Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  “She passed at the right time,” the man with the serpent staff said again, coming up to her. “She’d planted the fruit of her desires.” He gazed at her to see if she understood.

  “What desires?” Maia asked. “For whom?”

  At midnight Uncle Mao led a group of men on a bird hunt. They left in a swamp boat with flashlights and long-handled nets. JP carried a bell-shaped bamboo cage. A man boasted that he could tiptoe up to a sleeping bird and seize it with his bare fingers. Another claimed he could catch a nestling pair with a single swing of the net. Before daybreak, the men returned with a cage full of twittering birds. They covered the cage to quiet the chirping and hung it from the open veranda’s ceiling. The tiny brown sparrows were to be freed after the burial at dawn.

  From the house to the gravesite on the eastern edge of the dragon fruit grove was not far but could only be reached by waterway. The men carried the corpse from the living room to the dock and laid it in the canoe to be drawn by Charlee the camel.

  When Mama Mao had first heard about the foreigners and their floating crate and camel crossing the Mekong River, she immediately ordered her public security chief son to escort the troupe to their home. As soon as she gazed into the camel’s large eyes, broad nose, and subrident lips, she knew. “The face of a dragon!”

  Mama Mao had also sensed a polyhistoric presence in the waterlogged crate and insisted that it be set in a dry well-lit room. The mammoth dripping box was hauled up the spiral stairwell to the third-floor attic and placed beside the family’s ancestral altar.

  That morning when the sun rose over the Mekong Delta, the camel with the dragon face ceremoniously pulled the hearse-canoe, leading a procession of sixteen small boats upstream. At the eastern front of the orchard, the mourners disembarked and proceeded in a single file to the burial site, where a princely young man in saffron rags led a chant on being freed from the illusory world.

  “So fine!” Na said.

  “What does he mean by interbeing?” Maia turned to Na. “How are all things interdependent—oneself and another, human and non-human, life and death? How is there a universe in a flower?”4

  Na was not listening but whispering to herself. “So fine,” she said again. “Too bad he’s a monk.”

  Released at the end of the ceremony, the sparrows soared into the light that speckled their wings with indigo, crimson, and gold. The bell-shaped cage was rattled and tilted sideways to encourage a straggler that finally dropped on the ground. The injured bird was quickly kicked to a nearby cactus. The flock of sparrows trailed the procession downstream, circled the morning sky, and settled in the banana grove.

  After the guest mourners left in canoes and the travelers retired to their tents to care for Charlee, who had suddenly fallen ill, those that remained gathered on the open veranda under a blanket of starlit sky.

  Maia sat with her legs crossed in a half lotus, glad for the immovable hard tiles beneath her. She had not felt like herself since the eyeball interrogation. Things remained fragmented; odds and ends juxtaposed and floated in a pond of mumbo jumbo. Since arriving at her grandmother’s wake, she had found herself entangled in the moment and had become a member of the cast of strangers. Perhaps if she were to let go, the events would not seem odd nor incidental but interconnected somehow. Only then, her friend Phat in Little Saigon had said, would she find a single thread and see totality. Be still, he would tell her. Observe.

  Xuan leaned against the railing, a Tiger Beer in one hand. He smoked nonstop without saying a word, watching her from the corner of his eye.

  JP and No-No were sprawled out on the cool tile floor. The skeletal orange kitten lay on its back, four scrawny paws in the air, a protruding bellybutton on top of a bloated stomach.

  “Too much funeral food,” Na said.

  “He ate the dead bird.” JP rubbed No-No’s belly in small circles, giving the orphan kitten an after-meal lomilomi.

  “It’s a mark of filial piety that you’ve returned,” Uncle Mao said, clasping Maia’s hand in his firm, calloused grip. “You’re a child of Vietnam.”

  Beside him, Auntie Mao lowered her eyes.

  “She’s here on research,” fat Pâté chimed in, beaming. “Did you know Hòn Vọng Phu is a tale of faithful waiting?”

