Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  Nor was there any picture of Mai. I was told that during the Japanese occupation, the country was starving and Grandma Que had to let Mai go. Mai cried and cried and refused to leave. Grandma Que had to shove Mai onto the streets. No one in my family knew what happened to Mai immediately after that, but after the Japanese occupation and the end of the last Vietnamese monarch, Mai reemerged as a new woman. She rented a little house inside the Citadel and set up an altar to worship the female deities and goddesses of Vietnam. Before long, news spread past the small circle of the Citadel out to the green bamboo hamlets: the former royal chambermaid had developed a psychic ability to communicate with the dead, review the past, and foretell the future. Mai never married.

  Every other month, Grandma Que went to see Mey Mai to get a reading from the psychic. Grandma Que had taken over the family’s silk business and added to it the trading of cinnamon from Quang Ngai, the jungle province of central Vietnam. After all, her given name, Que, meant cinnamon. Her twin sister, Ms. Ginseng, had joined the Revolution, been captured and tortured, and then released by the French. She returned to the ancestral house in Hue to die. There was no picture of Ms. Ginseng in the house, either, although she was said to have been a mirror image of Grandma Que. At Ms. Ginseng’s death, all the secondary schools in Hue flew a mourning flag, and the young schoolgirls wept for one of the first daughters of the Revolution. Grandma Que believed her twin sister’s spirit had blessed the family’s trading business, which required her to purchase the best of cinnamon and ginseng found deep in the jungles.

  The war between the Republic and the Vietcong was underway. By then, the Vietcong’s night ambushes were regular occurrences, and Mey Mai’s fortunetelling helped Grandma Que pick safe routes for the transport of her merchandise along Highway One.

  “Don’t travel that route on that day,” her fortune said, and sure enough, when that day came, dynamite would blow up a bus. Grandma Que would light an incense stick on the ancestral altar and reward the psychic with a handsome sum of money, jewelry, furniture, or medicine. No one knew what the psychic did with the money and gifts she had gathered from the inhabitants of Hue. Her fame grew.

  In those days, Grandma Que frequently spoke to me of the mossy palaces and royal tombs of Hue. Our ancestors, the nine lords and thirteen Nguyen kings of Vietnam, reigned consecutively for almost two centuries, made Hue their capital city, and built their tombs while they were still alive. The most ostentatious royal tomb was built after French colonists had arrived in Vietnam, with their romanticism as well as their firing cannons and the best of seagoing ships. So on the outskirts of Hue, on a hill overlooking the greens of the ancient city and a miniature Versailles look-alike garden bordered with lotus ponds at the bottom of the hill, the bronze statue of a pro-French Nguyen king sat among somber walls studded with blue porcelain pieces and gold enameled bird and flower motifs.

  The River Huong flowed through the heart of Hue. Huong means perfume or scent, so the inhabitants of Hue call their city’s heart vein the “River of Fragrance.” The international tourist agencies call it the “Perfume River.” Hue had a violet horizon, so the kings’ palaces were called the Violet City, Tu Cam Tranh, where my great-grandmother, Huyen Phi, once resided.

  Hue was not just a city of kings and queens, but also of lovers and poets, dreaming always about a fragrance and a violet horizon that symbolized their romantic spirit. So, the river had to be called Perfume, sparkling green beneath violet clouds at sunset. Hue was not just a city, but The City. Their City—those beautiful women speaking with the musical Hue accent, hiding their demure smiles beneath the cone hats that shaded their lacquered stream of long hair, moving their lithe bodies in their black silk trousers and white ao dai—the silky, body-fitting tunics that split on both sides into fluttering wings.

  That was how I should remember Hue, Grandma Que said.

  Not how it was in the bloody eighteen hundreds, when the mandarin’s army—men who went barefoot and had no guns—started an uprising against French colonists, and thousands of Hue inhabitants died during a few days of fighting. The young king, Ham Nghi, was behind the short-lived coup, so he and what was left of his army had to abandon the Violet City and escape to the jungles of central Vietnam, where he disguised himself as a Montagnard. The French captured his teacher and took the old man with them to the jungle in search of the young king. French troops went hunting, using the old Confucian teacher as bait. The French recognized as the king of Annam the first Montagnard who immediately knelt upon seeing the old man.

