by Kien Nguyen
Before we separated at the end of that afternoon, he asked, “Can I see you and your friends again tomorrow, little fellow?”
I nodded and ran away, catching up with my friends.
The next day, unable to convince any of my classmates to accompany me, I returned to the beach alone. My new friend stood under the coconut tree, holding a plastic bag full of chocolate in colorful wrappers. I ran toward him. He picked me up and threw me in the air, then caught me before I fell to the ground.
I took the soldier to my home and showed him to my grandparents. Upon meeting them at the doorstep, he took off his helmet and bowed his head to salute them, the way Vietnamese people pay respects to their elders. My grandmother made us some lemonade while we sat by the pool. For hours the soldier lay on the grass, folding up yesterday's newspapers into boats that I floated on the pool's smooth surface. At one point, I looked up to see him propped on one side staring into the air.
“Hello, American, you okay?” I waved a hand in front of his face.
“Okay,” he replied. His eyes squinted under the sun. “I am just homesick. You understand homesick? I miss my family.”
“Family? Oh yes, I know. You have pictures?” I asked him.
“Yes.” He perked up. “Do you want to see my family?” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.
“My family,” I repeated after him with my broken English, holding the worn pictures in my hands. Some of them had dark creases, as they had absorbed his perspiration.
“No, my family,” he said, correcting my poor English. “Not your family.”
One by one, he showed me his loved ones. He told me he was from Wisconsin. To me, the name Wisconsin was as strange as the color of his eyes. His parents looked amiable and soft as they squinted at the camera. He also had an older sister who had just gotten married. The wedding picture showed a beautiful woman and her husband laughing on a church's front steps. The bouquet of white roses in her hands matched her dress and the veil on her blond hair. The same picture also showed his younger brother, who was about my age.
“You remind me of my brother, you know?” he said, touching my hair.
“Yeah? Good,” I said.
“Uh-huh. His name is Todd. He is a very good boy, sort of like you, very skinny. I miss him very much.” He touched his brother's face in the photograph with the tips of his fingers. “Yesterday before I met you by the beach, remember? I was on the phone with Todd. It was his birthday, but I didn't get a chance to sing a happy birthday song for him. He was leaving for summer camp. Anyhow, when I walked outside feeling depressed, I saw you running around on the sand with your bare feet. You look just like a little American boy, you know? I was so happy to meet you. In a way, being with you was like spending time with Todd, except that he talks a lot more than you do.”
I said nothing.
“Thank you,” he said suddenly.
“For what?”
“For everything, for this lemonade, for being my little friend, for making this place not so alien as it was two days ago.”
“Great. Then see you tomorrow?”
“No, I can't. I am leaving tomorrow for combat. I won't be back until a week from Friday.”
“A week from Friday?” I calculated loudly with my fingers. “Ten days?”
“Yep. Will you come back to the beach then and wait for me?” he asked.
“Sure. No sweat.”
I marked each day with a scratch on the wall in my bedroom. On the tenth day I ran back to the military base, but the spot under the coconut tree was empty. The afternoon went by as I sat alone in the sand waiting for the soldier to return. It was not until the sun dove into the ocean, and my grandmother called me for dinner, that I realized he would not be coming. The next day I returned to the camp only to be disappointed once again.
A week later, while in the middle of a hide-and-seek game, I saw a military truck parked in front of the soldier's base. Its cargo area was piled high with coarse bags made from ponchos, most of them darkened with dried blood. Something prompted me to go closer. I ran to the truck, and the intent look on my face must have convinced the American soldiers to allow me to climb aboard. As though I were dreaming, I reached out for one bag in particular buried deep under the heap. As I touched it, the zipper gave way under my hand, and from the darkness within, a familiar shock of blond hair tumbled out. In my trance, I wondered why I had never asked my friend to tell me his name. Unable to find the courage to rezip his body bag, I jumped from the truck and ran back home. At the doorsteps of my house, I remembered that the soldier had never known my name either.
Now a few years had passed. The Americans were gone. My family was fleeing to a life of danger and uncertainty. And another soldier was reciting Uncle Ho's rules to me. “And the fourth rule is ‘Take good care of thine own hygiene…’” Lying half-asleep in his embrace, I looked up and saw on his face the same expression I saw on countless lonely faces every day. It was the homesick look of the children who were lost in the chaos of warfare, witnessing death and disaster, longing for a meaningful touch.
CHAPTER NINE
It was six in the morning when we got to Nhatrang. The truck stopped briefly to drop us off. There was barely a moment for us to bid farewell to the soldiers before they continued on their journey. We walked home in apprehension. Nhatrang seemed to have acquired another layer of skin. New flags flew in front of every house. No one was on the streets. The city appeared clean and lifeless, except for the loudspeakers on every corner, broadcasting chapters of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
At home, we faced an incomprehensible ruin. The iron gates to our house had been smashed inward, and a trail of garbage and dirt led to the front door. Feces had been smeared everywhere, turning the pale beige face of the house into an obscene brownish mask. Most of the windows had been vandalized. Broken glass lay on the ground, on the patio, and in the dirty pool. The grass had grown like a weed, threatening to cover the front yard. All of the exotic plants had either been stolen or uprooted and left to die on the hard pavement. The tall wall that my mother had cherished had been crushed down to its last brick, and the thick vines that once covered it shared the same sad fate. With each step, we came upon more heartwrenching surprises. The front doors of the house, expertly carved from rare ebony, had been knocked off their hinges and broken into pieces.
