Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  I never envisioned Grandma Que in that filthy alley of Saigon’s District Eight. Yet, as I was carrying Pi in my arms after his afternoon bath, exhausted, ill tempered, with his weight bearing down on my side, I looked up and saw her face. Those black eyes and heart-shaped lips that spelled beauty even in a sixty-year-old woman.

  Later I found out she had arrived in Saigon unexpectedly and had taken a cab from Tan Son Nhat Airport. Her hair had thinned out some, the gray more pronounced around her temples. Other than that, she was the same as I remembered her, the royal grandmother who always conducted herself with the dignity of a princess.

  She showed no reaction to the congested traffic of Saigon, the barren alley of District Eight, or the modesty of our townhouse. She acted as though she had been there for quite some time. Immediately, she started to reorganize the kitchen, getting rid of the hazardous old kerosene stove.

  Pi was dressed every day in crisp linen, and I had time to take a nap after school.

  I could tell, however, that she had become older and more pensive. It was the first time she had ever left the ancestral house of Nam Giao. She had brought with her to Saigon only three items from the family altar in Hue: the jade phoenix affixed to a gold plate bearing the seal of the Nguyen dynasty, which the king of Annam had given to his Mystique Concubine before his exile, and the two ivory plaques that identified Grandma Que’s father-in-law, the Hong Lo Tu Khanh, and her adoptive father, Admiral Nguyen Tung. The day after her arrival in Saigon, she set up a modest altar table and placed these three items on a small pedestal, behind a glass jar full of incense sticks. It was not the same intricate altar in the Nam Giao villa, but it enabled her to resume the habit of burning incense. For the first time, our home in Saigon had an altar and burning incense, just like the old days in Hue.

  About a week later, the fourth item arrived: the lacquer divan given to the Mystique Concubine by the king of Annam. The divan was delivered intact, packed perfectly between layers of foam. Grandma Que had had it transported from Hue to our townhome. The shipping had cost her a fortune.

  For the rest of my time with her in Saigon until I saw her last, Grandma Que slept on this divan.

  It was obvious to me that when she decided to leave the ancestral house, she had also decided that she could not part from the four symbols of her heritage: the jade phoenix, the two ivory plaques, and the lacquer divan. In Saigon, she resumed the habit of polishing them every day.

  It also meant that she had decided to stay with us for a long time.

  But Saigon forced her to change, as it had changed my mother and me. It was not long before Grandma Que integrated herself into the urban life of the small alleys of Saigon. She no longer wore silk pajamas or brocade ao dai or an ivory comb on her hair. Instead, she dressed in polyester blouses and black pantaloons like the rest of the old women of the neighborhood. In many ways she managed to fit in perfectly. She was a natural at haggling over the price of fresh fish and crawling blue crabs at the wet market or at walking home with her plastic basket full of spinach and green herbs in one hand, her other hand holding the folds of her black trousers as she hopped over little ponds of sewage water in the alley. No one in the neighborhood could distinguish her from the old women of urban Saigon whose full-time job was to do household chores and take care of small children. For social activities, they squatted and congregated on the narrow front porches of townhomes and duplexes, and occasionally, Grandma Que would join them.

  The Annamese princess in her had given way to the nanny she had become. No one could imagine that not too long before, she had been an old, dainty woman dressed in silk pajamas or brocade ao dai, wearing dark red lipstick, the heavy gold bracelets carved with dragon shapes dangling on her two wrists. Not too long before, she had been a stern woman who lived alone in a marble-floored villa with her parrot, white rabbits, and a cinnamon log emanating its spicy scent all over her antiques, even onto an array of photographs on a family altar perpetually covered with the smoke of incense.

  “You want to go to Paris to be with André Foucault and his wife, don’t you?” Grandma Que asked me soon after her arrival in Saigon.

  I told her, “Yes, yes, yes.” Silently, with my eyes, I pleaded: Grandma, please approve.

  “You think this French couple would be kind to you?”

  I told her, “Yes, yes, yes.” With my eyes, I silently told her: It doesn’t matter; please, understand, I want to go.

