Postcards From Nam

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  “What are you doing?” I said angrily. “I don’t want to be listened to.”

  “I am sorry,” he said, his long fingers twisting together. His eyes gazed softly at me before he quickly lowered his head.

  “You played beautifully,” he said.

  I was, of course, pleased by the compliment. My piano teacher was stern and never gave compliments. There was only one formal recital at the end of every semester at the National Institute of Drama and Music, where I took music lessons. There, I was criticized more often than praised.

  “I came to bring you this.” He gave me a basket full of my favorite snack and breakfast food—slices of French baguettes, toasted with Brettelle butter, the genuine kind produced in France and packaged in golden aluminum cans. The toasts were topped with honey and sprinkled with brown sugar. I could devour a dozen.

  Nam told me he had made these toasts himself and had purchased the Brettelle butter with his own money. He had started a gambling table for the neighborhood called Bau Cua Ca Cop. He drew pictures of a crab, a fish, a tiger, and a squash on a large sheet of paper. He also made a hexagon-shaped dice and drew the same picture on each surface of the dice. Of course, only four surfaces had pictures, and the remaining two were blackened. The kids spread the sheet with Nam’s drawings on the table and bet their money on either the fish, the tiger, the crab, or the squash. In suspense, they threw the dice across the table. If the dice turned up black, all of them lost money to the house. If the crab turned up, for example, the kid who bet his money on the crab would win. All others would lose their money to the house.

  Nam made his money that way, using his school allowance and his artistic talents to act as the house. Soon he became a celebrity. Parents thanked him for keeping the kids from running around, risking getting hit by cars and trucks, or wandering into the soldiers’ post nearby, where gunmen guarded a storage of ammunition, or to the Chi Hoa jail where political prisoners and felony offenders were held. At the same time, the parents blamed Nam when their children demanded more lunch allowances. On balance, they would all forgive Nam because gambling was a festivity associated with New Year celebration. It was not such a terrible thing.

  But most of all, the parents tolerated Nam’s gambling because they recognized him as a talented artist. His crab, tiger, and fish were so lively they could move across the table at any time, one parent said. The dice was likewise an exquisite piece of art. Even my father, who frowned upon gambling, had to admit so. Nam himself solemnly declared at the gambling table that one of these days he would draw postcards and send them all over the world.

  “Even to France and America,” he declared. As Vietnamese schoolchildren, we instinctively knew the significance of France and America in our history, although we might not understand it all.

  So with gambling income extracted from innocent young boys, Nam had bought the Brettelle butter from the glamorous French grocery of Crystal Palace in the heart of chic downtown Saigon. He knew how much I liked French honeyed toasts—les biscottes—and had heard me complain that my grandmother had not made enough of them for breakfast. My huge appetite for these biscottes was never satisfied. So Nam decided to make me a basket.

  From that day on, I often had a stomach full of honeyed biscottes in between my piano practices. Occasionally, Nam added a different kind of toast, smeared deliciously with authentic French pâté, also purchased from Crystal Palace.

  But I still had difficulty thanking him. I was too proud, although I always hastily and readily consumed his delicious gifts.

  My mother was pregnant and had a miscarriage that summer. She hemorrhaged and fell in the bathroom at two in the morning. It was I who found her on the floor in a pond of blood. I screamed my heart out and thought she was dying. The whole house woke up in panic and we called upon Nam’s father, Uncle Pham. Within a minute or so, his taxi was in front of our house.

  As my father carried her away, I followed, picking up her slippers and hanging on to the hem of my mother’s black silk trousers, soaked with blood dripping from her dangling feet. I followed my parents to the door of Uncle Pham’s taxi. My father shoved me into the back seat. In the taxi, I turned around once and found the pair of almond eyes. Nam was watching me from behind his father’s taxi. As the car rolled on, he put his two hands around his mouth and yelled to me:

  “Your mother will not die. Mi Chau, don’t be afraid!”

  The taxi rolled on to Saigon’s Women’s Hospital, the Tu Du. All along the way, I murmured to myself, after Nam:

  “Mi Chau, don’t be afraid...”

