by Thuy Da Lam
“You know why no customers?” Na asked when it was time to close the café. Her mischievous eyes surveyed the dark surroundings. “This place is haunted—” She stopped and looked toward the man-dug fishpond. She whispered, “Someone is here.” It could have been the different time zones, the mix of alcohol and caffeine, or Na’s easy laughter. Whatever it was, the threesome peered intently at the approaching shadow. “It’s coming!” Na let loose a string of shrill laughter. The kitten leaped from JP’s lap, baring its fangs as if hissing at the shadow.
“Xuan!” JP exclaimed. “It’s Xuan.”
“We should go,” Maia said. “It’s almost curfew.” She stood up, but JP had already risen, shaken hands with the tour guide, and pulled out a chair for him.
“Didn’t think we’d bump into you here,” JP said.
Na eyed Xuan. “You scared us.”
Maia picked up the skeletal kitten by the nape of its neck like a sack of bones and gathered it on her lap. “Na thought you were a ghost.”
“Nonsense,” Xuan said.
“So brave!” Na said. “You’ll be visited—”
“This place is haunted,” JP mimicked her. He had given up on a serious conversation with Na. She had talked openly about being the café’s singer-hostess, her likes and dislikes, and her dream of one day opening a café of her own. She had let him touch her smooth lineless palms and boasted their absence of fate’s grooves. But when he said he was hapa with a lineage from the Middle Kingdom and asked if her father was American, her face changed.
“Big Al from Love City works in passport,” she blurted out. She then clammed up and became cross. She preferred ghost stories, believed in the afterlife, and claimed to converse with spirits.
Maia shifted in her chair, aware of Xuan’s eyes.
Na began an unsettling story that had been told around Ox Alley since the abandoned property was first expropriated. A young official had relocated his widowed mother from the North and turned the cactus orchard into a popular outdoor nightspot, which, for reasons only a few knew, he called Winter Night Café. Once in the airy house, they felt another presence. At night, they would hear a woman chanting. The official’s elderly mother made repeated offerings and set up an altar shop next door, but the spirit would not leave. “The ghost,” Na whispered. “Her husband built the house for her.”
Maia’s breath stopped. Fragments of people, places, and her father’s stories surfaced. She remembered the two-story L-shaped house with a balcony overlooking her grandmother’s orchard. In the summer of fire when the North pushed south and central Vietnam dissolved in flames, her father evacuated the family and in-laws from the highlands to Saigon. He built a home for his wife and daughter in a pocket of verdant land, an oasis in the concrete city, he had inherited with his crippled kid brother. His mother-in-law moved into the groundskeeper’s cottage and cultivated purple dragon fruit.
The night air turned chilly in the outdoor café.
Maia heard JP’s question. “How did the woman die?”
Leaning forward, Na’s eyes narrowed. “No one knows.” The dark clouds of hair hovering over her high forehead made her appear impishly grand, looking down on them and conjuring up their lives. A slow smile possessed her lips. “Lovesick maybe.”
Xuan slammed his beer on the table. He fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag. He settled into his chair, and for the rest of the night, he did not speak. They could not see that he was no longer watching them or that his eyes had softened. The beer toppled and rolled off the table onto the gravel, where the orange stray slinked over, sniffed, and lapped up the foamy liquid.
“What happened to the orchard keeper?” JP asked.
“Her younger daughter married the official,” Na said. “And they all moved to the River of Nine Dragons.”
Phat Salon
NO ONE HAD seen the dragon, only traces of its inky tail across the right collarbone of the owner of Phat Salon in Little Saigon, Orange County. The tail undulated as Phat cut a client’s hair and styled a look that revealed the woman’s true inner self.
“Inner-outer correlation,” he would say.
The transformation began with Phat serving the client a cup of hot herbal brew and a slow, deep massage of her feet until she sighed softly. He would then leave the room. When he returned, he cut the woman’s hair in a single fluid motion as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror and imagined the hidden dragon on his supple body—hairstylist by day and mixed martial artist by night.
Curiosity drew a steady stream of patrons to Phat Salon on Bolsa Avenue.
