The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  t was a most peculiar thing to do, or so everyone said on hearing the story of how Phuong’s father had named his second set of children after his first. Phuong was the eldest of these younger children, and for all of her twenty-three years she had believed that her father’s other children were much more blessed. Evidence of their good fortune was written in the terse letters sent home annually by the mother of Phuong’s namesake, the first Mrs. Ly, who enumerated each of her children’s accomplishments, height, and weight in bullet points. Phuong’s namesake, for example, was seven years older, fifteen centimeters taller, twenty kilos heavier, and, from the record in the photographs included with the letters, in possession of fairer, clearer skin; a thinner, straighter nose; and hair, clothing, shoes, and makeup that only became ever more fashionable as she graduated from a private girls’ school, then from an elite college, followed by medical school and then a residency in Chicago. Mr. Ly had laminated each of the photographs to protect them from humidity and fingerprints, keeping them neatly stacked on a side table by the couch in the living room.

  The letters accompanying the photographs were the only communiqués that Phuong’s family received about the children, for over the course of some twenty-seven years’ absence, Phuong’s namesake and her two younger brothers had never written a word themselves. And so, when the first such letter finally arrived, it was the cause of a great deal of excitement. The letter was addressed to Mr. Ly, who, as the plenipotentiary of the house, always took it upon himself to open the mail. He sat on the couch and slit the envelope carefully, using one of the few relics from his past he had managed to keep, a silver letter opener with an ivory handle. Flanking him were Phuong and her mother, while his two teenage sons, Hanh and Phuc, sat on the armrests and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the words their father read out loud. The letter was even shorter than the ones written by the ex-wife, merely announcing that Phuong’s half sister would be coming for a two-week vacation, and that she hoped to stay with them.

  “Vivien?” Mrs. Ly said, reading the name signed at the bottom of the letter. “Is she too good to use the name you gave her?”

  But Phuong knew instantly why her sister had taken upon herself a foreign name, and whose name it must have been: Vivien Leigh, star of Gone with the Wind, her father’s favorite film, as he had once told her in passing. Phuong had seen the film on a pirated videotape, and was seduced immediately by the glamour, beauty, and sadness of Scarlett O’Hara, heroine and embodiment of a doomed South. Was it too much to suppose that the ruined Confederacy, with its tragic sense of itself, bore more than a passing similarity to her father’s defeated southern Republic and its resentful remnants?

  It was easy, then, in the weeks leading to Vivien’s arrival, for Phuong to pass her days at home and at work constructing scenarios of a noble, kindly sister, somewhat solemn and sad, but nevertheless gentle and patrician, who would immediately take to her and become the mentor and guide Phuong never had. Her first glimpse of Vivien at the airport only confirmed the appropriateness of such a movie star’s name for the young woman who paused at the terminal’s glass gates, her eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, her lips slightly parted in a glossy pout, pushing a cart loaded with her own weight in crimson luggage. As she jumped and waved to get Vivien’s attention, Phuong was thrilled to see that her sister bore utterly no resemblance to the throngs of local people waiting outside to greet the arrivals, hundreds of ordinary folk wearing drab clothes and fanning themselves under the sun.

  Even after a week in Saigon, Vivien would appear no more of a native than on the day she arrived, at least in outdoor settings. On the streets, at sidewalk cafés, or hopping into a taxi, she was easily mistaken for a Korean businessman’s frazzled wife or a weary Japanese tourist, her frosting of makeup melting under the tropical glare. In certain indoor settings, however, she was clearly the mistress of her domain. This was the case at the restaurant Nam Kha, on the street Dong Khoi, where Phuong had worked as a hostess for the two years since her graduation from college. It was Vivien’s idea to treat the family to dinner at Nam Kha, a way to celebrate the halfway point in her vacation and something Phuong would never have suggested, the restaurant’s offerings being far more than Phuong or her family could afford.

  “But it’s a crime, don’t you think?” Vivien said, glancing over the entrées. Their table was by the reflecting pool, across from which two young women sat upon a cushioned dais, wearing silken, ethereal ao dai and plucking gently at the sixteen strings of the zithers braced upon their laps. “You should be able to eat where you work at least once in your lifetime.”

