Other People's Lives

by Johanna Kaplan

  The stage did not stop being hot, and lying stretched out on it with Gil Burstein, it seemed to Miriam that they were playing dead right underneath a gas streetlight from a stuffy summer night in the real Warsaw. Way above their heads hung a fat yellow bulb that was surrounded by a thousand insects. In all different shapes and sizes, they kept flying from the empty blue darkness backstage toward this one single glare, till the bulb, ugly and unshaded in the first place, seemed to be growing a beard as sweaty and uneven as a grandfather’s. Back and forth, over and around, the different insects crowded and buzzed, all with each other, so that, watching them, Miriam started to wonder whether these were Socialist bugs who believed in sharing with each other what they had, or else bugs who were secretly wishing to keep the whole bulb for themselves and, by politely flying close together, just faking it.

  In the woods, just outside the finished-off Warsaw ghetto, the night was bitter cold. Miriam stood up to sing the song of the girl with the velvet face who went out in the blizzard to shoot up the enemy, and knew that no matter how big the stage was, when she sang and played the piano there was nothing about her that was quiet at all. “‘Exhausted from this small victory, For our new, free generation,’” Miriam finally sang, and the curtain fell over her head like the garland of snow on the girl who could end up snowed under.

  Left all by herself behind the curtain, Miriam heard crying coming from people in the audience: they were the parents of no one in the play, but were crying now because, like somebody’s stupid, stupid parakeet, they had learned how to do one thing and one thing only. If anyone yelled out “Budgie!” right now, the entire audience would immediately get up and start flying. Amnon would fly out, too, and Bryna, always a bird-girl, ran up now to Miriam on the stage and right then and there began chirping.

  “Guess what?” she said. “Now there are two people in my family with red hair. My mother got her hair dyed and I didn’t even know it was her till she came over and kissed me.

  “Oh,” Miriam said, and because she could see that Bryna had big things on her mind—counting redheads—listened from somewhere for the sound of Amnon’s voice letting out his one Israeli-parakeet line: Say-me-what’s-wrong-Miriam, Miriam-say-me-the-matter. Standing there on the stage, a little girl in braids and a too-long dress who would end up not dead, Miriam promised herself that never again in her life would anyone look at her face and see in it what Amnon did, but just like the girl who could fake being dead, she would keep all her aliveness a secret.

  Dragon Lady

  “Miss Phung Ngoc Anh, a 24-year-old Vietnamese of Chinese descent.”

  There are places where it does not rain every day at a certain time, but the girl tripping over the mosquito netting in the heat does not know them. Not that she really hears the rain—it rains every day and she’s used to it. She pays no attention to the whirring fan from the gambling club across the street, and can even disregard the clatter of dishes and pans from the cookshop through the alley. What she cannot stand is the goat: every time he moves, the bell around his neck rings, and as he hops back and forth on his tether in the back, there is enough sound of bells to make it seem like a pagoda. Many people could gain calm from this idea, but she doesn’t—all it does is make her trip, and ring up through her mind certain things she has to live with.

  I built my hut among the throng of men

  But there is no din of carriages or horses.

  You ask me how this can be.

  When the heart is remote, earth stands aloof.

  It’s her grandfather’s favorite poem, this one, by T’ao Yuan-Ming, and on long walks he often recites it for her, in a way, as a lesson. But as it is, her heart is not remote enough. Not yet. When will it be? And who is she?