A flying dragon with enormous bat-like wings, a client whispered.
A sea dragon rises from the East, another said.
Phat’s ex-girlfriend from Berkeley had the last word: a black serpent coils tightly around his hard torso and breathes fire on his sex.
But Maia knew the creature was incomplete. What Phat had was only the tip of a tail. When the tattoo needle hit a nerve on his shoulder blade, Phat’s body went into shock. He fainted and was rushed to the emergency room.
Maia also knew it was not a dragon tail.
“A fish tail?” Phat repeated in disbelief, looking up at Maia from the low wooden stool, his fingers interlocking her toes. She was a walk-in, long straight hair dry and brittle with split ends from four years of college in the Northeast snow belt.
“A monstrous fish,” she said and told him a fish story she had read in her folklore class. Though Phat was not convinced even after the day she showed him the enormous fishtail stone displayed at the Museum of Folklore & Rocks where she was the curator’s new assistant, they quickly became friends.
In Little Saigon, where people consumed U.S. goods and participated in Vietnamese rituals and festivities, Phat and Maia, orphans at an early age, tended to the void of their parents’ absences in different ways. Phat further emptied himself in order to flow and become ungraspable, a defense in the martial arts ring and in life. Maia filled her void with stories. Phat strived to be mirror-like; she sought mirrors.
When word arrived that Vinnie Huynh went missing after landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport on Tết, the Independent Vietnam Coalition approached Maia with an offer of a research grant, with one stipulation: she was to be the liaison between the Coalition and E. Tien. Maia could not refuse the opportunity to travel to places she had only studied and read about in library books. She convinced herself that accepting the assignment was an act of love for her late father—to continue his legacy. The return was a chance to reconnect with family.
A week before her trip to Vietnam, Maia made an appointment at the salon. Phat served her a cup of warm herbal tea and massaged her heels, arches, and toes. He meditated and meditated but could not see her true inner desires.
He finally asked, “You’re returning to Vietnam to collect stories on rocks?”
“In four provinces, from central Vietnam to the northernmost border with China, stands a wife-rock atop a mountain cradling a child waiting for her husband’s return. Some believe he’s gone fishing in the South China Sea; others say he’s gone off to war. The story of Hòn Vọng Phu, a wife who turns into stone waiting for her husband’s return, shapes and is shaped by the physical terrains of Vietnam and the people’s expressions.”
He seemed unmoved.
She repeated the questions from her college project: “Why is Hòn Vọng Phu so prevalent in the imagination of the Vietnamese? How have the tale and its modern adaptations transformed in the diasporic community, where a confluence of histories, cultures, and languages interact? How do these stories narrate Vietnam’s national identity?”
He gave her a blank stare.
She then showed him the news clip of E. Tien. “I’ve been tasked by the IVC to look for my great-aunt.”
He remained silent.
She finally pulled out an old yellowing envelope with the address from her maternal grandmother’s last letter and told him the real reason for her wish to return.
“Someone there might be able to tell me what happened to my mother. Even if this were all a dream,” she said, forestalling his butterfly dream parable, “I’d still want to know.”
He trimmed her split ends but left her long hair as it was, a drying river seeking the sea.
Eyeball
WHEN XUAN VEERED the red Honda Dream off National Highway 1 onto a dirt trail that led into an old rubber plantation, Maia’s first thought was to hop off the backseat, dash for the main drag, and hitchhike to catch up with Na and JP. In her mind’s eye, she could see Na’s hair blowing like rainclouds, JP hanging onto the motorcycle’s rear grab bar for dear life, and No-No Pōpoki curling into a spiny orange ball in the front basket. Traveling on two motorcycles 136 kilometers southwest of Ho Chi Minh City over hills and valleys and through farmers’ markets and rice paddies, they would arrive in the Mekong Delta before nightfall. That morning, Na had sped off with JP on the used Minsk he had bargained down to 250 USD, leaving Xuan and Maia to follow. They were all going to the River of Nine Dragons to look for Maia’s maternal grandmother. But now Xuan left the highway and lost Na and JP.
