The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  Two more cameras flashed as their father held his pose.

  “Did he just say what I think he said?” Vivien whispered.

  “He doesn’t really mean it. It’s only an act.”

  But Phuong suspected that for the tourists, act was fact. Foreigners that they were, they could not tell the difference between a Communist and a man the Communists had exiled to a New Economic Zone. In a few days, or a week, or two weeks, they would leave, their most vivid memory about this day being the funny experience of crawling on their knees through a tunnel, with a vague memory of the passionate little tour guide and his somewhat quirky English. We’re all the same to them, Phuong understood with a mix of anger and shame—small, charming, and forgettable. She was worried her sister might see her in this way as well, but when her father waved the tourists onward and Vivien followed, she appeared to be concerned only with brushing away the small cloud of mosquitoes hovering around her.

  On Vivien’s penultimate night in Saigon, she and her father drank four flasks of milky rice wine at a Chinese restaurant in Cho Lon. After returning home, he went for a walk with his wife to clear his intoxicated head while Hanh and Phuc settled down on the blanketed floor of the living room, their bed next to the motorbikes. Upstairs, after Vivien closed the door to the room that Phuong shared with her parents, she pulled one of her crimson suitcases out from underneath Phuong’s narrow bed. The suitcase had been loaded with gifts from Vivien and her mother, from jeans and shirts to medicines and makeup, even shampoo and conditioner that had been bottled in the United States and were hence more valuable than the same brand bottled in a local plant. Now the suitcase was packed with souvenirs, a porcelain doll in a silk ao dai for Vivien’s mother, hand-carved teak replicas of cyclos for her brothers, a bottle of rice wine with a cobra floating in it for her stepfather, and, for her friends, T-shirts emblazoned with Ho Chi Minh’s avuncular face. But when Vivien opened the suitcase, she took out neither these mementos nor her own belongings. Instead, after rummaging underneath them, she dug out a small pink bag, somewhat crumpled from its journey, and presented it to Phuong.

  “I’ve got one last thing for you, little sister,” Vivien said. “I wasn’t sure I should give it to you, but I thought I’d come prepared.”

  Printed on the bag in cursive writing was Victoria’s Secret. Inside were a black lace brassiere and black lace panties, a wispy thong rather than one of the scratchy, full-bottomed cotton affairs that Phuong’s mother bought for her in packages of a dozen.

  “I can’t wear these!” Phuong said, blushing. “They’re scandalous!”

  “Go on, try them on.” Vivien pulled the nearly non-­existent panties from the bag and pressed them into Phuong’s hands. “I can’t imagine you in those granny things you have.”

  For a moment, Phuong hesitated. But Vivien was her sister and a doctor, and there was no need to be shy. She quickly stripped off her rayon pajamas and her cotton underwear, and just as quickly slipped on the brassiere and panties. Vivien nodded approvingly and said, “Now you look sexy. Some boy’s going to be very lucky to see you in those.”

  “My mother and father would never let me wear these.” Phuong hesitated, but then reached for the hand mirror hanging from a nail in the wall. The touch of lace against her skin and the glimpses of her nearly nude body, draped so provocatively, were thrilling. “Only naughty girls would wear this.”

  “It’s time for you to be bad,” Vivien said, yawning. “My God, you’re twenty-three! You don’t even want to know what I was doing when I was twenty-three.”

  Even after Phuong had put her pajamas back on, she could still see how she looked in the hand mirror, the flashes of skin against the strip of gossamer fabric. She drew the curtain separating her side of the room from her parents’ and slipped into bed with Vivien, who had put away the suitcase and donned her own pajamas. Lying there, arm by arm, she sensed that her sister’s gift had endowed their relationship with even more intimacy and trust.

  “What’s the first thing you’ll do in Chicago? Call your mother?”

  “Take a long drive by myself. I miss my car.”

  “I don’t even know anyone who owns a car.”

  Vivien stared at the ceiling fan, stirring the hot air of a typically humid night. The open window allowed in only the merest of breezes.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” Vivien said.

