The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  The moon beamed from high overhead. Anh fumbled with her purse. She had forgotten her keys and was afraid of waking her uncle. I couldn’t take her back to my house. This was not the proper way to treat a girl. Besides, my father already expressed his disapproval of Anh and me dating. I was in a quandary. There was no all-night diner, and taking her to a hotel would have compromised her reputation.

  We lingered indecisively at the gate under the arch trellis with blue ivy blooms draping over us, the pale moon on her arm. A sense of fullness welled within me, a sort of engulfing warmth. I wanted to share this feeling with her. I wanted absolutely to be with her. I gathered her into me. She was supple within the circle of my arms.

  “I have an idea,” I whispered. “Are you feeling adventurous?”

  Anh nodded, grinning. Her trust was empowering.

  I took her hand and we fled down the moonlit alley, her heels a flurry of clacks. A dog barked. We could have been the last souls left in the city. She giggled into my ear. I inhaled the scent of her.

  A cyclo driver was waiting on the main street. I told him our situation and made a proposition: an all-night tour of Saigon in his cyclo for the price of a hotel room—three times what he would have normally earned. He smiled and dismounted to tilt down the cab for Anh.

  Entrusting ourselves to a stranger, we floated deeper into the night, delighted. In ponderously slow strokes, he pedaled toward the city center, and then looped around the grand cathedral, the government buildings, and the commercial avenues. Saigon was flat, lush with tall trees; the night air fragrant with blooms. It was like going through an immense tropical park, the asphalt streets, fluid in their emptiness, like canals. We sailed through the city unimpeded. It was strange to know there was no French gendarme to stop and question our movement—a liberty I never knew in Hanoi. Saigon was at peace, without fears. We did not even own the privacy of four walls, but there was an impression of wealth as if the city was truly ours.

  Down by Ben Thanh Market, merchants were preparing for the coming day. We ate coconut tapioca pudding and sipped hot soy milk among laborers at a roadside stand near the market. He brought us down to the quay where a dozen cyclos had gathered by the river. Slouched in their cabs, exhausted drivers slumbered. One young man strummed a guitar, his cohorts drowsily humming along. A bottle of rice wine was being passed among them. We dallied, watching them for a few songs, then moved onward. Our chain-smoking cyclo-man enjoyed rolling in the night breeze.

  Anh asked me why Tat was so upset. I said he didn’t like being reminded of his family’s secret. He would never admit that he had foreign blood.

  “It’s not a big thing,” Anh whispered.

  “It is for people of our parents’ generation,” I said.

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “When I first met Tat through Ha in high school, I asked Tat why his hair was so curly. We were riding our bicycles. Tat kicked my bike so hard I fell over. I would have punched him right then, but Ha stepped in and calmed us down. We almost became enemies from the start.” I took a deep breath, still not sure if Tat had forgiven me for that unintentional slight. “I didn’t know Tat’s mother had given up a half-French son for adoption.”

  “Tat’s younger brother is very handsome. The first time I met him, I thought he was European.”

  “We are free now, but the older generations had to live under colonial rule. It was common for French bosses to have affairs with the wives of their Vietnamese subordinates. Sometimes, it was coerced. Sometimes, men offered their wives or even their daughters to their bosses to advance their careers.”

  Talking about it made me sad for our country and our people. It stirred up a slew of old feelings and made me feel dirty. How had generations of colonialism reduced us? How had we reduced ourselves? Are we doing that still?

  Anh fell silent. She curled into me, drawing her legs over mine. The hems of her ao dai draped us like a blanket. The cyclo lurched over a small pothole. The night felt tender, fragile. I couldn’t help but hope for a better future.

  She rested her head on my shoulder, eyes lulled closed by the cyclo’s gentle rocking. I was intensely aware of the warmth of her body. I wondered what she saw in me. Anh had many suitors more wealthy and accomplished than me, but she chose to wait patiently throughout our long courtship, six months of ice cream parlors, cafés, and dance halls. It was not customary for a woman to initiate talk of commitment or of a future together. To venture beyond cuddles and kisses was to enter the realm of matrimony—something unimaginably irresponsible for a college student, so far from success, working several jobs to help support his family.

