She Weeps Each Time You're Born

by Quan Barry

  POETRY BY QUAN BARRY

  Loose Strife

  Water Puppets

  Controvertibles

  Asylum

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Quan Barry

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barry, Quan.

  She weeps each time you’re born / Quan Barry.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-307-91177-3 (hardcover : alk. paper).

  ISBN 978-0-307-91178-0 (eBook).

  1. Families—Vietnam—Fiction. 2. Psychic ability—

  Fiction. 3. Vietnam—History—20th century—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3602.A838S54 2014 813′.6—dc23 2014006309

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Map illustration by Betty Lew

  Jacket design by Joan Wong

  v3.1

  for TLB and MIB

  with L&L

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Main Characters

  Glossary of Foreign Terms

  Epilogue [2001]

  Along the Song Ma [1972]

  The Fall [1975]

  “And the Water Was Made as Glass” [1979]

  Renovation [1986]

  Wandering Ghosts [1996]

  Life is a Wheel [2001]

  Bibliography

  And then She saw them—burn! burn!

  and simply the water was made as glass.

  And She is the way when there is no way.

  She weeps each time you’re born.

  Main Characters

  Glossary of Foreign Terms

  Bà—grandmother

  Ba—father

  Em—a form of direct address used for children

  Ong—grandfather

  non la—a conical straw hat

  ao dai—a traditional Vietnamese dress

  THE SAMPAN RIDE BACK DOWN THE SWALLOW BIRD RIVER IS uneventful, everywhere the dragonflies floating fat and red in the late-afternoon sun. The same oarswoman who rowed us out to the Mountain of the Fragrant Traces now methodically bears us away. We’re all tired—even crazy Hung, his sunglasses firmly in place, seems to slump in his seat, a cigarette burning down between his fingers. The water is calm, the landscape lush and meditative, and when it comes time to leave the boat, the three of us remain sitting for a moment as if stunned, hardly believing the day is almost over.

  On the back of Than’s motorcycle I pass the same sights we saw on the way out. Everything looks familiar, like scenes from a previous life—the harvest still drying in the middle of the road, the people doubled over in the paddies in the fading light. I have spent the last week touring around the northern countryside with Hung and Than as my guides; after only a few days I trust them completely. Then Hung pulls up alongside one more time, his motorcycle splashed with mud. He looks at Than and makes a hand signal before taking off up the road. There one thing more, Than shouts over the roar of the engine. Because you are lucky, Amy Quan, yells Than, Hung thinks maybe she see us.

  Ten minutes later we pull up out front. The simple wooden house is a perfect square, the boards splintery and gray, a ragged cloth hanging in the window in lieu of glass. In the yard, a handful of chickens and pigs cluster in the shade of a tree, this late in the day the heat still invasive, all smothering. I can tell something is different this time, something in the way Hung and Than keep glancing over their shoulders. Neither of them has lit up a cigarette. This not the house, whispers Than, we just park here. Up close a black crack weaves across one of his front teeth like a piece of string waiting to unravel. Than nods to Hung. Go with him, he says. For a moment he seems like he’s about to say more, but he leaves it at that.

  For the first time all day, Hung has taken off his sunglasses. Pale rings circle his eyes where the sun rarely touches his skin. Already there is a newfound earnestness in his demeanor. Hung the merry prankster. Hung who pretended to try to flip the sampan while we were gliding down the Swallow Bird River. I had caught a glimpse of this other Hung earlier at the Perfume Pagoda. The way he didn’t know which of the two entrances to walk through, the Gate to Heaven or the Gate to Hell, and when he followed Than through the Gate to Heaven, how even with his sunglasses on, I could see the relief flooding his face.

  The house is a quarter mile down the road. There are only four other houses in the area, each one also small and wooden, a rusty sheet of corrugated tin on the roof. Firelight flickers in the windows. As we walk, Hung keeps taking deep breaths in through his mouth. He moves with an air of quiet contemplation, head bowed as he leads me to this place he thinks I of all people need to be. In the silence his eyes glisten. Despite his constant clowning, at times I have sensed a deep sadness in him, as if his frequent jesting is keeping an inner darkness at bay. Beside me he treads like a man without hope. If I didn’t know any better, I might think he is afraid of where we are going.

  The moon teeters low on the horizon. I can hear crickets and frogs starting to call. Than and me, our families come from Saigon, Hung says in a low voice. The government doesn’t trust southern people. No Hanoi business will hire us. So we’re guides. He looks at me and I nod. Her name’s Thỏ, he says. Rabbit. For Vietnam she gives up everything. His voice is barely a whisper as if he is really talking to himself. She will stay until every little one is heard. The northern and southern dead. Hung takes one more deep breath. He puts his hand on the gate. Now she’s in house arrest, he whispers. No one is allowed, but out here … He nods around at the isolation of the landscape. A seedpod from a nearby tamarind falls on the metal roof, the clang echoing like a bell.

  The gate swings open on its rusty hinges, the sound almost painful to the ears. Silently we enter the yard in the shadows as the full moon rises behind us with its long grayed face, and then someone opens the door and waves at the ground and I hear a voice which doesn’t sound fully human calling xin chao, xin chao. Welcome. Welcome.