  “You already told me.”

  “What?”

  “A secret.” When Phuong turned her head, she could see into Vivien’s ear, the canal small and dark. “At Cu Chi.”

  “I guess I did.” Vivien scratched a bite on her neck. “I thought I would come here and I would love my father.”

  “You don’t love him?” Phuong propped her head on her hand. “Or you didn’t love him?”

  “It’s easy for you to love him.” Vivien sighed. “It’s easy for him to love me. That’s the way it should be. He remembers me. I don’t remember him. Can you love someone you don’t remember? Can you love someone you don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure.” A burst of cackling and laughter came from the alley outside, the neighborhood’s old ladies sitting on their thresholds, gossiping before bedtime. “But I know he’s not easy to love.”

  “A woman can’t fall in love with a man for whom she feels sorry. Can she?”

  “I’ve never fallen in love with anyone, so I don’t know.” The screech of the metal gate that was the living room’s front door announced their father’s return. “But you’re saying it wrong. You’re not falling in love, you just want to love him.”

  “You know what my mother told me when I said I was going to Vietnam?” Vivien paused. “Your father’s only going to break your heart, too.”

  Then Vivien rolled over on her side to face the wall, where a green gecko clung patiently to the plaster. The stairs creaked as Mr. and Mrs. Ly ascended, the discordant notes together composing a coda to Phuong’s day so familiar only Vivien’s arrival made her aware of it. Her sister’s presence in Phuong’s bed and the caress of the lace on her skin sharpened the dull pencil of Phuong’s perceptions, allowing her to write in her mind with ever-increasing precision the outline of the characters in her life. None was drawn more clearly than her father, whom she pitied and, even worse, did not respect. If he were only an adulterer and a playboy, then there would be cause for resentment, but he was in decline, a failure without even the glamour of decadence and bad behavior. This was a matter of sufficient sadness and embarrassment so that when her father’s shadow appeared in the doorway, Phuong turned on her side as well. There, pressed into her sister’s back under the weight of a humid night, she discovered that even lying down Vivien had broken into a sweat.

  At the amusement park the next morning, Mr. Ly photographed his children at the entry gates with a disposable camera, a gift from his ex-wife, delivered by Vivien. After Vivien paid for the family’s fares, Hanh and Phuc seized the lead, the former tugging on his mother’s hand. They picked their way through raucous troops of elementary school boys and girls, a battalion in red shirts and caps. A monorail traversed the park above the keen crowds, and in the distance, a roller coaster rumbled. One exhibition hall soon caught Phuong’s attention, its curious English name being the “Ice Lantern.” On a billboard outside, brightly colored photos depicted glacial facsimiles of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, and other man-made wonders of the world, lit in a rainbow of neon. “Let’s save this for later,” she said, “when we need to cool down.”

  “Good plan,” said Vivien, fanning herself with the park brochure.

  After driving the bumper cars at Hanh’s and Phuc’s request, Mrs. Ly insisted on visiting the Japanese orchid garden. Several young couples posed for wedding photographs in different corners, the veiled brides in Western wedding gowns and the grooms in white tuxedos, red roses pinned to their lapels. Mrs. Ly cooed over the spectacle, but Hanh and Phuc r
olled their eyes and asked Vivien if the next destination could be the Ferris wheel, rotating slowly above the water slides. It was Mrs. Ly who clambered into one cabin of the Ferris wheel with the boys, while Mr. Ly declined to join his daughters in another cabin, claiming acrophobia. As they ascended, Vivien studied the scenery from the barred window on her side, below which someone had drawn on the blue wall the stick figure of a girl with a mop of hair, fingers flashing a V. ­Phuong peeked over her shoulder, her breath tickling a strand of hair on Vivien’s ear. Vivien tucked away the hair and pointed toward the roller coaster climbing slowly into view, an upside-down caterpillar with dozens of human arms wiggling in the air. “I worked on a ride like that,” Vivien said. “All my friends found jobs at the park so we could meet boys.”

