"We're going out for real Vietnamese food," he said and gave us a stern look: Don't say I didn't warn you.
Saigon Palace was in a strip mall, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a dollar store. A teenage Vietnamese girl jogged over to my uncle and bowed several times, then guided him by the hand to a booth at the back of the restaurant. The two of them spoke loudly in Vietnamese and laughed. My aunt smiled and rolled her eyes.
"He's such a show off!"
We followed them to the table. The waitress nodded at my uncle, then she giggled, but I couldn't understand them. We sat down and I opened my menu and gazed at the pictures. The grainy images of shrimp and crispy pork were crooked and over-exposed, with an almost salacious quality to them. I thought about my father's Army yearbook, a cheaply-bound collection of photographs, their captions strewn with glaring grammatical and spelling errors. Beneath a picture of a middle-aged Vietnamese woman washing dishes in the mess hall: Nut Bad. A young Vietnamese woman typing a report: Oh yes, ain't it Lookin' Good! Or two Vietnamese teenagers in the middle of a group of GIs: Get it on Girls—Do it.
"Chicken or beef?" my uncle asked us. The words sounded odd in the middle of his conversation with the waitress, the way "Coca-Cola" or an American actor's name stood out in a foreign film, as if these terms were there first and the other language grew around them. He ordered for us and nodded, then rolled his chopsticks between his palms like he was trying to start a fire.
He seemed in control leading us through the parking lot, into the restaurant, guiding us through our first exotic meal, so I didn't have the heart to tell him we had eaten Vietnamese food plenty of times. I looked around the restaurant and saw a man and woman sitting with a young boy by the window. The man tried to talk to him, but the boy pressed his chin to his chest, his face illuminated by his cell phone.
"I go back every year," my uncle said, rubbing his hand over his gray crew cut. "Three, four times. To universities in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City." He sat up and patted his hip pockets, then his left shirt pocket and pulled out his business card. Robert Dalton, Professor of Economics. "Beautiful country. Just stunning."
"It really is," my aunt said. "At first, I was like, 'Oh, jeez, I don't know about this.' But it really is something."
"Did you notice what kind of jobs the women had?" Vanessa asked.
My aunt looked confused.
"Oh, I don't know. I didn't really notice.
"She's going into research mode," I said, rubbing Vanessa's leg.
"I guess waitressing," my aunt said. "Some had little shops and things."
"My colleague, Teddy, he'll show you guys around Da Nang," my uncle said. "Now his wife,"—he let out a long, slow whistle—"is one hell of a cook."
It was quiet for a moment, except for our chewing.
"What was it like when you were over there the first time?" I asked.
"Jeez. Well, I started teaching in '86, so..."
My aunt smiled. "No, honey. I think he means during the war."
"Oh," my uncle said, laughing. "Too many battles. They all blend together."
My uncle didn't seem to be the stereotypical Vietnam Veteran. He wasn't angry. He wasn't indifferent. But he also wasn't my father. I wondered why my uncle was so eager to go to war, why he would forge his birth certificate just to fight, and now the memories were a blur.
When my father found out he was drafted, he considered running to Canada. He decided against it because he didn't want to disrespect his father. I couldn't shame him like that. My grandparents drove my father to JFK Airport in 1970. My father sat in the passenger seat, his mother behind him. Their 1951 Chevy Impala hummed down the Long Island Expressway. No music. My grandfather had spent the night crawling around inside the landing gear of 747s, and though he could take the whole plane apart and put it back together again, the only time he had ever sat in one was on his flight to Germany during World War II. He pulled his Impala into the parking lot. My father stepped out and waited on the curb painted white for DEPARTURES, adjusting his uniform. My grandmother wrapped her arms around my father, told him she loved him. My grandfather stood up straight. My father leaned in for a hug. His father offered his hand.
"Guess that was about as close as we were gonna get," my father told me.