  I held her hands. She had long fingers, the palms coarse, hands unafraid of work. Anh opened her eyes and smiled the same smile that won me from the first moment. I knew then I would not give her up, that when the time was right I would ask for her hand. With the decision came a liberating sensation, that of falling.

  The sky was dark, but you could feel the shift toward dawn even before the eastern horizon changed. Downwind from the pho shop, the cool air was laced with the reassuring aroma of beef soup.

  THE NORTH

  1941–1943

  9. CRICKET FIGHT

  From the time of the Japanese invasion to the onset of the Great Famine, the country reeled through a period of escalating turmoil. A pervading lawlessness spread across the land. Opportunists thrived in the cities, availing themselves of monopolies and commissions—the largess that once was the sole purview of the French. Bandits plagued the highways. Peasant uprisings were common in the countryside. Underground, Communists and Nationalists were vying for power. The former gained popularity among the commoners. The latter had promoted the Japanese promise of liberating Vietnam, but the Japanese proved themselves even crueler masters than the French. The populace staggered under new taxes and outrageous rice requisitions. Young men found themselves conscripted and taken away to work as coolies. In its drive to conquer Asia, the Japanese army was quickly draining the country’s resources and setting the stage for a famine that would decimate a fifth of the population.

  It was the grand prelude to disaster and, for me, the happiest years of my life.

  I had the blessings of a privileged childhood, though, naturally, I was not oblivious to war. I’d seen guns and soldiers and heard of battles—it was all the adults ever talked about. But these things served as mere passing curiosities and random facts, because I was at that early age of boyhood ruled by binary simplicities: daylight and nightfall, school hours and free time, boredom and fun. It was that age where clouds had animal shapes and the seam of heaven and earth appeared as real and solid as the stitching on my shirt. Time had a spacious quality in which life unrolled as a series of unconnected events. I looked at soldiers marching through our village and saw only their impressive guns and uniforms, not the suffering they brought. I looked at a poorly seeded paddy and saw only the tadpoles to be caught, not the season of hunger to come.

  My cousin Tan and I reveled in this intermediate age of uselessness and early independence, too young to be harnessed for chores, too big to be confined to the playgrounds. We had escaped adult supervision. The days were ours to squander. We roamed and played in the sea of rice paddies. We had the occasional guidance of the buffalo boys, who were essentially older versions of ourselves, stretched out and filled up though still shirtless, barefoot, and sunned as brown as syrup.

  Our favorite buffalo boy was Chau, the widow cook’s only son. He was thirteen, which was effectively an eon older than us. For a few brief months, he went to school and sat with us in our village’s single classroom taught by my once-removed Uncle Uc. Soon after Chau learned how to write his name, he thanked our mothers for giving him the opportunity to learn and asked for their permission to quit. His mother kept his white short-sleeved shirt, sandals, and writing tablet with hopes that Chau would come to his senses. The moon-faced boy with the lotus grin had given up the classroom for the bright sky and naps on the
back of a buffalo. Oh, how we envied him. He had chosen to be a lord of the fields, whose days were freedom itself; whose head was rich with outdoor intrigues; whose hands were capable of crafting kites, slingshots, fishing poles, bird traps, toy kilns, bamboo flutes, and countless small marvels. He knew where the tart berries grew and could find spicy wild onions on any riverbank. He gave us the secret of honey-grass: A fragrant fistful of it stuffed in the pillow kept the nightmare away. He was the finest of our childhood tutors.

  Armed with slingshots and fishing lines, we barefooted across the summer days with the village children. We built tiny earthen ovens and baked catfish and snakehead fish encased in clay or wrapped in banana leaves. We had everything we needed: giant hay bales for hide-and-seek; cool, slimy ponds for splashing; and wind for our kites. We climbed trees and, perching like birds, gorged ourselves on longans, tangerines, and guavas plucked from branches. We lived to wage valiant battles on the lakeshore. Magic wands and enchanted swords. Bamboo popguns and watermelon rinds. We were bandits, legionnaires, French commanders. We were the native heroes who expelled the invaders.

