All during the party, Grandma Que sat quietly on a rosewood chair, casting her eyes away from the guests, who raved about her shrimp balls. She did not speak. Something was about to happen. I just knew. I had learned to read the mood of the dignified woman who helped raise me.
7. FAREWELL TO HUE
Toward the end of the party, my father made an important announcement to all of his friends. This was not just a Christmas party. It was a celebration. Also a farewell party.
My father had accepted a tenured position with the Faculty of Letters, University of Saigon. André, too, would be leaving Hue to return to France to practice law. Dominique could not stand the heat and humidity of Indochina. My mother was right. Vietnam to André was just a fad.
My fate was decided, too. Sœur Josephine had written a letter of recommendation. In Saigon, I would audition for Truong Quoc Gia Am Nhac Kich Nghe, The National Institute of Music and Drama. I would also be taking private singing lessons with a French Italian singer, Madame Misticelli, the only opera teacher in Vietnam, and a personal friend of Sœur Josephine.
It meant we were all moving to Saigon. My father announced his teaching would start in January of the new calendar year. So we would be packing right after Christmas.
People were still talking, congratulating my father on his new teaching appointment. Grandma Que stood up from her rosewood chair. She did her usual thing—letting go of her hair and rolling it up again, in one definite motion. But nobody noticed her. She left the room. I stood alone.
My temples began to hurt. The headache came on as a result of overwhelming emotions. I recognized years later that the painful moment must have been the first time I experienced, as an innocent child, the nostalgia of loss. The entire evening and its events had all been too much for me: the arrival of Dominique, our forthcoming departure from Hue, and my separation from Grandma Que. It had always been understood that Grandma Que would never leave the family altar, the house in Nam Giao, or her City. Even at that tender age, I had accepted so clearly that she had chosen to be the keeper of all that which defined her heritage—everything that bonded her to Hue. She had made clear to me that if Mi Chau and I ever left Hue, she would simply wait for us to return.
I ran after Grandma Que into the garden. Of course, nobody noticed our absence from the party. In the clear, starry night, the moon had come out, and Grandma Que stood looking at its bluish shape.
I heard footsteps and turned around. André had noticed our leaving the party and had followed us.
I reached out for him, and he took me in his arms. I began to cry, relieved to let out all those tears that had been suppressed since Schumann’s “Romance.”
Holding me, André spoke to Grandma Que in his French-accented Vietnamese: “It is a beautiful moon, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Reminds me of the Perfume River.”
“What do you know about the Perfume River?”
“I used to walk along the banks almost daily. Your mother once paddled a boat across the Perfume River and met her Prince Charming that way. I study the lives of your ancestors.”
“You mean, the life of my mother?” Grandma Que’s face was lit with rage. “From what I can remember of Mr. Sylvain Foucault, you don’t look like him.”
“I look like my mother, an Italian American. My grandfather said I had his passion, even though we didn’t look alike.” André said this slowly, his voice careful and sad.
“Madame, I would like to talk to you.”
I looked up at his face and, under the moonlight, recognized the serious expression that characterized those moments when he drifted into a different world and ceased to be my playmate. He kept talking with a tone of urgency, despite Grandma Que’s apparent irritation. His French accent and choppy Vietnamese made it hard for me to follow him.
“You see, as a child, I spent time with my grandfather in his old age, during his dying days, listening to him talk, at a time when he no longer had any interest in life but to reflect upon his deeds in Indochina.”
“How noble of him. And what did you find out, may I ask?”
“You have a twin sister. When your father was exiled, your mother was with child, so you also have a brother, madame.”
Grandma Que’s twin sister and baby brother? My mother’s Auntie Ginseng and Uncle Forest. Grandma Que never talked about them, but she must have loved them, like I loved my sister Mi Chau and my infant brother, Phi Long. I was keenly interested.
I looked toward Grandma Que. Still gazing at the moon, she said, coldly, “I don’t need you to tell me what I have, Monsieur Foucault.”