  “You should go, then. There, the Westerners can teach you how to sing like a diva of the Italian stage. When Huyen Phi was still alive, she once traveled to Europe to sell silk, and she often told me about the Italian stage. How grand it was. Not like here. Ours is a poor country, and performing artists, those Vietnamese leading stars of the southern opera, dao cai luong, are not well educated or well respected. It isn’t the place for a true first-class lady,” she said, as though talking to herself.

  With my eyes, I told her again, yes, I agreed with her every word.

  “The more I think about it, the more I feel you must go,” she said. “But if you are not happy there, rush home.” Grandma Que sighed, nodded her head, and went on to prepare for Pi’s bath. She did not act overjoyed, but the nod meant the matter of my departure for Paris had had her blessing.

  12. MY SECRET AND PARIS

  The decision was made. I would be sent to France, entrusted to the care of André and Dominique at least until I finished high school, and perhaps even beyond that point to include my college years if I could attend the Sorbonne. Paris and exposure to the Francophone culture had great educational value; no one in my family would argue with that.

  To me, going to Paris meant having the life in Paris Match with Tonton André, who resembled the romantic French actor Alain Delon and had the personality of Santa Claus. I frowned at the thought of having Tata Dominique around all the time, but overcame the unpleasantness with the image of a smiling and attentive André. I could not think of any woman or child who would not like being around Tonton André, with all of his dolls and toys and piano music books ordered from Paris. At night, I saw myself appearing in Paris Match, no longer as a skinny little girl in cotton Vietnamese pajamas or a plain pleated skirt, but a fashionable young woman, wearing dark glasses, dancing on platform heels in a gray wool coat with a fur lapel.

  My excitement about the forthcoming trip was tempered only by the thought that I would be away from Grandma Que, so soon after she had just arrived in Saigon. At one point, I solemnly claimed I couldn’t eat French food, things such as beefsteak and fromage—the variety of cheeses that makes France famous—so I would like Grandma Que to come along and cook for me; otherwise, I might starve in Paris. Of course, my request was quickly disregarded. My mother, in particular, was very much annoyed. It was impious for a granddaughter to make such a suggestion. She reminded me that Grandma Que was one of the thirty-six children of a Nguyen king, even if he had abdicated and was exiled. If there hadn’t been a war, and if history had been different, Grandma Que would have visited Paris on state affairs, accompanied by her own staff of interpreters and domestic help—never as a cook. And, of course, Grandma would never go at the invitation of a Foucault, I should have known.

  I arrived in Paris in time to see the change of seasons. Paris greeted me with the beauty of a gray sky stooping over rows of quaint, old, red-brick townhomes, narrow paved streets, and sleek branches bursting with red and yellow leaves in the cool air. André and Dominique lived in the fashionable neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés, in the heart of the Left Bank. Paris also held images of a cold and misty River Seine and pairs of adults strolling hand in hand.

  In all my excitement and desire, I never once expected that there could be another side to Paris—how awful the City of Light could make me feel.

  The first problem manifested itself during school enrollment.

  “She can’t be more than twelve years old, this little girl,” the French nun exclaimed when I was presented for enrollment. They relucta
ntly admitted me upon examining the certified translation of my Vietnamese school record, which authenticated my real age. I was indeed fifteen!

  The French nun’s sentiment was confirmed by almost every Parisian I met thereafter. The disappointment I felt inside was greater than I could show. I had wanted to go to Paris as a young woman, not as a child. Yet every Parisian I met thought of me as a child. Naturally they could not see my old soul.

  The second problem was even more severe than the first. Contrary to my expectation, André was routinely away in Marseille for his shipping business. Quite often, I was surrounded by les enfants terribles of St. Germain des Prés: those awful French teenagers who looked and talked so differently, they couldn’t be my friends. To avoid them, I had to spend time with Tata Dominique, who was cold and aloof and not at all suited to befriend a melancholy Vietnamese teenager.