  I kept repeating the phrase until the taxi stopped in front of the hospital. When the hospital staff moved my mother and pulled me out of Uncle Pham’s cab, I was still murmuring to myself:

  “Mi Chau, don’t be afraid.”

  3. LOVE AND GINSENG ROOTS

  At Tu Du Hospital, the doctor announced my mother needed a blood transfusion. But her blood type was uncommon among Vietnamese. The attending doctor said the blood type was quite common among black Americans, so he made a phone call to the blood bank of the American military hospital. Sure enough, they found a few suitable blood bags.

  My father was supposed to rush to the American military hospital in the outskirts of Saigon to pick up the blood bags. Uncle Pham would give my father a ride there. As my father hurried through the hallway of the hospital, he told me my job that day at the hospital was to wait and get a ginseng box from a medical intern.

  A ginseng box, he stressed.

  There was no time for further questions.

  I stood by the window of the hospital, looking out, hoping to see a bed of green grass. My eyes were met, instead, with concrete walls, buildings, and crowded streets full of mopeds, cyclos, and French-made cars like Renault and Peugeot. Somewhere farther, over red and gray rooftops, bulks of green leaves topped those tall and healthy trees, where I imagined there would be lovebirds’ nests. The hospital hallway smelled like medicine and alcohol, so I sat still, imagining lovebirds’ songs and blooming spring flowers. When my eyes shifted back to the hallway of Tu Du Hospital, my heart sank. Not even my vivid imagination of lovebirds and flowery scents could lift the sorrow from my heart.

  In that one day, in the hallway of the Tu Du public hospital, I learned the hard facts of womanhood. The hallway, tiled in a yellowish and dark blue checkerboard pattern, perhaps once shining and beautiful, was bordered by old walls painted with the same combination of colors—a thick stripe of dark blue at the base, met by orange wall space. The poor mothers-to-be of Saigon—perhaps the artisan and blue-collar female inhabitants of a small country stricken with poverty, war, and urban overpopulation—sat alongside the hallway, leaning against those blue and orange walls, crying, sweating, or even convulsing. Their faded black trousers and polyester blouses, cheap flowery patterned pajamas, or shapeless ao dai with checkered turbans and scarves that covered up their oily, disheveled black hair all added to the assortment of colors that spelled poverty. I heard all kinds of name-calling and curse words from these pained and desperate women. Some lay panting on old newspapers, towels, and rags. Some wiped their sweaty faces and smeared their dirty fingers on the flaps of their blouses. Others had their trouser legs turning upside down, inside out, the hemline falling back all the way to their inner thighs, displaying their dry, white or brown skin with its broken veins, scaled scratches, and red spots.

  Little kids were crawling, too, across the protruding, heavy tummies of their hugely pregnant moms. Some cried, others screamed, a few simply opened their mouths and stared at the empty space, their snot running down to their dried pale lips. The slender Vietnamese nurses in their white uniforms ran up and down the long hallway, some nervously pacing, with pads and medical kits in their hands, others simply patrolling demurely, promenading among the crawling women, avoiding an extending arm or leg here and there, completely with nonchalance, as though none of the patients affected them at all. These idle nurses were just there, waiting for the clock
to strike a lunch break. I even saw a nurse with a handheld mirror in her hands checking her makeup.

  I stared stupefied at those pregnant women, those exhausted adults who were ill smelling, unkempt, out of shape, and in pain. I had never seen so many pregnancies in one place before. My grandmother, who had accompanied my mother and me to the hospital, grimaced, repeating her Quan Yin prayer with one husky breath, her prayer lost in the crude curses and screams of the miserable women surrounding us. We exchanged glances, a young girl and an old woman, among pregnancies and poverty.