“But you must understand why your mother did what she did. About the postcards…”
“Please stop, Monsieur Foucault. You have no right to talk about the postcards.”
Postcards? What postcards? I was getting confused. When André had left for France, he had promised to send me a postcard—scenery of the beautiful cafes of Paris, the river Seine, and the garden of Luxembourg. I tapped on André’s arm, but he earnestly continued on, ignoring me. I noticed he was unconsciously making a fist.
“Forgive me, but I can’t stop, madame. If you didn’t know, then I must let you know. Your sister and brother both left home and joined Cach Mang, ultimately Ho Chi Minh’s Revolution, the Vietminh, at an early age.”
The Revolution? I had heard the big word, Cach Mang, from Grandma Que herself. I grabbed André’s hand and tried to interrupt him to ask questions, but again he was oblivious to me.
“My grandfather was not just an enemy,” he said, “or just a business partner of your mother, madame. Your mother wanted to secure the repatriation of your father and the restoration of the monarchy. She knew that my grandfather, the résident supérieur of Annam, could protect your twin sister and younger brother, the young revolutionists jailed in Hoa Lo. My grandfather could set them free.
“And he did just that, madame: he secured their safety as best he could, a very dangerous task, an act of treason against France. You should know, too, that back in France, he died a lonely and unhappy man, and I hope that after so many years, you can find the compassion in your heart to forgive him.”
“At least your grandfather died of old age,” Grandma Que said coldly, still looking away from André, toward the silver moon. “He lived his long and comfortable life. I won’t tell you how I had to bury my loved ones, Monsieur Foucault. Untimely deaths. Without proper burials, without coffins. I was not even able to procure some of the bodies to bring them home.”
“It was a very long war, madame. My grandfather and your parents were all extraordinary individuals. They had to do what they had to do. Can you at least try to understand what your mother had to do when she was alive?”
Grandma Que raised her arms and removed the ivory comb, her hair cascading down her side. “Who are you to tell me? You understand nothing about my mother.”
“Perhaps I don’t, but, madame, I do understand how you feel. Things must have been very hard for you, and I’m terribly sorry.”
Grandma Que was staring at him steadily. I thought I saw the fiery reflection of stars in her eyes. “Why are you, a Foucault, saying sorry? What for? You are not part of my family, and as a Foucault, you are not entitled to feel what I feel.”
After all the guests had left, my father began discussing the move. Grandma Que sat silently in the rosewood chair all throughout the discussion, until finally she spoke.
“I just want to know one thing, master.” Grandma Que always addressed my father formally, ong giao, as schoolteacher and master of the house. “Will the girls have a piano?”
“They will share one, yes.” My father removed his glasses to clean them, disturbed.
“Will there be a housekeeper?”
“Not on my teaching salary.”
“Will the children go to French or Vietnamese school?”
“I will decide that later, Mother,” my father replied, his voice rising.
“Will my daughter
and grandchildren come back to this ancestral house, one day? Your wife is my only child.”
“My job is in Saigon, and I doubt if we will come back to Hue, Mother.”
I was scared. No one had spoken to Grandma Que in that tone of voice. My mother, unhappy wife and daughter, looked pleadingly at her unhappy husband and unhappy mother-in-law. I sat in a corner twisting a strand of hair, never having felt this sad before.
Grandma Que got up to leave. “I’ll leave so you can discuss your move with your wife.” She let go of her hair and rolled it up again. “I would like my cinnamon log to go with Si and Mi Chau,” she said, decisively.
“That won’t be necessary, Mother,” my father protested. “Si and Mi Chau are children. They have no use for your cinnamon log.”
“The cinnamon log is meant to protect my granddaughters. They should take it with them wherever they go.” Grandma Que sat down again. She was just about to turn her hair loose again from the ivory comb.
“If we need cinnamon for cooking, we’ll go to the store,” my father said firmly.
“You don’t understand, Master, this is a very, very old tree—”
“Then it needs to stay with you all the more,” my father said, interrupting her.
I grew sadder and sadder in my little corner.
