MID-AUTUMN
We are lucky, you and I, to be Vietnamese so that I can speak to you even before you are born. This is why I use the Vietnamese language. It is our custom for the mother to begin this conversation with the child in the womb, to begin counseling you in matters of the world that you will soon enter. It is not a custom among the Americans, so perhaps you would not even understand English if I spoke it. Nor could I speak in English nearly so well, to tell you some of the things of my heart. Above all you must listen to my heart. The language is not important. I don’t know if you can hear all the other words, the ones in English that float about us like the pollen that in the spring makes me sneeze and that lets the flowers bear their own children. I think I remember from our country that this is a private conversation, that it is only my voice that you can hear, but I do not know for sure. My mother is dead now and cannot answer this question. She spoke to me when I was in her womb and sometimes, when I dream and wake and cannot remember, I have the feeling that the dream was of her voice plunging like a naked swimmer into that sea and swimming strongly to me, who waited deep beneath the waves.
And when you move inside me, my little one, when you try to swim higher, coming up to meet me, I look at the two oaken barrels I have filled with red blooms, the hibiscus. They have no smell to speak of, but they are very pretty, and sometimes the hummingbirds come with their invisible wings and with their little bodies as slick as if they had just flown up from the sea. I look also at the white picket fence, very white without any stain of mildew, though the air is warm here in Louisiana all the time, and very wet. And sometimes, like at this moment, I look beyond this yard, lifting my eyes above the ragged line of trees to the sky. It is a sky that looks like the skies in Vietnam. Sometimes full of tiny blooms of clouds as still as flowers floating on a bowl in the center of a New Year’s table. Sometimes full of great dark bodies, Chinese warriors rolling their shoulders, huffing up with a summer storm that we know will pass. One day you will run out into the storm, laughing, like all the children of Vietnam.
I saw you for the first time last week. The doctor spread a jelly on my stomach and it was the coldest thing I have ever felt, even more cold than the snow I once held melting in my hands. He ran a microphone up and down my stomach and I saw you on a screen, the shape of you. I could see inside you. I could see your spine and I could see your heart beating and this is what reminded me of my duty to you. And my joy. To speak. And he told me you were a girl.
Please understand that I love you, that you are a girl. My own mother never knew my sex as she spoke to me. And I know that she was a Vietnamese mother and so she must have been disappointed when she came to find out that I was a girl, when she held me for the first time and she shared the cast-down look of my father that I was not a son for them. This is the way in Vietnam. I know that the words she spoke to me in the womb were as a boy; she was hoping that I was a boy and not ever bringing the bad luck on themselves by acting as if I was anything else but a son. But, little one, I am glad you are a girl. You will understand me even better.
A marriage in Vietnam is a strange and wonderful thing. There is a genie of marriage. We call him the Rose Silk Thread God, though he is not quite a god. I can say this because I am already married, but if I was single and living once more in the village where I grew up in Vietnam, I would call him a god and do all the right things to make him smile on me. A special altar is made and we light candles and incense in honor of this genie. There is a ceremony on the day of marriage led by the male head of the groom’s family, and everyone bows before the altar and prays, and a plea to the genie for his protection and help is written on a piece of rose-colored silk paper and then read aloud. A cup is filled with wine and the head of the groom’s family sips from it and gives it to the groom, who sips from it and gives it to his bride. She drinks, and I am told that this is the most delicious thing that she will ever taste. I do not know who told me this. Perhaps my mother. Perhaps I learned it when I was in her womb. Then after the bride has drunk the wine that has touched the lips of the men, the sheet of silk paper is burned. The flame is pale rose, and the threads of silk rise in the heat before they vanish.
My little one, I was once very young. I was sixteen and I was very beautiful and I met Bo when he was seventeen. It was at the most wonderful time of year for lovers to meet, at the Mid-Autumn Festival. I saw him in the morning as I was coming up the footpath from the cistern. My hands and my face and my arms up nearly to my shoulders were slick and cool from my plunging them into the water of the cistern. The cistern held the drinking water for my hamlet, but no one had been looking and I knew I was clean because I had bathed that morning in the river and the water had looked so still and fine that I could not resist plunging my arms in and my face. When I came up out of the water, the sun that had been harsh with me all morning was suddenly my friend, tugging gently at my skin and making me feel very calm.
I filled my family’s jug and started up the path, and when I encountered this tall boy coming down the path with a strong step, my first thought was that he was coming to catch me and punish me for touching the water that the hamlet must drink. I looked at his face and his eyes were so very black and they seized on my face with such a fervor that I almost dropped the jug. I thought it was fear that I felt, but later I knew it had not been fear.
