Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  She kept an air-conditioned apartment in District Three, paid for by one of her Taiwanese clients. God knows how many wives and girlfriends the man had had in Vietnam, but the arrangement kept Mai Anh well fed, she readily admitted. She told me the Taiwanese, who ran a new hotel in central Saigon, was about to go home. He had made arrangements to pass her on to his friend, a Korean petroleum engineer representing South Korean oil interests in Vietnam. The engineer was in Vietnam for a one-year contract of offshore drilling work. That mythical sea dragon of the Vietnamese culture, Lac Long Quân, the forefather who stretched himself along some 2500 kilometers of narrow and winding coast, must have blessed the country with rich mineral resources deep in the blue sapphire waters. Conveniently, the mystical blue dragon also blessed Mai Anh with her next meal ticket and luxurious lifestyle by giving those foreign petroleum project engineers and managers a reason to be in the developing Vietnam. All for the good of the country, Mai Anh retorted.

  “But what happens when the engineer’s one-year contract expires?” I asked.

  Quite often, Mai Anh explained, local women in servitude concocted a fantasy—that somehow the cohabitation would lead to a marriage and a ticket out of the country. In some cases, the fantasy came true, providing the majority of the girls with more impetus to dream on of a way out.

  “Out of the country’s poverty and backwardness,” Mai Anh added emotionlessly, explaining to me that her deep pockets were always filled by middle-aged Asian men.

  “White men, who often stink and are far too hairy,” she declared, “can be quite stingy and expect to get it for free after a meal and a night of slow dancing.”

  She showed no shame, talked bluntly, almost defiantly, and considered herself lucky compared to other women. Some walked the streets. Others rode their mopeds alongside foreign shoppers who were carousing to make their Far East experience worthwhile. These butterfly-like silhouettes in their charming ao dai could propose and negotiate just as skillfully and boldly as the pimps, who could either be teenage boys or white-haired old men.

  Her crude comments made me flinch. No typical Vietnamese girl, demure, indirect, and non-communicative, could be that blunt. But Mai Anh was not a typical Vietnamese girl. She was the Lycée Marie Curie girl who had survived jail and the tragic deaths of both parents during the dark days of Saigon.

  I told Mai Anh of my desire to export the old divan, considered an antique by the authorities, and thus, by law, prohibited from being taken from the country.

  “Have you heard of the law of the jungle, my friend?” she asked me mockingly.

  I told her I understood.

  “Welcome to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” she said.

  She advised me to give up the official application procedures through customs. She knew a kept woman in Hanoi, mistress of a powerful cadre at the Ministry of the Interior, who could help. She said given sufficient time, she could get to almost everyone of power in Vietnam who had a mistress. She said she had found her place in the new Vietnam but was concentrating on leaving the country, even if she had to leech onto one of her wealthy foreign hosts, just like the native girls she disdained.

  I spent the night with Mai Anh in her air-conditioned apartment and listened to her tape of Vietnamese music in the seventies, banned at one time by the Communist government. The music brought us back to our old days at Marie Curie. For a split second or so, I thought she might have shed a tear.

  In the morning I left Mai Anh and headed for a meeting at the Century Hotel, where my English and Australian law partners talked of how the government was attempting to curtail the practice of law by foreign firms in order to protect the new law graduates of Vietnam. Those few privileged lawyers of the new Vietnam were eager and needy to enter the international commercial world.

  It was the era immediately following President Clinton’s lifting of the U.S. embargo against Vietnam. My law partners warned me that the office phone line could still be tapped and that documents generated from the office could still be secretly screened by the Local People’s Committee or the Ministry of the Interior through the network of local employees that the government furnished to foreign enterprises. The discussion at the meeting centered on the various ways international law firms could legalize their presence in Vietnam and bypass local regulations prohibiting foreign lawyers from practicing Vietnamese law. The suggestions included teaming up with the so-called friends of the government as co-counsel, even if the “friends” had no legal training, and disguising time sheets showing the international lawyers were practicing Vietnamese law, or international law on Vietnamese soil, despite the prohibition of the Socialist Republic.

  “So, we complain about the country’s lawlessness,” I blurted out, “yet we find ways to evade or break their laws, in order to make a profit.”

  All the lawyers sitting around the breakfast table stared at me as though I were a monster, incomprehensible, out of place. I felt sick to my stomach and left the meeting early.

  Mai Anh’s hired chauffeur took me onto bumpy Highway 1 stretching between Saigon and Hanoi. The endless, winding road was waiting for World Bank’s infrastructure development loans to fill the bumps. I passed through the greenery of Vietnam, the breathtaking Col des Nuages, or Pass of Clouds, nestling against the whiteness of flying clouds, hovering over perpendicular cliffs that soared from the sapphire sea below. I passed white sand beaches and green forests, square rice paddies with sluggish, skinny water buffalos dipping themselves in muddy water. I passed quaint bamboo tree entrances to villages that have endured for centuries, with their old low-roofed, yellow schoolhouses. In the front yards of those schoolhouses, shoeless children wandered toward the side of the dirt road, their necks craning out, their inflated bellies protruding over bony kneecaps.