  As if on cue, Cross-eyed Lai, who had been tuning an aluminum steel-string guitar, slap-strummed the marching rhythm of “Hòn Vọng Phu 1.” Comrade Ty led off with magnificent gusto, and Pâté and Lai intoned the chorus. After the soldiers marched off to war, Na sang “Hòn Vọng Phu 2,” a lyrical ballad about a wife waiting and eventually turning into stone. Na’s soulful voice blended tenderly with the sparrows’ night chirping.

  JP scribbled in his journal. “Did her husband ever return?”

  Xuan tapped his cigarette over the railing, ashes falling, his eyes on the fireflies flashing in shadows. He recited the opening lines of “Hòn Vọng Phu 3.”

  Atop the Western Range

  someone gazes toward the Eastern Sea,

  waiting—

  like our country from past to present.5

  “Why wait?” Maia asked. She felt Uncle Mao’s grip and Auntie Mao’s eyes.

  “Your Má should have waited,” Uncle Mao said quietly.

  The singers fell silent. The flock of sparrows on the banana grove stopped twittering. The breeze, heavy with the smell of algae and fragrance of white nocturnal flowers, bore a mixture of sweet spices from the travelers’ bonfire, where No-No had trotted off after sniffing the air. The revelers sucked in the strange scents and fell asleep full of dreams of life elsewhere.

  Dewdrops

  LEE HAKAKU BOYDEN taught Kai the different words for wind: sea breeze, land breeze, easterly, westerly, monsoon, and typhoon. But what Kai had a knack for was sniffing the air to tell who was near their campground. Lee and Kai would venture from their unit with gourds of jungle moonshine that Cook Cu had distilled and barter with passersby for the things they needed. Lee, a former US Army translator, spoke the Montagnard tongues, and Kai, indigenous to the mountains, could offer to clear shortcuts for travelers or guide the lost.

  While Kai sniffed out what was in the wind, Lee smelled things from long ago, invisible things in the present, and things that had not yet happened. When the incessant easterly blew from the Central Highlands across their campground, Lee became insomniac with concern, which intensified with Vinnie Huynh’s arrival, bearing news from the headquarters in Little Saigon, California.

  Trained with the Special Forces, the young Vietnamese American was full of talk of The Art of War, reciting passages and filling Kai’s ears with combat strategies and tactics such as deploying spies and incendiary attack. Vinnie also got Kai hooked on Camels, whose sweet unfiltered smoke evoked a deep familiarity Kai could neither place nor explain.

  Lee, whom Kai had taken to calling “Pops,” accelerated his language lessons, teaching his hānai boy all he knew: Lee’s own mother tongues, the lingoes he had learned formally in school and picked up in Kalihi Valley, and those he had cultivated to survive the jungles of Southeast Asia. Lee convinced Kai of the importance of language, through which one encountered the other in the world. Knowing languages was a hingeless door that swung in all directions, a pivot on which one stood to see intersecting horizons in order to understand oneself as another.

  “To live is to speak and to listen,” Lee would say. “Life’s a conversation. Spiders spin webs, trees fruit, and birds sing. They’re speaking. Listen.”

  To Lee’s chagrin, Kai picked up tweeting most readily. The pair would spend time carving birdcalls from jungle materials to imitate the mountain babblers. More and more, Pops and son twittered, conversing with each other and their surroundings in nature’s intimate codes.

  Lee suspected the transformation was brought about by Cook Cu’s jungle moonshine: dried leaves, berries, barks, and other nameless ingredients, steeped in morning dew. A descendant of the royal poet-chef for the fourth Nguyen Emperor, Cook Cu concocted a mountain
dew that induced the men to become one with the wilderness. On the other hand, his nightly poetry recital from memory of his ancestral Gia Phả Họ Kim transported them to another time and place.

  “Dewdrops,” from his family annals, was a favorite of Cook Cu’s.

  Frangipani and a grove of pine lap about the crumbling stones

  that celebrate Tu Duc, the ineffable, the longest reigning Nguyen emperor,

  and no wonder, breezes whisper—

  he lived.

  At every meal, fifty chefs stewed and boiled, steeped and steamed,

  crafted fifty cunning dishes, served by fifty trembling servants;

  no need to tell what sudden fate awaited

  fumbling feet.