  “The real crime is five dollars for morning glory fried in garlic,” Mrs. Ly said. She sold silk at the Ben Thanh market and possessed the eyes of an experienced negotiator, smooth and unreadable as the beads of an abacus. “I can buy this for a dollar at the market.”

  “Look around,” Mr. Ly said, his tone impatient. All the other guests were white with the exception of an Indian couple in the corner, the man in a linen suit and the woman in a salwar kameez. “These are tourist prices.”

  “These are foolish prices.”

  “Price aside, this is a good restaurant,” Vivien declared. Her voice was authoritative, the way she must sound in her examination room in Chicago. Not for the first time, Phuong imagined herself in her sister’s place, wearing a white coat in a white room, looking out a wall of windows at a haze of white snow. “What do you think?” Vivien nudged her knee. “Too outrageous for you?”

  “Not at all!” Phuong hoped that she projected an air of confidence and ease, unlike her brothers. Hanh and Phuc were speechless, their silk-bound menus considerably more handsome than any textbook they owned. “I could get used to this.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  The guests at the neighboring table rose, and on the way out, two of them paused beside Phuong, the brunette taking a photograph of the musicians strumming their zithers. “They’re just like butterflies,” she said in an Australian accent, squinting at the image on her camera. Eavesdropping on them, Phuong was relieved not to be the object of their fascination. “So delicate and tiny.”

  “I’ll bet they never worry about what they eat.” Her friend flipped open her compact to inspect her lipstick. “Those dresses look stitched onto them.”

  Night after night, Phuong had observed the customs of tourists like these, her degree in biology no more than a memory as she opened the doors of Nam Kha with a small bow. Having come to dine on elegantly presented peasant cuisine, the guests were suitably impressed by the Cham statuary, by the Chinese scrolls hanging upon the walls, and by Phuong herself, her slim and petite body sheathed in a golden, formfitting ao dai. Sometimes guests would ask to photograph her, requests that were initially flattering but now usually irritating. Still, she could not decline, as her manager had made clear, and so she would force herself to smile and tilt her head, a trellis of hair as black and silky as her trousers falling over her shoulder. Striking this or another pose, Phuong could pretend that she was not a hostess doing a foreigner’s bidding, but rather a model, a starlet, her sibling’s namesake. What she actually looked like she never knew, for while every­one promised to send her the pictures, no one ever did.

  When she arrived, Vivien carried with her a schedule of the sights she wanted to see, complete with estimated travel times via train, bus, car, hydrofoil, or plane. President Clinton had come the year before, his much-celebrated visit reassuring her mother that Vivien could return safely, especially when armed with a US passport and dollar bills. So equipped, Vivien had overcome her father’s token resistance and paid for the family during all of their outings. “I’m the doctor, aren’t I?” she said. While Phuong was impressed by Vivien’s approach, as if vacationing were a job in which to seek promotion, she was not surprised. In the occasional dispatches sent by ­Vivien’s mother, a picture had emerged of an independent young woman, the unmarried pediatrician
who had backpacked solo through Western Europe and vacationed in Hawaii, the Bahamas, Rio. Mr. Ly, who made a humble living as a tour guide, reviewed the itinerary and said, “I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  He was a man who rarely praised, except when it came to his first trio of children. His wife had absconded with them after the war, when he had been banished to a New Economic Zone and his mistress had come demanding money. Vivien’s mother had been ignorant of the other woman’s existence until then, and her response was to flee the country with her three children on a perilous trip by boat. Mr. Ly had learned of their flight in the middle of his five-year sentence, the loss leading to a spell of shock and depression that he had not shaken off until his return to Saigon. Life must move on, his mistress said, so he had divorced Vivien’s mother, made his mistress the second Mrs. Ly, and sired three more children. He often compared Phuong with her absent sister, which had cultivated in Phuong a sense of yearning for Vivien but also some undeniable jealousy. A weevil of envy resurfaced nearly every day of Vivien’s visit, for her father was behaving completely unlike himself, as if he were also competing at a job, in this case to win Vivien’s approval. Without question or criticism, he followed Vivien’s plan for visiting temples and cathedrals, shopping malls and museums, beaches and resorts, south through the Mekong Delta, east to Vung Tau, north to Dalat, and, within Saigon, from the dense, cacophonous alleys of the Chinese quarter in Cho Lon to the glamour of downtown’s Dong Khoi, where Nam Kha was the most expensive restaurant on the boulevard.