  Joy did not come so naturally, and I had to train myself to be happy. I learned restraint and solitude in living with Dominique, giving her embraces without feeling the warmth, eating her petits-beurre out of politeness without tasting the sweet, speaking a foreign language while afraid of being made fun of.

  Life got better only when André was back in Paris in between his business trips to the coastal cities. André opened for me a life full of wonders, giving little thought to what was appropriate or inappropriate for a young teenager to absorb. We went south to the coast to find sunshine when Paris got cold. There, Antibe and its museums left me with images of peach and yellow villas facing cobblestoned, winding alleys bordered with flowering bushes. I stared at Picasso paintings, fascinated by his lines and shapes, ignorant of the paintings’ meanings. Aix en Provence offered me not only its tranquil beauty, but also the Far-Eastern center where André showed me black-and-white pictures of a Nguyen king and his Annamese entourage when they visited Paris. Vestiges of my maternal extended family, he claimed.

  Finally, La Cité. We strolled the city, took l’autobus, ate ice cream at the famous house of Berthillon in Île St. Louis, climbed the steps of Sacré-Coeur, walked through the narrow streets of Montmartre, and toured the outskirts of Paris in his Citroën. In the boutiques of glamorous Champs-Élysées, André bought me a Dior hat, an extravagance for a teenager accustomed to wearing cotton pajamas to run around the alleys of Saigon. I proudly wore my Dior hat even in the evening hours to accompany him, thinking of myself as his companion and not just a child. My fifteen years of life lit up when the night sparkled and the stream of traffic passing L’Arc de Triomphe became diamond necklaces that graced the City of Light with sparks.

  It was in Roma, not Paris, that I truly viewed myself as the young girl who practiced singing. In Roma I first heard Haydn’s “Salve Regina” sung in a church, where André arranged for an Italian singer who had appeared at La Scala to test the range of my voice.

  “Salve Regina, mater misericordiae; vita dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.” Hail, O Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. Hail!

  The music was so beautiful it made me cry. Crying because of beautiful music was as easy as crying for love, André murmured to himself. I, as usual, attempted to memorize his words. I memorized, too, the sacred Latin of “Salve Regina.” I needed neither understanding nor translation, just the sheer beauty of sound.

  “Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes, in hac lacrimarum valle.” To thee we send up our sighs, weeping in the valley of tears.

  The image of the Virgin Mary, pure and good, reminded me of Quan Yin, the female Buddha in her white robe, standing on a lotus blossom floating over the South China Sea. When I told André of my comparison, he nodded but went on to tell me that the tortuous lines of “Salve Regina” reminded him of his soul, yet its lofty sound resembled my noble face, and I blushed in joy.

  “Eja ergo, Advocata nostra…O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.” Hasten theretofore, our advocate…O merciful, O pious, sweet Virgin Mary.

  So André adored my face, the way he adored the face of a grown-up beauty, although the Italian voice coach, like the Parisians, thought I was a twelve-year-old child!

  But the happiness of Roma was short-lived. Back to Paris, to the Gare de Lyon, with its bright yellow lights on snowy nights. Back to the St. Germain des Prés townhouse, where he kissed Dominique on the doorstep and I rushed off to my schoolgirl bedroom, wishing we had never come back.

  The sweet moments of my stay in Europe were overshadowed and tarnished by episodes of intense arguments between André and Dominique. I walked the neighborhood aimlessly for hours or isolated myself in the living room or the attic, away from the bedroom where harsh and rapid French was spoken. I could not understand all.

  And then he was gone again.

  Fall and winter in Paris passed so slowly. There was no picture of me appearing in Paris Match. I learned to eat fromage, including Camembert, and actually liked it. I frequently cut classes and wandered along the streets of Quartier Latin with its abundance of used bookstores and record shops. I hopped on city buses, down to the banks of La Seine, back to St. Germain des Prés with its cafés and magasins, where I peeped at expensive boutiques and looked up at barren trees.