  It was a clever trick, but in Grandma Que’s opinion, French colonists were not astute enough to know that the king’s parents and teacher were the only people before whom the king would automatically kneel. The trick had to be the work of those Vietnamese traitors—the Viet Gian—who, for materialistic rewards, would broker their culture, sell their own roots, and betray their king.

  I thought it was dumb of the young king to kneel like that. If it had been me, I would have escaped deep into the jungle. Maybe I would have disguised myself as a rabbit—better still, as a bird. I would grow wings and fly away from those Frenchmen with guns.

  The French spared the young king’s life and exiled him. For a Vietnamese king, exile, according to the Grandma Que, was the equivalent of death. At times, Grandma Que said, death was better than life because death ennobled and immortalized. I thought of those dragonflies hovering over blooms of honeysuckles and birds of paradise in the ancestral house’s backyard; days later, I would find them lying on the front porch, flying no more. I would pick one up and stare at its corpse. Grandma Que said too much summer heat and flower fragrance had killed the dragonflies.

  I did not see anything ennobling in their death.

  Exile. Exile. Exile. I remembered the Vietnamese word Grandma Que had used that day when she told me of Ham Nghi, her great-grandfather, the young king. The word sounded mysterious. I liked the way it was spoken. Starting with the high ascending pitch, the accent aigu, and ending with no pitch. Kiep tha-huong. Kiep vien-phuong. The destiny of those who had to live away from their homeland.

  Every little girl of Hue roots was destined to have a poetic soul, Grandma Que said. If my younger sister, Mi Chau, and I ever had to live away from Hue, I should always find ways to grow a big, tall tree—for example, the classic, popular longan tree of Hue—in order to create a shade under which I could recite poetry and nurture my poetic soul. She told me to wait patiently, even if it should take years for the tree to grow, bear fruit, and provide a shade large enough to cover a swinging hammock. I watched her as she described the tree to me. Her soulful eyes shone on me, those black pupils reminding me of lacquered, perfectly round longan nuts.

  “Wait patiently,” she said.

  “I will,” I murmured to myself, and to a pair of moving longan nuts that could see my soul.

  On that memorable day in 1965, Grandma Que and I boarded a cyclo. We sat in the sedan chair at the front of the vehicle, and the driver biked behind us. I loved riding the cyclo, enjoying the wind that caressed my face and blew my hair backward. When the cyclo came to a slope, the driver would get off his bike and push us up the slope; I’d turn around to find his sweaty face hidden beneath the old, frayed cone hat. I understood the hardship of a cyclo driver’s life. Grandma Que always gave him a big tip and told me to address him as “Uncle Cyclo.”

  Lotus ponds appeared along one side of the road as we approached the Citadel. Grayish-green and mossy, the ancient wall blocked the other side of the bumpy road. We moved along the Citadel, bumping up and down in the sedan chair as Uncle Cyclo pedaled and breathed heavily behind us. Approaching the main gate of the Citadel, with its carved dragons and curved roof, I saw a row of rusty cannons lined up in a vestibule pointing away from the Citadel. Grandma Que called them the bodyguards of the king, now useless, but once representing a golden era respected by China and admired by Siam.

  The cyclo moved slowly through the front gate to the other side of the mossy
Citadel, and my eyes were filled once again with lotus ponds. Lotuses floated over wide leaves covering the surface of the water like a peaceful, soothing plate of mauve, lavender, and dull green. When the Snow White dress got old, I would ask Grandma Que to make me a lotus pond dress. The hemline would have drawings of mauve lotuses among beds of jade leaves floating on the dark, mossy water. When I walked, my lotus ponds would go with me, dancing around my knees against the clear white background of floating clouds. The wind would blow freely on my shoulders down to my lotus ponds.

  3. MEY MAI’S SÉANCE

  “Good morning, Princess,” Mey Mai said to Grandma Que as we entered her place of worship.

  Those days, Mey Mai always called Grandma Que “Princess.” The term often brought a smile to Grandma Que’s solemn face and brightened her dark, inscrutable eyes. An energetic and plump woman, Mey Mai stood in stark contrast to Grandma Que. Energy and warmth emanated from the old woman’s animated, birdlike eyes and rosy, round face, almost wiping away signs of sagging muscles associated with her more than seventy years of life. She stood with her back straight: too tall, too imposing, and too exuberant for an old Vietnamese woman. There she stood to greet us, the cheerful Mey Mai, her satin-clad body almost filling up the narrow entrance. When she hugged me, I smelled cedar incense on her satin sleeves.

