Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  He turned to my mother and thanked her for all those beautiful flowers that, throughout the years of his friendship with our family, had provided him with the paradoxical images of Baudelaire’s “Fleurs du Mal” in the Far East. My mother smiled and said her flowers were not meant to be the image of pain or the darkness of Baudelaire, nor the tearful songs of Vietnam that represented the inspiration of poets. She was planting them out of necessity, for herself and in memory of her own childhood.

  André went on and on about the burden of being a romantic and an idealist in a world full of ugliness. His eyes, slightly reddened, wandered toward me although he had begun to address my father. “Professeur, I feel at home in Vietnam. It is terrible, the damage done by war to a land so devastatingly beautiful. You know, I would even turn down the Foucaults’ inheritance to remain forever in Indochina if I had to, and even if it meant losing Dominique.”

  My father cut him off and gave him a schoolteacher’s speech. “Whether you give up your inheritance, Vietnam is still poor, and the hundred years of colonialism and a continuing war have already taken place,” my father said reproachfully.

  I was old enough then to understand every word, yet did not fully grasp the meaning of the complex issues—why André looked so stricken with guilt and why my father appeared so exasperated. When I looked over at André, his eyes were still fixed on me and he continued speaking, almost monotonously. I might not have understood everything, but as usual, I memorized his words.

  “My family made a fortune out of Indochina. My grandfather was involved in the torture and beheading of Vietnamese patriots, the oppression of Vietnamese peasants on railroads, in rubber and coffee plantations and dangerous coal mines. I happen to know all about those things from my family’s living room and my grandfather’s study. But I would not call my feelings guilt or shame. I know I should not hold myself responsible for French exploitation and the oppression of her colony. After all, I wasn’t even born then. But, Professeur, do you believe in mysticism—the unexplained things that happen to us? Why do I love this land so much? How can one explain why one loves a certain color or shape? I never want to leave here!”

  “Then why did you marry Dominique, who doesn’t want to live in Vietnam?” my father asked. I immediately perked up.

  André turned to face my father but said nothing in response. He mentioned, instead, that I was growing up very fast and that one day, it would be nice to have artistic photographs or portraits made of me, dressed in traditional Vietnamese costumes of the 1920s.

  He talked of the collection of black-and-white photographs that his grandfather, Sylvain Foucault, had taken of women in the Violet City. The photograph collection had become part of the Foucault library in a castle outside of Paris. André described how, as a boy growing up in France, he had stared at these photographs displayed in his father’s study and had studied them. Old pictures of Indochina and the Violet City had been part of his childhood even before he set foot in Vietnam. He mentioned again and again how, with each day, I was looking more and more like the beauty featured in those old photographs.

  “What beauty?” I asked, and he gave no answer.

  The afternoon sun was about to die out when André asked, “How is Madame Cinnamon these days, living alone in Hue? She has always been alone, hasn’t she?”

  “It is my mother’s fate,” my mother said.

  “My fondest wish after so many years is to have Madame Cinnamon’s forgiveness so my grandfather’s soul can rest in peace. I guess she never forgives. I can’t blame her.”

  “You’re forgiven, André, if it means that much to you,” my mother said gently. “You have it from me. My mother is very stubborn.”

  The party ended as quietly as it had started, and André’s lips barely touched my cheekbone as he headed for the door. After he was gone, my father sat alone in the patio for a long time.

  “Poor André,” my father said. “He wanted to write a book—an epic—on France, America, and Indochina. But it’s been years and he hasn’t completed it.”

  That night, I stood in front of the mirror and wrapped the Christian Dior silk scarf around my shoulders, letting the silk caress my bare skin. My instinct told me the scarf was André’s idea, not Dominique’s. I took one of André’s roses, smashed it against my chest, and let the crushed rose petals fall down along my side.

