Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  I did not know then that adoration, by its nature, was short-lived.

  Once again, he was gone before dawn. There was no telling when he would come back, if he would come back.

  My new situation had intimidated me, but in that situation, there was he, who had excited me beyond all expectations. Yet his disappearance every morning while I was still sleeping also brought me a terrifying sense of insecurity and discomfort.

  So against my wishes, I began the emotional ritual of waiting. Each night, my entire being was focused on the sounds I anticipated to hear at the door, signaling his arrival. The warnings given by the eunuch Son La—that I was born into a time of changes—came back nightly to haunt me:

  “Things are changing, and you must be prepared for your fate…”

  What was my fate?

  “His Royal Highness might leave you. So keep him with you as long as you can, and Heaven will grant you a son.”

  How could I obtain and secure the birth of a son?

  So, every time I got up alone, finding him gone, I faced my panic and isolation, sensing the terrible feeling that this nervous waiting game could be my fate.

  Later on, I gave that terrible sixth sense a name. When my fate was played out, in ways that I could not have predicted, I began calling that sense of calamity the Face of Brutality.

  7. THE LUXURY OF WORDS

  After a month or so of intense passion, the routines of my conjugal life with the king of Annam began to form. It was a relationship in which body movements substituted for the luxury of words. During the day, I patrolled the courtyard nervously, missing the sparkling waves of the Perfume River and the silver moon to which I used to sing the folk tunes of central Vietnam and the poems of my mandarin passengers.

  At night, his hunger for me shut off all opportunities for songs, poems, or conversations, and I responded to him as a lioness who moaned and screamed but did not speak. I knew all about his body and nothing about his mind. I became acquainted intimately with every cell of his skin and the raising and calming of his flesh and hair roots, but nothing of his thoughts.

  In the peak of my delight, discovery, and curiosity, I was already haunted by the fear of abandonment and tragedy. Lying in his arms, I could not help remembering the words of Son La, and those warnings of his about my terrible fate became the prison torturing my mind. I hung on to my king, hoping I would bear a son, as the old eunuch had advised me to do. I tore off the silk wrapping at the clicking of my king’s golden boots outside the double doors. My fierceness and passion became our bondage. The more I despaired at the thought of him leaving me the next day, the more fiercely I loved him, like a wounded, starved lioness.

  Yet the inevitable could not be avoided. Like all concubines, I was doomed to a wait.

  He was with me night after night for a while, joining and meeting my fierceness with his own, and then he would disappear for days, or at times, months. He would return as a surprise, but only for a while, and then he would again depart. Between his visits, I waited and waited, concocting all the words I would like to speak to him when he returned. When he did return, the hunger took over and I had no occasion to deliver my words.

  And then the waiting began again as his visits became even more sporadic. One day, Son La told me that it was about time for me to wait, not just for the return of the king of Annam, but eventually also for a pregnancy that could result from any such encounter. Only the right pregnancy could solidify my place in the Violet City. Under Son La’s encouragement, I began to learn the patience of counting days and nights.

  “Wait and wait patiently…”

  I didn’t need the protection of my wooden paddles against roving eyes and hands of men, as there were no men. My world consisted of chambermaids and my eunuch Son La. I could no longer sing, as there was neither sky nor river to sing to. The isolation caused me to lose my mind.

  Sometime during the process of waiting, I started screaming at night, but my heart-wrenching screams were swallowed by the four walls of my boudoir, muffled by the thickness of those brocade drapes and curtains. When my throat got hoarse, I stopped screaming and listened to the stillness of the night. The only person who knew of my hysteria was my Son La. The old man often looked at me with bewilderment, murmuring to himself that in his more than forty years of servicing the Royal Palace, he had never heard a concubine express herself this way. I would mourn and call out my lover’s name, “Buu Linh, Buu Linh,” and Son La would try frantically to silence me, cautioning me I was not supposed to call the king of Annam by his given name. I should be addressing my husband by his dynasty name, the Royal Highness Thuan Thanh. In response to the stern warning, I would disdainfully pout my lips, beat on my chest, and utter vicious words. Son La would be kneeling by my bed, confused and in despair, fearful that the guards would hear my blasphemous curses and whining.

  “What can you expect, Son La?” I sobbed. “I’m a common paddle girl!”

  Every time I passed a night without Buu Linh, I cursed against both Heaven and Earth. I even ripped a down pillow into pieces, having wetted it first with my tears. When my king did not appear for months, I hated him and wanted him dead. I shut my eyes and imagined him loving a dozen women whose fingers traveled across his brown skin when they undressed him. I pulled on my hair until the hairline around my forehead became red and raw and developed into blisters.

  In my moments of rage, Son La would massage my feet and kiss my toes to calm me down.

  “Hush, hush. You cannot say those bad words about Heaven’s son! It’s the most hideous crime. You can be sentenced to death, and all members of your extended family can be beheaded as well.”

  “But I have no family,” I sobbed. “I am an orphan. They can kill me, but I have no relatives for them to behead. In any event, it is better to die than to love a man who leaves me like this. I am imprisoned here. I can’t go anywhere.”