  The main room was already filled with so many other visitors whom I did not know. They sat solemnly on colorful, dyed straw mats that surrounded the altar, from which rose a fog of burned incense. Grandma Que took her place at the farthest side of the room right across from the altar, and I nestled next to her. Behind the altar was the painting of a woman with sharp, slanting eyes and leaflike eyebrows, whom Grandma Que explained was the Goddess Lieu Hanh, deity of Vietnamese womanhood. Mey Mai sat on the center mat. She had put on a loose, seven-color satin smock over her ao dai. The horizontal blocks of colors and the fabric’s sheen made her body appear even stockier. She placed her palms together in the middle of her chest, closing her eyes in concentration, and her lips pulled into a broad, euphoric smile.

  A group of women dressed in green satin gathered in front of the altar and started chanting. I could not figure out their words. One of them stepped forward to place a piece of red silk cloth over Mey Mai’s head, covering up her grayish bun of hair.

  Mey Mai began to shake her head, gently and slowly at first and then faster and faster, picking up the rhythm of the drumbeat. Sitting directly behind her, the drummer wore a purple turban and a loose ao dai designed for a man, worn over purple trousers that matched his turban.

  Mey Mai stood up and swayed. She raised one leg and turned around on the supporting leg, her body tilting and rising as she tried to balance herself. She swayed to the hypnotic, eerie chorale. And then she spun. Her head shook and swirled underneath the red silk cloth, straining and quivering like a shapeless animal yearning to escape its cage.

  I held my breath and stared.

  The thickened incense smoke made me cough. The coughing tore at my itchy and burned throat, and I could not stop. Grandma Que placed her hand over my mouth, smoothing my chest with her other hand. Under the red silk cloth I caught a glimpse of Mey Mai’s white eyes, looking my way, as though she had slightly raised the cloth for the sole purpose of looking at me. Her black eyes had almost disappeared behind her swollen, wrinkled eyelids. For a moment, I thought my lips had frozen. Just at the point when my ears were starting to go numb, the drumbeats stopped and Mey Mai convulsed and fell backward. The red silk cloth fell off her head as two woman chanters leaped forward to catch her before she hit the floor.

  A thick silence followed as Mey Mai lowered herself to the floor, her legs crossed in Buddhist meditation, her face grimacing in pain. Someone had opened the door, and a cold draught swept over my limbs. I hung onto the flap of Grandma Que’s ao dai.

  When Mey Mai began to speak, the voice that came out of her lips was someone else’s voice, no longer deep and solemn like that of an old woman. The tone was now light and clear. The words came in garbled strands, with complicated nouns and verbs of the adults’ world. I recognized only one word—that mysterious and melodious word I had heard from Grandma Que. Exile. Exile. Exile.

  Grandma Que shifted slightly in order to pull me closer toward her. I pulled my limbs together so that I could rest all of me against her chest until I could feel the warmth of her breath at the top of my head. Even then, I still nervously pulled the flap of her ao dai to keep myself calm. Squeezing my hand, she bent over and whispered into my ears.

  “There is nothing to fear. This place is full of ancestors.”

  I looked around. No one in that smoke-filled room looked like the set of black-and-white photographs that lined up on the altar at the house. Nor did anyone resemble the translucent Huyen Phi in her silk-and-black-ink portrait. No one looked anything remotely like Grandma Que. In sum, I saw no relatives in that crowd. My feet were trembling against my will. I grabbed them and tugged them under the hem of my Snow White dress.

  One of the chanting women had struck a bell, which gave a sharp, jingling sound, and Mey Mai bent down as though struck with pain. She started hissing. She leaped forward, and her two hands came together in a worshiping gesture, as she broke out crying. My cough had returned, although I tried desperately to suppress it. I could hear Mey Mai’s sobs in unison with my cough and the racing of my heart. All that time, people around us were bowing their heads all the way down, their foreheads touching the straw mat.

