Over the years, as the name of Mai-Dao’s country became a household word even in Boiling Springs, Thomas couldn’t see the news of her country’s civil war, the deployment of U.S. troops there, and the body bags that returned without thinking of her. In 1968, the year that she gave birth to me, though he didn’t know that back then, he thought of her as he watched her hometown—it was the southern capitol, so he thought that it would keep her safe—exploding on his television set. He hoped that she was far away from there. He imagined her back in New York City. He tried to imagine how her world had changed. He tried not to think about her, a married woman, as he was a married man.
On April 30, 1975, Thomas and DeAnne sat riveted in front of their television set as Dan Rather announced that Saigon was “now under Communist control.” DeAnne remembered her husband closing his eyes and keeping them shut as he listened to the reporter announcing that Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
The letters addressed to Thomas began arriving at the blue and gray ranch house soon after. They were postmarked Chapel Hill, so DeAnne wouldn’t have paid much attention to them, except for the foreign name in the return address.
Then came the telephone call on the night of July 5. It was 11:30 p.m., and DeAnne and Thomas were already side by side in bed. Thomas hung up the receiver and ran out of the house, still in his pajamas. DeAnne heard her husband’s car door slam shut. When she heard his car door open, it was 4 P.M. the following day. She went to the front door of the blue and gray ranch house, and I was asleep in his arms.
Thomas had to tell DeAnne the story of my birth mother’s life, or what he knew of it. That was DeAnne’s precondition for agreeing to my adoption. DWH, the truth teller now, told me that she, in fact, didn’t feel like she had a choice. Thomas had already made up his mind. She might as well get the whole story in the process, DeAnne thought. She also thought that it would be better (for her) if she made the decision then and there to believe that what her husband, Thomas, was telling her was true.
DeAnne asked to see the photographs. Then she asked to see the letters. She told Thomas that he had to throw everything away. He promised her that he would. He didn’t. After he passed away, she found the photographs in his office. The letters she didn’t find there. DWH said that when Thomas showed the letters to her she couldn’t bring herself to read them. The handwriting was all curves and delicate loops, and all she could imagine was the body of the woman who wrote the words. DeAnne made Thomas read the letters aloud to her. So as I slept in the guest bedroom of their house, Thomas and DeAnne sat at the kitchen table and talked for the remainder of the day.
Mai-Dao wrote her first letter to Thomas on May 1, 1975, one day after the fall of Saigon. Mai-Dao had been in Chapel Hill for almost a year already. Her husband, Khanh, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Saigon, was a postdoctoral fellow at UNC, and after much bribing and string-pulling back in Saigon, she and their six-year-old daughter had been able to join Khanh in September of ’74. Mai-Dao took with her to Chapel Hill the last letter that Thomas had sent to her in Saigon. Since the first day of her arrival in his home state, she had been taking mental notes of what she liked about his South, so that she could share them with him. Then she reread his letter, dated December 10, 1960—he’d written to her on our wedding day, Linda—and the letter reminded Mai-Dao that she knew nothing about his life in the fourteen years since then. Thomas must be a very different man now, Mai-Dao thought. So she set aside the idea of writing to him and tried as best as she could to settle into her new temporary home, a trailer that Khanh had rented for them in order to make the most of his small monthly stipend. She thought it was a storage shed when they first drove up to it. The interior was the size and width of a corridor in the three-story villa that her father had given to them as a wedding present back in Saigon. Khanh reminded her of how lucky they were to be here and not there.