  “But he loves you,” Son La said quickly.

  I stopped sobbing, looking at Son La with disbelief. “How do you know?”

  “He must love you. He has not been with anyone as much as you. He has some fifty wives, mostly daughters of the ministers, who show no zest for life. You’re different. Look at you, you are full of life. After all, he found you by the Perfume River.” The old man rubbed my toe.

  “Perhaps this will make you feel better,” he said, raising my toe to his mouth and closing his lips over it.

  I did calm down. I looked at the old man’s face and felt tremendous affection for him. But he was not Buu Linh, and I was alone.

  I tumbled into the courtyard one day and found Son La moving slowly in the courtyard, his limbs shifting like branches in a slight wind.

  “What are you doing, Son La?”

  “Tai Chi. An ancient art to balance your body, soul, and spirit.” Son La stopped midway and bowed respectfully. “Move with me, my lady; it will help you,” he urged.

  I mimicked his watery circles in air. “It’s like a dance,” I said.

  “It is the freeing of the soul from the body. Breathe, my lady, breathe.”

  “Tell me more about freeing the soul,” I told Son La one night.

  “Good, my lady, I will teach you Himalayan Buddhist meditation. Again, it will help you.”

  He sat down on a rug in my boudoir, and I sat with him, imitating his posture. The exercise went on, and I lost track of time. I was surprised by the old man’s dexterity and suppleness.

  “How did you learn all of this?” I asked him.

  “I am a eunuch, my lady.” He was pressing his palms together over his head. “We have only our minds to develop. It is my greatest resource; otherwise, I would have wasted away, living inside the palace.”

  Day after day, I learned to press my palms together while pressing my heels into the ground, with Son La as my coach. As I pushed myself farther and farther into the center of the earth, my spirit began to roar, and a strong wind of energy flew up from the core of my body. Soon, Son La no longer had to suc
k my toes to keep me from screaming. I had learned the art of gathering my energy and dispersing it at the same time.

  My husband’s conjugal visits had become more and more infrequent. His absence, rather than his presence, became my way of life. I accepted my circumstances while waiting for the unknown.

  When my screaming at night fully stopped, I concluded that God had sent Son La to me to compensate for my misery inside the palace.

  8. CONFIDANTES: A LEARNED EUNUCH AND THE SHREWD CHAMBERMAID

  Son La was the oldest son of a low-level mandarin and his concubine, an opera actress. His mother, the illegitimate child of a Vietnamese man and a Cham woman, gave Son La his one-fourth Cham blood. Son La was the oldest of ten children. When the French occupied Annam, Son La’s father joined the mandarins’ army and was killed during the king’s uprising against the French in Hue.

  Opera performers and artists were classless citizens, forbidden from sitting for the mandarins’ exam, and occupied the bottom of society. As such, they were free from Confucian protocols, although they frequently portrayed characters that epitomized Confucian ethics. Off her stage, Son La’s mother was an outcast from society, a woman of Cham descent, concubine and widow of a poor man, a washed-out actress who had prematurely aged because of poverty and childbirth. After his father was murdered, Son La’s mother no longer had the health and good looks to carry on the life of a performer. She became a curtain drawer for small opera troops performing in faraway villages, and her ten children were dragged around with her to do odd jobs. During rice harvests, they learned to pick up scattered rice dropped onto the dirt road from farmers’ baskets for their dinner. Son La passed his early childhood in hunger and yearning for a decent meal with plenty of rice and meat. As a child, he had already devised his own method to conquer hunger. He let his mind drift to the sky and immersed himself in thoughts that he imagined filling the cavern of his belly.

  When Son La turned twelve, he was castrated so he could begin a career with the royal court. Manhood went in exchange for better subsistence and a means to feed the many mouths of an extended family, all sharing the last name of a poor mandarin. Son La insisted on telling me that becoming a eunuch was his personal choice, for he knew he could gain Confucian knowledge living among the aristocracy. On the day of his castration, his family gathered at the ceremony, where a specialist summoned for the occasion numbed Son La’s flesh with herbs. After the procedure two men carried him and ran around in a circle fifty times to help stop the bleeding and ease the pain. The ceremony was considered an ennobling act.

  The plan went well and Son La’s goals were achieved. Son La soon became the sole supporter of the extended family, feeding not only his nine siblings and aging mother but also his father’s first and second wives and their children. When he was assigned to me, Son La was already fifty-five years old, an eager, attentive old man with the innocent grin of a young boy. As a eunuch, he was wise, careful, and loyal. A genuinely noble quality existed in him that was lacking among the petty personnel inside the royal court. I did not fully recognize this quality until much later, after my chambermaid, Mai, had joined me in the West Palace and together my pair of servants introduced me to the wonders of learning.

  It was Son La who brought Mai into royal life.

