Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  Then the tantalizing presence merged into me, and I felt free.

  I flickered my eyelids and the dancing women disappeared, replaced by Mey Mai’s jovial face. I held my spinning head, curled up in Grandma Que’s lap, and wanted badly to cry. Strings of whispers kept emerging from Mey Mai’s wrinkled lips.

  The voice asked me to look up and meet the Spirit of the Perfume River.

  I looked up and saw only Mey Mai.

  As the sugary voice poured words into my ears in the fog of incense smoke, I saw on Mey Mai’s face Grandma Que’s black longan eyes. The eyes grew larger and larger until they filled up the horizon of my mind, looking out at me through Mey Mai’s wrinkled eyelids. And then they dwindled into two small dots, as Mey Mai’s face was replaced with the face of a woman I had never seen before, her silhouette edged against the translucent horizon that met a sparkling river. All turned dark except for a moving spot of light.

  In the spot, I saw the woman. Her dark hair was tugged behind her ears beneath a gold turban, and her black lashes moved like flickering shadows under the long, slanting, painted brows of a queen. The lashes cast shadows of small, pointed arrows onto her fine and translucent cheekbones. Her earrings sparkled into a thousand stars. Her thick, curvy lips moved slightly as she mimed the words I read from her mouth.

  “My child,” the stranger said, “wait patiently.”

  She was repeating Grandma Que’s favorite phrase.

  That was how the Spirit of the Perfume first spoke to me in 1965: through Mey Mai’s wrinkled mouth and eyes, and in the clear voice of a young woman. The spirit told me that she resided in the Perfume River and would always wait for me there, as the matriarch of my maternal family, my guardian, my protector.

  She went on to tell me her life story as the Mystique Concubine of the Violet City.

  PART TWO:

  TALES FROM THE VIOLET CITY

  HUYEN PHI, THE MYSTIQUE CONCUBINE

  1. THE WAIT OF A ROYAL CONCUBINE

  (Hue, the capital of Annam, French Indochina, 1910)

  “Wait patiently!”

  I once heard that phrase in a popular drum song. It was about the time when the king sent out his messengers to announce the royal decree across the land, calling for the people to defend the country. Noblemen responded and left their home to traverse jungles, climb mountains, and assemble under the king’s torch. Flags were flown, horses galloped, the royal sword was passed on to the commander general. Noblemen wore their gun smoke–saturated cloaks into battle. They tore out pieces of their cloaks, wrote the message of victory on them, and let singing birds carry it home, to the villages.

  In the villages their wives held small babies, waiting for the return of their husbands, for that glorious day when victory over invaders would be declared and the national territory restored under one Heaven-chosen king. Daily the women cooked their rice, casting their sorrowful eyes upon the smoke that came out of their rice pots. The silver smoke traveled past the treetops and through layers of clouds. The women waited for the singing birds that carried messages of victory from far-off battles. The wait seemed to last forever.

  Or the singing bird might just carry home the news of death. Dead noblemen turned into gods through the flow of their blood—gods that protected the royal sword as it made its way home to the king’s throne. Heaven mourned their deaths, and their widows wilted away in loneliness, still waiting for warrior husbands who never returned. The singing birds all turned sentimental. Their sad songs echoed over oceans and forests.

  One young wife refused to believe her husband would not return. She kept hearing songs of victory, seeing flags flying home, longing for the galloping sounds of her husband’s horse. Leaves in the forest budded and fell, and seasons changed, and she kept waiting. One day, carrying her baby, she climbed to the top of a cliff overlooking the ocean so she could see her warrior husband ride his horse home, when the singing bird would sing the joyful song of reunion.

  She stood there day after day, night after night, forgetting time.

  “Wait patiently,” she kept murmuring to the harsh wind, and the singing bird repeated her call. She was alone on top of the cliff. Her baby had fallen asleep.

  And the legend goes, the woman eventually turned to a limestone statue, holding her baby, waiting for her warrior husband. The wait was eternity.