That became her mantra in the months to come: lucky to be here and not there. She enrolled her daughter in the first grade and was amazed at how quickly a young child could pick up a new language, like it was just a shiny new toy. Mai-Dao audited classes in the art history department of UNC and thought often about traveling up to New York City and seeing the Metropolitan Museum of Art again and, of course, her beloved Central Park. Khanh told her that there was no money for such a pleasure trip. She looked at her husband, amazed at how the young man who had shown up for their dates in a chauffeured car had changed. She couldn’t have imagined that he would become so serious and practical, with worry lines cut deep into his forehead. Lucky to be here and not there, she reminded herself. She went to the library and checked out a cookbook—the first one she had ever read—and fed her husband and daughter American-style meals, which the cookbook author, Betty Crocker, assured her were both economical and nutritious. Mai-Dao wasn’t a very good cook, so every once in a while she and her daughter would go to the supermarket and indulge in the American snack foods and sodas that she had missed so dearly when she was in Saigon. “Thomas, did you know that there is a soda in Vietnam that tastes exactly like Dr Pepper?” Mai-Dao asked, in the first of her eight letters to him. I don’t know why, Linda, but that always stuck in my head. Maybe because of your grandma. You know how she drank that stuff like water.
On April 30, 1975, Mai-Dao and Khanh and their young daughter had sat in their rented trailer home in front of a small TV set, one of the few things they owned outright here, and had watched in disbelief as “there” disappeared. Mai-Dao started to cry when she saw the word yesterday appear at the bottom of the tiny screen, the white text superimposed over the footage of the evacuation of Saigon. Khanh whispered in her ear that she shouldn’t cry in front of their daughter. Mai-Dao stopped, though she knew that it wouldn’t change a thing. Her father was a general in the army. Khanh’s father was one as well. When Dan Rather reported that South Vietnamese servicemen and their families were among the seventy thousand South Vietnamese who had made it safely to Thailand, Khanh turned to his wife and said that they would hear something from their families soon.
How? she wondered. Who would have had the forethought in the chaos of an evacuation to write down the address of a son and daughter who were lucky enough to be in a city called Chapel Hill? Even its name sounded distant and safe, Mai-Dao thought.
Over the next day or two, while her husband went to his office at the university to make the necessary telephone calls, listing their names with the International Red Cross, and trying to reach his distant relatives in Paris, Mai-Dao tried to keep herself from thinking about her mother being shoved and pushed into a helicopter or into a boat—if my mother was lucky, Mai-Dao reminded herself—by cleaning the trailer home, washing every item of clothing that the three of them owned at the Laundromat, and writing a long, belated letter to Thomas. “I’m here with my husband and my daughter” was how Mai-Dao began her letter. Thomas choked up when he read those words to me, Linda. I could have told him to stop reading, but I didn’t.
DWH had been speaking very slowly, pausing in between words, stopping in midsentence. The incomings, given such a cadence, were acute and more assertive than usual, as if the tastes triggered by the words literally had more time to sink in. I had to excuse myself from the kitchen table. I went into the living room and telephoned Kelly at the Greek Revival. I asked her to bring over a bottle of whatever she had. It wasn’t even noon, but Kelly, in true form, didn’t ask why, didn’t sound a bit surprised, and came by the blue and gray ranch house in less than fifteen minutes with a bottle of bourbon, two-thirds full. Kelly came to the back door of the house, said good morning to DWH through the screen door, handed me the bottle thoughtfully hidden inside of a fancy shopping bag underneath a layer of tissue paper, and was on her way again after she had squeezed my hands so hard that my fingers almost went white.
I poured for myself a juice glass full of bourbon and asked DWH if she wanted one as well. I couldn’t remember at that moment whether I had explained to DWH about
the ameliorative effects of alcohol. We had discussed cigarettes and their effects on my condition during our morning talks, but I wasn’t sure whether the topic of alcohol or sex had reached the breakfast table yet. It didn’t matter, because DWH answered yes. You know, your grandma loved to mix that stuff with her Dr Pepper.
Iris’s truth serum of choice, I thought.
