Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  When I touched the items, the coldness of the jade and ivory sent chills up my spine. To reach them, I would have to stand on the lacquer divan, studded with mother-of-pearl inlay, imposingly situated in front of the altar table.

  On the altar were two rosewood frames that remained empty. Ma reserved them for Aunt Ginseng and Uncle Forest. She polished the empty frames the same way she polished the dead men’s photographs. She said her sister and brother had left home.

  Either they would return one day, or they would become spirits to join the ancestral altar.

  “Why did they leave home?” I asked.

  Ma pulled me into her lap and whispered the stories to me. There was an airplane circling the air over the village Quynh Anh once, and a young village girl, friend of Auntie Ginseng, had taken out a handheld mirror she always carried in her blouse pocket. French soldiers thought she was trying to send a signal to anti-French rebels so they could shoot down the plane, so the French soldiers shot the young village girl. Aunt Ginseng saw this. She became mad. So she left home to make sure no innocent young girls would ever get shot again.

  Uncle Forest, on the other hand, left for an entirely different reason. He had been raised not only by his mother, the Mystique Concubine, but also by his adoptive father, Admiral Nguyen Tung. The old admiral died the same year Uncle Forest turned eight years old. Years later, after a devastating flood swept through the village of Quynh Anh, the family had to move the admiral’s skeleton to a new burial ground. The admiral’s remains were uncovered, and the young Forest got to hold the skull of his adoptive father in his hands. Something touched the core of his soul during the experience. He made his decision then. He left a note for both my grandmother and Ma bidding farewell, announcing that he’d be joining Auntie Ginseng somewhere in the north. He even wanted to go to Japan to study the Japanese experience of industrialization and decolonization. That was what both his biological father and adoptive father would have wanted him to do, he wrote in his note.

  The year was 1925. My Uncle Forest was fourteen.

  “What do Auntie Ginseng and Uncle Forest look like?” I asked Ma.

  “Like Lady Trieu and Thai Hoc the Patriot.”

  It was easy for a young girl to get a notion of Lady Trieu, because even the maids who couldn’t read a newspaper would talk about the gold-armored woman. It was not as easy to get acquainted with Thai Hoc the Patriot.

  “Did he look anything like Napoleon?” I asked once.

  “No, no, no, no!” Ma’s voice was shrill. “Not at all! Napoleon was French!”

  I was disappointed. Napoleon was the conqueror, the patriot, the greatest man of all men.

  Something must have clicked in Ma’s head after my question that day. She abruptly withdrew me from French Catholic school to enroll me at Lycée Dong Khanh. I had to sit through an examination first, and to the best of my recollection, I did very poorly. The maids in the house gossiped that when one was the daughter of the richest woman in Hue, one got admitted wherever one wanted to be! There, on the steps of the red brick schoolhouse called Lycée Dong Khanh, a group of older students showed me a leaflet with Thai Hoc the Patriot’s face on it. I formed my first notion of Uncle Forest then. On the leaflet appeared a shorthaired, square-faced man with a trim moustache and bushy brows, looking out grimly at me. He was no Napoleon, but he had his own appeal.

  The students told me Thai Hoc the Patriot led a revolution and died at twenty-six years of age on a French guillotine before I was born. Before he died, he said something like, “If a man does not achieve success, at least he achieves a legend.” That’s what I remembered from the tales told by the older students. In my mind, Thai Hoc the Patriot died, so he became a legend. So, to me, legend must mean death. Death was what happened to a man who led a revolution and achieved no success. Only those who succeeded lived.

  At least my matriculation to Lycée Dong Khanh helped me understand why Ma left those two frames blank. Auntie Ginseng and Uncle Forest left home to become legends. They could be dead at any time. Then, they would join the spirits that became my roots, my home. Meanwhile, I was to keep another secret. I wasn’t supposed to mention Uncle Forest or his noble mission to anyone outside the household. I did not want Uncle Forest’s enemies to capture and guillotine him like in the case of Thai Hoc the Patriot. I pledged to myself I would keep my lips sealed.

