I am inside the villa again, on Nam Giao slope. I am tiptoeing barefoot on the cool marble floor, and the checkerboard design dances under my feet. I am reentering the ancestral house, my naked heels pressing onto the checkerboard marble that cools off the heat outside. I stop, concentrating on my heels while feeling in the pores of my skin the silence that embraces me in its enormous presence. The silence becomes a cold wind that sweeps through me. In perfect rhythmic synchronization, I move along with that cold wind.
I crawl inside the mosquito net that waves like a layer of mist, and find her lying still with her eyes closed so I can’t see the soulful black longan seeds underneath her thin, smooth eyelids, with their tiny wrinkles that hold the secrets of her life. Her mass of long hair, salt-and-pepper, spreads to one side of her body. I lie down next to her and talk. There is so much to tell. I have in my mind images of barren trees, skeleton branches, and red leaves that fill up the damp ground of St. Germain des Prés, Paris, or the suburbs of New York City. She has never seen red leaves. Nor has she seen the kind of scentless magnolias grown in the West.
I find myself falling down a cliff, the space below me so blackened I cannot see the bottom. It is an excruciatingly slow fall. Slowly, slowly, tumbling like those leaves departing the trees of St. Germain des Prés, reminding me of the fate of the exiled. I am falling down the course of Exile. In my descent, I hear every word of her whisper. She says, “What good does it do to go on living when all your loved ones are gone and you never know when you will be able to see them again?”
And then she says the last thing that sticks to my mind, following me until I hit the bottom of the cliff. The fall makes no sound. I land and the heaviness of silence will not let go of me. But in that silence I hear her. She reminds me of all my promises unfulfilled. Put her on the lacquer divan in the old French villa at Nam Giao. Let her hang on to her jade and diamond earrings and gold bracelets—memory of a royal concubine, artifacts already blessed with the holy water from the bottle of the compassionate Quan Yin. Place the rings inside her mouth to keep insects away, the bracelets on her chest to protect her heart, earrings tucked inside her ears, blocking the ear canals from the beastly sounds of darkness.
My very strong grandmother wants to be safe. She once talked about the baskets of violet orchids hanging all around her French villa. She said that when my grandfather—the man she loved—was still alive, the only flower he liked was a mauve orchid. Orchids prefer shade and only occasional sunshine. Gentlemen grow orchids for the women they love a lifetime, and for the cause they pursue. In death, let her be with the gentle fragrance and violet shades of the flower that signifies the dignity of her womanhood and symbolizes the color of the horizon of her beloved city.
I held Grandma Que’s hair in my arms. I caressed the hair that had waited years for my touch and embrace. The presence embraced me as much as I embraced it. I felt her and saw her in her last moment on earth.
I held on to the salt-and-pepper wig and thought of all the losses. No more magnolia tree in front of an old villa to welcome me home with those hanging baskets of violet orchids and a chime-filled porch. No more dainty white mosquito nets hanging over a mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquer bed. She had wanted all those physical things within her upkeep to welcome me home, once I turned old and gray and tired of life in exile.
I was not yet old and gray, and I had returned home.
Grandma Que and her world were gone.
I raised the wig and pressed it to my heart. The pain revived and cut me in half, sharp like a sword piercing through. I bent along its gradual and precise path into numbness.
9. LAST GIFTS
I had offered O-Lan money. Just like Comrade Chuyen, she refused my gift. She did not come to see me for money, she said.
“Is there anything you want or need, O-Lan?”
She hesitated for a while and then spoke, almost too eloquently, as though she had planned the speech. “I have grown children, and many granddaughters. They are all healthy and good. I would be pleased if you could take one of my grandchildren to America. You can just pick one among them. Any particular one you like. A little girl, perhaps?”
I had not thought of this before. A crawling baby girl under my care, even if there was no longan tree in America to provide a shade over her, the way I was once shielded?
“Chung toi ngheo qua, co oi!” O Lan drawled. “You see, miss, we are poor, too poor. The parents would be grateful to give the child away to an adoptive parent like you, and no one will create any problem for you. It would be the greatest deed you could do for me.”