*
On our way to the airport, my father bent one wrist over the wheel of his 2001 Ford Explorer, his other hand tapping the SEEK button, searching for a better song. He accelerated, following signs for 495 West, the Long Island Expressway. My mother, the passenger, dragged an emery board across her nails in quick mechanical strokes. From the back seat, I watched her movements. It was as if she was preparing a meal: body hunched over the garbage can, peeling onions or shucking corn. Vanessa sat beside me, her hand resting on my backpack, Lonely Planet's Guide to Vietnam jammed into the mesh pocket.
He stopped on 95.9 The Fox, home of Long Island's classic rock, though the station broadcasts from Norwalk, Connecticut, across the Long Island Sound. The DJ spoke in a throaty drawl, too tough for a station whose call letters spelled out a furry little animal. Perhaps the DJ was a sly fox, convincing all his fans, if DJs still had fans, that they were slick men on the prowl, one hand snapping out a Steve Miller tune, the other signaling to a sexy thang on the corner. This was my father's favorite station.
The Fox played The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today" and for a second, I thought my father had popped in one of his mix CDs. He picked out the opening guitar riff on the steering wheel, then looked at me in the rearview mirror.
"Tell ya, boy. Never thought this would be happenin'. Not in a million years."
My father had been amazed that it was even possible to go online and buy tickets to Vietnam. They allow that? What seemed to puzzle him the most was that we would want to go, that this was our choice.
Vanessa stared out the window, the rising sun revealing red streaks in her hair. She sat low in the seat with her legs resting on her giant backpack, which was stuffed with our clothes. Frayed baggage labels hung like tassels from nearly all the zippers. Some labels displayed unfamiliar airlines, in-country flights Vanessa took in Africa or South America. I told myself the nervousness in my stomach was actually excitement.
On Vanessa's lap was a binder the health clinic in Ho Chi Minh City had sent her several weeks ago. The material included the clinic's mission statement, how they hoped to fill the gap in sex education in Vietnam. I had listened to Vanessa speak to her advisor before we left and watched her make small, neat notes in the margins about the women she would be teaching. Some were in their twenties, some closer to sixty. They worked in bars, clubs, massage parlors. Vanessa was concerned about how well she could teach without knowing Vietnamese. Her advisor told her not to worry. They would supply a translator.
Bars, clubs, massage parlors. These words stood out each time I saw them in Vanessa's binder, as if they were written in neon. I thought about my older brother Don and me wandering through Amsterdam's narrow streets the summer I graduated from college. Our faces coated in red light, we stared at the women behind glass, daring each other. Neither one of us had the nerve to actually open the door and speak to the women. The nights were cool, and sometimes when I looked down the crowded streets at people in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, they seemed like Christmas shoppers in New York City, gazing into Macy's window display.
We walked into an old movie theater and sat in the balcony. Men in suits filled the seats around us. Through binoculars, they watched a man dressed as a gorilla pull his penis through a slit in his pants and jump on top of a naked woman. My brother and I leaned over the balcony. The woman closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. Behind his mask, the man's eyes glowed like an animal caught on the highway. I didn't mention the sex show in the postcards I wrote to Vanessa.
The backpack I used in Amsterdam was the same one on the seat between me and Vanessa. In the side pocket, pressed between the pages of our Lonely Planet, were two photographs from my father's going-away party. In t
he first photograph, everyone sits around a long table full of bread and pasta, extending their wine glasses for a toast. My aunts are slim with dark curly perms; my uncles are slim with slightly more hair. My grandmother looks exactly the same. Beside my father is his fiancée, Maddy, sitting beneath her shiny blonde beehive. My father wears a plain white t-shirt and an expression that says: All right, Bozo, take the picture.
The second photograph looked as if it was the same moment shot from a different angle. The back of my father's head, the side of Maddy's hair. In the background, beside the wood-paneled support pole, my grandfather stands, his face half in shadow.
The end of The Chambers Brothers. The tick-tock cowbell returned, the lyrics reduced to time...time...time. I watched the back of my father's head as he looked from side to side, then pulled into JFK's short-term lot for DEPARTURES. He shifted the Explorer into park. My mother tried to open the door but it was still locked. Vanessa looked at me and I grinned, pointing to the radio and then my father. The song slowly wound down, and Lester Chambers and my father finished with a guttural grunt.