Thomas, according to DWH, admitted that he immediately wrote back to Mai-Dao. He glossed over the contents of his letter, except to say that he had included his telephone number and had asked Mai-Dao to call him. She never did, but she did send a second letter to him at the blue and gray ranch house. Your grandma told me that meant that he’d never been unfaithful to me before. A cheating man would’ve known to give his office number and mailing address, your grandma said. Mai-Dao wrote that there was still no news about her or her husband’s families. For once in her life she didn’t mind so much that she was an only child. Her husband, Khanh, was unable to sleep or eat, worrying about his five younger brothers and their wives and children. In the middle of the night, Khanh would be in his office on campus trying to telephone them, one number after the other. Their lines had all been cut. How soon after the end of a war does the telephone service resume, Mai-Dao wondered. How about mail delivery? She didn’t know these answers, but she wrote to her mother and father every day just in case they were there waiting to receive word from her. Mai-Dao thought often about her favorite building in Saigon, the Central Post Office, and she wondered if it had survived the last days of the war in one piece. Mai-Dao wrote to Thomas that she felt guilty that she was worrying about a building, even if it was one designed by Gustave Eiffel, when the people who had gathered there were now so scattered and unaccounted for. She felt so guilty that she wouldn’t dream of sharing these thoughts with her husband. Her daughter was too young, of course, to understand. Mai-Dao wrote that she was grateful that she had Thomas for a friend.
Thomas responded to Mai-Dao’s second letter, asking her if he could come to Chapel Hill to see her. I knew he didn’t want to admit that to me, but he had to. That’s how much he wanted you, Linda.
Mai-Dao sent back a third letter, this one short and unequivocal. She wrote that a face-to-face visit wasn’t a good idea right now. Maybe when things were more settled. Still not a word from my family or Khanh’s, Mai-Dao added. Thomas swore to DeAnne that he never drove the 191 miles from Boiling Springs to Chapel Hill, until he received the telephone call summoning him there. He continued to write to Mai-Dao, though.
In her fourth letter to Thomas, Mai-Dao thanked him for his generous offer, but she thought that she and Khanh would be able to manage. Thomas admitted that he had offered to send her money, Linda. He said he would have told me, if he had. Mai-Dao wrote that she had found a part-time job at the main library on the UNC campus and was working during the hours when her daughter was at her summer school. The job kept her from thinking, which was what she wanted right now. The extra money was helping out too. Mai-Dao asked Thomas if his wife worked outside the house. I knew he hadn’t brought me up once in his letters. She had to. Mai-Dao wanted to know because she was surprised at how much her husband had objected to the idea. Khanh had never been that sort of a man, not a dinosaur by any means. Khanh was caring, thoughtful, and one of the most intelligent men she had ever met. It must have hurt Thomas to read that—the first time to himself and then again to me. Still no word from our families, Mai-Dao wrote. Every night Mai-Dao dreamed that she was aboard an airplane that was about to land at the Saigon airport. The plane circled low over the southern capital, so low that she could see the red roof of the Opera House and the twin spires of the Basilica, the wide boulevards, and the cramped alleyways. Every night, she realized too late that it was a nightmare because the plane she was on would never land.
Thomas thought it was time that he became more involved. It was already the beginning of June. A month had passed since the fall of Saigon, and Mai-Dao and her husband still had no news about their families. Thomas wrote to Mai-Dao and offered another type of assistance, one that he knew she couldn’t turn down. He asked for the names of her mother and father and of the immediate members of Khanh’s family as well. Thomas wrote to Mai-Dao that he would contact a family friend who was a congressman. This man could make the right phone calls, Thomas assured Mai-Dao. Willie Hoyle had just been elected to his first term, Linda. I know it’s hard to imagine, but back then we thought that Willie could really get things done.
Mai-Dao’s fifth letter arrived soon after, and it was only a couple of lines long. Thomas knew that he had overstepped again. Mai-Dao wrote that Khanh thanked Thomas for the offer of assistance, but Khanh felt that this was a family matter. If Thomas would be so kind as to send them the name of the congressman, Khanh would contact the gentleman directly to inquire about what resources he and his office could extend to them. Thomas knew from the formal tone of the letter that Mai-Dao wrote the letter but that Khanh was either looking over her shoulders or dictating it. Thomas confessed to DeAnne that he had wanted to go to Chapel Hill right then and there and talk man-to-man with Khanh, to talk some sense into him.