When she detected no overt sign of enthusiasm from me, she deflated like a flat tire.
“O-Lan, I will consider it seriously,” I assured her, watching her mouth open again with hope. “I will just have to let you know. But I can’t just pick up a child on this trip.”
“Perhaps the next trip, then?”
I could not give her any more assurance, so I opened my suitcase and took out my mid-length wool coat. “It gets cold in Hue,” I said, “so please keep this from me.” I put the coat inside her straw bag.
“If I accept this,” she said, “you will still consider adopting one of my grandchildren, then, or will this be all? You wouldn’t think you have paid your debt to me for burying your grandmother by giving me this coat, would you, miss?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “I’ll do all I can.”
She jumped up to squeeze my hand. “One more thing,” she continued with her excitement. “The silk farm.”
“What about the silk farm?”
“Deserted and abandoned by the government. Without silk, the village of Quynh Anh is dead. For years, I have been selling noodles instead. Nowadays, fabric is smuggled from China. But Vietnamese silk is good—darn good! So delicate, so fine, and I know all about silkworms. All my children and grandchildren and in-laws can work. The village can revitalize. Maybe you can get your friends in America to be interested in rebuilding that silk farm. That would make your grandmother’s soul very happy.”
She sounded sophisticated and solemn, as though she were delivering another practiced speech. My eyes searched for O-Lan’s, and she met me there. I found, again, the pair of animated eyes in an animated old woman, like that day at the séance, in all that incense smoke. Through these eyes, I had met the Spirit of the Perfume River. I found in that pair of eyes the sincerity that gave meaning to my homecoming. I had to believe in the rare signs of goodness in this ravaged land. I had traveled in that land like a stranger, not knowing for sure whether it was indeed dear to me. I had to hold on to my own conviction that it loved me, honestly loved me, like Grandma Que had loved me, and that I could do some good to the place.
Another item, old and fragile, tugged at the bottom of O-Lan’s straw bag. O-Lan said it was a handwritten notebook prepared and kept by the eunuch Son La until his death in 1935. Grandma Que had kept it on the altar, hidden behind the photographs, and had managed to retrieve it from there before the North Vietnamese closed the door to her villa at Nam Giao. After she died, O-Lan became its custodian. Son La’s notebook, the eunuch’s recording of my great-grandmother’s life in the Violet City, was meant to be with me. So O-Lan turned it over, together with the wig.
I saw O-Lan to the door and bought the rest of her chewy tapioca noodles—the banh canh—so she would not have to worry about her income for the day. I gave the basket to the hotel’s restaurant staff.
“Everyone in town knows O-Lan,” one of the waiters said. “She wanders around talking to tourists and concocting stories all the time to win sympathy. What were you doing with the banh canh peddler, miss? Be careful, and don’t believe everything she said! That old, shrewd woman must be up to something.”
10. RIVER, COFFINS, AND MEMORY
In the aromatic air, the Perfume River sparkled under the bluish moonlight. A lamp hanging from the balcony shone onto the eunuch’s notebook that I held in my hands.
I began to read Son La’s handwri
tten notes, describing the making of a royal concubine—the transformation of the poor paddle girl of the Perfume River into the legendary Mystique Concubine of the Violet City. The loyal old servant had recorded the tale in the new Vietnamese, Chu Quoc Ngu, using the Roman alphabet. He had devoted to the new alphabet the same intricate attention as to his Chinese calligraphy. The handwriting shone in perfect penmanship, meticulously leaning toward the right. The even strokes, blurred and stained on old notebook paper, resembled scripture from rolls of an ancient Egyptian text.
Son La’s notes stopped with the Mystique Concubine’s departure from the Violet City for the hamlet of Quynh Anh. Those who had knowledge of what happened thereafter were all dead. All I had to go by, as the returning child of Hue, was the notebook of the old eunuch confirming what I had heard at a séance performed by an old medium, a former royal maid and professional guerrilla spy accustomed to deceit.
