Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  Instead, my mother repeated and finally finished her question as though she were speaking to herself.

  “Will you go back to Hue and try to find the villa and the magnolia tree? That was your grandmother’s world. Just find it and let me know if it’s still there.”

  2. HO CHI MINH CITY, 1994

  I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, my former Saigon, on a hot and humid summer day. But neither the tropical heat and humidity nor the familiar clipping sounds of the tonal, monosyllabic Vietnamese language spelled any welcome-home message. Instead, exiting the plane, I found myself squinting at the blazing sun in disbelief. Gone were the bright lights and glass windows of the passenger lounge overlooking the airport runway. Gone was the elegant, canary yellow compound that connected the passenger lounge to the row of office buildings that once housed American military headquarters. Bare ground and unkempt hangars had taken their place.

  I was shocked by the primitive austerity of the new scenery.

  The alarm in my mind started to buzz as I observed customs officials in their mustard green uniforms, with their blank faces, flat cheekbones, greenish skin, and yellow teeth. The Vietcong, the enemy, the wicked and brutal—the buzzwords and irrational fears of childhood fed by widespread propaganda—quickly revived in my head. I feigned nonchalance by adjusting my sunglasses and smoothing my linen pantsuit, although my heart pounded. I had to apply the one Asian trait that had helped me make it through life—the ability to stay emotionless and bury my feelings deep inside.

  Wait and wait patiently, even if it means eternity, went the saying from my childhood.

  So I waited patiently in a long line of nervous Vietnamese expatriates returning home, all looking exhausted and restless, yet still arguing about baggage that contained gifts for relatives, representing the excess and comfort of America. A fellow traveler, a middle-aged, jovial Vietnamese woman, put her mouth to my ear. “Put a ten-dollar bill inside your passport, my dear, and you’ll make it through the line quicker.”

  I thanked her for the tip, but bribing my way down the path homeward was something the lawyer in me would not do. When it was my turn to present my American passport and the entry form bearing the heading “Socialist Republic of Vietnam—Independence, Liberty, Happiness,” I decided to address the young immigration official in his mustard green uniform, who was staring at my passport picture, by the familiar pronoun “anh,” and referred to myself as “em.” For that moment, the young man had become my respected older brother and I was his little sister, a feeble female looking up to his fraternal power. (In informal conversations, the Vietnamese address each other by familial relationships, even if they are not related.) Nineteen years ago, this customs official would have been my enemy, the Vietcong. The young man flashed a smile.

  “Born in Hue?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A lawyer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make lots of money in America?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any gift for fellow countrymen?”

  “No, I’m on a commercial, business mission, not allowed to carry gifts.”

  He stamped the entry form and returned my passport, and I headed toward the exit.

  A horde of haggard people gathered behind the metal fence separating the airport from street peddlers, taxi and cyclo drivers. For a fleeting moment, I saw the crowd outside the airport gate as the same group of anxious and despairing people I had seen climbing over barricades outside the U.S. embassy that day in April of 1975. After two decades, these same people just looked poorer. Their hollow faces, shallow skin, sunken torsos, and chopstick arms and pant legs all spelled the hard life of the developing world. They leaned against thin ropes and the metal fence that separated common life from the privileges of a plane taking off, away from the plague of poverty, to a better life elsewhere.

  The crowd had signs with names of the foreign guests to be picked up. I, too, was welcomed with one such sign. It said, Ms. Simone Sanders. Not a Vietnamese name. I walked toward the sign, passing two woman selling oranges and grapefruit at a wooden stand. I caught their stares, lingering upon my linen suits and leather purse.

  “Tay hay Ta?” one of them said to the other, wondering whether I was “foreign” or “domestic.”

  “Tay,” the other woman said definitively. She considered me foreign. I was glad to hide behind my dark sunglasses.