  For hundreds of years, the limestone statue has watched over the South China Sea, guarding the coast of Vietnam. The waiting wife has become the sorrow of the Vietnamese woman in wartime. She has become the culture itself.

  2. THE FACE OF BRUTALITY

  I have heard the legend and know what it feels like to wait for my husband, although he is not at war.

  I lean on the half-moon window frame carved into coiling dragon shapes, looking out at the night. The lanterns in the courtyard flicker against the silver threads of an elusive moon.

  I see it. The face.

  Its contours merge with the night, so the face no longer has shape. Yet I know it snarls at me, since the beam from the pair of beastly eyes follows my movements. I see the red eyes moving in the dark.

  For years I have stood here looking at the night, sensing the presence and seeing the face. I call it the Face of Brutality. It mocks me every night, telling me to stop waiting. But I wait and wait. One night passes. Another night comes.

  Tonight my senses are sharper than usual. This is my last night in the Violet City.

  I go back inside to look after my daughters, Cinnamon and Ginseng. The twin girls are holding hands in their sleep, their tiny, rosy fingers intertwining, the tips fragile and pinkish like young roots. The girls’ joined hands rest in the hollow between their bodies, their black, fuzzy heads leaning against each other. The twins seek comfort from each other’s warmth. Occasionally they stir gently, their hands separating and rejoining as they breathe steadily.

  I sit by the edge of the lacquer divan where they sleep, running my fingers over the mother-of-pearl inlays and shining black paint. We will be taking the lacquer divan with us tomorrow. The entourage will consist of my chambermaid, Mai; my eunuch, Son La; my twin daughters; and myself. We will depart in the morning to a village approximately two hundred kilometers away from the Violet City, on the outskirts of Hue, on the way to the Port of Thuan An. By this same time tomorrow night, the half-moon window will be closed behind me, and my life in the Violet City will be in the past.

  But I know the Face of Brutality will still be out there. It goes where I go.

  The lacquer divan was a special gift from my husband before the girls were born. The wood came from the forests near the foothills of the Truong Son, the Elongated Mountains, in the province of Thanh Hoa, known for its cinnamon and cedar wood. He had the divan made and delivered to me during my seventh month of pregnancy, in anticipation of the arrival of a son.

  I, too, had expected a baby boy. The day the court’s physician confirmed my pregnancy, I ran to my window and stared triumphantly at the Face of Brutality, right into the eyes of that secret animal that had been watching me and haunting my life. I sneered at it. My son could become the future king of Annam. Heaven had answered my prayers.

  It was my maid, Mai, who first discovered my pregnancy. The round-faced and dove-eyed Mai is the only daughter of an herb doctor and is more talented, versatile, and resourceful than the average maid. She claims knowledge of astrology and astronomy, as well as principles of herbal medicine, passed to her by her learned father. She also boasts to me about her sixth sense and psychic ability.

  I remember so well the night when, in helping me change for bed, Mai began examining my eyebrows. The eyebrows of a pregnant woman, in the early stage of her pregnancy, stand up a certain way. Mai nodded quietly as she brushed my brows backward with her thumbs. She then left my boudoir to fetch her medicine box. When she returned, she removed from the box a small piece of dark green jade. She tied a red silk thread to my left wrist and connected it to the piece of jade, then pressed her thumb against the soft
skin on the inside of my elbow. She bent her head over my wrist, and listened attentively to my pulse.

  “My lady, you are very, very pregnant,” she announced.

  She asked to examine my belly. I took off my tunic without a word. I had noticed the change in my body for weeks, so Mai’s excitement didn’t surprise me. She told me to lie on my side and examined my lower abdomen from that side view. “I hear a very strong heartbeat,” she said, “as though there are two of them. Strong kicks, strong turns. I have no doubt it will be a boy, my lady.”

  She helped me up and took both of my hands in hers. “Your life will be different. You will be the mother of a prince. No more waiting.”