  At some point, my grandmother stopped praying and talked to me:

  “The public hospital is overpopulated with patients, deliveries are free of charge, and these women can’t afford to go elsewhere,” she said. “I want you to remember one thing from this scene. There is a cord that connects a baby to the mother’s womb. This cord symbolizes the bond between mother and child. When the baby crawls out of her mother’s big belly, the cord has to be severed. When a poor country woman delivers her own baby in the village, there may or may not be a midwife, and quite often the mother has to cut the cord herself. The cord is cut, but the bond lives on, passing from mothers to daughters and then granddaughters, down the bloodline.”

  Much later that morning, my father was back with a box in his hands. He rushed through the hallway, hardly looked at us, and disappeared at the end of the hallway. This had to mean the right kind of blood had arrived, and my mother would not die.

  I stretched my tired limbs and leaned against the fragile frame of my grandmother, who continued her murmuring Quan Yin prayer. I closed my eyes and envisioned a beautiful and compassionate Quan Yin in her pure white gown, standing on a full lotus blossom, sprinkling holy water from her hand to a vast East Sea—the symbol of salvation, rest, peace, and motherhood. In her holy, beautiful hands lay my mother’s life. Somewhere along the path to life—between Quan Yin’s almighty hands and my mother’s heartbeat—I saw the dangling blood bags donated by the American military hospital.

  Past noontime, a medical intern in a white coat came out, identified himself, and called my grandmother’s name. She went with him, and I stayed in the hallway with the pregnant women. She was gone for a long time. It was hot in the hospital hallway, yet I quivered in silence. To calm myself down, I moved to the window, looking past the concrete walls to the treetops and white clouds above. I genuinely missed Nam. If and only if he were here to hold my hands, perhaps I would stop shuddering and would not feel so tired.

  I moved toward the window and sat down alongside the wall. I desperately wanted to take a nap, yet could not rest my eyes. Once, hospital workers came with a stretcher to carry away a screaming pregnant woman, dropping onto the floor an old newspaper. I picked it up and was immediately repelled by the smell of human liquid. I had to crane my head out of the window for a breath of fresh air to calm my stomach.

  As the nurses came to take the women away, one by one, the crowd in the hallway thinned out. Without the constant crying and mourning of the pregnant women, all of a sudden, an unusual void of silence filled the hallway of Tu Du and cooled it down as through fresh air had entered the ward.

  Eventually, my grandmother appeared at the end of the hallway, holding a ginseng box in her hand.

  The ginseng box.

  My father’s statement came alive in my head, so I perked up and stared. It was my job to guard and hold this ginseng box.

  In slow whispers, my grandmother told me my little brother was inside the ginseng box. My mother had lost a male child that day. The medical intern had confirmed, as much as he could tell, that the baby was definitely a boy. A former student of my father, the medical intern had gathered the remains of the fetus into the ginseng box. My baby brother was not bigger than a ginseng root. He fit inside a ginseng box.

  I scrutinized the ivory-colored ginseng box and held this sacred object with awe. I was not quite clear of all facts of life and the process of procreation, yet in one day I was getting more than my full share of knowledge. I held the ginseng box as a symbol of all of the sufferings, losses, gains, insights, confusions, and real or surreal impressions of a young girl, absorbed in one full day.

  For the first time, I realized the ginseng box resembled a miniature coffin built for little beings. I sniffed the box—it had the pungent herbal aroma of ginseng or roots cooked in a clay pot. I held my baby brother’s coffin against my heart, overwhelmed by a sense of love. I began to cry. I told my grandmother I wanted to look inside the box, to see my baby brother’s tiny eyes, ears, and fingers, but she forbade me from doing so. She said the doctor had “vacuumed” or “scraped” my mother’s tummy, and what was left of my baby brother was like smashed ginseng. Cells, to be exact. The idea of having my tummy vacuumed or scraped sent me into another crying fit. I understood what it meant to be a woman. With inflated stomachs from which babies crawled out. Ill-smelling and shapeless mothers-to-be, crying, cursing, lying, or sitting on old newspapers, leaning their beat-up bodies against the dirty blue-and-orange walls of public hospitals. Either that, or babies died, smashed and stored inside ginseng boxes, and mothers-to-be sat in ponds of blood, eventually having their tummies vacuumed or scraped.

