by Ho Anh Thai
At around eleven or twelve at night, about the time that whatever remnants of the traffic police force were getting a bit sleepy, the race would begin. The loudly revving motorbikes would shoot through the openings in traffic. Once they ran into a group of cyclos that had formed a sort of honor guard for a flag ceremony, the musicians playing traditional instruments and blocking off all two-wheeled traffic on the street. The racers tried to swerve around and through them as curious onlookers spilled out onto the sidewalks and balconies to watch. One young racer slid off onto the sidewalk at a speed of nearly a hundred kilometers an hour. He was thrown headfirst into a wall; his bike skidded around in its death throes, whirling around like the arms and legs of the curious bystanders and the accidental participants. Many bikes on the long racetrack crashed, splitting the skulls of the guys and the girls on them—the headbands they’d donned for their own funerals now sticky with brain matter. The blood just drove the excitement even higher, increasing the racers’ sense of danger and their cavalier attitude. Complaints from honest citizens just fueled the rebelliousness of the drivers. When the cops raced after them and hunted them down, the racers just felt prouder and saw themselves as outlaws. The police mobilized a force of high-powered motorcycles, ready to give chase, to randomly ambush them along the raceways and arrest them. After a few such battles, the racers began to employ guerrilla tactics. They worked with decoys that would blast through like true racers, popping and crackling at full speed. The sparse police force would immediately appear and give chase with everything they had. When there were no more police vehicles to ambush them, then the real races would begin.
Phũ started racing during the final period of this phenomenon. He didn’t race for money, nor for the girls (sitting behind him), nor for any of the usual hundred miscellaneous reasons. He simply did it to shock the eyes of those pale bourgeois kids who would sit on their bikes and shiver with fear, and who had never risked their lives at high speed during death drives, the white headbands they would wear at their own funerals already fastened in place. He made those daredevils faint with bewilderment at a driver without a white funeral headband and straddling a Win with the throttle wide open, a driver who would shoot past those brats belching smoke, then screech right into his target, jump off into a late-night coffee shop, and find another pair of lucky panties. After that he’d complacently drive back, pick up his friends, and deliver them to their own targets. Phũ was successful in the beginning. He was successful in the end, too, on the day the police arrested him—if you don’t count that he knocked down a little girl who had suddenly pedaled her bicycle onto the street out from a small alley. The impish kid had been coming back late from studying English and had driven across the street, afraid that her parents would scold her. Not knowing that the road right outside the gate was one of the main legs of the race circuit, she had been blind and deaf to the massive, roaring machine bearing down on her. At one in the morning Thế was notified that Phũ and his bike had been taken into custody at the district police department. Even though it was the middle of the night, he’d immediately called a deputy interior minister who was a friend of his, and also phoned the director of the hospital and made sure the girl’s broken leg was put in a cast. That morning Thế went to visit her house. They were a family of poor civil servants—a husband, wife and two children, living from paycheck to paycheck. “Something unfortunate has happened,” Thế said. “Please allow our family to apologize and cover all the medical expenses until your daughter is totally healed. But that’s not all. Since fate has shoved our two families together, I would like to treat your daughter as my own child. When she graduates I’ll find her a suitable job—she’s studying English, right? You two don’t need to worry about finding classes anymore, either; my son will take responsibility for her tutoring, and if not I’ll find a good instructor for her.”
But, as it turned out, no instructor would dare to trespass on Phũ’s territory, the place where he quickly established his sovereignty. When Phũ’s dad forced him to go visit the patient, he was surprised to find that the little girl had turned into someone with a nice figure and a face that was also beautiful, though the girl herself seemed a bit lacking in personality. But, despite one deficiency, she was actually pretty spectacular. Her leg was a bit bowed, but it only made her more charming and unique. It was as if she had a face, eyes, nose, mouth, and teeth that all had been specifically designed for her, like a composition penned for a demanding course of study. Her eyes right then were a bit askew, but all that meant was that after she healed she would be even more beautiful. Phũ would go over and tutor her in English while her leg was in the cast.
When he had entered high school, guided by his own nature, Phũ had been assigned an English class. At the time, if one studied English or French he was considered second-rate compared to those who studied Russian. Thế had had to intervene to get his son into the Russian class, which was for many people the road to a paradise of thermoses, refrigerators, and pressure cookers. Entering the Russian course in the Russian department was a natural thing for privileged kids, and a real stroke of luck for kids from working-class families. Phũ was able to switch into the class easily, and Thế was also easily able to secure him a spot on the team of students competing in the Russian Language Olympics, or send him to some university over there. But suddenly that paradise exploded in disorder and confusion like a mine blowing up among nobles, angels, and fairies. The day the masquerade ball finally ended, heaven simply reverted into a stretch of dry and desolate earth, populated with make-believe princes and officials rushing to take off their disguises and switching to ordinary fare and clothing. That year, those that had just finished their university courses in Russian wisely made the decision to switch over to English and French, so they would have the chance to find work in the Western companies who were finally flooding into the country. It was a repeat of the way many had abandoned Chinese for other languages ten years earlier, and then had to go back and start studying Chinese again so that they could try to find work for bosses from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Having to make quick adjustments and swim with the tide is the special characteristic of Homo sapiens, in its incarnation as modern man. That same year that Phũ passed the entrance exam for the University of Foreign Languages and his always-resourceful father managed to switch his son, who had just taken his Russian exam, into the department of English literature. By the time he’d entered his third year, he was quite capable of guiding the girl in the cast through her first year of study. Although Phũ was normally one of those explorers who could not handle being next to a girl for over two weeks without venturing into the secret and forbidden depths of the ocean, this time was different. Since her leg was still injured, he had to patiently bide his time by “temporarily eating somewhere else.”