  First of all, her name is not Phung Ngoc Anh. Not yet. From such a Chinese family, how could it be? She is named Sut On (Snow Quiet), and from the Ling family, so Ling Sut On, and for most of the years before she was twenty-four, lived in Cholon, in the rooms above her uncle’s go-down. He is her First Uncle, her mother’s oldest brother, and though all he’s supposed to have downstairs in the warehouse is rice, what else he might have his stained fingers into is a secret between them and his abacus, which, no matter what else is going on in the world, never seems to stop moving. Really there’s not as much there as Wu and his round-bottomed wife always like to pretend, but still, even Sut On’s grandfather, First Uncle’s own father—who cannot complain of being thrown out or not supported (it’s not as if Wu were actually unfilial)—even Sut On’s grandfather says to no one in particular when Wu is around and looks as if, for a minute, he might have stopped moving beads in his head, “‘If a state is following the Way, it is a disgrace to be in poverty and low estate within it. If not, it is a disgrace to be rich and honored.’” And sometimes, when Wu’s gambling cronies come upstairs, Sut On’s grandfather smiles, looks straight ahead of him, and, pretending that he’s talking to himself, says, “‘Ill-gotten wealth and honors are to me as wandering clouds.’” With that kind of smile on his face, he looks as if he might be a wandering cloud, and half the enjoyment for him is throwing them all off and leaving that impression. Wu gets the point, though. He puts down his teacup, makes a quick bow, and heads down the stairs, his friends clacking after him like Mah-Jongg tiles. His attitude is well known: One—you’re not in Canton any more, Old Man. Two—I don’t care who you were there. Three—what good did all your study and Confucius-quoting do you when famine came? And four—if it weren’t for me, every single one of you in this house would be out on the street and starving. Not that Wu would actually ever dare say this to his father himself: he leaves it for his perfect, quiet wife to shriek it out to Sut On’s mother. In Wu’s presence, you could think that First Aunt, Ping, had no tongue at all—stolen by the fox-fairies maybe. She is silent and sweet-faced as she bends down in her cheong-sam to give him things, and always cooing with her children, but as soon as Wu is out of the room, and especially when he takes his old secondhand Renault and goes out buying rice in the Delta, Ping begins shrieking and, for all her concern with perfection, suddenly doesn’t even care how much she offends her husband’s father. “It’s my house,” is one of her favorite beginnings. “Everything here is mine, and when we move, even if we let you stay here, you would be left with nothing.” And another one: “When we move, even if we let you visit us, you wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “And the goat?” says Sut On’s mother, very familiar with this conversation. “Will he know what to do when you take him?”

  It’s not much of an argument, though, because everything in the house does belong to Wu, goat included, but he is a miser and would never move. Besides, who would watch the go-down? Not his sickly brother Lim, who also lives upstairs with his whiny wife and children and cannot even watch what he says or to whom he says it, so busy is he darting around in his leather cap and dreaming up schemes for anyplace else—Hanoi, Macao, Bangkok. Nor would Wu trust Sut On’s father—a man who could not even properly take his wife to his own home. This is what makes it so hard on Sut On’s mother, who is in any case practically a barren woman: two sons stillborn, and another one so puny he did not last a month. Of course, there is Sut On, but she is only a girl, and naturally there are people (one of them Sut On’s father) who blame it on Vietnam: what kind of country has women for heroes, keeps up statues of women who drove off invaders mounted on elephants? But Sut On’s mother never gives up, goes to fortune-tellers constantly, and every morning before she sets out rice cakes and tea (while French ladies are having coffee and long hot rolls), she lights her joss stick and prays to Kwan Yin. With no sons, Sut On’s father could take another wife if he wanted, but this is impossible to imagine. Once, in the time of the Japanese, he ran a public letter-writing stall, but for as long as she can remember, her dim, red-eared father has always worked for her uncle and usually smoked enough opium pipes to not even know who she is. If anyone spilled tea on him, he wouldn’t feel it. So no one pays attention to him, l
east of all her mother, who never suspected how lowly she had married, and there is no respect for him in this house. Every so often, though, his face changes, and suddenly, as if he were one of the Forty-seven Beasts, he is forced out of his thinness and quiet, and above all the usual racket, even over explosions or bombs, he begins to scream and stamp his feet, cursing in peasant Cantonese that Sut On cannot even understand. Which one of the Forty-seven Beasts is what she tries to figure out when this happens. For instance: there once was a man who spent all his days and nights in wickedness and unbelief. His family pleaded with him, his friends argued and cajoled, his neighbors warned him, but it was all useless, for in his arrogance he would not change his ways. Suddenly, in the middle of his life, he was overtaken by a strange and mysterious illness: for ten years he would neither speak, receive visitors, nor move from his bed. His son, who was dutiful, hovered by his father’s doorstep, and finally one day heard the old man call for a bundle of hay. As quickly as the hay was brought, so quickly was the door now shut again, for, to the poor obedient son’s horror, he saw that his father had been turned into an ox.