  Later, back outside, the moon burns bright, the lights of Hanoi visible in the distance. Than turns the motorcycle off the rural road and onto the highway where we wait our turn to pay a toll. Around both wrists he wears a bracelet of prayer beads, each one inscribed with a tiny image of Quan Am, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who Than says keeps him in Her sight as he wanders far from home. Now the street will turn to asphalt, the way smooth and clear. As we wait, I notice a young boy walking barefoot by the side of the road, a dirty piece of cloth wrapped around his waist. In the years to come I will make three more trips to Vietnam, the country of my birth, piecing together the story of Rabbit, of how she was born in the dirt and the sorrows to follow. I have spent the past six weeks touring Vietnam, this place where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite. I have seen everything the guide books speak of—Reunification Palace, the endless rubber plantations, tunnels running hundreds of miles under the earth. This is not a story of what is missing. Some things just have yet to be found.

  As we wait in line to pay the toll, I watch the young boy walking barefoot along the s
houlder. The highway before us is a long treeless strip of concrete miles from anywhere. Even now as I write this a decade later I wonder where the boy came from. I can still see him smiling to himself, holding something close to his chest that wriggles and flashes in the growing moonlight, the boy’s ribs like a lattice. I stare harder. Slowly the cars inch forward, the drivers impatient, the bills ready in their hands, Than revving his engine. Then I see it—the boy is holding a live fish, the thing more than a foot long, his right hand lovingly stroking its pale iridescent belly, and he is walking down the side of a highway at night in Vietnam as though he has all the time in the world.

  On this we do not agree. Some of us say she was made manifest in a muddy ditch on the way to the pineapple plantation. Others say it happened hunkered down in a piggery, the little ones with their wet snouts full of wonder at the strange bristleless being wriggling among them for milk. Either way we bow to you. Believe us when we say life is a wheel. There was no beginning. There is no end. But we will tell you the story as she believes it occurred under the full rabbit moon six feet below ground in a wooden box, her mother’s hands cold as ice, overhead the bats of good fortune flitting through the dark.

  WHEN LITTLE MOTHER TOOK OFF HER NON LA UNDER THE jackfruit tree, Lam knew what he had to do, and he knew what he wasn’t capable of doing. All his long life he’d been the hand that shields the candle guttering in the storm. And now this young woman was standing in his yard underneath the jackfruit tree, the cuffs of her loose black pants dirty from paddy water. It was obviously the mosquito sickness, the kind that can eat twenty pounds off a grown man in under a week. Yes, it was definitely the mosquito sickness, but there was something else. He tried not to stare. Her pregnant stomach was stretched tight, her cheeks sunken, gums receding as if she had already died and nobody told her.

  He was just coming back from gathering the wild peony root. With his cane, the errand took twice as long. The flower grew in a small grove along the road to the mountain. He had heard that on the other side of the mountain the landscape was bombed flat, empty C-rations and discarded magazines and clothes and everything the Americans no longer wanted strewn in the places where the butterfly bush used to flower.

  He lifted his cane and motioned for her to follow him inside. A jackfruit fell from the tree and broke open, the smell instantly on the wind. Little Mother nodded and put her hat back on. Something shimmered at her feet. Lam blinked and rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, it was gone. He was an old man, older than Uncle Ho would have been were the old patriot still alive. He was old enough to remember the famines brought on by the Japanese army and their insatiable hunger for rice. Still, he knew what he’d seen shimmering at her feet—a ring of words shining in a perfect circle on the ground around her. Sông dài cá lội biệt tăm. In the long river, fish swim off without a trace. The sunlight streaming through the reeds in her hat.

  Then Lam heard the sound of a door banging shut in the wind. His nearest neighbor was more than a mile away. This is what happens when you live in two worlds at once, he thought, but all he said to her was come.

  His two rooms were just off the road along a bend in the Song Ma, the river an impenetrable red. No one was allowed on the other side of the Song Ma, the area declared a free-fire zone where anyone remaining could be shot without question. In the last year he had taken down the paper lanterns that hung from the branches of the jackfruit tree. Without the lanterns it was still obvious somebody lived there. Even on the eastern side of the river, it was best to be cautious, not attract attention. Sometimes when a convoy of trucks would rumble past, his house would shake, the planked boards rattling, the palm leaves thatching his roof rustling as if a strong wind were blowing.

  Inside he offered Little Mother his only stool, turning it so the few stray pieces of reed sticking out of the warp were to the back. She bowed before taking his hand and easing herself onto it. He smiled at her humility. They say the Emperor has a throne of solid gold in his summer palace, he said. Can you imagine such a thing? She didn’t answer. During the last war he had treated a Vietminh soldier with a blood infection who claimed his mother had worked as a cook at the palace. The soldier had said as a child he and his cousins would sometimes play in the many splendid rooms, the Emperor away for most of the year. The soldier didn’t move when Lam stuck a needle in the top of his head, all of the soldier’s joints swollen from the infection, his knuckles big as grapes. Once I sat on it when no one was looking, the soldier whispered. Sat on what, said Lam. The throne. The needle wouldn’t stay in. A drop of blood appeared, beading on the scalp. What was it like, Lam said. The soldier gazed into the fire, the flames raging in his eyes. Finally the needle took, the metal ringing at an imperceptible frequency, vibrating like the wings of a housefly. The soldier didn’t flinch as he answered Lam’s question. Like sitting on a mountain of corpses.