But once her leg had healed—that same leg that was a bit bowed when she walked and made her more charming in Phũ’s eyes—she truly fell into his hands. He brought back the usual small souvenir to show me, though it was unclear what number it was in his collection.
These days the motorbike fever seems to have vanished from the roads of Saigon. People there drive in a more orderly and lawful way than those in Hanoi. It was rare to see insane kids racing frantically through the streets as if spreading their madness. Instead, people in Saigon loved their bikes as a kind of ideal, a be-all and end-all of human desire; everywhere and anywhere people—especially young people—met, they incessantly spoke about their motorbikes, as if they were the instruments which would speed them into a newer, faster, more revved-up life.
Phũ and I parked the bike across from the mini hotel. We’d just finished when a girl stepped out and jumped on her bike. She drove away leisurely. For a moment, from behind, I thought that she looked like the girl that had rented the Captain’s Studio before. But I didn’t object to Phũ tying up his loose ends. She was wearing exactly the same blouse and skirt as the girl from the Captain’s Studio. I suddenly realized that the two women mu
st be connected to each other, maybe as friends. I decided that when I returned to Hanoi I would find her name and address in the guest register of the Apocalypse Hotel.
She was driving slowly in front of us. Around us was a horde of women, all of whom could be classified in one of two ways: good, straight women returning home from work; or women going out to work all night. Nomadic nightwalkers. These sources of instant entertainment for men didn’t dare to come together under the trees, in the alleys, or other waiting areas. The whole area had turned into hunting grounds. So the working girls rode bikes and went out into the street. Those with money had motorbikes; those without had bicycles. The women wouldn’t stand around under the trees—no, they’d turned into mobile recruiters of customers: “If any of you guys wanna play, hop on. Hey, baby, I’ll be your little xe ôm driver.” 19
The woman was still driving unhurriedly alongside both the professionals and the virtuous. Leisurely, Phũ followed right behind her as she pulled into an empty street with the wheeled whores scattered here and there and the remnants of the chaste people fading off into the distance. The authorities and the police force had also all disappeared to wherever it is they go. Phũ accelerated up to fifty kilometers per hour. The woman kept effortlessly in front of us. Sixty kilometers an hour. She still remained casually ahead of us, as if she hadn’t sped up at all. Phũ went insane. Eighty kilometers an hour. His huge motorcycle was aimed straight at its target and shooting forward. At that instant I realized that Phũ wasn’t planning to use just any weapon on her, but the massive 750-cc bike itself. The motorcycle would crush the girl, as if she had been knocked over in a traffic accident, and we would flee the scene.
The bike was at full throttle. The skilled Hanoian behind the wheel, showing off his talent on the “iron bird,” was the image of the angel of death itself. The hair on my head felt like it was going to tear off my scalp. Phũ’s hair, tied back, was whipping me, stinging my face. The prostitutes on their bikes yelled out and retreated to the shoulder of the road. But the girl was still driving leisurely ahead of us on a Cup 70 like a children’s toy. A ghostly motorbike. I felt that we were following bait into a trap. I wanted to tell Phũ to end the chase. But I couldn’t even open my mouth. Phũ growled deep in his throat. He held his ground; the bike’s throttle still wide open. He was still desperately trying. Suddenly it seemed we were at last narrowing the distance. The woman’s hair flounced lightly, as if a soft wind had blown gently through it.
Suddenly the front of Phũ’s motorcycle reared straight up onto its back wheel and stood like a powerful horse gone mad. I somehow understood that the girl had escaped. The bike remained on its back wheel like a high-wire unicycle at the circus. The canopy of the tamarind trees over Phu’s head caught and spun the pale green light, blurring like a propeller. Little by little the spinning circle engulfed the trees. The working girls and their bikes on the side of the road were spinning. The girl we’d chased, escaping, started to spin as well. Then Phũ was thrown from the spinning motorcycle. His head bounced against the foot of a tree and cracked wide open. He rolled a few times and then lay still, his body resting on an uncovered septic drain.
I spun frantically in a spiral of fiery colors and the deafening crunch of crashing metal. I could vaguely see the motorcycle, like a black water buffalo, smashing into the side of the road, whipping back into the foot of a tree with a crash, and then disintegrating into a pile of loose bits and mangled parts.