  My driver holding up the sign for me was a typical middle-aged Vietnamese man with squinting eyes and balding hairline. An old polyester shirt hung loosely over his diminutive torso. Those eyes occasionally cast scrupulous glances toward me, as though a straightforward meeting of my eyes would show equality and hence disrespect. He was eager to please, wanting to take over the carrying of all of my luggage. He flashed broad smiles, showing his bad teeth, and crammed my luggage into the trunk of an old Toyota. The car rolled on through the crowded streets of Saigon, weaving through crisscrossing seams of cyclos and mopeds. Thousands of mopeds rushed around us from what seemed to be thousands of directions, as though at any moment a collision could have taken place, springing these cyclists into the air. The residential streets of Saigon were framed with food carts and street vendors. The display of culinary delights ranged from dried cuttlefish to boiled peanuts wrapped in newspaper, and beef noodles served in chipped bowls glazed with a thin film of yellowish oil.

  Despite all that animation, the city appeared dreary. A few rare spots of green trees diversified the urban chaos, yet were unable to brighten it or sweep away the dust. The smoky sky of Saigon became a huge movie screen. I was the only spectator and an actress, watching and reentering that surreal movie, back into a place I’d once called home.

  3. LOOKING FOR THE MARBLE FLOOR

  By 1994, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had made the historic Continental Hotel of Saigon into a state-owned joint venture project. The hotel had become an investment of non-French investors in partnership with the government. The French owners were long gone, together with the elegance and luxury of a colonial past, although French architectural features remained in the structure’s cheery white facade. Inside the lobby, the French touch remained only in the intricate wood beams and dark wood paneling.

  Earlier, I had asked the reservation clerk specifically for room 210, overlooking Rue Catinat, now called Dong Khoi, or Uprising Street. As soon as I opened the door, I looked down to the floor.

  There was no gray marble underneath my feet.

  Although the French owners were gone, the new management still placed French instruction booklets, greetings, and menus on the table de nuit, which was no longer a copy of a Louis XIV antique but, rather, a Hong Kong–made nightstand. The cheap nightstand did not go well with the grandiose opera curtains covering an entire wall—the only real vestige of old French Indochina left in that drab room. I had no recollection of the curtains, either, although I remembered distinctly the moment when Christopher asked me to approach the window. There, nineteen years ago, I stood with Christopher behind me, looking out at Saigon skyline, harbor and downtown district. Apparently, those heavy and stately curtains were opened and drawn up back then. Perhaps I was too confused and self-absorbed then to notice the details of the room.

  It was 1994 and I stood in the middle of the room, seeing vividly the twenty-year-old girl who walked away from the tall French windows that had allowed her one last look at the city, before she was determined to leave it behind for good. Quietly, she unbuttoned her ao dai. The gold-embroidered dragon danced its last dance when the black satin fabric dropped to the floor. The first cold breeze of conditioned air hit her belly like a sharp blow when the black silk pantaloons finally rolled off.

  In my business suit, I knelt on the carpeted floor, crawled toward a corner, dug my fingers under the baseboard, and peeled off the carpet.

  I recognized the cold gray marble floor underneath.

  I drew up the deep red velvet opera curtains and stood pensively at the window overlooking Dong Khoi, as I
had done that day in April. Farther, on my right, toward the other end of the downtown district, the round clock on top of the gate to the Ben Thanh market still defied the passage of time.

  I could see it. It was the same clock.

  I craned my neck to look to my left, back at the white Opera House, a Saigon landmark. The white dome and the French colonial facade had endured. In front of it, what was once known as Saigon’s miniature Champs-Élysées had lost the glamour, yet was busy still, with pedestrians, cyclo drivers, and its four-lane traffic separated by paved medians that housed bazaar-style kiosks and souvenir shops. The city, though deteriorating and impoverished, was still intact, except for one thing. At one end of the shopping square, the statue of a paternal Uncle Ho, grinning among a group of children at one end of Dong Khoi Street, had replaced the bronze statue of a South Vietnamese soldier of pre-liberation days.