  I woke up in the middle of the night to the fragrance of André’s roses, their yellow petals dancing in my head. I repeated those words of Baudelaire. Au pays qui te ressemble. Like a drunk, I got out of bed, swayed my fourteen-year-old body back and forth in an imaginary dance, and drifted in and out of romantic dreams. And then I stood still, watching twenty-three yellow roses bloom in a French crystal vase. The crushed petals of the twenty-fourth rose were still lingering on my skin.

  A notion entered my head the day after my fourteenth birthday that I would become an international lawyer, writer, poet, traveler of the world, seeker of beauty, and lover of Baudelaire. Like André. I would do all this and sing at the same time.

  If my mother had to plant flowers, I, too, had to sing, no matter what.

  11. THE MAIDEN WHO PRACTICED SINGING

  The day after my thirty-fifth birthday, I walked into my Fifth Avenue office and, from my glass wall, stared at a bubbling Manhattan below. Somewhere in front of the glass was America and behind it, a blurred Saigon of the seventies, all before the fall of a regime that broke my life as a young woman in half. I could still hear the helicopter sounds on top of the U.S. embassy in central Saigon. I could still see myself, twenty years of age, boarding the helicopter alone. When the machine had lifted itself into the hot air, I was still craning my head to look down at the U.S. Embassy building, at all those panic-stricken faces below.

  Fifteen years had passed since then.

  I mindlessly arranged the papers on my desk, knowing America had welcomed me with all my ardor and aspiration. The papers on my desk spoke of my successful law career. I had done well for myself.

  Yet, in this land of dreams and opportunities, I had let go of my childhood dream. I had not taken up singing as a serious pursuit. I had become a Manhattan lawyer and spent the money I earned on trivial things like Chanel goods. To fool myself with a sense of noblesse oblige, in my days as a young associate in my law firm, I spent nine hundred hours a year on pro bono work, in addition to my normal load of two thousand billable hours a year.

  All throughout the late seventies and eighties, boat people rushed out to sea to escape Communist Vietnam. One of these boat people was from the village of Quynh Anh. He brought us the news of Grandma Que’s death. No details were given.

  So, for a decade, I regularly sent money to friends and relatives in my former Vietnam, fooling myself that I was helping those young women who might be trying to reach their own high note, in memory of Princess Cinnamon.

  But that was all I did. There was deliberate, self-constructed amnesia somewhere in my brain to cope with the pain. My years went by like a long sleepwalk.

  Sitting among stacks of legal documents, I decided to take up singing again. I would seek the best coaches among the voice teachers and music professors in the vibrant artistic community of New York City. I would repeat the arduous struggle to reach so, re, me fa, so, la, and then my ultimate high la.

  I leaned back in the comfort of my leather chair, yet feeling the pain of knowing that in pushing the limit of my voice, I would give up, start again, and then give up. In between, I would cry into my pillow, for something so beyond my reach—the reclamation of my childhood.

  Constance, the high-cheek-boned, black-haired German Italian choir director, had reminded me of the need to imagine someone—anyone—reigning in the round dome of the wood-paneled theater. To this someone, said Constance, I should attempt to deliver the heartbeat of a muse.

  During rehearsal, she would shout, “Flat! Flat! I can’t stand it!” and automatically I would imagine that special person as my sole audience. And then the
notes emanating from my lips would become dark, light, opaque, translucent legato, pulsating with vibrato; and the voice would cut through the space like a shooting star. Nothing stood between the streamlike darting of the voice from my lips to the heart of that special someone.

  After dress rehearsal I went home and wrote down in my choir notebook, Cher André, je veux emprunter ton coeur, encore une fois. Dear André, it’s time to borrow your heart, again.

  Throughout the choir practice of Haydn’s “Salve Regina,” I kept with me an orange, velvet-covered hardbound notebook, where occasionally I recorded the beautiful sayings I had read:

  “Et c’est l’heure, Ô poète, de décliner ton nom, ta naissance, et ta race.” And it’s time, Oh, Poet, to decline your name, birth, and race.—Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse).

  “But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?”—Whitman.

  “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share.”—Nabokov.