  Before I could react, she placed a finger on my lips. “There is so much jealousy among the royal concubines, so you must keep this a secret, until the baby is stronger and more mature. That way, no one can harm you and the baby. Only then will we summon the court physician.”

  It was a difficult pregnancy. I was sick quite often, and by my seventh month of pregnancy, I had become so big that at times I could barely move. When I looked down, I could no longer see the hemline of my smock or the green phoenix wings at the tip of my velvet slippers.

  Even the court physician expected a healthy, huge baby boy.

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest and womb when I saw my husband, standing behind the red and gold brocade curtain, turn and walk away after the midwife announced the birth of two princesses. My husband left as the maids put the crying infants into my arms, one on each side of me. So I kissed my daughters and named them Cinnamon and Ginseng, in memory of the forests of central Vietnam, where my ancestors came from.

  3. THAT PADDLE GIRL

  I remember it was a cool night like this when he first met me on the Perfume River—a meeting that ended my life as a poor orphan, a Champa girl making a living by paddling passengers across the river.

  We, the Chams, are the disappearing Hindu minority of central Vietnam. The Kingdom of Champa was officially annexed into Vietnam during the fifteenth century, and by the start of the sixteenth century, most Chams had taken on Vietnamese last names.

  My family, too, took on Vietnamese last names. Only in our minds do we hold on to what is left of those ancient, abandoned mossy temples, of those stone towers, wood and rock carvings, and the sad candle dances of our Hindu heritage.

  We are the Chams: the conquered, the extinct.

  My extended family made their living by chopping wood and searching for ginseng and cinnamon in the forests until the French came, imposed high taxes, and controlled the trade. My family then moved away from the foothills of the Truong Son Mountains and concentrated instead alongside the various rivers of central Vietnam. We needed to learn a new trade. We began making a living by paddling passengers across these rivers, as though paddling away our pain, resentment, and nostalgia for our lost kingdom. My folks settled in Kim Long, an area around the main boat dock of Hue. Typhoid fever decimated my family, just as malaria had claimed the lives of generations of Cham cinnamon and ginseng traders. Only my parents and I, their only child, survived.

  The surviving Chams of the defeated, extinct kingdom of Champa had always rotated their trade between the jungles and the water. Paddling along rivers to us was a sacred art. It was told to Cham children that after the last battle, the Viets captured the queen of Champa and transported her by boat back to the north. The exodus began in the rivers of our kingdom. Under a full moon, the captured queen, crying for the defeated, jumped into the river and drowned herself. The surviving Chams called out after her, “Mee-ey, mee-ey,” meaning “that noble woman.” The sound mee-ey entered history and was mistaken as the name of the Champa queen.

  After centuries, the mourning sound of mee-ey worked its way into the folk tunes of central Vietnam, or what’s left of the Champa Kingdom. I know these tunes very well, from the “Nam Ai” (“Mourning for the Southern Land”), to the “Nam Binh” (“Peace for the South”), and the “Mai Day” (“Mourning of the Paddle”). The wailing sounds of the pentatonic scale were heartbreakingly sad. The Chams believed Mee-Ey’s soul never left the water, so when we paddled along our rivers, we hoped to catch her spirit. It was believed that the spirit came alive particularly in moonlit nights.

  By my generation, the Chams’ resentment toward the Viets had dwindled. I grew up knowing I was Cham, the ethnic minority of central Vietnam, and part of the heritage of Mee-Ey. I accepted, too, that I was also part of the State of Annam, under the Vietnamese king, as I was told, regardless of who once claimed ownership to the land.

  My father died when I was five. From my mother, I learned to paddle our boat, carrying on the family trade. We stayed in Kim Long, upstream from the Perfume River that ran through the City of Hue. After my father’s death, my mother took me farther down to the banks of the Perfume River in the heart of the city. We moved there to attract a more exclusive clientele and to avoid the fierce competition in commercial Kim Long. I grew up on our boat, learning the art of paddling against the wind, in heat as well as in cold. I also learned the art of cooking a clay pot of rice on burned logs in the middle of the river, amid whirling wind and sparkling waves.