  “Let me present to you, my lady, this very smart young girl,” Son La said to me one day, pointing to the dove-eyed girl who had followed him into my boudoir. She was a chubby girl, quite tall and large-boned for a Vietnamese woman, yet surprisingly swift and animated. Dressed as a royal maid, she smiled at me and immediately lowered her head, as they had all been taught to do. Her smile remained on her full lips, and I began to see it as a smirk. I frowned with displeasure.

  “She is not your ordinary maid, my lady.” Son La read my mood and immediately came to the young girl’s defense. “She is the only daughter of an herb doctor and teacher in my village. The scholar failed the Confucian exam only because he rebelled against the examiners’ rules. This fourteen-year-old girl knows how to read and compose poetry better than a mandarin.”

  “Poetry?” I asked, arching my eyebrows, although secretly my heart lifted as I remembered my favorite mandarin passengers on the Perfume River.

  “Yes, my lady, poetry,” the girl said. And then she began to speak in verses.

  “Did you learn those words from the mandarins who travel the Perfume River?” I asked, unable to conceal my excitement.

  “No, my lady. I learned them from my father’s books.”

  “Books?”

  I did not know a woman could learn from books.

  “You, too, my lady, could learn to read.” She raised her eyes to meet mine and was no longer bowing her head.

  For the rest of my life, I would always remember Mai as I first saw her that day in my boudoir. I could never forget the surreptitious glance and mischievous smile of the young girl who did not always bow her head as she was taught to do and who introduced me to my first Confucius book. Son La had brought Mai into my secluded life, another blessing. Together they uncovered my thirst for learning, and took turns teaching me how to read “chu Han,” Vietnamese characters adopted from Chinese. It was a slow, elaborate, and frustrating process, but I eventually succeeded, having dedicated to ancient characters and calligraphy the same passion I had dedicated to paddling.

  9. THE PREGNANCY

  Inside the Citadel it was the head eunuch who announced nightly where His Royal Highness had decided to spend the night. The head eunuch was a very old man, as old as the walls of the concubines’ courtyards. He walked slowly, his back bent almost into an arch, his eyes to the ground. He talked to us, the women of the Violet City, without looking at us. Slow and thrifty with words, he never said more than what he needed to say. When the sun went to sleep behind the elongated shape of the Truong Son Range that separated Hue from Laos, we, the lonely women of the Violet City, leaned against the carved pillars under our curved roofs, looking out to our respective courtyards. We waited for the lantern that signaled the arrival of the head eunuch, who always took time with his announcement, as though to tease us. Yet he delivered his words with a stern face, and there was no teasing in the pair of eyes so dry and dull they reminded me of cracked earth.

  It was an autumn night, and the lotuses must have blossomed fully all around the Violet City when the head eunuch announced the arrival of the king of Annam in my courtyard. As in the old days, my royal husband entered my boudoir with his entourage, dismissed the woman dressers, and reached for me with the same hunger as during our first night as husband and wife. But it had been a long time, so I received him calmly, with control. I finally pulled away from him and retreated to the farthest end of the lacquer bed. There, I remained reclining placidly while he disrobed. I observed the same lover in a different light, as a different woman.

  That night, the lioness in me cooled and transformed into hissing steam. I savored him in the steam of my soul, one that had known sorrow and the impermanent nature of things. In many ways, I had been reborn and reformed. The young teen lioness had matured into a calm, poised woman who, like all women of the Violet City, learned in her desolate life that she could love and belong to one man, yet share him with hundreds of other young, beautiful, and obedient women. Every night there was a happy, blossoming woman and many weeping ones. Some of us kept waiting and others gave up, as our youth and beauty faded away, along with our capacity for anguish.

  I had long known that the women of the Violet City had taken an immediate dislike to me due to my Cham blood and common background and that they had cheered when the king of Annam stopped returning to my boudoir. My lack of sophistication had helped me survive the vicious comments of my peers. Quite often, I did not even understand their mockery. And I was lucky to have a protective eunuch and a clever chambermaid, who both helped shield me from misfortunes and the snares of royal protocols.

  That night, when the head eunuch’s announcement was heard over all concubines’ courtyards—th
at His Royal Highness would soon arrive in my boudoir—I knew the surge of jealousy would be revived among my competitors in the Violet City. The comfort of his arms that night did not soothe away my knowledge of possible danger, even though the cells of my skin danced under his fingertips.

  He had shuddered into a long-lasting rest with his perspiring face buried in the stream of my hair when I gathered all of my courage and spoke. I spoke casually of the sufferings of the warrior’s wife who turned into a limestone statue because of her wait, and he raised his head to look at my face. Panic appeared in his eyes.

  “What are you suggesting, woman?”

  I instinctively covered my lips with my hand and began whispering, not knowing why the secretive manner was called for. I recited to him the poetry of the mandarins who had traveled my river, wanting me to convey to the king of Annam the sufferings of his people. With Son La and Mai’s help, I had learned the meanings of those words. They described the responsibility of Heaven’s son to stop the sufferings of his populace, including the wait of those longing individuals, which could harden human flesh into stone. I was thinking solely of myself, my own longing and despair. I wasn’t sophisticated enough then to think of Annam.