Inside the house, it looked as if a thousand angry horsemen had stormed through, leaving a trail of destruction. We walked through the hallways in shock, stepping on the remains of broken chandeliers and vases. The silence from within the house was absolute, except for the reverberation of our footsteps, echoing from room to room. There seemed to be no one inside.
However, we were not alone. Our cook and two maids had not abandoned my mother's house. When the looters came, they had hidden themselves in the kitchen building, across from the main house, and had remained there since. Upon hearing our voices, they ran up from their rooms, shrieking with happiness as they saw us.
The cook was a woman of my grandmother's age. She had been in my family for more than a decade. We had always assumed that she had no next of kin, for she had never uttered a word about her family. The fact that she never left the house or had any visitors reinforced this comfortable impression. My grandmother used to tell us how the cook had applied for the job, coming in alone one day with a small suitcase. At that time, my grandfather was in the military service, and my grandmother needed a hand in the kitchen. The woman was never much of a talker, but she was a hard worker and a good cook. I did not know her name. My mother taught us to call her Aunt O, because she had a habit of falling asleep by the stove with her mouth wide open, forming the letter O.
The two maids standing next to the cook had come from a large family that lived a few blocks away. Neither had married, and both were in their midforties. Instead of returning to their own home, they had chosen to stay at my mother's place, where they were provided with their own space, a lux
ury that was not affordable elsewhere. Upon seeing us, they could not stop screaming and reaching out to touch my brother and me in astonishment. They said over and over to my grandparents that they were happy to see us arriving home safe and sound.
Aunt O cracked open a coconut. She poured its juice over a boiling pot of sticky rice as we sat on the floor in the kitchen, listening to the gossip from the two chirping maids. They filled us in as to what had happened to the city since we had left. Convicts who had escaped from prison a few days before the Communists took over had vandalized the house on numerous occasions. After that, looters had come, looking for hidden treasure, and others had come looking for us. Aunt O and the maids were about to give up hope of our return. They imagined that we had fled the country before the fall of Saigon.
In Nhatrang, the Communists had settled in during the last few weeks. Census had been taken, starting with the citizens' voluntary registration. Through the information that they had gathered, the Communists had taken away the first group of men who had held high status in the old government and military. In the middle of the night, the men were taken out of their houses in handcuffs and chains to a top-secret location. Without revealing too much, the government informed the prisoners' wives and children only of the name of their secret camp: a “neo-educational” compound, where they would be enlightened about the superiority of the new order.
The Communists had divided the city into small groups called towns, and even smaller divisions called clusters, or communities, composed of about fifteen families. Each of these communities was headed by an elected official who in most cases either had been brought in by the military or was in the past a spy for the Communist government. The voting was a formality in which everybody came to acknowledge his position.
Aunt O put the sticky rice with coconut topping in little bowls and laid each one down on the kitchen floor in front of us and spoke to my mother for the first time. “You have to go to the community hall and register your family. Do it as soon as possible, if you don't want any more trouble than you are already in.”
My mother gazed at her with a puzzled look. “Trouble? You mean they are looking for me? What trouble are you referring to?”
Aunt O shrugged, pointing at my brother and me. “This trouble.”
She looked up from us to the window. Following her gaze, we saw the mansion hiding behind a large palm tree. “That trouble,” she said to my mother.
My mother kept silent as the cook continued. “Take all of your identification with you, including every piece of paper that you have. They want to know as much about you as possible. And believe me, before you even get there, they already know everything about you and your past.”
“Who is our community's leader? Where do I find him or her?” my mother asked.
“Don't ask me that. I think you should go and find out for yourself,” Aunt O said. “Just be prepared, that's all. The office is in the community hall.”
“Where is the community hall?” my mother asked.
“You know, madam. It used to be Master Kien's school.”
My mother jumped. Turning to Aunt O, she said, “Please, don't call us madam or master anymore. In the past month, I have lost everything I have ever had. I am now as dirt poor as everyone else. If you all want to see me live to raise my children, then please stop using those titles.”
She got up to leave the kitchen. Aunt O called after her, “You'd better go around town and tell everyone that, and when you meet the town leader, tell him that, too. Otherwise, he will address you as madam. Because that was what you always wanted everybody to call you, remember?”
My mother ran out of the house and disappeared for the rest of the day. As night fell, my grandparents watched the clock and fretted. Unable to stay still, my grandmother walked outside to the front gates and looked up and down the street. Inside, Loan kept Jimmy and me occupied in my mother's room with her stories. Nevertheless, we both wanted our mother. The anxiety mounted and finally, my brother started to cry. A few moments later, I joined him. Loan sat on the edge of the bed, watching us cry ourselves to sleep.