  Or another one: in a village a farmer, known for his idleness and covetousness, one night stole into the yard of his friend and neighbor and, in the false glow of darkness, came away with his neighbor’s most prized duck. Swaggering in the moonlight, he cooked the duck that very night, ate it, and later, in the midst of his sleep, felt his skin begin to itch. In the morning his body was covered with a thick growth of duck’s feathers, so painful that he cried out. “Quack,” came the farmer’s voice in his agony: he had been turned into a duck.

  If Sut On were a French girl, she would not have to listen to such scenes of stamping and cursing; they would not happen, and if through some accident they ever did, she could go off and turn on the water faucets, tremendous silver spigots known to shine through French villas, and in the rush of French water, drown out all the noise.

  How does Sut On know so much about what happens in French houses? In a roundabout way, the answer is her grandfather, and in an even more roundabout way, it’s certain big-time Cholon merchants, much richer than Wu, so much richer, in fact, that when they appear at the house unexpected, it sends Wu running up and down screaming orders and bumping tea things. By mistake, he even bowed at a no-good friend of sickly Lim’s whom he had forbidden to ever come back. This is the perfect situation for Ping, who is always waiting for the time her smiling smug ways will get a deserving reception. But it’s not Wu these whispering, dark-suited merchants have come to see. Instead, it’s Sut On’s grandfather—whose reputation they have not forgotten, whose words and even name, because he was once their teacher, can still recall them to fear.

  “‘Man’s life-span depends on his uprightness,’” says Sut On’s grandfather immediately. Naturally, they are up to something. Why waste time? “‘He who goes on living without it escapes disaster only by good fortune.’”

  “My grandfather was a lettré,” Sut On would say later on in her school years, simply to make an impression, because otherwise she was ashamed of her household. But in much later years and in a very different place, this old misused sentence came back to her head with a certain surprise.

  The merchants leave without even saying good-by to Wu. This is the reason for their visit: they have managed to secure an extra place for a Chinese child in the French school, and they wish to honor their old teacher by offering it to him for one of his grandchildren. Sut On’s grandfather is very pleased—not so much by the offer, but because they remembered to quote for him from Feng Kui-fen: “There are many brilliant people in China. There must be some who can learn from the barbarians and surpass them.”

  Wu is furious, he stalks around and cannot even go back to his abacus. What does he care about French schools? The richest men in Cholon have been in his house, drunk his tea, have come and gone as if he were nonexistent. If they truly want to honor his father, then help make the old man’s life more prosperous and comfortable by entering into business arrangements with the son. But Ping sees it differently: “Think of Chen. When he goes to the French school, he’ll be able to help his father”; and because Wu is still fuming, children on the floor are crying, and Chen, a loping, sneaky boy, is nowhere around, Ping shrieks out in an unwifely voice, “Chen! Find Chen! It’s his grandfather who wants him.”

  “Do they think I have no ability?” says Wu. “Do they think my contacts in the Delta would be of no use to them?”

  “If you don’t find Chen immediately,” Ping screams at all the other children, “you are disobeying your grandfather!”

  Lim’s listless friend, who has taken off his shirt, yawns very loudly, the goat rings his bell in the back, and Sut On’s grandfather, who does not at this moment look like a wandering cloud at all, says, “It’s time for my walk with Sut On.”