My thoughts drifted back to those old photographs and postcards that arrived in New York City from Paris, all bearing the trademark of the Foucault gallery and containing secrets I might not wish to know.
Where was the truth?
I became the wandering soul looking for roots buried under ruin, denied forever the certainty of full knowledge.
I closed Son La’s notebook and stared down at the Perfume River, hoping to find, amid those sparkling ripples, a familiar image. I was looking into depth and darkness that never ended.
I began to see a film of fog. Amid all that fog, a slender almond shape of a paddleboat began to appear. It moved slowly and silently in the tropical air of a hot autumn night. A slender silhouette of a long-haired woman was paddling. The small boat took more vivid form before it blurred again. It kept flickering. And then at the blink of my eyes it was gone for good.
I heard the eerie sound—Mee-Ey! Mee-Ey!—that noblewoman of ancient Champa. Fear not death. Fear not exile. Let her soul rest on those sparkling waves. She has become part of her river and her earth. The chorus became the promise of her eternity.
I looked to the riverbank. The hot air filled my nostrils, burdened my chest, and rushed my breathing. I blinked again and saw Grandma Que, as I had remembered her for all my life in America. Moonlight shone directly on her, and the stream of hair—salt-and-pepper, like lacquer marked with snowflakes—flowed alongside her fragile frame.
She was looking forlornly at the River Huong. Coffins. Coffins. And coffins. Catching sparks of the moonlight beam above them. Coffins were floating slowly and silently, on that cool stream of water, in that hot air.
The silence seemed to last forever, until she turned to face me, with those same sad and serene eyes.
I saw her face. So clearly. The wrinkles could not take away the beauty of the fine bone structure. But the face was changing, transforming into the face of a young girl. The identical twins in André’s picture and postcard collection. The five-year-old Simone who sat on the stairway of the photography studio of Tan Tan.
The girl grew slowly older and older, gradually turning into the fifteen-year-old princess of the South Sea Pearl photographed by the Foucault gallery. The face of Cinnamon. The same face appeared on the fifteen-year-old misplaced Simone who strolled the streets of Paris and sang the scale in a church in Rome. The face got older and older again, until it became the forty-year-old, solemn-looking woman in the portrait that bore the stamp of the Foucault gallery.
It was my face all along.
The face continued to age, older and older, until wrinkles filled it and the eyes became almost hidden behind the drooping folds. She returned to being my Grandma Que. The face I had remembered all my life but could never see in a dream.
I was facing her, again. Just her and me, with the silent river behind us.
She smiled assuringly, and the sad longan eyes beamed. Mi Uyen, my beautiful lovebird, you are the princess of Annam; Si, poupée Si, coquettish Si, Si of the Jeanne D’Arc Institute, Si of Lycée Marie Curie, Mi Uyen of Saigon’s College of Law, welcome home, my child!
11. HOPE, LOVE, AND EXILE
I returned to Saigon the following week and stood in front of the villa that had once been occupied by André and Dominique. The name of the street, Rue Tu Duc, had been changed to some contemporary revolutionary’s name. The villa had been converted into a French Vietnamese restaurant catering to European patrons.
I entered the restaurant and ordered a meal for my thirty-ninth birthday celebration. I ate alone.
The knowledge that in this place a long, long time ago, André and Dominique had lived their married life sank my mind into the mud of nostalgia. As the waiter placed my favorite French flan before me, I closed my eyes and imagined André and Dominique, young and serious, loving once, laughing once.
When I left the restaurant, the sun’s yellow rays at the end of day were still lingering on Saigon’s sidewalks.
I traveled the streets between my former house in District Eight and what used to be the National Institute of Music and Drama, where, as a young girl, I had biked and sung under the shade of those tall tropical trees.