  Somewhere along the sidewalks, I would hear the sounds of Chopin. Chopin became my best friend. I followed his sound from one draped window to another, along rows of brownstones, until I reached home. Dominique’s home. Every day was a wandering journey. Off I went every morning in my little short coat and patent leather shoes, but I seldom went to school. Once it occurred to me that I could just go elsewhere, I freed myself from all that—the pain of being the only Vietnamese among all the French boys and girls in class and being questioned by the French nuns about the contents of all those French books. When asked about school by Dominique, I learned to make up a bunch of lies. It was all so easy.

  No one in Saigon was supposed to know my sorrow, fear, and homesickness. In letters sent home, I only spoke of the melancholic beauty of Chopin’s music; the townhouse intricately decorated with oil paintings and velvet curtains; Dominique’s buttery biscuits, petits-beurres, and soupe à l’oignon; the svelte mannequins of Galerie LaFayette where Dominique bought me a wool Scottish dress; and the tree-filled neighborhood of St. Germain des Prés—trees that towered over rooftops and chimneys, drawing smoke out of the Parisians’ mouths and nostrils when they walked the streets. “Ça va, ça va bien,” the men in trench coats and hats and the women in miniskirts and high boots stopped momentarily to greet each other in their Parisian French, underneath those trees.

  No one was supposed to know the bitter lessons Paris had taught me—that reality could never match the beauty of a dream. I was too proud to tell anyone, especially Grandma Que, about the haunting solitude of a young girl removed from her home. For months, I cried every night, badly wanting to return to the filthy alleys of Saigon’s District Eight.

  Naturally, my school record turned out to be a disaster, but André and Dominque tolerated this awful result. In fact, they argued among themselves and candidly admitted that my school failure might have been their fault. They discussed what they should tell my parents, and I prayed to myself, hopelessly, that they would never be able to relay the bad news. To my parents, I was supposed to be perfect!

  However, my French got much better and I did learn new things—improved piano fingering techniques, operatic singing, oil painting, and a bunch of other impractical niceties that did not require much language proficiency, including an undying taste for French baguettes, butter, escargots, bouillabaisse, and la haute couture—the allure of high fashion.

  The only consistently nice thing about those days in Paris was the fact that I was always free to practice singing.

  No one knew Paris also housed my secret.

  “Non, non, nous ne sommes pas amoureux, c’est impossible, c’est formidable.” He had broken down in tears.

  Something happened, something broke, and I did not stay in Paris the full year. The reason given by the Foucaults to my parents was my disastrous Fr
ench school record. I was to return to Saigon before springtime. So Paris to me meant summer, fall, and winter. Just a little radiant sunshine and then long months of falling red leaves, white snow, and skeletal branches.

  Nineteen seventy-one. How happy I was to be hit with the heat and humidity and the dirt of Saigon as the door of the Air France plane opened at Tan Son Nhat Airport, and I knew at once I was home. Back to Grandma Que. The load of hidden sorrow that persisted through my time in Paris was lifted from me, like a leaf twirling off an autumn branch.

  I stepped out of the plane and looked back for the last time. The Air France stewardess smiled at me and said, “Au revoir.” In her clear chestnut eyes, I recalled the scenery of Paris circling around André, who knelt, his hands pressing upon his stomach, his chest heaving.

  “Oh, Lord, what have I done to the little girl I once held in my arms?” His hands clutched his anguished face. I tried to catch his arm, and he avoided my touch. “But what difference does it make, Lord, even if I kneel down before you and put upon you the weight of my sins, while indeed for years I already consumed her with my eyes?”

  I resented Paris for making me remember André this way. “Stop crying, André,” I told him, but he kept shaking his head.

  “No, no, no, Fleurs du Mal, the flowers of evil. You will never understand the pain and sins of Baudelaire.”

  Of course I understood. Only André did not understand. There was nothing he could have done to me that I would not have wanted him to do.

  In the summer of 1971, according to Grandma Que, I was already on the verge of developing into a young woman. So she began to have dozens of classic ao dai made for me, with darts around the bustline, nipped at the waistline—the formfitting style designed only for young women.