  I also wrote down the seven notes, from A to G. Each time my voice reached a note, I blacked out the corresponding letter with a marker, the harsh, black ink permeating the pages and smearing the handwriting that made up my favorite literary quotes. Up half a tone on the chromatic scale. And half a tone more. Breathe out on each word slowly, without the chest frame collapsing. Let the voice soar high. Higher and higher. Hold the note, and the vibrato would linger forever, past the point where the sound itself ripples out, dissolving in space. On to the search for freedom. To where the Statue of Liberty holds out her fingertips. And even higher, to the limitless sky. All the way with the nightingale of my childhood.

  All letters became blackened except for the ultimate high A. André’s name began with an A, the infinitely crisp and clear stroke. In singing, I felt a pulse within me, and I silently called it my “Art,” starting with a capital A like André’s name. To reach the high note, my Art had to spill out of me. My body became the container of my Art, and I had to break that confine.

  Grandma Que used to talk to me about the silkworm that wanted to shed itself into beautiful fabric until all that was left was the naked body of a helpless insect. She said the Mystique Concubine’s spirit had blessed the silkworms of her silk farm, enabling the production of the best silk. The beauty it gave belonged to others. All threads were peeled off to expose the soft, pulsing worm inside. The silkworm struggled against the web of threads, among the fragrant cocoon of green leaves. When the threads were removed, the flesh was displayed, and the silkworm perished. To produce perfection and reach freedom, the silkworm had to die.

  In 1970 André and Dominique lived in a villa on Rue Tu Duc, a few blocks from Madame Misticelli’s house in Saigon. On the way to my private voice lessons, I biked slowly under rows of soaring tall trees bordering the narrow street, singing to myself. Occasionally, I saw André walking alone, wearing glasses, holding a book in his hand. He rarely said anything to me. Instead, he merely nodded to acknowledge my presence as though he deliberately kept a distance or was preoccupied with other things. I would hurry to pass him, conscious that perhaps he wanted to avoid me. I missed seeing his beautiful brown eyes underneath those wire-rimmed glasses. I grew sad, as though the butterflies of Hue had finally flown away, beyond my reach.

  But those fluttering butterflies came back to me one day. I was practicing the scale in the living room, next to my piano, attempting to reach the high C note, a do, and then working myself up to the high E note, a mi. I was pushing my breasts forward, drawing a long, deep breath from beneath my diaphragm muscle, lower and lower, deeper and deeper into my abdomen, in order to support the heightened pitch. Yet I simply could not stretch my voice to reach a comfort zone. Frustrated, I stopped singing and looked out at the window.

  I caught his gaze. André was watching me. My cheeks were heated, my body, inflamed. I thought for a moment I had stopped breathing.

  Outside the window, the butterfly lashes fluttered. My heart fluttered, too, with them.

  It was not a Sunday when he was supposed to come over for his Vietnamese lessons. André had stopped by unexpectedly to let us know Dominique had won the battle: the couple would be going back to Paris, and André’s Indochina would soon be a closed chapter in the book he still had to write.

  That year, 1970, I was about to turn fifteen, still a flat-chested, long-haired melancholy girl who stood five feet tall, weighed eighty-five pounds, and looked barely twelve years old. I had become skinnier. My long hair had lost its luster due to lack of care and the humidity and dust of busy, polluted Saigon. Worst of all, the hardship of life in Saigon had made me into an ill-tempered teenager.

  The war had escalated, paralleling the skyrocketing cost of living in Saigon. My mother had to take a teaching job at a secondary school. In overpopulated and commercialized Saigon, my parents’ salaries could not afford a nanny for my brother Phi Long, nicknamed Pi, or any kind of domestic help then quite common in middle-class Vietnamese households. Houses rented to Americans generated revenues about five times higher than rentals to locals. Contractors doing work for Americans made millions, while civil servants and schoolteachers—the impoverished middle class—could not afford red meat at daily meals. After the Tet Offensive, it became common knowledge that domestic maids and cyclo drivers could be Vietcong agents or sentries. Poor people joined Vietcong underground operations at Cu Chi or retreated into the jungles or Ho Chi Minh Trails, hoping the Communist Liberation Army would eventually prevail and bring about better lives, closing the gap between the poor and the rich.