  His tea was made from drops of dew gathered from the lotus petal,

  shadows moving in the shallows round the teahouse, every dawn

  five hundred quivering beads to make

  a perfect pot.

  That much the almanac reveals but not what sort of perfect flowers,

  only dewdrops from the petals of young maidens,

  the trembling dew of blushing lotus

  filled the pot.6

  Progressively paralyzed by his ailment, Cook Cu strove for inner stillness. His moonshine induced a drunken forgetfulness among the men so as to be in the present. His nightly poetry recital stirred them to take flight to a life elsewhere.

  Vinnie’s arrival jolted the stasis.

  Lee sensed restlessness in Kai, who began to venture with Vinnie beyond the campground’s perimeter and would not return for days. Lee’s suspicion that they were crossing the border into Vietnam’s Central Highlands was confirmed when he overheard them conversing with one another in tribal animal-like calls. After more than two decades in the jungle, Lee had come to a crossroad. The child he had carried from the burning rubble of war had not physically grown but was now overflowing with action.

  The Dead Letter Box

  THE ROOSTERS WOKE Maia from a restless night the morning after the burial. The house was nearly deserted. Except for the travelers caring for their sick camel, almost everyone had gone for the day. Na had convinced JP to accompany her to Sadec to scout a location for a café. Chief Mao, in a crisp public security uniform, reported to Station House 49. Auntie Mao, the town’s postmistress, rode with him in the family canoe to her one-woman post office.

  That left Mama Mao. Before making her weekly trip to oversee her altar shop in Ho Chi Minh City, the old woman enlisted Maia to help with preparing a fruit offering. The bowed figure in brown cotton clothes led Maia to the surrounding trees.

  “Mâm ngũ quả,” she instructed.

  They picked a spiny dragon fruit, a red pomegranate, a hand of plump bananas, a fragrant pomelo, and a nipa palm nut. They arranged and re-arranged the five fruits on the round lacquer tray until Mama Mao sighed approvingly. “Balance and harmony.”

  Maia carried the tray and trailed the old woman up into the attic. As they climbed the spiral stairwell, Mama Mao instructed Maia to light incense for her ancestors. “Remember, bow your head and don’t stare.” When they reached the landing, the old woman took the offering and approached the wooden crate, where water had seeped out onto the floor. Maia followed closely behind.

  “Stand back,” Mama Mao hissed. “You light incense.” The old woman placed the offering on the floor before the crate and fell on her knees. She sniffed the water, dipped an arthritic finger into the puddle, and licked its crooked tip, tongue moving in toothless mouth. “The Mekong River,” she muttered. She dipped another finger but this time sucked it like a lollipop. “Saltier,” she said, “like the ocean.” She mumbled something about an early nineteenth century shipwreck in the middle of the Atlantic, trying to retrace the passage of the cargo with her tongue.

  Mama Mao prostrated before the wooden crate and chanted in a high voice that filled the silence and stilled Maia’s breath. The box contracted and expanded, and a dull pounding pulsated from within. Maia held her breath and watched the old woman and box unblinkingly until she realized it was her own heart beating. She released her breath and took several steps back. She calmed herself and scanned the bare attic. On the family altar, framed black-and-white photographs of different sizes and shapes crowded under the red glow of the electric candlelight. She approached the altar, feeling the eyes on her and remembering Mama Mao’s words: bow your head and don’t stare.

  Maia lit three incense sticks. Wisps of jasmine smoke spiraled upward and lingered in the stagnant air. She bowed three times. When she stuck the joss sticks into the sandy miniature planter, she could not help but peek at her ancestors’ faces. All seemed to be strangers. Her eyes then rested on a four-by-six-inch unframed picture, dusty and curling at the edges. Tucked in a corner of the altar, Great-Aunt Tien gazed out: an open smile, wild long hair, and skin the color of her black clothes. Beside her great-aunt stood an older man—pale, thin, and a wispy beard.

  “Don’t stare,” Mama Mao said.

  “That’s, that’s—”

  “Your side of the family.”

  “She’s alive . . . isn’t she? And . . . is that . . . Uncle Ho?”

