Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  It took six months before our front and back yards blossomed with new beds of flowers. By the time the flowers bloomed, I overheard my mother tell the old man that soon the butterflies would come to land. She wanted to plant the violet French pensées and the blue Forget-me-nots, especially for me.

  Planting those flowers in Hue would be a difficult task because those species of flowers needed the cooler climate of the highlands, the old man pointed out. The difficult did not deter my mother. “Those tiny flowers will be nice for Si when she grows up,” my mother said. “She can put them inside her scrapbook. It’s the kind of things girls want to do.”

  At night, I began to dream of chasing butterflies and picking violet and blue flowers out of my mother’s flower beds. I ran wild in Mother’s garden, even in the middle of a dream.

  During weekdays I often took an afternoon nap after school, and when I got up, Grandma Que would feed me an afternoon snack, usually a French flan floating in dark, caramelized syrup, and then I would ride my bike and Grandma Que would walk along to accompany me. Together we traveled slowly down one of those slopes of Nam Giao, on Princess Huyen Tran Street, along the bank of that small, dark green stream. We passed quiet green areas and stately looking villas until Grandma Que signaled it was time to go back. On the way back to the house, we had to go up the slope, so she would push my bike, and I would put my feet up on the bike frame, almost to the steering wheel, no longer pedaling, laughing my six-year-old laugh. The first thing I smelled as we approached the villa was the sweet, overpowering fragrance of the white magnolias. Grandma Que said white magnolias often housed the spirits of beautiful women. The soft white blooms resembled a beautiful woman’s face.

  During those walks, Grandma Que also spoke to me. All those exotic phrases and concepts sounded so fascinating simply because they came from her heart-shaped lips.

  “Oan chi nhung khach tieu phong, ma xui phan bac nam trong ma dao,” she said. It is no use to lament, those rose-cheeked, ill-fated women of the East, she explained. That was why the Mystique Concubine was so unhappy with her life as a royal concubine and encouraged her children to join the Revolution to challenge Heaven’s mandate. Of her three children, Grandma Que, as the oldest, had to stay home to take care of what constituted the family’s heritage.

  “Concubine…what’s a concubine? Revolution…what is a revolution?” I kept asking, and she kept telling me to wait until I grew up a little more. Meanwhile, she pushed my bike by the saddle, up the slope, against the wind.

  Before we entered the house, we would stand in front of the gate watching the sunset. A gust of cold air caressed my limbs when the reddish color of the late afternoon extinguished over the tiled rooftop, and darkness gradually spread upon the sparkling stream across the street and on top of all those green trees. And in that changing color of the end of day, Grandma Que would tell me stories of the Vietnamese princesses from ancient times. Five hundred years ago, Princess Huyen Tran went south to marry the Champa king so Vietnam could gain two provinces, in which lay the city of Hue. And that was why they named the street of our house after the princess, Huyen Tran Cong Chua. Two thousand years ago, Princess Mi Nuong loved the singing voice of an ugly fisherman and could not marry him. She could not bring herself to love the ugly man, just his voice. He, on the other hand, fell in love with her, the real Mi Nuong, and when he died of lovesickness, his heart crystallized into a piece of jade. The villagers carved it into a teacup and presented it to the princess as a gift. Saddened, she shed her tears into the teacup. At the bottom of the teacup appeared the lonely fisherman, singing his heart to her. The cup then shattered into a thousand pieces, signifying his broken heart.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Grandma Que explained that the fisherman’s heart was broken because he loved so much and received so little in return.

  I remembered becoming dazed just watching Grandma Que’s serene facial expression. I saw how her eyes had become so remote. She was looking straight into the sun that had turned violet, telling me a day had ended. When the sun died, its reddish color faded, and one could look into the sun without hurting one’s eyes, she said. When I pulled on the corner of her blouse, she shrugged slightly, removed her eyes from that violet horizon, and squeezed my hand. She told me Princess Mi Nuong was sad because she had expected perfection—that beautiful singing voice of a man she could never marry. Yet, the man’s face did not match the perfection of his voice.