My mother did not come back until the next afternoon, and she was as pale as a sheet of paper. Without saying a word to anyone, she stormed into the house and disappeared into her room, slamming the door behind her. My grandparents ran after her and knocked on the door in vain. Ignoring their pleas, she remained inside for the rest of the day. Later that evening, my grandmother urged me to take a tray of food upstairs to my mother.
I came to her door, balanced the tray in one hand, and knocked gently with the other. A long silence weighed heavily, and then I heard her voice. “Kien?”
“Yes, Mommy. Can I come in?”
I heard her footsteps as she got up from her bed and opened the door. She stood before me with dark circles under her eyes and tangled hair. Looking at me as though I were a stranger, she took the tray. I walked into her room and heard the door snap shut behind me.
The room was a mess. It looked as if my mother had turned everything inside out and upside down. In the middle of her bed, on top of a white handkerchief, lay a handful of her jewelry, gleaming under the light. She set the dinner tray down on her makeup desk, picked up the handkerchief, and tied it into a knot with the jewelry inside. Then she picked me up off my feet and set me down on a chair in front of the broken mirror. She knelt before me. Her eyes stared into mine, dark as black pearls. I could feel electricity racing along the nape of my neck.
“Oh, Kien,” she sighed. “There are so many things I want to tell you. I don't know where to start. Let me just begin by saying that from this point on, I can't allow you to be a child any longer…”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“How old are you, Kien? Can you tell me?”
“In four days I am going to be eight, Mommy,” I said to her, thinking that the answer would please her. But she reacted with dismay.
“Oh, God. That's right. Your birthday is coming, isn't it? Kien, listen to me. You are my oldest son. You have to help me. I can't do this alone. Do you understand?”
“Understand, Mommy.”
“You have to grow up. I am going to have another baby soon, and I need you to help me. From now on, you can't just cry anytime things get tough, and you can't trouble me anymore. You have to take good care of your brother, and when the baby comes, you have to take care of it as well. I need your help and I need you to promise me. Okay, Kien?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“What are you promising to me?” she pressed.
“I promise not to cry, to be tough, to take care of Jimmy and the baby.”
She hugged me for a long time. Then she continued, “Good boy. There are two more things I want—no, not want—I need you to understand. Number one: I want you to keep everything you know a secret. Don't tell anyone anything, even if they threaten you. Remember all the dead bodies we saw on the street? If you say anything at all, I will die like them, so will you, and your grandfather, and your grandmother, and your brother, and the baby, too.”
“Don't say anything. Everyone will kill us,” I repeated.
“Exactly! Number two: guard this for me with your life.” She stuffed the handkerchief in my trousers' pocket. “This is all I have left. Without this, we also die. Don't show it to anyone, and don't ever lose it, understand?”
“Why don't you hide it, Mommy?”
“I did. I hid it in your trousers. Just you and I know about this, okay?”
“Okay. How long do I keep it?” I asked her.
“Maybe for a long time. I don't know exactly how long. Every night before bedtime, I will see you in here, and you will show me the handkerchief, so you won't forget and drop it somewhere. Yes?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Now be a good boy, and go get your grandparents for me. If Loan asks you what we are talking about, what will you tell her?”
“Tell her nothing,” I answered her.
She breathed out a sigh of relief, a
nd said to me, “That's my boy. Now go. Go fetch your grandparents.”
I didn't have to; my grandparents wasted no time rushing upstairs to meet my mother as soon as they heard her door open. We all sat on her bed as she told us what had happened to her at the community center, where she had gone to register our family.
CHAPTER TEN
Nhatrang, May 11
Aunt O was right. The private school I had attended until about two months earlier now housed the community center. The Communists allowed the priests and nuns to stay in the rectory for the time being, but the church was closed down and the school was transformed into a government outpost.
My mother walked into the principal's office only to see, through an opaque glass door, a dark shadow of a man sitting behind the desk. Near the entrance a small table sat against the wall. Behind it, a woman in a police uniform stopped my mother from going any farther. It took a moment before my mother recognized her. Just a few months before, the woman had been a garbage collector. She would come to Aunt O's kitchen through the back door to gather leftovers for her children.
Upon seeing my mother, a look of hatred registered on the woman's face. Her eyebrows rose as she looked my mother up and down.
“I have come here to register my family,” my mother said.
“What rock have you been hiding under? It has been over three weeks. Where the hell were you?” the woman asked.
“My family and I got stuck in Saigon. We returned home as soon as possible.”
“Liar! You filthy counterrevolutionary. We all know where you've been, what you've been doing.” The policewoman grabbed a sheet of paper on top of her desk, then threw it at my mother. “Take a seat, fill out that form if you are here to see our community leader. Do you think you can handle all that without having me repeat it again?”
“I understand, thank you,” my mother murmured.
In front of her desk, facing the opposite wall, was a row of seats. Seven people waited to be seen by the town leader, who was alone in his office, assisting no one.