“The tree belongs to the girls, and they need it,” Grandma Que said firmly.
“I’ll decide what they need. They are my daughters!”
“And may I remind you, ong giao, they are also my granddaughters.” Grandma Que stood up. She closed her lips, rerolled her hair, and left the room.
8. SAIGON
In the years to come, I thought of life in Saigon as transient, expecting the day we would all be returning to Hue. My mother shared my feelings, although we never openly discussed our longing.
In 1966, Saigon to me was just a noisy beehive. Having been mesmerized by the tall André and having secretly admired the statuesque Dominique as the epitome of classic beauty found in Paris Match, I viewed my dainty Grandma Que and her cinnamon-scented villa as the only Vietnamese aesthetic counterpart of Western exotic grandeur. So, to me, the Saigonese were simply little men slouching in their cotton shirts, little women swaying in their colorful ao dai tuniques or cotton print pajamas, and little children twisting their rubber sandals on paved sidewalks, swinging their plastic briefcases containing their violet ink bottles and scrapbooks with preprinted lines. I saw none of the elegant image of French “Cochinchine,” that “gem of the Far East,” or “Paris of Asia” as the adults had referred to their capital city.
The only thing impressive about Saigon was its magnificent downtown. It overwhelmed me. My mother explained that the French colonists who built Cochinchine must have attempted to incorporate certain features of central Paris into Saigon. But the hot and humid Asian city, bathed all year round either in dust particles dancing in burning sunshine or unexpected tropical monsoon rain, did not exactly turn out to be a miniature Paris, even though the French touch permeated the ambiance of various districts of Saigon, most notably the Catinat downtown district. A giant clock highlighted the facade of the Ben Thanh market, a two-storied shopping galleria stretching through several blocks of downtown Saigon. The landmark clock watched over the weaving traffic on a multilaned boulevard, bordered by tall trees and rooftop nightclubs bearing fancy French names—from the Rex, the Au Chalet, the Crystal Palace to, most notably, the ice cream parlor Pôle Nord, the North Pole, a favorite hangout of Saigonese youths. Once in a while, either my father or André would bring Mi Chau and me there for ice cream.
A white, French-domed opera house occupied one part of what was known as Rue Catinat under French colonization. The opera house was used by the South Vietnamese government as its parliament house. At the other end of the former Boulevard Charner was Saigon’s Hotel de Ville, City Hall, an ornate, canary yellow structure decorated with distinctive white moldings, sea-horse and angel motifs, typifying French-built architecture. To the left of the opera house was the more than one-hundred-year-old Continental Hotel—a square, white, elegant structure with its ornate French facade, glass windows, and long marble corridor. The traffic of the former Boulevard Charner, separated by a median on which were situated dozens of souvenir shops and busy little kiosks, reminded the French-speaking Saigonese and nostalgic French colonists of the Champs-Élysées.
But perhaps the colonists and the Saigonese fashion-conscious crowd were all dreaming, since at best Boulevard Charner would only be an Asia substitute. The small scale of the shops, the lack of glitz, not to mention the Asian-styled noise and petty unkemptness, took away from Saigon any illusion of Parisian grandeur or romanticism. Yet, the area bore all of the warmth, coziness, glamour, and endearment that made Saigon lovely and unforgettable to its millions of inhabitants.
Not to me, in 1966, when my heart and soul were still with Hue. I disliked Saigon and secretly blamed it for my separation from Grandma Que and her violet world. In comparison to violet Hue and its green River Huong, Saigon was a crude, polluted gray cloud full of chaotic lines and dust particles.
My glimpse of the supposedly fashionable downtown Saigon was always short-lived. I accompanied my mother on those rare shopping sprees for special occasions such as New Year, or birthday celebration dinners where the children were given filet mignon, French onion soup, buttery gateaux studded with raisins, and crisp apples and pears that were imported and wrapped in soft white tissue paper. Unlike Mi Chau, I did not care much for filet mignon or apples, and would rather have traded them for com tâ’m, crushed white rice sprinkled with fish sauce and garnished with Vietnamese bacon bits.