  My grandmother was mad at Tu Du Hospital. She wanted them to find the identity of the blood donor. She would like to invite him to dinner at the house. We knew nothing about him except the fact that he was a black man. Without him, my mother would have died. The hospital staff told her the blood was frozen, and although the American military hospital kept a record of blood donors, no one had time to find out the identity of any particular donor to satisfy an old woman. They even said the way the war was going, the donor might have died. My grandmother kept on asking. She wanted the soldier’s identity even if he had died. She would keep his name, age, and hometown on the family’s altar and burn an incense stick for him every day. The medical interns did not take her seriously. What was wrong with this country, she complained. So much had happened in the war people had forgotten the importance of gratitude.

  My father finally came out from the medical ward and announced that my mother was all right. Everything went well, except that she would never have another baby.

  I went home in Uncle Pham’s taxi. He had washed my mother’s blood off the back seat, but my nostrils still took in the lingering smell of blood. I carried the ginseng box home, holding it against my chest when I sat in the taxi. I raised it higher than my forehead when I walked with my grandmother, self-conscious of each step I made.

  That night my grandmother lit a kerosene lamp in the patio, and together she and I dug a hole in the spot where she would have planted a fruit tree if the patio had been big enough. We did not speak one word throughout the process. My grandmother said she would have named my baby brother Cuong, meaning strength. I laid Cuong’s coffin down into the hole and watched my grandmother cover the ginseng box with dirt.

  “He would have been a beautiful boy,” my grandmother said.

  “How do you know, Grandma?” I asked.

  “He has to be,” she said grimly. “He is my grandson.”

  Trying to sleep away the events of the day, that night, I no longer thought of Mr. Au as a malevolent ghost. I started praying to him. As the senior citizen, he would be taking care of my baby brother. They shared the same ground in the alley of District Eight. I cried for Cuong. I never got to see his tiny eyes, ears, hands, and feet. In the place where our fruit tree would have been, his rooted ginseng body would find its place to grow. Into a different form.

  Since then, every day, I kept looking at the spot where Cuong lay, hoping to see a root, a flower, or a leaf that would spring and bloom, representing the spirit of my little brother. It would be a wonderful surprise for all of us. But nothing ever sprang out of the ginseng box underneath that chosen spot.

  By the time my mother was released from the hospital, still weak and pale, in bed all day, occasionally making little steps to the bathroom and back to the bedroom, my grandmother
had already written on a piece of paper the phrase “Ong Linh My Den Khong Ten”—the unknown black American soldier—referring to the blood donor. With deference and a burning stick of incense in one hand, she placed the piece of paper on the family altar. I argued with her some—we did not know whether he had died! But she had her mind made up. In her mind, the blood donor, to whom my mother owed her life, had joined the ancestral spirits of the altar and become part of our family.

  It was months before my mother was well again. A skilled horticulturist, she decided to plant immortals around Cuong’s tomb. Soon, healthy and lively purple and orange immortals circled the spot where Cuong lay.

  Life went on. When Nam was not bringing me delicious honeyed toasts, he was hanging out with Pi. He grew up and became much taller. We both turned eleven and passed the junior high school entrance examination. When a girl turned eleven, she was a young woman, no matter what. A boy who turned eleven but had been confined in a Saigon alley, of course, always remained just a boy.

  I continued my daily piano practice and caught Nam listening, one day.

  “Why listen, Nam?” I challenged him. “You are not sophisticated enough to be familiar with this music.”

  “Oh yes I am,” he said softly, leaning against my piano.

  “Then, tell me,” I said, my fingers dancing across the keyboard, “What’s the name of this piece? I bet you don’t know.” I continued playing. Mi re mi re mi ti re do la, la mi la, do mi la ti…

  His face reddened. He could not answer. He did not know the name of the tune.

  “Don’t count on me to tell you, Nam. As I said, you are just not sophisticated enough.” My voice was full of mockery.

  “I love your song, Mi Chau, regardless,” he said. Tears were lurking in his eyes. It was silly of him to cry over something like this.