  “This is like Saigon in the old days.” Mr. Ly smiled fondly, gazing upon the restaurant’s velvet draperies and marble pillars. During the war, he had owned a shoe factory, a beach home in Vung Tau, a chauffeured Citroën. Photographs from that time showed a dapper man with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. Now, so far as Phuong could tell, he wore his sadness and defeat in a paunch barely contained by the buttons of a shirt one size too small for him. “L’Amiral on Thai Lap Thanh. La Tour d’Ivoire on Tran Hung Dao. Paprika, with the best paella and sangria. I always used to go to those restaurants.”

  “Not with me,” Mrs. Ly said.

  “What do you want to do tomorrow?” Mr. Ly asked Vivien. She refilled his glass from the bottle of Australian merlot and said, “I left it blank on my schedule. I always leave a day or two for surprises.”

  “Can we go to Dam Sen?” Hanh asked. Phuc nodded vigorously.

  “What’s that?” Vivien refilled her own glass.

  “An amusement park,” Phuong said. She was drinking lemonade, as were her mother and brothers. “It’s not far from here.”

  “I worked in one when I was sixteen,” Vivien said. “That was a crazy summer.”

  “We can save Dam Sen for later,” Mr. Ly said. “Since you’ve seen where your sister works, let me take you on one of my tours tomorrow.”

  “One hundred percent.” Vivien raised her glass, using the classic toast he had taught her.

  He clinked his glass against hers, gazed upon his sons affectionately, and said, “Yours is a lucky generation.”

  “I wouldn’t say we were so lucky,” Phuong said.

  “You’ve never appreciated what you have.” Her father waved his hand over the meal and Phuong squeezed her glass, bracing to hear the stories of her parents one more time. “You want to talk about bad luck? After the Americans abandoned us and the Communists sent me to the labor camp, we ate roots and manioc to live. There were worms in the rice, which was mostly water. People caught dysentery or malaria or dengue fever like the common cold and just died. It was amazing we had blood left for the leeches.”

  “It wasn’t so much better at home,” Mrs. Ly chimed in. “I sold everything to survive after the war. My sewing machine. The record player you gave me, and the records, too.”

  “The dumbest part was the confessions.” Mr. Ly stared into his glass, as if all the lessons learned in the labor camp, once distilled, merely served to fill it. “Every week I had to come up with a different way to criticize myself for being a capitalist. I wrote enough pages for a whole autobiography, but every chapter said the same thing.”

  Phuong sighed, but Vivien was listening intently, chin cupped in her hand. “There’s something I’ve always wanted to know.” When their father looked up, Vivien said, “Why give your children with your other wife our names?”

  This was the question Phuong had never asked, fearing the answer she always suspected, that she and her brothers were no more than regrets born into flesh. Vivien’s forthrightness, however, did not appear to surprise or daunt their father, who merely raised his glass and said, “If you hadn’t come back to see me, I would have understood. But I knew you would come back to see the one I named after you.”

  Vivien glanced at Phuong, who maintained a stoic expression. After all, it wasn’t Vivien’s fault their father behaved the way he did, playing favorites and pitying himself. “So here I am,” Vivien said. She returned her father’s gaze and clinked her glass against his. “And here’s to us.”

  “One hundred percent,” Mr. Ly said.