He lunged forward and caught the jug of water and it splashed him on the face and the chest and he laughed. When he laughed I grew weaker still and he had to take the jug onto his own shoulder and turn and walk with me up the path to my house. We did not say many words. We laughed several times in silent recollection of the falling jug and the splashing water. And we looked at each other with side glances as we walked. Sometimes I would look and he would not be looking; sometimes I knew he was looking and I did not look; but other times one of us would look and the other would be looking at just the same time and we would laugh again. At last my legs grew heavy, though, as we neared my house. I told him we now had to part, and as he slowly took the jug of water from his shoulder and gave it to me, he said that his name was Bo and he was from a different hamlet but he was staying here for a time with a cousin and he asked if I would be out celebrating the moon tonight and I said yes.
The Mid-Autumn Festival is all about the moon, my little one. It is held on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when there is the brightest moon of the year. The Chinese gave us the celebration because one of their early emperors loved poetry and he wrote many poems himself. Since all poets are full of silver threads that rise inside them as the moon grows large, the emperor yearned to go to the moon. On the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month this yearning grew unbearable, and he called his wizard to him and told him he must find a way. So the wizard worked hard, chanting spells and burning special incense, and finally in a blinding flash of light the wizard fell to the ground, and there in the palace courtyard was the root of a great rainbow which arched up into the night sky and went all the way to the moon.
The emperor saddled his best horse and armed himself with a sheaf of his own poems and he spurred the horse onto the rainbow and he galloped off to the moon. When he got there, he found a beautiful island in the middle of a great, dark sea. On the island he dismounted his horse and he was surrounded by fairies who lifted him up and danced and sang their poems and he sang his and it was the most wonderful time of his life, borne on the shoulders of these lovely creatures and feeling as if he belonged there, his deepest self belonged in this place, so full of wonder it was. But he could not stay. His people needed him. There was another world to deal with. So with great reluctance he got onto his horse and rode back down to his palace.
The next morning the rainbow was gone. The emperor did all the things he needed to do for his people and one night he thought that he had earned a rest, that he could return to the moon at least until morning. But the wizard came at his call and sadly explained that there was no return to the moon. Once you came down the rainbow,
there was no way back. The emperor was very sad, so he proclaimed that every year on the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month, the anniversary of his trip, there would be a celebration throughout the kingdom to remember the beautiful land that was left behind.
My little one, you would love all the paper lanterns that we light on this night. They are in the shapes of dragons and unicorns and stars and boats and horses and hares and toads. We light candles inside them and we swing them on sticks in the dark and the village is full of these wonderful pinwheels of light, the rushing of these bright shapes. I saw Bo again in such a light, with the swirling of lanterns and the moon just coming over the horizon, fat as an elephant and the color of the sun in fog. I saw him in the center of the hamlet where we had all gathered to celebrate and the lights were whirling and when our eyes met, he suddenly staggered under the weight of an invisible water jug, he carried it around and around in circles on his shoulder, a wonderful pantomime, and then he lost his footing and I could almost see the jug there on his shoulder tipping, tipping, and it fell and crashed and he jumped back from all the splashing water and we laughed.
At the festival of the moon, it is not forbidden for an unbetrothed boy and girl to speak together. We moved toward each other and I could feel the heat of the swinging lanterns on my face as the children ran near me and cut in before me, but Bo and I kept moving and we came together in the center of the village square and we spoke. He asked if my family was well and I asked about his family and I was happy to find that the father of his cousin was a good friend of my father. Bo asked if my water jug was safe and I asked if his shoulder was in pain from carrying the jug and we slowly edged our way to the darkness beyond the celebrating and then we walked down the path to the cistern and beyond, to the edge of the river.
This was perhaps more than our hamlet’s customs would allow us, but we did not think of that. I was a strongheaded girl, my little one, and Bo was a good boy. I sensed that of him and I was right. He was very respectful to me. I felt very safe. We stood by the river and a sampan slipped silently past and it was hung with orange lanterns, the color of the moon from earlier this night, when it was near the horizon and Bo did his pantomime for me.
Now the moon was higher and it had grown slimmer and it had turned so white that it nearly hurt my eyes to look at it. Nearly hurt them but not quite, and so it was the most beautiful of all. It was as bright as it could be and still be a good thing. And Bo slipped his arm around my waist and I let him keep it there and the joy of it was as strong as it could be and still be a good thing. We stood looking up at the moon and trying to see the fairies there in the middle of the dark sea and we tried to hear them singing their poems.
My little one, Bo was my love and both our families loved us, too, so much so that they agreed to let us marry. In Vietnam this was a very rare thing, that the marriage agreement should be the same as the agreement of hearts between the bride and the groom. You will be lucky, too. This is a good thing about being in America. A very good thing, and I wonder if you can tell that there are tears in my eyes now, if you can sense this little fall of water, surrounded as you are by your own sea. But do not worry. These tears are happy ones, tears for you and the life you will have, which will be very beautiful.
I look at the gate in our white picket fence and soon your father will come through. I want to tell you that you are a lucky girl. Even as my tears change. Bo and I were betrothed to be married. And then he was called into the Army and he went away before the ceremony could be arranged and he died in a battle somewhere in the mountains. The gate is opening now and your father, my husband, is coming through and he is a good man. He keeps this fence and our house free from the mildew. He scrubs it with bleach and hoses it every six months and he stops at my hibiscus, not seeing me here at the window. I must soon stop speaking. He is a good man, an American soldier who loved his Vietnamese woman for true and for always. He will find me by the window and touch my cheek gently with the back of his fine, strong hand and he will touch my belly, trying to think he is touching you.