The dirt trail cut through the rubber forest, a colonial past buried deep in the red soil. The hum of the motorcycle’s engine momentarily halted the shadows of workers tapping the trees to drain their milky liquid into aluminum buckets. Beyond the old plantation, the trail widened and curved along muddy ponds of ivory lotuses. The motorcycle’s wheels skidded over the swampy ground, and the stench of algae rose with the morning sun. From time to time they would pass a roadside eatery, its menu painted white on the tree bark, inviting passersby to stop for Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang, Dừa Tươi & Bia Hơi.
The path gradually wound upward to an empty lookout at the foot of the mountain. A barefoot boy about seven or eight loitered nearby, hawking still life drawings of five fruits that looked like naked ladies. “Mâm ngũ quả!” he cried. “Mâm ngũ quả!” He had a three-patch hairstyle of the late sixteenth century and a cheeky singsong voice.
The lady’s head is a pomelo,
her eyes like longans,
breasts like peaches,
palms like Buddha’s-hands,
her garden, a fragrant wedge of jackfruit.2
Xuan ignored the boy and his portrait of a naked lady and parked the motorcycle next to the motley tents along the mountainside. The makeshifts fluttered in the breeze, but not a sound or movement came from inside. At the far end of the tents sat an enormous water-damaged wooden crate, silent and still like the mountain. Xuan walked to the crate and examined its faded print. BANGALANG 5-26-1830. He peered through the cracks into the pitch-dark interior. He kicked it. The sodden wood gave a long, hollow creak.
Beside the crate, Maia leaned on what she had first thought was a sun-warmed boulder. She was startled when she realized it was the rounded back of an old sleeping camel. She had never been up close to a great beast of burden. She gingerly caressed its graying head and stroked the tough leathery skin of its cheek. Its outstretched neck sank farther onto the ground. Its large eyes squeezed tight, shutting out the midday light. She did not question the camel’s presence at the foot of the mountain but found comfort in the steady rise and fall of its heavy, laborious breathing.
Xuan paid the fruit boy one thousand đồng to watch the motorbike and motioned Maia to follow. As they climbed the stones that were leveled in the slope, she silently rehearsed the reasons for her return. She chanted a mantra she had learned from a laminate pocket-sized picture of Quan m: “Nam mô A-di-đà Phật. Nam mô A-di-đà Phật. Nam mô A-di-đà Phật.” She cleared her mind in anticipation of what was to come. When she looked up, she saw a looming French cathedral with twin steeples. The red tile pitched roof with upswept eaves reminded her of a Chinese pagoda. The high tower’s eastern and western arches and angles fused seamlessly with the natural folds of the mountainside, shrouded in low-hanging clouds.
On the summit, three men in green public security uniforms were playing cards at a stone table under a flamboyant tree. They left the game as soon as they saw Xuan and Maia. The men’s sandals dragged over the ground and disturbed the red dirt that rose in a haze and fell on their gnarled toes. The smallest marched with heavy steps toward them as if weighted down by a great burden. “You’ve come on time,” he said, his accent from the northern countryside.
Xuan nodded at the small man, whom he called “Comrade Ty,” and acknowledged the other two at his heels. Pâté was stocky with a plump liverwurst face. Cross-eyed Lai had pale translucent skin that stretched over his stick frame. “They want to ask a few questions,” Xuan said.
A gust of wind blew a cloud of scarlet blossoms off the flamboyant branches. The blossoms fluttered and ascended like butterflies before falling. Beyond the front yard, the land dropped off steeply into rice terraces that bejeweled the earth with emerald and gold.
“Awfully pretty,” fat Pâté murmured. He took her hand and pulled her to the stone table. His chubby thumb stroked the top of her hand, his eyes on her jade locket. He suddenly reached over and yanked the locket from her neck. The chain broke and slipped to the ground. The jade was in his fleshy palm.
“What’s inside?” he whispered. His knees started to bounce.
“My father’s ashes.”
“Sister,” the leader said, “you’ve returned for what purpose?”