  3. WHITE MAGNOLIA

  Growing up with Ma in her ancestral house on the slope of Nam Giao also meant getting to know her magnolia tree in the front yard. It was Ma who had taken care of the tree day after day, making it grow so tall and spread its leaf-heavy branches over the roof, sprinkling white petals over the front yard. The tree became the benchmark of how far I could go back to my earliest memory of living with Ma.

  Ma said white magnolias reminded her of Ginseng. As a young girl, Auntie Ginseng often picked a magnolia bloom and placed it next to her face. She would cock her head and pretend she was being photographed like a silver-screen star of the West. The translucent white petal shone onto her young skin. And then Auntie Ginseng would take the bloom and place it next to the Mystique Concubine’s face to compare. Mother and daughter would laugh, and Ginseng would throw the bloom at Ma, asking Ma to do the same thing. Ma would refuse just to irk Ginseng. Ma called Ginseng the magnolia thrower of the house. At times, Ma said, the magnolia thrower would lick off the fresh drops of dew on the white petals.

  “Sweet, sweet, sweet,” she would claim, licking her lips.

  Ginseng said when she grew up, she would get married and have a baby girl, whom she would name Dew. Not just any Dew, but the best of Dew. Mi Suong. Beautiful Dew. Ma took Ginseng’s idea for a girl’s name and gave it to me, her own daughter. So that was the origin of my name.

  Of course, as a grown woman, Ginseng had no time for a baby because she was busy wearing golden armor, even wooden shoes like Joan of Arc. My aunt pointed her sword at the sky and rode giant elephants in the misty jungles of North Vietnam.

  I was grateful to the absentee Auntie Ginseng for having come up with such a beautiful name for me. Ma told me that before Auntie Ginseng left home to join the Revolution, she wanted Ma to get married some time and to have a daughter. Ma was to name her firstborn daughter Dew. My aunt knew that as the warrior, she would be giving up the dream of having a daughter of her own. That was the sacrifice she would have to make in order to pursue the cause for the people. My aunt wanted Ma to fulfill the dream Ginseng had to abandon. I was that dream.

  I was equally fascinated with Auntie Ginseng’s riding elephants. But occasionally, I questioned how she could throw those dainty magnolia blooms around like table tennis balls. At times, I sadly concluded that Ginseng must have had a mean streak in her to treat magnolia blooms that harshly.

  The big blooms rested tender in my hand; those ivory petals were large enough to fill a porcelain winter melon soup bowl that could feed five adults. Ma would place the blue-and-white translucent bowl out on the mossy porch to collect rainwater. Every day, she would pick a fresh bloom, severing it from its long, grainy stem with a pair of scissors. She would float the cut bloom inside the bowl and place it on the rosewood altar table. The floral scent filled up the room, lingering upon the ivory lace curtains and the edges of the dark furniture that shone with lemon juice.

  Much later, I fell in love and married a philosophy student at Sorbonne whose nom de plume was L’Espoir, the French word for his pen name “Hope.” When he brought home to me my first bottle of Christian Dior perfume from Paris, I sat dumbstruck until I could recall what the scent reminded me of: the cut magnolia blooms that permeated Ma’s altar room.

  I imagined, too, the flowers would turn into a woman’s face, smooth and white like magnolia, with painted brows like two slanting ink strokes, just like in the silk painting that hung in the altar room and supposedly captured my grandmother, the Mystique Concubine. The woman’s face that I imagined as the metamorphosis of a magnolia bloom became my notion of my grandmother, the Mysti
que Concubine of the Violet City and the matriarch of my family, a household consisting of women and no living men. Through generations, Ma said, we, the women and young girls of the ancestral house, would be bound together by that absentee woman, in her silk portrait.