  I left the Continental Hotel and walked down the street. A little girl selling postcards followed me all the way, her large, black eyes pleading. I took a one-dollar bill out of my purse, and dozens of other large, black eyes immediately appeared from nowhere, quickly forming a circle around me. Beggars—women and children with their rugged brown faces and toothpick limbs—tugged at the hem of my skirt, uttering small, pleading phrases that sounded like refrains of a mourning tune.

  It took me almost an hour to escape from the singing beggars of the new Saigon.

  Back on the balcony of room 210, I watched the night fall, peering into the darkness that bestowed its threatening presence upon the city. There were no streetlights. Suddenly, I understood why my great-grandmother, the Mystique Concubine of the Violet City, had analogized the night to the image of a villain whom she called the Face of Brutality. Somewhere, in all that darkness shared with such a villain, floating in the blackened sky, André’s dreamy Indochina smiled her amorous smile, exactly the way she was portrayed in the Foucault collection, sluggish and languorous and mystical in her undying romance, awaiting a revolution or the last conquest.

  She faded away, André’s L’Indochine, leaving me alone with memories that did not die. I understood the place of memories. For those who quickly forgot, memories did not exist. For others, they got tucked away somewhere waiting to be uncovered.

  4. THE LACQUER DIVAN

  I went back to the town house in the back alley of District Eight; paid a healthy lump sum to the present owner, a government cadre named Minh; and asked to spend one night in his living room. He was hostile at first, obviously concerned that I might be attempting to reclaim the house. “The government deeded the house to us!” he declared.

  By the time I had doubled the size of the initial offer and placed the cash in his hand, he pretended to smooth the corners of the dollar bills I had given him, tapping one foot lightly while dancing his eyes around to avoid my gaze. He placed the money inside his trouser pocket, a signal that he had graciously acceded to my request. “Please feel at ease and look around,” he said.

  The house had been chopped into three quarters, occupied by three cadre families as the government’s reward for their contributions to the People’s Revolution. Cadre Minh, my host, occupied the largest quarter, a three-meter-wide claustrophobic room filled with old furniture and spider webs in all corners.

  The old tile floor, now heavily stained, used to be the part of our living room where my piano sat. There, I had practiced my scales while André looked on from the window. The tiles had moved beyond merely yellowing; a brownish shade had overtaken what used to be a translucent white, each piece of tile blackened at all four corners with accumulated dirt.

  My eyes drifted from the broken chair to the chipped table before I caught sight of some sparkling thing in the corner, underneath a torn, flowery cotton curtain. I stooped to look and saw the carved glistening phoenix wings made out of mother-of-pearl inlaid onto lacquer, underneath a layer of dust.

  I raised the curtain and gasped.

  Under a torn mosquito net, the old lacquer divan, too flashy and stoic for the meager surroundings, occupied a dark corner, as though it had been waiting for my return all this time. Despite the abundant scratches and chipping of the mother-of-pearl inlay, the enduring woodwork shone stubbornly, mocking and challenging its filthy surroundings.

  For another exorbitant amount, I persuaded Cadre Minh to let me spend my night on the divan. In the beginning, he wanted to bargain for a better price, bragging to me that because the divan looked so antique and beautiful, for years, despite extreme poverty, he had been reluctant to sell or dispose of it. He knew it was an antique. I let him go on with his bragging until he detected my impatience. Only then did he voluntarily stop his song-and-dance with a wide yawn.

  Nothing would have prepared me, however, for his next reaction. When I quietly told him that I was the great-granddaughter of the original owner, his face turned white as a sheet.

  “My children, my wife, and I, even our relatives and guests, have tried to sleep on this beautiful thing. None of us could stay the whole night,” he said. “We all had terrible nightmares about being drowned in a river or caught in a fire. At times we felt someone was pulling on our legs or pushing our backs so that we would fall off. The truth is, by the time word got around, no one would want to buy this divan, even if we had wanted to sell. I thought of chopping it up, but every time I raised an ax, something stopped me and I just couldn’t destroy this beautiful thing.”