Vanessa and I stood on the curb. My father held her wrist and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. He handed me my backpack, then pulled me in for a hug: Winstons and gasoline. He stepped back and rubbed my shoulder, grinning.
"Gonna be hot over there, boy. I can tell you that much."
3
SIX A.M. Ho Chi Minh City is a steaming engine. Though I can hear motorbikes toot their horns or a bus grind its gears, the city is dominated by an electrical hum, an audible heat, as if a swarm of cicadas hovers over the restaurants and apartment complexes, the green lakes and street vendors. Conversations break through the din and sound angry, even aggressive, and I wonder what there is to fight about at six a.m.
Last night, I spoke with the owner of our hotel, and as he poured me another shot of rice wine from a plastic water bottle, he said the language only sounds hostile. "Sounds and meanings are very different." He took a sip. I asked him what he hears when we talk—Americans, I meant. Another sip and his smile grew. "I hear R's. All the time R's." He stood up and began to bark, or maybe cheer. "Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra. Very much." He sat back down and shrugged, as if to say it wasn't my fault.
Vanessa and I gather our things and meet our guide in the lobby. He is a thin man in a short-sleeved dress shirt and black jeans, a braided leather belt and white sneakers. He sits in a large, intricately-carved chair, holding a steaming bowl of pho inches from his face. The lobby is filled with other travelers, white men and women with enormous backpacks—Australians, Germans, Swedes, my fellow Americans, some French. The hotel staff in matching mint-green Polo shirts, rush out like a pit crew and surround the new arrivals. They reach up to help the travelers remove their backpacks; the travelers turn and bend down to tip them.
As Vanessa and I walk through the lobby, our footsteps rattle the glass cabinets filled with ceramic Buddhas and lacquer paintings. Our guide stands and bows and reaches for my hand. To him, we are "An-tun-nee" and "Ba-nessa." To me, his name sounds like three coins dropping into a glass of water, and I can't imagine what it sounds like to him when I say, "Pleased to meet you, Anh Dung Nguyen." He nods several times, then pulls a map from his back pocket.
"So. You want to see Long Binh, yes?"
"Yes," I say. "And also Bien Hoa."
He nods. "Because you father?"
"Yes."
"He still alive, you father?"
"Yes."
A big smile. "Why he no come?" He opens his arms wide as if offering a hug.
Vanessa and I look at each other and laugh. "I'm not sure," I say. "Too far away, I guess." I realize after I've said this that it's the only reason I can think of. I never asked my father to come and he didn't offer. He hates long flights, can't sit in one place for too long. My father seemed satisfied with his memories: If I had to live my life over again, I'd go back.
I packed his voice. His stories live inside the recorder in my pocket, and sometimes during our trip, I'd plug in my headphones and press Play.
Anh nods. "Lots of men come back. Lots." He leans forward and slurps down the rest of his breakfast. "First we go here"—taps the map—"then here"—tap—"then we stop here for you to buy"—tap, tap, tap.
"Oh," I say. "That's okay. We don't have to stop."
"Okay, we stop for bathroom only. And maybe you buy," he says, quickly refolding the map.
*
Ho Chi Minh City's paved veins bleed into one main artery, Highway 1, which runs the length of Vietnam. Motorbikes piled with bamboo or chickens or friends or relatives flow through massive eight-way intersections, head-on, and zoom around a rotary, the driver's feet grazing the curb or the muffler of another motorbike. We do not merge as much as we are absorbed into traffic. An opening reveals itself only after our driver pulls out, and suddenly our car is surrounded. Our driver hits the horn—not a honk, but a rapid chirping, like a robotic cricket.
In minutes, the city is gone, and the country opens to infinite green. Farms and rice paddies spread for miles, eventually growing into the mossy mountains painted on the horizon. In the fields are tombs the color of Easter candy. They rise like an exotic crop scattered across the land. A little boy sits shirtless atop a water buffalo, whipping the animal's slick haunches, trying to motivate him around one of the pink and purple stones. "We keep the dead close," Anh says. I try to imagine burying not my hamster but my grandfather, my aunt or uncle behind our pool, beside my mother's flower bed—a colorful stone rising against the seasons, jutting up through leaves and through snow.