  “Did you find a boyfriend?” Phuong leaned a shoulder against her sister’s arm. She hadn’t told Vivien that she was still wearing her gift, delighting in it like a child with a new and magical toy. “Was he handsome?”

  “Rod was cute. He’d give me rides home, and we’d go on one of the side streets around my house, park, and . . . kiss. I don’t suppose you’ve done that?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You haven’t found any boys you like?”

  “I don’t want any attachments,” Phuong said firmly. “I don’t want anyone holding me back.”

  “From what?”

  At the center of the park was a lake the size of a saucer, crumbs of paddleboats floating on its surface. Jutting into the lake was their noon destination, a restaurant in the shape of a dragon’s head, dividing the waters as Vivien’s departure tomorrow would divide the world once more into those who stayed and those who left.

  “Can I tell you a secret now?”

  Vivien smiled. “Sure.”

  Phuong searched for the words to say what she had never told anyone before, how one day she, too, would leave, for Saigon was boring and the country itself not big enough for the desires in her heart. “I want to be like you,” Phuong said, gripping her sister’s hands in her own. “I want to go to America and be a doctor and help people. I don’t want to spend my life waiting on people. I want to be waited on. I want to travel anywhere I want, anytime I want. I want to come back here and know I can leave. If I stay here I’ll marry some boy with no future and live with his family and have two children too soon and sleep in a room where I can touch both walls at the same time. I don’t think I can stand it, I really don’t. Haven’t you ever felt this way?”

  “Oh God,” Vivien said, looking up at the ceiling of the cabin. Phuong had hoped for enthusiasm and would have settled for reluctance, confusion, or condescension, but she was not prepared for the panic on her sister’s face. “I told her she should have told all of you the truth.”

  The roller coaster plunged down the tracks, the passengers screaming. When Vivien shifted her weight and pulled her hands free, her arm peeled away from Phuong’s shoulder with a moist suck of sound, the air no cooler than down below.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “My mother.” Vivien took a deep breath and looked once more through the barred windows. “Did you know that when she came to the States, she told the government she was twenty-five?”

  “So?” A drop of sweat trickled down the small of Phuong’s back.

  “She was thirty.”

  “I can see a woman doing that.”

  “My mother also told the government she was a widow.” Vivien turned back to meet Phuong’s gaze. “She wasn’t telling the truth when she told our father I was a doctor.”

  Phuong blinked. “You’re not a doctor?”

  “I’m a receptionist without a job. I was let go the month before I came here. My mother and my stepfather do not own a house in the suburbs. They live in a condo in West Tulsa. And my mother does not own the Nice Nail Beauty Salon. She works for it as a beautician.”

  “Then why tell us you were a doctor?”

  “Because you all wanted to know how much I made a month, and what I paid on my mortgage, and how much my car cost. It was easier just to answer than to say I wasn’t a doctor. But just so you know, that whole story about me being a pediatrician was my mother’s idea, not mine.” The cabin had reached its zenith, an elephant chained by its ankle visible far below, a windup toy tottering back and forth. “My mother also told me not to date my boss, especially if he’s married.”

  “Your boss? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He said it wasn’t me, it was the economy,” Vivien cried. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid?”

  “No,” Phuong said. “No one’s ever broken up with me before.”

  “It happens to everybody.” Vivien’s eyes moistened. “So I thought I’d come here. A stupid reason, isn’t it?”

  “I thought you came here to see us.”

  “That, too.”

  “Where’s all the money coming from?” Phuong could not tabulate how much her sister had spent, but she knew it was in the thousands of dollars. Just the gift envelopes alone that Vivien had distributed on her first night in Saigon held six hundred-dollar bills for Mr. and Mrs. Ly, with two more for Phuong and one each for her brothers. “All the dinners and tickets? The trips to Dalat and Vung Tau?”

  “In America, they pay you extra when they fire you. Even receptionists get a nice check from big companies.” Vivien fumbled in her purse as their cabin continued its descent. “I also have credit cards. I don’t mind spending money. I wanted to show you a good time. You’ve never been anywhere.”