The locket was passed from Pâté’s clumsy fingers to Cross-eyed Lai, who tried to pry it open with his long pinky nail. “Đéo mẹ!” Cross-eyed cursed when his nail snapped. He pulled out a pocket-sized stiletto and wedged its sharp tip into the octangular jade case.
“I’m collecting stories on Hòn Vọng Phu.”
Pâté’s legs stopped bouncing. “Hòn Vọng Phu? The trilogy Hòn Vọng Phu 1, 2, and 3—‘The Army Departs,’ ‘Eternal Waiting,’ and ‘The Husband Returns’?” His patchy moon face beamed at her. “We’re the Public Security Trio, third place in last year’s Mekong Songfest. Comrade Ty is our lead man!” He pounded a marching rhythm on the stone table with his fists, and in a deep baritone, he sang the first “Hòn Vọng Phu,” in which soldiers depart for war. Cross-eyed Lai dropped the jade locket into his back pants pocket and joined in with a high-pitched voice, his bony fingers intricately picking the strings of an air guitar.
“Pâté! Lai!” The leader shushed them after the first verse.
“Curtains?” Pâté asked in a small squeak. He turned to her and said, “Sister, you don’t listen. We’ll all be drenched.”
Pâté and Lai disappeared into the temple and returned with two red curtains. They tore the curtains lengthwise into strips and then braided and knotted the strips into a thick long cord. With a quick movement, Lai twisted Maia’s arms behind her, and Pâté tied them with a red band. They roped her ankles.
Pâté and Lai walked to a giant blue globe perched on a pedestal beneath the gutter of the temple roof. On the side of the globe, a painted long leaf-shaped eye stared out amidst white clouds. The top had been broken to catch rain.
The men tossed one end of the cord over an upswept eave about ten feet above. It hooked on the eave and dangled four feet from the ground. The other end lay slack.
The leader kneeled down, and with surprising strength, he scooped her over his shoulder and carried her to the globe. They tied her bound ankles to the slack end of the rope. The leader pulled the other end and hoisted her off the ground. Pâté and Lai pushed the giant eyeball beneath her.
Her world was inverted.
Blood rushed to her head as her body dangled over the sphere’s jagged edges. She smelled salt. She straightened her posture like a soldier marching off to war, but she was in black peasant pants and tied upside down with red ropes. When she looked into the sphere, she saw petals drifting like dismembered butterflies. She thought of her father and his fight. Her head became heavy and hot as blood pulsated faster and faster toward the steady hum of whirling blades chopping air.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Her father
commanded the pilot to lift off from the burning land. Her mother curled around her, covering her from the scorched bodies and homes ablaze. Her grandmother and aunt huddled beside them. As the Huey maneuvered southward for Saigon, the summer of fire ignited a flame in her young heart.
“We don’t need to do this,” the leader said.
The first time they dunked her, she squeezed her eyes shut. When they raised her, the leader’s face was inches from hers.
“Who sent you? Why have you returned?”
The intervals in the water became longer. Each time she was hauled up, her interrogator appeared paler against the darkening clouds.
The last time they dunked her, she ran out of breath. She tried to curl upward to lift her head out of the sphere, but she had become weak. Fluid oozed into her ears, up her nostrils, beneath her eyelids, and coursed through her body. She heard distant voices. Persevere and join hands with others. Limbs untied, she reached out, bare fingers grasping still water. Her legs drew up close to her body. Curled into a ball, she spun in the briny fluid and settled into the curve of the sphere. She saw Xuan through the glassy eye.
“It’s over,” Xuan said and laboriously fished her out of the colossal eyeball. He carried her and ascended steps, dripping wet. Put me down. She wanted to resist; no words came. Sunrays from a long leaf-shaped eye shone over the great arched entrance. Except for the bullet holes that broke the exact centers of the stained-glass windows, the temple appeared intact and vivid under the lowering sky.
They crossed the threshold. Once they were inside, she heard lively conversation that became louder. She shivered uncontrollably when Xuan laid her on the cold tile floor beneath the golden light that glowed from the vaulted ceiling where people lounged on a lofty pyramid-shaped lantern. Now and then, they would glance down at her. She strained her ears to listen but could only catch fragments.