  I learned then that perfection could be found in the singing voice.

  4. ANDRÉ FOUCAULT AND HIS BAUDELAIRE

  When you were twenty years old,

  I was just born.

  When you turned forty,

  I reached my glorious twenties.

  I never thought the Twist song of my childhood could have foretold André’s arrival in the summer of 1961 in Hue.

  André Foucault materialized for me as the image of an angel. An angel, to me, was the product of wild imagination combined with the bits and pieces I had learned about God and Jesus Christ from Catholic prep school. I learned the contours of an angel the same way I learned the lovely French language—with the paradoxical mixture of fascination and detachment I usually held toward any Western product thrust into my life in Vietnam.

  At school, the nuns made it clear that angels came from the sky. I was reminded of a nightingale that flapped her wings every time I sang—an image so pure, so far-reaching, so ethereal, so beautiful it could not exist for very long in mundane life, like that fleeting moment when my voice reached the high la note, then cracked or faltered. Angels and André fell under the same category as the nightingale that represented the fleeting possession of beauty in my singing. These precious things came into my life to deposit the silt of memory, and when I blinked my eyes, they were gone for good.

  The day after my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up in my Manhattan apartment alone in my bed, the urge to sing straining my lungs to bursting, yet I was unable to make the sound. André and Hue and those childhood performances and singing lessons all seemed so far away. My mind became my own Perfume River. On this bank of the river were America, Manhattan, law, and a jailhouse of memory; on the other bank were Vietnam, Hue, André, and my urge to sing.

  I got out of bed that day and celebrated my birthday with the malaise of an aging dame. I tumbled to the bathroom, looked into the mirror, and found nostalgia in a pair of forlorn, ebony eyes. I saw a stranger’s mouth that had ceased to laugh and when pulled into a forced smile, had lost any radiance of youth.

  I bent my head over the sink, seeing the rich brown eyes of André and hearing the words of Baudelaire. Ma douleur, donne-moi la main…Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l’Orient, entends, ma chère, entends la Douce Nuit qui marche… I saw my six-year-old self lying on my back with one arm crossing my forehead, one leg up and my toes wiggling, drawing circles onto the misty air. The circles formed words of Baudelaire: douleur for pain; L’Orient for my home; la Douce Nuit for my Night; linceul for my mourning cloth for the angel who had departed. Pain, give me your hand. And, like a mourning cloth training toward the Orient, listen, my dear, listen to the footsteps of Lady Night.

  At the dawn of a Manhattan day, I could hear the traffic on Fifth Avenue. In broad New York City daylight, I was listening to my Night, to the quietude that carried its own sound. Oh, my Night. Her sweet scent fell all over me. The Night spread and carried with her the words I had written onto the air with my wiggling toe when I was a child. André’s words. Those words blossomed into Baudelaire’s flowers of evil, his “Fleurs du Mal.” Decades later, I folded and unfolded corners of my soul and filled it with those same words. I had to see you again, my memory. Childhood turned into dreams, with symbols of beauty stuck in a surreal corner of the mind, becoming spots of pain. André and Baudelaire, inseparable in my memory of Vietnam, taught me the meaning of pain. Oh my, my, my. I could stop breathing right at that moment and still hear words.

  I started to think of myself as a woma
n who housed in her soul the myths of Indochina. Stories told by elderly women bound to me with blood ties thicker than fate. Up, up the ladder of the blood ties, and their stories told to me all became my own. Mysteries crystallized in my heart and made me into the keeper of memory.

  At thirty-five years of age, I had become thousands of years old. As old as all those myths from ancient Vietnam.

  Wrapping a woolen shawl over my shoulders, I rode the elevator down to the building lobby and walked the streets, my head flooded with memories of those hot summer nights in Vietnam and images of a beautiful man separated from me, not only by an ocean but also by twenty years of age. A man who had viewed my mother’s tropical flowers in Vietnam as his Fleurs du Mal.