In the early days of our lives in Saigon, my mother talked incessantly to Mi Chau and me about Grandma Que’s villa in Hue and its garden. In Saigon, we lived in a barren townhouse in the back of a small alley. Saigon eroded her dreams, my mother said. It had taken away her only hobby, gardening.
“Why do you like gardening so much, Mother?” I frequently asked her.
Most of the time, she did not answer. Once, only once, she dreamily said, “Comme les fleurs de lys que j’ai cueillies dans le jardin de mes pensées.” Her beds of lilies became the gardens of her thoughts.
In those moments, my mother and I became the best of friends, and I would gently place my head onto her arms, listening to her talk. My mother spoke of the checkerboard marble floor of Grandma Que’s villa, its high ceilings with molded corners and green French shutters. She talked of the beautiful shapes and colors of roses, daisies, lilies, sunflowers, and other exotic flowers of the Far East. She talked of the chimes that ornamented the front and back porches, dangling in the wind, making their clear, reedy music.
Every night, before bedtime, my mother wrote letters to her woman friends in Hue, the female teachers of Lycée Dong Khanh. She read her letters out loud for me to hear, as though she were delivering a monologue before an audience, describing the beautiful time of her life in Hue and her longing to go home. “I am so afraid I will never see flowers or a garden again in these filthy alleys of Saigon. To escape, I turn to poetry and pretend to garden with words.”
When my father entered the room, she would stop the monologue and pretend to read a newspaper.
My mother considered life in Saigon too tough for her leisurely, bourgeois style and complained that the power of the American dollar was uprooting tradition and the identity of the Vietnamese middle class.
I was too young then to understand the political role of the Americans, yet old enough to get a picture of our economic life in Saigon, painted vividly by my frustrated mother. She constantly stressed the need to be frugal. At lunches and dinners, she complained to my father, and I quietly listened. Our family, as well as other civil servants, schoolteachers, and families of combat soldiers, had to struggle to survive the skyrocketing inflation of Saigon on meager monthly salaries. The cyclo drivers and maids who rushed into the city from war zones occupied the bottom of the wage-earning chart. On the other hand, if
one worked for or did business with the Americans, salaries were much higher and, therefore, life was better. Landlords preferred leasing properties to American tenants; taxi drivers preferred picking up American passengers. A new type of moneymaker appeared on the scene of Saigon’s commerce: the contractors and auctioneers who transacted with the Americans. Desperate young girls from the countryside poured into nightclubs, bars, and dancing parlors serving American GIs. A new occupation emerged: the GI wives and girlfriends, not highly respected, according to my mother, but pleasantly well fed.
I saw them—the GIs—occasionally, on Saigon streets, in their army uniforms, those black and white men, all too tall to fit the low sky and small alleys of Saigon. Either rosy under the sun or glisteningly dark like the night, the GIs were towering, hairy figures, obviously out of place. Occasionally, I found a soft, dark-featured one who looked a bit like André.
“They are not French,” my mother would explain. They are Americans. They are supposed to be our friends.
“As my children, you stay away from the GIs, you hear?” my mother would tell Mi Chau and me, pointing her fingers at the horde of children who followed the GIs. Once I challenged my mother’s order. “If the GIs are our friends, why aren’t we allowed to follow them like the children of the streets?”
“Those children are the bui doi,” she said, calling them the dust of life. “They are orphans, shoe shiners, and errand boys. You are not the bui doi!” my mother exclaimed.
I watched with envy the bui doi roaming in their free-spirited way, even if they looked dusty and dirty. Circling or following the GIs, the children shouted in rhythm, “OK, Salem, Coca Cola, and chewing gum!” Those towering figures in army uniforms would smile broadly, distributing items to the children who fought among themselves for the largest share of the goodies. The bui doi got all the things they asked for in their broken English, from cigarettes to milk cartons and, most of the time, Coke cans and fruity chewing gum. We got none because we were children of respected schoolteachers and civil servants.
Daughters of the River Huong Page 16