  I arrived in Hanoi just in time for its nostalgic fall season, its cool breeze welcoming new foliage and buds of plum flowers, stirring tiny and peaceful waves on Hanoi’s tranquil lakes. I walked through government offices in buildings that seemed a hundred years old. Their classic French architecture and facades contrasted with the neglected interiors, the chipped coats of paint and baseboards, and the old Oriental furniture sitting over stained tile floors. I came in and out of these buildings, frustrated with red tape and the inert bureaucracy, saddened by the Hanoians’ poverty, yet bewildered and awed by the city’s overwhelming air of history.

  I followed the steps Mai Anh had carefully outlined for me, meeting with her contacts, one person after another, mostly in the famous fish restaurant La Vong located in the old commercial neighborhood of Hanoi, the ba sau pho phuong. There, grilled fish was served in a clay pot of sizzling oil over a tiny coal stove, next to a clay plate full of fresh dill, lettuce, and mint leaves. I followed someone into a house near the West Lake in the outskirts of Hanoi, where I was told to drop off an envelope full of U.S. currency.

  I never met the mysterious mistress of the Ministry of the Interior official, but when all had been said and done, the woman sent one of her runners out, promising me that my divan would be delivered at the dock of Singapore’s World Trade Center within a month. The runner said part of his job, at the instruction of the madame, was to entertain me on a night out in Hanoi. A taxi picked me up and took me to the Metropole Hotel for dinner, and then to a dance club in the outskirts of Hanoi. The darkness of the place, together with the silhouettes of slender, red-lipped women wearing black dresses, wasn’t far from the feel of the second-class discotheques and mini-nightclubs of New York City. Under the dim light, the women all reminded me of Mai Anh.

  Just when I was leaving the dance hall, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face at the door. I recognized the English partner at my law firm, his thin hair and clean-shaven chin lighting up over his necktie as the neon sign outside the dance hall beamed across his balding forehead. He was getting into a cyclo with a petite Vietnamese girl who looked half his size and his age. Crowding into the narrow sedan seat of the cyclo, she sat in his lap, resting her childl
ike frame upon his potbelly. I knew the man’s Christian wife and his three children, all living in Singapore while he set up business in Hanoi and made trips back to Singapore during the weekend. I felt nauseous. Off I fled, leaving the neon sign of the new Hanoi.

  7. O-LAN

  In the following days, I managed to take a trip to Hue and looked for the old places. It was in the late afternoon when I strolled by the French villa at Nam Giao. An earlier visit to the People’s Committee of Hue confirmed what I had expected to hear—the villa had been nationalized into a guesthouse for government workers. Plans were underway to evict the residents and convert the villa into a bed-and-breakfast hotel to meet the needs of foreign tourists attracted to Hue’s royal tombs, vast open land, and dreamy scenery.

  I walked around the villa several times. Peeping inside the stone wall encircling it, I saw again scenes of my sixth birthday. I walked to the front gate and met a man in his early thirties, who introduced himself to me as the house manager.

  “I saw you circling the property,” he said. “What do you need, miss?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just want to look. It’s not a crime to look, is it?”

  He looked at me strangely, perhaps noticing the dampness in my eyes. “You are from abroad, aren’t you? I’ll let you look, but only for a few minutes.”

  He opened the gate. Part of the front yard had been blocked off, and a narrow cement walkway had been built, leading to the front door. I recognized the high ceiling and cool, checkerboard marble floor, but the entire open living room had been chopped up into smaller rooms. The villa had been divided into small, filthy apartments, all facing a dark hallway. Tiny doors and windows opened to rusty iron balconies, painted in gaudy orange, where trash was not contained in bags, and dripping wet clothes were clipped to old, unused electrical wires.

  I stood dazed in the dark and humid hallway. The wretched poverty of modern Vietnam had taken away all the romanticism of memory.

  “Someone must have lived here once,” I said to the house manager on my way out to the gate, “before liberation, before the nationalization of private assets. The house once belonged to someone.”

  He looked at me defensively. “This house belongs to the people of Vietnam,” he claimed.

  I observed his obstinate face. He could not have been more than thirty-five years old, speaking with the coastal accent of North Vietnam instead of the musical accent of Hue. I moved to the front yard, and he followed me.

  There was no magnolia tree. I saw instead piles of dirt, lumber, rusty sinks, clay containers, and metal bars. Like a construction site.

  I went to the spot where the magnolia tree had once been. It was difficult to make my way through the piles of dirt and metals. I finally located the spot, convinced it was the right location.

  “This is the commune’s patio,” the man went on. “Residents come here to work, cook, and the children play after school. The water does not drain properly in this patio, so they are undertaking renovation. They are doing all this work themselves.”

  I was bending over to look for traces of the tree, among piles of metal bars. “Where is the tree?” I asked. “You’ve cut down the tree!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where is the tree?” Tears stained every word I spoke.

  He lowered his head, and his voice softened almost to a whisper. “You used to live here, didn’t you?” he asked, already knowing the answer. “I moved here from the North. I don’t know the history of this house.” He avoided my eyes.