  I stopped at a coffeehouse, smelling fresh bagels and blueberry muffins. I heard from the radio’s classical station Beethoven’s “Elegischer Gesang,” Opus 118. “Sanft wie du lebtest hast du vollendet, zu heilig für den Schmerz! Kein Auge wein’ ob des himmlischen Geistes Heimkehr. Sanft, sanft wie du lebtest hast du vollendet.” As gently as you lived, have you ended, too holy for grieving! No eye weeps, while your heavenly spirit returns home. Gently, gently as you lived, have you finished.

  The sounds of Beethoven became the mourning for the departure of a noble spirit. I mimed the German lyric but could not sing, although the sound continued in my head. The sound chilled me and made me bend. I held my stomach in pain. Oh, André.

  5. BIRTHDAY IN HUE

  In the summer of 1961, all my mother’s work in the yard was completed in time for my sixth birthday party, thrown for me in her newly landscaped garden. The kids at my French school, together with my former friends from the Phu Cam complex and children of our neighbors on Princess Huyen Tran Street, were all invited. I had never had a party like that before. My mother placed chairs and benches all over the front yard and arranged freshly cut summer flowers on a serving table full of my favorite food: sticky rice, syrup drinks, and all kinds of Vietnamese rice flour cakes and French sweets like gâteaux au rhum, bonbons, petits-beurres, and choux à la crème.

  My father had tied colorful balloons to all the trees. I was busy blowing a balloon. When I looked up, I saw a tall, brown-haired man walking through the front gate toward me. He was one of those Frenchmen from Paris Match, walking out of the magazine. He moved underneath the shade of the magnolia tree, his shoulders slightly tilting to one side to avoid the drooping branches. Like Santa Claus, he carried a doll and a big bag. For a moment I thought the French nuns’ angel was descending upon my life, bringing with him lots of toys, including French dolls with golden hair, who could sing and speak small French phases in a whisper.

  He continued crossing the front yard where the kids were playing, the only European, lost yet standing out, towering amid a bunch of Vietnamese children and adults, a lean, muscular frame and broad shoulders under an ivory cotton shirt. Even with the tan, he was lighter than we were. I noticed those deeply set eyes and the delicate bone structure that defined the high bridge of his nose, bony cheeks, and square jaw. From my corner, I ran up to him, craning my neck to look up at his face. I noticed, too, a dimple in his bluish chin. (I found out much later that such a bluish shade was the trademark of a well-shaved man.)

  At that tender age, I knew he was beautiful. Like pictures of men wearing trench coats in Aunt Y-Van’s Paris Match.

  “Je m’appelle Si,” I said, proudly introducing myself. Cute Si, poupée Si, six-year-old coquettish Si, as everyone in my family had described me. Si. Si. Si. Like the French word for a note on the piano.

  “Enchanté, mademoiselle,” he said with a smile and a sparkle in his brown eyes. “Je m’appelle André.” He had just called me “miss,” as though I were an adult.

  “You are…so tall,” I added, in what I thought was perfect French.

  He bent and looked down closely at me, a look of surprise as though he had not expected to see me so close to him. His irises were pure chocolate. They smiled at me under thick lashes.

  There was something else in his eyes, I thought. A sense of recognition. Much, much later, in Paris, he told me it was the recognition of a treasure long lost: he saw in me that day the eyes of L’Indochine. My tall angel put down the bag of toys, picked me up, and kissed me on both cheeks. He handed me the doll, telling me there were more in the bag. I touched his face, its cool smoothness reminding me of an orange with the finest of peels, silky to my fingertips. He smelled so nice, like soap, candies, lemon, a slight touch of cough syrup, and something else, too. It was a scent I couldn’t identify, so different from the cinnamon scent emanating from the mandarin collar of Grandma Que, so distinctive from the fragrance of white magnolias that permeated the air. Only much later, well into womanhood, did I discover it was the smell of a freshly bathed, well-shaved man.

