Vietnamese-American friend, working with underprivileged children for free. He was recently hired by his alma mater, New York University, to teach children's dentistry. “One false move and a child will be afraid of dentists for life,” he said.

  But he vastly prefers working with his imagination to dentistry. As a dentist, “you work in a tiny little area and most of the people are afraid of you,” he said. “It's a very lonely world.” As a writer, he said, “I live each day feeling very, very full,” growing in understanding of his characters, and of people in general.

  His work helps him understand his own origins, as well. Said Clain: “After the memoir came out, I asked if he would ever go back to Vietnam. He said he had too many bad memories. With this novel, that's kind of what he's done. Fiction is a way for him of returning and exploring Vietnam.”

  That's not to say he has any second thoughts about his new homeland. “Coming to America was the only dream I wanted,” he said. “The rest of my life is just a bonus. I'm always trying to expand my versatility, and this is such a great country for that. If I wanted to write a screenplay, I have a chance. If I wanted to go back to school to be an MBA, I have that chance, also. There's a lot of opportunity out there for everybody.”

  John Habich's profile of Kien Nguyen originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on November 24, 2002. Reprinted with permission.

  Questions and Topics for Discussion

  1. Discuss the tension between duty and personal choice in The Tapestries. To what extent did the characters have control over the way they lived their lives? Discuss the role of fate in the lives of the novel's principal characters.

  2. Did you learn something new about Vietnam and its history from reading The Tapestries? Did you sense a conflict between the forces of history and the forces of modernism? Could you foresee a source of future conflicts in Vietnamese society after reading this novel?

  3. Discuss the romantic relationships in the novel—Ven and Big Con, Dan and Tai May, Dan's mother and her gardener. What was the role of loyalty in these relationships? Can you identify modern as well as tradition
al elements in each relationship?

  4. Who was your favorite character in The Tapestries, and why? Which characters were the most dynamic? the most passive? the most complex?

  5. How did the author's use of metaphors and other figures of speech influence your experience of the story? How did the author's depiction of weather and landscape contribute to the novel's mood and tone?

  6. What is the significance of Ven's disfigurement at the hands of Magistrate Toan? Do you think it reflects the position of women in Vietnamese society in the era portrayed in the novel? Do you think that the position of Vietnamese women has changed since that time?

  7. Were you surprised by the details of food and daily life that are presented in the novel? In what way were these details important to the story? Discuss the differences in the lives of the wealthy and the poor.

  8. Did you perceive certain characters to be representative of the historic culture of Vietnam? Did others appear more modern? Sometimes the characters in The Tapestries make choices based on traditional values that could be hard for a Western reader to comprehend. Identify some of the critical choices that altered characters' lives. Did the author succeed in making these choices understandable to you?

  9. Who was the bigger villain—Magistrate Toan or Lady Yen? Who did more harm to Dan and the other characters in the story? Was Dan truly obligated to kill Magistrate Toan because of the family legacy?

  10. Kien Nguyen has stated that The Tapestries was inspired by the story of his grandfather's life. Which parts of the novel do you think were factual, and which parts do you think were fictional? Are these distinctions important to you?