  Little Mother placed a hand on her swollen belly. In the firelight, shadows ravaged her face. In places her scalp was visible, her hair patchy as if moth-eaten. Child, Lam said. The word hung in the air. The time is late. The medicine will do for you what it can. He could hear the sound of flies buzzing among the overturned crates heaped with clutter in the other room where herbs and flowers hung from hooks. Rows of glass bottles lined dusty shelves. In each one floated insects, tiny birds, embryonic reptiles.

  With his finger he began to draw a figure in the dirt. He made a star at the top of the head, a large X at the base of the spine. Then it was time, the flames the right shade of gold. Are you ready, he whispered. He could feel his heart ticking in his chest. Gently Little Mother reached out and took his hands, drawing them to her face. He uncurled his fingers to let her have a closer look.

  In the center of each of his palms was a spot like a moldy thumbprint, the skin pitted with a deep green scar the size of a coin. When he was younger, he would sometimes chase small children playfully through the market, holding his open hands up in front of his face, the green scars like unblinking eyes. It’s who I am, he said. She let go of his hands. The clock in his chest was pounding. We have to get the blood moving, he said. Let the light in. Little Mother nodded. I am an old man, he added. Please. Quietly she took off her shirt. The skin over her belly was stretched tight like an animal hide dried in the sun. He couldn’t help but wince.

  Even Lam is surprised by the steadiness of his hands, though there has always been a gentle knowingness in his touch. He lights a scrap of paper on fire and drops it inside a small bamboo jar, then places the mouth of the jar on Little Mother’s bare shoulder. The jar tightens, the lip adhering to her skin as the fire burns up the air inside, creating a vacuum, the body’s internal pathways invigorated as the darkness within is drawn out of the blood. After a while he lets go and the jar stays fixed where it is. Then he lights other slips of papers, drops them in other jars, attaching each one to a different spot on her body. The smell of burnt paper fills the room.

  When he’s done, he stands back. She looks arboreal, arms outstretched, her body wreathed with burls. Something in the way she holds her arms in the air reminds him of a tree. He imagines sitting under her boughs and opening his eyes as if for the first time on earth, her limbs bursting with white fist-sized flowers. Lam gasps, the memory of a long-ago afternoon suddenly flooding his heart. Life is a wheel. That love should summon him again through the curtain of all these years. There are times when one must prune the tree that bears the fruit. The new life has to come that day, that very night. He must do all he can. There is nothing and everything to lose. He lights one last strip of paper and drops it in ajar. Quickly he attaches this to the root chakra, the volatile door on the lower back.

  The drawing of toxins to the surface of the skin. Like drawing light out of the darkness. Little Mother’s body covered with mouths, each one breathing clean and fresh. Her eyes heavy-lidded, both open and closed. The seeing into a thousand rooms at once. An orchestra of doors and hinges, worlds opening, jawbones rattling in the wind. The body wheeling t
hrough room after room. Sometimes in the quest for health, one must purposely inflict damage. The tree pruned back so that the fruit will flower.

  Will it come tonight, she whispers. Yes, he says, patting her shoulder, but he says it mostly to reassure himself.

  Gradually the jars loosen and drop off one by one, and where each has been, a dark circle remains. Technically they are bruises, like kisses that bring the blood up to the surface of the skin, the blight patterning her body. The fire burning in the corner of the room begins to die out.

  After her skin has cooled, he helps her to dress. For a moment he thinks he sees the skin of her belly trembling, but it is probably just a trick of the late-afternoon light. Together they walk outside to the jackfruit tree. He has done all he can. He of all people should know that when the heart breaks, there is no salve. Around them the air hangs fetid with the wet heat that follows the southwest monsoon. On the ground the ants are already dismantling the ruined fruit.

  Wait, Lam says. He hobbles back inside. He returns with a peony, its pink bud furled tight as a fist. Tell your mother-in-law Thuan I am her servant always, he says, pressing the flower into Little Mother’s hand. He thinks of Thuan and her old-woman eyes as though rinsed with milk. If he were a younger man, he would run a needle through fire and take Thuan’s face in his moldy old hands, carefully lifting the cloud from each of her eyes. He imagines that when he finished, Thuan would rise from the stool and behold him as he used to be, both their bodies once again young and flawless.

  Little Mother nods and tucks the flower in the weft of her hat. She has never heard anyone call her mother-in-law by her given name. She knows Bà will be happy to get the peony, her milky eyes shining. For a second time Little Mother pats the flower with her fingertips, securing it in place. Everywhere the small bruises jewel her skin, each one the diameter of a child’s wrist.