I took a cyclo to Saigon’s Notre Dame Cathedral, a miniature of Notre Dame de Paris, nestled in the heart of Saigon, amid rows of green trees—one of the few spots in Saigon that remained unchanged. It was the late afternoon hours when I got off the cyclo and walked toward the cathedral. For a moment, I thought I saw André in between rows of trees, young and energetic, swift and extraordinarily handsome, yet reflective and wistful still. Holding a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, he was walking toward me, nodding to acknowledge my presence, and when I passed him, his beautiful brown eyes obsessively followed my footsteps.
Nec amor, nec tussis celatur. Love is like a cough. Cannot be hidden.
In agitation, I closed my eyes. Sorrow sank in, as I realized perhaps in my life I had fallen in love too early. At fourteen years of age, when somebody gave me yellow tea roses and read Baudelaire to me in my former Saigon.
Nec amor, nec tussis celatur.
When I opened my eyes, I thought I saw Christopher’s reproachful gaze as on the date of our wedding in Las Vegas. “You are the bride who wants no wedding or honeymoon,” he had said. “Why did you come to me in New York City? You owed me no obligation. Once you landed safely in America, why not stay with your family and look for the one you truly love?”
“Because,” I whispered, “I wanted to know with certainty that I had boarded the plane.”
Somewhere I still heard the angry roar of the last helicopter atop the U.S. embassy.
“You did board the plane,” my husband seemed to say. “But you never left the place. It is always in your heart, Simone. I can never blame your heart.”
My late husband, symbolic of America’s largesse, had never blamed my heart. In fact, the largesse was so great that he never asked to occupy my heart, knowing that I had left it behind. “Allow me to say I’m sorry,” I said to Christopher before he faded away.
Standing in the heart of the new Saigon, I began to rediscover my feelings for André, persistent and haunting since childhood, in a completely different light. He was the only one outside the culture who understood the bond between my soul and those of all the women in my bloodline. My love for him became the genderless, asexual love that persisted through time and space. The young boy of Paris had grown up into the young man of America, and had traveled so far to find in me images of Indochina that no longer existed. We stood at different corners of the world. To start that far from each other, loving was an impossibility, a taboo, a forbidden fruit. But we did meet in a war-torn place, bound together by the same melancholy and mysticism that housed our respective remembrances of childhood, and then off we went again, far from each other, locked in separate places, swept away by our own weaknesses and circumstances.
When the last bit of sunlight died out over the Notre Dame Cathedral of the new Saigon, I thought I saw once more André’s soulful eyes and fluttering lashes. Those eyes told me they understood t
he coffins of Cinnamon. His fate was tied to mine, in ways too mystical to be expressed in words. André shared in the perfect world that I had lost with the fall of Saigon. Once I realized our bond, my love for him became the love I had for my own humanity, my birthplace, and generations of political immigrants—those nostalgic people, homeless in their sphere, stateless in their world. I loved him anew, beyond all manifestations. Beyond this transient existence.
The realization shook me, and all of a sudden I wanted so badly to sing, to reach those high notes on the right-hand side of my piano keyboard. Into the skyline of the new Saigon. Until night fell and darkness subsided so the evening butterflies of his eyelashes would gather and follow me into my nocturnal tune, where finally, as the young woman who practiced singing, I would reach a perfect la.
I closed my eyes again, knowing my childhood was gone and both Christopher and André had departed from this world. From the points of their departures, all my fear and sorrow were mine alone to bear. Part of me had become the lonely paddle girl who appeared in the fog, and part of me had become Grandma Que sitting by the bank of the River Huong watching and mourning the deaths of her loved ones.
In the hot and humid air of tropical Vietnam, I heard again the choral music of Beethoven’s “Elegischer Gesang,” sung for the departure of a gentle and noble spirit. The symphonic chorale filled up Saigon’s sky, rising to a crescendo that lifted me to the top of the cathedral.
Silence ensued after Beethoven ended.
And then, in all that utmost silence, across the River Huong where coffins floated, I heard again the clear voice of a young woman, singing the phrase I once knew so well, in the wailing sadness of the Nam Binh pentatonic tune:
Daughters of the River Huong Page 30