  “Someone died here. By hanging herself fifty years ago.”

  “A woman?” he asked.

  “My mother saw her die.”

  “I am not surprised, miss. You must have heard the rumor. The residents kept talking about some ghost. I told them there is no ghost. Even if someone did die here, it was too long ago. Enough time has passed for all ghosts to be reincarnated. They must have started their new life already. Besides, in this country, so many people have died through the years. Good cause. Bad cause. We don’t have enough room for the living, let alone ghosts.”

  “Wait, miss,” he called after me.

  I had been standing on Princess Huyen Tran Street, watching the sunset. Somewhere I could feel the unobtrusive silhouette of Grandma Que in her black silk pantaloons, standing still, looking into a dying sun. Next to her was the little girl in her ponytail, holding her bike.

  In front of me now, the same sun was dying. The stream across the street was still there, but it was muddy and full of trash. The body of water no longer had the cool, calming color of imperial jade. Trash accumulated on both banks, and the green grass had turned dry and yellow.

  I turned to face the comrade as he walked toward me.

  “I heard about the princess and her silk farm,” he said. “She died after liberation. She had no family.”

  “She died,” I could only repeat. “Tell me how she died.” I forced a smile.

  “There was a housekeeper here once,” the man continued, his eyes glancing downward, his hand hanging in the air in a gesture of guilt and embarrassment, perhaps, as though he were too proud to apologize for his earlier lies. “I know who you are, miss. You’ve come back to find what was once yours.”

  His fluttering hand seemed to tell me: I am not responsible for your loss.

  “The housekeeper, they call her O-Lan,” the man said slowly, pausing to wait for my reaction. “She used to live here to take care of the altar when the princess was away in Saigon. All before liberation. I heard from the people around here.”

  “Where can I find her? This O-Lan? In the village of Quynh Anh?”

  “Do you have relatives there in the village?”

  “No, I have no one,” I said. “The person I cared for so much in Vietnam is dead. And I have never met this O-Lan.”

  “I would not go to the village if I were you. Let me find O-Lan for you.”

  I opened my purse and took out all of the cash I had with me. I expected him to grab the green U.S. dollars, but he pushed my hand away.

  “No, no, please don’t do this,” he said.

  “Why are you being so nice?”

  “You have something to do with this place, and I saw tears in your eyes. You’re very sad. You are out of place here. I like you and don’t want you to wander out to the villages. That would make you even sadder.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s now 1994, the last decade of the twentieth century. Yet there is nothing in the village but sheer poverty and deterioration. Central Vietnam is the poorest part of a very poor country.”

  I thought of the shoeless children in half-abandoned schoolhouses I had seen during my voyage through Vietnam. It was almost the end of the twentieth century, and shoes for schoolchildren in the countryside were a luxury. Unaware of my thoughts, the cadre went on, describing the same scenes I had seen of Vietnam.

  “The villagers are very poor. For example, children have no shoes, and they smell. Further, the village is not sanitary like your hotel. You may get sick drinking and eating there. Those villages just recently got electricity, and there isn’t enough of that. The villagers expect you to give them cash and gifts—you, as one of the lucky and wealthy Vietnamese who live overseas and return home to visit. Those poor souls will follow you and expect things from you. Are you rich enough in America to feed an entire village, and many more, for the rest of their lives?”

  I shook my head.

  He stopped talking and looked down at his feet.

  “Why do you care?” I asked.

  I sought his eyes and he looked away. For a while, his eyes were riveted to the spot where the magnolia tree once stood, as though he were trying to find ways to tell me more. His eyes shifted toward the river across the street, and he began talking again, this time nonstop, as though he were hurrying through to hide his emotions.

  “When I went south after the war, I, too, found a different world. I may be from the North, but my family is originally from Hue. The
people from overseas come back home and spread their money around. Or the people here ask for money. Coming home becomes a money transaction. Done for love, family, pride, duty, whatever, it is still a money transaction. This takes place everywhere in Vietnam nowadays.

  “But I want to say Hue is different. There are Hue citizens who will do something for the sake of doing it and who are not for hire. Also, we from the North got the bad reputation: mean, stupid, unreasonable, argumentative, greedy Commies who blinded themselves in Ho Chi Minh thoughts, took out their hatred and jealousy on the people of the South, and got rich because they robbed the South of its property. But there are exceptions, too. You don’t have to pay me to help you, miss.”

  I was speechless. A sudden gust of wind plucked the cluster of green dollar bills from my hand and sent them flying.

  “You should hold on to your money, miss!” he yelled at me in his Northern accent, agitated to see the cash fly away, his hungry eyes following the dancing bills.

  Together, we chased down the green dollar bills scattering down the street. One bill flew toward the stream. He ran after it, crossing the street, and returned with it, breathing heavily.

  “We almost lost it to the river. That’s a lot of money, miss. A U.S. twenty-dollar bill. It’s more than what I make in a month as a government cadre.”

  He went on to promise me again he would try to find O-Lan in the village of Quynh Anh. And then he would send her to my hotel. All free of charge.