  “Elle est très jolie,” he said as he turned to my father. Of course I was beautiful, I thought. Unlike my baby sister Mi Chau, who was almost bald, I was Si, a child with thick, long, black hair like a woman. Grandma Que went to great lengths to make sure my hair was beautiful. She sprinkled cinnamon essence on me. She boiled the boket nut and dipped my hair in its broth every day. (She had been using the same shampooing method on her own hair all her life, and at her age, her salt-and-pepper hair was still shining, falling to her kneecaps.) Whatever the broth did to my hair, it grew so long and thick my mother was afraid I would trip over it. Everyone in the family, except Grandma Que, was concerned I would not grow and would remain a midget because my hair had gotten too heavy for my body weight. Every day I had to get up at least one hour ahead of school bus time so Grandma Que could braid my hair and tie it with a bow.

  My mother had moved the party to the backyard garden and had put some straw mats down on the grass. André volunteered to be my pony. All of the kids lined up, including my sister Mi Chau, but I got most of the rides. Everybody else was jealous. There was a moment in the pony game when André, my pony, turned over on his back to take a rest. I was climbing onto him. I sat on his chest, laughing and laughing. I spread my legs, wiggled myself down to his stomach, and laughed some more. The next thing I remembered was a tremendous sense of affection when I was looking down onto his face. His hands were resting on my waist, and he was smiling at me. I could see the rose tip of his tongue and his shiny white row of teeth. Instinctively, I bent down to kiss the curvy corner of his mouth. When I looked up, his moving eyelashes reminded me of the evening butterflies hovering over my mother’s flowers in the twilight of sunset. The day butterflies were colorful, but the evening butterflies were usually larger, in a somber brown or black. They gathered in the garden only at sunset or at night.

  Trying to catch the butterflies, I touched his lashes, and he closed his eyes.

  “Your lashes are curly, unlike mine.” I touched my own lashes.

  For a moment, André opened his eyes, and the evening butterflies fluttered their wings.

  “Oui, c’est çà, ma chérie. C’est la différence entre l’Est et l’Ouest.” Where was East and where was West, and why did they have to be different? I toppled down off him and began to arrange my newly acquired dolls on his torso. I put my tiny hand underneath his cotton shirt, feeling the light brown fuzzy hair on his chest, his firm stomach muscle, and warm skin.

  And then I remembered my old doll. The old doll looked like a miniature version of André.

  Before André arrived with his selection of dolls, I had only one Western doll, given to me by Grandma Que’s French physician. I rushed inside the house to fetch this old doll, eager to return for fear André would disappear. It was a boy doll, with short brown hair, dressed in a dark blue shirt and matching shorts. His plastic lashes could not move like André’s. He carried a water bottle on a strap, and I often filled it with water, so his shirt was perpetually wet. I had had him for so long.

  When I showed him to André, I told him that even though the new dolls were prettier, the boy would always be my favorite.

  “Il te ressemble, c’est un garçon,�
�� I said, pointing at André, who was a boy like my doll, addressing him with the informal pronoun.

  “Oui, moi, je suis un garçon,” he said, acknowledging he was a boy.

  “Et moi, je suis une fille, avec les cheveux longs.” I pointed at my long hair. Boys, like my old doll, had short hair and wore shorts. Girls, like me, wore dresses or silky pantaloons and had long hair.

  “Et toi, une fille très jolie.” He stroked my long hair, confirming I was a beautiful girl.

  The tender moment evaporated when Grandma Que appeared at the door opening onto the garden holding a fan, her silhouette edged against the bamboo curtain that dangled in the wind. Her arrival meant it was time to blow the candles and cut the cake. I would be singing a solo, “Au Clair de la Lune.” In the last rays of the sun before dusk, Grandma Que stood still, staring down at the reclining André, who was trying to curl himself upward as I struggled to hold him down with my hands.