  The park’s most prominent landmark loomed before them, a mountain painted an alluvial red, hollow and metallic. “It doesn’t matter,” Phuong said. None of it did, neither the lies nor the fact that Vivien had everything, even Phuong’s name, which she didn’t care to use. “You don’t have to be a doctor to sponsor me.”

  “Where are my tissues?” Vivien wiped her tears away with her hands.

  “I won’t bother you.” Phuong touched Vivien on the arm, sticky with perspiration. Their cabin was nearing the platform. “I’ll find a job. I’ll take care of myself. I’ll take care of you.”

  Vivien snapped her purse shut, still crying. “I’m sorry, Phuong. When I return, I’m putting my life back together. I’ve got to pay off four credit cards and my student loans and hope my house won’t be taken from me.”

  “But—”

  “I won’t have time to worry about a little sister.” Now it was Vivien who seized Phuong’s hands with her own tear-dampened ones. “Can you understand that? Please?”

  When the attendant opened the door, their father was waiting, disposable camera held to his eye, his wife standing behind him with the boys. The Ferris wheel rotated at its measured pace, slow enough for them to step out, Vivien first. A week later their father would develop the photograph, but it would take Phuong a moment to examine the laminated picture before she remembered what was absent underneath the clear plastic. Vivien was visible in the doorway, eyes moist and makeup smudged, but by an accident of timing or composition Phuong herself could not be seen.

  While it had taken Vivien twenty-seven years to mail her first letter home, it took her only a month for the second missive. Phuong returned one evening from Nam Kha to find her parents and brothers clustered around the table in the living room, sifting through a stack of pictures that Vivien had enclosed. A smiling and cheerful Mr. Ly waved the letter at Phuong, a single sheet that she read sitting on the arm of the couch. The letter recounted Vivien’s wonderful memories, dining on a floating restaurant on the Saigon River, being fitted for a custom-made ao dai, riding on a pony cart around Lake Xuan Huong in Dalat, with the best day her arrival and the worst her departure. I looked out the window of the airplane until I couldn’t see the country anymore, she wrote. Everything’s so green. The moment the clouds covered it, all I wanted was to return. And so the letter went, her sister’s hypocrisy making
Phuong so ill that it was all she could do not to tear the letter in half.

  “Tomorrow I want you to have these pictures laminated,” Mr. Ly said, sorting through the photographs Vivien had sent. “We’ll make an album from them.”

  “What for?” Phuong said, tossing the letter onto the table.

  “What do you mean, what for?” Mr. Ly was incredulous. “So that we’ll have something to remember her by until she comes back.”

  Phuong studied her father as he sat on the couch, surrounded by her mother and brothers, clutching the photographs as if they were equal to the hundred-dollar bills Vivien had given him. For the first time in her life she felt pity for him, certain that it was not just her father who would break his daughter’s heart, but the daughters who would one day break his. She contemplated telling him this truth, that Vivien was never going to return, and that one day, perhaps not soon, but eventually, Phuong would leave as well, for a world where she could fall in love with someone she didn’t know. It was merely a matter of momentum, and she now knew how to begin.

  By nine the next morning she was alone in the house, the boys gone to school, her parents at work. She wore her sister’s gift, and over the lace donned a blouse and Capri pants. It would be best, she thought, to do what needed to be done outdoors, and so she placed a stool by the living room gate and a tin bucket on the pavement of the alley. When she opened the envelope of photographs, the first picture she saw featured her father and Vivien shivering in the Ice Lantern at the amusement park, their last stop that day. In the foyer, an attendant had handed them polyester parkas, hooded, knee-length, and in neon hues of yellow, pink, orange, and green. Even with the parkas, stepping from the foyer into the Ice Lantern itself was a shock, for it was in essence an enormous refrigerator, an echoing hall that offered a walking tour of the world’s tourist landmarks, rendered as ice sculptures no taller than a man’s height. Dazzling neon lights in the same spectrum of color as the parkas illuminated the sculptures, the scurrying crowds, and a pair of long chutes, also carved from ice, down which shrieking children slid.