  There is nothing at all unusual about Sut On’s grandfather taking her out for a walk. It’s been a habit of his for years, and rarely is the walk itself very different. For years he has held her hand and walked slowly through the different streets in Cholon, only speeding up a bit or ducking into an alley when he sees the face of someone he does not respect and would rather avoid. Occasionally they go along the docks and this is the only part Sut On does not like: the coolies, wearing no shirts and sweating, load things on their backs and mutter to themselves peasant Cantonese curses, just as her father does in the times when he is angry. Her grandfather does not allow her to look away, but because he knows she does not like it, he buys her a slice of pineapple or a fruit drink to suck on. Usually, though, they walk slowly through the streets and the stalls and he tells her about his life in his village in Canton, which even her parents have never seen, tells her stories from ancient China, and sometimes when he thinks of it, recites pieces of poems. What she likes best is the story of Chuang Tzu, who was a philosopher, a real person, but was never sure of it. One night he dreamed he was a butterfly, and when he woke up he couldn’t decide whether he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or whether instead he was really a butterfly who kept on dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. “Is it I, Chuang Tzu?” her grandfather says, changing his voice when he comes to this part of the story, and thinking about it now, Sut On is about to ask her grandfather to tell it to her again, but he is holding her hand more tightly and walking along so quickly that they are no longer even in Cholon, but in Saigon itself, where Vietnamese live, and there are no more signs in Chinese.

  “Look very carefully, Sut On,” her grandfather says, and being in a strange place, how can she do otherwise? She knows hardly any Vietnamese, having lived in Cholon all her life and always gone to a Chinese school. Once, in one of his strange, unpredictable fits of anger, her father knocked down a Vietnamese policeman, leaving him sprawled out right on the street. Probably he had said something against the Chinese or looked at her father in a way that made him think so, but since it had happened in Cholon, even though there were many people watching, naturally it had all come to nothing, except for her mother, for whom it was just an extra reminder of how she lived in shame.

  Sut On looks around her and knows what she will never be: a lithe Annamese girl, pretty in an ao dai. Her bones are too broad, her legs are too heavy, and even if she ever put on an ao dai and got accustomed to the material, just above it her face would be a dead giveaway—she will always look Chinese. That’s not what her grandfather has in mind, though.

  “They have nothing,” he says, and will not even look at all the Vietnamese who crowd through the street. “No empire, no culture, no language, no energy. They couldn’t even keep their alphabet, which in any case was really ours. What do they have that isn’t borrowed?” and walking along in his long Mandarin coat and his beard, Sut On’s grandfather does not dodge around trishaws or pedicabs, but passes right by them as if they were shadows and not there at all.

  And soon they aren’t: they have walked so far, Sut On and her grandfather, that by this time there are no more trishaws or bicycles,
only Frenchmen in cars. Their eyes blink too much against the sunlight, their feet seem stuck as they push them, in big shoes, along the street.

  “I’ve never told you this story before, Sut On,” her grandfather says. But she’s in no mood for a story. No other street is so wide and so shiny, no other street has no markets or stalls. Instead, people walk in and out of glass-covered stores wearing the same kind of clothing that stares out from the glass. With their very pink faces, they climb to the top of high-windowed buildings, and when they get tired of being so high, they come down to the street, tip back in strange chairs, and, unfolding their newspapers, they sip cups of coffee and don’t suck their gums. Not one of them knows enough to hold a cup with two hands, and despite this, they live in big white houses hidden by gardens, where maybe occasionally they take off their wide shoes. Even their little children have pink faces and red and yellow hair and, when they take rides on airplanes, do not come home to goats.

  What story can have come to her grandfather’s mind? Heng O, the Moon Lady? The Sisters in the Sun? How the Eight Old Ones Crossed the Sea? What on this street could make him think of any of them?

  “A hunter went into the woods and in them found a young deer, a fawn so lovely that he could not kill her. Instead, he brought her back with him to his home, and let her play there within his yard. At first he worried that his dogs would attack the shy creature, so different from themselves. But it was not so. For months on end the fawn played and frolicked with the dogs in his yard, and grew up with them so well that the hunter saw no reason to return her to the forest. One day, however, when the gate to his yard was open, the deer ventured forth and, seeing some dogs in the distance, she scampered up to play with them. But these were strange dogs who had never seen a deer before. They tore her up from limb to limb and that is the end of her story. For so long a time had she lived with dogs, she no longer knew she was not one of them.”