Reasonable Man–to–Reasonable Man, I thought.
Before Thomas could write back, Mai-Dao’s sixth letter arrived at the blue and gray ranch house. It was five pages long. This one was really from her, Thomas knew. She apologized for her previous letter. She confirmed that Khanh had asked her to write it, and she blamed its content on Khanh’s lack of sleep. Her husband was becoming irritable and somewhat irrational, she wrote. He had been threatening to buy a plane ticket to go to Thailand to search for their families. Mai-Dao had to remind Khanh that he held a passport issued by the Republic of Vietnam, a country more commonly known as South Vietnam and one that no longer existed under either name. If Khanh, now a citizen of nowhere, left the United States, he might never be able to return.
Lucky to be here and not there, I thought.
Khanh, a man who rarely raised his voice in anger, yelled at Mai-Dao that night. He didn’t need to be reminded of the obvious, he screamed at her. But he did, Mai-Dao insisted in her letter to Thomas. She wrote that she had brought up Thomas’s offer to contact a congressman in the hopes of calming Khanh down. Her failure to anticipate Khanh’s reaction she blamed on her own lack of sleep. Otherwise, she would have known, would have kept Thomas’s offer to herself for another day, and sat there silently by her husband’s side instead. Khanh demanded to know how she knew Thomas Hammerick, and how long the two of them had been keeping in touch. Khanh assumed the worst, that he had been cuckolded from the first day of their marriage, and that there had been other men. Mai-Dao sat there, stunned. When she became engaged, her mother had warned her that no man wanted to know about a woman’s past. Her mother told her that it was best to pretend that you have been reborn, an innocent baby in his arms. Her mother, Mai-Dao wrote to Thomas, was always right. You might want to take another sip, Linda. Just bring the bottle to the table. Mai-Dao wrote that the worst part of the argument was that their daughter, Linh-Dao, was in the trailer and had heard everything that Khanh had said. The girl from birth had been a quiet child, so quiet that sometimes they would forget that she was in the room. Mai-Dao asked Thomas if he had any children of his own. All those letters, Linda, and he hadn’t told her anything about our marriage.
Thomas saw that this sixth letter from Chapel Hill had a different return address. Mai-Dao had used her work address at the UNC library. He wrote back to her there. Thomas told DeAnne that he expressed his regret for the misunderstanding that had taken place between Mai-Dao and her husband. Thomas, however, reminded Mai-Dao that she didn’t need her husband’s permission to proceed. With or without Khanh’s approval and cooperation, Thomas could still approach the congressman for assistance. Thomas urged her to send him a list of names immediately, but if she really wanted Khanh to make the call, enclosed was Congressman Hoyle’s phone number and mailing address.
Thomas waited two and a half weeks before
he received his seventh letter from Mai-Dao. Her letter wasn’t what he had hoped for. There was no list of names. There was no “Thomas, I will call you soon.” There was no “Thomas, I will see you in Chapel Hill.” There was only news about Khanh’s family. His youngest brother, Trac, and his wife were among the refugees who had made it to Thailand. There was still no news of the whereabouts of Khanh’s four other brothers and their families. Trac had made contact with their second cousin in Paris, who had telephoned Khanh.
According to their second cousin, Trac and Khanh’s father had shot himself in the early-morning hours of April 29. Their mother had refused to leave her husband’s body alone and unburied when Trac came for them. Khanh received the news of his father’s death with a kind of stoicism that surprised Mai-Dao. Khanh immediately concluded that it was better that way. A proud man like his father couldn’t have survived a subjugated life, he told her.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 27