  Mama Mao picked up the picture, glanced at the pair, and turned it over. Still sucking on her tongue, she scrutinized the inscription and then handed the picture to Maia. “You read.” They moved toward the circular glass window for more light. The writing had faded, but Maia could still make out the words. There was no date. “You can read Vietnamese, can’t you?” Mama Mao asked.

  In the cylindrical beam of sunlight through the attic window, Maia slowly read the words out loud.

  Núi ấp ôm mây, mây ấp núi

  Lòng sông gương sáng bụi không mờ

  Bồi hồi dạo bước Tây Phong Lĩnh

  Trông lại trời Nam, nhớ bạn xưa.

  —H.C.M.7

  “It’s a poem,” Maia said. “For my great-aunt . . . from Uncle Ho?”

  “Who knows?” Mama Mao shrugged. “Would you like to see more family pictures?” Not waiting for an answer, the old woman fell on her knees and opened the cabinet doors beneath the altar. Raising dust clouds and disregarding spider webs, she pulled out an antique cookie tin and extended it to Maia. “This is for you.”

  A soft morning glow illuminated the verdant swampland. Maia placed the tin box on the tile veranda and sat in the shadow cast by the extended roof. The river had flooded the dock and reached far up the front yard below the house. No-No trotted up from the wet grass, where he had been basking in the sunbeam. He pressed his bony head against her leg and coiled his rat-like tail around her ankle. He plopped on his side, exposing a distended belly for her to rub.

  Dust rose and spun in the slanted morning light as Maia opened the tin to find an old photograph of her parents. Her mother smiled, head tilted, half-shut eyes gazing at her father, who stared at her, holding her hand and grinning widely. They stood in the garden of the L-shaped house in a world of their own. Maia came across a picture of her father in olive drabs, hoisting a rifle and leaning against a stone bridge. With an oversize helmet on his head and a hand grenade hanging on his flak jacket, he looked like a teenager dressed up in someone else’s uniform. Behind him, the bridge arched across the river like a crescent moon.

  Beneath the pictures, she found a bundle of several letters. She recognized her father’s even and deliberate handwriting. A yellowing page, torn from a notebook, addressed her father in a hasty scrawl. It was a letter from her mother, the date and location illegible. Maia returned the box to the altar’s cabinet and kept the letters, suspecting they never reached the intended readers.

  She followed the overgrown footpath into the dragon fruit grove. Veering toward the sound of rushing water, she came to a clear river lined with weeping willows. Large floating leaves spread from bank to bank, covering the river in green except where blushing pink lotuses bloomed. She tucked herself under the shade of a willow and began to read a letter from her father to her mother.


  I’ve been waiting for your letter but nothing has arrived. This evening, live bands performed on the corners of downtown Philadelphia to welcome the summer’s arrival. In the midst of the festivity, I felt the warmth of my tears.

  What is the meaning of a cluster of evening clouds, a yellow leaf windblown from the past autumn, or a gentle breeze from the rose garden of Sadec where we stopped for a meal of fish and vegetables?

  You were always away. I waited for you like the rose garden from yesteryear still waiting for your return. On those rainy evenings at the train station, I watched passengers disembark. After waiting, I could only help you with the bags.

  I was mad at the clouds. I blamed the wind. I even hated the yellow autumn leaf.

  Visiting you on the nights when the town was bustling, the most we ever did was accompanying others out. Why didn’t we make a date on one of those evenings to go to the lake atop the mountain? The trail, though not spectacular, did have the gentle breeze whispering through the pines. With you beside me, I’d see your hair blowing in the wind, hold your hand in mine, and hear your voice. We’d have had a chance to talk about a life that matters.

  I still haven’t seen a more beautiful footpath than the one along the open marketplace beyond the bridge. Then, we were living at Old Lady B, sharing house with Captain V, who wanted to fire his gun in the middle of the night. After that, we rented a house from Sister L behind the wooden church.

  Do you still remember the rooster that I asked you not to sacrifice? You didn’t know how much I loved him. He never pecked at your mother’s flowerpots. He’d follow me everywhere. Whenever he heard me calling, wherever he was, he’d come running. But I had to carry out your wish. That night, I couldn’t sleep and woke at three in the morning. I embraced him . . .