  I imagined she would evaporate into a tiny stream of air, traveling so lightly from her silk portrait to the porcelain bowl. There she would then transform herself into the bloom of magnolia floating in the rainwater that smelled like the early morning dew on the perspiring glass window behind the curtains. And then, like smoke, she would curl herself out of the bowl, her long black hair floating behind her back. Like Ma, she wore white silk pajamas, the soft fabric reminding me of the rich, smooth texture of the white petals that covered the ground of our front yard.

  In that dark altar room, I imagined my grandmother would float through the dark space, her naked feet suspended slightly above the tiled floor. At times, my three dead grandfathers would also come alive, walking out of the black-and-white pictures that held their images. The emperor boy would pull my sleeves, making me bow. The two old men—a paternal grandfather and an adoptive maternal one—would approach me, placing their dry hands on my forehead and dragging their long, curled fingernails across my temples like the touch of a dry bamboo branch.

  And I would faint.

  Of course, Ma knew nothing about my fantasy. She would think I was impious.

  The fear and excitement combined made me regard the altar room with both love and awe. Most of the time, I avoided the altar room by spending my days in the front yard, drunk in the sweet smell of waxy blooms. They were mine and not just Auntie Ginseng’s little table tennis balls.

  But soon, I discovered that, just like Auntie Ginseng, I had my own mean streak.

  When the white blooms fell like rain onto the damp ground, I picked them up and placed them in a bamboo basket. I had a little shovel and, one morning, tried to replant those blooms into a flower bed that followed the half-moon shape of my bedroom window, directly underneath it.

  I wanted to create my own magnolia tree.

  In the process, I never expected to see those pitiful earthworms. At the sight of them, I threw the shovel and ran back to the house. The reddish-brown creatures were shaped like chopsticks, yet grotesquely soft and wriggling. They could crawl through the cracks between my fingers. My shovel had stabbed them in half, each half still corkscrewing through the dirt as though gasping for life.

  Inside the house, I held my dirty hands together and stared at my palms. I had seen earthworms living and dying. A tear fell into the middle of my joined hands; in my palms, I saw a clear little pond in which I could still imagine shadows of the reddish creatures wiggling in despair. Even in death, they still moved. I cried into the pond of my palms because I knew I had killed them.

  Yet I would do it again, trying to plant my tree. I had become obsessed with the idea even though I knew the planting of my dream tree had killed, and would continue to kill.

  In the only two times I met Aunt Ginseng, I never got a chance to ask the thrower of magnolia blooms why she did such a thing. What was so compelling that she had to pull a petal apart, the same way I had to stab earthworms to get to my version of a dream?

  The first time I met Aunt Ginseng, it was in the middle of an autumn night, yet the air outside was full of fog. It was the day of the “August Moon Festival” in the lunar calendar, which, under the Western calendar, occurred late in the month of September. We were supposed to get a clear, full moon.

  I had eaten lots of greasy sesame cakes during the day and woke up in the chill of the night, my eyes catching the stream of that festive moon from the open window. I was busy listening to the rumbling noises in my stomach, concentrating all of my attention on my belly. In the stillness of the night, I realized that the window was wide open. It was the fog that had gotten inside and made me sick. It had got into my belly button and given me a stomachache. I turned over on my stomach and hid my face into the pillow. From the corners of my eyes, I raised my eyelids and glanced upward at the window frame.

  Ma was standing outside the window, holding the lantern, staring back at me. Ma, standing still, behaving oddly and strangely dressed. She had on dark cotton pajamas and a funny-looking, unattractive, green hunter’s hat. Her eyes were fixed on my face, intensely, like a stranger. Her hair was divided and tightly woven into two Chinese braids, hanging on both sides of her face, protruding from the hat rim. The lantern flickered in her hand.

  I noticed she was not wearing the green jade bangle and the gold carved bracelet, which had been blessed with the holy water of the female Buddha Quan Yin at a temple. Something was not right. Ma wore that jewelry all the time, even in sleep.

  The intensity of her glare was so haunting I could not continue looking at her. I had to close my eyes again.

