Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  Maia held her breath. She was again eavesdropping in the house of her childhood.

  “You’re here to gawk or shampoo and blow dry?”

  “Can you make it quick?”

  The chair squeaked beside her.

  “I haven’t got to the market yet. Sweet-sour fish soup, steamed anchovy loaf, boiled greens.”

  The sound of running water muffled the voices.

  “The girl still speaks her mother tongue, doesn’t she? I’d learn English, but this head of mine and all those to be verbs: I am. You are. We are. They are. He, she, it is. Oh, heaven-earth! What use is to be now?”

  The water stopped.

  “Roller set or blow dry?”

  “Just blow dry, some waves and curls.”

  The hum of a hair dryer filled the room.

  “It was my fate, the nun at Ox Pagoda predicted. I accept. But hers? Is she asleep?”

  Light twirled through the hole in the roof and the sky pressed on her closed eyelids. “Why did you believe in prophecy?” she wanted to ask, but her head was spinning, her tongue heavy. What were the words she copied in neat cursive on the inside cover of her high school journal? Something about chance. Something about choice. What’s destiny in Vietnamese? What’s Vietnamese for chance? For choice?

  “She wanted a shampoo and then fell asleep. She must have been in the fire. Her hair smells of smoke.”

  We waited, Ba and I, in the Eastern Sea. In my dream, I saw you swimming in Grandma’s garden from the second-floor balcony. Up and down rows and rows of miniature yellow roses, purple dragon fruit, and mai bonsai you swam. Freestyle, backstroke, then butterfly. By the starfruit tree you treaded water, watching a school of angelfish glide by. The fish had escaped from Uncle’s pond. In Ba’s dream, you’d fallen into the well under the guava tree, but he couldn’t bail you out. It was a dream—a nightmare. Wasn’t it?

  “Okay, beautiful as always.” The hair dryer stopped. “What kind of fish soup? Butterfish, sea bass, catfish?”

  “Whatever One-Eye has caught.”

  A gust of wind blew the door open, and the smell of the ocean faded.

  Murmured voices and occasional laughter mingled with the monotonous scratching of the broom on the floor.

  “You’re awake.” Fingers kneaded her scalp.

  Through the hole in the roof, she could see the gray afternoon sky. Rainclouds cast shadows into the salon.

  “What about a haircut?” the stylist asked, untangling her long damp hair with a wide-tooth comb.

  In the mirror Maia caught sight of the sweeper. The woman looked up. Her side-swept bangs fell back and revealed a scar on her forehead.

  “You should layer your hair,” the woman said. “It softens your cheekbones.”

  Something made Maia agree. When she met the woman’s gaze in the mirror again, she knew hers was one of the voices she had heard earlier.

  The stylist cut her hair with an easy flowing motion. When done, she asked, “What do you think?”

  Her straight long hair, now blunt cut, had layered sides, feather-like. Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt different. She grasped the warm ball that swelled in her. When she stood up to leave, the room seemed to spin, and its walls dissolved, making her dizzy as if she were standing in the riverbed of a world in flux. She edged toward the door. The craters in the ground seemed cavernous, dark and vast.

  “Wait!” the woman with long side-swept bangs called. “Take this.” She handed her a faded red basket.

  “That’s not mine.”

  “It’s your mother’s,” she said. “Follow the stream. Go across the bridge to the marketplace. You can’t miss her.”

  The watercourse meandered along the edge of the forest. She looped the straps of the shopping basket around her shoulder. The plastic, once sturdy and red, was now lucent pink. She would fit right in, sauntering to the market in the yellow đồ bộ. But she was walking too fast, almost running, kicking up dust and pebbles that trapped between her sandals and feet.

  The stream entered the woods, leaves rustled, and birds chirped. They sounded celebratory. She did not accelerate into a sprint as she did on the cross-country trails she had run in high school—Nike Air sneakers, spandex tights under yellow-and-white school uniform when the autumn air turned cold in the Northeast, head full of imaginings of the future. The trail was always a loop, circling back to the starting line, to bystanders’ cheers and the final push. Now entering the forest, she slowed to a walk. Her hair was drenched with sweat. She was hungry and her mouth salivated, remembering the tart and sweet fragrance of a ripened fruit. She stopped to splash cool water onto her face and took a big gulp.

  She heard voices. When she looked up, she saw moving shadows. Some were bobbing in the water. Follow the stream, they had said. Go across the bridge to the marketplace. She had left the salon and walked downstream. Should she have gone the other way? That would have led her back to town and she did not remember a bridge.

  The forest seemed young, no ancient banyans rooting into the earth, no lofty redwoods reaching for the sky. The trees were lean and lush, too sparse to shade the pockmarked ground. Here and there, the watercourse widened into shallow basins. In one of these craters, she came upon a group of women on their haunches, washing clothes, sifting rice, and cleaning vegetables. Some were bathing, long black hair coursing down naked backs.