  I stared at him, speechless. Was he telling me the truth, or was he simply playing with my emotions, knowing of my background and reasons for returning to the house for a visit? How did he know to use the images of a river or a fire, if the story he told was not true? I tried to rationalize. The country, after all, was deceptively complex, and the city, despite its growing population, still functioned like a small town, especially when the Ministry of Interior and the neighborhood police, the Cong An, actively controlled the flow of information, tourists and visitors, as well as the lives of its citizens.

  Whatever the possibilities, Cadre Minh and I stared at each other from opposite sides of the divan for a long time. A chill traveled down my spine as I peered down at the luscious mother-of-pearl dragons and phoenixes dancing around the divan’s four legs. I wanted to ask Minh more questions, but he had conveniently left the room.

  Minh came back to give me a thin blanket that smelled of mildew. The extra service cost me a dollar, or ten thousand Vietnamese piasters. The amenities did not include pillows, so I had to put my overnight bag under my head.

  I spent the night on that familiar lacquer divan.

  My back ached as it came into contact with the hard wood. Unable to sleep, I focused my eyes intensely on the flickering light coming from a kerosene lamp. Electrical blackouts had become routine for the inhabitants of modern Saigon. A humid odor—a combination of mildew, sewage, damp soil, and kerosene—filled my nostrils.

  I felt the cool and smooth wood surface underneath my back and limbs. I could still hear Grandma Que speaking to me on that same divan while tears fell down her face. It was indeed very rare that she cried.

  I went back to the past and needed no sleep to relive the nightmare. It was Grandma Que’s nightmare, related to me in 1972, after I had returned home from Paris.

  5. THE COFFINS OF CINNAMON

  My father’s townhome in District Eight of Saigon had no extra bedroom for Grandma Que, and while I was in Paris, Grandma Que had slept in my bedroom. Upon my return from France, she insisted that I was grown enough to have a private bedroom all to myself and that she would be sleeping on the divan, which had been placed next to the family altar table, adjacent to the dining area. So, my father set up a rattan screen that separated the lacquer divan from the dining area and the altar. What was behind the screen became Grandma Que’s modest quarters. She adjusted to the small space quietly, never once mentioning the luxurious spaciousness of her villa in Hue.

  Those days, I hid my broken heart about André by studying hard for the final two years of high school
before the college entrance examination. Quite frequently, I stayed up very late to prepare outlines for classes. I studied at the dining table, where I could spread my papers and homework.

  It was a late, quiet night in the summer of 1972. The air was stuffed with humidity, as air-conditioning was not part of the lifestyle of the average Saigon household. I had dozed off from studying, my head falling to the table, when I was suddenly awakened by sobs from behind the rattan screen.

  It took me a few moments to adjust my vision. I had forgotten to blow out the kerosene lamp, which flickered on, casting shadows of the furniture onto the tiled floor. In the still night, the sobbing sounded eerie and tragic. I listened carefully. Grandma Que was crying in her sleep.

  Until then, I had never heard or seen her cry.

  Terrified, I went behind the screen and found her quivering. She was awake, her eyes wide open, her trembling fingers clutching to the edge of the pillowcase in the flickering yellow light of the kerosene lamp. Tears filled her distorted face and dropped onto her salt-and-pepper hair, spread on the pillow.

  I took her slender frame into my arms, not knowing exactly what to do. I did not realize how much I had grown until I felt her trembling against me, delicate as a child, and I was able to embrace her fully. I, the spoiled and weepy Simone, was comforting my strong-willed grandmother, a woman in her sixties, my protector, my guardian who always made things right for me.

  In tears and sobs, she told me of her nightmare. In the dream, Grandma Que had been sitting alone by a riverbank, facing a tranquil river, the cooling stream of water flowing downward, its movement obvious and distinct, yet eerily silent. The silence was absolute, and although the river was moving, time had frozen in place. There were objects flowing downstream in harmony with the flowing water. They, too, floated in silence.