  And then the terror struck.

  It was not Ma at all at the window frame. It was a stranger I had never met. She had Ma’s face.

  I must have fainted for a few minutes. When I regained consciousness, I remained frozen in fear. I opened my eyes again and the first thing I saw was the empty window frame. The woman was gone.

  I heard voices coming out of the altar room, racing and competing. Ma was speaking to another woman. It must have been the stranger whom I had seen at my bedroom window.

  “She betrayed all of us,” the stranger said.

  “Don’t say that about your own mother,” Ma was pleading. It was strange to hear her voice choked and weak.

  “You and your bourgeois life, think of the sufferings of this country!”

  “But I am your flesh and blood!”

  I got out of bed and left my room. The voices became clear and clearer. I was approaching the altar room. I pushed lightly on the door, already ajar. I peeped in. The room was well lit. All lights had been turned on, and all lanterns and candles were burning.

  There were two of Ma in the room. But no, there was only one Ma. My Ma in her ivory silk pajamas, her dark long hair falling to one side, the jade bangle and gold carved bracelet circling her wrists, the velvet slippers enclosing her feet. The other woman, a replica of Ma, was everything I did not want Ma to be. If Ma was a willow tree, the other woman was a bamboo shoot. In the black pajamas and rubber sandals, she looked and acted like a foul peasant—somehow too robust, too monstrous. And she was yelling at my Ma:

  “Face up to reality! Your revered mother slept with the enemy for wealth and security…People are dying every day, and you are well fed! Why?”

  Ma’s hands covered her face.

  “You know what the irony was, sister?” the replica continued. “It was Foucault who secured my release. Without him they would have executed me along with Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, the first Vietnamese woman to join the Party in Moscow!”

  I pushed on the door and stepped in. “Stop yelling at my mother, you monster!” I screamed hate at her. “You scared me at the window!”

  The two versions of Ma turned toward me simultaneously, both standing awkwardly in front of me, as though they had been caught stealing.

  I burst out crying. The two versions of Ma stood there and watched.

  “Dew, meet your Aunt Ginseng,” Ma said softly, brushing her long fingers through my entangled hair.

  I looked at the woman who was supposed to be Auntie Ginseng. There was no gold armor. No wooden sabots. No pointed sword. Just a dark-skinned version of Ma in coarse peasant’s pajamas and an ugly hat.

  “Come here, Dew,” she said, extending her arms, her eyes softened and her voice soothing.

  “No.”

  “Don’t be sullen, Dew,” Ma said. “Your aunt has come back home for a few minutes. Just a few minutes. She is fighting a war for the good of all of us, remember, like Lady Trieu.”

  The unwelcomed auntie was approaching me. I could smell her peasant smell, like dirt and rainwater and wild cuckoos and roosters. I turned away, but she got me just in time. I struggled against her embrace but finally yielded to her wa
rm hand and amazingly soft touch.

  “Hello, Dew. I saw you sleeping from the window,” she said, her voice sturdy and friendly.

  “Where’s your gold armor?” I asked.

  Aunt Ginseng chuckled. “In here,” she said, pointing to the middle of her chest. “My gold armor is in here.”

  I looked at her face and acknowledged the resemblance. In close proximity, she was indeed my Ma. The exact same face, except the skin was coarser and darker—a shade between amber and brown sugar.

  “I’ll give you something to replace the gold armor,” she said, reaching inside her blouse pocket and displaying in her palm a pebble. “I found it in a stream near the Chinese border. I saved it for you.”

  I stared at the tiny pebble, the size of a peanut. It was a very pretty pebble, multicolored and smooth.

  “Look closely at it. It gives off golden light, see?” she said.

  I looked, and she was right. I saw the golden spark. Maybe she was right. Maybe the pebble had Lady Trieu’s gold armor in it. Maybe it was magic.

  “I love you very much,” she said. “I have to go before sunrise.”

  And then she let go of me.