  For all the years that Mr. Ly had worked as a tour guide, he had never asked Phuong to accompany him on one of his trips. Although she had never wanted to go, she realized the next morning on the tour bus that she would like to have been asked. Vivien did not seem to appreciate their ­father’s special regard for her, or her fortune in even being a tourist on this day, the boys left behind at school and Phuong’s mother busy at the Ben Thanh market. Instead, Vivien ­focused her attention on the crowded conditions of the aging bus, whispering complaints into Phuong’s ear about the long-haired, budget-minded backpackers who jammed the thinly cushioned seats and made their father’s company a success. Then, embraced by clammy weather once they stepped off the air-conditioned bus at Ben Dinh, Vivien could only mutter that this was not exactly her idea of fun.

  “I don’t even like camping,” Vivien said as the sisters trailed behind the other tourists, winding their way through the eucalyptus trees and bamboo groves where the fabled tunnels of Cu Chi were preserved. “I’d rather be in a shopping mall or a museum, but even the museums don’t have air-conditioning here.”

  “Father wants you to see him at work,” Phuong said patiently. “He’s good at what he does.”

  “Don’t tell him I said anything, okay? I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “So we have a secret?” Phuong teased.

  “Sisters have to have secrets,” Vivien said. “Oh my God. What is it? Thirty-four degrees?”

  “This isn’t so bad. It’s not even that hot.”

  “I’m being bitten. I can feel it. Look at my legs!”

  Vivien’s shins and thighs were studded with the pale bumps of fresh bites and the red kernels of fermenting ones. For a pediatrician and seasoned traveler, Vivien had proved woefully incapable of caring for her body. While Phuong wore gloves extending to her upper arms and nylons underneath her jeans, her sister wore T-shirts that exposed her bra straps and shorts that were sometimes so brief they revealed the waistband and thong of her panties. Despite her bared skin, Vivien neglected to use mosquito repellent and complained whenever the weather was hot, which was, according to her, nearly every second of the day and night. Her sister’s vulnerability was alternately a source of annoyance and endearment to Phuong, rendering Vivien less intimidating and perhaps more deserving of the secret Phuong longed to entrust, what she had never told her family and what only Vivien could understand.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen, a punji trap.” Mr. Ly spoke in English, beckoning for the group to halt. The two dozen tourists, all Westerners, stepped close to the bamboo trapdoor. He spun it on its hinge until it was vertical, revealing a pit as deep as a grave and as long as a coffin, a dozen sharp wooden stakes embedded in the earth. “Step on trapdoor, you fall in.”

  After a couple of tourists took photographs, Mr. Ly waved the group forw
ard. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and gray slacks with polished brown leather shoes, whereas at home he typically lounged in shorts and, perhaps, an undershirt. What was strangest to Phuong was seeing her father joke and chat with the tourists. Whenever he spoke to Phuong at home, it was mostly to call for another beer, or to have her fetch him his cigarettes, or to request a particular dish for dinner.

  “And this, an original tunnel.” Mr. Ly stopped and pointed at a square hole the size of a sheet of paper, covered with a wood board and a scattering of leaves at the foot of a eucalyptus tree. “Here, guerrillas live for years and attack Americans anytime.”

  The tourists were almost all Americans, but this history did not seem to offend them. Instead, they seemed fascinated, raising their cameras as he lifted the board to show the narrow, dark entrance. In the distance, from the shooting range, a machine gun fired a burst of rounds, each bullet costing a dollar, according to their father. Phuong was bemused at how these tourists would want to spend their money and their day here, instead of at the beach, or at a fancy restaurant, or in a hammock at a rustic riverside café. The reason for such behavior, her father said, was that the foreign tourists knew only one thing about this country, the war. These tunnels, then, were a must-see on their itineraries.

  “Later we see new tunnels, made big just for you. Last time an American go in this one, he can’t get out. He too fat!” To illustrate his point, Mr. Ly extended his arms and joined his hands, creating a large hoop in the air. “Anyone want to try?”

  The tourists grinned and shook their heads, the smallest of them as tall as Phuong’s father. Phuong was afraid he might call on her to slide into the tunnel, but when no one volunteered, her father scowled and raised his fist. “This is how we win our victory!” he cried. A camera flashed. “We reunite our country through courage and sacrifice!”