Up Highway 1 to Bien Hoa. Behind tinted glass, within air conditioning. Our driver is silent; he doesn't seem to speak English. He hits the funny-sounding horn each time he passes a vehicle, which is often, and as it trails off it sounds as if the car is laughing. The radio quietly plays a Muzak version of the Titanic soundtrack. Anh sits in the passenger seat, holding an unlit cigarette in his mouth. When he turns and talks to us, the cigarette jumps like a needle picking up an unstable frequency.
"Platoon." He points to the squat cement buildings capped with corrugated metal, an old movie house, and a dry fountain that form Bien Hoa's center. He holds his hand out straight and sweeps it across the windshield, fingertips grazing the glass. "All Platoon."
Anh knows me. He has never seen me before, but he knows me well. He's driven me up Highway 1 since the late 1980s, when I traveled to Vietnam from New York or Boston or Idaho or Kentucky, when I sat in the back of his car beside a father or a grandfather, a brother, an uncle. He takes us north from Ho Chi Minh City, to small towns whose names we know well, have been to or heard stories of. Anh studies the movies, listens to the music, points to a square of cement where Charlie Sheen once stood or patches of jungle that inspired CCR's "Fortunate Son." He drives us through the towns, and they all look the same, and perhaps none of us in the car would recognize a thing if Anh didn't mention a movie title or song lyric or speak the name of the town written on the back of the photograph in my pocket, my father standing in front of the old movie house: Bien Hoa, '71.
*
"Many men came here for a woman."
We stand on the cement pier in Bien Hoa, Anh's cigarette now lit, the driver watching us from the road. Anh looks around, paying close attention to the locals walking by, staring. I can tell by the slow pulls he takes on his cigarette, his calm tone, that he is not nervous, just careful. He tells us most tourists don't come here, and many of the locals have not seen a white person since the war.
"Very few women left in Bien Hoa," he says, almost under his breath.
"How come?" I ask.
"Marry soldiers. Soldiers take them home."
I think about the souvenirs we had bought earlier in the trip, the black chopsticks and their ceramic holders, wrapped tightly in tissue paper.
"Did the women want to leave?" Vanessa asks.
Anh purses his lips and stares down the street. "Perhaps some," he says. "Others, maybe not."
We stand on the pier for another minute or so as Anh finishes his cigarette. The stores across the street are different from the shops in Ho Chi Minh City. Instead of pizza and hamburgers, pirated copies of Dispatches or The Things They Carried, these stores sell scrap metal and lumber and copper piping. One man sits in the only empty space in his shop, as if at the helm of a small ship made of tires and hubcaps. Men laugh on the corner, drinking coffee, playing cards. Men crouch on the pier, pointing into the dark water. Men watch Anh flick his cigarette into the canal, clap his hands together, and their eyes follow us back across the street, into the car, as we disappear behind tinted glass.
The highway is less congested once we leave Bien Hoa and head toward Long Binh. Long Binh is where my father spent his twentieth birthday. This is where he spent most of his nineteen months in Vietnam. This is where he worked as a cook, mixing vats of oatmeal and mashed potatoes, brewing oceans of coffee, baking mountains of donuts. This is where he and the other spoons spent one-hundred-degree days preparing soup or baking apple pie. This is where the jokes start: How long you been in Long Binh? Been too long in Long Binh. This is where he cleaned and polished his rifle, hung posters of Jimi Hendrix and Playboy centerfolds, drank weak, government-issued Budweiser. One of the sixty-thousand soldiers living within this militarized metropolis, he constructed a hooch out of scrap wood and empty crates. This is where he sunbathed on a lawn chair, somewhere in the dusty divide between two of the U.S. Army's largest structures in South Vietnam: a hospital and a prison. This is where he bought a television and a stereo, tapped off a buddy's extension cord that was tapped off a buddy's extension cord. This is where Vietnamese women went hooch to hooch, waving white rags, speaking the only English necessary.
The Language of Men Page 2