  Naturally, I became the household help my mother could not otherwise afford. She taught in the afternoon; I attended Lycée Marie Curie in the morning. When my mother was teaching, I took care of Pi. Late in the afternoon, my sister Mi Chau would watch Pi for an hour so that I could cook the evening meal. I did everything else in the house, including washing clothes by hand, hanging them over wires that crisscrossed our patio and destroyed the aesthetic appeal of my mother’s potted flowers.

  “You have to hold on to Pi,” I told Mi Chau one time. “You cannot move or let him go until I return.”

  When I returned after cooking the evening meal, Pi was crying and struggling, as Mi Chau was holding him down. When I took him from Mi Chau, I realized the bed was stained and that Pi had wet his pants.

  “You said not to let him go. I couldn’t take him to the bathroom,” she cried.

  I cried, too, feeling sorry for myself. Like my mother, I fantasized about returning to Hue, to the comfort and luxury of Grandma Que’s lifestyle.

  I struggled on to keep up with my singing practice. Once a week, I had to go to a piano lesson at the Institute, and then a singing lesson with Madame Misticelli. I put Pi on the front of my bicycle and Mi Chau on the back, and biked to the Institute. When I was taking lessons, Mi Chau would stand outside the classroom with my bike and Pi. One day, she wandered off, after tying Pi to the bike with the bicycle rope. After one hour of practice, I came out of the classroom, catching her untying Pi. The child’s wrists were bruised and red. I slapped Mi Chau and she screamed.

  I slipped down and squatted onto the floor, exhausted and defeated, my vision blurry because of the shock. I could see the front yard of Grandma Que’s villa in Hue, the sweet and peaceful time I had lost. My father and Saigon had failed me. He, with all his education in Paris, and Saigon, with its glamorous downtown, could not provide me the comfort and caring given me by Grandma Que and her city of dreams.

  Life went on as a struggle until an accident happened: I was standing on a wooden stool and was just about to light the kerosene stove to cook rice when the stool gave way under me. I lost my balance and fell. Mi Chau had fallen asleep, and Pi had come into the kitchen and pulled on the stool. I fell on top of him, together with the kerosene stove. Luckily, the stove was not lighted. But sister and brother were bruised, and bathed in kerosene. We had no evening meal
that day. That night, my mother wrote Grandma Que:

  I am sorry to bother you again, Mother, but your grandchildren need your help in Saigon. We can no longer return to Hue because after the Tet Offensive, we do not think that Hue is safe. Here in Saigon we are living in substandard conditions because my husband’s teaching salary and mine are not enough to keep up with the cost of living here. Si handles Pi and the household while I am at work. Today, the kerosene stove fell on them…

  She read me the letter and I began to hope, although it would take a lot for Grandma Que to leave the ancestral house after my parents had abandoned her in Hue.

  In despair, I thought of André. I had written to Paris, sending André my sketches, poems, watercolor paintings, and the passages of prose I had written about Hue in Vietnamese and French. I described how I could not practice singing because of household chores and babysitting responsibilities.

  My parents received two letters on the same day. The first was from Grandma Que. She would be departing for Saigon soon to help my mother take care of Pi and the household. The ancestral house would be looked after by a villager from the Quynh Anh hamlet working for wages.

  My parents did not show me the second letter, but I’d seen that it had been stamped in Paris. After dinner, they locked their bedroom door and stayed inside for about an hour. I could hear their voices, rapid and intense, but could not make out what they were saying. When they emerged behind the door, they told me I could finish the rest of the school year in the prestigious neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés, Paris, upon one condition: André wanted to have Grandma Que’s approval. He wanted the matter to constitute a gesture of trust from the woman who did not forgive.