You will love him, my little one, and since I know you understand my heart, I do not want you to be sad for me. I had my night on the moon and when I came back down the rainbow, the world I found was also good. It is sad that there is no return, but we can still light a lantern and look into the night sky and remember.
IN THE CLEARING
Though I have never seen you, my son, do not think that I am unable to love you. You were in your mother’s womb when the North of our country took over the South and some of those who fought the war found themselves running away. I did not choose to run, not with you ready to enter this world. I did not choose to leave my homeland and become an American. I have chosen so few of the things of my life, really. I was eighteen when Saigon was falling and you were dreaming on in your little sea inside your mother in a thatched house in An Khê. Your mother loved me then and I loved her and I would not have left except I had no choice. This has always been a strange thing to me, though I have met several others here where I live in New Orleans, Louisiana, who are in the same condition. It is strange because I know how desperately many others wanted to get out, even hiding in the landing gears of the departing airplanes. I myself had not thought of running away, did not choose to, but it happened to me anyway.
I am sorry. And I write you now not to distract you from your duty to your new father, as I am sure your mother would fear. I write with a full heart for you because I must tell you a few things about being a person who is somewhere between a boy and a man. I was just such a person when I held a rifle in my hands. It was a black thing, the M16 rifle, black like a charcoal cricket, and surprisingly light, with a terrible voice, a terrible quick voice like the river demons my own father told stories about when it was dark and nighttime in our village and I wanted to be frightened.
That is one thing I must tell you. As a boy you wish to be frightened. You like the night; you like the quickness inside you as you and your friends speak of mysterious things, ghosts and spirits, and you wish to go out into the dark and go as far down the forest path as you can without turning back. You and your friends go down the path together and no one dares to say that you have gone too far even though you hear every tiny sound from the darkness around you and these sounds make you quake inside. Am I right about this? I dream of you often and I can see you in this way with your friends and it is the same as it was with me and my friends.
This is all right, to embrace the things you fear. It is natural and it will help build the courage you must have as a man. But when you are a man, don’t become confused. Do not seek out the darkness, the things you fear, as you have done as a boy. This is not a part of you that you should hold on to. I myself did not hold on to it for more than a few minutes once the rifle in my hand heard the cries of other rifles calling it. I no longer dream of those few minutes. I dream only of you.
I cannot remember clearly now any of the specific moments of my real fear, of my man’s fear with no delight in it at all, no happiness, no sense of power or of my really deep down controlling it, of being able to turn back with my friends and walk out of the forest. I can only remember a wide rice paddy and the air leaning against me like a drunken man who says he knows me and I remember my boots full of water and always my thought to check to see if I was wrong, if there was really blood in my boots, if I had somehow stepped on a mine and been too scared to even realize it and I was walking with my boots filled with blood. But this memory is the sum of many moments like these. All the particular rice paddies and tarmac highways and hacked jungle paths—the exact, specific ones—are gone from me.
Only this remains. A clearing in a triple-canopy mahogany forest in the highlands. The trees were almost a perfect circle around us and in the center of the clearing was a large tree that had been down for a long time. We were a patrol and we were sitting in a row against the dead trunk, our legs stuck out flat or tucked up to our chests. We were all young and none of us k
new what he was doing. Maybe we were stupid for stopping where we did. I don’t know about that.
But our lieutenant let us do it. He was sitting on the tree trunk, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward smoking a cigarette. He was right next to me and I knew he wanted to be somewhere else. He was pretty new, but he seemed to know what he was doing. His name was Binh and he was maybe twenty-one, but I was eighteen and he seemed like a man and I was a private and he was our officer, our platoon leader. I wanted to speak to him because I was feeling the fear pretty bad, like it was a river catfish with the sharp gills and it was just now pulled out of the water and into the boat, thrashing, with the hook still in its mouth, and my chest was the bottom of the boat.
I sat trying to think what to say to Lieutenant Binh, but there was only a little nattering in my head, no real words at all. Then another private sitting next to me spoke. I do not remember his name. I can’t shape his face in my mind anymore. Not even a single feature. But I remember his words. He lifted off his helmet and placed it on the ground beside him and he said, “I bet no man has ever set his foot in this place before.”
I heard Lieutenant Binh make a little snorting sound at this, but I didn’t pick up on the contempt of it or the bitterness. I probably would’ve kept silent if I had. But instead, I said to the other private, “Not since the dragon came south.”
Lieutenant Binh snorted again. This time it was clear to both the other soldier and me that the lieutenant was responding to us. We looked at him and he said to the other, “You’re dead meat if you keep thinking like that. It’s probably too late for you already. There’ve been men in this place before, and you better hope it was a couple of days ago instead of a couple of hours.”
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Page 10