I was unconscious for a time. I had landed on a hand-pushed garbage cart that had been sitting on the side of the road. The piled waste of civilization, consisting of rotten tomatoes, eggs and stale rice—all sealed in puffy plastic bags—had saved me. When I came to I rolled down off of the cart and ran over to Phũ. The whole underside of his body was covered with rancid sludge from the open drain. The upper part of his body was crushed into the mouth of the opening, like that of someone wanting to push himself up to climb out. The whole back of his skull, from just above the nape of his neck, had completely disappeared. It looked like a coconut that had been scooped out to use as a ladle.
I trembled as I saw, wrapped around that coconut ladle, a band of white cloth, encircling the forehead in the front and its two ends hanging loosely in the back.20 He looked exactly like the embodiment of some iconic image: the Death of a Motorbike Racer.
But Phũ hadn’t had a cloth band wrapped around his head before he’d died—especially not a white cloth. I was still conscious enough to remember that point.
A day later I was sitting on an airplane returning to Hanoi, transporting Phũ’s body. In the course of just one week I’d had to escort two corpses on these flights. A body in the North brought down South. A body in the South brought up North. The airline was becoming a shuttle flight for corpses.
The lady sitting next to me had tears flowing down into a handkerchief that covered her whole face—except for a pair of rheumy, waterlogged eyes. It was like an actor’s exercise. Okay, now try someone on her deathbed. Okay, now you’re at the funeral of a dear friend. Okay, now, love that has come to nothing. Disappointment in love. Now disappointment in love becoming meaningless. Deception also finally turned into something meaningless.
Wounds heal. Wrongs can be made right. Everything can be fixed—except death. In half a month I’d had to witness three deaths. Ten months before was the tragic and pitiful death of my own daughter. After experiencing so much death, being so close to death, maybe a person starts to see life a bit more realistically. Take the airline hostess over there. Her smile was the foundation of her career, but who knows if she had an old, bedridden mother or grandmother at home, lying in her own filth. Who knows if her only brother is in some Western corner of the sky fearfully waiting for an Asian gang and the police to deal with him. Or take the lady sobbing next to me. She’s probably crying because she’s suffered some kind of financial loss or because she’s been fired. Snap out of it. Loss of money isn’t a cause for so much mourning and wailing. Whatever her position was, it wasn’t worth her being in despair like that. She would understand this if she’d had to throw the dirt on the coffin of a loved one.
But then I changed my mind. She must be crying for someone who had just died. Yes. That was it. It became clearer as her suffering grew. Only a recent death could have sunken those large eyes into such desolate darkness, could have turned that face pale as a corpse’s, to writhe under some deep pain unconcealed by those light sobs. Finally, I could no longer conceal my sympathy. I let my face resume its most truthful appearance: pain and anger. When she refused her meal and asked just for a cup of water, I also refused my meal and asked just for a cup of water.
“Please, just go ahead and eat normally; I’ll try to stop bothering you,” she said through her sobs.
“You’re not bothering me at all. I’ve also had some sad things happen lately,” I said, my voice slightly quavering. My real voice.
And so the lady was conveniently able to find someone with whom to share her story. She and her younger sister had gone to Saigon to try and find work. She’d scored a job as a salesperson for a soda company, and her little sister had found some clerical work for a foreign company. In the old days people in Saigon called the women who worked for foreign companies American Office Girls, a kind of girl that was just there to play with the lustful old bosses. Nowadays, any female who is able to find entry-level positions in American and Western enterprises is full of pride. But her boss also had the enterprise to enter her, and had then flung her aside and fired her the next day. Her sister had had to go to the Từ Dũ Hospital multiple times to have abortions. Each time she would beg her older sister to take her. This time she had gone by herself. She had waited too long, afraid to go, and then had followed the old midwives that prowl about in front of the hospital gate down into a dark alley. A doctor who was operating after hours to make some extra cash had pierced her uterus. It became infected and she died two days later.
The woman rummaged through the handbag clutched t
ightly in her lap, and showed me a photograph of her and her deceased sister. A round face, like a dish, a flat nose, and a pair of eyes with one puffy eyelid. European and American men would all go crazy for such a pretty native Giao Chỉ face like that.21 But she was the kind of girl that the young men of Vietnam would find too rustic and immediately turn from. Honestly, how could I let myself compare this little imp to my three guys? Three big, impressive guys, around 1.8 meters tall, overflowing with desire, overflowing with life. I just couldn’t understand how those powerful bodies, those bewitching faces, could fall prey to the fire, or could decompose in the swampy, muddy earth beneath their graves. And I couldn’t believe that maybe there was a wandering soul hidden in the white banks of clouds outside, flying and following this airplane carrying Phũ’s body.
The woman had cried and lamented at length about how everyone in her family had wanted her to bring her sister’s body back to Hanoi for the funeral, but the airline refused to transport it. They had been on their own in Saigon, and she didn’t know anyone who had the power to help, so she finally resigned herself to having the body cremated. She was carrying the urn of ashes right here in her handbag. She thought that it must have been because of the urn that the hostesses were burning incense and praying. I didn’t have the heart to expose the truth that the prayers and offerings were for Phũ’s body. Nobody knew anything about her urn, and her poor sister who suffered in life and then died, continuing to suffer in the afterlife.