  When I turned twelve, my mother died, leaving me to paddle alone on the Perfume River. I did not think of her as being dead. Her spirit had soared high to join the star-filled sky of Hue and reunite with the spirit of Mee-Ey. My mother reappeared each night, shining above me and watching over me, keeping me company as I paddled. I got the strength to carry on my existence that way. None of my passengers knew where I came from. No one asked. To the inhabitants of Hue, I became the sound and sight of the Perfume River itself. To disperse the loneliness, I sang into the sky. Singing kept me going, even in the coldest night. I also learned poetry from mandarin scholars who crossed the river. I could recognize those learned men immediately: white trousers, black tunics and turbans, and in their arms, cloth bags stuffed with Chinese books, chest games, and baked clay teapots. They spoke in poems and conversed in verses. These poems, they told me, depicted the sufferings of the people of Annam under French rule. They wanted the king of Annam inside the Citadel to hear them. The French, I was told, suppressed the mandarin scholars and the people, but could not extinguish their poetry.

  Sing on, they told me, sing for the king of Annam and the whole city of Hue.

  So I sang. To the rhythm of my paddles, I sang.

  I grew up without noting the passage of time. One day, in the radiant sunshine, I leaned over the edge of my boat, which was also my only home. My skin was dark, my brows bushy, my legs long and muscular. These characteristics of my Cham blood had become more distinctive from the long days and nights of paddling, which helped accent my small waist against my full hips. With my paddles and strong arms, I learned to guard against the roving eyes and hands of male passengers. But the mandarins, who told me that they were students of Confucian thoughts, were always respectful. In their poems I found my solace, even if I did not understand the words. I pushed my chest forward, filled my lungs with air, and words burst from my mouth, my paddle cutting through the surface of that dense water. I felt full singing their words. I felt alive.

  I kept on paddling and singing until I met him. I had turned fifteen that year.

  4. THE KING OF ANNAM

  On the night of our meeting, as a fifteen-year-old paddle girl who had never encountered an aristocrat, I did not see in him the image of the king of Annam. Rather, I saw a lean young man, extraordinarily handsome in his turban and black organza tunic. His style of dress—that combination of black and white—identified him as a mandarin.

  But this young mandarin was different. It was the proud way he carried himself, looking at no one. He also carried no cloth bag, had no books or chest game or clay teapot with him. He looked not more than twenty-five years old, perhaps a little too slender and frail despite the healthy shine of his dark skin. His frailty contrasted vividly with the fierceness of his face—he had the serious, sullen, and cocky countenanc
e of a lion. I had seen the painting of a lion’s face in a banner carried by an opera troop that once boarded my boat. If I were to transform that holy animal on the poster into the image of a man, it would be this mandarin.

  He boarded the boat along with the other passengers. I paddled across, but when the others disembarked, he stayed on. He crossed the river again, back to the other side and, again, stayed on with the boat while the others disembarked. His heated eyes shone; my body felt heavy under his dark, probing gaze. I sang to calm myself, and he listened attentively, his eyes never leaving my belly and waist. By the fourth time we crossed the river, he had paid all the other customers a silver coin each for them to stay onshore. As we took off, he told me he wanted to take over the paddling, and that was how we crossed the Perfume River, bathed in the soothing breeze of the wind and the illuminating glow of the moon, intoxicated by each other’s presence. Then he gave me a gold coin. Far too much. He was touching my hands and looking into my eyes. Embarrassed, I tried to remove my hands. And then he asked me, “How would you like being married to a king?”

  I giggled and said I would love to marry a king, but no king ever took a boat across this river in the middle of the night.

  He told me his given name. “Buu Linh,” he said. It meant a holy animal, a royal one, he explained.