  Of all the boyhood diversions, cricket fighting stood out as the singularly superlative game that captured our imagination and endured fondly in our memories even when we had long outgrown it. It was a game that consigned boys and girls alike to countless hours scouring gardens and fields for crickets. At any time of day, we could be seen tiptoeing in the grass, ears cocked to the cricket songs. We flooded them out of their burrows, the large unpredictable browns, the ferocious reds, the swift blacks. We kept them like jewels in exquisitely crafted matchboxes, equipped with cellophane windows for viewing. We lived, ate, slept, and went to school with our beloved pets. It drove Teacher Uc crazy, the chorus of crickets that rang out suddenly in the middle of his lessons.

  There was a spot between the village and the estate where we gathered to play. I only remembered it as a timeless place infused with a tender, silky light; an island in the silvery sheen of paddy water, speckled with fluorescent green rice shoots. There was a fishpond and an old, sleepy tamarind tree on a rocky patch of soil near where the village road joined the provincial highway that led to the city and the world beyond.

  We met there, a rabble of boys and girls, to barter and trade crickets, marbles, cellophane papers, empty cookie tins, sweets, and playing cards. Someone was always gnawing on a length of sugarcane, and we passed it around like a communal lollipop. We showed off our pets and traded the ones we didn’t want.

  My best friend Hoi gave me a tiny chestnut-brown cricket. It had a peculiar keening song. I gave him a coconut candy and a sheet of cellophane paper. Hoi’s grin grew until his eyes squinted shut.

  “Oy, Thong! Come look at Binh’s cricket,” Tan shouted. “It’s the sorriest looking bug I’ve ever seen. Its mother must have been a cockroach.”

  It was a pretty cricket with a reddish coloring on the belly and wings like lacquered rosewood. Binh didn’t respond to the insult, a sign that he was not eager to risk his cricket.

  “Look at his limp feelers. He’s scared,” Tan said to the group. This was a rite of cricket fights, open to players and spectators alike—the trading of slurs and insults until a challenge materialized. “He’s scared just like his owner.”

  It was the cue for the audience chorus: “Just like his owner! Just like his owner!”

  “Thong’s cricket will eat yours like peanut brittle,” Tan mocked.

  “Ha!” Binh had taken the bait. He puffed up to his full height. “Mine will snap yours in half first!”

  I leaned into him. “Oh, your mouth is so big, I bet your mother keeps chickens in there!”

  The crowd shrieked in delight: “Chickenshit mouth! Chickenshit mouth!”

  They laughed and quickly divided into two bands, each giving allegiance for one boy and his cricket. Volleys of taunts and jeers slung round and round, and there was no way either Binh or I could back down without being called a coward or a sissy.

  “What’s the bet?” I yelled, holding up my hands for silence.

  “Ear boxing,” Binh said.

  Pig-bellied Chung, the class clown, squeaked and scurried around, fingers fluttering like a timid sand crab. Everybody laughed. The prize for winning a cricket fight had always been the pleasure of inflicting pain on the loser in one of several creative methods. Binh had made a cheap bet.

  “Kick,” I said.

  Hoi shouted, “He’ll never pay up!”

  A cackle ran through the group. Binh blushed. We all remembered the time Binh lost and refused to be kicked by a boy half his size. After that, no one, not even the girls, would accept his challenges. Being ostracized from the game proved unbearable, and a mere week later, Binh apologized and took the little boy’s foot to his bottom like a good loser.

  “Kick! Kick! Kick!” chanted the merciless choir. Everyone, except the boy getting a hard foot in the rear, was a winner.

  “Five kicks,” Tan suggested.

  “Ten kicks!” cried another, splaying digits to a roar of laughter.

  Binh ignored them. “Same as before then: one kick.”

  “One kick!” Chung quieted the rabble, playing the part of the ringmaster. “Reds from the stable of Binh against Blackie from the stable of Thong.”