  When Mey Mai’s sobbing and convulsions stopped, my coughing abruptly ceased, too. She turned her head up to the ceiling, but her eyes dashed around the room. Again, she spoke. This time I understood her words.

  “Soon,” she said, “during a Lunar New Year celebration, after almost a hundred years, this City will undergo another massacre. Hell on earth will be waiting.”

  The crowd immediately reacted with rising whispers. The steady beats of the drummer were eventually lost in the audience’s murmuring. Oblivious to her audience’s reaction, Mey Mai was parading, and my eyes followed her footsteps. She stopped in the middle of the red and ivory straw mat that dented under her naked heels, tugging her fingers inside her sleeves. She closed her arms into a circle and then swung them rhythmically forward at the space, murmuring strings of sounds, which at times were swallowed into her heavy breathing. Mey Mai made a couple of rounds in front of the altar before she again fell backward as though pulled by a powerful force, her neck swollen, her eyes rolled up, and the whiteness of her eyes expanding.

  She was strangling herself, rolling on the straw mat, and the audience stirred in chaos. The chanting women stepped forward and gathered around her, pulling the hair around her temples.

  Someone announced across the room that a spirit had entered the room and had got into Mey Mai.

  I swallowed with difficulty and my stomach began to hurt as though the unknown force that tortured Mey Mai had also gone over to me. I squeezed Grandma Que’s hand for assurance, hearing her prayer to the Compassionate Buddha: “Nam mo a di da Phat…” I concentrated on her prayer to calm myself, closing my eyes to avoid the irritating incense smoke.

  “Little one, open your eyes!”

  I opened my eyes and saw Mey Mai’s euphoric face. She was speaking in a young woman’s melodious voice—a stranger’s voice.

  “You, my dear, will escape the massacre.”

  I turned away from her and squeezed the corner of the flap of Grandma Que’s ao dai, wet and wrinkled from my unconscious nibbling on it.

  “I will always protect you,” Mey Mai said, in the voice of the stranger. She reached out for my hands, but I avoided her touch. The incense smoke confused my eyes. I rubbed them with my knuckles.

  “Hush, hush, calm down,” she half sang. “Your fate, my dear little one, will be in faraway places. Exile. Exile. Exile.”

  I turned to Grandma Que. “Is she talking to me?” I asked.

  Grandma Que said nothing, and the stranger’s voice continued to em
erge from Mey Mai’s lips.

  “Yes, I am speaking to you, and don’t be afraid, my child.”

  4. SPIRIT OF THE PERFUME RIVER

  I felt lightened and exposed, as though a thousand beams of light were traveling through me, and in this streak of focused brightness I began to see things. I no longer smelled burning incense. Instead, the fragrance of blossoming lotuses filled my nostrils.

  I saw shapes of stone, brick pyramids and towers, their reds and grays mingling with the dull green of moss. The pyramids dwindled into cone shapes situated solemnly on the coifed heads of silent women moving among the ruins of old temples. The women held flickering candles burning over lotus buds growing from the middle of their palms. Their bare feet quickened over moss and brick, then floated over an expanse of lotus ponds. I heard the tiny splash of frogs jumping around the banks mixed with the click of the dancers’ copper anklets. The women danced in smooth, slow, and deliberate movements, their curved fingers closing and opening to the chanting human voices coming from so far away—a thin echo that cut through the stuffy air. The sounds rose and the dance formed. The women joined hands. With their bodies and fingers they formed shapes and circles, pyramids and half-moon fans. They moved stoically, surrounding me, at times hovering over my head. I blinked. The women were lining up in front of me with candles burning in their hands. Slowly, their palms opened and the wax from their candles turned into blood dripping onto their wrists, the thick redness permeating through the yellow, mauve, and pastel green of blooming lotuses underneath their naked feet.

  Someone must have lifted me, and I felt the sensation of flying through that stuffy air. I was being laid down on floating lotuses, then moved to the top of a gigantic tower. Grave, ebony eyes looked down upon me. The dancers’ candles were spilling into me, and I felt the heat of burning wood. The horizon had turned reddish, and I felt the presence of some being, powerful and engulfing, suspended in the air, bearing down on the women’s limbs as they were slowly transformed into a display of frozen silhouettes. I alone was flying high in the heat of a flaring fire.