  “Why so late?” a woman asked, floating in midstream. Her central lowlands accent had a northern air. “You’d better hurry. The fish are fresh today.”

  “Could you tell me where the market is?”

  “You’re not from around here?” The woman looked at her closely. “That’s right, you’re the daughter. Why so small and dark?”

  “Those Westerners,” a naked woman interjected, wringing water from her hair and twisting it into a knot. “Tall like Noël trees, big like rice wine barrels, and white like daikon.”

  The women laughed. They appeared to be in their mid-forties, robust and mature, but bantered like a group of young girls.

  “Bigmouth! That’s why no men are around.”

  “Sister talks as if she had a man. With her lacquered black smile—”

  “Go ahead, girl.” The women laughed and waved their hands. “Follow the stream. Do you smell that? That’s where the market is. That’s Old Charcoal, roasting wild boar. Most delicious is the fatty, crispy skin, with jungle moonshine for fertility.”

  She left the women and followed the dirt path. From a distance, their voices rose and fell like frenzied creatures’ mating calls. Where the stream emptied into a lake, she saw a footbridge swaying in the breeze. Go across the bridge to the marketplace. She looked around. She heard the buzzing of a market and smelled roasted meat. She crossed the footbridge.

  The open marketplace spread along the lakeside.

  “Mua đi! Mua đi!” a blind peddler cried, clutching her basket of pink mountain apples.

  “Come buy! Come buy! Fresh fish. Sweet fruit. Roasted pig. Come try!”

  The aroma of barbecue lured her toward an old woman tending a fire pit. She was fanning the flame as the carcass sizzled, dripping fat, and the smoke rose. When the woman looked up, her scorched black features startled Maia.

  “Roasted pig?” asked the charred skull. “Jungle moonshine?”

  Maia backed away and merged into the market.

  Fish plopped in shallow water on silver trays. A shrimp leapt. Sea-green crabs crawled in box steps. Bright dragon fruit in pyramids, green guavas in woven baskets, spiny red rambutans in bunches, yellow jackfruits split open, fragrant and sweet. Leafy green vegetables, fresh herbs, pickled roots. Ground spices came from near and far. Anchovy. Fertilized duck eggs, thousand-year-old preserved eggs.

  Maia saw a woman with shoulder-length hair. The woman walked with a light bounce, moving through the aisles. She reminded Maia of a farmer who balanced two baskets with a pole on his shoulders. It’s the bounce that keeps the heavy load off, the farmer had said. The woman stopped
here and there, haggled over the prices, paid, and then left without taking her purchases. She stopped at the fish vendor, then vegetables, then spices.

  “Little miss! Little miss! Which do you like?” A fishmonger pointed to a tank full of fish when Maia passed by. He watched her from one eye, the other a dark hollow socket. “Which do you like? Choose one!”

  In a swarm of silvery sea-green, a small flash of pink caught her eyes.

  “Con cá hồng?” The one-eyed fishmonger saw her focus.

  He swooped his net into the tank, a swirling commotion, and caught a willowy pink fish with glossy dark round eyes. He plopped it onto his wooden chopping block and raised his sharpened cleaver.

  “No! Oh no! Can I have it alive?”

  “Not clean? Scale? Gut?”

  “Can you put it in a bag with some water?”

  Lowering the cleaver, he picked up the fish by the tail, dropped it into a bag, and filled it halfway with water. He tied the bag with a rubber band and handed it to her. “It’s paid for,” he said and pointed her to the vegetable vendor, where she picked up tomatoes, pineapple chunks, okra, tamarinds, and fresh herbs for sweet-sour soup.

  Maia followed the woman, stopping at the same vendors to collect more purchased items. She picked up pork belly and salted fish for steamed anchovy loaf and rau muống for boiling, then shallots, garlic, and chili peppers. The basket was getting full. Sweet-sour soup, mắm chưng, boiled greens. What was missing? Eggs. She remembered the rooster from before the sea crossing and the red hen on the other shore. She bargained with a fair-skinned girl and paid two thousand đồng for four eggs.

  She looked around and saw the woman talking with the bird merchant. Birds of all varieties twittered in bamboo crates. The woman pointed to the swallows. They haggled and she paid. The peddler caught a brown pair and placed them in a small wicker carrier. With the birdcage dangling in one hand, the woman left the market, the wind ruffling her hair, the swallows chirping.

  Maia followed the woman along the shore. They reached the river that drained the lake. An ancient stone bridge arched across the water like a still moon above shifting currents. The graceful circular lines created a sense of peace, though it was a passage of war, one that had served an army’s movement. As she got closer, Maia saw that it had been seriously damaged, with jagged gaps that small vehicles could fall through.

  When the woman neared the crossing, she released the birds from the cage. The pair fluttered hesitantly, a pink evening glow on their wings. The swallows swerved and floated and soared across the sky.