  Chung placed a large glass pickling jar on the ground, and the kids quickly gathered around the miniature stadium, packing four-deep, squatting, crouching, piling on top of each other, vying for a good view. Binh carefully opened his matchbox, shook the cricket into his cupped palm, and then placed it in the jar. I put mine in. They were the same size, as evenly matched as one could hope for.

  Binh tapped the jar to agitate the crickets. They squared off, hesitating. Left on their own, crickets rarely fought. In most encounters, the hierarchy was immediately established with the weaker cricket submitting to the dominant one by turning away, baring his flank, and fleeing.

  I could feel my face reddening. If my cricket was a coward, they’d mock me too. I wished I had kept my cricket safe in his box. Chung dropped a small brown female cricket into the jar and guaranteed a fight.

  The moment Reds and Blackie noticed the female, they lunged at each other and grappled. They used their front legs like arms and kicked with their large hind legs. The dagger-like spurs on the hind legs were sharp enough to cut through their armor. The female cricket stayed clear of the combatants. Blackie mounted Reds from behind and bit off a feeler. Reds jumped, launching the both of them across the jar. They struck the glass and tumbled apart. A detached limb twitched on the floor. It was one of Reds’s forelegs. Blackie came forward and took a kick that spun him sideways. Then they engaged in the deadly clinch, clawing away at each other.

  We crowded around the mini-stadium, yelling, cheering, locked in the momentary eternity of mortal combat. The crickets separated and, as abruptly as it began, it was over. Reds had his belly slashed open, yellowish entrails showing. He was also missing a feeler and both front legs. Blackie fluttered his wings in a feeble victory dance. He had lost a foreleg. He would not fight again.

  The crowd sighed with satisfaction. I scooped my cricket back into the matchbox to be released back to the garden where I’d caught him. Chung reclaimed the female and chucked the red cricket and the broken pieces into the pond for the fish.

  The children giggled and moved back to form a circle for us. Binh knew the strategy: Every time you win, you must kick the other boy with all your strength because next time, his cricket might win and he might kick you even harder. Binh had done exactly that to me three times in a row, so he knew he had it coming. Bending over, he braced himself, hands on knees. He didn’t see that I had taken a few steps back. I bounded forward and, in a running kick, unleashed the blow with all my weight behind it. Binh grunted and pitched forward onto the ground, red-faced, eyes in the back of his head, hands clenched between his thighs.

  In my eagerness, I had missed and kicked him in the groin.

  All the boys and girls laughed so har
d they forgot whose turn was next.

  In the irrigation ditches, small silvery fish darted, tadpoles lingering along the edges. Way off, a cock crowed. On the breeze rode the scents of a countryside childhood, paddy water, black earth, and honey-grass. Across the fields, the buffalo boys flew their singing kites. Butterfly-shaped wings of red and yellow swooped and climbed, making wistful looping melodies in a bright blue sky.

  Some joys were so simple as to be incorruptible in memory, untouchable, neither by distance nor by tragedy. It remained unfathomable to me throughout the bridging decades, how things could abruptly change within a brief span of seasons, not enough time for a child to become a man, or for an orchard to take root. Laughing children of the rice paddies, many of us would not live out our teenage years. None came through unscathed.

  We all would fight battles not of our choosing. We would be fierce crickets.

  THE SOUTH

  1962

  10. THE RECRUITER

  The stage was set for war. Within months of splitting the country into North and South, it became apparent that the U.S. would renege on the most important stipulation of the Geneva Accord: It would not allow a free and democratic election to reunite Vietnam. In a single stroke, millions of displaced people, northerners who had migrated south and southerners who had followed the Communists north, would never see their homes again.

  On July 7, 1954, the Americans selected Ngo Dinh Diem, a former mandarin and a Catholic, as their choice for prime minister of a Buddhist country. U.S. President Eisenhower gave aid directly to Vietnam, bypassing the French and sending a clear message that France’s time in Vietnam was over. Without hope of regaining control, the French withdrew their remaining troops in South Vietnam and stopped supporting the Vietnamese factions that had sided with them.