  “Má!” Maia called out a single word that came to her.

  The woman turned.

  Maia gazed into her own face, only a few years older. “Má?”

  They stepped together onto the bridge that arched across the river like a crescent moon. They walked around the holes and cracks, through which they could see the water rushing below. Across the river the land dipped and then rose, a rolling field of emptiness under the red evening sun. They came to a large jagged opening on the bridge.

  “Be careful.” The woman took her hand. “Jump!”

  They leaped the gap. In the river, sky.

  Notes

  1. The legend of Bà Triệu is based on my reading about Triệu Thị Trinh in David G. Marr’s Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945.

  2. The poem is an abbreviated translation of Trạng Quỳnh’s explanation of his five-fruit painting in the tale “Thi Ngũ Quả.”

  3. “The Party’s Three Delays” is from David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai’s ‘Vietnam’: A Portrait of its People at War.

  4. The idea of interbeing is from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love in Action: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change.

  5. The lyrics are translated from Lê Thương’s “Hòn Vọng Phu 3.”

  6. “Dewdrops” is by Nolan W. K. Kim.

  7. The poem “Mới Ra Tù Tập Leo Núi” is a Vietnamese version of Hồ Chí Minh’s poem written in Chinese after his release from prison in southern China in 1943. The poem appears in Nhật Ký Trong Tù / Prison Diary.

  8. The lines are from Hồ Chí Minh’s letter to the indigenous minorities in Pleiku.

  9. The lyrics are translated from Nguyễn Văn Thươ ng and Kim Minh’s “Đêm Đông.”

  10. The idea of eternal return is from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes.

  11. The passage is from Zhuangzi, trans. Hyun Höchsmann and Yang Guorong.

  12. The passages are from Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare, trans. Roger T. Ames.

  13. The hymn to Mother Earch is based on my reading about Pô Nagar in Nguyễn Thế Anh’s essay in Essays into Vietnamese Pasts, eds. K.W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore.

  14. The quote is by William Jennings Bryan.

  15. The rumor that Hòn Vọng Phu had crumbled and scattered in the ocean is mentioned in Andrew Lam’s “The Stories They Carried” in Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.

  16. The quote is from Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

  17. The lyrics are translated from Lê Thương’s “Hòn Vọng Phu 1.”

  18. The lyrics are translated from Lê Thương’s “Hòn Vọng Phu 2.”

  19. The lines spoken by the children are adapted from Subramanian Shankar’s translation of Kanian Poongundranar’s “yaadhum oore, yaavarum kelir.”

  20. The lyrics (from John Hodges’ 1844 “Buffalo Gals,” originally published as “Lubly Fan”) are quoted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight.”

  Acknowledgments

  Fire Summer is a work of fiction. While many characters are inspired by real life, places depicted have geographical correspondence, and events are noted in history, the story is fictitious. I am grateful to the John Young Scholarship in the Arts for enabling my research in Vietnam in 2007. I thank my dissertation committee at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa: Craig Howes for my essential gesture, Cristina Bacchilega for asking questions of stones, and Robert Onopa for saying no in 1965 and yes in 2010. I am indebted to my teachers—Colleen Majors at Stephen Girard Elementary School; Ed Kiernan, Joan Gucken, Nancy Tregnan, and especially Naomi Kuziemski for her loving guidance at the Philadelphia High School for Girls; John O’Neill, Douglas Raybeck, and William Rosenfeld at Hamilton College; Paul Lyons, Kathy Phillips, Mark Heberle, Reinhard Friederich, Robert Shapard, Ian MacMillan, Steven Goldsberry, and Chung-ying Cheng at the University of Hawai‘i at Mãnoa. I thank Frank Gallo, Susan Branz, Cuong Mai, Kazuyo Karan, Jacinta Suataute Galea‘i, Jocelyn Cardenas, Ralph Lalepa Koga, Michael and Tiffany Tsai, Bruce and Mahany Lindquist, and Mark McGrath and Janet J. Graham for friendship; Kate Gale, Mark E. Cull, Tobi Harper, Monica Fernandez, Natasha McClellan, Rebeccah Sanhueza, and Tansica Sunkamaneevongse at the impeccable Red Hen Press for shepherding a hatchling; Jennifer Lyons for literary representation and much more; Nolan W. K. Kim, Gypsy Love-Sponge, Bingo Hunkaluv, Moñino Crawdad, Sophie Charlotte Mucho Más, and Matilda Lani Abdullah for love, inspiration, and the journey home.

  Biographical Note

  Thuy Da Lam was born in Qui Nhơn, grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives in Honolulu, where she works on her next book and teaches at Kapi‘olani Community College.

  She holds a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College and a PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Fiction, the Myrle Clark Writing Award, and the John Young Scholarship in the Arts. Fire Summer is a revision of her dissertation, part of which appeared in Lost Lake Folk Opera in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

 

 

 
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